My wife has several stickers on the back of her motorized wheelchair that declare her to be a feisty feminist and the world’s nicest badass, among other things. There are ones that say “Girl Power,” “Listen to Women,” and “Forgive Yourself.” But one of the most prominent stickers declares “Civility Is My Superpower.”
I’ve heard her say that people who really know her are aware that that’s not necessarily true about her. That’s why, when I saw a sticker in a store that said “Back the Fuck Up,” I wanted to buy it for her because I thought it really captured what she is all about. But she said, “No, thanks,” because as the director of a state agency, her job sometimes requires her to do stuff like testify in front of state legislators. And she thinks that the civility message goes over a lot better in a crowd like that.
I may still buy that sticker for her anyway, if I can find another one that says “So,” and I’ll put both of them on the back of her wheelchair, right next to the civility sticker, so that it forms one big sticker that says: “Civility Is My Superpower So Back the Fuck Up.” That really, really, really captures what she is all about.
But I’m of two minds when it comes to civility. On one hand, I know that civility is the bottom line if you want to use whatever political power you have to change things for the better. Eventually, you’re going to have to win some people over to your way of looking at things. Until enemies can civilly engage with each other, hostilities fester and the spiral goes on and on ad nauseam, like the Hatfields and the McCoys. But civility also strikes me as a surefire way to water down your convictions, often to the point of meaninglessness. Some things you just can’t quietly and repeatedly swallow, or they will also fester.
So to what extent should you endeavor to accommodate the ignorance of people who just don’t get it and never will? At what point should you call them out? How many times should you let the deeply racist crap that someone is saying just roll off of your back? It’s OK to agree to disagree and leave it at that when it’s about unimportant stuff like whether Coke is better than Pepsi. But when one person has power over another, that’s a whole different story.
Suppose that someone has their foot pressing down on your throat and you tell them to remove it, but they say no. If you just agree to disagree, you’ll still have a foot pressing down on your throat. Nothing changes!
I think this is how it works with civility sometimes. If the cruel people are in charge, you can’t accommodate them at all. You can’t ask them nicely to stop doing what they’re doing, because cruelty and selfishness are what their empire is built upon, and if they give that up, they have nothing left. All you can do is resist by refusing to be anything like them.
As Frederick Douglass proclaimed, “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.” And as the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. noted, “There can be no peace without justice, and there can be no justice without peace.”
That’s the only way anything truly changes. I don’t insist that my friends and partners all be political lefties, but that’s who I end up being surrounded by anyway. I guess that’s the type of people I attract (or at least that I don’t repel). I’m lucky that I never had to deal with the stereotypical conservative uncle who seizes every opportunity to goad everyone at the family Thanksgiving dinner by loudly expressing his screwy beliefs. I grew up in a rather apolitical household where nobody was very passionate about politics. We always talked about other things, not because we were trying to avoid conjuring up a bitterly divisive political debate, but because that’s just what we did. So my ability to remain civil has never been put to the test to that degree.
The closest person to that in my life is one guy I know who proudly proclaims that he is a Republican. This really baffles me, because I consider him to be a very intelligent man. And you’d think that the first question that an intelligent man would ask himself would be, “Why the hell am I still a Republican?”
I don’t know what he thinks about the squatter currently occupying the White House. I’ve never heard him bring it up. Maybe that’s because he’s smart enough to know that doing so could well cause him considerable grief, being that he is often the only Republican in sight, including his wife of many years. But this fellow is definitely not a political goader, and he doesn’t go around spewing racist crap. And we disagree on little else (except that he is a White Sox fan, which is another one of those Coke versus Pepsi things).
So my guess is that he doesn’t care much for the squatter, because he knows that he would have to do some pretty extreme intellectual contortions in order to get behind most everything that the squatter says and does. But he probably votes for him anyway because he always votes for Republicans for some reason, and the squatter is all that Republicans have to offer at this point.
Maybe the reason that he always votes for Republicans is because to do so is a family tradition for him and he just doesn’t have the strength and energy it takes to buck it. But he also doesn’t hesitate to proudly proclaim that he is an atheist, which bucks his family tradition even more.
Another thing that is a mystery to me is how people who are political opposites not only attract but stay together. I suppose they focus on the things they have in common, but what could those things possibly be? I can’t imagine getting very close to anyone who buys into a rightwing philosophy. And I can’t imagine anyone like that would ever want to get very close to me, either.
Like I said, I don’t insist that my friends and partners all be political lefties, but that’s who I end up hanging out with. I don’t screen anybody, because I know that there is much more to life than politics. We all need to take a break from it every now and then. Our political convictions are just a portion of our complete beings.
But to me, our political convictions are a significant portion of everyone’s complete being, because they reflect one’s outlook on life and one’s morality. So it’s hard for me to believe that any person who embraces the selfishness and paranoia at the center of the greed creed could ever give a flying damn about anyone other than themselves. That’s why empathy is the worst enemy of rightwing ideology because it is the exact opposite of that ideology. And I find empathy to be a very attractive human quality.