Seeing Both Sides Now

One of the difficulties I have had in my life is the ability to see both sides of an issue.  This doesn’t mean I don’t have opinions of my own, since I obviously do.  It does mean, however, that I often need to think about what I hear for a while before I comment on it.  Of course, sometimes I don’t think, and it comes out wrong!!  It is known as foot in mouth disease!

This past week on Martin Bashir’s program he had a segment discussing Congressman Alan Grayson’s comment comparing the Tea Party to the Ku Klux Klan (KKK).  Some other Democratic Congressman had criticized Grayson’s comments stating that he had learned as a legislator never to discuss fascism, the Nazis, the KKK or slavery.  I found that a tad odd since these all are historical facts, and they need to be talked about so that we can learn from history what is malevolent.

Bashir’s point was that the KKK had carried out a policy of lynching innocent black men for little or no reason, and the Tea Party had never done that.  To compare the two then trivialized the horrors of the KKK.  Grayson’s point, which he did not make very well, was that Tea Party rhetoric was very often racist, and that he had received many vicious and threatening e-mails of a racist nature.  Therefore, his analogy between the Tea Party and the KKK was valid.

How to reconcile the three ideas that had been tossed out there:  the first, that one must never discuss fascism, the Nazis, the KKK or slavery (the Democratic Congressman); that when one found common points between two events one had the obligation to compare them to each other (Grayson); to compare one truly malevolent historical fact with another historical fact that was not as malevolent but did have points of convergence was to trivialize the former (Bashir).  All valid points.

It is my opinion that the Democratic Congressman and Bashir were trying to make the same argument that one should not attempt to make a position stronger by comparing it to an horrendous event.  An example would be comparing Obamacare to slavery.  The comparison is ridiculous to start out with, but it also trivializes the dreadfulness of slavery.  And this is a very compelling argument to never do that.

And yet Grayson apparently recognizes that words can have terrible consequences if not unchecked.  It wasn’t until Europeans began to compare peoples of color and their cultures as being terribly inferior to European culture that the enslavement of people of color became OK.  After all, if a people had an inferior culture, and then only 3/5ths of a soul on top of that, it became almost the duty of the superior peoples to enslave them to save the people of color from themselves (the white man’s burden).  And in Germany in the 1930’s when it became the policy of the Nazis to begin the verbal assault against Jews, homosexuals, and anyone who the Nazis considered defective, that eventually the populace as a whole began to view these people as inferior or a detriment to society, so it was OK to treat them abominably.  I doubt in the beginning of this denigration the average German had any idea what the eventual results would be, but if the government thought it was the right thing to do, then neither did many of them care.  The end result was the murder by one means or another of nearly 9 million people, 6 of the million were Jews.

The lessons to be learned from all of this I believe is that it is just as important to talk about what has happened in our history – the good, the bad and the ugly – as it is to talk about what is happening in our country right now – the good, the bad and the ugly.  But how we talk about it can have great consequences.  Therefore, direct analogies between two uneven events should never happen.  But it is important to surface malevolence whenever and wherever it arises.  An example would be to discuss the coded racial rhetoric of the Tea Party from the perspective of depriving people of their dignity as human beings, of possibly depriving them of their civil rights, or of the Tea Party for being just plain cruel and immoral. 

Words do have consequences.  We must use them wisely.