I should be working on a writing job right now. But I’m feeling a bit irritable, and a bit of venting seems in order because the irritation is keeping me from focusing.
Two of my aunts often use their Facebook status updates to make political points. Generally this amounts to those “cut and paste this if you agree” reposts. Since my aunts (like most of my relatives) are much more conservative than I am, their posts tend to infuriate me.
Sometimes it’s because they’re bent out of shape over stuff that’s not even true: gangs using handicapped people and children as bait to kidnap women in mall parking lots, President Obama cancelling the National Day of Prayer, and how you can get AIDS from a handshake if you don’t say three Hail Marys and drink a guava-strawberry smoothie with your left hand while hopping on your right foot.
Okay, I made that last one up. But you get the point. It’s chain e-mails all over again. And no matter how many times I point it out to them, they never think to check Snopes to see if their friend’s friend’s cousin’s attorney’s neighbor might have it wrong. Heaven forbid they even do a little Googling to see if maybe this stuff is just crazy talk, or perhaps exaggerated by the telephone effect. The way data moves these days, you can go from “Polly Noonan lost ten dollars at the casino last night with her dog Millie” to “Paul Newman left ten million dollars to start a dog casino” in no time flat.
Last night’s repost was about the new Florida law requiring individuals who apply for assistance under Florida’s administration of the federal TANF grant to pass drug tests. If they have kids and fail the test, someone else can be designated to receive the funds for their kids. But not a penny for them until they can pee clean, God-fearing American pee like stand-up citizens. My aunts think this is great: “Let’s get Welfare back to the one’s who NEED it, not those that just WANT it.” I’ve no idea who got them reposting this, but the aunts who didn’t re-post that liked it.
Let’s take a look at that. Johnny Spoon and Bonnie Fork were high school sweethearts. They have a little too much peach schnapps after the prom and Bonnie winds up pregnant. They graduate and get married that summer. Bonnie stays home with little baby Gaga, while Johnny gets a job to pay the bills. It’s a lot of stress, being a 19-year-old high school graduate trying to support a family. He wanted to go to college and become a Web millionaire. Bonnie was going to be an optometrist. Johnny makes a bad choice and starts doing drugs. Now he’s addicted, and it’s hard for him to hold down a job. It’s even harder in a bad economy.
Bonnie loves him, but she can’t take care of him and the baby. She’s just a kid herself. And she won’t have drugs around her little girl. She has to leave with baby Gaga and move back in with her parents.
Johnny’s not a bad guy. He wants to work and do right. But now his brain is wired to demand a certain kind of chemical stimulation. And as badly as he wants to get off drugs and be the man he needs to be, he can’t: his brain can no more stop screaming for a fix than his stomach could for food. It’s not a lack of will or a weakness of character. It’s one bad decision compounded by a cruel trick of biochemistry.
And now he can’t get help from the state to make ends meet. He can’t keep a job, he can’t keep a roof over his head, and before long he’s on the streets with millions of others. The farther he gets from the rest of us, the farther he gets from the possibility of help. The longer he stays out there on the streets, the better the chances are he’ll turn to crime and wind up in prison or worse.
Are we really willing to shut the door on all the Johnnys out there? Are we really willing to write them off for one mistake? Yes, Johnny made the wrong choice when he started doing drugs. But he can’t make that right on his own anymore. He physically can’t break the hold those nasty little molecules have on his neurons. (Ask yourself why the first of the Twelve Steps is admitting your powerlessness before your addiction.) It’s easy to let our non-addicted brains think, “Well, he just needs to grow a spine, haul himself up by his bootstraps, and apply a little elbow grease.” But until you’ve lived inside a brain that doesn’t work right you can’t possibly know what it’s like. I’ve had a taste of it with my own serotonin-starved brain, and there’s a sense of powerlessness there that taints everything you think or do: you can’t trust your own consciousness. I can’t imagine what it would be like to need something that I know is destroying my life and slowly killing me.
It’s also worth noting that the goals for the TANF block grants don’t say anything about “drug eradication”. It’s not a priority for the federal government to make sure only “clean” people get help. And it’s their money.
Part of me wants to argue all this with my aunts. It’s not just that their short-sighted lack of compassion offends me in ways that would have surprised me a few years ago. I feel like I need to Fight the Good Fight. The more we let our White Whales and Big Red Buttons dictate policy, the worse we’ll make our policies. And the more we stand back in silence while the ignorant and ill-tempered spew vitriol at the voiceless and defenseless, the worse things get for “the least of these“. And after all these years of appeasement, of hiding who I am and letting them think I’m still one of them, I feel an almost desperate desire to carve out a space for my true self. I get to breathe, too.
Part of me thinks it makes more sense to “drop the rope”, as Mneme says. I’m not going to change their minds. They were raised in pretty much the same conservative, fundamentalist Christian background I was. And they’ve had a lot more practice and indoctrination than I have. They are pretty firmly set in their ways, and they are pretty firmly convinced that this is the way God would want things. Kind of hard to argue with that.
Someone at that Other Place suggested I should let it go. Their beliefs are rooted in story, not truth, so there’s no point arguing with them. (She’s a big believer in Eckhard Tolle, of whom I know very little. Also she’s an inveterate and frequently illogical arguer, which is both annoying and funny, but that’s neither here nor there.) In this case she’s right. We all have narratives we’ve written to make sense of our lives. “Punish the wicked” is a bigger theme in theirs than mine, and nothing I do will persuade them to edit their narratives to make room for a little more mercy. They will filter every argument through their narrative, even though I’m trying to show them that it’s the narrative itself that needs changing.
And if I’m being honest with myself, part of my desire to argue with them is rooted in that same “punish the wicked” theme. I’m just more inclined to swing the axe than cheer the headsman, and I have my own ideas about whose necks need cutting. But as Nietzsche wrote, “distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful”. (I really should finish Zarathustra sometime.) That reflexive “no” isn’t the best approach.
That’s really the heart of it: not the reflexive “no” or the automatic “yes”. Making conscious moral choices instead of relying on knee-jerk responses. Sailing over your emotional waves, learning to ride them out. It’s easy to say “no welfare for scummy druggies”, and it’s easy to say “you’re wrong, you narrow-minded, short-sighted, heartless jerks”. But the right thing to do is take a step back, think it through, and proceed with well-earned calm and confidence.
