What's up with the frightened white U.S. males?

I went to the post office this afternoon and I noticed a tall Caucasian-looking guy with a shaved head looking at me from where he was standing – out of the line me and the three people in front of me were in. When I looked back at him, he sort of nodded and started looking in another direction. When the person being helped by one of the two clerks left, the clerk called him up, she said, did you stand in line like the rest of the people and he said, no I thought I was behind the lady that just left. She said, yes, but there is only one line. He wheeled around while she was still talking and said: “Stuff like this is the reason I’m moving to South Africa.” In an otherwise quiet post office, that is an attention getter.

He came and got in the line behind me and I said: “You were here before me, do you want to go ahead of me?”

He said: “Nah, I’m not in any hurry.”

He stood there a minute and then he said to no one in particular, but I guess mostly to me since I was closest: “This country is not the way it used to be when I was growing up. I spent 16 years in the military and now I have come back and this country is not the same, that’s why I am moving to South Africa.”

I said: “So, you have a place there and everything?”

“Oh yeah,” he said, “I am leaving in two weeks. This country is not the same country I left.”

I said nothing else. I was determined to not egg him on, but if I was going to say something, I had it picked out and it would have been: “No, you are right, this country has changed. I don’t think people are quite as racist as they used to be, or at least they can’t be and get away with it.” I am so glad I didn’t say that. Who knows how he might have responded and in some ways, I would have been joining him rather than somehow “correcting” him.

One day last week I received a text from my wife in the middle of the morning saying they were in a lockdown situation at the learning resource center of the Tipton County center of Dyersburg State Community college, where she works, because a fugitive was thought to be in the area. They spent the rest of the day in lock down, with students finally escorted out in the middle of the afternoon and then my wife left around an hour early, escorted out to her car by police officers. They were afraid he might try to steal someone’s car in the parking lot. He had already stolen a police cruiser and abandoned it, a few days before. They caught him two days later, near the center where my wife works.

It was all over the news and in the papers and from the coverage we learned he was: “anti-government and anti-police”, “a survivalist,” that he had a stash of guns in his mother’s basement, which was in a subdivision just behind where my wife worked. Pictures of him in the paper showed long white hair and a long white beard, although in the picture taken of him after they caught him, he had shaved all but his mustache and goatee, his hair was darker and shorter and he appeared to have lost a lot of weight – it was about 10 degrees the night he was caught in an abandoned house.

I know a number of white males who have lots of guns and who often say things such as: “I hate the government,” “I hate paying taxes,” “I just want to be left alone,” “This country is headed in the wrong direction” and so on. A few months after President Obama was elected, we were at a wedding of a friend and a white male at a table behind us was talking to people at his table loud enough for everyone to hear and he said: “People, I am telling you, we are in big trouble. This country is in deep trouble.”

I know people are paranoid about a number of things, but I am not sure I have seen so much fear among white males in the south of the U.S. until a black man became President. It is as if they are living their worse nightmare.

Is racism the primary driver of their fear? Such an accusation can easily be denied and of course, not all white males who think our country is in deep trouble are equally concerned over race. Some of them would cite high taxation, some would bring up that: “They are coming for our guns”, others would say: “This country has not been the same since they took prayer out of the schools”, and I am sure there would be a lot of other things on their list too.

But one thing they have in common is an apparent belief that their backs are to the wall, that things cannot get worse, that something has to be done. Some of them get so far gone with this thinking that they start taking action, like the fugitive who caused my wife’s school to be locked down.

They seem desperate, ready for a fight, ready to join a militia; to want to do something, anything, to join an action to redress wrongs. They are believers in grand conspiracies, defenders of the true values of this country, lovers of some sort of myth that things were better but got worse and that a lot of people who could have done something, did nothing; and that they cannot allow themselves to do nothing too.

I have spent my entire life around men (I suppose the occasional woman too) who think this way. I am not sure of the best way to handle it, because most of them are blowhards, but once in a while one of them will do something violent. I suppose the best we can hope for is if we are in a line with one at the post office, he is the blowhard type and not the action type, unless of course his action involves moving to South Africa; in which case I'd say: enjoy your new life.

On Love

In a clip available on Youtube, Jacques Derrida, admonishes girls who were trying to interview him that they should try to ask him questions rather than have him simply talk about love, but when they asked questions such as what do you think of what Plato said about love, he did not like the questions; so he asked one of his own: can you actually love someone or do you love the person’s qualities. His answer seemed to be that Fred can only love Frieda’s qualities and when he gets to know her better or if she changes while he knows her and he no longer sees her as having the qualities with which he fell in love, he will cease to love her and move on to someone else.

He also got into the issue of love and being. He said the most important question pertaining to being was what is being and the most important question regarding love is what is love.  It was at this point he moved in the direction of asking whether you could actually love a person rather than their qualities.

He did not wish to get into clichés regarding love and I certainly understand his desire to avoid them, but I can think of no other subject so prone to the use of cliché language, than that of love. Any subject written and sung about as much as love, will inevitably suffer from tired and hackneyed expressions (tired and hackneyed, how tired and hackneyed, huh?).

But really, what is love? Does it differ from infatuation? Is it possible to completely love someone, without regard to the qualities we perceive? If someone has a few great qualities we desire in a person, but many others we do not prefer; do we weigh them on a scale and see which weighs more, the ones we love or the ones we do not love? Is it possible to fall in love with a few desirable qualities of a person and then no matter how our perceptions or the qualities change from then on, to love that person without regard to these changes?

If we were to do this, would we wind up being in love with the idea we once had of the person, rather than the person? What does it mean to be in love with the idea of a person? What if the person is mean or unlikeable, but we have fallen in love with him or her? Might we do the person a disservice by continuing to love the idea we had of him or her, and do nothing to help him or her change for the better?

Is the purpose of love merely to make us feel good, to feel needed, desired by someone else and for us to make the other person feel the same, or should it be more? Should love also involve each person making the other person better in some way, serving as a source of inspiration?

I think love that does not result in mutual development is inferior. In other words, I believe the best love has an instrumental part to it. We are all headed in various directions at any given time. In some ways we are moving toward goals, toward something better, and in other ways, we are moving toward bad outcomes, toward something worse. We should each seek to help those we love be better people, to have good futures, to move in the right directions.

This means our love is neither neutral nor unconditional, but rather, it is judgmental. At first this may seem to be a bad thing, after all; Carl Rogers’s term “unconditional positive regard” is one of the nicest sounding phrases I have ever heard. But when you think on the subject a little, you might come to see that positive regard might just be sufficient. Unconditional positive regard suggests I accept you totally, just the way you are; but what if you are doing things that are dangerous to yourself and others? Should I love you without setting any conditions? I don’t think I should.

The conditions of our love should be healthy, not unhealthy, that is, they should center around helping the loved one avoid bad outcomes and to realize good ones. Clearly, what is good or not good will have to be worked out between the two people. Some lovers (people who love one another) will fight over this, but I still say it is better to have such a contested love than a love without conditions.

What Derrida was discussing may be this sort of objectified version of love, one where we look at a person much the way we would a car or a house. We know the characteristics we want in a car, big motor or fuel efficiency, color, reliability and so on. We know what we want in a house, nice closets, or a gourmet kitchen. Should we apply this sort of reasoning to our evaluation of the people in our lives, I would say we are not talking about love as much as evaluative appraisal.

I disagree with Derrida in this respect. I believe we can appreciate a car even though it does not have all the qualities we desire, the same with the house; and I believe we can appreciate a person in spite of the presence of qualities we do not like and the absence of those we do. In either case, we are talking about appreciation or a type of evaluation. In the special case of love though, not only can we ignore missing good qualities and present bad ones, our love for the person transforms all these qualities into positives. That, I believe, is the definition of love: the imaginative process by which we transform another person into a perfect state. The people I truly love, I love entirely, just as they are, warts and all; because, when I love a person, her warts become beauty marks.

So how is it I can love someone constructively, love a person critically so as to help him or her improve; when I have defined love as not seeing anything wrong with the person’s qualities? When I love someone who has faults, the fault, habit, whatever it may be does not cause me to judge her negatively, it inspires me to compassion and I will work tirelessly to help that person change for the better. I can evaluate and love at the same time because love endows me with compassion so I avoid the contempt I feel for flawed people I do not love.

Faith, hope and charity

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Consider the big three: faith, hope and charity. The first two can be entirely selfish, but not the third. The first, faith, is belief without evidence. The second, hope, is belief with evidence. The third, charity, is belief in oneself or others.

Faith is all you have when no evidence of what you believe is available. Faith is related to hope since it is the belief that someday the evidence you long for will become available. So, faith is a subset of hope.

Hope is searching for and clinging to any evidence you can find that things will turn out okay or get better. Hope is similar to faith in that both are based in an abiding desire for something better.

Charity, in some ways, does not appear to belong in a list with the other two, since it is not obviously related to desiring something better. However, if we look at it more closely, we see that it can be construed as putting ones energy into creating conditions for things to get better for someone else or yourself rather than merely having faith or hoping for things to get better. It is in this way that charity is superior to faith and hope. It is selfless when applied to others and self-forgiving when applied to yourself. I am defining charity not as giving things to people in need, but in a more general sense, as loving others, loving life in all its forms, including yourself.

Even though charity should be our goal, charity alone is hollow without hope, and hope is not possible without evidence of things getting better. Faith is available whether one has hope or not and whether one has evidence of things getting better, or not. Faith gets us by when things are the bleakest. Once evidence becomes available, hope takes over and once we have ample hope, we can begin to turn our attention to the needs of others. But even faith relies on charity.

As I have said, charity includes love for ourselves, but we should also broaden the meaning of faith to include belief in others and our meaning of hope to include hope for others.

If I have faith in you, that means I believe in you without evidence available for why I should do so. If I have hope in you, I have some evidence on which to base my belief in you. For example, I may have faith you can drive across the country even though I do not know what sort of driver you are. But once I get a report from you that you have stopped halfway for a night’s stay in a hotel, your success gives me hope my faith was justified.

If I extend charity to you I might do so without any faith in you or without any hope for you. Charity for others is sort of like faith in oneself. It is being gracious toward someone, perhaps even in the presence of evidence that the person is not worthy of your faith in him or her or hope for him or her.

If I have faith in myself I am believing in myself without evidence that I should do so, but if a little evidence becomes available, I am given hope. More basic than faith is charity toward myself. If I do not have charity toward myself, I will not likely be inclined toward faith in myself and thus I will never be able to muster hope because I will not be searching for evidence to support my faith.

The Apostle Paul said charity was the greatest of these and I would have to agree. Charity lays the groundwork for faith just as faith does for hope. You might say faith and hope are relatively luxurious perspectives because they both assume charity. If I have no charity for myself or someone else, I will not spend the energy necessary to develop faith and if I have no faith, I will not be looking for evidence enough to establish hope for others or myself.

Charity is better than the other two both in that it is selfless when it applies to caring for others and in that it is necessary for the other two. Until you consider what underlies hope, you might be inclined to believe hope is the most fundamental.

It might also be said that one cannot love or extend charity toward oneself or others without faith or hope, but I do not believe this to be the case. If I have faith in you that assumes I have charity toward you, otherwise, why would I bother? If I have not charity for someone else or myself, I will not care enough to adopt a position on the issue of whether things will get better for that person, with or without evidence.

Fortunately, we spend most of our days in hope, because others had faith in us that grew out of the charity they bestowed us. And others get their hope from us too, because we had faith in them before the evidence was available and we did that because we loved them or had charity toward them.

Charity without the other two is a pretty bleak circumstance, but it is what we rely on once we have lost faith and hope. On some level we might all be considered hopeless and even faithless. After all, we are nothing but these individual selves seeking to make our way in a vast universe with no real evidence on which to base decisions on which way to so things will turn out well for us. We do not even know how we might define “turn out well.”

So, charity is what is left once all hope is gone and after we have lost our faith. We extend charity toward ourselves and others in the absence of the other two and wait for our belief in ourselves and others to return so we can begin the process of finding evidence on which to base hope.

Those who have lost hope can survive on faith. Those who have lost faith can survive on charity (love for ourselves or love we get from someone else). Those without charity cannot survive.

On this the first day of 2014, at the least, I wish you a supply of charity on which to build faith enough to sustain you until you find hope - evidence things are getting better.