42, and (hopefully) counting

It's been a bit since my last post.  Sorry.  On vacation for a week in late July, then no time since then to catch up.  My run of over 100 hits a day ended about 3 weeks after it started.  No explanation for either its inception or ending.  Happy for the attention though.


On vacation I was reminded of how opinion of the topics of the day can be so varied.  There wasn't as much politics or social issue talk on vacation this year as some other years but what did occur among my family and the other people we encountered demonstrate the difficulty that our elected officials face in determining the course of America.  Whether it was overseas conflicts, the state of our health care industry, Supreme Court rulings, income disparity, immigration, or whatever the topic, opinion just among those in attendance varied widely, split 50-50 in many cases.  If an extended family with similar genes and environmental influences can have such disparity in their opinions, imagine the range when one considers the depth of differences between Americans across regions, incomes, race, intelligence, political awareness, education, etc.  If nothing, we are a nation with perspectives that run the gamut, probably more so than any other country in the world.  Many, including myself, frequently lament the state of partisanship and lack of cooperation and compromise, but considering how different Americans are from Maine to New Mexico, Wall Street to Main Street, perhaps we should be pleased with just how much we do accomplish when we put our minds (and wills) to task.


Which brings me to 42.  For those non-baseball fans, 42 was the number worn by Jackie Robinson when he played baseball with the Brooklyn Dodgers.  He, along with the GM of the Dodgers, Branch Rickey, broke the race barrier in the 1940's.  Up until then, black baseball players were restricted to playing the game with the all-black teams that dotted America at the time.  Currently, there is a movie running on HBO called 42 which details the first year of Robinson's entrance into major league baseball.  Of course, it is a Hollywood version of the events, but is apparently reasonably true to the real story.


For me, the pivotal scene is when Branch Rickey, played by Harrison Ford, asks Jackie (played by Chadwick Boseman) what he will do when he is spit upon, called a nigger, and exposed to the incredible racism that he will inevitably face during the upcoming year.  "Will you fight back?"  Rickey asks. 


"Do you want someone who doesn't have the guts to fight back?", questions Robinson in a not too pleasant response.  "No," says Rickey, "I want someone who has the guts not to fight back".


Think about what an incredible request this was.  And, assuming Robinson complied in a manner anywhere near how it is depicted in the movie, think about how incredible this behavior was, especially during those early days in cities where, not only were there social restrictions to blacks and whites mingling, but in the South where there were actual laws against such intermixing.


And now extrapolate that incredible strength of character to the world stage.  Instead of justifying "proportional retaliation" what if the offended nation chose the more difficult path of no response.  Instead of revenge after attack, there was no revenge.  Instead of the Old Testament "eye-for-an-eye", there was the New Testament teaching of turning the other cheek.


I know, your first response is what about Hitler?  Didn't his atrocities require an immediate and physical response?  I would, of course, answer yes, Hitler's clear intention of ethnic cleansing required war.  But Hitler and his beliefs, his ability to motivate a nation of rational people to commit irrational acts, did not develop in a vacuum.  Perhaps, after WW1 had the victors not punished the losers with economic devastation to go along with the already diminished capacity to recover via the loss of life and resources, perhaps if the Treaty of Versailles emphasized less the so called War Guilt Clause and was more like the Marshall Plan that was executed after WW2, perhaps the perceived punishments of the German people would have been short circuited and not led, in part, to the nationalism that was used by Hitler to build his Third Reich. 


Perhaps it is still too much a part of the human genome to hurt after being hurt.  Revenge, whether person vs person, faith vs faith, or country vs country, seems to be the first instinct, the first response.  But it is not the only response, as Jackie Robinson demonstrated in 1945. 


A young co-worker recently said to me that everyday he felt that the world was getting worse and worse in terms of people hurting others.  I tried to explain to him that perhaps it is only because, with our advanced communication technologies, it seems that way because we hear about the atrocities more quickly and more often.  Thirty years ago, would we even know about the humanitarian crisis in the Middle East where thousands of people have been driven into the desert due to religious persecution?  Perhaps the fact that we know about it and are horrified by it indicates that we are evolving spiritually, towards a more compassionate viewpoint of relations with others.


War is not the answer sounds like a nice sound bite, good for a bumper sticker or a t-shirt, but not as the basis for the policies of an America that seems to have enemies throughout the globe.  But what if it is the drone bombings, the nation occupations, the forced change of leadership, the perception that America will get her way, no matter the cost to the people on the ground, what if our response, our refusal to learn from Jackie Robinson, that plays a role in this environment of hatred.


Restraint in the face of aggression is not an easy path to follow.  But if we are serious about our belief in American exceptionalism, it can only be proved by following the more difficult paths.