Helpfulness, Foolishness, and Assumptions

The other evening, on my way home from my church gig, I stopped to help someone.

I don’t say that to toot my own horn. I’m not advertising for good karma, or “what goes around comes around.” It just made me think of a few things.

 

The basic layout of the event was: it was a few moments before sunset on a late-October Sunday evening, and I took my usual shortcut through the back streets of Worcester to get home. During rush hour, I can avoid getting caught in stop-and-go (and mostly stop) traffic; and at any other time, well … it’s just habit now.

A minivan sat at the end of the street that re-connected with the larger avenue which I would otherwise have used. Its right-turn signal was on. So I pulled in behind it. The line forms to the right, and all that. The driver got out, and at first I thought he was just waiting to pick someone up and was making a big show of waving me past (as Bill Cosby once said, “Come around, idiot! Come around!”).

Then I noted that he was looking at me and waving a finger. Didn’t think I’d done anything wrong, but in a city like Worcester with its share of weird driving customs, I might have. He looked agitated. This is not always the best sign. I thought he looked a bit frantic. And then I got a bit frantic when he came around to the passenger side of my car. But for some bizarro reason, I rolled down the window.

I know. It’s a dangerous world out there; what were you thinking, Rob? I’m not sure, other than, “for all I know, in a moment I could be a current event.” I’m not here to claim that some higher power was assuring me it would be all right. All the safety manuals in the world tell you not to do this. I might have been on the verge of being carjacked.

“Hello!” he said. “Could you do me a huge favor and give me a lift to the gas station on Park Ave.? I ran out of gas. I passed eight stations and thought I could make it to where I’m going. Can you help?”

“Sure,” some other voice than my own said.

So he trotted back to the minivan, put the hazard lights on, locked the doors, and came back to my car. And climbed into the passenger side seat. Maybe I should say he shoehorned himself in. He was a big fella.

“Thanks a million, man. I was gettin’ worried.”

“No problem at all.” And it actually wasn’t. I was not far from my house; neither was that gas station, past which I bicycle all the time; and I had no particular need to get home in a screaming hurry.

“I can’t believe I didn’t stop at one of those gas stations before. Just stupid.”

“Hey, it happens.”

“My fuel light was on and everything. I hoped I could get to the dinner party I’m going to, and then figure it out from there.”

At the gas station, the attendant loaned the man a plastic gas container, which he filled and then set gently in the back seat of my car. Again he clambered into the front seat. This more than resembled my attempts to sit in my five-year-old nephew’s little toy two-seat pedal truck. There should have been cartoon sound effects.

We drove back toward the man’s gas-less van.

“I really appreciate this, man.”

“Not a problem,” I said again.

“In this day and age, most people drive by; they won’t stop. It’s a crazy world out there, and who knows what crazies are out there? And when you’re really in trouble, people probably worry that you’re one of those crazies.”

“I hear you,” I nodded, waiting for the next sentence. I’ve seen my share of bad movies. Speaking of crazies…

“Must have been twenty cars passed by. Maybe I didn’t look pathetic enough.”

I smiled. “Glad we got you helped out, then.”

We arrived at his mini-van. He wrestled himself out of my car, fetched the gas can, and paused before going to refuel the van.

“Really. I owe you. Didn’t know what I was going to do there for a while. My name’s Ben, by the way.” He shook my hand. “I’m Rob,” I replied. “Good to meet you.”

“Same here, believe me. Thanks again.”

And I drove off, not neglecting to consider that if things had gone a little differently, I could have become a news item, or at least a detail in the Worcester police logs. I wondered what had possessed me to open the window and talk to the man, or in fact what had caused me not to hit the gas and just go go go. I wasn’t in a bad section of Worcester, but sometimes one can’t be sure what’s a bad section of any town and what isn’t. It is, as Ben said, a crazy world.

 

Here’s a little detail to add to what was a thoughtful remainder of the evening:

I look somewhat like the actor Bob Balaban, which is to say, middle-aged, bespectacled, bearded, thinning hair, and not the most imposing-looking guy in the world.

He looked remarkably similar to Ruben Studdard – if, instead of singing on American Idol, Ruben was driving a mini-van in central Massachusetts, and if he wore tattered sweatshirts and jeans instead of glitzy famous-person clothes. Ben was a BIG fella.

In short, not to put too fine a point on it: I was white and he was black.

 

I’m not here to brag that I am so racially color-blind that I didn’t notice this. I’ve known black people and white people, I’ve had black and white people as friends and colleagues, but I’m not here to try and convince anyone that my reaction was totally, utterly free of an awareness of our respective racial backgrounds.

I’m not here to boast that I could sense something about the situation that told me it was perfectly OK and perfectly safe and that I wasn’t about to become a statistic. When Ben first came around to my car window, I will admit that I thought, “for all I know, it may have been a wonderful life.”

I would like to think that I would have said that if Ben had looked like George Lopez, or Jackie Chan, or Jackie Mason, or James Mason. Or Bob Balaban. I would like to think that I am so open-minded that Ben’s racial background wouldn’t have mattered at all. But I grew up in the 1970s in an affluent suburb of Boston, amid not exclusively but mostly white persons, and I bring with me the subtle baggage of that time and place. As much as I consciously work to fight against it! – because I know we’re all God’s children, and we all might easily run out of gas at 6 o’clock on a Sunday night and need someone’s help; and if I ever find myself in that situation, I would be pleased if someone stopped to help me, no matter what they looked like.

But if I ever AM in that situation, here’s the rub: there are stereotypes which have been out there for a very long time, and which (in spite of all our best efforts) are still out there, about who looks threatening and who doesn’t.

I don’t look threatening. Seriously. That’s not even a personal bias about myself; I just don’t. And therefore I don’t have to deal with society’s stereotypes about how threatening I would look to many people if I were six foot tall, three hundred pounds, and black.

But Ben does.

We didn’t talk specifically or explicitly about race. But in this world, sadly, there are pre-existing notions about who is more likely to be a “crazy”; about who is more likely to be a carjacker; about who is more likely to rob you; about who is more likely to bomb a building. And far too often they’re based strictly on looks.

 

I was glad Ben got where he was going that night. I was glad I got where I was going. (Mom, if you’re reading this: I promise to be a careful citizen in the future, as well as a caring one.) But I was more than a little sad that I had so much to think about afterward.

Not Worth The Paper It’s Not Printed On

We live in a country that was theoretically founded, in part, on the idea that you can say or write what you want and not go to jail for it. At least, unless your speech or writing slanders or libels or physically endangers someone.

Most of the time this is a great thing. So much better than what life must be like, in places where you can go to jail if someone in power suspects you of merely thinking something that doesn’t please them.

In our country you can hold any old wacko belief you like, within limits. Those limits have to do with personal safety and the avoidance of wrongful accusation. Our Constitution provides for some wonderful freedoms, where those freedoms are not abused.

And the example of free speech that has gotten me writing … has nothing to do with the personal safety of anyone. It may not be something that in common-sensical circles would even be considered worth losing sleep over, or spilling any ink about. That example is a news item — and as a former journalism major, I think calling it a news item is a danged stretch – which comes from the latest addition to the American political landscape, one Mr. Donald Trump.

The idea is this: Mr. Trump suspects Mr. Obama wasn’t a good enough student to deserve to be welcomed into Ivy League schools, and – outrage! – somehow he did. (Never mind that Ivy League schools’ admissions departments have demonstrated a knack for their job. Separating the wheat from the chaff, and all that.)

For the past few weeks, Mr. Trump has been aided and abetted by members of the media who are afraid to think that by ignoring his blather, they’d be somehow missing something that really was important. He has been busy filling the airwaves and Internet and newspaper pages with his doubts about the American citizenship of one Mr. Barack Obama. Mr. Obama happens to be the President of the United States at this time.

Set aside, for the moment, the fact that the proper paperwork that confirms Mr. Obama’s status as a natural-born citizen of the United States has been displayed publicly and confirmed publicly by the state in which he was born (as well as at least one Internet fact-checking organization).

Set aside, for the moment, the fact that to this correspondent’s knowledge, no one created a cottage industry out of questioning Mr. Obama’s citizenship while he was running for election to the Illinois seat in the United States Senate.

Set aside, for the moment, the undeniable truth that there are people out there in the political world and beyond who have a desperate need to say any old thing they possibly can to take Mr. Obama down a peg or two or three – and they choose not to bother with critiquing his policies. That would require doing some work.

Free speech doesn’t have to be correct; it can be demonstrably fact-challenged, mistaken, outright wrong or morally repugnant, and it’s still protected. Proof of this is that the Westboro Baptist Church people are still out there, setting up protests near the funerals of fallen US military personnel. It’s not pretty; but the Constitution says what it says for a reason.

None of Mr. Trump’s frankly grotesque self-expression constitutes, strictly speaking, a free speech issue. It may be a question of “could we please spend our time on issues that are actually important or even existent?”, but free speech protects the foolish as well as the wise, or the wiseacres.

No, this time Mr. Trump has expanded his suspicion of the President’s qualifications to include the question of whether Mr. Obama deserved to be a member of the Columbia University or Harvard University student bodies, based on his qualifications as a student.

And again, the First Amendment protects this. We as citizens or journalists can question anything! Between 2000 and 2008, we damn well should have done more questioning. And, it’s always helpful for the questioner to have a little, oh, I don’t know, evidence to back his or her assertions up. But the Constitution does not require this.

As theoretically intelligent persons, though – as perceptive consumers of the mass media – we need to be a little more detail-oriented when we consider the assertions of public figures. Consider a few quotes from an Associated Press article, posted online by many newspapers, that sprang from Monday’s interview with Mr. Trump:

“Real estate mogul Donald Trump suggested in an interview Monday that President Barack Obama had been a poor student who did not deserve to be admitted to the Ivy League universities he attended. Trump, who is mulling a bid for the Republican presidential nomination, offered no proof for his claim but said he would continue to press the matter as he has [pressed as an issue] the legitimacy of the president’s birth certificate.”

“Offered no proof for his claim.” In a court of law or in my sister’s third-grade classroom, that doesn’t cut it. Like my sixth-grade math teacher, Ms. Natale, said to us: “show your work.” In the American media marketplace though, apparently that’s not as much of a concern.

“’I heard he was a terrible student, terrible. How does a bad student go to Columbia and then to Harvard?’ Trump said.”

From whom did Mr. Trump hear that? Whether or not I care to challenge that assertion, the larger question is, why does Mr. Trump get to make unattributed assertions like that? And why don’t more people challenge him, and people and organizations like him?

Beth Fouhy wrote the article for the Associated Press. To her credit, she did more research on Mr. Obama than Mr. Trump probably bothered to, or cared to. (Or perhaps he felt that doing his homework would hurt his cause. And Mr. Trump thinks we want THAT in the Oval Office in 2012?)

“Obama graduated from Columbia University in New York in 1983 with a degree in political science after transferring from Occidental College in California,” Fouhy writes. “He went on to Harvard Law School, where he graduated magna cum laude [in] 1991 and was the first black president of the Harvard Law Review.” Make of that what you will, but I think it likely that one would have to be a fairly competent student in order to achieve these accomplishments. (That statement could be seen as unattributed conjecture, but I prefer to think of it as analysis.)

“Obama’s 2008 campaign did not release his college transcripts,” Fouhy’s article continues. “Trump told the AP that Obama’s refusal to release his college grades were part of a pattern of concealing information about himself.” And, Trump is further quoted, “’We don’t know a thing about this guy [Obama]. There are a lot of questions that are unanswered about our president.’”  Later in her article, Fouhy notes that Trump “declined to disclose his net worth, saying he’ll do so if he decides to run.” Kettle? Pot on line three again.

When I read the headline of this article, “Donald Trump: Barack Obama wasn’t qualified for Ivy League”, I decided to beat back my initial response, which was: “…Seriously?”

Then I read the rest of the article, and my response continued to be, “…Seriously?”

Let me get this straight: our economy is in trouble; we’re still sending our military personnel into harm’s way for reasons that seem murky at best; gas prices are going up and up and up; our own citizens and those of nations around the world are trying to survive myriad natural disasters; despots are oppressing their own people, often violently. And all Mr. Trump can come up with as he seems to prepare people for his run for the Presidency is a continuation of the now-disproven “birther” conspiracy theory and an unresearched attack on the educational background of the current president?

[At this point, a little tiny part of me would love to see Donald Trump run for president so that I can watch as Barack Obama intellectually eviscerates him during a televised debate. It would be a little like watching the New York Yankees play the East Overshoe Middle School Fightin’ Mascots. Identifiable on the surface as two entities involved in the same activity; but not nearly a fair fight.]

According to Fouhy’s article, “Katie Hogan, a spokeswoman for Obama’s re-election campaign, declined to comment.” Ms. Hogan would represent the grownup in the room.

There are reasons why Mr. Trump might pursue these trains of thought (I can’t even bring myself to call them lines of reasoning). One reason might be that in Trump’s world, whatever he says is law, regardless of whether it makes any sense or not, and he’s gotten used to everyone around him agreeing with him, or else “they’re fired”. One reason certainly could be that Mr. Trump may not have policy positions that he can run up the flagpole in order to help him compete with Mr. Obama in the eyes of the majority of the American electorate; so he’s gotta find something to throw at the incumbent.

That “something to throw”, not just from Mr. Trump but also from members of Congress, members of the alleged Tea Party Movement, members of the cable-TV-news-pundit and talk-radio-blowhard and blogospherical worlds … those “somethings to throw” at Mr. Obama have nothing to do with Mr. Obama’s policies, or whether he’s made good on his campaign promises, or anything to do with what kind of job he’s doing. They have everything to do with the fact that all these particular people can’t handle the idea that Mr. Obama sits in the Oval Office. My apologies, but this is truth of it: as much progress as has been made on this front, there are still plenty of people, with plenty big mouths and plenty of money to publicize themselves, who can’t handle the fact that a President of the United States … ummm … doesn’t look like they do.

It’s that straightforward. There is a body of evidence out there that, taken as a whole, cannot possibly lead an objective observer to any other conclusion. There are people in the United States who can’t handle the thought that a person who doesn’t look like Washington or Lincoln or Roosevelt or Eisenhower or Clinton or Bush is sitting in the Oval Office, legitimately elected by a majority of American voters. For every major change, there is pushback before the change settles in and is fully accepted. And most of the pushback being leveled against Mr. Obama (or whatever person had been the first US President from a “minority group”) and his family is childish, plain and simple – on the order of the playground “oh yeah?”. (“Mrs. Obama wears Army boots.”) And most of it is probably not worth giving the kind of air time that a Donald Trump seems to demand.

And now I’ve probably spent time on all this that I could have utilized for more productive purposes. I’ve been victimized as well, although I’m not going to blame Mt. Trump. I’ll blame myself for paying attention to his silliness.

This most recent of Mr. Trump’s unattributed and probably unfounded assertions isn’t news. It’s blather. I’d like to hope we all deserve better than someone like him. And we absolutely need incisive, “hold-his-feet-to-the-fire” journalism from those who are forced by the currently accepted rules of celebrity to cover the every errant thought of people like him.

To Mosque, Or Not To Mosque

This, from the leadership of the New England Conference of the United Methodist Church, one of whose congregations is my home church and also where I do my “church-gigging”.  Makes sense to me:

“Statement from the Anti-Racism Steering Committee: It’s Not about the Mosque”

“We who are the members of the New England Conference Anti-Racism Steering Committee have watched the on-going arguments about the location of an Islamic Community Center in lower Manhattan with anxiety and disgust.  The Community Center, known as Cordoba House (or Park 51), will also incorporate a Mosque.

“If the issue were truly the right of Islamic leaders to erect a Mosque, there would be no debate. The Constitution of the United States is manifestly clear that any religious group has that right, subject to the zoning laws of the local community. These matters have already been settled by the locality: New York City. United Methodists have long upheld these rights as demonstrated in the Social Principles of the Church: ‘The rights and privileges a society bestows upon or withholds from those who comprise it indicate the relative esteem in which that society holds particular persons and groups of persons. We affirm all persons as equally valuable in the sight of God. We therefore work toward societies in which each person’s value is recognized, maintained, and strengthened.’

“‘We urge policies and practices that ensure the right of every religious group to exercise its faith free from legal, political, or economic restrictions. We condemn all overt and covert forms of religious intolerance, being especially sensitive to their expression in media stereotyping.’ [Paragraph 162, Social Principles]

However, demagogues and irresponsible political leaders have chosen to inflame passions and attempt to deny US citizens their right to freedom of religion. Specious arguments have been raised, to the effect that ‘Muslims ought to be sensitive to the losses suffered on 9/11 and not place a Mosque in such close proximity to Ground Zero’. How far away is too close? Objectors also oppose Mosques in other cities, such as in Boston a few years ago and more recently in Murfreesboro, Tenn. where violence accompanied the debate. Too close to Ground Zero perhaps? Anyone who knows New York City understands that two blocks is further away in lived urban space than two villages in a rural area.

“Some, but only some, relatives of the victims of the Twin Towers crime have objected, ignoring the reality that Muslims also died in the attack. The 9/11 attacks were crimes against humanity, not against a religious orientation. The misrepresentation that the 9/11 attacks were religiously motivated leads to allegations that Islam is intrinsically more violent than Christianity or Judaism. That is not the experience of the people of Iraq or Afghanistan. Moreover, the Crusades are still a vital memory for many in the Middle East and the Iberian Peninsula.

“The reality is that adherents of all religions have violated the tenets of their faith with violent and aggressive acts, rationalizing that they must be justified because ‘God is on our side’. If non-violence were a requirement for the location of a place of worship, there would be few of any kind. Christians in particular have been quick to demand the right to evangelize all over the world, demanding equal treatment, sometimes blithely trampling on the religious sensitivities of others. This is not the case in this instance: Cordoba House Community Center will serve a community already established and part of our society. That is, perhaps, what the demagogues and political pundits most hate and fear: that we are now a multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, multi-religious society. This is something to be celebrated, not condemned.

“We who decry racism in all its manifestations rejoice that at long last the promise of the Constitution, as amended, is becoming fully realized, so that all are truly equal and accorded the same freedoms and responsibilities. It is not as George Orwell said in Animal Farm, ‘all…are created equal, but some are more equal than others.’ We recognize and support the placement of Cordoba House Community Center and Mosque as a matter of legal right and simple justice, in accordance with our Christian faith, and welcome the opportunities that we as persons of faith have to meet and work with other persons of faith, our brothers and sisters.”

On top of which, within the last couple of days, it has been reported that there actually were at least a couple of mosques housed in the World Trade Center complex, one of which was actually in the South Tower.  And there’s a mosque much closer to “Ground Zero” than the location everyone’s ranting and raving about, which has been in business since the early 1970s.

So I’d love to ask some of these right-of-center commentators: do you know any Islamic people personally?  Have you even ever met one?  I have.  Guess what?  Oh my goodness.  He’s a human being like the rest of us.

One problem is fear.  The remedy for fear is knowledge.  The other problem is people who feel they have something to gain from spreading fear.  The remedy for that is … asking them politely to knock it off; it diminishes all of us.