Decency Desperately Needed: Life as it ought to be Lived.

A number of years ago, I had the opportunity to meet Paul Rusesabagina very briefly. If you don't know of him, it is worth noting that Mr. Rusesabagina is a delightful man with an easy smile, and the author of an incredible memoir called An Ordinary Man. A movie was made about him in 2004. It was called Hotel Rwanda. It was nominated for several Oscars. Maybe you've heard of it.

Mr. Rusesabagina was a hotel manager at the time of a genocide that lasted for approximately 100 days in Rwanda in 2004, killing between 500,000 and a million Rwandan people, depending on whose estimate you use. While the Hutu majority slaughtered fellow Rwandan citizens who were (or were suspected to be) of Tutsi ethnicity, Paul Rusesabagina, a Hutu, sheltered over a thousand Tutsi men, women, and children in his hotel. It was a decision made at great personal peril, but with little question. To Mr. Rusesabagina, it was the only decent thing to do.

It's easy to think of atrocities like genocides as things that happen to "other people." Mr. Rusesabagina describes pastors murdering their congregants, teachers murdering students, doctors murdering patients. Neighbors killing neighbors. It seems mad, savage. Something that could only happen somewhere else.

The beauty of the memoir, An Ordinary Man, is that it very eloquently describes a sort of "frog in the pot" syndrome that can so easily happen to anyone, anywhere. If you toss a frog in a pot of boiling water, the adage goes, it will immediately leap out for fear of being killed. But if you take that same frog, and you put him in a pot of cool water, he will stay. And if you slowly turn up the heat, he will hardly notice.

Eventually, there will be no more frog.

In Rwanda, millions of reasonable, thinking, intelligent people fell victim to absolute madness. It began with ethnic tension, enhanced by economic imbalances.  Slowly, it played out on talk radio, where menacing pundits referred to the Tutsi minority as "cockroaches" and defined Hutus who protected or sympathized with Tutsis as "traitors." As time went by, the radio beckoned Hutus to "exterminate the cockroaches." With the help of a militia leader who smuggled more than half a million machetes into the country, it cultivated in unimaginable atrocities, with Hutus attempting nothing short of an extermination of an ethnicity.

Frogs in pots.

Rwandans, by African standards, enjoyed a good quality of life. Rwandans place a high degree of value on education. It is culturally important to know the history of one's country there. These are a people who understood the perils of war in the past, and the ethnicity which perpetrated the 1994 genocide was a majority with quite a bit to lose. And yet.

Reports vary on exact numbers, but militias recruited massive numbers of average joe citizens to commit their dirty work. Perhaps hundreds of thousands of human beings died at the hands of machetes, wielded by people they knew. Reasonable people. Thinking people. Frogs in pots.

So what went wrong?

I had the chance to ask Mr. Rusesagabina a question, and I'll never, ever forget his answer.

"What is the difference between the people who will murder their neighbors, and people who won't?" I think my motivation was selfish--I am haunted by this question every time I read an account of the Holocaust, or of "ethnic cleansing" in Bosnia, or of the genocide in Darfur. Somewhere, in the back of my mind, I know that much of the Nazi rank and file started off as little boys who picked flowers for their mamas; who grew up to be regular guys that made love to their wives and went to church and paid bills and were just people until some horrible ideology became so precious to them that they would give up every last shred of their humanity to prove some insane, awful, unforgivable point. What happened there?

I think I asked that question because I wanted Mr. Rusesabagina to assure me that I would never be evil. I'd never be "weak" like that. Maybe I wanted him to tell me the key was to be enlightened, or smart, or educated. I wanted him to tell me there was some intrinsic part of my being that was immune to becoming a monster.

But that's not what he said.

"The difference," he said, "is that some people realized that soon enough, this would all be over, and they would have to answer for who they were when things were not sane."

It is important to remember that the decisions you make, the behaviors in which you engage, can have consequences that you cannot see. Hate wins temporarily. But ultimately, civility returns, however briefly, and those who have descended into hatred in the meantime are left to answer for their words and actions. It is only a matter of time.

Paul Rusesabagina said the same thing in his book, too: "This is why I say that the individual's most potent weapon is a stubborn belief in the triumph of common decency."

It's true. For every person I can think of who will lie, or cheat, or steal, I can think of a dozen who have made my life better. For everything that you see or hear about how corrupt and awful a world we live in, I bet you see more examples of basic human decency, whether you realize it or not. Food shelves are everywhere, run by volunteers and stocked by quietly thoughtful people. Driveways are anonymously shovelled for neighbors with limited time or mobility, leaves are anonymously raked, lawns are anonymously mowed. People fall in love and hold hands and feed babies and tithe and deliver meals and throw surprise parties and get married and give to charity and pay their taxes (even if they grumble) and send sympathy cards. We are kind, most of us. We care for one another.

And yet, there are frogs in pots.

"We are all born with a powerful herd instinct and it can force otherwise rational people to act in inexplicable ways," writes Mr. Rusesabagina.

And that is what scares me.

You see, today Fox Nation, a FoxNews affiliate, ran the following headline:

"Obama's Hip-Hop BBQ Didn't Create Jobs"

I would link to the page, but they don't deserve any more hits. You can find it yourself, if you require proof. The New York Times and The Washington Post both covered it.

Beneath the slug, photographs of three celebrity party guests, all black, surrounded the president's own photograph. There were no photographs of any white party guests, nor any allusion to any ethnically-white stereotypes.

Fox executive vice president of programming, Bill Shine, defended his network's decision to air the headline, citing Politico's reference to kids who "stole the show doing hip-hop dance routines" as grounds for choosing such a headline.

My heart is broken.

I am sad that my country has reached a point in its history where common decency at the highest levels seems to be lost, and where the citizenry of my country is willing to accept that loss of common decency as a routine part of the political/social/economic/human game. What has happened to our standards, when we accept racial/socioeconomic/religious bigotry as normal? Because it doesn't matter which side of the political fence you sit on. Racism is wrong.

I am heartbroken that we are willing to give airtime to candidates who will say, as Michele Bachmann did, that "Gay marriage is probably the biggest issue that impacts our state and our nation in the last, at least, thirty years. I am not understating that." As millions of unemployed men and women struggle to feed their families, while the most essential lifelines for our working poor are being slashed from government budgets in order to keep tax loopholes for corporations wide open--why then are we pointing fingers at the behavior of "other people"? The private behavior of "other people" is really our biggest issue? What has happened to our backbone, when we are willing to ignore our needy in favor of federalizing the rules for interpersonal relationships? Because it doesn't matter which side of the political fence you sit on. Hypocrisy is frightening.

I'm devastated when I read the transcript of Glenn Beck comparing the attendees of a youth camp in Norway to the Hitler Youth in the very earliest days after a right-wing terrorist shot and killed more than 90 children at that camp, which, in fact, was not Fascist by its very definition. I am apalled by the cruelty we will allow in our media, and hurt that my fellow Americans will pay money to support a man who would so willingly dance on the graves of the innocent. They were youth. They were a future that is no more. Why aren't Americans of every political stripe boycotting every product and network that has any affiliation whatsoever with this man? Why aren't we demanding at least a very, very basic level of decency? Because it doesn't matter which side of the political fence you sit on. Cruelty is evil.

I am crushed by the fact that we cannot collectively seem to treat those with differing opinions, lifestyles, socioeconomic conditions, or ethnicity as equally valid human beings. I am afraid of the implications.

I'm no Chicken Little. I don't think the sky is falling. This is not a call to action against an imminent American genocide, and I am not insinuating that you are the sort of person who does not realize that "soon enough, this will all be over, and you will have to answer for who you were when things were not sane," as Mr. Rusesabagina said.

But I'm wondering if we don't realize that we, too, are frogs in a pot of one sort or another. I'm wondering if there is some wisdom in the idea that we should pause in this challenging time and consider the consequences of the finger-pointing and the hatred and the blame that we're allowing to thrive in our culture.

Somehow, we have forgotten that underneath all the ideology and rhetoric, underneath every empty theory (they're all theories, remember--different than fact), underneath all of the heat and the vitriol and the anger, there are very real, very human beings.

Actions matter. So do words.

But other things are important, too. Our quiet cultural acceptance of a complete lack of human decency is perhaps more terrifying than those who so vocally spew their contempt. What matters isn't whose theory is right or wrong, or to which system of over-hyped rhetoric you most closely relate. Those things are temporary, and they change. How much you lost in the stock market doesn't matter, nor does the number of dollars you pay in taxes. What matters is who you are, when everything seems insane.

One more quote by Paul Rusesabagina:

"Kindness is not an illusion and violence is not a rule. The true resting state of human affairs is not represented by a man hacking his neighbor into pieces with a machete. That is a sick aberration. No, the true state of human affairs is life as it ought to be lived." 

I'm ranting, I know. And I'm not particularly qualified to preach. But it's important to me that we all consider that when this vulnerable time in our nation's history has passed, when we've returned to the "resting state of human affairs," there will be some of us who have wielded all sorts of unnecessary arms. Hostility and agression and extremism are weapons of a very dangerous sort. The problem is, we rarely see the damage that such weapons can cause until it is far too late.

And so we must ask ourselves:

Who are we, right now? What are we willing to accept from our politicians, our media? From our beer buddies? From our families?

For all its imperfections and missteps, our country was founded on some pretty basic principles of human dignity, and for more than two centuries that country has strived and worked and grown to overcome that which stood between its flaws and its future. When did we stop striving and working, and start pointing fingers and shouting?

I really, truly believe that decency and civility win, in the end. In the meantime, I think we owe ourselves something better than this animosity we're feeding, all in the name of politics and the television stations that make money because of politics.

I am a liar.

I didn't pull the last post down after a day. See, all the friends I thought would mock me didn't actually mock me. They thought it was badass.

So, the Snark Song will stay.

(You guys are strange.)