Bless Those Who Curse You 4 comments

By Peggy Rosenthal

“Screw you!” the man shouted angrily from the sidewalk as I passed by. I was walking in the street with the “Health Care for All” contingent of the July Fourth parade at an affluent suburb outside the city where I live. The sign I carried said “Single Payer Now—We Need HR676.”

I left my group and went right over to the man. “Pardon?” I said. “Screw you!” he repeated, shouting close into my eyes, his late middle-aged white face turning pink with rage. I smiled calmly: “Is that a decent way to talk?” (Along the parade route, we’d sometimes been applauded, sometimes booed, and sometimes shouted at with “How are you going to pay for it?” or “Socialists!” But this was the first time we’d been treated to an obscenity.)

Before he could reply, the woman standing next to him (his wife, I assumed), scowled at me with “How dare you turn this parade political?” at the same instant as another man in back of them hurled himself toward me with a ferocious pointing gesture and a “Get OUT of here—just get OUT of here!”

From years of nonviolence training, I knew not to pick up their tone but to remain friendly and calm. And truly I did have to “get out of there,” because my contingent was disappearing down the street as the parade continued onwards. I turned to run and catch up with my group, calling a joyous “God bless you!” to the angry trio as I left them. They looked stunned at my blessing—and that’s the last I saw of them.

I don’t want to use this post to argue why I support the Single Payer “Medicare for all” policy as the health care reform our country needs. Rather, I want to meditate on public decency. What has happened to public discourse?—this was my musing as I walked back to my car after the parade. What has happened that would make an educated, affluent adult consider it appropriate to shout obscenities at someone whose political views he didn’t share?

I also mused on the oddity of the woman’s considering “politics” out of place on Independence Day, the commemoration of the founding of our country’s body politic. I do understand where she was coming from: July 4th has lost any meaning beyond parades, cook-outs, and fireworks. That got me to pondering how public meanings get morphed. So by the time I drove back home, I was tossing over both ponderings in mind: indecency in public discourse and the morphing of public meanings.

Immediately I recalled a poem by Marilyn Nelson that I might have mentioned in a long-ago post. The poem, “Minor Miracle,” begins:

Which reminds me of another knock-on-wood
memory. I was cycling with a male friend,
through a small midwestern town. We came to a 4-way
stop and stopped, chatting. As we started again,
a rusty old pick-up truck, ignoring the stop sign,
hurricaned past scant inches from our front wheels.
The truck driver, stringy blond hair a long fringe
under his brand-name beer cap, looked back and yelled,
         “You fucking niggers!”
And sped off.

There’s a surprise nonviolent, transformative ending to the poem — which I won’t give away. You can read it in Nelson’s The Fields of Praise; or, better still, sign up for her poetry workshop at this August’s Glen Workshop and ask her to read the poem aloud to you.

I thought of this poem because, like my experience that day, it raises the question of how to respond to hate-filled obscenities in a nonviolent spirit. What other poems, I wondered, spoke into this question? Soaking my sore feet (it had been a long parade route), I remembered Wendell Berry’s “Sabbath Poem” about listening to the fears of others. Designated only “1979: I” in Berry’s A Timbered Choir collection, the poem has the speaker going into the woods to “sit still.” As his heart and body quiet,

...what is afraid of me comes
and lives a while in my sight.
What it fears in me leaves me,
and the fear of me leaves it.
It sings, and I hear its song.

This poem then recalled me to a fine reflection on Independence Day in the July 3rd Huntsville Times [Alabama] Columnist Kay Campbell writes: “Teachings of the great faiths seem to point to a freedom that is less about independence and more about inter-dependence: Dependence on each other, on creation around us, and on God. Happy Dependence Day!”

Campbell’s words helped me in thinking about why and how meanings morph in public discourse. The “Independence” that was originally a body politics’ declaration of freedom from an occupying power has shifted over the centuries into its current sense of “Independence” of the absolutized American Individual. It’s me against all the rest of you: this ideology lies somewhere behind the rage-filled obscenity hurled at me during the parade.

Finally, I turned gratefully to the poet I can always count on to give me lines that enliven the nonviolent spirit, the spirit of keeping rage from becoming catching. In “Jerusalem” (in 19 Varieties of Gazelle), Naomi Shihab Nye offers one of the sentences I cling to: “There’s a place in this brain / where hate won’t grow.”

We all need to find this place—and to move into it.