Listening to the news lately, I keep thinking of a scene from that great old western, High Noon. The town marshal – weary, frustrated, under enormous pressures – wanders down to the livery stable, to gaze on his horse, rest his hand on his saddle, and think, for a moment, how good it would be to just … ride away.
His deputy, who for reasons of his own would very much like the marshal to just ride away, finds him there, and immediately prods him, with growing urgency, to do just that. The marshal shrugs off the suggestion.
“I thought about it,” he admits. “You think about a lot of things, when you’re tired.”
He turns to go, but the deputy blocks his way – urging, insisting, and finally, physically pushing the marshal toward his horse.
The marshal’s eyes grow wintry.
“Stop shoving me, Harve,” he snarls. “I’m tired of being shoved.”
Me, too. ‘m tired of being shoved.
And thinking ‘m not the only one.
Three stories crowded the news these past two weeks, each of them calculated to shove somebody, or a lot of somebodies, or maybe all of us.
One demanded that we solemnly wallow in the fact that more than 100,000 Americans have now died from something related to coronavirus.
The second required us to accept the fact that our country is brutal and racist to the core, that our cops are corrupt and violent to a one, that any of us who don’t beat our own breasts in abject personal shame are sick and weak and part of the gloating, privileged scum that overruns this miserable excuse for a nation.
The third was the relentless chorus, renewed every hour on the hour and preached at a deafening roar in every existent form of mass communication, every day, that President Trump is the embodiment of all human evil and that life on earth will mean nothing until he is shut down, shut out, shut up, hacked into a million pieces, with each individual cell individually spat upon.
If only he’d gotten the virus. If only that cop had pressed his knee into Orange Man’s neck. We could have declared a national holiday and flooded the streets to kiss and hug like V-J Day.
I get it. I should be terrified. I should feel guilty. I should despise our nation and its leader. And I should be demanding that other people do these things, too.
Only I don’t. I don’t. I don’t. And I won’t. So stop shoving. ‘m tired of being shoved.
Thoughts, re: the virus.
· ’m sorry – truly sorry – that so many have died, and more will. But numbers are beginning to show, and doctors are beginning to admit, that most of them would've died the way almost everyone dies … which is to say, whether the rest of us had gone about our daily lives as usual the last three months or not.
· A distressingly large number of people in our country right now have a deeply vested interest – political, economic, sociological, professional, personal – in keeping us uneasy, unsettled, terrified. So we are being reminded, urged, pressed every day, every moment, to put on our fairly useless masks, step six feet back, and remember how scared we’re supposed to be.
And plan on living like this for the rest of our natural lives.
· Hardly anyone telling me how awful those 100,000 accidental deaths are has expressed any concern that more than three times that many infant children were deliberately killed last year, pithed like frogs in a high school biology class – or that most of those killings were accomplished using our tax money. (Paul Harvey used to call that “selective indignation.”)
Thoughts, re: the cop who killed George Floyd.
· Is it possible that the cop didn’t kill him because Mr. Floyd was black, or because the cop is white, or even because he’s a cop … but because he is a cruel, violent man, burning with cold rage? He has reportedly bullied and brutalized a number of people of all walks of life the last few years. Being a cop gave him a convenient platform for doing so.
He and those who let him do what he did do not represent whites. They do not represent an imaginary superiority. They do not represent cops. They represent people of every race, creed, job, and economic station who choose to do evil. They represent themselves.
· By the same token, the people rioting all over America these last few nights are not rioting because Mr. Floyd was killed. They are rioting because they want to riot. Mr. Floyd’s brutal murder has given them a convenient disguise in which to wrap their pent-up furies and frustrations and violence.
· There are two kinds of Americans: 1) the vast multitude who are horrified at what happened, and 2) the very, very few who are not.
Neither group will change its mind because of the riots. Therefore, the riots are communicating nothing to anyone except that a lot of people are out of control. And that a great many of our elected officials will let them be.
Thoughts, re: the president:
· He talks too much, and at all the wrong times. He can’t let a pitch go by. He’s volatile at a time when we all yearn for someone calm, cool, collected, reassuring.
· That said, anyone who makes the formidable enemies he’s made – in government, in media, in Hollywood, and among the social activists – is doing something right.
· He’s actually, to my mind, doing quite a lot right. He loves his country, defends it against its enemies, speaks truth (however crudely) to power, values the sanctity of human life and the priority of religious freedom, knows how to grow an economy, and unlike most of his opponents, he genuinely likes and understands the people who voted for him.
Any one of those things puts him head and shoulders above the competition. All of them together – however flawed he may otherwise be – make him a remarkable leader.
Yeah, yeah, yeah … now you’re mad.
Thing is: ‘m not ashamed – and 'm not going to be – of being white, middle-aged, Christian. Of being able to afford my own home. Of how I treat the people I interact with each day. Of being free, and responsible. Of loving my country, and this wide, beautiful world, and the life it’s been given to me to live.
So go ahead. Be mad. Disagree. Tell me why.
But stop shoving. ‘m tired – to the depths of my soul – of being shoved.
Comments