The Reckless Courage of Youth

 Things became quite busy during the month since my last post. I’ll try to catch up. But I must first add something about what is going on in the US right now.

Since the election, the sitting president has refused to concede after more than a month of failed attempts to overturn the results. For the international community, the perception is generally that America is not the pillar of democracy and respectability that it once was. In short, the longer it drags out, the more pathetic it looks. The electoral college meets next week so that might be the last nail in the coffin of these efforts and allow the country to move forward on the monumental task of repairing itself and its image abroad.

The one sad thing that persists is the resistance in the US to basic pandemic mitigation protocols. Again, looking at the US from the outside, the ignorance and/or selfishness is stunning. The world used to hold the country in high esteem and over the past year it’s really been Make America Embarrassing Again (an acronym not easy to pronounce). Worse than that is led by people who claim to have a faith based on loving your neighbor as yourself. Yet they are willing to allow millions to be sick, hundreds of thousands to die to avoid some temporary inconveniences. History will not be kind to them.

Related to this, Idaho has made the world news for a few things during the pandemic. One is the spike in cases and the overwhelming impact on the healthcare system in many areas. My family has been hit by Covid and I find myself being resentful of people, particularly people of faith, who continue to behave selfishly and in contradiction to their said beliefs. Looking at countries where the population stepped up and didn’t throw tantrums about doing the right thing, many are now going to spend Christmas together and are attending large sporting events. Who knows how many lives have been saved as a result of solid leadership and a population that has a basic respect for one another.

A related story appeared on both the Huffington Post and Washington Post this week regarding an incident in Idaho where minutes into a public health district’s virtual meeting to vote on a local mask mandate, a county commissioner tearfully excused herself after getting a phone call that anti-mask protesters had surrounded her home. She said her 12-year-old son was home alone and there were protesters banging outside the door. She left abruptly to go home and make sure he was okay. The visibly upset commissioner left her colleagues at the meeting stunned. They soon learned that protesters had gathered outside the Central District Health office and one other board member’s residence as well, targeting the public officials who were meeting virtually from their homes and private offices as a precaution amid the worsening pandemic. The protestors are vile human beings.

Earlier the same day, Nazi stickers with the words “we are everywhere” were found on the Idaho Anne Frank Human Rights Memorial in Boise. Even more horrid.

The question is whether this type of evil was always there at this level and people now feel they have a green light to act upon it, or if this is something new-ish. It’s likely a combination of the two. Either way, it’s ugly and the evil is being fostered by leaders at multiple levels. It makes me think of the response by many Americans as Islamist extremism has been on the rise. Many have felt that moderate Muslims don’t speak out enough to condemn the frequent attacks – that by their silence they have been complicit. If they would only speak out, they say, the instigators would be deprived of the support and resources necessary to continue their actions.

Now we’re seeing right-wing conservative extremism on the rise in the US. I’m aware that many, if not most, conservatives don’t agree with the tactics of the more extreme but they maintain this same silence regarding these extremist factions. Is the inability for conservatives to speak out against extremism due to fear of recrimination, similar to the situation of many Muslims? Are they afraid of the hooligans showing up at their doors as they did these county commissioners? Maybe. But they are creating an enabling environment of threats, intimidation, violence, etc. and this is not going to end well.

We’re all familiar with the excellent quotes by MLK and others regarding people who do nothing in the face of evil and are therefore complicit in the evil itself. But it requires the integrity to honestly look at what is going on and decide if what is going on is consistent with what one believes. If not, then what? C.S. Lewis said, “Courage is not simply one of the virtues but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means at the point of highest reality.” This is undoubtedly a testing point and, though it requires courage from all sides, for those who have woken up and found themselves on a team that has gone off the rails, in my opinion they will have the higher responsibility to either continue to foster the hate or muster the courage to speak out against it.

I am admittedly pessimistic. I’ve seen little evidence of people willing to rise up within the ranks of conservatives to speak out against not only evil within their ranks but tendencies which fly in the face of conservatism itself. There are some but they are few relative to the overall force behind the far right. Politicians, irrespective of their true personal convictions, have made political and/or economic calculations to ride the extreme wave, at least for now. Moderates have been pushed aside. The sheeple continue to adopt what they are told by extreme media and pundits.

Some believe that there will be a tipping point that will sober people up and snap a critical mass out of their hateful stupor. Though the Civil War did not remove the hatred of people that had wrapped their Christianity around slavery, it was a tipping point that resulted in the 13^th Amendment. The Civil Rights Movement was another tipping point that contributed to breaking the pattern of public facilities being segregated by race and achieved the most important breakthrough in equal-rights legislation for African Americans since the Reconstruction period (1865-77), even though hatred and bigotry continued.

At my most optimistic, I tend to think it will be more of a slow, methodical erosion of untenable positions, possibly cultivated by a youth that is tired of their parents’ BS. When I look at the Civil Rights Movement and the youth that were fed up with the fact that their parents had morally fallen asleep at the wheel, I could imagine another imperfect movement to reel in the sins of parents who again mistakenly feel that they are on the right side of history. Though many older and wiser people will continue to do their part, it could be the reckless courage of youth that will need to come save the day. Godspeed.