The last one I watched addressed the dynamics of micro-aggressions, as they’re called — the many daily and unspoken rejections or insults given to African Americans – and Native Americas and poor whites — by people who are uncomfortable with or hostile toward them.
I don’t and didn’t doubt that micro-aggressions are real.
What made me log out is that beneath the specialized and sophisticated language of the term the micro-aggression defines the same kind of hard looks, blank stares, false smiles and general stink-eye people dole out to one another in your average setting on your average day the world over.
That doesn’t detract from its effect of course. On that score, the word needling comes to mind and the notion of death by 1,000 tiny cuts.
Nor do I dispute that human creativity has fashioned some ingenious variations involving racially motivated stink-eye. Still, like the Pollack jokes of my youth, jokes about the Irish, the Jews, African Americans and Hispanics, to me, micro-aggressions are variations on a common theme.
My twofold bottom line:
1. Human stink-eye is widespread enough that it could be an Olympic sport.
2. Those keeping box scores on the effect of human bigotry are best advised not to focus on the uniqueness of one form over another as the gross amount of suffering that results.
In the past dozen years, I’ve been convinced that health statistics, which bear witness to how our gross domestic product of suffering is distributed among us are the best rule of thumb. And I’ve been persuaded that they are most likely to tap into national reserves of empathy.
Suffering and illness are vulnerabilities are part of the common ground of human experience.
If one can’t have empathy for someone suffering with the same afflictions as we do – the same afflictions that shorten or suck away the quality of lives of those we love – nothing can.
And if we’re able to read and not weep over the suffering accounted for and expressed by infant mortality rates well, our species may be a lost cause.
Finding common ground
All of which is my way of arguing that the path toward empathy is through what we have in common as people, both through our joys and our pains. And, on that score, I think one of the obstacles for a shortage of empathy toward immigrants now in our city is the difficulty in trying to image what it would be like to try to wake up in a place run by violent gangs. From this distance it seems a wholly foreign notion.
That said, there is another statistic involving community suffering establishes that those who have protested the resources spent on accommodating the influx of Haitians to Springfield have reasons other than race to protest.
As National Public radio reported it in a 2016 story when Donald Trump made a campaign stop in a Springfield: “Median incomes fell an astounding 27 percent in Springfield between 1999 and 2014, more than any metropolitan area in the country, according to the Pew Research Center.”
The city itself is still recovering from the migration of those jobs to people in other lands. On the one hand, I don’t think those now doing those jobs are to blame. On the other, it’s taken me years not to take personally the damage done to the jobs including mine that migrated out of from newspapers by the coming of digital age.
How you can help
If you’re with me so far, please hang on just a little longer.
The most straightforward solution to alleviating the pain inflicted by bigotry-induced stink eye is everyday openness and kindness.
When seeing the fathers, mothers, grandfathers and grandmothers of “others” basking in the presence of a baby, suggest the child at the center of it all the attention is the most beautiful after, in my case, our two grandsons.
If someone’s fumbling with their phone and you, the mention that you’ve ordered training wheels for your 5G device. It establishes a common ground.
If two people are obviously friends and enjoying one another, interrupt tell them you enjoy watching others enjoy the great gift of friendship and share the story of a friend.
If you spot someone who’s knitting and you’re a knitter – or if your grandma was one – break the ice with that.
Common interests are common ground, a path to acquaintance, friendship and, over time, a broader understanding of another person – a step toward realizing the humanizing potential we can bring out in one another. It’s a step toward freeing our minds of bigotry; and as a popular song of recent years suggests, “the rest will follow.”
And in contrast to what some may believe about us due to recent events, Springfield is showing the way forward.
The lush green space that stretches from Columbia to Main Streets in Springfield’s regenerating downtown is called the National Road Commons. I’m pretty sure the bookies in Vegas would endorse my bet that its creators chose the name in hopes a new common ground for a city that had lost that about when the great economic slide came.
Our commons is fulfilling its promise as a place where we can enjoy and know one another. I think of all the people I see and have come to know at the Blues and Jazz Festival, Beatles concerts and recent chalk art festival there. Similar opportunities now exist at l Mother Stewart’s over a beer or the Co-hatch over a waffle, or various spots over coffee.
I believe all of us human beings are, in a way, bigots in recovery. We’re each born into small, secure world we have to venture out of to connect with “others.”
A final related thought.
I’m not one who usually commends commandments to others. But thoughts on my own history bigotry have brought me back time and again to the commandment that – at the very least — we not bear false witness against our neighbors and that we not say about them something we know or can reasonably know is not true, particularly something hideous.
That may be a way forward, but it will never lead to a commons along the national road.
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