For the Other

Please stop telling me how to feel.

Stop telling me to calm down. Stop telling me to get over it. Don’t tell me to relax or to stop being offended.

If you know me, and you care about me, I would be grateful if you would give me a minute; if you would really pay attention.

I am grieving the outcome of this election. I am disheartened, discouraged, and disappointed. I have just recently attained a small degree of emotional health and stability after a crushing personal loss—and this feels like a set-back to me.

You may not understand this. You probably don’t understand it. That’s OK. You don’t have to understand it in order to be empathetic. All you have to do is believe me that this is really how I feel.

I am trying my best to not say unkind things about people who supported Trump. I think I’ve succeeded for the most part—but if I’ve said or written something that feels like a personal attack or insult, please bring it to my attention. I do not want to hurt or offend you. I want to give you the benefit of the doubt, and I would like you to do the same for me.

You say how upset you are by the negativity—as though “negativity” on its own is a bad thing. “Negativity” is the only appropriate response to racism, ethnocentrism, sexism, and violence. No matter who we voted for, we should ALL be negative when we read a story about a young Saudi college student in Wisconsin beaten to death, or middle-school students in Michigan chanting “build the wall” at Latino classmates.

This is why I grieve. This is why I am discouraged, and even afraid for my friends who are Latino, black, gay, Jewish, or Muslim.

White Trump supporters do not, as a group, I presume, feel threatened and afraid when they leave their homes. They don’t wonder if they will be insulted or demeaned or threatened just because of who they are or what they look like.

But the groups that are targeted by Trump and some of his supporters do feel these kinds of threats and fear. The president-elect of the United States has said rude, scary, demeaning, threatening things about them—and some of his supporters take this as license to bring their formerly hidden racism, ethocentrism, misogyny out into the light.

Trump’s America is frightening for some people—entire groups of people. If you could acknowledge this without minimizing it, or contradicting it, or blaming it on the media, it would go a long way to helping those of us who are grieving and/or afraid to believe that this is not the America that you want to see.

Please don’t minimize it by saying it goes both ways.

I know of a few incidents that went the other way—Trump protesters that went too far, a white man who was beaten possibly because he voted for Trump. But these, I believe, are rare events in a backdrop of rising intolerance for the Other.

Pointing out that some Trump supporters have been insulted and even harmed by Trump-opposers does not mitigate the fact that Trump’s presidency, aligned with the KKK and other hate groups, represents an increase in fear and actual danger to at-risk groups. This comparison is another false equivalence in a sea of false equivalencies. It doesn’t even come close to being the same because Trump supporters are the ones who have the power and influence of the President on their side.

I’m not in any way saying that all Trump supporters are racist or sexist or any other “-ist.” I’m not saying you are. I’m saying it’s out there, and it appears to be getting worse.

I started out by telling you about my own grief and discouragement—but none of this is really about me and my feelings. I acknowledge my own white, cis-gender privilege. My sorrow is not for me.

I grieve for the Other. For the immigrant. For the mother of young black men. For a Muslim woman afraid to wear a scarf. For a brown-skinned store owner, for a young woman getting her first job, for a queer student in a classroom.

I am grieving for America.

Punishing Madoff

Does it serve the public good to put Bernard Madoff in prison for the rest of his life?

Madoff committed crimes for which he should be punished and for which he should pay reparations to his victims. Putting him in prison will accomplish the former, but not the latter.

There's gotta be a better way.

What if, instead of prison, Bernie got one of those leg things that doesn't let him go outside of a certain range, and has to live in a small apartment, and go to a 9-5 job, and turn all his assets over to be distributed to his victims? What if he works with the FBI to catch criminals like himself, like Frank Abagnale, Jr., did?

The courts have already ordered Madoff to forfeit $170 billion in assets. It would be great if the money could be distributed fairly (whatever that means) to his victims. I don't know if that means giving more to people who have less, or repaying victims based upon how much real money they lost. I'd be more than happy to help them figure this out. For a fee, of course.

I'm just saying, as I have said before: it makes sense to treat non-violent offenders differently than violent offenders. Restorative Justice emphasizes "repairing the harm caused by crime." Obviously, he will never be able to fully repair the financial harm he caused with his gigantic swindle. But he can repair some of it, and isn't some better than none?

And one more thing: people are talking about how Mr. Madoff "ruined the lives" of the people he swindled. I'm just wondering: did he really "ruin" their lives by taking their money? Yes, he cheated them and stole from them. Yes, he changed their lives, and probably made many of them face extremely difficult financial challenges.

But is this the same as "ruining" their lives? If experiencing the holocaust first hand did not ruin Elie Wiesel's life, can it really be said that being cheated out of his life savings ruined him? I'm sympathetic to Mr. Wiesel, and I agree with him that Mr. Madoff is "a thief, a scoundrel, a criminal"--but seriously. Elie Wiesel's life is not ruined, any more than anyone's life is ruined by a catastrophic financial investment.

It's only money. Mr. Wiesel, with all due respect, and all the others who lost money in the Great Madoff Ponzi Parade, still have their brains, their skills, their sources of income, their families, their lives. From the perspective of a person who struggles more than some, less than others, to make ends meet every month, especially in the last 10 months, I still say, "It's only money." They'll make more.

What Madoff ruined is people's expectations and hopes for the future. They hoped and expected that they'd have money for luxuries. They hoped and expected that they'd be able to take nice vacations, shop at Macy's, spoil their grandchildren, and generally live financially comfortable lives.

Expectations. If you depend on them too much, I'm sure it feels like you're life is ruined when they get shot to pieces.

That's a spiritual lesson right there.

The Circus Problem

The Circus is coming to town.

At church we've been hearing sermon anecdotes about the pastor's tradition of taking his girls to see the circus every year; and we're being asked to make a donation to send refugee children to the circus.

I'm all in favor of family traditions, and I'm all in favor of giving refugee children an opportunity for an entertaining outing.

However. A few years ago my friend Q sensitized me to the animal cruelty issues that accompany circus acts that involve animals, to which I had been happily oblivious. So I am here today to use the Power of the Blog to educate you, dear readers (all six to eight of you) about the issue, so that you can make an informed choice about whether to support animal circuses in the future.

You might, like me, have the impression that anti-circus activists are card-carrying PETA members, extremists who throw paint on fur-wearing socialites and wear shoes made out of bamboo shoots. And perhaps some are.

But don't throw out the baby with the bathwater. Just because PETA has a reputation for extremism doesn't mean that they are wrong on every issue. To paraphrase Barry Goldwater, "Extremism in defense of the humane treatment of animals is no vice. And moderation in the pursuit of the humane treatment of animals is no virtue."

PETA claims that Ringling Bros. and Barnum and Bailey Circus mis-characterizes its handling of animals in its marketing materials. Rather than training methods using touch, food, and praise, as they claim, Ringling apparently uses bullhooks and beatings to dominate and subdue circus elephants.

The USDA has frequently cited circuses for animal welfare violations. Here's a link to an FDA Inspection Report from a circus in Florida (not Ringling) that cites problems with veterinary treatment, animals with untreated lesions, and unacceptable caging. It's not an isolated situation.

The Humane Society of the United States "opposes the use of wild animals in circuses and other traveling acts because cruelty to animals is inherent in such displays" (italics mine). They bust the marketing myths about the care and welfare of circus animals in this article. Surprise! Wild animals do not do their tricks out of love for their trainers. Elephants don't balance on tiny chairs for their own enjoyment. They do it to avoid pain.

We don't have to answer here the philosophical questions raised by the Circus Problem (i.e., What is our responsibility to animals? What does the ethical treatment of animals look like in a humane, civilized society? What should animals be used for?), even though those are excellent questions. It's enough to assert and affirm that animals should not be treated with cruelty. That's the law.

It's also a stated principle of the American Veterinary Medical Association: "Animals should be cared for in ways that minimize fear, pain, stress, and suffering." (Read the other seven principles of animal welfare here.) Circuses just do not meet these criteria, especially the part about using "thoughtful consideration for [the animals'] species-typical biology and behavior." A bear riding a bike is definitely not species-typical behavior.

So before you take your kids to the circus, think about the messages you're giving them about how we should treat animals.

Sorry to spoil your fun. Blame it on Q.

Book Review: The Shack

I have finally joined the club that meets at The Shack. Apparently, this iconoclastic bestseller has been rocking the Christian reading world since its publication last year. Christianity Today called it "fiction for the faith-starved." It is a self-published phenomenon.

The Story

Mack receives a mysterious invitation, ostensibly from God himself, to revisit the shack where the deepest tragedy of his life occurred. The story flashbacks to the time of the tragedy. Mack's young daughter is abducted from a campground. They never find her, but eventually they find evidence that she was violently murdered by a serial killer.

Mack goes to the shack, where he delves into intense theological psychotherapy with Papa, Jesus, and Sarayu: The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Papa is a jolly Black mother-figure, baking pies and whipping up four-course meals out there in the boondocks, hundreds of miles from the nearest Trader Joe's. Jesus is, of course, a rugged but gentle Middle Eastern handyman; and Sarayu is a mystical, pan-dimensional being who fades in and out of sight. They eat (a lot), fish, walk, and always talk.

The four cover a lot of theological ground. Theodicy is the main theme: reconciling the existence of evil and suffering with an omnipotent, benevolent God. But there's also Trinitarianism, the incarnation, Hell, predestination, original sin, forgiveness, and more.

The Review

I did not love this book as the millions who have put it on the NY Times bestseller list obviously do. I didn't exactly hate it, either. My buddy Stroke put it this way: "The prose is as bad as the writing in The Da Vinci Code, which was pretty bad. However," he continued, "the book deals with ideas that Christians should think about and grapple with."

(Some Amazon reviewers indicated that the book does not promote one faith over another, but unless there are other faiths with Jesus the God/Man and a Trinity, then it surely does point toward Christianity.)

I agree with Stroke. The prose is dry, awkward, and occasionally ungrammatical; it is often cliche; and it has too much telling, too many details, and too many characters. The Shack needed a firm editing hand.

For example, there's this paragraph early in the story, shortly after the main character, Mack, cracks his head open on his icy driveway:

He would have to wait until Nan made it home before he would get any real medical attention; one of the many benefits of being married to a registered nurse. Anyway, he knew that the worse it looked the more sympathy he would get. There is often some compensation in every trial, if one looked hard enough. He swallowed a couple over-the-counter painkillers to dull the throbbing and limped toward the front entry.

Problem one: the second clause in the first sentence is a fragment. It's awkward; it begs for a verb.

Problem two: sentence three is not just awkward and passive, but it introduces the impersonal, third-person pronoun "one" which just rubs me the wrong way. It sounds like the author is injecting himself right into the middle of the story. Otherwise, maybe it's Mack who's thinking that there is compensation in every trial--but then why isn't this thought punctuated like a direct quote?

But the biggest problem is that the whole first third of the book is written in this talky narrative style, in which Young moves the story forward insistently, like he's in a hurry to get somewhere with it. Instead of developing characters and setting up the plot, he attempts to cram an entire novel's worth of drama, action, suspense, and horror into the first third of the novel in order to get us to the four-way conversation between Mack and the members of the Trinity. And that's a problem.

It's clear that Young's hope and intent with his book was not primarily to tell a story that compels the reader to think and feel, but to give the reader a theological lesson. Don't get me wrong--I love theology, and I think it can be pretty exciting. But I feel gypped by a book that pretends to be a story, when in reality, it is primarily a Message About God.

Young must have been influenced by the philosopher Peter Kreeft, who did exactly what Young attempted, only with great success. Kreeft's Between Heaven and Hell imagines a Socratic dialogue between Christian apologist C. S. Lewis, humanist John F. Kennedy, and pantheist Aldous Huxley after they all died within a few hours of each other in 1963.

"Where the hell are we?" says JFK in the first line of Kreeft's pithy novelette; and the three embark on an entertaining philosophical debate about the meaning of life, life after death, and the claims of Jesus.

Young, on the other hand, introduces two entire families of characters on page 34 that completely disappear 30 pages later; takes his main character to an isolated cabin where he confronts God and his worst horror with too much sarcasm even for me; and crafts a cliche Jesus, complete with a big nose but a warmth so that "Mack knew instantly that he liked him." Of course he did.

I can't completely hate a book, however, in which the protagonist admires Bruce Cockburn amid the garbage dump of intellectually-stunted-in-the-name-of-Jesus Christian music that's out there. But it's not enough to allow me to recommend it.

The Theology

Concerned Christian reviewers have labeled this book as dangerous because of its faulty theology. It's sacrilege, many reviewers have said or implied, to paint God the Father as a woman. I'm sure many also feel a knee-jerk antipathy to the idea that the church might have the whole paternalistic hierarchy thing wrong.

Honestly, I don't care very much about these issues. The Shack is not systematic theology. It is a work of fiction, and not even very good fiction at that. Banning or vilifying a work of fiction because its characters might be somewhat off the beaten track of Reformed Theology is pointless.

In my mind, the most serious theological deficiency is also a serious plot deficiency: The story takes a far too simplistic view of forgiveness. Mack has an other-worldly reconciliation with his father, who, as far as we knew, had died a miserable, hateful, toxic, and unrepentant man. Does Young want us to believe that repentance is optional? That everyone will end up healed, forgiven, and redeemed? And what exactly was it that caused Mack to instantly forgive and embrace his father? I didn't buy it on either the story level or the theological level.

The Bottom Line

If you are struggling with or interested in the theological issues that Mack delves into, there are many other books that offer better theology without the trappings of second-rate fiction, or better fiction without the distraction of questionable theology.

Update: I forgot to mention this important point: The whole book revolves around Mack's suffering about his daughter's horrifying abduction and murder. When Mack talks to Jesus about this, to try to get some understanding and peace, the answers are as lame and uncomforting as anything I've ever read. Basically, Jesus tells Mack that Missy was never alone, because Sarayu--the Holy Spirit--was with her; that they talked, and she was comforted; and that "she was more worried about you and the other kids, knowing that you couldn't find her. She prayed for you, for your peace." Jesus tells Mack, "She was so brave!"

I have to call bullshit. If I were the parent of a murdered child, this would not comfort me; it would piss me off. I suppose it is theoretically possible that it could happen in real life--that a six-year-old child would feel the presence of God enough so much that she would pray for her family in the middle of her own traumatic ordeal. But it's also possible, and even more likely, that she experienced no such comfort or security before her violent death

The bottom line is that there are just no words that can bring comfort to a parent in those circumstances, or in any circumstance in which a child experiences fear or pain. It is not only feckless to try to take away a person's sorrow, it is manipulative and insulting.

So there.

The Sociopath Next Door

My peeps and I were sitting around talking about life's latest challenges, and one of us, ZZ., was distressed about a family problem. Her brother-in-law, Oscar, she said, had cheated most of her siblings and/or their spouses out of large sums of money. Whenever he was around, things of value disappeared.

One time, ZZ, her husband, Oscar and her sister were walking around downtown, shopping and hanging out. At some point, Mr. ZZ noticed that Oscar was wearing a completely different shirt than when they started out.

"Hey Oscar," Mr. ZZ said, "Where'd you get that shirt?" There was disingenuous hemming and some vague hawing, but no real answer. Apparently, Oscar had gone into a store, tried on a shirt, and walked out without paying for it.

Another time, Oscar's six-year-old child was discovered to have stolen the valuable jewelry of several people at a family gathering. Six years old. Six-year-olds do not steal wedding rings and watches and valuable jewelry unless someone is teaching them to do so. When the missing items were discovered in her possession, ZZ was disturbed when there were no consequences, no conversations, no apologies forthcoming. Her suspicion was that her sibling was headed in that direction with their child, but was shut down by her husband.

This guy has no conscience, and he even has no qualms about using his own child to get what he wants. It's creepy; it gives me the chills; and Martha Stout claims in The Sociopath Next Door that one out of every 25 people you meet is a sociopath like Oscar. The defining characteristic of a sociopath is that he has no conscience: he can do whatever he wants without feeling remorse.

The Sociopath Next Door is an interesting, well-documented look at sociopathology and the history of the human conscience. It's somewhat repetitious, which got annoying to me--Stout frequently references the 1/25 ratio, or the 4 percent rate of occurrence of sociopathology.

But other than that minor tic, the book held my interest, and I appreciated the balance the author struck between academic scholarship and popular or layman's language. I was intrigued by the discussion of the origin of conscience and the science of sociopathology: where does conscience come from? Why is it more influential in some people, and less so in others? Why does it even fluctuate in influence even within ourselves?

And of course, the ubiquitious sociological question, is sociopathology more influenced by nature (i.e., genetics), or by nurture? The research seems to indicate that heredity and environment share responsibility almost equally. The absence of conscience has not so far been linked to early abuse; and in fact, Stout suggests, "there is some evidence that sociopaths are influenced less by their early experience than are nonsociopaths."

The brain science shows that normal brains respond differently to emotional words (like love, hate, cozy, pain) differently than they respond to neutral words (like table, chair, fifteen)--but not so with sociopathic brains. Apparently, the sociopath's brain demonstrates an altered processing of emotional stimuli, except for primitive affective responses to immediate pain or pleasure.

The subject of desensitizing the conscience of soldiers in order to make them more effective killers was particularly chilling; and I renewed my vow to do everything within my power to direct my children away from military or law enforcement careers. (Not that I don't respect the people willing to make those sacrifices; I totally do. But I do not want that life, and especially that internal life, for my children.)

Stout could have done a better job at delineating the different types or specialities of sociopaths. She describes the covetous sociopath, who takes what he wants, and when he can't take what he wants from another person (intelligence, success, reputation), he hurts, damages or lessens them in some way. Apparently sociopaths can also be motivated by the desire to dominate or control, or even by inertia or laziness.

The author suggests that "the most universal behavior of unscrupulous people is...an appeal to our sympathy." We are defenseless when we pity, she says, and "our emotional vulnerability when we pity is used against us by those who have no conscience." Other common characteristics of sociopaths include superficial charm; lying; risk-taking behaviors; shallow emotional affect; the need to control, win or dominate; and the refusal to take responsibility for behaviors or choices.

Most criminals are not sociopaths, and most sociopaths do not get caught or punished for their anti-social behaviors. So how do we protect ourselves from these ice people? Stout suggests some rules, including the following:

• trust your instincts
• question authority
• don't trust flattery
• reserve pity for the innocent
• don't lie for them or protect them
• stay away from them.

The Sociopath Next Door is creepy, but worth reading, because you will encounter these people, and it will help you, if you're tempted to question your own goodness or sanity, to protect your psyche, and to protect your friends and family also.