So, I live in the suburbs of Washington, DC. My wife and I moved here about a year and a half ago because she was called to a church in the area. It was exciting and terrifying in equal measure, though I think more for me than for her. I remember driving along the Potomac on the Virginia side, all of the monuments visible through the trees, and I asked her, “Did you think you would ever live in a place like this?” Her response, “I was accepted to Georgetown for college…so yeah. I did.” Granted, she didn’t go there, or we wouldn’t have met. However, she did a good job of bursting my small-town bubble.
This last weekend, I crowded onto the Metro with thousands of others and trekked into the nation’s capital to take part in the Women’s March on Washington. I was packed into the crowd, shoulder-to-shoulder, with all those who had traveled from across the country to hold signs and chant out in the hopes of having their voices heard. I think I will always remember the signs and voices that were raised. They spoke support for LGBTQAI+ rights, affordable college or childcare, access to healthcare for children and women, safety and inclusion of immigrants and refugees, recognition of ecological responses, and positive reforms to address racial tensions. Those were just a sample of the diverse crowd that jammed into downtown DC that day, to recount them all would take my entire post.
What has hurt, however, is the response I saw when I got home. I had spent the entire day hearing stories and meeting people from all over who wanted to be here in solidarity and support of those who are not heard, and my social media was flooded with those who thought it was frivolous, at best, and destructive, at worst. In the days since, I have contemplated deleting my social media accounts and never going back because I hurt so much for those who criticize to interpret my actions, and the thousands of others who took to the streets across the country, as nothing more than hurt feelings or whining.
Equally frustrating, were the marchers and allies who attacked critics with equally reductionistic ascriptions. It’s not new that people would let fly more ad hominem attacks at one another, nor is it unique that the response is more of us wanting to shut down instead of get involved and reach out. It hurts to be reduced to the most esoteric of motivations and then dismissed because those are the things no one understands. As we try to navigate such incredibly tumultuous a time as this, we should try and recognize that there are things that are not helping in these situations.
The constant thread of the last year is that people feel as if they are not being heard. Either we are ignored by the political elites who continually count on us for votes while only responding to the will of their donors. Or the political system itself has ignored us through structural means manipulated by one particular ideology. Some feel as if the economic structures of the global economy are maintained in such a way to alienate those who produce in order to benefit those who invest. Others that the social structures that have created divisions based on such trifling criteria as the color of ones skin or the amount of money in their bank account are now doing everything in their power to ignore the tension that still exists between these socially constructed categories.
These are all serious problems, and problems the Church, since that is what I write about here, should be focusing its energy towards in order to bring the light of the Gospel’s call to justice to bear. That justice will never materialize, however, if we continually reduce people down to the parts of their argument that are the most reprehensible in order that we might dismiss them. In a world that is so filled with color, to say that solutions are only found in black and white is to miss the target in so wide a fashion as to be playing on a different field. Issues of race, gender, sexual orientation, social stratification, political disenfranchisement, employment opportunity, educational access, and healthcare reform, to name a few, are not simple hurdles that can be cleared with simple responses such as, “Well, maybe you should just get out there and make sure the other person gets elected next time.”
I used to think it was that simple. I had hoped it would be that simple, but it is obviously not. However, we now hold to such a high degree of ideological purity that everything is seen through lenses that remove all the color from the world. We have created for ourselves a world devoid of nuance. Our boundaries are such that everything is “pass/fail” and now we can’t even hear the crowd. We have lost the ability to appreciate diversity, though arguably we never had such an ability in the first place.
If we continue to reduce our world down to such a pure essence that it has no meaning, and therefore can be easily dismissed, then we will forever be stuck in our present. This kind of reductionism will definitely kill us all.
