Itchy fingers on the leavers of power May 3, 1985

 


They call this having a conscience – this rude state of waking in which one spends life walking around zombie-like, eyes narrowed, mouth shut.

“He’s here,” people say, “but not all here.”

Dawn doesn’t help me either, a cold moist world without puddles, just contradictions.

Newspaper headlines bearing Reagan’s name and Nazi symbols; nobody actually believes the media myth that Reagan likes Nazis.

But like the day itself, these issues are masked in cloud and misinformation.

Throughout history, politics conveniently attaches labels to enemies, and we turn allies into enemies when the fit suits us, once the Brits were our enemies, then our allies, the Japanese our friend against Russians, then bombing Pearl Harbor only to become our friend again, just as the Germans went from enemy to friend when a bigger Soviet threat emerged.

The term Nazi is different, too filled with images beyond the scope of reconciliation, gas chambers and death camps from which we can always draw new enemies and not fear we might offend a future friend.

When we want to humiliate someone, we call him a Nazi, drawing up all the mass slaughter few others outside of Stalin and Pol Pot can rival, a systematic mass murder living up to all the possibilities of the industrial age – just as the use of the term White Supremacy automatically alludes to black slavery, the whipping and the selling block.

Nobody believes the people we label such terrible things are really those things at all, but a short cut to winning an argument without resorting to fact.

The real horror is far worse, what hides within us as we progress, science misused for terrible purpose, regardless of our ideology, the socialists carrying the weight of Stalin’s purges, the capitalist industrial bearing the burden of the slaughtered Jews, the white settlers tarnished by the death of Natives he never meant to kill.

And yet, those of us without blood on our hands stand accused by judgmental hordes who seek to load us down with the baggage of a history even they carry, the beast is inside each of us, brought out at an inconvenient time, revealed even in the hearts of people who profess to be sure, who use these slurs in some deluded sense of self-righteousness.

I don’t like Reagan, but calling him a Nazi or a racist to gain a political edge is wrong, because we can’t win an election without stooping to our worst instinct by telling lies we know in our hearts to be lies, building a case of hatred based on our own hatred rather than actual fact.

The danger of this rhetoric is not that we believe it to be true, but that any hand of any race or color with hands on the leavers of power is capable of the same atrocities, and those who spout this crap are closer to pulling the leavers than the person they accuse.

How can we hope to control the machines that are so capable of mass slaughter if we can’t control our own basic urge to hate those we disagree with?

I always assumed that the future would get better and better, our medicines, our machines, our social structures creating a more perfect world, forgetting that people do not improve at the same pace if at all, and we still cling to that small brain that makes us hate.

And so we get people of good faith mouthing horrible diatribes, while inside that pea-sized primitive brain, they ache to do what they accuse their enemies of, fingers itching on the leaver to rid the world of people, ideas or philosophies they disagree with, doing this mass murder (of people, ideas or institutions) all in the name of some higher order, social justice or opposition to racism.

Those who accuse Reagan of being a racist or a Nazi merely reflect the evil that lies within themselves.

And that terrifies me most because I see no difference between the good guys and the bad, only petty little people with their fingers clutching the leavers of power.


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