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In times of hysteria
Six things ordinary people can do to restore sanity.
One of the most
difficult experiences of democracy is to watch your country going crazy, and
feel responsible. In a dictatorship you could just zone out: The Powers That Be
will do what they do, and your opinion doesn’t matter anyway. Your neighbors,
your friends, your co-workers — their opinions don’t matter either, so there’s
no point in arguing with them, or even letting them know you disagree. You
might as well just binge-watch something light on TV, and wait for the wave to
pass.
In a democracy it’s different: We are the
wave.
In a democracy
it’s different: We are the wave. Politicians really do respond
to certain kinds of public opinion, sometimes to our shame. So,
for example, my Democratic governor (Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire, who I have voted for, given
money to, and was planning to support for the Senate) called for a halt on admitting Syrian
refugees. (She later reduced it to a “pause“, “until intelligence and defense officials can assure that
the process for vetting all refugees is as strong as possible to ensure public
safety.” But the damage was done: Any governor who wants to come out
against refugees can claim bipartisan support.) My representative (Annie Kuster
of NH-2, who I have also voted for and given money to) voted Yes on the American Security Against Foreign Enemies Act,
which at a minimum would delay any new refugee resettlements by 2 or 3 months,
and might snafu the process altogether. [1] (Check your representative’s vote here.)
If my side has
been characterized by politicians timidly letting the panic sweep them away, on
the other side it’s been bedlam. Ben Carson is openly dehumanizing refugees
with metaphors about “rabid dogs”. Donald Trump is
talking about closing mosques, because “we’re going to have
no choice”. He has advocated forcing American Muslims to register with the government,
so that they can be tracked in a database. Marco Rubio expanded Trump’s proposal to call for
shutting down “anyplace where radicals are being inspired”. Ted Cruz and Jeb
Bush want a religious test for refugees: We should accept
Christians, but not Muslims. John Kasich wants to create a government agency to promote “Judeo-Christian values” around
the world. [2]
Chris Christie
says we shouldn’t even let in little kids. Like, say, this
Syrian girl, who mistook the photographer’s camera for a gun and
tried to surrender.
And
Remember this Syrian boy? His photo evoked
international compassion a couple months ago, but that never lasts, does it?
When Governor
Jay Nixon didn’t try to block Syrian refugees, state Rep. Mike Moon called for
a special session of the legislature to stop “the potential Islamization of Missouri“. But
the bull goose loony (to borrow Ken Kesey’s phrase) was a Democrat: Roanoke Mayor David Bowers, who justified his
refusal to cooperate with resettling refugees by citing FDR’s Japanese internment camps during World War II.
That national disgrace is now a precedent. (Who knows? Maybe slavery or
the Native American genocide will become precedents too.)
I had never
heard of Rep. Moon or Mayor Bowers before, but none of the Republican
presidential candidates seemed this insane when they started campaigning. So I
suspect they’re just saying what they think will appeal to their voters. They
may be pandering to the public fear, attempting to benefit from it, and playing
their role in spreading it, but they didn’t start it.
We did that.
Ordinary people like us. Our friends, our relatives, our co-workers, the people
we know through social media. And so I suspect it’s up to us to stop it.
I have to
confess I didn’t see this coming. After the Paris
attacks, I expected a push to hit ISIS harder, maybe even to re-invade Iraq and add Syria to the occupation zone. (Jeb Bush recently joined Ben Carson, John
Kasich, and Lindsey Graham in calling for ground troops, though he was vague
about how many.) I didn’t foresee an Ebola-level panic [3] focused on the
refugees who are running from the same people we want to fight, much less the yellow-starring of American citizens who
practice an unpopular religion.
But OK, here we
are. Our country is going crazy and we are right in the middle of it. What do
we do now?
1. Don’t make
it worse. In particular, don’t be the guy hysterically running around
and yelling at other people not to panic. Sanity begins within. You have to
find it in yourself before you can transmit it to other people.
So: calm down.
If you need help, seek out other calm voices. The needed attitude is a firm
determination to slow this panic down, not a mad urge to turn the mob around
and run it in the opposite direction.
Once you start
to feel that determination, you’re ready to engage: Participate in
conversations (both face-to-face and in social media). Write letters to the
editor. Write to your representatives in government.
Don’t yell.
Don’t humiliate. Just spread calm, facts, and rationality. When engagement
starts to make you crazy, back away. Calm down again. Repeat.
2. Disrupt the
spread of rumors. Panics feed on fantasies and rumors. Fantasies tell
people that horrible things could happen. Rumors assert that
they already are happening.
Social media is
the ideal rumor-spreading medium, so it takes a lot of us to slow a rumor down.
But you don’t have to be a rhetorical genius to play your part. Simple comments
like “I don’t think this is real” or “That’s been debunked” are often sufficient,
especially if you have the right link to somebody who has checked it out. The
debunking site Snopes.com has tags devoted to Paris
attack claims andSyrian
refugees.
Here are a
couple of the false rumors I’ve run into lately:
Current Syrian
refugees resettled in America
are not “missing”. I heard this one during a Trump interview with Sean Hannity. Trump
refers to “people” who are missing — with the implication that they have gone
off the grid and joined some kind of underground. Hannity corrected to “one
person … in New Orleans”.
(Think about that: It’s gotten so bad that Sean Hannity has to
tone stuff down.) ButCatholic Charities has debunked that
story: They resettled the guy in Louisiana,
and then he moved. He’s not missing. (The source of this rumor was probably the
desperate David Vitter campaign for governor, which
tried to ride the refugee panic to a comeback victory. It didn’t work.)
No, lying to
further the cause of Islam is not a thing. Under the doctrine of taqiya,
a Muslim may lie about his faith to escape serious persecution or death.
Anti-Muslim propagandists have tried to turn this into a sweeping principle
that justifies any lie to an unbeliever — and consequently justifies
non-Muslims in disbelieving anything Muslims say. But it doesn’t work that way.
Now, I’m sure ISIS has undercover operatives
(just like we do) and that Muslim leaders lie (just like leaders of other
faiths). But there’s no special reason to think Muslims are less truthful than
the rest of us.
I won’t try to
predict what further rumors will arise. But when you run into one, checkSnopes,
google around a little, and see if somebody has already done the hard work of
checking it out.
As you
participate, remember: In social media, you’re not just talking to the person
you’re responding to (who might be hopeless), you’re also talking to his or her
friends. Some of those friends might have been ready to like or share the rumor
until they saw your debunking comment. You’ll never know who they are, but
their hesitation is your accomplishment.
3. Make
fantasies confront reality. Fearful fantasies work best when
they’re vague and open-ended. For example: Terrorists are going to
sneak in as refugees and kill us!
Think about
that: A terrorist is going to submit to a one-or-two-year screening process,
establish a life in this country, and then drop off the grid, strap on a
suicide vest, and blow himself up in some crowded place.
Does that scenario make any sense? Wouldn’t
it be simpler to come as a tourist? An aspiring terrorist could get in much
faster with less scrutiny, spend a few weeks visiting Disney World or hiking
the Grand Canyon, and then start
killing us, while his fake-refugee brothers-in-arms are still tangled in red
tape.
Sometimes the
most devastating response to a nightmare fantasy is the simple question: “How
does that work, exactly?” If you can get a person to admit “I don’t know”,
you’ve restored a little sanity to the world.
4. Call out
distractions. The Slacktivist blog makes this point so well
that I barely need to elaborate.
As a general
rule with very few exceptions, whenever you encounter someone arguing that “We
[America]
shouldn’t be doing X to help those people over there until we fix Y over here
for our own people,” then you have also just encountered someone who doesn’t
really give a flying fig about actually doing anything to fix Y over here.
So if somebody
says we shouldn’t be taking in Syrian refugees while there are still homeless
children or veterans or whatever in this country, the right response is to ask
what they’re currently doing to help the people they say are more deserving.
Odds are: nothing. Their interest in homeless American vets begins and ends
with the vets’ value as a distraction from helping refugees.
Once you grasp
this tactic, you’ll see it everywhere. So: “All those resources you want to
devote to fighting climate change would be better spent helping the poor.” “OK,
then, what’s your plan for using those resources to help the poor? Can I count
on your vote when that comes up?” Silence.
When people argue
that there’s a limited amount of good in the world, so we shouldn’t waste it on
anybody but the most deserving, ultimately they’re going to end up arguing that
they should keep the limited amount of good they have, and not use it help
anybody but themselves.
5. Make
sensible points. If you can capture somebody’s attention long enough to
make a point of your own, try to teach them something true, rather than just
mirror the kind of bile they’re spreading. This is far from a complete list,
but in case you’re stuck I have a few sensible points to suggest:
The process for
vetting refugees is already serious. Time explains it here, and Voxhas an actual refugee’s account of how she got
here.
America needs mosques. Research
on terrorism (not to mention common sense) tells us that the people to worry
about aren’t the ones who are pillars of their communities. The young men most
likely to become terrorists are not those who feel at home in their local
houses of worship, but the loners, or the ones have only a handful of equally
alienated friends. (That’s not just true for Muslims like theTsarnaev brothers, but also white Christian
terrorists like Dylann Roof.) When you can’t connect
face-to-face, that’s when you start looking around online for other radical
outcasts you can identify with.
So it would be
bad if American mosques just magically went away, as if they had never existed.
But it would be infinitely worse for the government to start closing them. What
could be more alienating to precisely the young men that ISIS
wants to recruit?
Religious
institutions aide assimilation. Imagine what would have happened if we had closed
Italian Catholic churches to fight the Mafia, or Irish Catholic churches for
fear of the IRA, or Southern Baptist churches that had too many KKK members.
The Founders
envisioned American religious freedom extending to Muslims. AsBen Franklin wrote:
Even if the
Mufti of Constantinople were to send a missionary to preach Mohammedanism to
us, he would find a pulpit at his service.
We seldom look
back with pride on decisions made in a panic. This is where the Japanese
internment precedent should be quoted: That’s the kind of stuff we
do when we get caught up in a wave of fear and anger. So should our refusal to take in Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany.
The Red Scare is another precedent. More
recently: Everybody who jumped from 9-11 to “Invade Iraq!” or “We need to torture
people!” — are you proud of that now?
6. Look for
unlikely allies, and quote them. Listening to Trump, Cruz, and the rest,
it’s easy to imagine that everybody in the conservative base is part of the
problem. But that’s not true. Here are a few places you may not realize you
have allies.
Christians. I know:
The self-serving
Christians [4] so dominate the public conversation that
sometimes it’s hard to remember the existence of actual American
Christians, i.e., people trying to shape their lives around the example and
teachings of Jesus. But if you screen out the clamor of “Christians” focused on
the competition between their tribe and the rival tribe of Muslims, you will
hear people who are trying to figure out what the Good Samaritan would do.
And I’m not
just talking about liberal Christians from the mainstream sects.
Lots of evangelical Christian churcheshave been
involved in resettling refugees in their local areas. They know exactly how bad
it is for refugees, and can put faces on the issue. They’re not happy with the
people who are trying to demonize Jamaal and Abeela and their three kids.
The Mormon
community retains its collective memory of being outcasts. [5] SoUtah stands out as a red state whose
governor has not rejected settling Syrian refugees.
Ryan Dueck sums up:
as Christians,
there are certain things that we just don’t get to do.
We don’t get to
hunt around for excuses for why we don’t need to include “those people” in the
category of “neighbour.”
We don’t get to
look for justifications for why it’s better to build a wall than open a door.
We don’t get to
label people in convenient and self-serving ways in order to convince ourselves
that we don’t have to care for them.
We don’t get to
speak and act as if fear is a more pragmatic and useful response than love.
We don’t get to
complain that other people aren’t doing the things that we don’t want to do.
We don’t get to
reduce the gospel of peace and life and hope to a business-as-usual kind of
political pragmatism with a bit of individual salvation on top.
We don’t get to
ask, as our default question, “How can I protect myself and my way of life?”
but “How does the love of Christ constrain and liberate me in this particular
situation?”
And all of this
is, of course, for the simple reason that as Christians, we are convinced that
ultimately evil is not overcome by greater force or mightier weapons or higher
walls or more entrenched divisions between “good people” and “bad people,” but
by costly, self-sacrificial love. The kind of love that God displayed for his
friends and his enemies on a Roman cross.
If you read the
comments on that post, or look at this rejoinder from National
Review, you’ll see that Dueck’s point of view is not universal among people
who think of themselves as Christians. But it’s out there.
Libertarians. Some
parts of the libertarian right understand that oppression is unlikely to stop
with Muslims. So Wednesday the Cato Institute posted its analysis: “Syrian Refugees Don’t Pose a Serious Security Threat“.
Conservatives who won’t believe you or Mother Jones might take
Cato more seriously.
Scattered
Republican politicans. I don’t want to exaggerate this, but here’s at least
one Republican trying to slow the hysteria down: Oklahoma Congressman Steve Russell. He said
this on the floor of the House:
America protects her
liberty and defends her shores not by punishing those who would be free. She
does it by guarding liberty with her life. Americans need to sacrifice and wake
up. We must not become them. They win if we give up who we are and even more-so
without a fight.
Russell
eventually knuckled under to the pressure and voted for the SAFE Act, butsays that he got something in return from
the Republican leadership: the promise of a seat at the table in the subsequent
negotiations with the Senate and the White House. We’ll see if that makes a
difference.
These
next few days, I think it’s particularly important for sensible people to make
their voices heard, and to stand up for the courageous American values that
make us proud, rather than the fear and paranoia that quake at the sight of
orphan children.
Every time you
stick your neck out — even just a little — you make it easier for your neighbor
to do the same. Little by little, one person at a time, we can turn this
around.
[1] What
disturbs me most about the supporters of the SAFE Act is that they’re not
calling for any specific changes in the way refugees are screened, they just
wantmore of it. I suspect most of the congresspeople who voted for
the act have no idea how refugees are vetted now, much less an idea for
improving that process.
As we have seen
in the discussion of border security, more is one of those desires
that can never be satisfied. If this becomes law and in 2-3 months the
administration comes out with its new refugee-screening process, we will once
again face the cries of “More!”, along with the same nightmare fantasies about
killer refugees.
[2] Actually,
the main thing wrong with Kasich’s proposal is that he sticks an inappropriate religious label on
the values he wants to promote: “the values of human rights, the values of
democracy, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and freedom of association.”
Russian dissident (and former chess champion) Garry Kasparov has a better term
for these: modern values.
In the West,
these values were championed by Enlightenment philosophers, many of whom were
denounced as heretics and atheists by the Christian and Jewish authorities of
their era. So no, these are not Judeo-Christian values.
[3] The two
panics have a number of similarities, as John McQuaid points out. In each case “a
terrifying and poorly-understood risk has stirred up apocalyptic fantasies and
brought out the worst in the political system.”
If you want a
paradigm for fear-mongering, you can’t beat this Donald Trump quote, which combines the
appearance of factuality with no actual content whatsoever:
Some really bad
things are happening, and they’re happening fast. I think they’re happening a
lot faster than anybody understands.
One similarity
between the two panics is noteworthy: Both times Republicans attributed
President Obama’s sane and measured response to his lack of loyalty to the United States.
During Ebola, Jodi Ernst said Obama hadn’t demonstrated
that he cares about the American people, and recently, Ted Cruz said Obama “does not wish to
defend this country.”
Strangely,
though, over-reacting during a panic seems to carry no political cost, because
everyone forgets your excesses while they are forgetting their own. In a sane
world, Chris Christie’s over-the-top response to Ebola would
disqualify him from further leadership positions — especially since it turned
out that the CDC was right and he was wrong. But no one remembers, so he is not
discouraged from flipping his wig now as well.
[4] You know
who I mean: The ones who find the Bible crystal clear when it justifies their
condemnation of somebody they didn’t like anyway, but nearly impenetrable when
it tells them to do something inconvenient. So the barely coherent rant ofRomans 1 represents God’s complete
rejection of any kind of homosexual relationship, but “Sell your
possessions and give to the poor” is so profoundly mysterious that
it defies interpretation.
[5] My hometown of Quincy, Illinois took in a
bunch of them after they were expelled from Missouri in 1838. That event has its own
little nook in the local history museum, because generous decisions are the
ones descendants are proud of.
BTW, you read
that right: The Mormons were expelled from Missouri. Just as pre-Civil-War
states could establish slavery, they could also drive out unpopular religious
groups. Didn’t hear about that in U.S. History class, did you?
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