Prejudice is a chain, it can hold you. If you prejudice, you can’t move, you keep prejudice for years. Never get nowhere with that.                  (Bob Marley)

In the wake of the first presidential debate, a lot of commentary has predictably gone down about the big moments. Trump responding “That’s business” to Hillary’s description of the devastating losses suffered by poor and middle-class Americans in the wake of the 2008 financial meltdown.  Trump crowing “That makes me smart” to Hillary’s assertion that he paid no income taxes for some number of years. These were moments that deserved media attention. They reveal character, attitude, values or lack of. But for me, the most amazing point in the debate occurred here:

Lester Holt: Do you believe that police are implicitly biased against black people?

Hillary Clinton: Lester, I think implicit bias is a problem for everyone, not just police. I think, unfortunately, too many of us in our great country jump to conclusions about each other. And therefore, I think we need all of us to be asking hard questions about, you know, why am I feeling this way?  [my italics]

What makes this a standout is its rarity and authenticity. We expect political debates to paint policy with a broad brush: I’m for this. I’m against that.  But here is Hillary suddenly departing from that script and speaking as a human being about the (our) human condition. With these words, she set every American a true challenge.

Assumptions

Assumptions—we all make them. We see someone on the street, in the gym, at the supermarket. Without any attempt to engage the person, we take a slapdash mental survey and rush to judgment. In nanoseconds, we register race, ethnicity, gender/transgender, age, any obvious physical or cognitive disabilities.

Requiring closer scrutiny, but equally in the assessment mix, is class. Class gets tricky because it runs along two separate axes that may or may not intersect: education and income. But our eye is not fooled for long. An educated person would never speak in that manner, hang out at that bar, make that mistake. A person of means would never drive that car, live in that neighborhood, frequent that diner. Nothing is off the table: weight, clothing, hair style, accent. We note them all.

As I mentioned in my last post, sizing up people and situations is developmental and has its evolutionary purpose: to distinguish a threatening situation from a non-threatening one. Every seven-year-old does it. It’s the rush to judgment in non-threatening situations that’s the problem. And no, someone being of a race or sexual orientation or class different to our own does not constitute a threat.

Not My Kind

My parents lived for some years in a gated community. The houses, with minor variations in floor plan, were indistinguishable. The community covenant permitted owners to “individualize” their home by choosing one of three colors for their front door. The options? White, off-white, and ivory. (God forbid you should have one beer too many. You’d never find your own house.) There were other rules—many—including no clotheslines, no leaving your garage door open (!), and no pick-up trucks.

So, did all this homogeneity produce a sense of well-being and harmony? Did these cloistered homeowners feel secure in the knowledge they need never encounter people different from themselves in their immediate environment? No, instead they looked for ever smaller differences, magnifying them until they assumed enough significance to point a finger: Not our kind.

It would be easy to feel superior to this example. Most of us don’t live in gated communities, and many of us wouldn’t wish to. But we do live in divisive times. The Us vs. Them mentality permeates every aspect of our polarized culture.

Us vs. Them

Trump calls a Latina “Miss Housekeeping,” and we all recognize this as a racial/ethnic/gender slur. In this instance, Us vs. Them is those who are biased against Latinos and/or women, and those who aren’t. But there’s a second part to this: Why do we all understand this is a slur—what implicit bias do we hold that equates a “housekeeper” with someone of lesser worth?

Us vs. Them is frequently a triumph of fear over fact. Since 9/11, a growing number of non-Muslim Americans have trouble seeing a Muslim American without thinking “potential terrorist.” In their fear, people buy into propaganda that Muslims are overrunning the country. Fact: Muslim Americans represent only 1% of the total U.S. population. Fact: Muslim Americans have been crucial to helping law enforcement unearth terror suspects. Fact: Hate crimes against Muslim Americans are at their highest levels since 9/11.

Stereotyping is not the sole property of any particular party affiliation, socio-economic, religious, or cultural group.

Mindful of the history/origins of the Ku Klux Klan, angered and upset by the 2015 racist murders of nine black members of Charleston’s Emanuel AME  Church, how many of us hear a white person with a southern accent, and bristle: Racist, Confederate flag-flying, cracker thug!

And that was exactly Hillary’s point: No one is immune. At some level, whether deep-rooted and multi-generational or free-floating and vague, we all have a personal acquaintance with implicit bias.

Breaking The Silence

I had an encounter in the supermarket this summer that opened my own eyes. I was standing in a long line at checkout. Directly behind me were two men. One middle-aged, one older. Both white. Both dressed in short-sleeve plaid shirts. Work pants. They looked like Joe-the-Plumber’s (political/media stereotype) cousins. High school education. Maybe a year of community college. All this went through my brain in three, four seconds. And my brain fired back a rapid conclusion: Conservative. Probably longing for the “good old days” when white heterosexual men ruled and everyone “else” knew their place. Want to silence “the liberal media.” Would find me in my Neil deGrasse Tyson tee shirt a threat to everything they believe in.

Then I stopped and took stock of this reaction. I asked myself some version of Hillary’s Why am I feeling this way? Because I don’t think I’m like that, and I certainly don’t want to be like that, but there I was, being just like that.

So I took a deep breath, smiled at the men, and nodding at the (still) long line, said, “You think it would break the bank if they hired a few more cashiers?”

And that was all it took. We started talking about how so many big companies have made severe cutbacks in staff, and what this was doing to people’s lives.

“It’s the guys at the top, gettin’ greedy, grabbing all the money,” the younger man asserted.

“It’s the attitude everywhere now,” his uncle agreed. “I like this Bernie guy. If decent jobs and healthcare for everyone makes me a socialist, count me in.”

I wanted to hug him.

Okay, for me, that was a lucky hit. What if they had said something truly repugnant to me? Well then I would have had the option of expressing my views or walking away. But at least my response would be based on reality rather than a preconceived notion.

I know that approaching and talking to strangers is not always easy or pleasant. (I staffed a table at a farmer’s market for Elizabeth Warren during her Senate run. Trust me, I know.)  But, really, how many times do we encounter someone so obnoxious that the finding of any common ground is impossible? More often, people express a mix of things—some which we connect with, others not so much. It can be uncomfortable to hear opinions and ideas different to our own, but the real world isn’t limited to three identical door colors or a single design. There are blue doors and red doors, barns door and metal doors, French doors and glass bead curtains. And the weird, sometimes scary, sometimes wonderful, true thing is: They’re all our kind.

Humans have a long history of tribalism and clannishness, but we also have a brain structure which gives us the power to evaluate our behavior and to choose to behave differently. In a world full of nuclear weapons and environmental hazards, a world facing the challenges of climate change, a refugee crisis, and cyber attacks, we can’t afford to be feuding like the Hatfields and McCoys. Each of us is depending on all of us recognizing that the sum of what we have in common is far greater than our differences.

Like the woman in the red pantsuit at the debate said: We are stronger together.

 “Be careful how you are talking to yourself because you are listening.”  (Lisa M. Hayes)

When I first encountered George Eliot’s Middlemarch in my undergraduate days—a book that among much else explores the ideal we aspire to versus the real we attain—it was Dorothea Brooke who intrigued me. A young woman all fired up to reform the world and save humanity, Dorothea (after an unfortunate marriage choice and other muddles) must ultimately settle for doing good in a hundred smaller ways. Eliot doesn’t disparage Dorothea for what she fails to accomplish, but pays homage in the closing lines to her unwavering resolve to help people:

But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs. 

Recently, revisiting Middlemarch via the excellent 1994 BBC miniseries, I found myself drawn to Tertius Lydgate, the doctor determined to reform the haphazard (and hazardous) medical practices of his day. He, too, suffers an unhappy marriage, and his bent to self-righteousness doesn’t endear him to the local medical establishment who are jealous of his intelligence and ambitions. In summary, he fares less well than Dorothea:

Lydgate’s hair never became white. He died when he was only fifty …  He had gained an excellent practice …  His skill was relied on by many paying patients, but he always regarded himself as a failure: he had not done what he once meant to do.

I had forgotten this part of the book, or it had slipped off my Teflon-coated twenty-something self. Lydgate’s harsh appraisal of his life surprised me. He endures much, accomplishes much, and is generally a very admirable character. That he regarded himself as a failure saddened me. Where did such a negative self-assessment come from?

The Beginnings of Negative Self-Chatter

When I was a first grade teacher, I learned a number of things:

1) You cannot possibly repeat yourself enough;

2) You must always be in two, preferably three, places at once;

3) Take note of who the miscreants are on Day 1, then win them over.

But the most profound thing I learned was that somewhere between the end of kindergarten and the middle of first grade, we begin to measure ourselves against others, and to form a picture of where we fall on the human continuum. We start to judge our abilities, and those judgments are not often kind.

This ability to assess situations and people, to form judgments is developmental and necessary. If we couldn’t distinguish between the trustworthy and the unreliable, between a safe course of action and a dangerous one, we would not survive long. But its corollary is that we

often rank ourselves and our efforts against heroes past and present—Alan Turing, Eleanor Roosevelt, Nelson Mandela, Malala Yousafzai—and conclude we are inferior. I saw brilliant kids falter as they began to realize other kids were brilliant, too, and I understood the question they silently asked: Just how much more brilliant, and what does this say about me?

Reconciling Our Ideal and Real Selves

Like Dorothea Brooke or Tertius Lydgate, we each harbor an ideal self. Someone who makes their mark on the world in some profound, indelible way. The scientist who discovers a cure for cancer. The lawyer who takes on the big corporate interests and scores a game-changing win for environmental legislation. The writer whose novel brilliantly reveals the truth of our times. The teacher whose passion for learning changes the lives of her students forever. Our ideal self embraces the challenge, works tirelessly, brushes off setbacks, laughs in the face of adversity, and is beloved by all who champion the good.

If this seems an exaggeration, consider the thousands of films and books that feature a protagonist who against all odds takes on the impossible challenge and succeeds. We are drawn to these stories because in their characters’ indefatigable courage and devotion, we glimpse our best true self.

But the movie/book invariably ends and we’re back to real life in real time. A world where meals need fixing and kids need caring. Where cars break down and furnaces die. Where our control is limited and our efforts often go unremarked. Where the best-laid plans fly right out the door.  And rejection truly hurts.

In this world, the rose-tinted glasses are off and we bump up against our very human limits not infrequently. In this world, we are not always so kind to ourselves. How could I be so stupid as to miss that opportunity? Only an idiot would have done that. Everyone else knows how this works except me. We threaten to kick ourselves for being too slow, too timid, too naïve, too lazy. Like my first graders, self-accusation follows self-assessment, and doubt follows both. But does all the negative self-chatter actually bring us closer to who we hope to be, or does it just bring us down?

Try A Little Tenderness

Writers, let me assure you, have ample opportunities for negative self-talk. We must constantly convince strangers who never asked us to write anything to look at what we’ve written. To read our short story, our novel, our screenplay. Most of them don’t, and many won’t even respond. We work in solitude, producing a product that is always subject to subjectivity itself. Your book is brilliant on Tuesday, godawful on Wednesday. Thursday, you salvage what you can, dump the rest, and continue. Any serious writer will vouch for the fact that the writing life is a constant zipline between ecstasy and despair. They will also tell you that they never quite “get it” the way they envisioned it. The ideal remains in the mind. The real is what tumbles out on the page. Yet somehow, out of this maelstrom  good books are born. Sometimes, even great books.

Like the lives of children teachers do change. Like the lives of people biologists and doctors do save. Like the social injustices lawyers and activists do right. Maybe we don’t always stop the bad guy, win the girl/boy, and save civilization, but we are better than we know.

Last week, I found this card in a store: Talk to yourself like you would to someone you love (Brene Brown).  The words surprised me in their resonance. As if their author understood my struggles, knew my vulnerabilities, and was kindly urging me to give my heart a rest.

Talk to yourself like you would to someone you love. Maybe we just need to cut ourselves some slack. Stop lambasting ourselves for all the ways (we think) we fall short, and begin counting all the ways we succeed. Offer ourselves the kind words we would offer a colleague, our children, a friend.

Eliot tells us the world regarded Tertius Lydgate as a man who “had gained an excellent practice,” a man whose “skill was relied on by many paying patients.”

But Lydgate only saw that “he had not done what he once meant to do.” Pity.

“As long as you can laugh at yourself, you will never cease to be amused.”  (Anonymous)

Some months ago, a friend shared a story at a party. The NGO she works for is part of a global project involving a half dozen other NGOs. Right in the middle of a networking weekend, no one could get access to the project’s shared online folder. People from Amsterdam to San Francisco were frantically e-mailing each other: Where’s our data?! When the dust settled, it transpired that one of the participants had moved on to another job and wiped the old files from his computer to gain usable space. Unfortunately, he was listed with Google as the administrator on the folder. When he erased his copy, he unwittingly erased all the members’ copies.

Everyone at the party had a good laugh over this little tale of digital mayhem. Probably because: 1) we could all imagine ourselves doing something equally stupid, and 2) we were relieved we hadn’t been the one to do so in this instance.

Since then, I’ve often found myself chuckling over this incident and wondering if its innocent perpetrator saw its humorous side—after all, no one was hurt and though it was a nuisance, the remaining NGO members were able to reconstruct the folder from their individual notes. I hope he can laugh as we at the party laughed, but I’m doubtful. We tend to suffer the embarrassment of our mistakes for a long time. Sometimes to the grave.

There’s a lot of pressure to perform to perfection out there. Mistakes are anathema—heads will roll, et cetera—yet who among us doesn’t make them?

To compound the problem, we are vulnerable to something psychologists call the “Spotlight Effect.” When we think we’ve screwed up—called a prospective employer by the wrong name, tripped over a cord as we made our way to the podium to give a speech, sent the wrong manuscript to an editor—we tend to freak out, imagining that everyone saw, that everyone now thinks we’re awkward, stupid, incapable. This magnification of our own mistakes has two negative effects: 1) To avoid any risk of humiliation or rejection, we become much more guarded in what we say and do; 2) As a consequence, we drain a lot of the joy from our lives.

Tragedy + Time = Comedy

My husband once set his hair on fire while trying out an expensive cigarette lighter in a posh department store. My friend Pete swallowed a piece of ham tied to a string while doing an experiment on peristalsis. I hauled around my three-week-old son at the bottom of a Snugli, like a sack of potatoes, until a woman in the supermarket told me there was a little button-in cloth seat for newborns. Embarrassing? Well, in the case of the peristalsis experiment gone awry, maybe more frightening than humiliating. The point, though, is that these anecdotes, told and retold over the years, have become the source of much hilarity and bonhomie. As comedian and writer Steve Allen said: Tragedy + Time = Comedy. Our most embarrassing missteps become our funniest stories, the ones everyone asks us to repeat.

But what if we just cut to the chase and start laughing at our foibles the moment we spill the lasagna all over our lap, drop our cell phone down a restaurant toilet, forget to attach the CV to our job application? Life should come with a beeper, warning us when we’re about to screw up, but it doesn’t, so we need to adopt the ability to laugh at ourself.

My dad could be ornery, and he was not much with the compliments, but he could always laugh at himself. It’s probably the most important thing I learned from him. I remember one time in a restaurant, he was fixing his coffee. “Geezus, this cream is thick,” he remarked as it fell in chunks from the little pitcher into his cup. “Oh no,” my mom cried, “that’s my blue cheese dressing. I asked for it on the side.” Now, my dad could have blamed his mistake on the low lighting or the waitress’s failure to set the blue cheese next to my mom’s plate or the stupidity of a restaurant that would put both cream and blue cheese in identical pitchers. But he just laughed. Because it was funny. Because there’s no point in pretending you didn’t do what you did. Because no one is perfect. And then he ordered a fresh cup of coffee.

Mistakes—we all make ‘em. So, laugh it up. And if the people around you can’t cope with this very human reality, maybe you just need different people.

Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap, but by the seeds you plant.  (Robert Louis Stevenson)

Along with debates, campaign speeches, and a slew of primaries, election years seem to bring out the cynics among us, all of them asking, “What’s the point?” Undoubtedly, there are some born-to-be-negative cynics, but I suspect most cynicism springs from disappointed idealism. People who hold a much-cherished Big Picture of a perfect world, and feel cheated and angry when it fails to materialize. All measures short of complete victory are tantamount to failure.

In all this, the Little Picture—the stories of real people in real time, their welfare, their fate—tends to get lost.

Let me be clear: Having a Big Picture view is essential to progress. Big Picture thinking allows us to see the connections between seemingly disparate events. It enables us to consider the extent of a situation: Is it local, national, global? An isolated incident, a series of coincidences, or a systemic issue? Grasping the Big Picture is key to formulating long-term goals and strategies. As the folk song says, it’s about keeping our “eyes on the prize.”

But, the Little Picture is where we live.

It’s where those featureless pixels in the Big Picture become recognizable faces, grow names, sprout human needs. Where a family of refugees tugs at your heart because you have a family, or have lived through a disaster, or are the child of immigrants. It’s the picture in which we recognize our humanity in the faces of others.

The Little Picture is not a selfie. It’s not about viewing the world from the comfort of your own armchair and asking “What’s the problem? I’ve got mine, Jack.” Not the egocentric attitude expressed by Mel Brooks’s character in The 2,000 Year Old Man: “Let ‘em all go to hell except Cave 76!”

It’s about seeing the actual lives behind the numbers. It’s about the significance of helping someone even when you can’t help everyone. It’s about remembering that someday, somewhere, that someone in desperate need of immediate aid may turn out to be your child, your parent, you. It’s the answer to “What’s the point?”

I was reminded recently of the significance of the Little Picture—how far its ripples on the larger pond can travel— in an e-mail from North Carolina Policy Watch. It seems that Americans tend to be pretty blasé about the routine nuts and bolts of our democracy, such as the selection of federal judges (which, by the way, is directly related to who’s in the Oval Office and who has the majority in the Senate). The federal judiciary is not the stuff of pumped-up passion and fireworks. Many of us would be hard-pressed to name even one federal judge. Yet, it wasn’t the Supreme Court, but the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit that struck an “… immense blow for the future of democracy, inclusion, and the effort to combat discrimination” when it ruled North Carolina’s voter suppression law unconstitutional on July 29 of this year (NCPW). Similar U.S. Court of Appeals decisions have come down recently in Texas and Wisconsin.

Are these individual state rulings as good as Congress restoring the Voting Rights Act in its entirety? No. Are these decisions, which enable several million students and non-white voters (both targets of voter suppression) to have a voice in our elections, better than waiting for Congress to restore the VRA? Undeniably.

Waiting for Godot: The Perfect vs. the Good

Voltaire wrote: Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. The Big Picture is often the image of an ideal: Health care for everyone. Adequate housing and education for all people. Environmental standards that not only halt damage to the planet but actually reverse the destruction to our air, water, and soil. An end to all violence worldwide.

These Big Picture goals are admirable, majestic, profound. But the roughly 20 million Americans who now have health insurance, thanks to the Affordable Care Act, are not just numbers. They are diabetic teens and adults who did not die due to a pre-existing condition. They are children who did not die from a strep throat or a ruptured appendix because their parents cannot afford to pay $800 a month with a $3,000 deductible—in essence, paying an insurance company $10,000 a year and then having to pay for most or all of their healthcare expenses. They are people working 2-3 part-time jobs, whom no one will hire full-time because that would mean giving them benefits, including healthcare coverage.

So, is the ACA a failure because 30 million Americans still remain uninsured? As one of the millions of self-employed workers for whom it made healthcare possible, I am grateful every day. As one of the 7.4 billion human beings on this planet, I know we still need to do more.

But waiting for a perfect world, a perfect system, the perfect candidate—it’s like waiting for Beckett’s Godot. It just ain’t comin’. And nothing in history supports the idea that it ever will. So we can sit on our hands in protest at the imperfect or we can dive into the fray, do what we can to improve things for more people, and make good with what we get. In truth, I’m convinced it’s the only way to achieve anything. The journey of a thousand miles always begins with a single step. We start with the Little Picture and strive to paint a larger, wider canvas from there.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 speaks to this eloquently.

The CRA came about:

Because in 1961, black and white civil rights activists rode interstate buses into the segregated South. These “Freedom Riders” wanted to highlight the Interstate Commerce Commission’s failure to enforce earlier Supreme Court decisions that had ruled segregated public buses unconstitutional (Irene Morgan v. Commonwealth of Virginia, 1946; Boynton v. Virginia, 1960).

Because in 1960, four black students held a sit-in at a whites-only lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina. Within a week, the movement grew from four to 300, and the sit-ins fanned out to other segregated lunch counters in Greensboro, then to other cities and states across the Jim Crow South.

Because in 1957, the “Little Rock Nine”—nine black students, registered by the NAACP and escorted by federal troops—became the first black pupils to attend the all-white Little Rock Central High School.

Because in 1955, Rosa Parks sat down on a bus and refused to give up her seat to a white woman when the whites-only section was full, thus sparking the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

Because a woman named Sarah Louise Keys had done something similar in 1952, as had Bayard Rustin in 1947, and Irene Morgan in 1944. Back and back to Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass.

None of these actions freed all black Americans forever from discrimination and the savage violence of racism. Sadly, more than 50 years later we have ample proof of that. But that doesn’t diminish the significance of these advances or the courage of the participants or the outcomes of their actions. Taken separately, they are all Little Pictures. But they are also pieces of a much larger picture, one we are still painting. And despite setbacks, despite backlash, they have added up to real change for many, many Americans. That we still have a long way to go does not negate the lives improved, the lives saved. Each of them is, after all, someone’s only life.

The Starfish Story

I first heard the Starfish story when I was doing my M.Ed. It goes something like this:

A man is walking along the ocean and sees a beach where thousands and thousands of starfish have washed ashore. Further along he sees a young woman picking up one starfish after another and tossing each one gently into the ocean.

“Why are you throwing starfish into the ocean?” he asks.

“Because the sun is up and the tide is going out and if I don’t throw them further in they will die.”

“But,” the man says, “don’t you realize there are miles and miles of beach and starfish all along it! You can’t possibly save them all, you can’t even save one-tenth of them. In fact, even if you work all day, your efforts won’t make any difference at all.”

The young woman bent down, picked up another starfish, and threw it into the sea. “It will make a difference to that one.”

Everything we do that makes life a little better for another person matters.

And that’s the point.

Source: All photos from the March on Washington, August 28, 1963:

http://www.history.com/topics/black-history/march-on-washington/pictures/march-on-washington/core-members-at-march-on-washington