BOY IN THE BUBBLE
My wife and I saw the film Loving on New Year’s Day. It’s about Richard and Mildred Loving, the Virginia couple whose lawsuit led the Supreme Court in 1967 to overturn state laws against interracial marriage. I’d heard of the case, and I just assumed that they were educated urban professionals with a substantial support network encouraging them to be a test case and make legal history. Nope. They were poor, and 100% country. They tried living in Washington, D.C., and couldn’t take it, opting to move back to Virginia and risk jail rather than remain in the city. Even though I knew they’d win their court case, I thought they were crazy to go back.
My initial assumptions about the Lovings, as well as my reaction to their decision to return to Virginia, are examples of a mindset that could be described as a bubble. That’s the metaphor that PBS used and which I wrote about extensively in a post on January 2. That post generated more comments than anything else I’ve written, and after considering that feedback, I have some additional thoughts which I’ll share here.
I don’t know (and don’t really care) whether the PBS poll is valid, in the sense that it accurately measures what it purports to measure. I object to the poll’s basic premise, which was that “average white Americans” are somehow the most genuine Americans, and everyone else lives in a bubble of snobbery, divorced from the reality of the American experience. I may or may not be a snob, but I’m as genuine an American as any Trump voter.
Still, I’m willing to work with the bubble metaphor as long as a few things are understood. First, everyone lives in a bubble of some kind. Next, everyone is at least a little dubious about people outside their bubble, and the further outside it others are, the more dubious most of us get. Third, there is no such thing as a single genuine American experience. And finally, we’re all divorced from reality in one way or another, in the sense that none of us can experience all aspects of reality – on account of that pesky bubble we’re living in.
My first bubble was my mother’s womb. Then it was my immediate family, and then my extended family and neighbors. When I went to school, my bubble changed, and kept changing – expanding in some areas and contracting in others – as I moved from one neighborhood to another, and from one school to the next, on into high school, college, and grad school.
No one would have predicted my educational trajectory when I started school. My family was strictly blue collar. My mother and my father grew up in different parts of rural Kansas, and both moved to the big city (Wichita, population c. 100,000 at the time) to find work during the Depression. Their hope for me was that I’d graduate from high school and then get a job on the assembly line at one of the three aircraft factories in my home town. That’s what success looked like for someone like me in the early Fifties.
I credit the Russians for giving me an opportunity for a different life. I have that in common with Donald Trump, although the Russian intervention on behalf of Trump in 2016 was deliberate, whereas back in 1947, they didn’t even know I was alive. Probably still don’t.
It happened like this. When the Soviet Union unexpectedly took the lead in the space race by launching Sputnik in 1957, the American educational community panicked. In their search for future scientists and engineers, and they were desperate enough to notice a shy, chubby kid in Wichita, Kansas, and conclude that he wasn’t as dumb as he looked. They put me in classes with other smart kids. Suddenly school was fun, and that changed my life. It helped determine who my friends were, which jobs I took, the places I lived, the woman I married, the way I looked at the world, and all the rest of the components of the life I’ve led since then.
In other words, Sputnik played a key role in determining the particular bubble I live in. I’m happy with that bubble. But I recognize it as a bubble. I think that’s important.
My guess is that most of the world’s 7 billion people believe that the life they were born into is “normal,’ and anyone who lives differently is at least weird, and maybe even evil. At its worst, that attitude is what sustains groups like ISIS and the Ku Klux Klan. But any brand of religious or political fundamentalism is a manifestation of a similar instinct. It played a prominent role in the 2016 presidential election.
At the conclusion of each presidential election, it used to be customary for the winner to at least pretend to be magnanimous in victory and to pledge to try to work with the other side for the common good. Magnanimity isn’t a part of Donald Trump’s makeup, and the Republican Party abandoned bipartisanship sometime in the previous century. Naturally, Democrats (including me) are pissed off, and we’re tempted to fight fire with fire.
Instead of looking for common ground, both sides are engaged in a relentless search for evidence of the differences between US and THEM, the better to demonize THEM. Instead of expanding our bubbles to detoxify our differences, we’re contracting them and making the walls thicker. There’s no happy ending on that road.
This should be the point at which I offer a clever way to resolve that conundrum. I wish I had one.
I do believe that it’s important to recognize that not all bubbles are created equal. Some genuinely bad people will soon be in charge of this country. They’re not bad because their bubble is different than mine. They’re bad because they’re pursuing policies that will hurt people. There are millions of vulnerable people whose lives will be ruined if Republicans keep their promise to dismantle the social safety net that this country has been building since at least 1933.
America’s social safety net isn’t perfect by any means. Many other countries do it better. But even with all its flaws, our social safety net represents an acknowledgement that we have a collective responsibility to all of our fellow Americans, not just the ones in our particular bubble. Our willingness to help others is the thing that makes us a civilized nation – not our wealth, not our military power, not even all our entertainment options.
I have a Twitter account. (Don’t bother following me, because I’ve never tweeted and don’t plan to start. I got the account last year so I could read some political analysis of the presidential election.) Last week I saw a thread in which a Republican invoked Psalm 139 to justify hating his enemies. Psalm 139 is about the omnipresence of God, as in verse 8: “If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there: if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there.”
But the Psalmist – presumably the guy with the secret chord that pleased the Lord – ups the ante in verses 21-22: “Do I not hate them, O Lord, that hate thee? And am not I grieved with those that rise up against thee? I hate them with perfect hatred: I count them mine enemies.”
Those lines are great for Republicans who love to cherry pick Bible verses that reinforce their personal prejudices. But if they’d kept reading, they might have noticed that the concluding verses of the Psalm make it clear that David’s main concern is less about hating enemies of the Lord than about not becoming one himself. Verses 23-24: “Search me, O God, and know my heart: try me, and know my thoughts: and see if there be any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.”
I believe that I have a moral obligation to support policies that help people in need, and to oppose policies that hurt them. But I also feel a moral obligation to avoid fighting fire with fire. I can’t preserve civilization by becoming a barbarian. In his Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says this (Matthew 5:43-44): “Ye have heard that it hath been said, ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbor, and hate thine enemy.’ But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you.”
That’s a tall order, obviously. Fortunately, Jesus isn’t telling us to become like our enemies or to ignore their misdeeds. He’s telling us to love them in spite of themselves. That’s something I’m willing to work on while I’m trying to stop them from wrecking the country.
I draw inspiration from the example of Richard and Mildred Loving - two seemingly unremarkable people who had a profound impact on history fifty years ago. They weren't trying to change the world, but they did anyway, simply by persisting in doing what they thought was right. If enough of us follow their example, we can change history too.