I’m thinking about what “love your enemies” means in a time like this. I think it means to show your enemies that you are not the monster they imagine you to be; you are a person with as complex and meaningful and rich a life as they have. That’s what the ideas of “turn the other cheek” and “go the extra mile” are about: shining a light on the banality of evil.
To those that interpret these ideas as “sit there and take it,” I will remind them that Jesus chased the moneychangers out of the temple with a whip. Nonviolence is not passivity.
To be clear: I’m not telling anyone how to act, and I’m especially not telling anyone how to feel. Not now. I’m trying to figure out how to approach a world where enough people saw fascism and voted for it. I’m curious why they would, but I don’t have a lot of patience for it.
What I really keep thinking of is an old Tumblr post talking about how no one deserves death. Someone immediately chimes in with a group of people that do something truly horrible and eventually says they “aren’t human.” This prompts the original poster to push back (quite politely, I might add):
denying the humanity of people who do horrible things accomplishes exactly three things:
- give cover to people who haven’t been caught yet by allowing them to use their humanity as “proof” of their innocence
- silence any criticism of societal structures and institutions that facilitate those horrible things by putting the focus on individuals who are assumed to be so uniquely monstrous that the ways it was made easy for them are irrelevant
- provide a shortcut to dehumanize anyone you feel like killing: simply accuse them of doing a horrible thing
We see this with the far right’s continued broad, baseless characterization of LGBTQ+ people as… we’ll say “dangerous to children.” We saw it this summer with Vance’s repeated baseless insistence that legal Hatian immigrants were here illegally and eating people’s pets. None of these accusations are true, but it serves to paint these people as inhuman monsters. And when your opponents are inhuman, nothing is unacceptable.
It is so, so easy to say these people are the real monsters. And yes, this behavior is monstrous and inhumane. And it is being done by humans to other humans.
So much of what I see happening in politics right now is just reinforcement of the idea that “other” people are monsters, all in service of keeping people from the realization that their opponents are humans.
Because sometimes—not always, but sometimes—when people see the ones they are fighting as fellow humans and not a faceless enemy, when they see their actions are having real consequences for real people… they stop.
This is the long-term work: to get those fighting against manufactured enemies to see their fellow humans and stop. But I can’t say all this and not mention one hard truth: not everyone stops. Some people keep fighting. Maybe they prefer the intellectual comfort of a black-and-white fight. Maybe they prefer the privilege the fight affords them. Maybe they stand to gain from people fighting.
In times like these, when one side refuses to see the humanity of the other, refuses to stop…
Then we defend. We respect their humanity while refusing to let them deny the humanity of others. We counter their lies, neutralize their weapons, restrict their actions.
We ask “What would Jesus do?” And then we flip the tables, grab the whip, and drive out the exploiters.
Take care of each other; I’ll see you next time.
