I have to admit, I rarely feel much emotion when I see an obituary for someone I didn’t know. Even people I liked. When I read that Christopher Plummer had died, for instance, I didn't feel sadness that a 91-year-old actor had passed away peacefully. I thought about the movies he'd been in and that I'd liked. An obituary is an opportunity to reflect on someone's life.
So I can’t say I felt sad when I heard that Rush Limbaugh had died, but did I feel anything else?
Rush Limbaugh was a man known for hateful and vitriolic comments, the kind that diminish people. Limbaugh caused immense pain to gay people, ruptures within families, much of the coarsening of America’s discourse.
His leaving the world does not undo any of that damage. Only we can decide whether his legacy is a less kind world.
In the past several years I have seen a lot of evaluating of the souls of other people, most notably when they die. There was a certain amount of “dancing on the grave” when Osama bin Laden was killed, but I also saw it for a number of public figures. Margaret Thatcher. Antonin Scalia. George Bush. John McCain. Each of these people did things that other people found revolting, but where does it stop?
I see something very corrosive happening in our righteousness. Left or right, we are all human and we could be wrong.
The way we react to human beings’ suffering says more about us than it says about them. In the Christian tradition, we are responsible for evaluating the state of our own souls.
That is the moral place reached by people I admire most, in my own and in other traditions. Is that where I am? Not by any stretch, and nor am I to judge anyone else for not being there.
But what if each of us is to be judged by the best thing we have ever done or said, rather than the worst?
What if we are to be judged by the repentance of our hearts?
We don’t know these things. For myself, I can only hope.
3 comments:
You ask good, thoughtful questions. And yet, it seems reasonable that Jewish people worldwide would have felt relief when learning of the death of Hitler. "Dancing on your dead enemy's grave" is shameful to be sure, but feeling relief at the death of a person who has consciously and intentionally brought about great evil in the world seems quite reasonable. Urging us not to rush to judgment is, on the other hand, very much in the Christian tradition. P & G
Thank you. While I believe Hitler was sui generis, I certainly agree that relief is a reasonable emotion if the death of someone actually stops the harm that he is doing. And as I said, I even understand stronger emotions than relief.
What I don't think is that jubilation is an emotion that we should give vent to, even at the death of a human being we truly think was horrible. I mentioned a variety of people and in each case (as well as others), I have seen a degree of gladness expressed on social media that disturbed me. Again, not because of who the person was, but because it elevates a negative aspect of human nature. And a tempting one--the long history of torture and other cruelty, sadly, shows the ugly human tendency to take pleasure in the suffering of others.
Less of that type of cruelty, in my view, would be the most powerful rebuke to those who perpetrated so much cruelty in their own lifetimes.
"Less of that type of cruelty" would be a great gain. Would those committed to such horrific behavior perceive it as a "rebuke"? I doubt they would, but it would surely affect the rest of humanity in positive ways. P
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