I’ve been thinking this week of my Baptist grandmother, who took it upon herself to make us fit for civilization. Fortunately, I didn’t see her often. When my father and mother were first married, they moved 120 miles away from her, to give themselves a little breathing room. But she was a determined woman, so would drive to our house every couple of months and stay for a long weekend. I say long weekend, though it was only two days, like every other weekend, it just felt longer.
On the weekends she visited, my parents would warn us to be on our best behavior. The difficulty was in knowing what constituted best behavior, since we never knew in advance the theme of her visit, whether she might teach us the proper way to greet dignitaries just in case the Queen of England visited Danville, or the appropriate attire for public events, or grammar. My grandmother was big on grammar. There were right words, and wrong words. Good words and bad words. Innocent words and dangerous words Oh, the grammar weekends. She would begin her lecture saying there were some words we shouldn’t say. My brothers and I would ask her which words she meant, that we needed to know them so we wouldn’t accidentally mention them. She’d say, “I can’t repeat them.” We would ask her to write them down or maybe whisper them in our ears. It turns out Gosh darn! were bad words. Along with Heck! and Shoot! and Son of a Gun! Did I mention she was Baptist?
Oh, but times have changed. When our son Sam came home from basic training, I asked him what he’d learned. His eyes bugged out of his head, and he said, “My sergeant taught me that Teresa isn’t the only word that comes after mother.” Now there was a man who could have used my grandmother.
We’ve been talking about the do’s and don’ts in times of change. Today, I want to talk about wrong words, bad words, dangerous words. There’s a man named Timothy Snyder, who was born in Dayton, Ohio to Quaker parents. He is now a professor of history at Yale University, and has written, among other things, an instructive little book called On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons From the Twentieth Century.
In that book, Snyder writes about a Nazi named Carl Schmitt, an attorney who created the legal underpinnings for the Holocaust. Remember that the atrocities of the Nazis were framed in moral and legal language. Carl Schmitt said the way to destroy all rules was to focus on the idea of the exception. You convince people that the present moment is so fraught with risk and hazard that exceptions to the rule of law must be made. You then persuade people that the exception, the temporary deviation from the norms of decency, must become permanent. Timothy Snyder said this was the basis for every fascist movement around the globe. Fascists always start by warning us we are in danger, we are at risk, so we must suspend our usual practices and customs in order to counter some imagined evil.
So the historian Timothy Snyder says that in times of social change, listen carefully for the growing claims of exceptions. We’re already starting to hear them. Presidents must be above the law in order to do their jobs, so we become a nation of men, not laws. America must expand its territory, so we seize land that isn’t ours. Native born children aren’t true citizens, so we become a nation with legal protection for some, but not others.
We’ve been here before. In 1942, the newspaper columnist Walter Lippmann, hoping to pressure President Roosevelt into giving military authorities on the West Coast a free hand to round up and imprison 120,000 American citizens of Japanese descent, wrote, without offering any evidence, “The Pacific Coast is in imminent danger of a combined attack from within….” Colonel Karl Bendetsen of the U.S. Army, placed in charge of the interment, even ordered the arrest of Japanese infants adopted by white families, telling a priest in charge of an orphanage in Los Angeles, “I am determined that if they have one drop of Japanese blood in them, they must go to a camp.” Where have we heard that before? The same logic has been used to enslave Black people, consign Native Americans to reservations, load Jewish people on trains, and now Hispanics will be targeted. One drop of blood is all it takes.
This is why in times of social change, we must listen closely for the language of exceptions, lest it creates a permanent state of perceived emergency, and thus becomes the doorway to tyranny.
We were never really taught the real bad words, were we? The real bad words are the words that single out the Other, the words that justify evil, the words intended to stoke fear, not understanding. Those are the bad words.
Last week, we thought about the visit of the Magi and their refusal to report the whereabouts of Jesus to Herod. From his infancy, Jesus owed his life to the civil disobedience of wise and honorable people. But he owed his death to people demanding an exception.
When Jesus was arrested, he stood before Pilate, who thought him innocent and said so to the gathered mob, telling them, “I find no basis for a charge against him. In the custom of Passover, I will release one prisoner. Let it be this man.”
Instead, they demanded an exception, and shouted back, “No, not him! Give us Barabbas!”
Now Barabbas had taken part in an uprising.
So Barabbas was pardoned. Pilate. What a mess of a man he was. Smart enough to know Jesus was innocent but not brave enough to face down a mob. Lot of that going around these days.
So Pilate made an exception, Barabbas was pardoned, and Jesus was killed. Jesus owed his life to the civil disobedience of wise and honorable people. He owed his death to people demanding an exception.
Pay attention, friends, listen carefully, for the language of exception, for the mob’s demand that decency be set aside for the sake of safety or personal gain. Listen carefully for any demand that would have us forsake grace for greed.
To be sure, there are people who pose a threat to our nation, but it is never the dispirited and starving mother wading a river, her infant in arms, dreaming of a new life in a Promised Land. The real threat is posed by those who confuse evil for good, who with the bellows of hatred fan the embers of fear into a conflagration, who believe that one drop of blood can make someone our enemy and not our friend.