Shooting at the Wrong Target

I have grieved the deep polarization in our nation and struggled to understand it. The rancor with which it is expressed is disturbing. The anger seems to be more than just being angry. Our anger is extreme, reactionary, irrational ... often bordering on hatred. In our anger, we attack the other, not just their position. We demonize the other. We judge, condemn, discount, demean, and seek to destroy. We unleash the whole arsenal of our anger at those we now view as the enemy. Gone is any effort to hear and understand the other, much less any sense of compassion or empathy for them. It is as though we are at war with one another. 

But it seems to me we are fighting the wrong war. We are attacking the wrong enemy. We are shooting at the wrong target. As a result, we are biting and devouring one another (as Paul said in Galatians 5:15). We are in a self-destruct mode. 

As I struggle to understand this polarization and rancor, it seems to me we are avoiding the real issue. As a result, we are displacing our anger. 

Anger is a mask that fear wears. Thus, our national anger is really the face of fear ... fear of what we believe we are losing. Our fear and anger are dimensions of grief ... grief we do not recognize because we have not recognized or named what we have lost.  

We as a culture do not do well with loss or grief. In the case of a death, we are at a loss for what to say or what to do. We are accustomed to being able to fix things, but there is no way to fix the pain of losing someone we love. So we mumble empty platitudes that make us feel better but which do nothing to touch the other's pain. We fill the other's kitchen with more food than they could ever eat - perhaps in an attempt to fill the empty space in their hearts created by the death of the one they love. We tip our hat at the loss with sanitized funeral services, rushing past the death as quickly as possible. Our haste isolates the person who experienced the loss, condemning them to cope alone. 

Beyond the death of a loved one, we experience losses of all shapes and sizes all the time, but we have not been taught - or given permission - to recognize those losses, name them, and grieve them. We have been told to "suck it up" and get on with life. As a result, we live with the emotional pain of unrecognized and unaddressed losses that have piled up through the years. We live with a boatload of unresolved grief. 

It seems to me our personal experience of unresolved loss and grief is duplicated in our national experience of loss and grief. The losses we have experienced in my lifetime pile up, one on top of the other: the assassinations of President Kennedy, of MLK, of Bobby Kennedy; Viet Nam; the civil rights movement; the Challenger explosion. 

In more recent days, 9-11 shook our nation to the core. Our sense of safeness, our (mistaken) sense of invincibility, our sense of being exceptional in the world, our very identity as a nation was lost. But we never took time to identify these losses, much less grieve them. Instead, we declared war on terrorism, surrendered personal liberties to government overreach, and began to adopt an isolationist mentality. (Donald Trump's "America First" policies are the inevitable product of this isolationist thinking.) Because terrorism was such a nebulous target, we ended up shooting at the wrong target by attacking Saddam Hussein and invading Iraq. 

9-11 is not the only identity-shattering loss we as a nation have experienced but not grieved. The Supreme Court's decision to recognize gay marriage struck at the heart of what many considered "the sanctity of marriage." The Black Lives Matter movement pointed out the problem of police profiling and police brutality against blacks, attacking the respected symbol of law and order. Colin Kaepernick's kneeling during the national anthem to call attention to police brutality was interpreted as a disrespect for the flag and the military, both symbols of national pride. The nation elected its first black president (who was opposed and vilified at every turn - a not-so-subtle expression of 21st century racism). The white-based, white-dominated, white-oriented culture with which many of us grew up was (is) giving way to greater diversity. Outside the urban area, family farms have been swallowed up by large scale corporations. Rural communities are shriveling up and dying. (The community in which I grew up is an example.) In short, we as a nation are experiencing seismic change that involves the loss of the way things were. All the while, we continued to fight a war on terrorism in strange places like Afghanistan, sacrificing the lives of American soldiers in yet another war we cannot win. 

In the face of such significant losses, we have reacted with anger, shooting at the wrong target. We are attacking the wrong "enemy" and fighting the wrong war. We have turned on each other. The Religious Right has joined hands with the Republican Party to lead the attack against "the liberal left wing that is destroying our way of life." The liberal left, in turn, has attacked the radical right-wing nationalists as the problem. As a result, the nation is polarized in a new civil war to determine which side will dictate what the new norm will be for our country. One side wants to reverse what is happening in an effort to go back to a white-dominated culture of the 1950's; the other wants to move forward into greater diversity in which people of all colors enjoy the promises of our constitution. 

And then you add the COVID pandemic - a faceless virus that lurks in hiding, waiting to ambush us at every turn. It has robbed us of so much - primarily the freedom to do as we please but also our normal routines and activities, our contact with one another, our ability to worship together, our jobs and income (for some), our economy as a nation, our schools and the freedom to send our kids to school without fear, our ability to celebrate weddings and graduations, the opportunity to celebrate a life that has ended, etc. Normally, when we are struggling or hurting, we can turn to one another for support and encouragement. But the pandemic's shelter-in-place restrictions have isolated us from one another. And we all are experiencing the same struggles at the same time. We have little left over to help one another even if we were not isolated. 

Our reaction to the pandemic is in line with our grief-avoiding pattern as a nation. We politicized the shelter-in-place restrictions and the wearing of masks. We allowed the pandemic to fuel the polarization. Rather than recognizing and grieving our losses, we turned on one another in anger. We attacked one another. We shot at the wrong target. 

The healthy response to these many losses is grief - the recognition, naming, and grieving of what we have lost. Healthy grieving helps us come to terms with what we loss and helps us turn loose of it. The failure to grieve keeps us stuck in pain and fear and anger. 

Grief is a powerless feeling. After all, we can't undo the loss. And we don't like being powerless. It leaves us feeling vulnerable to more loss. It gives birth to fear inside us. Anger, on the other hand, gives us a sense of power. So instead of grieving what we have loss and feeling afraid of more losses, we get angry. In our anger, we stop thinking clearly or rationally. We attack one another with our anger. We end up shooting at the wrong target.

I believe we as a culture are stuck in unrecognized and unresolved long-term grief. It is one of the factors in our polarization - a major factor in my mind. We have once again misdirected our anger and are shooting at the wrong target: each other.

We have no way to win a war when we are fighting the wrong war. As long as are fighting the wrong enemy, our energies are wasted. We will never resolve anything.  We will only end up destroying selves and the thing we are fighting to protect: our nation. 

Perhaps we need to reclaim the Hebrew practice of lament - giving voice to our grief in the context of worship. 60 of the 150 psalms (40%) are lament psalms. 

I believe we as a nation need to grieve ... with each other ... lest we destroy each other because we are shooting at the wrong target.