Hop on my thought train…

(totally unedited sketched out recent thoughts…)

I’ve been introspecting what’s gotten me charged up about the need to not just sit back while the rights of those behind the Park 51 mosque plan are threatened.

It’s not because I have any special innate sympathy for any religious project, much less a Muslim one.

It’s not because I feel antagonistic to those who feel insulted and provoked by the presence of such a project near the former towers site.  On the contrary, whatever other motives the planners have, even I , a city-loathing suburb-dweller, feel the proposal as all but a slap in the face.

But two factors make we want to protect the rights of these people.

The first is well known and well understood.  It’s the same reason the ACLU defends neo-Nazis and the Klan (I’m not equating the Park 51 folks with either, just keep reading).  If rights were just for popular groups that everyone loved all the time, they wouldn’t need protecting at all.  Society must be kept safe for dissent and offense.

But there’s a second reason.  I believe all levels of government are trampling people’s rights all the time, so why would I be motivated to engage in a project to defend the rights of one group (with whom I share very few sympathies) against the potential thuggish behavior of another group of civilians?  Why not pick some government action to protest instead?

The answer is I trust in the bedrock civility of my fellow citizens in a way I don’t trust the government.  I trust in their capacity for shame and for reconciliation, their capacity to pull back from dehumanizing rhetoric and see their enemies as fellow humans.

But part of why I believe this is the simple fact that it’s much harder to ignore the reality of an action you have to tangibly confront the results of, as opposed to one you can order from afar.  Is it harder to kill a child with your bare hands, or to sign an order to bomb a village?

Vegetarians know this, and confront carnivores like me with the prospect of having to slaughter our own meat.

War protestors know this, and work to make sure images of destruction get broadcast for all to see and seared in our minds.

So why is it so hard to make people see how so many government actions trample rights?  Another pair of reasons:

First is the size of the number in the denominator.  The supporters of a given action are likely to be many, and as such, feel that their personal level of responsibility in any given action amounts to no more than a rounding error.  But that is not impossible to overcome.  Again referencing war protests, people can still be led to feel the importance of changing the direction of their support, even if it individually amounts to little.  People still want to be on the side of the right.

But the consequences of the action must be palpable to be motivating.  Thus the second reason why government action can be so hard to counter: its proximate effects are largely invisible.  And this is because the victims of the action are basically cowed into submission.

The victims have MADE themselves invisible.  Each thinks they have too much to lose, each expects no mercy (and by “mercy” here I mean a simple acknowledgment of the horrible injustice they face).  They know the force that can be brought to bear against them is overwhelming.  And they make themselves so easy to push around.

Again, a pair of reasons:

Many of us are disarmed, making resistance beyond token unlikely.

But far more important, is how much of our property (in the form of currency) is seizable with little more than a keystroke.  Liens and garnishments.  If the state needs to punish us, they merely need to reach out and take the sizable percentage of our livelihood that we’ve placed within their arms reach and tied with a bow and a note saying “Feel free to take this if you think we’ve stepped out of line, Love, Your Humble Subjects”.

No one sees the costs of this facilitated theft.  Hell, it’s just some numbers changing in a database to them.  Sterile, and cold.

What I want to do is to find how to make the victims more visible, less self-sacrificial.  That way, the victimizers, not evil people in their own right but deadly as a mass, can evaluate their actions in the full context of their consequences and choose appropriately.

Because when I think about it these two scenarios…

A) A relative of a Christian 9/11/01 victim relinquishes her hatred of Muslims and comes to embrace their right to live and worship alongside her, even near the site of an infamous crime committed in the name of Islam.

B) The IRS says “Okay, we’ll give you a pass” to someone who strenuously objects to money being spent on abstinence initiatives and purposely turns in ten cents (their computed individual share of such an initiative) less than their computed tax liability.

…the fact that the first seems much more likely, despite the stakes involved, really gives me pause.  In B, I’d say the highly probable outcome is that the person’s life would be destroyed if they attempted to keep those ten cents out of the hands of the tax man.

I have more faith in the potential humanity even of mobs than I do of the soulless machinery of gov’t.  But how to make ourselves in the role of the machine cogs aware of every life we grind up or carve off a slice of?

Liberals in particular are rightly aware of the US’s wanton projection of force internationally to compel others in distant lands to do things we want.  Why are they so sanguine about internal projections of force?  Does the faulty logic of “We gave you a chance to do this on your own, but you chose wrong, so now you’ve left us no choice but to make you.” somehow seem more compelling if you’ve formalized it in a vote?

Gotta work on this.