"Without forgiveness, there's no future." Bishop Desmond Tutu
Lately it seems like every time we turn on the television or read the newspaper we hear that that something else is threatened: our homes, our jobs, our health. We feel anxious and scared as we face uncertainty. It's easy to get angry, to want to blame someone. Why is it though, that some people are quicker to anger while others seem more tolerant?
In his latest book, "Outliers: The Story of Success," Malcolm Gladwell writes about an enduring "culture of honor" that persists in some parts of this country. While honor sounds like a good thing, he argues that a society hell-bent on preserving its honor is quick to anger and slow to turn the other cheek.
Anger can rapidly turn to violence. Think of the infamous Hatfield-McCoy feud in the Appalachian south. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, at least 1000 people died in similar family feuds.
Gladwell posits that cultures of honor took root in regions without good farmland, where inhabitants tended pigs, goats or sheep on hardscrabble hillsides or on the western rangelands. Herdsmen, off by themselves, were unfriendly and even hostile to outsiders who might threaten their livestock, their livelihood. Every intruder was seen as a threat. To survive, a herder had to make it clear in words and actions that he was not weak.
On the other hand, Gladwell suggests, the survival of farmers with better land in the North and Midwest depended on cooperation within the community. It took everyone to harvest a large crop. Farmers were more likely to overlook perceived insults in the interest of getting a critical job done. Turning the other cheek was a sign of strength, not weakness.
Although angry, aggressive behavior may have meant survival generations ago, the world has changed. Our lives are different. Perhaps we need to develop different survival skills for this world. Perhaps tolerance and forgiveness would better serve us today.
Bishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa " who knows something about getting past the past " says, "It is one of the things about forgiveness you have to remember. It is not spiritual. It is part of real politics."
Politics is more than stubbornly and loudly standing one's ground. Politics, at its noblest, is about building consensus and finding common ground on which to stand together. It is about being greater together than we are alone.
In these troubling times, we, citizens and lawmakers alike, need to stand and work together for our common good. For our survival.
- Lorie Schaefer is a retired teacher.