Finnegan and Maxwell, from Facebook
Most of us, women especially, react to this photo with exclamations of delight: “How sweet! How cute! How adorable!” I did too the first time I saw it, but then I stopped to think: how much of what is wrong with our world today could be fixed by an outpouring of love?
Traditional Christians would certainly claim that universal love—loving God first and then our neighbors as ourselves—is the only answer to our troubles. Radical Christianity, a movement that came out of the revolutions of the 1960’s, particularly in Latin America, based activism for social justice on the doctrine that deeds, not words, are foundational to faith. They would probably not preach that love is the cure for all social ills. As we all know, our ability as humans to love consistently our neighbors—whom in many cases we don’t even know—or strangers, particularly from other cultures, is feeble at best, and many therapists make their living off the miseries of failed or unrequited love in personal relationships. So how could this frail staff support the suffering of this world?
So cute, yes; sweet, yes. But without much application today.
I’ve been moved, even astonished, by the unexpected activism of my relatives: all white, all privileged, some living in the south. My sister and her adult children have gone to the protests in Louisville, called in response to the police murder of a black woman asleep in her bed; they go to an unfamiliar part of the city, the old black ghetto, and form a line between the protesters and the police. Most police hesitate to fire so-called rubber bullets or launch tear gas cannisters against unarmed white people, including women and children, standing in front of them.
My daughter-in-law and her two early twenties daughters went to the protest at the capitol here in Santa Fe. There were no bullets or tear gas, although terrified shop owners had boarded up their windows, and armed vigilantes patrolled, claiming they were protecting private property, but the police now are so heavily armed and armored that even standing in their presence is intimidating.
In Los Angeles, where police murder of black people has gone on for decades, beginning with the 1992 beating of Rodney King (one of the first police assaults to be videoed and seen by thousands), my third granddaughter, also in her early twenties, lives in an apartment building in West Hollywood where a National Guard unit is installed on her corner. She’s been packing sandwiches with food for the protesters and the homeless, a skill learned in her Roman Catholic high school with its emphasis on service.
When she left her building two days ago to buy supplies, she was confronted by armed men pointing their weapons at her, even when she held up her hands and explained what she was doing. Terrified, she retreated into her building, where at night she hears the constant noise of military helicopters and the chants of the protesters on the street below.
Were these women inspired by their love for the protesters? I haven’t asked them, but I venture to say it was not love but an equally passionate sense of duty.
We often think of duty as a dry and bloodless affair, but as the doctor who is the narrator and the central figure in Albert Camus’ The Plague makes clear through his actions, it can actually be passionate, all-consuming, wordless and deeply rewarding. The doctor’s young friend, a journalist trapped in the quarantined town, after attempting to escape by any means begins to work with the doctor and finds that his growing commitment means more to him than his passionate wish to return to his wife.
Duty as a passion is particularly foreign to us here in the U.S. with our preoccupation with personal relationships; every pop song, every movie elaborates and massages this near-obsession. But we are perhaps learning in this crisis that we are moved by another passion, not cute, not sweet, but with—perhaps—the power to effect some changes in our unjust society.
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