Not everything is black and white: Grays can be more important

Such are the times we live that libertarian Senator Rand Paul can rally liberals.  As if throwing darts blindfold in the hope any idea of his gains traction, the senator has managed to strike paranoia in some liberals who fear drone strikes on American soil.

Never mind that previous to Rand’s filibuster the other week, most Americans who envisioned such a scenario also believe 9/11 was a Bush conspiracy and couldn’t get a date to Six Flags.  For the record, while this liberal feels the killing in Yemen of Anwar al-Aulaqi’s 16 year old son, Abdulrahman, was wrong, the killing of his father was not.

The quandary over drone strikes has two parts.  First, whether or not the CIA has authorization to carry out the strikes as it is not a direct arm of the military and has operated in nations where we are not in direct conflict with an identified military.

Second, whether the CIA or the military may be legally sanctioned to kill American citizens overseas who have, by degrees, taken up arms against this nation rather than capture them for military or civilian due process.  As to the latter part, on the killing of Americans, the question to be asked is what exempts Americans over Pakistani’s, Yemeni’s, Saudi’s or Egyptian’s who decide to take up arms against the U.S.?

As to the first question, the Obama administration has recently offered its legal rationale for the use of drone strikes.  While the administration’s response does not morally put the United States in the clear, it does provide a beginning framework for the future in this relatively new realm of warfare.  Also, it places the U.S. in a situation that Israel has existed in for years, if not decades.

Despite its wars against nations like Egypt, beginning with its founding in 1948, Israel has fought a ‘dirty war’ for its existence with its other neighbors as well.  It has been a tit for tat battle across borders with civilian casualties and little recourse in courts of law.  Dirty wars are not pretty and many who participate, especially in Israel, know they are morally compromised by killings that send a cruel message to their enemy.  Over the years, Israel has sent its share of messages, not all of which I condone.

With the situation the U.S. finds itself in, trying to shut down international terrorism is not about land or military might.  If it were, the U.S., like Israel would already have won, hands down.  And while we may differ from Israel in some of our approach to combating terrorism, we may have learned from Israeli’s that the way forward is defensible but not so morally black and white as we had hoped.

In America, many of us have come to call the system of slavery that existed in here until 1863, our ‘Original Sin’.  It’s a convenient way to overlay a tenet of Christian faith onto a nation of laws with a current plurality of faiths.  Plus, it sounds dramatic.  Yet if we accept original sin into our lives, might we also be willing to accept the next sacrament?  Might we then be willing to accept the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Ed decision as our nations’ ‘Baptism’?

Christianity holds that Adam, the first man, sinned and was tossed from Eden.  His original sin became the sin of all mankind.  Our modern day baptism is an ablution performed for an individuals’ regeneration from original sin, in essence freeing them so they may be received as a child of God.

If we view the Brown court case, so wisely fought by Baltimore’s own Thurgood Marshall, we can see the pessimistic view our society had for itself in unequally separating two equal peoples.  Similar to the catholic Jansenists of several centuries ago, who cynically believed in predestination of fate and not free will, our society ultimately judged that black Americans were not equal to the rest of America.  In forcing the removal of ‘separate but equal’ law, Marshall’s winning argument also removed the laws’ ignorant legal and moral logic.  Even so, today I fear the power of pessimistic Jansenists still in our midst.

We Democrats can easily point fingers at the GOP as a quick guide to not so subtle bigotries that still exist in our nation.  The shouting match last Friday at the annual CPAC meeting is a reminder that the GOP has a long way to go when it comes to embracing the one America it says it represents.  Still, my worry is less with them.

When actor Forest Whitaker was wrongly searched for theft at an Upper West Side deli in Manhattan last month, the antennae of many liberals and black Americans began getting messages about the coded, secreted world of even the ‘good, racist people’ as headlined on the N.Y. Times opinion page.  Since this incident, the man who searched Whitaker has been fired and the deli owner has been hugely apologetic, all the while claiming his employee actions werent racist.

For anyone who, like Whitaker, has been similarly accosted, followed or leered at in a store knows, the disarming shame that comes with such treatment can, at least, leave a person feeling used.  As if there exists some other motivation and that you are simply the target of their venal actions.

In Baltimore, there is an Ace hardware store in my neighborhood that I no longer patronize.  Despite the need to support local merchants and grow Baltimore commerce, their practice of following their patrons like ghosts up and down each aisle gives people like me an eerie feeling.  Their way of informing fellow employees of patrons’ movements with hand held devices leaves this white, Carhart wearing blue eyed devil in a state of nervous duress.

When I asked the manager about this practice, she admitted to it.  What’s more, despite how much money I’d already spent in the store during a recent building renovation, she said the stores’ policy was set by the owner and would remain.  Fine.  As a result, Ace has lost my business, though I pray they survive and amend how they treat their customers.

My observations on the Whitaker incident are these.  I blame the actor for none of this.  By most all accounts, Forest Whitaker is a good guy and a wonderful craftsman on film.  Still, if the employee wasn’t a bigot, why was he fired?  Because Whitaker was famous?  Like anyone who has worked in retail, we do what we’re told by the boss.  So, isn’t it fairer to assume the employee was doing his bosses bidding?  Trying to right a historical wrong done to black Americans by this method may not bring us any closer to social equity.  In the end, it may just leave another guy without a job in a bad economy.

One of the current theories being pedaled in liberal circles is that white folks want ‘race neutrality’ while black folks want ‘race acceptance.’  In trying to form another divide along color lines we Democrats, the party that pushed integration and fought to destroy ‘separate but equal,’ have allowed our bourgeois pessimism to divide us in a way the real bigots, religious hucksters and the GOP could never do.  And the message we send to the poorest of us, whom we say we defend, is that it will never change and that we are seemingly fated to exist in such misery.  Bull.  What petit bourgeois, Jansenist bull.

A quote from Teilhard de Chardin, a French Jesuit, hung in my parents’ diningroom as a reminder of what the Jesuits have given the world in intellect and faith.  Maybe this is why humans cling to faith before politics.

“Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love, and then, for the second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.”

The papal bull of U.S. law was handed down to us as our baptism in 1954.  We do live in a world of color where the nuance of grays is more important than seeing in black and white.  Falling back on our fail safe fears will do nothing for the poorest and most ignorant among us.   Some may call what we do in the United States a baptism by fire or by blood and I won’t disagree for mine is both.  More than that, mine is a baptism by desire.

The law is canon.  The rest is up to us.