A Time for Heroic Action?

See...

Family cemetery visit led to hanged census worker

Friends: Hanging victim devoted his life to kids

“Times of threat bring increased aggression,” said Jerrold Post, a CIA veteran who founded the agency’s Center for the Analysis of Personality and Political Behavior during his 21-year career at headquarters in Langley, Va.

“And the whole country’s under threat now, with the economic difficulties and political polarization,” said Post, now a professor of psychiatry at The George Washington University. “The need to have someone to blame is really strong in human psychology. And once you have someone to blame, especially when there’s a call to action, some see it as a time for heroic action.”
(see Social change could spark violence)

If census worker (and Scout leader and teacher and lymphoma survivor and churchman) Bill Sparkman's death turns out to be anything other than suicide or deliberate mis-direction on the part of the killer or killers, then every person and especially every media pundit – professional or amatuer – who ever diseminated the idea that our current federal government is fascist or socialist or run by traitors or is being illegally led by a constitutionally unqualified president (or similar statements) has some blood on his hands for his death.

Let me say that again.

Maybe it was a suicide, or a murder in which the killer sought to deliberately mislead on motive or maybe some weird auto-erotic thing such as that which ultimately claimed Keith Carradine...

But if not...

...then anyone who participated in the poisoning of our national conversation to help create an atmosphere in which a harmless census worker could be targeted for lynching by a violent wing-nut bears some responsibility for his death.

In 1974 (the year of his death from cancer at the age of 50) Ernest Becker won the Pulitzer Prize for his book, The Denial of Death. I cannot recommend it enough. It, along with the works of the late lawyer / theologian William Stringfellow and, I guess I should add, the Bible, have most informed my views on the reality of (and the attempt to overcome) death as a moral (as compared to a biological) issue.

In a nutshell, my read on Becker is that humans – the one animal species with the capacity for symbolic thought – find the idea of death, in its full implications for human meaning, intolerable. The better adjusted of us learn to accept a “vital lie” in which, somehow or other, death is overcome. For example, death will not matter if I have surviving children, or if I gain tremendous wealth or power, or a great number of sexual conquests, or make the world a better place, or have the greatest stamp collection in the world – the content of the “lie” doesn't really matter, so long as we believe it and can fulfill it.

And God help the poor fool who stands in the way of our (as psychologist Norman O. Brown called it) immortality project. (This, in the Bible, is what is called “sin”, but that's a topic for another time :-)

For the lesser adjusted (and I place myself in that category :-), we develop some neurosis or phobia or something, which allows us to continue functioning, albeit in an impaired way.

For example, let's say I can neatly bundle all my existential anxieties about my death and the ultimate meaning (if any) of my life into a fear of snakes. I can function just fine so long as I'm not confronted with snakes. And that's a viable “plan” because, to a certain degree, I can manage my activities to minimize the possibility of encountering snakes.

One major alternative for dealing with death is to openly confront it – that option Becker calls 'heroism'.

The hero (and we all love heroes – look at the movies we watch) confronts the power of death in a very direct and non-metaphorical way – and defeats it.

And THAT type of heroism, I'm afraid, is what Jerrold Post (in the block quote above) refers to: someone who has been all charged up by anti-federal government ranting and decides to fight and destroy “evil” directly by lynching a representative of the federal government.

It's the same type of heroism Roeder (allegedly) had when he gunned down Dr. Tiller as the unarmed Tiller ushered at his church.

Now his heretofore worthless life is transcendently “meaningful.”

But – and you can trust me on this - God help the radio show hosts and internet bloggers who selected his target for him.

A true hero right now is someone who leaves their ultimate justification in life in the hands of God and does their best to de-escalate irresponsible rhetoric before more innocent people are killed and, more importantly, before all chance of America's brilliant constitutional government functioning is lost amidst the inane babble of those who would substitute hate and ideology for citizenship and intelligent conversation.

Bill Bekkenhuis
Bethlehem, PA