"My country, right or wrong," is a thing that no patriot would think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying, "My mother, drunk or sober."
G. K. Chesterton
There is no place like home. It’s where we live. It’s where our families live. Our dogs fertilize the grass. Our kids go to school here. All our friends live here, too. You can not help but love your home----
That Chesterton quote makes a pretty good point. If we were helping a loved one—say a mom or dad or spouse---to drink to excess or use drugs dangerously, society would label us “enablers”.
An enabler in most definitions is a person who through his or her actions allows someone else to achieve something. Most often the term enabler is associated with people who allow loved ones to behave in ways that are destructive. For example, an enabler wife of an alcoholic might continue to provide the husband with alcohol. A person might be an enabler of a gambler or compulsive spender by lending them money to get out of debt.
In this fashion, though the enabler may be acting out of love and trying to help or protect a person, he or she is actually making a chronic problem like an addiction worse. By continuing to lend money to the gambler, for example, the gambler doesn’t have to face the consequences of his actions. Someone is there to bail him out of trouble and continue to enable his behavior.
The term enabler is also part of the larger definition of codependency. Codependency at first arose as a definition of adaptive behaviors a person might make if he or she lives with someone with substance abuse or severe emotional problems. A codependent tends to remain so, because he or she adapts to or ignores the behaviors of the ill person. In fact, the codependent often becomes an enabler because it allows one to be involved in fewer conflicts.
http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-an-enabler.htmWhile it is easy to claim that people who defend their country—or state or city---against any criticism are showing patriotism, in fact the greatest patriots are those who dream of improving their country. For, as William Blake wrote “Opposition is true friendship”. If we really love someone (or someplace) we want to help him grow as a human being. That means we have to be willing to point out when our friend is engaging in self destructive behaviors.
A society becomes self destructive when it ceases to value all citizens equally and becomes a tool for special interests who use deception and violence to pit people against each other, a practice sometimes called “Divide and conquer”. Whites are pitted against Blacks. Blacks are pitted against Hispanics. Those who own their own homes are played against folks who rent. People who have money are told that those who lack money are “the enemy”. American citizens are told “it’s ok if we do it to people from other countries.”
Since people are, by nature, caring towards other people (it is how the human community survives), this unnatural behavior causes us anxiety. We feel a deep conflict between our urges to help anyone who shares with us a human face and our fear of being criticized by people who share with us a human face. Our fear paralyzes us. In the end, we decide that the safest course is to sit back and wait for things to get better.
Most of us do not actively praise our government for doing things like arming soldiers in the Congo, so that they can help American businesses acquire that region’s natural resources---a process which is associated with such crimes against humanity as rape, child enslavement into the military and murder. We do not stand up and applaud when our soldiers torture Iraqis. We do not throw parties when our bombers in Afghanistan level civilian homes.
No, we show our approval in a more subtle way. We keep our mouths shut.
All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to ... remain silent.
Thomas Jefferson
If you truly love your alcoholic wife, you will tell her to stop drinking. If you truly love your country, you will tell it to stop____(you fill in the blank).
Because of the internal conflict we feel about atrocities committed by our group, sometimes silent complicity is not enough. We may even go a step further and decide that the inhumanity of our community or country is actually a
good thing, since it is part of our national/state/local/group identity. In this way, church members learn to tolerate sexual abuse by their clergy. Some men decide that women who are the victims of violence “were asking for it”. Americans learn to shrug off corporate imperialism. Colonialism is not good, we acknowledge----but the wealth it brings our country sure is welcome. And hey, if our nation becomes rich and powerful enough through its violence against other countries, then we can always use that power to do good. If we can keep 90% of the people happy and well fed, then it is worth it to sacrifice the other 10%....
In Texas, where I have lived for 42 years, the people have some pretty strange notions. For instance, in a survey taken a few years ago, the majority of Texans polled said that they would rather see an innocent person go to jail than see a guilty person walk free. An attitude like that should alarm folks. It is a sign that innocence is not respected or protected by a large number of people in my home state. Even without looking at the numbers, you could guess that people who feel this way would also be more willing to have children suffer poverty, medical neglect, homeless and early pregnancy at a rate higher than that in most of the rest of the country. As a physician, I have seen first hand the results of this (dare I call it unnatural?) attitude towards our future working citizens.
I am sure that folks in other states have some odd, even inhumane attitudes. Since I do not live in other states, it is difficult for me to write about them. I know the south intimately, but not California, not New York, not Ohio. I do know that a successful lawsuit in Ohio recently awarded mostly Black residents of a rural neighborhood damages, because they had been denied water (in a racially discriminatory fashion) for years.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25635291/wid/110915733/I know that many people in Texas, where I would live would seize upon this as good news----but not in the way you might imagine. They would crow
See? The rest of the country is just as bad as the south . As if being part of a larger gang if thugs makes thuggery acceptable.
If someone was to point out that until very recently a
suburban Black community in the Dallas-Fort Worth area was denied basic utilities----and that the problem was never addressed until a developer bought up all those homes owned by Black folks at a bargain price, those same “my state, right or wrong” folks would proclaim “That’s all in the past. Don’t be so negative. You will make our state look bad.”
If my state is acting badly, then it should look bad. If we know that crimes against humanity are being committed by our peers, we have an obligation to speak out---or we are complicit. This is the reason why so many people are demanding torture investigations and prosecutions. It will not be pleasant. We will learn things that shock us. Some people will even see loved one go to jail. But, we will all learn a valuable lesson, namely that a family (or community or state or country) can survive conflict and emerge even stronger than before----
If we are not afraid to point out the beam in our own eyes as readily as we criticize the mote in someone else’s.
"Silence is the voice of complicity."
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