On Decency and Being Good Neighbors

The news has been very sad on many levels lately. Wars and rumors of wars, people offending the core religious beliefs (as opposed to criticizing the behaviors) of millions of human beings...

In seeking to return some perspective and context to events in the last week, I have sometimes walked away from this keyboard feeling like I needed a purifying shower, a renewed baptism of sorts. There is too much hurt in the world, where it should be easy enough to be kind.

To be kind... not to exploit the 'other'... for money, for lust, for power. To be simply kind, good; good neighbors. It is not just one group of people or another but it is a world which has forsaken the Good, and is increasingly losing the sense of what it means to be good. To be kind is opposite of the sheer will to power. It is to seek the good of the other. At the very least it means determining not to provoke, not to taunt, not to harm.

Greed

And yet we see our children being exposed to and desensitized to every kind of evil daily. Why? It makes no sense apart from the love of money, greed:

"For the love of money is the root of all evils; which some coveting have erred from the faith, and have entangled themselves in many sorrows".---1 Timothy 6:10

But money is no index to a good life. Kindness surely is, however. There have always been evils in the world; every kind of sexual deviance and violence; none of it is new, even if, admittedly, the visual medial culture has magnified it all in the order of magnitudes. But in decent societies not long ago behaviors which were deviant, Red Light Districts and the rest, were always segregated, kept away from children and people who wanted to live decently, according to their faith. People have a right not to be seduced towards defilement.

Advertising World

But when money becomes the highest good, the seductions of advertising becomes ubiquitous, wall to global wall, as it were. On the Internet, pornography is everywhere--in lands in our "In boxes" daily, unsolicited. But what decent people cannot see that pornography should be, if we refuse to abolish it, at least very tightly segregated to one section of this medium, as were those Red Light Districts not long ago. Have the pornographers and moguls no sense of shame and decency at all?

Not those for whom money is the highest good, it appears. And what of those who would provocatively project and impose their lusts on Jesus Himself in the name of "art" in order to provoke his followers? Every morally sane persons knows this is ideology, not art. And it is a provocative, hateful ideology. But some professional-victim-posing-groups evidently need to provoke, they actually want to get a violent response to wickedness so that they can keep the funding coming in. They seem disappointed when it doesn't happen. But meanwhile they (constantly) turn up the heat on the people they hate---Is this not violence? Not hate?

And yet they call it "tolerance"...It is very cynical.

Even the Mafia

At one time even the Mafia would protect neighborhood children, sons and daughters, wives and loved ones. And woe to the Hood who sought to defile one of these. Even the Mafia once understood some residual decency and the necessity for boundaries. They kept to their clubs and did not demand to perform shameful deeds in the faces of all. Rapists did not fare well in jails. Why? Because even the Mafia had a sense of decency and outrage.

But what of the spiritual rape? The defiling of our children and young people? Bob Dylan in one of his songs openly deplores "old men turning young daughters into whores"...

Not Difficult

It is not difficult to be decent; to prefer peace to violations of the souls of others. To be good to one another. To refuse to exploit another simply because the "law" says a "legal age" has been arrived at. We can all at least keep offensiveness within tight segregated boundaries. Otherwise the societies which refuse this decency reveal themselves to actively promote wickedness. Then society itself becomes the matrix of Hate crime, sexual abuse and tyranny.

There are the hungry to be fed, those traumatized by Money Wars to be healed, consoled, the sick who need the benefits of our taxes instead of a million needless, often hurtful, expenditures. We do not have to offend one another. We can do better.

See it: Small Acts of Kindness. In Truth, in Justice, in Decency. We can differ without hurting, without killing, without exploiting, without wishing or doing harm to any: babies in the womb who need to be welcomed into the world; the sick, disabled and elderly who need our kindness, for we are indebted to them for birthing compassion in us, for helping us when we were weak and vulnerable. We can help one another without otherwise agreeing, without seeing eye-to-eye, and without naivety. We can bless one another in hope, in justice, forgive one another in goodness, in love, without seeking unjust or perverse gain, without seeking to take or mock what is sacred, what is not ours or vile to take. Kindness and respect can happen, person to person, sovereign nation to sovereign nation, in all situations short of violence, short of blood, short of violation, short of selfishness or greed in any of us. This is what Catholics want.

Polemics, like the Catholic teaching on war, should be defensive only. Sometimes we---all of us---must answer evils decisively, or show ourselves complicit.