by John Heid
“All our problems stem from our acceptance of the filthy rotten system.” Dorothy Day
Lent is upon us. These days I see many souls in our local community walking a contemporary Way of the Cross.
The First Station: Last month local police brutally apprehended a young man who recently had lived at Bethany House. Officers repeatedly tazered the man after a conversation-gone-sour devolved into a footrace and altercation. Several of the seven policemen wound up with bloody noses, and our friend with a manila folder full of charges. The city newspaper spun the incident into an epic drama including bold-faced headlines that made it Winona’s crime du jour.
The Second Station: State regulations kept another guest in jail more than a month after her three-day sentence was served. She was prohibited from returning to her family and home state, despite the nonviolent nature of her charges, until probation workers completed paperwork and secured state approval. Thus, she was both incarcerated and exiled because of policy and bureaucratic torpor. The filthy rotten system has a high tolerance for suffering. Her story is not an exception to the rule.
The Third Station: A young family who often shares evening meal with us hovers on the precipice of abject poverty, one crisis away from collapse on any given day. Social service regulations rule them out as often as eligible for one needed service or another. There is no shortage of genuinely thoughtful, caring social workers attempting to support our friends. Yet policy and procedure encumber them like shackles on a long distance runner. Our society’s social services are rarely either. . . .
The Fourth Station: Dwindling resources and sky-rocketing health care insurance premiums are forcing local social service agencies to opt for high-tech appliances, like remote camera monitoring, in lieu of human presence, in adult foster care homes during nighttime hours.
What do these vignettes say to us? What is a humane response to the myriad and cavernous needs we witness up close and in the newspapers? Who suffers and who is nurtured? Who profits while others languish?
Would training in nonviolent conflict resolution minimize bloody noses and tazered bodies? Would compassionate social service policy humanize our communities? Would a radical restructuring of fiscal priorities from a weapons-building economy to a people-nurturing one create beloved community? Is technology a worthy substitute for human touch? In catholic worker parlance, what will make it easier for people to do good, every last one of us?
It is easy to rant—to make believe we are somehow bystanders. It is hard not to be discouraged, if not downright infuriated, by the daily onslaught of bad news, especially when one recognizes the names and knows something of the life stories behind the mug shot images in section A of the newspaper.We are a small town in a small world in one of countless big galaxies. We often know the police and the policed. The social worker and the client. The health care worker and the patient. The newspaper editor and the face in the mug shot. They are James and Jane. Sam or Susan. Betty or Bill. Neither are villains nor hero/heroines. Rather, they are neighbors or friends or acquaintances, our sisters and brothers. All of these, all of us, are dehumanized when the inherent violence of the “filthy rotten system” insinuates itself into our relationships.
Can we, one by one, disengage from that which encourages, codifies, legalizes, reinforces a myth that we are not fundamentally one, i.e. brothers and sisters in the human family? Can we evolve beyond our acceptance of this filthy rotten system? Do we believe that personalism trumps state responsibility? Can we seek out and nurture “those tiny molecular forces that work from individual to individual” (William James)?
How can we begin (again and again) to build a new world in the shell of the old?
Can we start by recognizing the humanity of every single person mentioned in the daily news—from athlete to terrorist, from CEO to lotto winner, from dealer (car and drug) to nurse of the year? Can we go beyond just thinking outside the box to climbing out of the damnable ideologies that box us in?
Is it public policy that holds us together or our shared humanity? Is it law that liberates us or is it genuine, unfettered, works of mercy and compassion that are the warp and woof of our social fabric? How can we move beyond bystander status in the fray of the daily Stations of the Cross? How can we evolve beyond the frigid terrain of charity to the fecund fields of justice?
Gandhi commented: “Imagine the face of the poorest person in the world and then ask yourself if the step you are about to take will make any difference in that person’s life.”
I’d add . . . let’s look at ourselves and ask if the next step we take will make us more fully human . . . or less.