Pop 89: I Am Not A Bad Ass
By Madonna Hamel
madonnahamel@hotmail.com
I don’t want to be a bad ass. Nor do I have any desire to have my work seen as kick ass. And I don’t need balls. Nor do I feel the urge to tell certain people to grow a pair. I have used such terminology on occasion. I’m guilty of trying on certain words to see how they fit, to register their effect. And the truth is, I might feel a rush for a second, but it doesn’t last. It turns out, well-placed wise-cracks expressing zero tolerance for fools and bs, don’t lift me out of the fray, they hurl me into the heart of it.
I love Eugene Peterson’s definition of “spiritual” as “mature”. Spirituality is not a little segment of life over here while emotions and thoughts and actions live over there. It’s the posture we take toward life as a whole. I’m paraphrasing here, but his point is: there is a spiritual solution to every problem and it’s the mature choice.
I am trying to listen to my conscience and respond to difficult people and situations in a mature manner. And that about does me in for the day. It’s so much easier to use the popular school-yard bully language of degradation to get back at someone who doesn’t see things my way. But my darn conscience asks of me that I use the mature method of listening and responding to someone who is obviously suffering from fear. Frankly, it’s a rare person who can do that. (About as rare as stumbling on a freshly opened evening primrose, which only blooms one night a year. I’ve seen one in eight years. Which just about matches my record for mature, calm responses to irate people.)
People, in large numbers, and from opposite directions, are getting angry about the SAME things, in both Canada and the States, and reports show a kind of insane horror B-movie quality to much of the behaviour.
Extremely-extreme polarized flag-wavers howling from the side of the road sound just like town hall “progressives”: They both warn that the country (in Canada and even mores in the States) is going to hell, as we speak. You can scroll through your preferred news outlet broadcasting your preferred version of truth. And they both use exactly the same words, like: “If you don’t fight for your country you won’t have a country worth fighting for.” Or “They” (the woke progressives and the good-ol-days conservatives) “are taking away our freedoms. Our rights. Our choices.”
Of course, the choices we make and the rights we defend and the freedoms we yearn for are different in nature. Priorities fluctuate wildly. Which brings me back to Eugene Peterson. He was in the midst of translating the bible into a language local Montana cowboys and country folk could appreciate when he got a call from Bono, the singer, saying he had a backstage pass for him. He was performing nearby and would pay for his flight because he really wanted to discuss his books with him. Peterson declined, he was still working on his translatation and was about to tackle the major prophets. “But Gene,” said an interviewer, retelling the story, “It was Bono!” To which Peterson replied, “But Dean, it was Isaiah!”
When did we prioritize smart-ass remarks, bad ass behaviour and kick ass performance over civility, conscious action and mature comportment? I mean, I know we all move through those phases when we’re teens as we try to assert ourselves, discover our limits and create boundaries. But when did being an ass get the reverence conscientiousness deserves? When did grown adults replace being kind and considerate with getting rich and famous (or belonging to an entourage of the rich and famous) as a life goal?
What got me writing and thinking about this, again, is a book I’m reading called “Across That Bridge,” by the late American congressman and civil rights servant of the people, John Lewis. For those who don’t know the story, Lewis marched alongside Martin Luther King on many occasions, including the time they, and hundreds others, tried to cross the Edmund Pettus bridge in Alabama. Lewis was beaten with batons by police almost died due to his injuries.
But it isn’t just what Lewis writes that moves me, it is Andrew Young’s words about Lewis that struck me. Young, another fellow marcher and civil rights worker from the sixties, now a UN ambassador, called Lewis “The conscience of the US Congress.” Who on earth deserves that moniker today? And does anybody even want it?
A loose canon hurling cheap shots won’t get called a “conscience”. Nor will the “clever” or “smug” or “righteously superior” among us. No. It requires self-containment, discernment, calmness and clarity to be a “conscience.” And willingness. And, above all, it also requires a desire to earn that name. It requires a belief that to be named thus would be the highest honour.
John Lewis also spoke in Washington in 1963, where and when Martin Luther King Jr.,was introduced as “the moral leader” of the American nation. Today, the word “moral” is either an unhip, judgemental buzz-kill, or considered the sole property of a private club who has God on its side.
To have developed a conscience, to adhere to a moral code is a sign of maturity. And yet popularity seems to be the unabashed driving force behind so many cultural and political leaders these days. John Lewis was a humble man. And humble men have a way of humbling us. In the final pages of his book Lewis doesn’t exhort us to be bad asses. He calls for us to make love a priority. “Hold only to Love,” he writes. “ Clothe yourself in the work of love, “ he writes. “Anchor the eternity of love in your own soul.” Because, as King said, over and over, we don’t have like each other. But we must love each other. Or, having made asses of ourselves, we will die fools.