Keeping My Stupid Mouth Shut
During the presidential election four years ago something circulated by email, something nasty about my candidate, and I commented, contributing to the anonymous conversation. Someone immediately retorted threateningly toward me, viciously and alarmingly. It was my lesson never again to participate in those mindless exchanges.
Anonymity is a fog that shamefully lets us be other than human, even sub-human, and if we are Christian, other-than-Christian*. I’m thinking of road rage, but especially of the internet, the world wide web.
Driving on a Los Angeles freeway years ago, I saw an angry young man deliberately bumping and bumping and bumping the car in front of him, an older sedan driven by a very elderly man, with his wife beside him in the front seat. As their car kept getting bumped from behind, she was looking back at the car behind them, terror on her face. It was, of course, a situation that could prove deadly at any moment. Her husband took the first exit, but the angry young man simply followed them off, still bumping. I don’t know, but her husband probably had committed some major offense such as cutting in front or going too slow, and enraged the driver behind them. It reminded me of stories of young Nazis picking on elderly Jews during the Holocaust: if you don’t know someone, which is to say it’s personally anonymous, you can commit any heinous evil you choose.
But somebody knows them. Somebody loves them.
The internet provides the same anonymity, doesn’t it. Many news articles and such have space below for “Comments.” Scroll down and say what you will, or read the comments of others. It's like going into an old fashioned outhouse: it smells horrible in there. And you may get bit on the butt by a spider. The comments very often show the shame of non-accountability for one’s words. People slash wickedly at each other. If you don’t know somebody, you can call them whatever you wish, use whatever filthy and demeaning language you choose.
Though I am a minister, an Episcopal priest at that where supposedly we are to the left of the population, some of my views on social issues are to the far right of Genghis Khan, no joke. In a conversation, barring a burst of my sometimes uncontrollable and always regrettable temper and sailor mouth, I try to speak carefully when with friends, parishioners, family, loved ones, or anyone who expresses views with which I disagree strongly. There’s no anonymity, and so I try to be -- human. And Christian. Definitely, I do not always succeed, sometimes I wag my tongue when I should be wiggling my ears.
Being mindful of human differences is even more important for anyone in the pulpit. I am not there to offend or as the ultimate authority on anything, and my opinions on any given subject are likely to be far out different from the views of at least someone on every conceivable issue. My ordained mission is not to spout my social, political views, but to proclaim Christ. And that lovingly.
On the internet, my policy is never under any circumstance to scroll down and “comment” on what the idiots, imbeciles and morons have said and are saying. And if I do so anyway, comment anyway, I demean myself and become what they appear to be.
Even in my blog postings, where I joke that my purpose is “to annoy -- someone -- anyone”, I try to remember who I am.
Besides, there’s no anonymity before God.
TW+
* In my inquirers’ seminars and confirmation classes, my going in definition is that a Christian is someone who, because of believing or at least accepting certain things about Jesus of Nazareth, tries to live life in a certain way, specifically the Way of the Cross, a way of agape, chesed, lovingkindness and sacrifice.