Growing up, when my daddy wanted to insult my mother he would call her a “cracker.” She was from southern Georgia and for her, that word was offensive.
Potentially hurtful, yes, but a chance to turn the other cheek material, definitely. Ugly words only hurt us when we let them, when we choose to take offense. We can choose not to.
But today to even have been overheard describing someone by a derogatory name like “cracker” can get you fired from your job, or worse.
My daddy always got a reaction with it, so he used it. My mother was born into an illustrious Southern family that did not recover following “the war between the states.” It left them dirt poor and she never got comfortable with that. So the insult really stung.
Growing up in a time when people were openly bigoted or racist, even my parents and their friends, I heard all kinds of things said about, and said to people I loved, which were not kind, or polite. And even though the things they said were reprehensible, vile, a host of negative adjectives, I still believe they had the right to say them. The Bible says, “Out of the heart, the mouth speaks.” So when these people speak they are letting the listener know the condition of their hearts.
Then we chose to associate with them or not.
This country was founded on freedom. The Supreme Court denied a number of First Amendment free speech claims throughout the 1920s. In Whitney v. California, a Communist Party USA organizer, Charlotte Anita Whitney, was arrested for “criminal syndicalism.” Justice Louis Brandeis in his dissent argued for broader protections for political speech:
“Those who won our independence … believed that freedom to think as you will and to speak as you think are means indispensable to the discovery and spread of political truth; that without free speech and assembly discussion would be futile; that with them, discussion affords ordinarily adequate protection against the dissemination of noxious doctrine…”
Political speech is protected, but when Gregory Lee Johnson burned an American flag at a demonstration during the 1984 Republican National Convention in Dallas, he was charged and convicted with violating a Texas law prohibiting the vandalizing of venerated objects. Justice William J. Brennan Jr. wrote in the 5-4 Supreme Court reversal of the lower courts’ ruling that, “if there is a bedrock principle underlying the First Amendment, it is that government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society finds the idea offensive or disagreeable.”
Just because you’re odious or you’re an idiot doesn’t mean you don’t have the right to express yourself in private conversations. Something’s really wrong in a society where private conversations are no longer private. Something is gravely amiss when people are recording others and sending it to the news media. And remember, depending on who is doing it, it is a crime.
Which brings us to the Los Angeles Clippers’ Donald Sterling: if the NBA commissioners had simply fined Sterling a humongous amount of money for what he said, and banned him as they did, Sterling would have looked like the lascivious idiot that he probably is. In trying to force a sale of property held in trust the NBA is going to have big ticket legal fees from now till kingdom come and the highly litigious Mr. Sterling, age 80, is going to enjoy the limelight along the way. He has nothing to lose.
Is Mr. Sterling an idiot or is he crafty like a fox? During this sad saga, the team’s value has jumped from an impressive half a billion dollars to a full billion. He was recorded saying something ugly in private but is milking it for a profit.
It seems like that would be against the law, like prostitution. We don’t need to see and hear the man’s pimp on Anderson Cooper with yet another recording. The nation has much bigger fish to fry. This is not news and it distracts us from what is.
Right now in Raleigh, the state legislature just passed Building Rule Changes limiting the public’s (that is you and me) right to go into the legislative building and air its grievances. This is news.
In an obvious attempt to silence the Moral Majority that gathered in protest on the legislative lawn last year, lawmakers enacted legislation that prohibits being disruptive in the legislative building. The numbers of 2013 protestors started in the hundreds and finished in the thousands. About 900 of these were arrested as they protested in the legislative building during Moral Mondays.
Last Monday night about 400 protestors gathered for the first Moral Monday of 2014. Under the new rules, if they enter the building they can be arrested in the building and charged if their behavior is deemed “imminently disruptive.”
Most of my parents’ generation has died, but sadly, racism and bigotry have not. And obviously there are still those less-than-perfect people who do not yet love their neighbors as themselves.
The Bible is clear we are to respect our leaders even when we disagree with them. In the predominantly white town of Wolfeboro, N.H., there’s a police commissioner, Robert Copeland, age 82, who doesn’t have the sense to keep his toxic opinion to himself and this week he lost his elected position for it. Copeland admitted using a racial slur in speaking about our President, apparently preceded by an obscenity, while in a restaurant in March. It would have remained a private conversation, but a resident of the town overheard him and complained when she found out what Copeland’s job was. He resigned following the national uproar that even Mitt Romney weighed in on.
It is never good to have morally compromised people in elected office. That goes for those who tweet photos of their laps, who use vile language, drive drunk, have their hand in citizens’ wallets, and those who are unfaithful to their spouse.
Nevertheless, I am reminded of this that was said more than 2,000 years ago: “He that is without sin among you, let him cast the first stone…”
And then too, there’s something inherently wrong when one word garners that much attention, holds that much power. On this Memorial Day, I question if it is the word that is so powerful or the ones wielding power capitalizing on the offense to suppress others’ rights to their opinion, however noxious?
