When something beyond comprehension takes place, it is normal to look for a story or an analogy to make sense of it. Kids do that. Adults do that, too. We want to feel less afraid, less outraged, less hopeless. It is helpful to have an analogy to remind us exactly how things may improve, when they are at their worst.
The analogy that comes to mind comes from the 12-step addiction recovery movement. To me, it feels like America is hitting bottom. Of course, the flaws of this analogy are obvious. America is not a person. America can’t go to rehab.
But the analogy signifies the depth of the problem and also signals hope. It reminds us that change begins to happen when one hits bottom, because change requires acceptance of the truth, and sometimes that can only happen when the truth is so dark and insane and obvious that you can no longer look away, when the truth is so maddening that people start burning things down. Only then is acceptance forced upon us.
America says it is unhappy with what it keeps doing. America says it wants to change. But it keeps doing the same thing anyway. That’s like what addicts do. That’s why the point of maximum ugliness may also be the point of maximum hope.
Of course, America is not a person. Where the 12-step analogy is useful, though, is in the process it lays out. Not the “higher power” part but the “fearless and thorough moral inventory” part.
We Americans have not yet made a searching and fearless moral inventory of our past. We have not painstakingly examined the wreckage we have caused. And we have not begun to make amends.
One reason we Americans as a whole haven’t faced up to our past is that we as individuals feel innocent. We as individuals didn’t lynch or enslave anyone. So how do we as individuals do a moral inventory on the behavior of the nation as a whole? What is our role?
Here is another analogy. Take those cops who killed George Floyd. One had his knee on George Floyd’s neck. The others stood around and didn’t do anything to stop it. That’s like us. We acknowledge how awful slavery was, but we don’t do anything to atone for it. We stand around pretending not to see the cop with his knee on a man’s neck. We pretend not to know the wealth we enjoy was acquired through mass kidnapping, slavery, genocide, and torture. We are complicit because we do nothing to atone for it.
I believe that as humans, as Americans, we all bear some responsibility for what our country has done in the past. I believe that membership requires us, while we enjoy the benefits, to also assume the debts.
I believe there is a debt to be paid. I think the moral case for it is strong. Even if we cannot pay that debt in dollars, we owe it in our behavior, our words, our deeds, our comportment, our sorrow and humility. We white people owe something to those who have been the victims of our country’s past and its present.
What is it about the refusal to admit the truth that is so maddening and hurtful? I don’t know whybut I have observed that it is true, in myself and in others. It would be nice to believe it is because we humans revere the truth.
We believe that it is honorable, when one has been beaten, to acknowledge it and ask for help.
Maybe that is what some police departments are doing when their leadership resigns. They are opening themselves up to the outside, saying, We are beaten, our situation has become unmanageable, we are asking for help.
America is not a person. America cannot go to rehab. But America sounds like an addict who wants to stop. America sounds like she’s realized she has a problem and wants to change.
