Former Clinton White House speechwriter Tom Rosshirt is part of a group that has recently created a “Dignity Index.” It’s “an eight-point scale” that scores public speeches on their “power to unite or divide.” The goal is “a cultural shift in our politics,” and the sponsoring organization, called Unite, urges you and me to “start your own journey by taking the Dignity Pledge.” We’re asked to enter our email “to stay informed on the dignity movement.” Why? Because “there is no America without democracy, no democracy without healthy debate and no healthy debate without dignity.”
I’ve known Tom Rosshirt for many years, and even corresponded with him in early stages of the development of the Dignity Index. And if there’s anything I can assure you of, it’s the purity of Tom’s intentions here. And as with any project sincerely offered by intelligent people, I hope this effort makes a difference.
But I’m sure Tom and his colleagues know what they’re up against.
And I’m not talking about other, infinitely more powerful forces dedicated toward keeping Americans at each other’s throats. That’s been a big racket since I was in college, and didn’t yet know what my own politics were. People like Rush Limbaugh and Morton Downey, Jr. just bewildered me then. Because I wasn’t mad yet, myself.
When I was a kid, I remember my dad describing some of his friends and acquaintances as “angry people.” My mother was one of them. “Lotta anger in there!” my dad would scoff, when she erupted in obscenities over a hassle in a department store parking garage. Although it wasn’t she, but he, who came at my frustrating teenage self with both hands flailing.
“Anger issues,” is the term we use today. And it applies, it seems to me, not to a select few “angry people,” damaged early in life and destined to bark their way to an early heart attack death. It applies to more American adults than not.
And why not?
Parenting is enraging, spouses are enraging, dating is enraging—other people are enraging.
Bosses, colleagues, corporations—all enraging.
Traffic is enraging, technology is enraging, customer service is enraging, having to do your taxes is enraging—enraging for their own sake, and enraging because nobody told us there’d be days like these.
Growing up in America, we were told we lived in a special, free nation—and then we grew up in Cleveland, and given nothing but rules, and punishment for breaking them.
We were also raised on the presumption of steady progress: Nobody was saying the n-word anymore, nobody was allowed to litter anymore, factories weren’t dumping chemicals into the river anymore and the USSR was no more. “Everything’s getting better,” an engineer friend used to tell me with devout seriousness. “Every day, in every way.”
Starting with Santa Claus, we were encouraged to believe in all kinds of magical and romantic things that either never came to pass, or that happened such twisted ways that we hardly recognize them.
We watched one thousand American movies with well-timed endings—(swelling music and credits)—that did not in any way resemble the ways our loved ones’ stories are actually ending—(young and suddenly, or endlessly with morphine constipation).
We were told we could be anything we wanted if we worked hard enough. We worked as hard as we could, and wound up not getting what we wanted—or getting it, and realizing it wasn’t what we expected.
The kids weren’t all right, the marriage ran out of gas, the stock market went in the shitter at exactly the wrong time and the Browns left for Baltimore.
And you really think it’s politics we’re so mad about? “I hate all politicians,” the guy says. No, you hate your lying parents, your lying teachers, your lying history books, your lying church leaders, your lying artists.
Our politicians? They only lie to us because they have to: Because nobody else ever told us the truth about anything, and they’re not about to break the hard stuff to us on the eve of the election.
You want to start working on your anger? Gather up, examine and inventory all the disappointments of your life: all the things you hoped and expected would happen but never did, and all the terrible things that happened that nobody warned you would. Stare at these things. Eat of them, because they are bitter, and because they are your heart.
Next, count up all the pleasant surprises that came to you that you never could have imagined but have been lucky enough to come to see as part of your destiny, too. Place them all in line on a long shelf, in no particular order: unlikely relationships you’ve built, hobbies you’ve found, Mexican food you love.
And now for grad school: Find direct connections between your misfortunes and your good fortune—your disillusionment and sorrow and loneliness and embarrassments—and the truth and love and humor and faith that you could not have discovered any other way. And you group these opposing impostors together, in pairs.
To the extent that you can manage to do those three things with integrity—not as a onetime epiphany, but as a regular meditation, a cycle of thinking—you’ll likely treat others with dignity, without even having to try.
And if you don’t have the time, patience or stamina to do that kind of exercise—God almighty, I do understand. But probably, that’s why you act like an asshole so much of the time.
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