So, by now most of you have seen, or at least heard of, a Native American man being stared down by a young man in a MAGA hat while he plays a drum quite close to him. I commented about it with a quote from a favourite author.
First, I want to address the narrative of what happened. There's an apparently common conception that the young men in the video went and surrounded him. They did not - Nathan Phillips approached the group, playing a peace song, and then the young man the in the video was either pushed by the crowd or chose to confront the man, standing perhaps a foot away and almost touching the drum he was playing.
According to Mr. Phillips' account, and based on the video, he was shouted at by students, and while there are no chaperones in sight, he claims that they did as well, and that some of them chanted "build that wall." I honestly see no reason to doubt his account of the events - using Trump-related propaganda to intimidate already has a history, and we don't have a full video of what occurred.
So, that's the event, so far as we can see or interpret it. There are some additional pieces we can tease out that add to the context. Mr. Phillips has been protesting for longer than I've been alive, is a Vietnam veteran, and a man with a good reputation across pretty well all First Nations groups. The young man is wearing a hat in apparent support of a man who uses the name of a Native American heroine as an insult. There are others, but there's another wrinkle on this that made me think of Terry Pratchett's admonition that evil begins when you start seeing people as things: these boys were on a school field trip to protest abortion in front of the Lincoln Memorial.
My thoughts on abortion are complicated, to say the least, but as a general rule I've decided to refer to myself as being "pro-baby." That is, I want the national economy, the social structure and health care to all be designed such that any woman who wants to have a baby can do so and both mother and child will have the opportunity to thrive. Since we're nowhere close to having any of those things be true, and given the way the politics of abortion have, I believe, tarnished and distorted Christianity and other people's view of Christianity, I don't think that I could, in good conscience, protest abortion and consider it to be something God believes I ought to do. Again, I've arrived at this opinion though a complicated series of steps, but one of them involves a three-week period in 1994.
I was a kind of nerdy kid, still pretty fresh from a very small, close-knit Christian private school and all but thrown into the largest high school in my town, but I had some friends and some confidantes. I was a sarcastic ball of hormones and fear, but around those friends I could relax and be more like the person you've met if you've met me recently. It was in this context that one of my friend's girlfriends approached me.
She was pregnant. The father wasn't my friend, but some guy she met at a party, who'd gotten her drunk, raped her, and left her there. It was the sort of party where that kind of behaviour could easily happen and be covered up, the sort that Good Girls Don't Go To, and she was more terrified of her parents finding out about the party and the pregnancy than anything else, it seemed. She hadn't been to a doctor yet, but she'd been getting nauseous every morning, and she'd missed her period for two months straight, which she never did, and could I help her, please, please?
I honestly had no idea what to do, but she was a friend, and she was desperate, so I wasn't going to let her alone. I sincerely believed it was my Christian duty to help to the extent that I could, and to keep her counsel to myself unless she let me talk about it with someone. I asked if I could, as I had a friend that I thought could help and between the three of us we figured out a plan to take her to a local women's health clinic where she could get help, hopefully anonymously.
The first visit was on a cold and rainy Saturday in March. The doctor was a man in his mid-50s, with a kind face, and a strangely shaped, conical skull that looked like it had simply pushed through his hairdo, leaving a ring of hair around his head like the snowline around the edge of Mount Everest's peak. He was comical in the interview, too, until he realized that wasn't the set of bedside skills he needed and became quite serious. Blood was drawn, tests were made and in the next week it was confirmed that she was pregnant, about three months along, and could you come in again, please?
The next Saturday, the doctor was far more serious. The tests confirmed pregnancy, but also revealed that the fetus was far less developed than it should be. More tests were necessary.
On Tuesday, she didn't come to school. She had a serious fever, couldn't keep food down, and was bleeding from, as our president would say, her wherever. The doctor called that same day to tell us the bad news - the placenta hadn't adhered properly and was likely to tear free completely, potentially leading to hemorrhage. With her symptoms, she was brought in for examination and likely surgery at a nearby outpatient clinic.
I left school in the middle of the day, giving some no-doubt creative excuse, and when we got to the clinic, I discovered that evidently the women's health clinic had protesters, but only during the week. There were six or seven of them, standing on either side of the walk leading up to the clinic, yelling at the men and women who were going in. One of them wasn't much older than me, and he was particularly histrionic, waving his sign in front of women's face in particular and shouting some pretty vile stuff at them.
As we made our way up the walk, my friend already in tears, our drive holding her and charging ahead like a fullback, I made an especial effort to head off the young man with his sign. When he moved to block our path, I knocked the sign, intending to just knock it away, but instead knocking it away. He moved as though intending to charge my pregnant friend, and I put my hand on his chest and asked him not to.
I don't remember the entire conversation in detail, but I do remember asking him, Christian to Christian, to not harass us because we were already dealing with something serious and he wasn't helping, and that his consistent response was, "It's my right to peacefully protest."
I asked him to identify with us as people, as individuals, as creations of God with feelings and needs and wants, with pains and sorrow and a deep, abiding need for grace and mercy, and he refused to do so, just reiterating his right, over and over, to treat us as objects for his rights to be acted upon. I don't know when it began in him, exactly, what it was that did it, but that, right there was evil.
I wish I could tell you that my friend's story had a happy ending, but it doesn't. It's not mine to tell, frankly, both because anything further could reveal who she is, and because the story is hers, and not mine from this point onward. I only tell it to pass on one of the lessons it taught me:
Evil begins by treating people as things, and when we choose to stand against a perceived injustice in a manner that treats people as things, evil is the inevitable result.
