Distinguish survival choices from long-term commitments.

• Distinguish survival choices from long-term commitments.
More dangerous than our investment in injustice are the excuses we develop to justify it. It’s those after-the-fact rationalizations that can ease our slide into long-term commitments that are not even remotely in our self-interest.

Did you ever see one of those pit bulls chained up in some jerk’s backyard, barely fed, cooked in the sun, rousing itself only to slam against the fence at children passing by? One of the most pitiful and maddening sights imaginable. I’ve seen people just like that dog, and the chains we wear are the excuses we made for our complicities.

To explain our participation in the crimes of our masters, we say, and sometimes come to believe, that people deserve to be robbed and poisoned, that we need someone to tell us what to do, that we can’t trust our neighbors, that buying an SUV is a great achievement, that we’re not responsible for child labor or poisoned seas. Oddly, it’s when we take responsibility for some unjustice, when we accept it as our own choice (even when we have little choice in fact), that we hasten to invent some justification for the whole rotten system. That’s why warlords make time in their busy schedules to insist the new recruits pull the trigger against some other victim; it binds us to a life of crime.

Many times we ourselves are the main victims of the crimes we abet. We get forced into some rotten deal and then try to talk about it as if it were what we were looking for all along, the fulfillment of our dreams. Remember the teen I heard about who claimed to be having 3 babies so she could get on welfare? She portrayed herself --and by implication, all other social service clients-- as lazy, selfish, ruthless and irresponsible. She made the welfare program itself sound like a fraud. Those were certainly the conclusions drawn by the older woman who told me this story, though it’s extremely unlikely, given the very low levels of welfare payment in Tennessee. Possibly this kid hadn’t a clue what was happening to her, but needed to act as if she were in control.

I remember a different sort of assertion of control from another teen, age 17. She had just moved in with her dad, his alcoholic wife and their kids. She was afraid she was pregnant. She would not have an abortion, though, because it wasn’t the fetus’ fault its parents had sex, and if you “spread your legs” you must take the consequences. I said I don’t see having a baby as a matter of punishment, but a question of the parent's ability to care for it. But with all the chaos going on around her, she had decided to establish a moral code for herself, and stick to it. Now and again I wonder if this young person had that kid, and how it's doing.

Portelli sees that need to feel in control among Kentucky coal miners, too:

Let us begin with pride. Harlan County miners, like most American workers, do not primarily think of themselves as members of an exploited class— as opposed, for instance, to Italian workers, who have often been influenced by some concept of class struggle. Thus, while Italian workers are likely to draw a pessimistic image of their condition in order to project an image of militant pride, Harlan county coal miners seem often to feel that there is something personally demeaning —rather than collectively legitimizing— in appearing to be or to have been exploited (202).

It's natural to want to feel that we have power in our lives, as in fact we do. But other people have power over us, too. When we don't understand how gangster power operates, we may end up thinking we chose what they imposed upon us, and taking responsibility for their crimes.

One way to deal with rationalizations, or what might be rationalizations, is to peel back the cover story, and clarify the choices. I remember the next door neighbor talking about her years in the textile factory, until the palsy got so bad they laid her off. Didn’t sound like an easy place to work. For instance, OSHA had to come in to demand that the company reduce the cotton dust levels, and if you know how rarely OSHA acts you might guess the levels were pretty high. I asked my neighbor about unions. My neighbor said there were organizing drives, but the union lost both times; anyhow a union wouldn’t work in that factory. Her boss was a good Christian man. But as I asked more questions, she got to the point quickly: If you’re raising 3 kids without a husband, she told me, you put up with things (8-3-03).

I didn't tell my neighbor about other people in similar circumstances; I'm sure she knows more of them than I do. I didn't know enough about the history of textile workers organizing in my town to talk about that. In any case, I would have had to be careful not to make her feel like she did something wrong by not organizing her factory. But more information on specific ways the company managers set policy to control the workforce would, I think, make it easier for people like my neighbor and I to separate out our interests from the bosses'. (This is also the tactic of rightist conspiracy theorists. The job is a little easier for them, since they don't have to do any actual research. Did you know that once Obama forces socialized medicine on us, he will implant surveillance chips in our uteri?)

I need to practice more, but I think we can unravel the false justifications, and help each other step back from choices we make under duress. That way we don’t have to turn an ugly choice for survival into a lifetime policy. We might give ourselves room to reconstruct the resistance stories other peoples have learned.

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He was an odd old guy, my grandfather, and I am told I take after him. It was he who caused the trouble. On his deathbed he called my father to him and said, 'Son, after I'm gone I want you to keep up the good fight. I never told you, but our life is a war and I have been a traitor all my born days, a spy in the enemy's country ever since I gave up my gun back in the Reconstruction. Live with your head in the lion's mouth. I want you to overcome 'em with yeses, undermine 'em with grins, agree 'em to death and destruction, let 'em swoller you till they vomit or bust wide open' (Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man, “Battle Royal”).
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• Practice taking responsibility.
At the same time, we could help ourselves by taking responsibility for the decisions we do freely make.

In 2006, several U.S. soldiers disobeyed orders of an officer and a platoon leader to kill unarmed men in Iraq (Katchadourian 51, 52, 55). They had the gumption to take responsibility for their actions. The article I read did not explain how they came to their decisions, but here are a couple suggestions that might make it easier for us to take more responsibility, too.


# Bring hidden decisions to light. One category is the choices we make without much reflection, in order to avoid conflict, or because it’s too much work to keep redoing our decisions. The first step is to help these choices emerge from the background noise of habit and acceptance.

We delegate many of our decisions to partners or bosses; others we make once and let stand for decades, e.g. consumption strategies, who is unworthy of our concern, the search image for the ideal political leader. I put my savings into a “social investment” fund. They don’t make money off bomb-makers or torturers, not directly, but I know very well the corporate world is highly interconnected, and that the banks and other businesses in my fund do business with killers. I just don’t want to be bothered doing the scrutiny myself.

We want to hold ourselves accountable for these decisions, because they affect everyone, but it probably wouldn’t help to revisit these except in the context of specific goals. Otherwise the exercise becomes an accusations game – Why did you buy that stinkin SUV? Admit your inner racism, and the like. I’m quick to regard any such imposed self-reflection as the dread political correctness, unless I’m in a position to do something about it, with some clear purpose in mind.

So, if, for instance, we were to retrace this morning's footsteps --whether we showered with hot water, drank coffee, watched TV, drove to work, etc.-- in addition to identifying how these reinforce or resist business as usual, we have to go further, and name what it would take, personally and as a community, to do something different. If we can't see a way to change right away, at least we can understand our habits as choices.

At the same time, I recall an instance or 2 where subtlety sailed past the folks I was talking to. One had done a few trips as a coyote bringing workers (including her husband) across the border. She made up to $10,000, and hadn't the slightest second thought about her role in human trafficking. When I mentioned the people suffocated in locked trucks, she said she always put water in the trucks, and eventually her partners did, too. She said she'd also worked for the INS. All very matter of fact.

Another way to remind ourselves how important these seemingly non-political decisions are would be to adapt one of those political surveys that predict our voting patterns by our choice of corn flakes. Does this sound right? we could ask ourselves. How come the campaigners put us in these boxes?

Then there's the question as to how we respond to other folks’ politics-- could be mowing the lawn, pledging allegiance, buying the kid a slasher video game, listening to the preacher god damn whole populations, or letting racist remarks slide by. Here I think we sometimes have opportunities to engage each other rather than just put up with things that need to be examined. I listen sometimes to the rightist Dave Ramsay financial show on the radio. From the calls he gets, it sounds like he’s sparked useful money discussions among many families. We have families, colleagues, neighbors, congregations, golf partners. We talk about our consumer choices endlessly-- why we prefer this kind of peanut butter, or purple drapes, or botox to erase those annoying wrinkles. We could just as easily talk about how our choices affect everyone around us, and far away as well.

We have all the more opportunity in times of crisis (or general annoyance, as the case may be). Gasoline costs too much, damn politicians, damn oil companies, blah blah. If we give ourselves the chance, we can get to the part about the oil-based economy and oil-driven wars.

We can push for more information, even better a flow of information, to illuminate situations we would otherwise take for granted. Farmworker wages, federal subsidies for highways, the cost of new hospitals, the latest ozone alerts on the evening weather, all these should get as much attention as stock prices--and we can ask for it.

Again, the first step is to take these decisions of ours from behind the veil of habit and start to make them transparent and deliberate. We can’t usefully think about change until we know what we’ve done already.