I was about fourteen or fifteen. I was sitting on the school bus swapping jokes with two boys. The bus was parked outside the parochial high school that we were attending. The joke I told went like this: A man was jumping up and down on a manhole shouting "Fifty-two, fifty-two, fifty-two!" Another man came along and asked him why he was doing that. He replied, "Because it is fun. Try it." So the second man began jumping up and down on the manhole shouting, "Fifty-two, fifty-two, fifty-two!" He didn't feel the same way about it and walked away. Then came along a third man who asked him why he was doing that. The third man belonged to a different race and culture. The first man encouraged him to try it. When the third man - from a different race and culture - began jumping up and down on the manhole, the first man pulled the screen off the manhole and the man from a different race and culture dropped down into the hole. The first man then replaced the screen, got up on the manhole and started jumping up and down again, this time yelling, "Fifty-three, fifty-three, fifty-three!" It would not have been such a bad joke if I had not been using an inappropriate slang term to refer to the man from a different race and culture. I was only part of the way through the joke when I suddenly noticed a student climbing up onto the bus who was from the same race and culture as the man in my joke. A look of horror must have come over my face as the student walked back and took a seat right behind me!
I didn't know what to do. The boys were sitting there waiting for me to finish the joke. If I had been a quick thinker, I might have said to them, "I'll finish this joke later", but I wasn't a quick thinker. Very nervously, I finished telling the joke, trying to minimize the number of times I used the inappropriate slang term that probably wounded the boy behind me. Today, I look back at that moment with absolute horror! What was I thinking to be telling that kind of joke or using that kind of language in the first place? The irony is that I said it with no malice. I had absolutely nothing against that race or culture. I just wanted to tell a funny joke. The slang term had been used when the joke was first told to me and I just repeated it without even thinking about it.
Its been an interesting week. We started out talking obsessively about political violence. I wrote a reflection at the beginning of the week about the seeds of violence. I said that violence does not begin with a gun. It begins with a tongue. I said that everything we do and say sends a message to everyone around us and that our speech can be the seed that develops into someone else's fatal act of violence. President Trump appeared to be thinking the same thing at the same time. His solution was to set limits on the speech of half the country in his typical "Do as I say, not as I do" way. Stating what I had said so strongly, why was I now unhappy when people began to lose their jobs because of things they said and Jimmy Kimmel was taken off the air?
Everyone was then obsessing about the concept of free speech and their dislike of government interference. They said that the real motivation behind the President's actions was to eliminate someone he disliked and to use intimidation to stop people from criticizing him. Everyone is acting like this is the first time that free speech has been violated. It is not. It is just the first time that the government was involved.
Around the year 2000, Senator Lott made some comments to honor an individual who was celebrating his 100th birthday. The senator said something that was interpreted as racist and he was forced to step down from his position. Not long ago, a reboot of the show "Roseanne" was cancelled by the network because Roseanne Arnold tweeted an insult about the appearance of someone from a different race and religion. I was devastated hearing about the cancellation, upset not just for Roseanne, but for the other actors, and the fans of the show. Other people must have felt the same way, because a new show called "The Connors" sprung up in its place. That may have satisfied everyone else, but I still missed Roseanne and felt that the show was not the same without her.
Should hurtful or insensitive speech be addressed? Of course! But should anyone have their life ruined or their career (or show) taken away because of one thing they said in a moment of poor judgment? How many of us have never said anything that was offensive to someone else? How many of us have never said anything that we later regretted?
Jesus suffered and died so that our sins could be forgiven, so that our lives did not have to ruined by the mistakes that we have made. Our only way out of this cycle of violence is to embrace that forgiveness - for ourselves and for others.
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