Cleaning House

Yesterday’s news was headlined by another shock and tragedy: the murder of three Baton Rouge police officers by a hate-filled black man with a history of calling for violence against police. This atrocity is the latest event in a growing chain of conflicts between police and the black community, a chain that is both terribly heartbreaking and terribly frustrating.

The frustration is epitomized by President Obama’s uninspiring statement, in which he said all the right things but nothing that really addresses the conflict or its sources. It seems as if the President who rode his oratorical gifts to the White House has long since lost his mojo, content or resigned to repeat platitudes rather than put forth bold challenges. Many blame him for the current state of things, and as the leader of the nation, the buck does stop with him. However, he hasn’t offered an answer to this metastasizing ugliness and tragedy. So, into the breach I leap.

How do we address this terrible problem? How do we start to repair relations between police and the black community, relations that spawned both the Black Lives Matter movement and a number of push-back reactions?

The solution lies down an unpleasant path, one that will seem unfair and unjust, but one that is the only road to success. It requires taking the moral high road even as others don’t.

It is a solution that applies not just to the current stress between police and the black community, but to numerous other issues and problems of today. It addresses many, dare I say most, of the conflicts and dysfunctions that we witness in today’s society.

You have got to clean your own house first before you tell other people that they aren’t doing it right. – Dan Webster

If the black community wants police to treat its members with a color-blind attitude, it should stop reflexively defending its worst members. It should stop pretending there’s no black-on-black crime, that past injustices are an excuse for current behavior, and that racism lurks behind every rock and under every badge.

If police expect citizens to respect them, the Blue Wall of Silence must come down, and bad actors in law enforcement should be treated as they deserve. Those who screw up should suffer consequences, and those who deliberately commit bad acts should suffer worse consequences. Expect, nay, DEMAND that your brothers in blue honor their oaths and embrace their commitment to serve and protect every citizen fairly and equally.

If teachers’ unions want the public to stand with teachers, they should be the first to expel the worst from their ranks. Rubber rooms, shuffling of bad teachers to other schools, refusing to demand competence or success, and subordinating students’ best interests to the protection of the worst teachers.

If Muslims want their beliefs to be seen as peaceful and coexisting with those of other members of society, they should be the loudest in denouncing and turning in those who seek to do harm in the name of those beliefs. If they want acceptance in Western society, they should accept that they must coexist with Western society.

If Catholics tire of Catholic-bashing, they should demand that the Church report pedophiles to the police.

If Democrats think they should be given the people’s trust, they should cast out the untrustworthy among their own, no matter how powerful or senior in rank.

If Republicans think they should be given power, they should cast out the most reckless among their own, no matter how popular.

If people demand tolerance for their ways, they should first look at the intolerance their peers exhibit towards others.

And, most of all, if the press wants us to take them seriously, they should challenge their like-minded peers when they exhibit tendentiousness, ignorance, sloppy logic, impropriety or boorishness.

We are tribal by nature. We reflexively defend our own and reflexively distrust other. We are wired to think this way, and that wiring is the result of millennia of evolution. Unfortunately, biological evolution occurs much more slowly than societal evolution has, and many of the pressures that drove our biological evolution have been muted by the advances of society. So, we are in a dissonant state. We can rationally recognize when one of our own does wrong, but we intuitively want to defend our own out of a fear that not doing so will make other more powerful and dominant.

The bad among us drag us down. They undermine our moral foundations and arm those who we consider other or who consider themselves other with the power to make categorial denigrations.

John 8:7 tells us:

He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.

This is an admonition against personal hypocrisy, but our tribalism suggests its validity in the aggregate. If we protect our own, give them greater deference, and the benefit of the doubt that we don’t give other, aren’t we exhibiting the same hypocritical behavior?

It’s easy to find hypocrites on the other side of an issue. It’s great fun to point out how Michael Moore took public subsidies after he scolded others for doing so. It feeds our righteousness gene to mock Leonardo DiCaprio for flying around the world on private jets to raise global warming awareness. And, in the aggregate, it’s easy to denounce the black community for excusing the bad acts of its own and for closing its eyes to the terrible rate of black-on-black crime, or to denounce law enforcement for its “blue wall” and spit firebombs like “all cops are pigs.”

It’s hard, though, to call out your own when the other side isn’t calling out their own. Sometimes, though, the hard road is the only road that gets to your destination.

If your hackles raised at my picking on one or more groups in this article, take a moment and ask yourself if you really see no bad behavior being excused from within before you react. I assure you, there are bad eggs in any sufficiently large identity group, and there are those who will reflexively excuse and defend those bad eggs. Treat people as individuals, judge them on their individual merits and acts, and don’t give them special treatment because they’re of your tribe or a tribe you support. It’s a counter-instinctual mindset to take, but it’s the only real path out of this societal mess we find ourselves in.

Don’t wait for the other side to go first, don’t wait for someone else to take the lead. Don’t operate on the premise that “the other side is worse than we are,” even though it may very well be. Don’t think of society as a zero-sum competition, where being upright, forthright and moral is for suckers and the other side. That won’t fix anything. And, don’t think that silence is sufficient. You have more obligation to call out bad actors within your ranks than bad actors within other ranks. Like it or not, their bad acts reflect on you.

Want to fix things? Want to stand on a solid foundation when pointing fingers of blame at others? First, demand accountability within your tribe. First clean your own house.