A SOCIETY IN LOCKDOWN (3/22/05)

Garrison Keillor noted the irony in his first broadcast from Brooklyn: “Why,” he mused, “am I doing a radio show from a place where every car has a sign in its window that says ‘no radio’?”

For Keillor, it was a joke about the absurd demands of urban security. For a little girl murdered in Florida, the question asked by the most hypercritical among us will be, “Why did a loving family leave a door unlocked and a sleeping child vulnerable?”

For Elizabeth Smart, it was a bedroom window. For Jon Benet, a basement entrance. “No lock stands in the way of a thief,” the Talmud observed. Certainly not in the way of pedophiles and child-murderers. How credulous and negligent, then, must one be not to lock doors and windows . . . and what else? Alarm a home for every contingency? Attack dogs? Tasers? Blow-‘em-away pistols in every cranny? All this and then some. Just listen to talk radio.

It must come as horrific culture shock to the folks in Friendly Village to need to gird themselves against the heretofore unimaginable: intrusion, violation, someone other than a neighbor at the open door, the fear of becoming fodder for Unsolved Mysteries.

Even we boomers who grew up in bigger cities have childhood memories of more secure times. In my Chicago neighborhood, we left our doors unlocked. We considered people who locked them snooty. Kids walked into each other’s homes unannounced. Answering the door would have been a nuisance. Moms watched out for each other’s kids; no one escaped the omnipresent eye; one strike and out for the day or worse.

When did it all change? Perhaps it was when we started living in anonymity, not knowing, and certainly not cherishing, the value of neighbors and neighborhood. It has become a cliché, but it does not diminish the truth: We do not know the people who live to either side of us.

Blaming the origin of our isolation on paranoia would be a confusion of cause and effect. It originated with the raging “self-ism” that replaced the centrality of the neighborhood-ism of the 50’s and the social consciousness of the 60’s. Self-promotion. Self-awareness. Self-actualization. Self-advancement. Self-you-name-it. No room for you in my life. Only self.

Mobility and self-preoccupation have made most friendships ephemeral or rarely attached to the folks next door. Some of us take refuge in our churches and synagogues and affinity groups, but the best of them are momentary safety zones.

We have thus resurrected the ancient notion that, even linguistically, a stranger is synonymous with hostility. Ironically, that has not made us safer, only more vulnerable. We nervously try to secure every breach, only to discover more of them, even more fearful that an aggressor will find another way to prey on our child in the nanosecond that the door is open or that she is picking a dandelion.

So, we surround our children with all the security we can find and with a pervasive sense of paranoia that drives them neurotic. We postpone until an undefined “later” how they will acquire their sense of freedom, with all its challenges and vulnerabilities, away from our protective eyes.

Solutions? There is only one way out, and it will be slow, generations in the making: Get rid of the self-ism. Discover your neighbors. Create a neighborhood. Establish friendships. Start doing things for others and with others. Look out for each other’s kids. Read Isaiah 58. Resurrect the virtues of trust and mutual protectiveness.

All that, and pray every day that God watch over our little ones, and that our kids remember to lock up the house and set the alarm before they tuck in the grandchildren for a night of sweet, untarnished dreams.

But let the bitterness still be ours. Every convict I have ever visited in jail has told me that whoever is behind bars is merely a matter of perspective.

WHEN WILL GOD FINALLY HUMBLE MARTHA? (3/10/05)

God will have his way with Martha Stewart, or so I’ve been told. Her time in jail simply did not bring her enough public humiliation. We expect God to settle these kinds of scores.

Martha’s incarceration was a masterful PR conspiracy. Someone had to know that the schadenfreude, that prurient exhilaration we little people feel when arrogant bigshots are caught with their pants down, would be negligible. Making an example of her would not apparently prompt much contrition nor would it result in anyone learning to be more humble, not her fans, her toadies and certainly not Martha. The message was simply that her ordeal made Martha more Martha.

Perhaps this is where we wish God would step in: All we ask, God, is that You see to it that the haughty learn a little humility. But, what an arrogant, audacious expectation of God that would be, inferring that we were so un-humble as to instruct God who needed His humbling.

No, Martha does not give the public appearance of contrition. But, what we will never know are the nightmares that may, or may not, haunt her when she is surrounded by darkness, alone in the middle of the night, her head spinning with a cacophony of self-vilifying thoughts. You may say that she will never suffer those moments of humility, because she is too busy planning tomorrow’s financial coup. And you may be right. Only God and Martha know. Just as it should be.

We never know what awaits the seemingly unrepentant and even the repentant, when they are handed over to the demons of a dark, lonely room. I live a remarkably normal, even blessed life by day, thank God, but indiscretions decades old still haunt my sleep.

A number a years ago, I asked a young therapist, “Why am I any different from Jimmy Swaggart?”

His answer was deceptively simple. “Because you asked the question.”

Ten years ago, his answer satisfied me. Now, at best, I will give it a yes-and-no. From all outward appearances, Jimmy Swaggart seems as arrogant as ever. In the short run, he turned his public penitence into a cottage industry, a cash-cow. But, I do not know what happens to his spirit in the still of the night, what thoughts torment his soul when his yes-men and minions and well-greased bureaucracy fold their tents for the day. Only Jimmy knows. And God.

And so may it be of an entire laundry list of seemingly arrogant heavy hitters – from Bill Clinton to his moral counselor Jesse Jackson – who strut their stuff and acknowledge their indiscretions like burps along the road, if at all. We don’t know about the ghoulies and ghosties that haunt and humble them when silence replaces the intoxicating attention they receive by day. All we know is that we don’t get a public show of their humiliation for the sake of satisfying our own salacious viewing pleasure. Only they know. And God.

You’ll say that these egomaniacs don’t give a hoot about indiscretions once their spinmeisters get on top of damage control. Yet, I refuse to believe that they are all such malignant narcissists that somewhere deep inside the shame of wrongful behavior does not bring torment to their souls.

Once we get into the business of souls, that’s God’s turf, not ours. God sees. We don’t. God knows. We don’t. We look at God’s errant children by day and think that they have yet to get their comeuppance. We wish that God would do something to humble them, but what we really wish is that we could be in the audience to see it happen. Little do we realize that only God knows who among us has already been humbled by a taste of hell’s bitterness. Only God knows who has already been served more than his share of humility alone in the fearsome still of the night.