McCain: Rigor vs Low Expectations

Max Ferency
Jul 20, 2017 · 2 min read

On announcement of John McCain’s brain cancer there has been much celebration and/or insulting of his character. This link of him dispelling lies and fears about his presidential opponent Obama in 2008 has gone around as well. It was a nostalgic appreciation of a time when leading politicians dispelled outright falsehoods and had respect for their opponents despite political disagreements. Sadly in the age of “alternative facts” not all of us notice things like McCain saying, “He’s not an Arab, he’s a good man” suggests that if he were an Arab, he would not be a good man. I would hope that McCain just poorly spoke and actually meant “He is not an Arab and he’s a good man” as two seperate and unrelated statements but that’s not how it came out and so we have to call him on it. But that’s the hard part. Our language, culture, and mode of thinking are so painfully binary and we don’t have room for responding to this. If we were to grade his response we could give it a “C”. He’s not as bad as many of the horrible things Trump says and instead corrects the fear and lies being presented to him by his own supporters. That is good. We have such low standards for politicians these days that we have to recognize that is good. But we can’t let those low standards ever let us forget that is still not good enough, that we can’t lose vigilance about how we speak or whether we go the full way to address the wrongs in front of us. An “A+” response to that woman would have been “No ma’am. He is a good man. He is also not an Arab but it wouldn’t matter if he was an Arab because there are millions of Arabs in the world who are also good people.” Someone who gets C’s can hopefully be worked with to improve but we also can’t allow a C to be enough. We also can’t lump them in with people who get F’s because they probably won’t listen to us if we try to correct them. That’s hard but that’s also why this writing is in Medium and not a Tweet. But working to improve those in that gray area is also exactly what we need if we are going to get anywhere in addressing these issues in our society. We just also have to not loose sight of the light while we do.

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Max Ferency

Written by

Musician, thinker, facilitator, listener, coder, w@nderer. This is my place to develop ideas & observations - my public Commonplace book. http://maxferency.org

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