Rage and its Opposite
The opportunity that Joe Biden missed in Tuesday’s debate: compassion
Donald Trump is an IV bag full of rage.
In the hospital, after certain procedures, you are sometimes given a morphine drip to ease the pain. This IV bag is attached to a machine that does two things: it provides a clicker so you can self-administer the relief you need when you need it; and it limits how much clicking you can do, because morphine is powerful and addictive.
Donald Trump is an IV full of rage rather than morphine, and the machine is gone. His followers don’t need to self-administer because he gives them a steady, unceasing supply; and the supply is never limited because rage is powerful and addictive, and that’s precisely what he wants. He wants the addiction. He wants the craving. He wants his followers to need him, like any junkie who’ll sell their house for their next fix.
That’s what Vice President Biden faced in Tuesday night’s debate: a free-flowing stream of steady, undiluted rage. Sadly, in his own mild way, Biden took the bait. He too resorted to name-calling. He was polite and gentlemanly about it, but nonetheless, he took the bait. “It’s hard to get any word in with this clown,” he said of Trump. “Just shut up, man.” By taking the bait, he played Trump’s game, and you can never out-rage Donald Trump, the endless IV bag of pure, potent, poisonous rage.
But imagine if Biden had stopped for a moment, looked at Trump, and said something like, “I don’t know what happened to you. I don’t know what made you who you are. But whatever it was, I’m really sorry that it happened. It must have been awful, just really awful. I’m sorry. I wish I could fix it for you, I do. But you’ve got to stop taking it out on everybody else.”
That’s not likely to have any effect on Trump, but it would very likely affect the shell-shocked people watching. Trump is scornful of compassion, he rejects empathy, but that’s no reason not to try it. Quite the opposite, really.
What is Strength?
The image that Trump wanted to convey was of unbridled strength. That’s the entire basis of his pitch to the American people for a second term: I’m stronger than the other guy. But he has a child’s vision of strength and fails to understand what it truly is. He thinks strength is the ability — and the willingness, nay the eagerness — to hurt someone, to administer a blow. But true strength is the ability to receive a blow and stay standing. To receive a dozen blows but still walk forward.
In his remarkable three-volume graphic novel March, the late John Lewis wrote about the nonviolence workshops he participated in as a young man during the civil rights era. They were led by Rev. James Lawson, who had traveled to India a few years after Gandhi’s death to study satyagraha directly. Here’s how John Lewis described Lawson’s training:
In time, everyone plays the roles of protesters, the instigators, and the resistance. There may be a black person playing the role of a white person, or vice versa. We each tried to do everything we could to test ourselves, to break each other’s spirits. We tried to dehumanize each other. Sometimes I couldn’t help but smile — even laugh — when someone played such an unnatural role. But sometimes it was one of your friends calling you names, knocking you down, spitting on you. For some, it was too much. But we needed to see how each of us would react under stress.
Lawson taught us how to protect ourselves, how to disarm our attackers by connecting with their humanity, how to protect each other, how to survive. But the hardest part to learn — to truly understand, deep in your heart — was how to find love for your attacker.
But love was the source of their strength. Love is why they won.
A Quiz on Strength
Answer truly, who was stronger? The Black young people who began sitting at segregated lunch counters beginning in 1959, asking to be served the same as everyone else, or the “rough element in the white community,” as John Lewis described them, who were given free rein by the police to abuse the protesters?
Who was stronger: the armed soldiers lining Gandhi’s salt march at Dharasana, raining blows, or the silent, peaceful, nonviolent protesters who took every blow without even raising their arms for protection, and who thereby helped end the British occupation of India?
Who was stronger: the men and women who denied women the right to vote for nearly 150 years, or the suffragists who persisted and pushed back and won? We remember Susan B. Anthony; we do not remember the anti-suffragist Helen Kendrick Johnson.
The answer of history is clear. In the lunch-counter photo above, judging by the usual criteria, the White men appear to be dominant over the Black man lying on the floor. Yet it is the Black man who ultimately prevailed. That which we believe to be strength is in fact its opposite. True strength is quiet but firm, guided by love and by moral clarity, and no amount of violence can shake this strength or turn its purpose.
Isaac Asimov liked to say that “Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent,” and by that standard, the current President, even as he urges white supremacist groups to “stand by,” only demonstrates his real, lamentable incapacity. He cannot be strong because he doesn’t understand what strength is; he has no love in his heart for anyone but himself; and it leaves him weak, brittle, a schoolyard bully with a glass jaw. If even a little compassion were directed at him, he — or rather his equally-weak aura of invincibility — would shatter.
