The politics of decency

Image by Use at your Ease 👌🏼 from Pixabay

Sometimes, you read a story which puts to words what you've been thinking. You yourself might be good with words, but you need someone else to put it into perspective.

Yesterday, I read this story.

It's protagonist is Cody Johnston, a Georgian from Marjorie Taylor Greene's district. The title is an indication that for once this is not another of the Acela Corridor's Cletus hunts: In rural Georgia, an unlikely rebel against Trumpism. This is not yet another regurgitation of why MAGA voters are angry, and why they turned to a louche New York City so-called billionaire to champion their forgotten lives. Cody didn't go to university; yet he reads Emerson, and quotes it as those around him quote the King James Version. He is the type of man who is doubly invisible to those in the news media centers of New York and Washington: invisible first as a stereotype, and then invisible again for going against their preconceived notions.

This passage is telling:

He continued driving down a narrow, pine-shaded road until he stopped at a cluster of low brick buildings that was a housing project where he lived after his parents divorced, and where his neighbors were White and Black and poor. He remembered two more things.

The first was the image of his mother putting away groceries in the kitchen as he tried out a racial slur he’d picked up on the playground. He remembered the box of macaroni and cheese she had in her hand at that moment, and the feeling of the box slapping his face, and the sound of her yelling, “You’re not better than anybody,” and the shame he felt as he cleaned the noodles off the floor, thinking of his best friend, who was Black, and his friend’s father, who was always helping his mother out.

The second was his elementary school principal, a woman Johnson’s wife, Aliya, now refers to as “one of those blessed souls,” who noticed that he got in trouble all the time, and instead of punishing him, gave him the first book he ever read, “The Hobbit.”
“I remember there were all these themes about fighting the Dark Lord,” Johnson said, recalling how engrossed he became in stories of characters and their moral dilemmas, which had the effect of making him think about his own.

One could say that he's "not typical". And the piece does recount those around him who fit the conventions of reports like this. 

But, typical or not, every Cody Johnson is to be treasured. And every Cody Johnson is evidence of why areas like his should not be abandoned.

Certainly, it makes no sense to spend political capital on places like the 14th District. It's illogical. Resources are finite. And yet every person in that district who voted like Cody won Georgia for Joe Biden, for Jon Ossoff, for Raphael Warnock. Every person in that district who voted like Cody, and in districts like it all across the country, put off the Red Wave which was considered inevitable. Every person like Cody who voted as he did in towns like his gave Democrats a real majority in the Senate, and hobbled the incoming Republican majority to the extent that there's a real chance that Hakeem Jeffries will be elected Speaker of the House in the new year. So, at least from a political point of view, it may not be illogical to devote resources to bring the the Cody Johnsons of this sprawling, diverse country.

But forget about political calculus. I speak of human things.

This passage is also telling:

“The hardest part is the juxtaposition of knowing these are good, kind, loving, caring people here,” Johnson’s wife would say. “It’s like they put their morality in a box.”

These are not papier-mâché villains, voting to subjugate the rest of us. Would that they were. I'm not excusing their choices; we all have choices, as Cody did, and decisions to take, and must live with the consequences. But the idea that we must write off swathes of this Republic as irredeemable is, well, illiberal. It is as hard-hearted as that of which we accuse the Right. Senators Warnock and Ossoff will work just as hard for those who use disparaging, vile terms for them, because that's what liberals do. Going high when they go low is not being a Pollyanna. Seeing everyone as a human made in the image of a Divinity is not a waste of time. These things are what make living in a community possible. No, you don't have to take their shit; you don't have to remain silent when they say awful things. It is incumbent to speak up and speak out, as Cody Johnson learned. But at the end of the day, these are human beings: lost souls, frightened of a world they don't understand. No, many of them we may never reach; but Cody and his wife Aliya are proof that we can't simply abandon those regions on which we look down. 

We are in a struggle with forces that wish to take us down a dark path. And their simplistic solutions speak to too many people. We can't counteract them with our own bigotries. We must rise above. We must be nobler. We can't speak of righteousness and use the same tactics. Not for their benefit, but for our own, and of those who come after us. 

I close with this final passage:

He enlisted in the Army and got posted to South Korea, where he remembers how it felt telling fellow soldiers about his life for the first time, and looking out his window at the vast city of Daegu, thinking, “I could be on the side of the mountain right now, and I’m glad to be where I am.”

There but for God's grace go any of us.

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