Cop-outs and Regret

Regret: to remember with distress and longing.  The root of the word, from Old English, is graetan, “to weep”.  As soon as I had proceeded through the intersection, I regretted leaving the woman and her kids behind.  Maureen coined a good phrase in her comment to yesterday’s posting, required reading to understand today’s.  Please read it first, and then read on.  Click to go back to it.  “Asleep at the wheel” she suggested as a potential fifth cop-out.    But I was quite awake, aware and processing even in the minute at that light.  I was, in that sixty seconds, quite mentally active, active enough to have gone through every one of Bobby Kennedy’s list of “dangers” strewn before those who wish to change the world order;  I would say, to be human.  I’ll go through my thinking point by point, and you’ll see that I could not claim sleep as an excuse.

Futility:

First is the danger of futility; the belief there is nothing one man or one woman can do against the enormous array of the world's ills -- against misery, against ignorance, or injustice and violence.

I thought that these two feuding boys had developed an attitude, a resentment of each other that was deeper than anything I could have undone by helping.  Bobby Kennedy countered this cop-out with this contrary vision: “Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”  By the time I had turned the corner, I was imagining the memory those boys would have, of this old guy who left his car in the intersection, gave them a funny smile, took them each by the hand and walked them across the street.  Just a tiny ripple, but aren’t the pools of our hearts filed with just these ripples?  Isn’t it just this kind of memory of these Good Samaritans, these simple, courageous kindnesses that are the current of our caring?

Expediency:

The second danger is that of expediency; of those who say that hopes and beliefs must bend before immediate necessities.

I just wanted to get home, that’s all.  I was not exhausted from a day of work, or rushing to respond to a need there.  I could not even claim to have been in a hurry, like the seminarians in the research, rushing to prepare a sermon on the Good Samaritan, too busy to stop and help the person in distress placed, by the researchers, on their path.  I had no excuse, and perhaps that is why I felt cheap the moment my car had gained momentum, pushing me through the thicket of ethical weeds that I had not even seen as I observed the woman and her kids. Kennedy said that “human faith and of passion and of belief (are) forces ultimately more powerful than all the calculations” that we do in thinking about trade-offs of our time.  We’ve spoken of the folly of the “zero-sum game,” of thinking that I lose the time I give, rather than investing it in a win-win deal, in which I receive back more than I put in.  Like Maureen, we proceed through the intersection of moral failure snared with an anchor of regret that impedes our progress, while the wings of moral success (go ahead, call them endorphins) speed us forward, the wind at our backs.

Timidity:

A third danger is timidity. Few men are willing to brave the disapproval of their fellows, the censure of their colleagues, the wrath of their society. Moral courage is a rarer commodity than bravery in battle or great intelligence.

Oh, it’s so much easier to blog about nobility and the milk of human kindness here in the still-dark morning in my study than to face even little battles on the streets of reality!  The truth is, the wimp in me did consider turning on my hazard flashers and getting out of my car, holding up what little traffic there was and helping the family across the street.  Was there the imposing, powerful grille of a big truck behind me, or a shiny one of some expensive marquee, rendering me a bug worth squishing?  What made me so timid?  Kennedy quoted Aristotle, “At the Olympic games it is not the finest or the strongest men who are crowned, but those who enter the lists.”  I lacked, in that moment, the courage to enter the situation, and left a loser.

Comfort:

For the fortunate amongst us, the fourth danger is comfort; the temptation to follow the easy and familiar path of personal ambition and financial success ….

I am certain that our cars, like our homes or offices, become a comfort zone in which we are susceptible to indifference, to the objectification of subjective fellow human beings.  We look from our windows and windshields like we look at a television screen or computer monitor; people become pixels, a mouse-click eliminates them, or a light touch of the gas pedal and a simple turn of the wheel.  But Kennedy spoke words to those young students in Capetown in 1966 that we need right here today.  This road of comfort is not the road marked out for us.  We are called to greater things, not merely from laws and customs or even Scriptural stories and sermons.  We are called from within our hearts, in the moment of encounter.

 And this is where Maureen is right.  We are too often asleep at the wheel, missing these opportunities to stop and become more human, like the Samaritan whose little ripple on that Road to Jericho does today as Kennedy proposed the courageous act would, sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance first in ourselves, and then the rest of the world.  Lives without regret call to us from the side of the road.

Tomorrow – Change.

 FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.