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Coins for the Gasless
A Sermon Given
by the Reverend Douglas Taylor
on August 27, 2000
at Cedar Lane Unitarian Universalist Church
Bethesda, Maryland
We were driving north toward home on route 81. I had just finished telling my friend, Peter who was driving at that time, about how D.C. traffic has an edge to it that the Chicago traffic, which we had both experienced during seminary, had not had. It was the end of June and my wife and I, our kids, and our friend Peter were on our way home from General Assembly 2000. It was raining hard and it was a long drive. The traffic was not too bad, but there was the occasional maniac who was, in our opinions, driving too fast on the wet roads. And I took that opportunity to lament the aggressive, rude, and sometimes carelessly dangerous tone of the driving around here. I remember someone telling me that traffic and road rage in the D.C. area is increasingly seen as a social justice issue on a par with racism and gender issues.
Well, the rain cleared up and we pulled off the highway to fill up the gas tank and grab a snack. At the end of the exit ramp, there was an older man and a teenager standing with a sign that read, "Out of gas. Need cash." Their van was parked under the overpass. The pair of them looked rather tired and disheveled. Peter started fishing for his wallet saying, "I'm going to give them some money." I immediately hesitated, money had grown rather tight during my stay in Tennessee. My bank and my hotel bill did not agree as to how much money was going to change hands that week, and my credit card had a thing or two to add to the debate. This doesn't include the healthy cut we gave to the car mechanic just after we got to Nashville. So we had resigned ourselves to travel home sans plastic, using just what cash we had left. "Can you reach my wallet?," Peter asked looking at the four or five coins he had found in his pocket. "Just take some money from the coin well, there ought to be a bunch of quarters," I heard myself saying. So when the street light turned green, we pulled up to the pair and unloaded a handful of coins and a hopeful blessing.
And why not, after all. Driving home from Nashville in the rain, it was easy for us to see the connection between the road rage we had been talking about and our desire, our need to be helpful to strangers. My hesitance was not my own alone, it is the general cultural response of our times. Essayist William Kittredge recently wrote, "Many of us (in America today,) live with a sense that there is something deeply wrong in our society. Many feel our culture has lost track of the reasons one thing is more significant than another. We are fearful and driven to forget the most basic generosities." (W. Kittredge Who Owns the West?, 1996, p 162) We've lost track of the reasons why one thing is more significant than another. We are fearful and driven to forget the most basic generosities. That was my hesitation. I certainly feel that there is something wrong. I hope we all feel that sense that something is wrong, because there is. And no stock options, gated community, or self-help book will save you. For the social ill of our era can not be resolved by each individual through personal enlightenment. We need a societal response. But lest I get ahead of myself, I believe we need to get a better grasp on the problem.
Over the course of the past few weeks, several of you have asked me what I would be preaching about this week. Invariably each conversation has produced an anecdote about road rage or the lack of common decency on the road. I have heard a lot of stories about being cut off by aggressive drivers, about being left stranded with a disabled car on the side of a heavily trafficked road for over an hour as car after car sped past, about the surge of anger at the outright meanness of other drivers and their reckless behavior, about the calming techniques employed on a daily basis for the commute to and from work. It struck me that there is something deeper at work than just a tense and edgy atmosphere on our roadways. Yes, increased traffic volume is a contributing factor, but it runs deeper than that.
At the UU Minister's Association meeting before GA this year, our keynote speaker was Nicolaus Mills who spoke to us of the decline of civility in our society. Mr. Mills is the author of a 1997 book entitled: The Triumph of Meanness: America's War Against Its Better Self, and he is professor of American Studies at Sarah Lawrence College. And this is where I find the next level of the problem. In his speech to us, Mills reminded us that (and here I quote him)
"we are no longer a coherent nation bound together by our history. With the end of the cold war, we have come to apply the language and thinking once used to demonize our enemies abroad to those we believe threaten us internally. Our fears have led us to act on the basis of a lifeboat ethic that rewards ruthlessness. The only way to end the new meanness is to first recognize the grip it has on us. Over the course of the nineties, we have undermined our better selves." [from jacket cover]
This is not to say that this is a new concern or even a new way of portraying this concern. What grasped me was the level of implications and consequences Mills presented and the severity of the issue as he detailed it. Mills sees the core of this new meanness in the vacuum created by the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, which forced us to look within for our enemies. While it is true that we have hastily trained our weapons on Iraq, North Korea, and Muslim people, so too have we attacked affirmative action, immigration, welfare, feminism, and our political leaders with a vigor unique to this decade. Indeed the scope of this issue stretches far beyond our lack of common highway courtesy.
Let me recount to you a few paragraphs from the opening chapter of professor Mills' book. He
writes:
"As the 1990s draw to a close, it is clear that we are not the same country we were when the decade began. There is a meanness in our public and private lives that has changed the way we see ourselves and the future. Like the bumper stickers that ask "Where is Lee Harvey Oswald when his country needs him?" we have crossed a line that not long ago seemed to mark the outer bounds of decency.
"Meanness -- as a politics of spite and cruelty that targets the vulnerable -- is not new in American life. In the past it has been used to defend everything from Indian removal to immigration quotas. More recently is has been the basis of whole political careers. During the Great Depression Father Charles E. Coughlin gained national prominence when he combined his criticism of the Roosevelt administration with attacks on Jewish international bankers. In the 1950s Senator Joseph McCarthy achieved even greater power by creating a red scare that panicked the country and cost thousands of innocent people their jobs, and in the 1960s Governor George Wallace became a national figure when, in a dramatic showdown with the Kennedy administration, he challenged the right of blacks to enroll in the University of Alabama.
"In the long run Coughlin, McCarthy, and Wallace could not withstand the test of public scrutiny; decency triumphed over the political meanness they embodied. But the meanness of the 1990s, which is as much cultural as political, is an altogether different matter...."
"The new meanness is not just reflected in a political shift to the right that sends welfare back to the states for the first time since the New Deal and says we should cut Head Start while adding billions more to the defense budget than the military requested. The new meanness is also style and attitude, meanness without guilt as one critic of it observed." [pp 15-7]
Meanness without guilt. Perhaps this is most obvious in the media. The relentless attacks on the President's character over the past few years, the negative campaign tactics of people running for high office, the show trials of O. J. Simpson and the Menendez brothers, the TV and radio personalities like Jerry Springer and Howard Stearns. Meanness without guilt. It reminds me of the way many people slow down at the sight of a car crash not for safety reasons, but for the chance to see a body in the wreckage. There used to be a line. A generation ago, people used to cross that line for shock value and they were considered outside the realm of decency. That line is no longer there. There is no longer a set of rules we all play by. What was once considered repulsive is now highly sought after as entertainment.
There is something deeply wrong with our society. We are experiencing the erosion of civility. Frankly this is an issue that has me worried. I agree wholeheartedly with professor Mills' analysis of the symptoms and his diagnosis. He doesn't go very far with prescription or prognosis, but he readily admits that near the front of his book and fairly early in his lecture. He pushes us to achieve step one: to grasp the scope of the problem. I recommend his book and I promise to return my copy to the public library this week.
I want to press in a little different direction than Mills took in his book, and to do so, I need take a few steps back. I think that the end of the cold war is a crucial antecedent, I believe it is not the sole significant contributor to the situation. As a society we have made massive technological advances over the course of the past few decades, and the 1990s has been the digital decade. I fear that one result is an increase in personal isolation. More people communicate with cell phones and e-mail, more people are using the internet for entertainment, research and shopping, more of us are spending more time stuck in our cars surrounded by hundreds or thousands of other people stuck in there cars. I am not saying that technology is bad or harmful to our culture; I'm just saying that it has increased the opportunities for isolation.
Yesterday I had a conversation with one person about just this who commented that Alternative work situations were fine except we're losing the synergy of the group dynamic that fans the flame. Another person happened to mention a book she was reading that described how in the south a few generations ago, before air conditioners, people used to sit on their porches and have all their windows open. This, of course, meant that everyone in the neighborhood could hear what was being said inside the house. Nowadays, we've all but lost the concept of a neighborhood to have it replaced with 'planned communities.'
I have started taking a morning walk nearly every day. I throw on my baseball cap and head down to the lake there in Montgomery Village. I've noticed that if I don't initiate it, no one greets me as I pass my fellow walkers and joggers. So I make a point now to say "Good morning" to people, to inject what I 've always thought is, or at least used to be, a common courtesy. It seems like people think the only reason they are out there walking or jogging around the lake is for their health or for their dog to do its business. They don't seem to recognize that they are a community. They focus on the ground in front of them. They seem to studiously avoid eye contact. Now I'm only theorizing here, but it feels like when people behave like this they are acting under the axiom that says "strangers are dangerous and if I ignore them they won't hurt me." And I think, do you really want all of these people walking and jogging next to you to be strangers? With our vaulted sense of the individual, and our competitive work and leisure environment, we seem to have lost a key component from our ability to live in community. Mills wrote, "we are no longer a coherent nation bound together by our history."
Now, I am sure that you and I can guess what the analysis of this decline in our civility is like from other pulpits across our country. If we are no longer a coherent nation, if we have lost our communal center as a people, it must be because we are too focused on tolerance and pluralism. And if you don't believe that this is what is being said by some of our conservative Christian brothers and sisters, I'll show you the magazines and web sites. But I must admit, there is a kernel of truth to it.
This is not to say that we here at Cedar lane with out efforts toward tolerance, diversity, and pluralism are undermining our nation. Or that we here lack civility to each other and the strangers on the wayside. No. What I am saying is that we have a responsibility to project our into the culture our commitment to covenant as well. The reason we have not lost our center the way Mills says the nation has is because we are a covenanting community committed to this institution and its principles. There is no such commitment in the broader culture, yet there is the push for tolerance and pluralism.
When I see a homeless person at the intersection asking for a hand out, or a man with a sign saying "Out of gas, need cash," or a car pulled over with its hood up on the shoulder of 270, I do feel that urge to just focus on the road in front of me, "I can't help this person, if I ignore them they can't hurt me." And then I remember that famous quote from Cain who said "Am I my brother's keeper?" You better believe it! We need to break away from the isolation. What we need to ignore is the rudeness, ignore the Jerry Springer show, you don't need to slow down and stare at every car wreck. Keep up the meditation and calming techniques while driving, and whatever ever you do, make eye contact and greet the strangers around you.
Think of your neighbor before you are rude, or when they are rude to you. In one wonderful passage in Christian scripture it says, "love your neighbor as yourself." This is a powerful passage that Christians and non-Christians alike cling to. But look at this: it doesn't say, just don't hurt anyone, it says love one another. And it doesn't to love your neighbor in a way that is similar and only slightly less than yourself, it doesn't even say love your neighbor as much as yourself, but AS yourself! Let me tell you that is not easy. Think about what it would be like to BE that person, to walk in that person's moccasins before you ignore them, or treat them meanly, or judge them. For good or ill, your actions and attitudes have a significant effect on the people around you. You can be a positive force in our culture simply by being polite and going out of your way to be good to others. It strengthens the bonds of human kinship when we behave thus.
The situation is far from hopeless, but it is to the point that even the causal observer can see the erosion of our civility. There is a way to respond which even if only in a small way, does rekindle civility among us. Its a pretty harsh world out there. Be careful. But be nice, too.
In a world without end,
May it be so.
Rev. Douglas Taylor
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