Ordinary People, Heroic Acts

For the last two Saturdays in a row, I have taken two chairs, a pair of jeans and a shirt, a video camera, and a satchel with information cards and consent forms as well as two books, each containing about 350 pages, to a public square.

It’s the 30,000 Lives Project, in which I cheerfully consent to look completely ridiculous. My object is to read the randomly generated names of 30,000 people: the number of people who die every year of gunshot wounds.

Why do I do this?

I had to ask myself the question that first day—when I was visibly nervous. I had support, thank God. Raf was there, holding the sign that announced the project. Pablo was there, reading names and talking to people. Nydia strolled into the scene, kissed me and got right to work. Then doña Ilia strolled in and stole—blessedly though not surprisingly—the show.

The point is that nobody would have been on the plaza doing what I was doing if I hadn’t gotten pissed. The NRA was making me crazy—how many more massacres would it take before we had gun control? And yes, Facebook and the social media are fine—but all my friends think like me, for the most part. That’s why we’re friends.

So the real work wasn’t the ten hours of copying and pasting in the one hundred name batches that it took to generate the 724-page document. And the real expense wasn’t the hundred bucks spent on printing the books, fliers, consent forms or sign. The real effort was to put myself out there—to make a fool out of myself and to expose myself to the possible scorn of NRA members or gun “rights” advocates.

I don’t do well with conflict. Or so I thought, because when I encountered that first day a gun rights advocate, the conversation was surprisingly cordial. I heard him out, disagreed, and parted company. No big deal.

Well, it’s been two Saturdays—we’ve read six thousand of thirty thousand names, or 5% of the total. And we’ve spent 4 hours doing it. So it should take 80 hours to read the names of all the people who die of gunshot wounds in the United States. Yup—two full work weeks.

So now we know. But is it worth it? Do we get anything from having Marc and friends stand / sitting around in public reading names?

I think Philip Zimbardo would say yes. And he should know—having written my Psychology 101 textbook those many years ago. So I clicked on his TED talk, and was immediately hooked. It’s that old question—if you were a German in Nazi Germany, what would you do?

Sadly, we know what you would do. You would follow the crowd, go off to war, press the button that sends the poison gas into the nostrils of the Jews, gypsies and homosexuals in the chamber next door.

Or you wouldn’t. There was a German resistance, there were people hiding prisoners of war or Jews or anybody who needed hiding. So maybe you wouldn’t have colluded, maybe you would have been a hero, which is, according to Zimbardo…

…an ordinary person. A seamstress with tired feet, as Rosa Parks was that day she sat at the front of the bus. She didn’t wake up and say, “hey, I really oughta be a hero today,” she later said; she just had tired feet.

Years ago, at Wal-Mart, a motivational speaker concluded a talk by pulling out a dollar bill. He talked about how a person had given him a dollar bill with the message: go ahead, dream, follow your passion, you’re a leader and you can make change happen. So at every talk he gives, he pulls out a dollar bill and gives it to the person he sees having leadership potential.

There were about thirty people in an one-of-you-will-betray-me-moment—‘is it me?’

Well, I took the dollar in complete confusion, and did the only thing I could think of—put it under the laughing Buddha that then sat on my desk and now sits on my desk. And no—I haven’t spent it.

But if I was the person with the most leadership potential—and that guy really should cut out the morning bottle—it’s probably due to one thing.

I’m gay and I came out.

After you do that, you learn two things. First, that you can do it—that you can have the courage to face social disapproval, professional suicide, parental rejection. After that, standing in a plaza reading names is no big deal.

Second, going along with the crowd is not so important. Being liked is not so important. You realize—I’ll make my crowd, I’ll make my family, and no, I don’t have to have people like me.

Zimbardo talks briefly at the end of his talk about the bullying issue. And I agree with what I suspect would be his analysis—it’s stupid to tell a thirteen-year old kid “it gets better.” Sure, it’s true, and yeah, if feels good to say it. But do you remember how long time was when you were a kid? Christmas or a birthday took centuries to come around—now they pop up every other day.

I would tell these kids—“hey, you know what? There’s a reason you’re getting bullied, and it’s a good reason. You’re different, and that’s wonderful. There’s something special in you. I don’t know what it is, but I can sense it, and so can the kids around you, and they’re jealous ‘cause you’ve got something special, something to give, something unique. Do you know what it is?”

Kid looks up.

“Nah….”

“Well, that’s what we’re gonna find out….”

Requiem for a Pope

There are, in fact, some things to like about him. He’s fond of cats—he fed them around the neighborhood, and was lent a grey tabby when he went to a festival in Australia. He’s also a good pianist, whose favorite composer is Mozart. True, he didn’t say what his predecessor said after a performance by the Chicago Symphony, but that’s a pretty funny line to beat.*

Right—so we’ve gotten that out of the way, we’ve stated the little good that can be said of him. Though there might be one other good thing for lesbians and gay men to say about Joseph Aloisius Ratzinger: he wasn’t on our side.

Look, would you want a friend like that?

“It was a failed papacy,” said a student, who attends mass every Sunday, who is on the editorial board of the biggest newspaper in Puerto Rico, and who reads The New York Times every day. That’s why he could tell me the remark of a cardinal speaking—of course—anonymously. “The single beneficial thing that this pope ever did for his church was resign.”

Ouch.

And now that he has put himself out of the way of doing more harm, my feelings may be turning a bit.

He was and wasn’t a Nazi. Yes, he was conscripted into the Hitler Youth, but that was mandatory. He also served in the German army during World War. Here's what one source has to say:

Joseph Ratzinger was a member of an anti-aircraft unit protecting a BMW factory that used slave labor from the Dachau concentration camp to make aircraft engines, but he was drafted into the military and didn’t have any choice in the matter. In fact, Ratzinger also says that he never fired a shot and never participated in any combat. Later he was transferred to a unit in Hungary where he set up tank traps and watched as Jews were rounded up for transport to death camps. Eventually he deserted and became a prisoner of war.

Right—so we have a pope capable of watching Jews being rounded up for transport to a death camp. I’ll be honest: one question that has haunted me for most of my life is what I would have done had I been, as Ratzinger was, confronted with the question of acquiescing or challenging the evil that was Nazism.

Ratzinger took the middle path. Serving in the military was obligatory, so he served. Others didn’t, though that came at a great cost. A few hundred yards from Ratzinger’s childhood home, a family was hiding a young soldier and member of the German resistance, Hans Braxenthaler. The SS regularly searched homes, so it was no secret that the resistance existed. As well, a neighbor whose brother-in-law was sent to Dachau as a conscientious objector had this to say:

“It was possible to resist, and those people set an example for others. The Ratzingers were young and had made a different choice.”

Even more chilling, however, is that in 1941—when Ratzinger would have been 14 or 15—a cousin of his afflicted with Down’s Syndrome was seized and murdered by the Nazis under their eugenics program.

So we have a pope who confronts evil by joining in tepidly and then deserting the army in April of 1945. Did anyone notice? The army was in tatters at that point. 

After this, he resumes his studies in the seminary, and then becomes an academic. There, he excelled, earning praise from his students—he was diligent, committed, and always well prepared.

He should have stayed there, and probably wishes he had. But in 1977, he’s appointed Archbishop of Munich and Freising. And it’s then that the first mud stain on the white robe appears. Ratzinger approves the transfer of a sex predator to another parish, barely days after the priest begins “treatment.”

Ratzinger then gets sent to Rome, where his is appointed Prefect of the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. This is current Vatican lingo for the inquisition, and Ratzinger is up for the job. Part of which is to stamp down on any whiff of liberalism that might injudiciously drift across his gaze. The Jesuits get kicked, as do liberal priests everywhere. The other part of the job was to enforce a document called Crimen Sollicitationis—a document from 1962 that declared that all investigations in the Catholic Church were confidential.

Yeah?

It’s true, Ratzinger didn’t actually say “don’t go to the cops if you’ve got a predator priest,” but did he have to? Given the culture and history, just saying “these investigations are confidential” is more than enough.

Worse, somebody did call him on it. In Milwaukee, the church had a real problem with a priest named Lawrence Murphy, who took time out from his loving care of deaf kids to molest some 200 of them. The Cardinal wants to defrock him, but guess what? The church statute of limitations had run out. What to do?

The archbishop of Milwaukee writes to Rome, to Ratzinger directly.

Twice.

And never gets a response. Here’s Wikipedia quoting Archbishop Weakland:

"The evidence was so complete and so extensive that I thought he should be reduced to the lay state," and complained that Vatican tribunals moved too slowly.[2]

Reduced? Your word, archbishop, not mine….

The ironic thing is that Ratzinger did it all right. He met with the victims, he prayed with them, he shared their sorrow. He apologized and apologized and then apologized some more. He did far more than his previous boss.

It wasn’t enough, and it didn’t go away. In the end, it will be the first thing one remembers about Ratzinger. His obituary will start, “Joseph Aloisius Ratzinger, whose papacy was marred by the sex abuse scandal, died…”

For all his love of Mozart and cats, I wonder if in some way the guy had a chance. He grew up in a toxic environment. Here’s Ratzinger’s biographer on the subject:

John L. Allen, Jr. says that anti-Semitic violence, displacement, deportation, death, and even resistance turned the town into “an over-populated lunatic asylum of hopeless inhabitants.”

For all his hard-lined theological views, he appears morally weak, if not terminally ill or dead. All his life, he saw evil…

…and went along with it.

*Pope John Paul II left a Chicago church, where the Chicago Symphony Orchestra had just played Bruckner. A deafening roar rises from the crowd. The pope lifts his arms and silences them, remarking, “Please, I’m just the pope, not the Chicago Symphony.”