Our United State of Contempt

And the Path of the Explorer

I try to take a walk every day. I have a whole ritual about choosing my footwear. Let me tell you about my options. I have a pair of very sensible, very comfortable, nice looking pair of shoes that are somewhere between a tennis shoe and a loafer. Perfect for a stroll, they are certainly the best choice and I almost never wear them. I have a pair of handsome Ariat cowboy boots, all mahagony and black, comfy and most likely to bring a positive comment, but they rarely call to me either.

After all this deep consideration, 99.9% of the time I choose my lucky boots. Old leather work boots with new laces, they were already well worn when I got them. They are a little too big for me but the sophisticated insoles I got for them make them very comfortable. They are heavy and scuffed and not very cool in any sense of the word. They’ve fallen apart before and been sewn back together. I gather that they hold charm mostly just for me, but they are old friends and I like how they look and feel at the end of my legs.

I remember an interview with Mr. T where the interviewer asked him why he wears a beat up pair of old work boots, held together with just duct tape and good intentions, she seemed to find it particularly difficult to understand. He said that he wears them because they keep him humble and they remind him of his roots. I understood and felt understood. Footwear provides a lot of crucial benefits, but boots that are able to do all of this and also provide a feature like humility are lucky boots indeed. All at once, a reminder of humility and pride.

With this difficult decision behind me, I set out on my walk, down a trail that winds along the High Line Canal, through neighborhoods and ancient cottonwoods. It’s an unusually beautiful Spring-like day and the sunshine is warm on my face, like a gift. I see a neighbor, and we stop to talk like we usually do. We often run into each other like this, every day he feeds a family of cats that live along the trail. He actually has several families of cats that he supports like this and he tells me about each one, all the details, all the names. When there are kittens, he takes them into his home to make sure they see a vet. The pregnant mommas sometimes find him when they are about to have their young. There is a kitten he named Intrepid that likes to sit up in the tree to watch for him each day at meal time, I can sometimes see her up there from where I work.

Because of his unwavering support of the neighborhood cats, he is a controversial figure around these parts, it depends on who you talk to. But this act of kindness always endeared him to me.

We haven’t seen each other in a while, he asks me how my hibernation is going, I say good. He says that he thinks men look better clean shaven and asks me if my beard is itchy, I say it is not. He says he used to have a mustache, I say that they seem to be coming back. He asks me if I have seen all the crazy people on TV, and I say I haven’t, which people? With a look of disgust, he says they are the people protesting President Trump. Realizing the content of the conversation that seems on its way, I feel a sudden tightness in my jaw that I hope isn’t too noticeable.

I happen to have a lot of friends and family who support Trump. I most emphatically do not, I could easily be one of the people he saw on the TV. But I also have a lot of old fashioned ideas about talking and listening to each other anyway, and maybe walking away with a better understanding of the other point of view. A lot of strong feelings come bundled with political opinions these days, and it is my theory that behind each one of these feelings there are the same basic human needs and desires, just different understandings and perspectives. That smells a lot like common ground to me, if only we knew how to get there, if only we’d explore.

I give him a chance to say more, we haven’t talked about politics before and I’m not sure where I would begin. I get the impression that he has explored the issue mostly alone with his television, and sometimes we need to get our thoughts and feelings out there in front of another person. But what he says next surprised me. “It’s these Democrats, they hate Trump. I think we should just kill them all.”

That was not on my bingo card. I say those are very ugly words, I remind him that he is talking about people. He doesn’t walk it back and I decide its time to continue on mine. As I begin walking away, I mention that I am a Democrat. “I didn’t know,” he says.

How did we get here, as a country? I don’t think my neighbor reflects the feelings of most Trump supporters, but something else felt very familiar, something that has been rumbling around in the machinery of our political life, a steady knocking that definitely doesn’t sound right and makes you wonder if it can keep running like this for much longer. As I reflected on the interaction over the next couple days, I settled on a word. Contempt.

It gets worse. My neighbor’s contempt for the people protesting against the president was palpable, the words twisted his face as he spoke, the way a dog twists its nose when it growls. But the contempt that really bothered me didn’t come from my neighbor. I realized that I, too, am holding contempt. I didn’t think it was possible for me to hold so much contempt, it has never been my way, or so I thought. Where did it come from?

Here we have something beautiful, here we are part of the greatest human experiment. It seems strong, but it is also fragile. We can lose it, we can throw it away. It only works when we hold life as sacred, not just our own, not just the people we love, but the people we disagree with. It only works when we find some way to come together despite our differences. I’ve struggled to understand how other Americans can support a leader that seems so clearly opposed to the spirit that has made us strong. It feels like we are throwing away something precious. I’ve always understood we are a work in progress, but I thought we were better than this. And up from that formulation of our situation rises my contempt.

I’m not defending it. Once I recognized it, I couldn’t get rid of it fast enough, like a piece of garbage you didn’t realize you were still holding. My reasons getting there sound lofty, they are lofty, and I still see them as basically valid. Carried on the back of good reason or not, now that I find myself there, I have that wandered-into-the-wrong-room feeling.

There are some human emotions that are difficult to bear and difficult to navigate but natural to the human experience and inevitable, merely feeling it is not a sign that you are off track. We will get angry, sometimes for good reasons, and how we navigate anger makes a big difference. Then there are other emotions that let us know we took a wrong turn somewhere, I’d argue contempt fits there. I’d say contempt is a wrong turn at angry.

Emotions are not things we can just stuff down and call it a day. I suppose we can, but it is a bit like swallowing a bite without chewing, and generally leads to the same problems. Emotions deserve to be swallowed in parts, to be understood, just like people.

If there was a recipe for contempt, at least one of the ingredients would be a feeling of superiority. We might feel contempt for someone because we think that they should know better, which implies that we know better, and heck, maybe we do sometimes. But now that we’ve baked a loaf of contempt, who is going to eat it? I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone come around and change their perspective as a response to contempt. It is much more likely that they start baking their own loaf, it’s a bake-off. Contempt breeds contempt. Recursive contempt and the stack overflows.

It would be convenient for me if my contempt was as simple as that, a transient response to my neighbor’s words, a passing cloud. But this loaf has been baking for the last several years, as we’ve seen our country change. I have not been a very political creature for most of my life, but at some point it seemed important to be more aware. The people in my life span a pretty wide cultural divide, and politics have a way of showing up, invited or not. I knew that it could get dirty, but I thought that I could stay above it. I didn’t realize the degree of its impact.

I am developing a news app and I sometimes tune into podcasts about the news, from both the left and the right. Last night, as I tuned in, I listened with new ears. Pointing out similarities on both sides is not a good way to make friends on either side, but it is true here. The most common denominator that I can hear is the contempt. One side trends toward clear spoken and vitriolic. One side trends toward low key and implied. Online discussion boards, best avoided, are teeming with open contempt. Contempt that is encouraged and nurtured can bake into something else even worse. We live in a political reality where people have already gone beyond just hateful words. When we say someone should die, we speak for their team. Hate took a sister, a daughter, a would-be aunt away from my family. Hate took away my chance to know her.

Some people bear their contempt proudly. To give them the benefit of the doubt, perhaps because it affirms what they truly care about, perhaps because our culture sometimes encourages it. To do otherwise, isn’t that like backing down? Doesn’t the idea or issue we are defending deserve better than that? If we really care then it deserves better than our contempt, too, it deserves something that actually might help. There are other things we could bake with all the flour that goes into our loaves of contempt.

We might believe that our contempt is primarily for the ideas, not the people. But I’m not sure how much that helps when people are the medium for ideas. Hate the painting, not the paint? Some ideas are contemptible. Recognizing contemptibility and rendering contempt are two different things.

Another reason I don’t wish to hold contempt is that it is quite heavy. Someone does end up eating that loaf, just not the people we bake it for. It has a way of taking up our thoughts and energy and not giving anything good in return. I’m not inclined to be outwardly contemptful, at least I hope not. Being inwardly contemptful was bad enough.

What are the alternatives to contempt? One alternative is apathy, this might be the reason that so many people choose not to become politically involved. They recognize on some level that the cost for them would not be worth it, they just decide to let it go, let everyone else figure it out. While this might be a good idea for our immediate wellbeing, it is not good for democracy. It works best when all voices are heard, it needs the voices that refuse to yell most of all. Apathy is throwing the flour away, that’s good flour.

People are inclined to turn away from contempt, understandably so. The inverse is also true, when people are expecting your contempt but what you actually have for them is a willingness to understand, that is influential, perhaps all around. Expecting influence to go in only one direction is an expression of superiority. Influence doesn’t always mean the winning of hearts and minds. A better understanding is influence enough for the moment.¹

I don’t think there is an easy answer, but I think that humility must be an ingredient in whatever we decide to bake. It is so easy to believe that we have all the relevant facts and a thorough understanding of the issue. It is a trick of the human brain, it minimizes the importance of the parts we haven’t seen, and more so when we think we’ve seen everything. We all have blind spots, so we invented humility to help us navigate them with more dignity for all involved. We must nurture a curiosity for the things we don’t yet understand that could matter. Contempt is skipping to the judgement part, but there may be facts not in evidence.

The impulse to explore is mutually exclusive with the impulse to contempt. We must remember that we are a country of great explorers, that spirit took us to the moon.

On some level, our national state of contempt is not an accident. Contempt means engagement. People are making lots of money from contempt. I’m reading a book called Hate Inc. by Matt Taibbi. It is a raw and honest look at how we got here, one BREAKING NEWS alert at a time. Taibbi examines not just the media industry but his own role in it, he sets a high bar for honest self-reflection. One way to turn down the temperature is to stop turning to people and apps that are trying to turn up the temperature. Let us collectively turn away from contempt and it might no longer be a good business strategy.

For me, it was important to finally see it in the mirror. It is not a good look, on anyone. I was less likely to recognize it because I thought I was above it. I think about what I could say, what I could ask without a mouthful of contempt. With all these blind spots, thank goodness for lucky boots.

1. Deftly changing everyone’s minds around you is a fantasy we inherited from shows like The West Wing, that’s just not usually how it plays out, and that’s okay.