c. 1999 Religion News Service
(Eugene Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author most recently of”My Brother Joseph,”published by St. Martin’s Press.)
UNDATED _ The unforgivable sin, the sin against the Spirit, has been revealed at last. It is the calculated appropriation and manipulation of the grief of stricken citizens for political ends.
This is the smallness that Congress embraces daily in place of greatness. Floating through a stream of administrations, this routine plundering of grief as boldly as grave robbers amidst Mediterranean tombs is an art form under the current president. Give me your sorrows, your flooded homes, your shot-up streets and schools, he might sing, mocking the Statue of Liberty inscription, I’ll use every last one of your tears for political purposes.
Manipulator One flies in Air Force One from the scene of one disaster to another.
Clinton may look like he is giving when he sermonizes before the grieving in, for example, Littleton, Colo., a month after the high school shootings. If you watch our president closely, you realize he is actually taking, making spoils of the sadness of others when they are still too numb to notice it.
The proof is found in the way in which our Chief Executive immediately politicizes the suffering of the bereaved, not waiting an hour before folding it into the political omelet he is constantly preparing.
The president does not hesitate to turn the loss of others into a gain of attention for himself. Who is at center stage at these events? Who gets the television coverage and the headlines as well as the publicity for whatever questionable solution is proposed in Congress? And who takes public relations comfort from changing the subject from the theft of nuclear secrets and the other unfinished business of this administration?
Grief is the fiery aftermath of loss. As hellfire was once described, the flames of grief lick at the bared spirit but they do not consume it. Yet it is sacred fire because it is kindled from love and sacrifice and the thousand human details of being a spouse, a parent, a brother or sister of a once whole family. Grief is the blaze of autumn, of a harvest about to be taken, taken away instead, of a season suddenly turned too painful ever to visit again.
Everybody’s grief is different because the circumstances of life vary for us all. But the human foundation for grief is always the same. In our grief, we recognize that we belong to the same human family. It wouldn’t hurt so much if we were incapable of love and of relationships in which everything eternal in us commingles with that which is eternal in others. Those who love, even though their circumstances are as different as king and commoner, understand each other when they speak of love. So, too, we understand without Closed Captions the language of pain if we have suffered ourselves.
What, beyond gun locks and gun shows, is the common denominator of the suffering at Littleton and other scenes of school shootings? Those who fire the guns have all been adolescents who have suffered narcissistic injuries, they claim to have been affronted, derided, or jilted. These are not uncommon life experiences, of course, except for narcissistic personalities who are known to react with murderous rage when they experience an affront.
This is not the work of a gunsmith, it is a social product, a psychological and spiritual problem. It is not helped when the nation’s head narcissist intrudes in order to get the mega-injection of front page attention that feeds him the way blood does a vampire.
A leader must feed others instead of making everything into a feast for himself.
The chief authority in any group, from IBM to the Boy Scouts, sets the tone for maturity and morality in the organization. The leader of the nation does the same thing. What happens in a culture when its leader has revealed that he lacks self-control, respect for others and for the very law he mockingly invokes to solve these problems. The assistant principal who disarmed the Conyers, Ga., shooter displayed more character than the president. But, then, Clinton ran in 1996 against the relevance of character.
If there is a loosening of moral concern and behavior at the top, the hem of the culture uncoils and grows slack, letting the contents spill out of and away from control. When a society’s sense of self-mastery is dissipated, control lessens at every level, and terrible things happen that would have been restrained before.
The same president who wants laws against handguns and who speaks of talking instead of shooting problems out, also launches bombers and missiles on the Balkans. Is he so preoccupied with his image he cannot see this damaging inconsistency in himself?
The answer is yes. And, having lowered even our aspiration for a better standard of morality, this president now makes sacrilege of the human grief to which his own character may well have contributed.
DEA END KENNEDY
