Sermon: The Challenges to Respect

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The Challenges to Respect

By Charles Rush

October 10, 2004

day's theme is Cultivating Respect. It just so happened that I wrote it the same week that Rodney Dangerfield died, a man whose whole schtick was dedicated to his inability to get respect. A couple of his memorable lines:

"You know it's not easy being me… When I was born the doctor came to my father and said, 'We did all we could do but he pulled through anyway.'"

"And it didn't help that I was born ugly. When I was a child, my parents offered to make me a poster boy… for birth control."

"I could tell my parents hated me… My bathtub toys were a toaster and a radio."

"Everyone in the neighborhood knew my parents hated me. I once asked a cop to help me find my parents. I asked him if he thought we would ever find them? He said "Sure kid there are only so many places they can hide."

"I'm telling you I get no respect. One time I was kidnapped and the kidnappers sent back a piece of my finger to my parents. My father said he wanted more proof."

Even with my doctor I get no respect. I called him up once and told him I'd taken a bottle of sleeping pills. He said 'Have a couple drinks and get some rest.'"

"I told him I was suicidal and now he makes me pay in advance."

"My wife and I were happy for twenty years… and then we met." Rodney Dangerfield, the aluminum side salesman from New Jersey whose wife was horrified by him. Only in death did he get any respect and we will miss him.

Cultivating respect is foundational. In the ancient world, it was one of the trademarks that separated the civilized from the uncivilized. I was taken reading an account written by Aristotle of some Greeks that encountered some people from the East. They were on horseback when the encounter happened. They spoke to one another. Yet, they were barbarians. Aristotle was in the middle of a discussion on the difference between people that live in the polis (the City-State of Greece) and those that lived outside of it. He went on to describe a serious conversation that these Greeks had with one another, one that Aristotle himself added to, as to whether these hominids that they encountered were, in fact, human. Are we obligated, he asked, to treat them with the same rights that we accord other Greeks. Interestingly, he concludes, "no." In fact, for Aristotle, to really be human, you have to live in the polis. You have to have sufficient rational faculties or else you don't deserve the respect that citizens are obligated to afford one another. That was only 2500 years ago.

I'm quite sure that this enigma plagued serious people until not that long ago. Isaac Singer, in one of his novels, describes a Siberian who has been driven West by starvation, and has walked several thousand miles until he is in Poland. He is a hunter-gatherer. The time of the novel is 1400 a.d.. At night he finds himself on top of a mountain, looking down on a field under a full moon. But he is confused and frightened because the earth below him is moving just like the sea. Despite his hunger nearly unto death, he cannot move and sits a gape all night long, puzzled and frightened by a sight he had never seen in his whole life. What he was looking at was a cultivated field of wheat that was blowing gently back and forth.

Just 500 years ago, the divergences between levels of sophistication was sufficiently great that people did not immediately recognize that all hominids were, in fact, humans that should be accorded equal rights and respect. It is a sobering reminder that it has only been in the past 250 years that we began to speak in terms of "all men being created equal and endowed with certain inalienable rights… that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." Even still that new political lingua was not common sense everywhere. Indeed, just yesterday, Afghanistan held their first democratic elections in 5000 years and there are many parts of the world today where human rights, especially for women, are simply yet even a goal to be hoped for…

But in the past 500 years, our world has changed dramatically. Even 500 years ago, it was somewhat reasonable to erect a fence and keep the Barbarians out. Julius Caesar drew the line at the Tiber and told the Visigoths (the Germans) 'stay on the northern side or else.' The Emperor Hadrian built a wall across the north of England and told my wife's Scottish Ancestors, 'cross it at the cost of your life.'

Our world has been shrinking since that time. Already we are all inside of the gate, civilized and barbarian, and while we still have fences to be sure, all borders between our cultures are porous, becoming more so with the advent of advanced technology. The issue of cultivating respect is more important that ever and more complex to achieve at the same time.

At the moment, genuine respect is eroding around us, in four overlapping quadrants of our lives that I would draw attention to.

The first is in our wider political arena. We are obligated in our country to develop respect and civility in the political realm since we have a government that is "of the people, by the people, and for the people." The process itself doesn't work if we can't develop conditions for debate, dissent, critique, and reform. And I think it is obvious to everyone that our standards for exchange are in decline and have been declining for several years now. Perhaps you saw the remark of Martin Peretz last week, the editor of the New Republic, commenting on the debates that 'we do not so much have a choice of the lesser of two evils as the evil of two lesser.' His indictment was not exclusively directed at the candidates, but rather to the top strategists for both parties.

On both sides, we are witnessing an fairly dramatic increase in the willful distortion of the opponents voting record; a willful distortion of their position on important issues that are immediately before us; a willful distortion of the costs of proposed programs; a willful distortion of their intentions; an increase in attack ads that develop caricatured image primarily for emotional effect. Increasingly, the tone is shrill not only from campaign managers but even the candidates themselves. Invective is met with contemptuous sneering, again, not only from the campaign managers, but occasionally from the candidates themselves. What we get is far more heat than light. This filters out into the wider public arena in fairly profound ways. I'm sure you have noticed that it is more difficult to have a reasoned discussion with people of the opposing party on an important subject like the war in Iraq. When the leaders of the both campaigns set a standard of yelling past one another, little wonder that your neighbors follow suit after a couple of cocktails. We are not edified and our behavior is unbecoming. We must expect more from our leaders and from ourselves.

I think of William F. Buckley on 'Firing Line', particularly when he was interviewing someone that was his intellectual equal and polar political opposite like Daniel Pat Moynihan. Yale versus Harvard for God and Country. The exchanges were sharp, poignant to be sure, and also witty. But they gave each other a chance to actually give a full explication of their position with details and footnotes and the discussion was on ideas the entire hour. By the end of it, you had a good idea of what was at stake, and although they sharply disagreed with one another, they not only respected one another, they probably exchanged Christmas cards.

Since that show retired we have lived through two simultaneous trends in media coverage of all things political. One is represented by correspondents like Chris Matthews that only allow 5 seconds of answer before they cut you off and ask another question. Nothing profound has ever been unpacked in 5 seconds. So we get sound byte policy. The second is represented by journalists like Maureen Dowd who cover political matters far too much from the angle of vanity, celebrity, the perq's of power, prestige and hypocrisy. It creates a certain cynicism in the public that ideas are not really as important as who looks absolutely marvelous on the Washington elite social register. Covered as widely and broadly as this has become, it is undermining public confidence in the noble reasons people serve in public office. It undermines the serious discussions that go into the very difficult decisions like the invasion of Iraq.

There is a fine line between teaching our children to be wary of the way the public interest can serve the private egos of those in power and modeling disrespect and contempt for those that disagree with us and we are erasing that distinction as we speak.

Recently I found myself cornered by one of our citizens in a crowded room, finger in my chest, face reddening as they decried the sure ruination of our country if one party duped the public into electing them to power. I finally said, "Thank you for shouting your position at me." And he calmed down. We create our ethos every day and the loser politically in a culture of disrespect is everyone.

The second arena is sports. When my youngest daughter was playing kindergarten soccer, if the girls bumped into one another they would actually stop play and offer an apology, irregardless if that meant their team lost the ball. If it was just the two of us in the car before the game, I would pull her face next to mine and say, "Let's go over the mantra. Remember it's not how you play the game, it's whether you win or lose; never pass the ball when you can take a shot; if the ref's not looking smack your opponent real hard; cheat whenever possible." Annie would cut me off, "Dad, you're supposed to be the Minister." I never thought the day would come but it has and our girls are only marginally better sports than our boys.

We love sports because we want our kids to be not only athletic but competitive. Competition is a virtue but it need not be at the expense of respect. No question we have been on a long slow slide. All you have to do is remember the N.F.L. of 1964 and compare it to 2004. Today nearly every score and nearly every great play is followed by inappropriate taunting and celebrating that is in their opponents face. In the 60's Vince Lombardi used to remind his players that they were professionals and that when they scored they should act like they belonged in the end zone. Been here before and I'm coming back again.

There has been a steady rise in trash talking, not just among the players but the fans. The last time I got the corporate tickets down on the floor at Madison Square Garden the fans were so rude and so constant and so profane towards the opposing players, I was amazed blood was not spilled. And of course it is. In the late part of the summer, one baseball team got into a fight with a fan, one player actually throwing a chair at the fan's wife.

All of this finds a certain emulation on ball fields across the country. Incidences of fighting are on the rise; baiting opponents to get them ejected; excessive physical contact with the intent to injure.

We model for our children week in and week out a certain permission that we give ourselves as partisan parental fans to ridicule the officials which can become almost comical when parents are watching sports they didn't grow up playing like soccer or lacrosse and they don't really understand the rules. But that doesn't stop them from impertinent judgment and letting a weeks worth of frustration vent on some poor ref making $6 an hour.

It gets worse, the better the players are. I've been privileged to watch three state championships that my children were involved with and each time more than a couple of the parents just started coming unglued towards the culmination of the playoffs, so that their kids were glaring at them from the field. You just can't be state champs and carp over every little infraction. It is unbecoming.

And I wish it were limited to a lack of understanding about the game but as you know, sportsmanship has it's biggest problems in our area with baseball. On of the more awkward afternoons with my teenagers came the day that my 14 year-old-son had to throw my 40-year-old next door neighbor out of the game, then banish him from the field for abusive and profane use of language. The 9th grader was the adult and the Father of 3 is throwing a full blown tantrum. You can't make this up.

It is obvious that we are in an epoch of decadence that needs anger management work and boundary work and civility work. We need to develop our game, no question.

For the past 7 or 8 years, I've gone to the Army/Navy football game, a competitive rivalry if ever there was one. It doesn't matter that both teams may not have won a single game previously in the year, they both play with all they have. And what great traditions of rivalry with respect they have.

Just before the beginning of the game, all of the Navy students that have been studying at West Point for the year line up across from all the Army students that have been studying at Annapolis for the year for the ceremonial 'exchange of prisoners'. Every year the prisoners put letters on their backs creating a witty phrase to show their loyalty to their Academy.

During every time out, the screens above the scoreboard feature creative and very funny spoofs of real commercials that always end with some version of "Go Army Beat Navy" or visa versa and get the whole stadium to howl or cheer.

The most that any referee ever has to endure is a collective boo and those don't last for long.

Part of what they play for is the end of the game. All the cadets from the losing team file onto the field and congregate in front of the winning fans that are still in the stands and they sing their Academy's anthem and then the winners return the favor in song. And then they all have a well deserved night off to party. Great competition, great respect that together produce virtuous character. It can be done.

Finally, we must mention a generational challenge, a technological challenge… I speak of the internet. We are finally beginning to realize that we need to develop etiquite for the internet, called of course, netiquite.

There is something about the anonymity of the internet that has unleashed our lower selves in full form. There is something about the distance between users, even when they know each other, that emboldens people to disregard ordinary tact and restraint.

There is probably no major corporation that has not been subject to some sort of censorship in this regard. I was reading last week about a discussion forum that was opened just before MacIntosh came out with a product up-grade for one of their lines. Some of the changes were questionable but the attacks on the top executives became so scurrilous and hurtful, inappropriate and just butt ugly that the site was closed down. Somehow ordinary decorum was not considered necessary in this new venue.

Surely some of the parents gathered here have seen this happen personally. Our teenagers can be downright mean with put downs and insults face to face or on the phone, but chat rooms and instant messaging can take this to a whole other level still.

That sense of disrespect came out in the e-mails that our equity traders sent to each other a few years ago during the end of the dot.com bubble when so many of them were touting stocks to their customer and writing catty comments to each other about how worthless the stocks were. Reading through a bunch of those e-mails, I was a little bit surprised at the depth of their disrespect for their clients and just how stupid they thought we all are. Things that one might think internally for a fleeting moment in the middle of the day just riddled off their typing fingers and when you let a culture of cattiness develop without restraint, this is what you get.

These are wide arenas that affect us all directly and indirectly, eroding the foundation of respect day in and day out. And we have to manage them better than we are doing at the moment.

Jesus taught us to do unto others as you would have them do unto you. That is foundational respect, not only for others, but for yourself as well. That helps us to develop healthy boundaries and manage our anger.

Jesus modeled for us how to listen to other people, how to understand where they are coming from. That is very important for respecting them and creating a foundation for respectful exchange.

Jesus showed us how to involve people on the margins as well as the powerful and the beautiful. He didn't mock people or put them down or call them names or make fun of them. He didn't engage in bullying.

Instead, he showed people compassion. He was genuinely courteous, even towards lepers, even towards prostitutes, even towards other races of people that lots of Jews in his day wouldn't associate with.

We have no instances of Jesus on the ball field. Perhaps he would have blown a gasket there at some point. He was, after all, a man.

But we do have a poignant exchange with Pilate, even in the midst of his unjust trial that led to execution. Even when he critiques Pilate's authority and his sense of justice in the Gospel of John, he does it in such a way that remains respectful of his role and his office.

It can be done and we can do it better. I think this is one of the places where we would do well to remember the dictum of St. Paul, when he said "Be ye not conformed to this world", don't just let the prevailing trends around us define us, but "be ye renewed by the transforming of your minds". That is keep respect before you every morning. Model it with your spouse, for yourself, for your children and those you work with. It is intrinsically important. Amen.