WHAT PROFIT RIDICULE?
January 20, 2015
A disconcerting start to the year, filled with terrorism, confusion and hesitation. Let me work backwards from there.
I’ve hesitated to write about the horrendous terrorist attacks in Paris partly from confusion and partly from cowardice. Again, let me work backwards.
My cowardice has to do with not wanting to pay the possible consequences of expressing an opinion that seems to be in the minority. Certainly, when one finds oneself wanting to make a disclaimer up front, it smacks of cowardice. My disclaimer being that I most certainly do not approve of any form of terrorism; domestic or global, religious or otherwise. And let me be clear that I believe in the right to free speech. But I am not Charlie Hedbo.
The confusion I have around this event has to do with not understanding exactly what people mean when they say “Je suis Charlie” or “I am Charlie.” Are they really saying that they, too, believe in and practice ridicule? Is ridicule a form of free speech that furthers healing amongst believers and non-believers, have’s and have-not’s, natives and immigrants?
Frankly I find ridicule to be its own form of cowardice. Easy to sit at your desk and point a jeering finger at those who have less, or who are misguided and disenfranchised; who feel that the only thing they have left to cling to, while housed in peripheral slums, is their religion and the traditions they brought with them to the New World. And then, when you’ve drawn your violent cartoon and inked your condescending righteousness beneath it, you go home to your nice apartment in your genteel neighborhood, believing you have made a difference in the world?
Does one deserve to be murdered for this behavior? No, of course not. But I ask, is there not a touch of arrogance in assuming that there will be no consequences for this type of behavior?
Were any of you ever ridiculed on the playground? I was. I remember once being picked on by a small group of peers who earned their feeling of superiority that day by ridiculing me for the pattern on the fabric of my little skirt, which I had, until that day, seen as abstract shapes in the form of the letter “E” but which “they” deemed to be the devil’s tail. I remember the surprise of being singled out in such away. The instant feeling of being an outsider and the helplessness to convince them otherwise. And I remember, as I walked home alone, thinking up ways of getting even.
Whenever we ridicule others we are always implicitly saying that we are superior to those we ridicule. Whatever happened to reaching out a hand to those less fortunate and less evolved? All those millions of people around the world who marched wearing the label “Je suis Charlie” what message did they think they were sending? Did anyone stop to think how Muslims might interpret it? Were all those people saying that they believe in, and practice, ridicule?'
What other message might have been worn that instead of pitting “us” against “them” might have begun the long slow journey toward understanding and compassion? Because that’s what it takes…if you really want to change something this huge it takes understanding and compassion…and a long, long, time. Certainly a lot longer that it takes to draw a disparaging picture accompanied by a written smirk. If that’s free speech it’s terribly disappointing. Certainly freedom of speech is the right to express an opinion that differs from others. But what we say, how we say it and when, makes all the difference in the world.
So easy for we Westerners to judge fanatics as stupid to be willing to die for religion, but is it any less stupid to die for the right to ridicule?
For sure there is work to be done in Muslim communities and, hopefully, as seen in England after this latest act of terrorism, more Muslim leaders will start taking the responsibility to educate their youth as to the difference between faith and fanaticism. In the meantime perhaps the rest of us might pay closer attention to the way we label ourselves as well as others.
And in the end, what does ridicule achieve except a greater distance between us? How many people who’ve suffered ridicule have been changed for the better by it? It seems to me ridicule is cheap, in that it preaches to the already-converted. Although sadly, the price Charlie Hedbo paid for the right to practice ridicule was anything but cheap.
