In the Shadows

Over the past few days I have been on social media entirely too much.  Apparently so were a lot of others.  Snowzilla trapping all of us in our homes has led to more sharing of stick figures we should be like and pandas playing in the snow than is really probably healthy.  But in the midst of basically seeing a meme phenomenon run the life span from, "hey that's funny," to "stop it already," (referring to the stick figures you should be like) and being periodically over-cuted by a panda being a panda (seriously they are the cutest non-otter animal in the freaking world) I noticed something that had sort of been gnawing at me for a while.
As with many things it calls to mind an episode of Doctor Who, called Silence in the Library, where the adversary is a species called the Vashta Narada, a microscopic creatures that function very much like piranha, except they move in shadows instead of water.  They are present throughout the universe, living in forests, consuming dead flesh, they are driven by the need to hunt and consume, like ravenous bacteria that develop a sort of swarm consciousness.  Mostly they are diffuse, like ants or bees going about their business, but in the library (made up of books, which are made up of paper, which are made from trees) the Vashta Narada have become aggressive and deadly.
It is the concentration that makes them deadly.  They are present everywhere and account for the nearly universal uneasiness that one feels when alone in a shadowy place, and the equally widespread idea that darkness equals danger.  You see them out the corner of your eye, the flecks of dust in a sunbeam, they are not in every shadow, but they can be in any shadow, and they devour the flesh off of your bones.
Which leads me to the feeling I have had quite a lot recently, like a shadow that sort of moves unexpectedly and gives you an uneasy feeling.  We have a problem simply hearing each other's struggles, let alone being empathetic.  The first illustration is what I wrote about yesterday, the way that people seem to always want to negate the experience that we had here in the mid atlantic region with the blizzard.  Yes, other parts of the country regularly experience much worse weather than we had this weekend, and sometimes, they do manage to soldier on without shutting everything down for three days, but we don't.  The shadow was veiled as humor, but I began to see so much of it that I started to think maybe it wasn't just a shadow.  I know to people in Buffalo, 20 inches of snow is a minor thing, but to people in Maryland, it is not.  Here it produces anxiety and inconvenience, if not danger.
This was the trivial illustration that got me thinking about more serious matters of negation.  Negation is when you ignore or downplay the suffering of others by basically saying, "it could be worse."  When we do this about a weather event, it's a chuckle, when we do this about racism, sexism, and prejudices and injustices of all shapes and sizes, it's not freaking funny anymore.
The internet is a veritable forest of shadows within which negation may exist and swarm.  Victims of police brutality are negated because they may have been less than model citizens. Refugees are negated because they're not our problem, they might be dangerous, and we have enough problems of our own.  Poverty, and the poor are negated because they ought to be better at living this American dream and just work harder to get ahead.  LGBT people are negated because their lifestyle is not and probably never will be normative. Muslims (and Jews for that matter) are negated because their beliefs are not in line with the dominant system in this nation.  The fact that Christians can be negated in predominantly Muslim countries is used as a justification for at least some of this negation.
We even negate any reflection that might lead to changing this pattern to simple pragmatism: "that's just the way it is."
But negation is the road to constructing an enemy, and a tool in the dehumanization of the other.  And it is a deep and difficult part of our human nature to avoid altogether.  Consider Mark 7: 24-30.  Jesus himself encounters a Gentile woman, whose daughter has an unclean spirit.  She begs Jesus for help and for reasons that are actually fairly common and acceptable to a Jew of his era, he begins to negate her suffering, basically calling her a dog.  She catches him, and he repents of his negation and heals her daughter.  Christians tell this story in their Gospels, they don't hide it, they shouldn't try to explain it away, because it shows how truly exceptional our Lord really is.  Most of us would have doubled down on our own negation of that woman.
The reason the Gospel writers tell these sorts of stories about Jesus is because our faith is predicated on discipleship: following.  We are supposed to be like Jesus, not just admire him.  If Jesus seems less admirable for calling the Syrophoenician woman a dog, he is more worthy to be followed when he recognizes the shadow he was feeding and turns to the light.  I would much rather follow a leader who is willing to recognize the danger of the shadows than one who ignores the damage they can do.
Consider the danger of the shadow the next time you're tempted to name someone an enemy or negate their experience and their perspective.  Watch what is happening in your heart when you decide it is okay if human beings suffer as long as they are not too close to you.
It's pretty surely not good stuff.