Exploitation Fatigue and Chick-fil-A

Are you tired yet? News of shootings, bombings, acts of terrorism, racism, and senseless violence are barely minutes old before it begins. The hucksters of new and old media alike mount their hobby horses and start spinning human deaths to serve pet agendas. We’ve seen the Twitter and Facebook posts, the articles, and the speeches.

It seems everyone’s a huckster now. Everyone’s a salesman. The narratives seem almost written before the bullets fly. The narrators are merely waiting for an occasion to pounce. It was the guns! It was Christian homophobia! It was Syrian immigrants! It was mental illness!

That’s not to say there wasn’t a real culprit or cause for Sunday morning’s massacre in Orlando. As best we can tell, Omar Mateen was acting in the name of radical Islam. He claimed ties with Al Qaeda. He gave all evidence of being a faithful Muslim, including a pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia. He had a relationship with a radical imam recently released from prison. He allegedly shouted “Allahu Akbar!” while shooting the nearly 100 people at the “Pulse” gay bar. And he swore allegiance to the Islamic State on the phone with negotiators during the standoff. Yes, there was a real cause and a real culprit.

But that didn’t stop the political scavengers from mobbing the aftermath, hoping for red meat. It was one thing to see Twitter and Facebook behave this way, blaming everyone from Christian bakery owners, to the NRA, to Westboro Baptist Church. But watching the president of the United States stand behind his podium and recite a familiar laundry list of progressive complaints was truly discouraging, in a bitter-capstone kind of way.

So a little bit of encouraging news—some humanity amid the inanity—came as a welcome surprise. It was a little thing. Hardly commensurate with the loss of fifty souls in my home state (souls who, no matter what our disagreements over the particulars of sin and sexuality, should not have been gunned down). But as Goliath and Sauron learned the hard way, sometimes the littlest things can make the biggest difference.

Rumors circulated on Facebook that Orlando locations of Chick-fil-A, oft-maligned for its owner’s outspokenly traditional views of marriage, had opened their doors and fired up their fryers on Sunday (the day after the shooting). Of course, as anyone familiar with this Sabbatarian chicken joint will know, “never on Sunday” is a promise. But not until late Monday did news outlets begin confirming the story.

Evidently, the managers at these franchises thought those lining up outside of blood donation centers to help the surviving victims could use a little nourishment. So they handed out meals.

Simple. Human. And a total violation of a policy longtime Chick-fil-A addicts have sought for years to overturn. But apparently, these location owners took Jesus’ words in Matthew 12 to heart:

“And a man was there with a withered hand. And they asked him, “Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath?”—so that they might accuse him. 11 He said to them, “Which one of you who has a sheep, if it falls into a pit on the Sabbath, will not take hold of it and lift it out? 12 Of how much more value is a man than a sheep! So it is lawful to do good on the Sabbath.” 13 Then he said to the man, “Stretch out your hand.” And the man stretched it out, and it was restored, healthy like the other.”

Mateen showed how much hatred exists both within and beyond this country’s borders. On a different and perhaps more disappointing level, the opportunism of political hacks on social and regular-old-media showed how much hatred we harbor for one another. But by deciding that chicken was made for the Sabbath, not the Sabbath for chicken, the folks at a fast food chain gave us a glimpse of the kind of humanity (and yes) likely Christianity, through which Jesus promises to overcome that hatred.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons