Jesse Helms and the Currents of a Life

I really wanted to say something nice about him and thought about it. The best I’ve been able to come up with is that he and his wife adopted a child with cerebral palsy, he did work with Bono to address AIDS in Africa (although never here at home) and that he was very good at constituent services. I’m also sure he loved his family and by all accounts was courteous in most all his encounters.

Beyond that I find myself thinking about our general liberal-inclined desire to separate the person from the action. (He was a good person who did bad things…) Here I find the falsehood of that hope in spades. How can we ever separate ourselves from our thoughts and actions?How are we in any way different than what we think and do?

Jesse Helms was a man who built his career on race-baiting and a fervent desire for separation of the races. This is the man who called Martin Luther King Jr a communist and opposed every effort to honor the man’s legacy of justice and healing for our American nation. This was a man who opposed, near as I can tell, every single civil rights bill that passed through congress. And he extended his active hatred to homosexual persons for the course of his whole life. He even opposed a national clean water bill…

And he never ever “mellowed.”

He said, I understand, that history will judge his actions.

I’m sure that’s true.

In the meantime it’s hard not to think about my own thoughts and actions, and how truly they are who I am and what I will be…

Here I think of that old line from the Buddhist tradition.

I am of the nature to grow old.
There is no way to escape growing old.

I am of the nature to have ill health.
There is no way to escape having ill health.

I am of the nature to die.
There is no way to escape death.

All that is dear to me and everyone I love
are of the nature of change.
There is no way to escape being separated from
them.

My deeds are my closest companions.
I am the beneficiary of my deeds.
My deeds are the ground on which I stand.

I think of these words, I think of Jesse Helms,

And I think of my own sins,

And how I am what I think and what I do.

And I feel so many emotions wash over me,

The waves of an ocean…