I Thought Everyone Wanted to be Right. I Was Wrong

I wonder what it would take, to convince people that they’re in the wrong.

I have been thinking about this for so many years now, and I haven’t come up with an answer. What would it take to convince people they’re in the wrong? That enough is enough, and it’s okay to come out and admit they made a mistake?

What would it take to convince people that, if they’re cheering on masked thugs who murder citizens, torture clergy, and drag children outside to be zip tied in their pajamas at night, they’re cheering on the bad guys? That if a department of the United States Government is posting full blown Nazi propaganda and blatantly lying about its actions, that is something you mustn’t support? That when the people of Minneapolis are protesting a woman shot in the face by a government agent from inches away, and a government agent shoots one of the protesters in the face with a pepper ball from inches away, the government is in the wrong?

I truly can’t understand why anyone would support what the government is doing right now, but I know they do. I know they’re ready to trot out the same propaganda they’ve fallen back on since 2015. It’s their fault for resisting arrest. It’s their fault for being immigrants who came to us for help in the first place. We have to support this because Hillary would have allowed people to get abortions, never mind that the abortion rates have been going up since Trump’s first election. We have to support this because of DEI. You have TDS. 

Do they really believe what they’re saying?

Is it really this easy to find yourself part of a movement that commits atrocities?

When I was a little girl, and I learned about World War Two, I daydreamed about being in the Resistance. And I thought everybody else did too.

When I read Number the Stars, I spent hours and hours pretending to be a member of the brave Johansen family, taking in my neighbor’s daughter and helping her across the Baltic Sea to safety. When I read The Hiding Place, I fantasized about hiding my friends behind a false wall in my house. I read about French shepherds spiriting neighbors across the border to Switzerland, and played about that.

I learned about a congregation of Christians in a Nazi occupied country, who heard their Jewish neighbors screaming from inside cattle cars traveling by the church, and decided to sing hymns louder to drown out their voices. That infuriated me. I hated those Christians. I spent a long time pacing around my yard, fuming at a church full of strangers who died before I was born, trying to imagine the story turning out differently. I pretended that I was a member of that congregation. I imagined myself recruiting the others to help me sabotage the tracks to de-rail the train, then grab some of the prisoners out of it and run with them into the woods to hide. I had the vivid mental image of myself hiding in the brush, holding the hand of a person I’d just rescued, holding my breath and praying for courage while Nazi soldiers stomped past with their guns. Surely I’d be better than those cowards in the church. Surely I would.

I thought all children played and pretended things like that.

I thought everybody WANTED to do the right thing.

But I’m beginning to think that most human beings just want to be in a clique. They just want to feel themselves to be part of an in-group, and then defend the in-group no matter what, and assume that in doing that, they must be being good.

It’s been hard for me to realize that all the time I was studying my history and imagining being heroic, a lot of my fellow Americans  didn’t mind if you became the people singing loudly in that church.

My Catholic youth group actually was the place I was told about the cowardly Christians in World War Two. The youth group leader told the story in her animated, nearly manic voice, stressing again and again that those Christians committed a sin and that we must never ignore injustice. She was saying this to get it through our heads that we had to stand up in the face of government wrongdoing. In this case, she meant that we should take the youth group’s bus trip to the March for Life, but she acted as if she meant it for all kinds of government wrongdoing.  But I’m sure she voted for Trump. All of those people voted for Trump. I am sure she’s still defending Trump now. I’m certain she thinks she’s being pro-life to do so.

I’ve puzzled and puzzled over the disconnect.

I guess that a lot of you just assumed “stand up and never ignore injustice” means “point out when a political movement you’re not in does something wrong, but never go against what your own movement is doing.”

You don’t want to be right, and you don’t want to be good.

You just want to go along with great evil, and when this era in history is over, you’ll pretend you didn’t know.

That makes me angry, and it also makes me sad.