Doubt consumes me.
I went through my youth being taught the Catholic Church is the one true church, but my best friend back in those days, Dickie Mariano, was a Methodist and he was a great guy. I wouldn’t have hung around with him if he was a jerk. He still is a great guy.
It didn’t seem possible that a guy like Dickie was somehow diminished in the eyes of God because of a decision that was made for him when he was born.
Doubts crept in. As I got older, and circulated more widely in the world, I met some Jews — a few at first and then a lot by the time I got to college. They didn’t seem so bad. Hardly representative of the people some Catholics blamed for killing Jesus Christ.
More doubt.
I remember in 1966 when the late John Lennon said the Beatles were more popular than Jesus, and people burned their records and boycotted their concerts.
You couldn’t have been any more Catholic than I was. I went to Mass regularly, went to Catholic school, was an altar boy, sang in the children’s choir, and with all that, I still doubted that the zealots who instigated all that were really outraged. It just gave them an excuse to beat up on the longhairs.
I also doubted Lennon when he swore he wasn’t taking a swipe at Christians.
Doubt followed me to high school. My religion teacher said that we’d reach a point in our lives where we’d either embrace Christ or reject him. I doubted the choice could be that stark. Still, it was my first real crisis of
faith. What would my decision be?
Going to Northeastern University exposed me to all varieties of ethnic cultures, people of color and sexual orientation. Society (and my parents) told me to be color-blind, and to treat everyone the same. So that’s what I did. And I patted myself on the back like Little Jack Horner.
But the more I saw, the more I doubted that was true. It was probably the first lesson I really realized what Atticus Finch meant about walking in another person’s shoes.
Let’s talk about Muslims for a minute. The doctor who treated me at St. Elizabeth’s Medical Center in 2001, when I nearly died from sepsis, was from Pakistan, and he was a Muslim (yes, I asked).
I remember screaming at him (I probably swore at him, too) after he woke me up at 3 a.m., just when I’d fallen asleep, to tend to my IV. I saw him again three days later, when I wasn’t delirious with fever, and we smoothed everything over.
A week later, 9/11 happened. I was as horrified as the next person. Nineteen radical Muslim terrorists did this, but the Pakistani doctor who had saved my life wasn’t one of them. I had to remember that when the hate got turned up too high.
And since I never felt any pressure from fellow Caucasians to be visible in my condemnation of Timothy McVeigh after Oklahoma City, I shouldn’t have expected Muslims over here to do the same with Al Qaida.
These little moments make me pause and refuse to get swept along in the onrushing tide of the latest outrage du jour.
I’m not talking about doubting facts. I’m pretty sure there is such a thing as COVID-19 and that it’s killed, or helped kill, more than 100,000 Americans, and has thrown our lives upside down. And let’s see what the tinfoil-hats who say it’s either a hoax or that it’s been blown out of proportion have to say when they get it.
I’m talking about public perceptions, and how incessant propaganda (which isn’t exclusively the property of the right) helps shape them.
I see people nodding their heads in unison at some “pearl of wisdom” that hits me the wrong way and go diving to find the other side — the one that does not fit the narrative of the person dispensing the “wisdom.” And I’m afraid I find it more often than not.
I often think I’m a man without convictions, because every bit of “truth” that comes my way I view skeptically. If the entire scale of public opinion tilts one way, I’m looking for something, anything, that will shoot holes in it and jerk it in the other direction. I can’t be sure of anything, and often feel that the smarter you are, the less certain you are.
A few paragraphs back I talked of how smug I felt because I was “color-blind,” and how I somehow doubted it was that easily explained away.
In the ensuing years, I’ve divorced myself of that notion. I am not color-blind. George Floyd’s death, and hundreds of others like it, have proven once again that we are all products of our cultures, our experiences, our collective triumphs and our collective struggles. All of that has to be taken into account. And we cannot begin to understand how people who have suffered and struggled in ways we haven’t end up feeling as they do.
And until we get that through our heads, we’ll never have peaceful race relations in this country. And I have no doubt about that.
