Reflecting
on What We have lost
Middle age refers more
To landscape than to time:
It’s as if you’d reached
The top of a hill
And could see all the way
To the end of your life,
So you know without a doubt
That it has an end-not that it will
have,
But that it does have,
….. Forseeing by Sharon Bryan
Mortality focuses the mind and heart. Even on a
university campus where we are forever young, mortality grabs us. That is what
happened to me when I finally paid attention to what was happening. Thanks to
Mitch McConnell’s strategy of intransigence, the hounds of hell have been
released calling for action of any sort: “taking our country back” and “building
a wall” seem to be the catch phrases of choice. Most know that they do not
understand what it means to take something back from the American people; they
just do not like who the American people now are. And the wall is nonsense. But
it feels good to vent.
I understand the anger. Lots of things I
thought settled by the Civil Rights Movement seem to be disappearing. What the
voting rights act made possible has been gutted by flagrant political
gerrymandering. Just as Mitch owned up to undermining any legacy Barack
Obama might build, so too Republican state legislatures have worked to make
voting more difficult for those on the margins, minorities, the elderly, the
young. All in the name of preventing voter fraud. And voter fraud translates into people not
voting like the legislators would like them to vote.
I graduated from seminary in a time of high
idealism. The Movement was underway and America
was changing. The media began to look like America. The most obvious shift was
in television. Amos and Andy gave way to Sanford and Son and then the Huxtables
moved in next door.
Our family gathered to watch them each Thursday
night. We were living in urban America and we felt the problems we were dealing
with were not unlike what they dealt with.
We laughed together at shared human foibles. We had a road map for how to make it in the
new America.
When our second daughter graduated from
college, Bill Cosby gave the speech at graduation. His advice was sound: He told the graduates, “Don’t plan to move
home.” It was advice that many could not follow, but the economy does not
always listen to good advice.
Last I
noticed Pepperdine has not taken back their honorary doctorate. Being a college
with a religious heritage, they seem to understand something others have
forgotten. If honorary degrees were given only to perfect specimens of the
human race, they would all remain in the hands of their makers. Americans love
blindly and dismantle what they find flawed with equal passion. MIT does not
give honorary degrees and the policy has allowed us to avoid many awkward
conversations over the course of our history.
The legal system will grind out a form of
justice for Cosby. His behavior appears to have been abusive and criminal, but
he is standing in for a generation that told its young men that women were
objects to be possessed and conquest was the measure of manhood. Drugs to bulk
the body helped with performance in sports; drugs played a role in sexual
fantasies. They still do. There is an arc of accepted sexually exploitive
behavior that runs from Rhett Butler, carrying a resistant Scarlett O’Hara to
her bedroom, down through the golden age of Playboy. The only bad sex was no
sex. There is no color line to cross when it comes to boorish behavior and Bill
Cosby is a reminder of a collective societal dysfunction. It is hard to bring a class action suit against
middle-America.
Here at MIT pornography was a major fundraiser
for student activities during that period. There were few who had the temerity
to say that they thought Debbie Does
Dallas was inappropriate fare as introduction to the Institute. A Dean of
Student Life, Shirley McBay, who knew exploitation when she saw it, and an
Associate Provost, Samuel Jay Keyser, who understood that free speech was never
without cost, finally pulled the plug. Their courage is not forgotten.
Now, on the national stage, the Republicans
start talking about the implications of having small hands. Like school boys
who want to see how far they can spit or pee, the Republican candidates remind
us that we have not traveled as far as we thought. They remind us that Bill
Cosby is both a product and a victim of a cultural fallacy. Sexual powers are
never a reasonable measure of masculinity or leadership.
Robert M. Randolph
Chaplain to the Institute
