Moral Pain unmasks and exposes ev1il. Those who have some sense of justice want evil to be punished especially in others. Yet we deceive ourselves into thinking that all is well within us.
God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our consciences, but shouts in our pains. For some, pain presses actions; for others it produces stupor. – C.S. Lewis
Millions of Americans are in great anguish today induced by Moral Injury. Moral Injury is the spiritual agony that arises from situations that abuse the conscience. People whose deeply held beliefs about right and wrong – their conscience — are violated experience serious stress, depression, fear, frustration, and even suicidality.
Personal conscience is not inborn; it is developed in our formative years as we experience the lessons of people around us. National conscience, which we are encouraged to inculcate starting in our earliest school years, was built on America’s professed bedrock moral values and based on historic Democratic Principles.
Over the decades, our leaders’ increasingly decadent behavior – when decadence includes commission, omission and toleration — has fostered degraded behavior in an ever larger segment of the public. A corrupted public chooses its worst leaders, who pander to their foulest attributes and are rewarded through election and reelection. Decadence, therefore, describes a reciprocal cultural, moral, and spiritual affliction.
When people live in a time of maladjustment, when there is tension and disequilibrium, they become unbalanced themselves and then may follow unbalanced leaders.– Einstein
It is the circumstances, the contradictions — not people’s character — that produce the struggle. People suffering Moral Pain — metaphorically and literally — are easily deceived and have difficulty making ethical decisions, such as in the voting booth. Or they are in such a stupor that they self-disenfranchise, as more than 111 million adults did last fall — compare that 111 million votes with Trump’s 77 million votes and Harris’s 75 million votes.
Insanity in individuals is something rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule. – Nietzsche
Leaders are blameworthy; but as Henry Wallace states: Our worst enemies are our evil deeds and their memories, our pride, our selfishness, our indifference to atrocities when we should have stood against them, our malice, our passions, which by conscience or by habit pursue us with a relentlessness past our power to avoid. There always looms the possibility that hurtful Truth will break through the hypocritical walls we have built to protect our internal dimension.
Pain and hate are often connected. Hate of others, which customarily includes blame-laying and excuse-making, can be protective, albeit temporarily, shielding us from the sting of accepting whatever part we may have played in our own objectionable condition. When hate subsides, pain ensues or is intensified and that is when people lash out internally or externally.
Ah, God! what trances of torments does that man endure who is consumed with one unachieved revengeful desire. He sleeps with clenched hands; and wakes with his own bloody nails in his palms. – Jeffrie G. Murphy
Moral Pain can be triggered by death – of a loved one, certainly — but more often death of a dream, a concept, or a conviction about ones’ selfness. Pain in this regard is emotional, spiritual, or psychological.
Nevertheless, pain can awaken us from complacency and urge us to seek something greater. It can be a revealer, a teacher and a healer and give us an opportunity to learn and grow. Through pain, we gain deeper knowledge about ourselves. Pain forces us to confront difficult truths, our hypocrisy, and make necessary changes in our lives. It can teach us resilience and compassion for others as we learn who we are.
Pain also assesses our true courage over theoretical courage. Courage is not simply one of the virtues; it is the underpinning of every virtue at challenge points. Courage is not the absence of fear, but the ability to face our fears and failures and overcome them.
When it is obvious that the goals cannot be reached, don’t adjust the goals, adjust the action steps. – Confucius
As Audry Lorde tells us: To refuse to participate in the shaping of OUR future is to give it up. Do not be misled into passivity either by false security (the fascists don’t mean me) or by despair (there is nothing we can do). Each of us must find our work and do it.
My African forebears experienced and survived the Middle Passage; 361 years of legal slavery; 6,500 lynchings; mind-searing psychological abuse; betrayal by pseudo liberals, closets racists and false prophets; and Weaponized White Religion.
The threats against American democracy even today pale in comparison with the obstacles this nation leveled against allegedly freed slaves. Baldwin’s stranger from another planet might be surprised that Black people are still alive, striving and achieving, but I am not.
