HYPOCRISY
Alas, hypocrisy is sneaking up on me. That is one of the problems with being a liberal and professing to care about justice and fairness for others and for preaching peace on earth and for saying that I want to protect the environment. MAGA people can be honest about their bigotry and claim that, honestly, we are all bigots at heart who care only about ourselves. That is just the way the world is. Bigotry is at the center of traditional American values and we all, they say and I am beginning to feel, deep in our hearts are bigots. Liberals are caught in the huge gap between what they profess and what they do, at least this liberal, me, is. I am, simply put, much of the time a hypocrite.
Who am I to preach the simple life as I book my ticket to Barcelona and on to Marrakech. I paid my two euro carbon surcharge to Ryan Air when they offered it, but that doesn’t get me off the hook. I am rich not because of anything that I have achieved or deserved but because I live in a capitalist country where everyone is rich, or at least comparatively rich. And while other Americans may not be aware of how rich they are, I have no excuse, I do know how rich I am because I’ve photographed the families of the Ramesh Singh Boundary who are not rich, who live in tiny 10 foot by 10 foot houses with a stove in one corner and a large bed in the middle and clothes hung on a hook on the wall with no digital devices and not enough to eat and no way to keep rain from dripping through the plastic roof. During the pandemic if they get sick they get sick and die. They aren’t on any count of Covid cases. And since they are rickshaw drivers or work in hotels they are probably out of work and desperate for food and any other necessities. So for me to preach about the simple life as I hop from country to country is not only hypocrisy, but seen from the perspective of the folks in the Ramesh Singh Boundary it is disgusting. I am fully aware of my hypocrisy and have no excuses.
In addition I’ve have too many wasted years of graduate education to even keep track of which opened me up to all kinds of possibilities and dreams. My barber can’t do that, the poor in Varanasi can’t do that. Buddha was educated and rich when he gave it all up, so was Gandhi. Thoreau had gone to Harvard, I believe. My well educated Uncle Bob, an engineer who worked for an oil company used to give himself as an example of the way the poor could take care of themselves. “If I lost everything and was put out on the street I could get along ok,” he said. But not if he had had only a 3rd grade education instead of the very employable education he did have. The same for me.
I got paid well enough as a college teacher, but the college itself depended on the wealth of parents who were supported by the capitalist system and by large grants which came to the college from alumni and friends who had done well within the system. Students were opened up to possibilities and dreams in college. What an iPhone can reveal wouldn’t have been enough to open them up. You first have to want to read books about all kinds of subjects, like to listen to all kinds of music, be willing to let go and travel. The iPhone is miraculous, but you first need to be ready for it and if you are not ready the only thing you might use it for is to connect with conspiracy theories and bigotry to further fire up your own resentment for having been left out.
One weakness of liberals is that we so often know better for other people what is good for them than they know themselves and this gets us in trouble whether in Afghanistan or providing affordable housing.
Most depressing for me is the fact that, as I see it, not only do MAGA people believe in traditional American values of white suspremacist, male dominant, anti immigrant, misogynist, fundamentalist, patriotism which they are honest and unapologetic about, but that most of the rest of liberal America intuitively accept these values, too. We’ve been told too often how great we are to doubt it now. We are caught between a rock and a hard place, we want to stay comfortably supported by the Capitalist system, just as we are, and we want a world of fairness and acceptance and equal distribution of goods for all. We can’t have it both ways. MAGA people don’t want it both ways and are free from hypocrisy, if not from fear and hate.
Actually, I don’t know how all people feel, I am just projecting. But I can say with confidence that I like being comfortably supported by the Capitalist system and am not willing or able to follow the advice of Jesus, if you have two coats give one to the poor. I am not willing to give up travel. I may be able to live comfortably in a small space with an iPad, but I do that because it gives me freedom to do what I want to do. I’m not willing to share my small space or my iPad with the poor or to accept that the poor might not want my classical music or wealth of reading or delight in photography. They might, instead, want a decent income with three meals a day and a comfortable place to sleep and health care and warmth and would be satisfied with that, which apparently I am not.
So I guess I haven’t solved the world’s problems at all, and if it makes me a hypocrite to live as I do, I might not even have solved my own.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 