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Spring Message from the President of EarthSpirit

Lucas Hergert
Rhetorical Violence and the New Segregation

(Note: This piece was delivered April 16, 2002 at Miami University, Hamilton, in a student scholar symposium. It is the first part of an essay on violence, more of which I will publish in coming messages.)

This is an essay about violence, and about my not-so-unique struggle to define and grapple with violence conceptually and experientially. The key to understanding violence, I think, is not through definition. It is through a closer analysis of consequences that a genuine understanding comes forth. Modern theologian Rebecca Parker in Proverbs of Ashes tells it in this way: “A person who acts violently disregards self and other as distinct, obliterating the spaces in which spirit breathes.”

To Parker, “the place in which spirit breathes” is key. This metaethical precept says that (# 1) everyone has an intrinsic moral worth, and (# 2) there is a subtle interconnection between all people. Next, it says that these boundaries are dangerously easy to smash. When either of these principles is broken, we know from a very emotive place that a boundary has been crossed, that something is just not right.

What draws me to this theory is the concept of the subtle. Violence sometimes manifests itself in very distinct boundary crossing—a violation. When a person is raped and murdered a boundary has very clearly been transgressed. However, when an uncle sits with his niece on his lap, when is that boundary crossed? Is it through that very act? Is it when he places his hand on her thigh? Is it when he brushes his hand across her chest and what if he says that was an accident? What if?

According to The Rev. Dr. Sandra Lee it is this subtlety, this ambiguity, where we all go wrong. She once told the story of how; before she became a minister, and while working as a lab technician, she was asked to develop a method that would store fetuses that were obtained for certain experiments. Sandra Lee, at that time an enthusiastic young scientist, took a full-forces-ahead approach. She writes that her first idea was to freeze-dry a fetus. After submerging the small body in the dry ice for a period of time, she took it out of the container. The small body crumbled to dust. It was here, from a very emotive, pre-rational place that she knew she crossed that gray line.

Similarly, victims often know from that pre-rational state that something has gone wrong, even though rationally the act may not seem like a violent one. For me it was through words that the boundary between myself and an other was obliterated. I was riding home from school on the bus one day when two of my schoolmates started making gay jokes. This didn’t faze me, so I ignored them. They escalated their persuasion. Two became five, and five told me that they would kill me when I stepped off of the bus.

Fortunately, I was not followed. However, if rhetoric is the art of using language effectively—in this case affectively, persuasively—I was pretty persuaded. But others were not. My school administration, for instance, maintained that this was not a violent act and disregarded it from the disciplinary code.

But this rhetorical violence had yet to reveal its full complexity, for later that day, my friend called me the same word that the boys on the bus had. “Faggot.” There was a phenomenal difference between, “You Faggot,” and, “Hey faggot.” What I came to realize is that my friends and others had boundaries obliterated over and over again with that word. That word. I think there came a moment, a time, when, like the “n” word, someone pushed the assailant back. Pushed away that other who continued obliterating that boundary over and over.

This act had a doubling effect. (# 1) It re-established Parker’s “place where spirit breathes”—that place transgressed by the oppressor. (# 2) It strengthened the homosexual moral community. Ethicist James Q. Wilson says that humanity defines itself in communities, and the closer an individual gets to that community—in other words, the more characteristics a person shares with a community—the more human he or she is. The key to this, then, is those subtle boundaries. And when I take back a word that has been used to oppress me, it is a powerful act that redefines the assaulted identity with a strong borderline. Further, then, is the thought that these boundaries enforce solidarity with other victims. You must understand here that the homosexual moral community is a new creation, and the whole process has been a continuous act of reclamation and a purposeful segregation as its own community. Rhetorical defense from rhetorical violence has been one catalyst.

I would like to end with a poem called “The Love of Travelers,” by Angela Jackson.

At the rest stop on the way to Mississippi
We found the butterfly mired in the oil slick;
Its wings thick
And blunted. One of us, tender in the fingertips,
Smoothed with a tissue the oil
That came off only a little;
The oil-smeared wings like lips colored with lipstick
Blotted before a kiss.
So delicate the cleansing of the wings. I thought the color soft as
watercolors
would wash off under the method of her mercy for something so slight
and graceful, injured, beyond the love of travelers.

It was torn then, even after her kindest work,
The almost-moth, exquisite charity could not mend
what weighted the wing, melded with it,
Then ruptured it in release.
The body of the thing lifted out of its place between the washed wings
Imagine the agony of a self separated by the gentlest repair.

"Should we kill it?" One of us said. And I said yes.
But none of us had the nerve.
We walked away, the last of the oil welding the butterfly
to the wood of the picnic table.
The wings stuck out and quivered when wind went by.
Whoever found it must have marveled at this.
And loved it for what it was and had been.
I think, meticulous mercy is the work of travelers,
and leaving things as they are
punishment or reward.

I have died for the smallest things.
Nothing washes off.

Rebecca Parker says that life is at risk in our world through intentional obliteration of self and other. Sandra Lee says that the boundary that separates the self and the other is nearly transparent, only rough emotion can help us feel our way through. Contrastingly, James Q. Wilson says our boundaries act to dehumanize the other. Angela Jackson says we can’t get this balance wrong, for nothing washes off. And then the travelers would say that even the best-intentioned act is unable to help the wounded—but they try anyway.