We’re Complicated … It’s, uh, Complicated

I am convinced that humanity, particularly those of us caught up in technology culture, are losing our ability to tolerate complexity of any kind. 

Take the election, for example. I heard all kinds of folks asking what was taking so long about counting the votes. The answer to that was everywhere. Because of Covid-19, there were three times more mail-in ballots than ever before. Three times!  

It took a lot longer to count three times more ballots than it would to count the usual complement. Plain. Done. Simple.  

But no! People asked and asked and asked the same blessed question—despite the fact that the answer was echoed online and on every single television and radio broadcast all over the world. 

We’re used to having an answer to Who won? the night of the election. 

We didn’t get that answer. 

We know why, and still the forebemoanѐd moan, to borrow from William Shakespeare. 

I think it’s because we are losing our ability to hold desires and information that conflict.

 Now it’s entirely human to want what we want when we want it. I’d never argue that in a million, squillion years, but … [thank you, Mick Jagger] you can’t always get what you want. And neither can I. 

In this morning’s New York Times, poet Caroline Randall Williams writes, “Thanks to my father, whom I loved very much, I am an unabashed, fairly old-fashioned patriot. That surprises people. But why can’t I speak out against America’s ills and then, with unreserved good faith, contemplate its promise?” 

But that doesn’t work in a culture that is defined by strict zeroes and ones, does it? 

Not if we can’t hold the tension of opposites. 

Ms. Williams continues, “In 1964 [her grandfather] was interviewed by Robert Penn Warren for a project titled ‘Who Speaks for the Negro?’ Warren posed a complicated question. Part of the fear of desegregation and equality, he posited, was that it was hard to believe that Black Americans could really love people who just days, months, years, generations before had been willing to engage in a system that stripped them of their rights and their humanity. … 

“My grandfather’s response is still extraordinary to me. He said, ‘I think that many of us misconceive what loving those who hate you means. Loving—love does not mean what the white man has traditionally thought it meant. It does not mean being blind to his faults. It does not mean being afraid to tell him when he is wrong, or when he’s being stupid. It does not mean being afraid to fight him, in a legitimate way. … 

“‘So I say that love involves chastisement. And I think that the white American needs a whole lot of chastisement.’ 

“This holds true today,” Ms. Williams continues, “if only we replace ‘white American’ with Republican. The party has a great deal to answer for, in terms of the integrity of its elected officials and the ideological positions of its base.” 

Here, again, is the tension of opposites. Seventy-four million Americans chose Joe Biden and Kamala Harris to lead our country. Seventy million chose the incumbent. Those numbers are both mighty tense and mighty opposite. 

My inbox this morning greeted me with an outraged petition to pressure Emily W. Murphy, the head of the General Services Administration, to acknowledge the Biden/Harris win and allow the transition to start. She won’t. She’s among those seventy million. 

We cannot deny that the polarity that led up to this election is unfinished. We must not deny it. That polarity is, uh, complicated, just like every single one of us. 

The Republicans, just like Ms. Williams’ grandfather’s ‘white Americans,’ must not be reduced solely to white grievance and misogyny. Yes, both are operative, but so much more is operating as well. 

Allegedly, those voters voted against what Paul Krugman called “density and diplomas” in his column this morning. Democratic, educated, urban elites. Yes, this, too is operative, but it also has a lot more going on. 

We must learn once again to tolerate complexity, Beloved. We must. 

No one can be reduced to one action. No one. Not you. Not I. Not any elected or unelected official. One action happens in a lifetime of contexts. So do our belief systems. 

I solemnly agree with Ms. Williams’ thoughtful grandfather, “Love involves chastisement,” not so much in the sense of I want to punish you, but in the sense that I want you to learn to see things that you perhaps have not yet noticed. 

If we the people are going to heal the great divides in our country, Beloved, we all must learn to walk down the middle of the great abyss that separates us, greeting friends and acquaintances on both sides, until we find our similarities in all our complexity and make this great nation truly our home once again. 

P.S. More Rolling Stones, “…but if you try sometimes, you get what you need.” Uh, it’s complicated. 

Dr. Susan Corso is a spiritual teacher, the founder of iAmpersand, and the author of The Mex Mysteries, the Boots & Boas Books, and spiritual nonfiction. Her website is susancorso.com.