Can We Talk?

To simply say our culture is a mess might make one guilty of the greatest understatement of all time! That doesn’t make we me want to throw in the basket and give up by any means, but it does make me think we need to have a conversation that addresses real issues with a level of integrity that seems missing from both sides of the infamous red state/blue state divide in these United States right now.

A few weeks ago as I read the Sunday edition of the Atlanta Journal Constitution, I carefully reviewed every story on the front page of the paper and the front page of the metro-section. Every single story would have been missing from those front pages had those involved in the story acted with integrity. My gut instinct tells me that is more often true than not.

Integrity requires that we talk about things with the kind of honesty that doesn’t sugar-coat bad behavior and doesn’t make invalid assumptions about individuals and groups based on our personal attitudes about “groups.” So, not all evangelicals are right-wing Tea Party members and not all right-wing Tea Party people are mean and uncaring. Not every mainline Protestant liberal church member is a wild-eyed liberal discounter of the Jesus story and not everyone who cares deeply about God’s creation is a tree-hugging member of Green Peace, with an associate’s membership in PETA.

This integrity thing works both ways. For example, some of our national conversation right now is that policemen and women are out-of-control users of unnecessary force that ends up killing innocent people, often young African-American males. And another part of that conversation is that policemen and women are all incredibly just people who would never use force improperly.

Integrity forces me to say, “Wait a minute, can we talk?” No doubt many, many policemen and women are fine upstanding citizens who do their very best in what sometimes are incredibly difficult circumstances to act justly. It really is, for them, about justice and not power. But that can’t possibly be true for all law enforcement people and when the “good guys” tolerate and wink at the bad behavior of the not-so-good ones, then the lack of integrity present in those circumstances creates the kind of tension we see on the front page of the paper every day right now. I am not, by any means, an anti-law enforcement kind of person, but that infamous “blue wall” has what may be unintended, but very real consequences. If we wink at one cop’s bad behavior, don’t be surprised when these wild generalizations about unjust cops become the storyline in tomorrow’s paper.

On the other side of this equation, not every kid is “a good kid.” That doesn’t mean that having done something that isn’t “good” means you deserve to be shot, but it does mean saying “he’s a good kid” when there is an official record suggesting otherwise only creates tension. I would much rather hear a parent say, “He did some bad things, and he probably did some bad things because his parents didn’t do a good job of raising him, but that doesn’t mean he should have been shot.” This “he’s a good kid” line is not unique to any ethnicity in our culture. We hear it all the time. Being drunk and driving your parents' car with a load of high school friends and losing control and killing those friends is not “a good kid” thing to do. To say that is no different than to say “all cops are unjust racists” because of a particular incident that makes us make judgments about groups based on one person.

I have no idea what happened in Ferguson, Missouri. I’m not sure anyone does – including the police chief, the district attorney, Attorney General Holder, and President Obama. Michael Brown’s parents don’t know exactly what happened and Officer Wilson has probably run this incident through his head a million times trying to figure out how it all happened. We really should be praying regularly for the Brown family, the Wilson family, and the people who live in these communities.

These kinds of issues will always create the kind of unsettling tension we are experiencing right now until our culture decides that integrity is a vital issue in a free society. Would it make a difference if every police department in the US did a better job of “self-policing” and tore down the infamous blue wall in the name of integrity? Would it make a difference if parents could somehow muster the courage to not instantly accuse because, after all, their “kid was a good kid”?

The problem with integrity is that once you lose it, getting it back is a challenge. That’s why we say “every politician is a liar.” That’s probably not true, but so many of them have so boldly lied to us that we don’t believe any of them. Not every policeman is a bad person just waiting for an opportunity to abuse his or her power – but cover up the few who are often enough, and soon we believe that is true of every single one of them.

I know some very fine young African-American males. It breaks my heart to know that their parents have had to have conversations with them that I wouldn’t have to have with my son if I had one. This isn’t an excuse – any more than it would be an excuse to say all cops are bad because of a few – but unless we are willing to have the integrity to re-define what we mean by “he’s a good kid” people are going to continue to make “group judgments” about people that are unfair.

Of course that isn’t right. But that won’t keep it from happening again and again. No person in our culture should be the victim of abusive force from law enforcement. In reality, very few are – but the blue wall of protection allows some segments of our culture to think they are. Only integrity can fix that.

It isn’t right that our culture tends to pre-judge a whole segment of our society as little more than thugs. But excusing bad behavior with “he’s a good kid” allows our culture to think it is okay to assume that every young African-American male is somehow dangerous. Only integrity will fix that.

Integrity is a core character issue, not so much a behavioral issue. Behavioral issues most often can be fixed. An alcoholic can defeat his addiction. A drug user can get the help he needs to quit using harmful substances. A thief can quit stealing. A student who cheats on a test or plagiarizes a paper can defeat that bad behavior.

But core character issues are much harder to address. Just like I saw in the Sunday AJC, the absence of integrity as a core character issue produces every conceivable kind of bad behavior.

We need to have a national conversation about integrity.