Tuning Our Personal Radios And Dialing Down The Noise

Christian Moore, right, holds hands with his autistic friend, Connor, at a Wichita, KS, elementary school

A few days ago, I was asked this Quora question: “What are useful and helpful things to say when someone is going through hard times?” I answered:

“Speaking only from personal experience with 50 years as an adult encountering friends, family, and colleagues who were going through hard times—and being a person who has experienced some great loss and difficult times—I’ve found that the best response is to say very little and listen a lot. People who are suffering losses—deaths, tragic illnesses, deep doubt and depression, family breakups, divorces, job loss, etc.—are not looking for verbal consolation; they are in transmit mode…seeking empathetic listeners, people who genuinely keep their ears and hearts open, and their mouths and opinions closed. There will come a time when the grieving or suffering person will let you know when they want to engage in dialogue, when they are open to hearing your thoughts, are receptive to your examples of moving forward. But you have to be patient and kind and quietly comforting until that time. We all want to console and offer words that will somehow assuage our fellow human who is hurting, and it is so tempting to share by example (“l know how you feel…when my dad died…”), but your example is not their grief; your method for coping worked for you, but it may be irrelevant to how they see life at the moment.”

Those phrases, “To say very little and listen a lot…they are in transmit mode,” are part of the wisdom I learned from my parents, teachers, and key mentors I had along the arcs of my personal and professional lives. Their consistent (and common sense) advice—to counsel patience, personal reflection, and fact-inspection when faced with seemingly overwhelming challenges of the heart, mind, and career—has too often, of late, slipped off my to-do list when it comes to trying to comprehend the existential meaning of the maelstrom of rude politics, social discord, and threats to humanity posed by environmental abuse. 

I believe we all are two-way radios, capable of transmitting and receiving information on an infinite number of frequencies. In our day-to-day lives, we are subject to the broadest possible band of auditory, visual, and subliminal signals—human interactions that hum and buzz and occasionally crash in on us totally unbidden. The cicada-like droning of all the incoming messages around us drowns out the signals we need to be tuned into, those frequencies that emanate from not from any man-made electronic transmitter, but are transmitted to us from our better angels, or, if you’d rather, from our conscience.

I admit to being one of those message-distracted persons who, due in part to my training as a journalist, in part to my work as a government cipher for too many decades, and in part due to my natural instinct to try to comprehend everything all the time, has developed a flinch reaction to momentary shifts in social and political gravity. Somedays, every new object is irresistibly shiny, every motion around me is another squirrel to be chased, every noise above my head is a wolf in the attic, every new report of the human condition and downward curve of the Dow portends worldwide danger just over the horizon. 

The truth is bad enough: the Amazon is on fire, polar bears are running out of habitat, the bottom-most depths of the oceans are littered in plastic, coastlines are being drowned. And that’s a short list without going into the travesty of a border wall (read up on eminent domain), immigrant camps and deportation, categorizing eligibility for citizenship for newborns of military personnel and government civilians stationed overseas, sexual predators, mass shootings, opioid additions, hate crimes, human trafficking, and lies, lies, lies from the Oval Office.

For me, my personal radio is all too often set in “receive” mode in all frequencies. And in that mode, everything comes in—good, bad, neutral, truth, fiction, fantasy—to the point where the only messages I react to are the loudest ones, the more repetitive ones, the ones that overpower the truly important ones that may not have the signal strength to get through. I think a lot of us, perforce, go through our lives that way. Over time, we forget how to discriminate, or “fine tune” our personal radios. We forget we are in control of the frequencies we want or need to listen to. We forget we have control over the gain—the signal strength—of every message we receive.

Over the past two years, the noise level emanating from my Washington, D.C., hometown has increased to almost intolerable levels at all audible frequencies. From the far left to the far right, the political noise has become a background din much like construction noise in New York City—there is always some outrage going up, some proposal to be torn down. Jackhammer-anger and wrecking ball counterattacks are a 24/7 way of life here. 

The best visual of the noise machinery is on display on the South Lawn of the White House whenever the president holds a press availability with the background whine of Marine One’s idling turbines shredding reporters’ questions. The media noise follows the political noise, and often competes disharmoniously with the people and organizations it covers. Cable network talking heads compete for available decibel room, and it seems, with few exceptions (Fareed Zakaria, Cristiane Amanpour at the top of my list) that no panel “discussion” is complete without heated and loud exchanges of unbending positions. On-air comity died years ago.

And then there is the social media noise machinery—arguably the worst of all. It is here that the visual noise—the slashing written words, the drone of trolls, the unhinged ALL CAPS posts, the sadly uneducated rants of misinformed conspiracy believers, the immovable position takers, the bullies, the pot-shot cowards, the blind adherents to inhumane, unethical, immoral policies—becomes a cacophony that overwhelms all reason, like an out of control staple gun to the brain.

Well, I don’t need my brain stapled by someone else’s unfiltered noise. I’ve backed off my social media presence, unfriended or stopped following a number of posters who, even though I know them to be nice folks under other circumstances, are getting carried away by the noise and who feel compelled to add to it, not diminish it. Life is just too damn short to accept as normal the waves of noise that crash onto my private shore. 

I’m tuning my personal radio to the quieter channels, to the messages from friends and colleagues and kind-hearted persons for whom life is meant to be experienced in softer tones. I’m endeavoring to receive more than I transmit, and to keep an ear out for the kind word that is struggling to be heard through the roaring surf of meanness.

I will endeavor to listen more to stories like the one out of Wichita, Kansas—the wonderfully pure story of two little boys, Conner and Christian, who bonded on the first day of elementary school. Christian Moore, 8, saw another 8-year-old boy, Conner, standing in a corner, alone, and crying. Christian, unbidden by anything other than his own desire to reach out to another child in pain, took Conner’s hand and helped him overcome his distress. Christian didn’t know that Conner is autistic; he only saw the pain and wanted to assuage that pain through comfort. There is no doubt that Christian had his radio tuned in and was in full-receive mode. If Christian can do that, I know I can.

There Is Nothing Supreme About Being White

Probably white? Yeah. Supreme? Hardly    chart from 23andMe

I have been thinking lately about the term “white supremacy,” and what it means to me, a white male, with an ancestor whose claim to fame, in part, is due to his being at Jamestown in 1609, and on the Mayflower in 1620. Looking over my genealogical path, I note the presence of some fascinating men and women: an abolitionist and operator on the Underground Railroad; an inventor of a great steam engine; lawyers, doctors, screenwriters, poets, pilots, soldiers, farmers, merchants, and more. From Braintree, Massachusetts to Palestine, Tennessee, from New Orleans to Peewee Valley, Kentucky, the lines of my ancestors include Huguenots and Creoles, Irishmen and Englishmen and Scots, Protestants and Catholics and agnostics.

These various genealogical fibers are the chemically-identified warp and weft of my life—a not atypically blended DNA fabric for an average white American of mostly European descent (as my 23andMe DNA pie chart, at 97% Northeastern European, so clearly portrays). And I leave it at that, satisfied that I meet some present-in-America-since-the-beginning criteria, but only through sheer luck of the draw. I did not earn my ancestry; it does not endow me with a mantle of supremacy; it was thrust upon me with no expectations for what I would do with it.

But, suppose I twisted my origin story and boasted that my deep white roots entitled me to call out all “others” who got here later than my family did.

In that boast would be the suggestion of divinely endowed primacy, of ownership of history as my ancestors wrote it, of racial privilege, topping by first-claim the stories of other arrivals of non-Northern European descent who followed over the ensuing 400 years. That would be the ultimate claim to white supremacy, justifying by my whiteness the genocide of indigenous peoples up and down the Eastern Seaboard and then pursuing, killing, and isolating them across the continent. To lay claim to such white supremacy would explain “manifest destiny” and the wholesale taking of lands belonging to the ancients.

To revel in my birthright of supreme whiteness would surely absolve me of the sin of human trafficking in the peoples of Africa, the Caribbean, Asia, South and Central America. The irony of my first-white perfection would reveal itself in the hateful ways I treated my Irish and German brethren who made the mistake of not getting here when I did, and of how I turned away from the Poles and Czechs and Italians whose Eastern European and Southern European whiteness did not reflect the purity of my own fair skin. Oh, and how my whiteness would manifest itself in the anti-Asian policies that considered anyone of Pacific Rim origins to be merely sufficient to build my railroads and do my laundry, and then, once their work was done, banish them to West Coast enclaves or bar them completely from the American continent they and others stitched together rail-by-rail, grave-by-grave. (I would later add to their de-humanization by “interning” them in barbed wire enclosures.)

On and on, over the decades and centuries would my whiteness clash on both sides of an enormous national divide: slavery. A great Civil War would be fought to protect, or relieve me of, the vast accumulation of slaves whose labors and degradation underpinned the economic success of the slaveholding branch of my white line. While the Civil War may have decided the slavery issue for historical purposes, it did nothing to change my mind about the supreme meanness of my whiteness—that I could transform myself into white carpetbaggers who descended on the South to deliver ruinous economic and social ends for white Southerners in the guise of “reform” from the Northern whites.

But, supremely white Southerners were quick to their battle cry, “The South shall rise again,” and for the next 100 years, they fought back against their supremely white, educated, elite Northern clan, which was busy building steel and rail and shipping empires on the backs of non-supreme whites and immigrants. Ah…what a great time whites were having. From D.W. Griffith’s 1915 Birth of a Nation, to the 1920s New England white cabal’s “America First” eugenics campaigns—masterfully covered by Daniel Okrent in his The Guarded Gate: Bigotry, Eugenics and the Law That Kept Two Generations of Jews, Italians, and Other European Immigrants Out of America, to the follow-on America-Firsters of the 1930s and 1940s, it seemed as if the manifest destiny of whites was within reach.

All of the foregoing would fuel and justify my motivation for the xenophobic attitudes directed toward, and heinous crimes against, non-whites, I suppose, but only if I distorted the facts of my white origin story out of a sense of fear of losing the threads that bind me ineluctably to centuries of presence in America.

If my fear of becoming only “one out of many” overwhelmed me, and the majority of the many did not look like me, I might share my distorted version of my white origin story with other similarly fearful whites in America. Misery loves company, you know. Perhaps if these fantasies were elevated by like-thinking and like-looking national leadership and injected into the daily dialogue via television and social media, these alternate stories would seep into the dark corners of our society where lurk those hate-laden whites who wait for the call to action from equally hate-laden commanders.

Reduced to its basic components, white supremacy as practiced by the shooter in El Paso or the marchers in Charlottesville, white supremacy as embraced by a non-violent portion of our population, and white supremacy as preached by too many local, state, and nationally-elected leaders, is constructed of a convenient mythological retelling of the history of whites on this continent. In a nation built on myth, there is not now, nor has there ever been, supreme whiteness in America. Not by birth, not by achievement, not by timing of arrival, not by Congressional act or executive fiat. Even the Founders ultimately rejected the idea of crowning George Washington king.

The history of our country is replete with stories of whites who failed to rise to greatness, whites who devoured the land and crushed whole nations of indigenous people, whites who trafficked in other human beings, whites whose arrogance got us into terrible wars, whites whose hubris nearly destroyed our economy several times over, whites whose segregationist and cherry-picked misanthropic ideologies corrupted the educations, and soiled the minds, of tens of millions of children, cheating entire generations of a chance to help steer America toward a better shore.

There is nothing supreme about such deeds and thoughts.

There is nothing supreme about leaders who perpetuate the myth of white supremacy.

There is nothing supreme about being white.