I’m still trying to wrap my head around what happened Friday. A video went viral of a Native American facing a smiling teenager at the Lincoln Memorial. Since fuller versions of multiple videos have been made public, it is clearer that many assumptions were made and are continuing to be made regarding intent behind everyone’s actions.
I will admit that when I saw the viral clip, I was bothered by it. An older Native American man is chanting and playing a drum while a white teenage boy in a red Make America Great Again cap smiles at him. When I try to think back to the first impression I had when I saw it, I don’t remember thinking the boy was being disrespectful. But when I started reading the commentary and then noticed the MAGA cap, I allowed myself to assume the worst.
As I confront my own complicity in this virtual confrontation, I am reminded of a quote from Anne Lamont, the blunt but honest writer. She talks about the “shitty first draft” that we often create in our minds when we are trying to understand a situation in which we lack all the information. As we gather more information, we edit our version of it. It’s part of our human nature, our flawed perspective, to create an inaccurate “first draft.”
It was the hat that did it for me. I made a huge judgment about this young man from Kentucky because he was wearing a MAGA cap. When I read about his being in town as part of a Catholic school field trip to participate in the March For Life, I made more assumptions and judged more harshly. Shame on me.
I disagreed with a school bringing a group of teens to protest a single issue, yet I gladly participated in March for Our Lives with tens of thousands of teenagers last year, focused on a single issue as well. While I am offended when I see someone wearing a MAGA cap, I have no issue with people wearing pink knitted caps with cat ears on them. Hmm.
It was easy for me to assume the worst and I played right into the media’s lure to assume the worst, because that made it viral and thus made it “newsworthy.”
I now know that the young man is named Nick and that the Native American elder is named Nathan and that a man from another contentious protest group, the Hebrew Israelites, is named Shar. These are real people with three-dimensional lives and histories and feelings and they were all in the same place at the same time and their interactions went viral in a “shitty first draft” that carried myriad misleading assumptions across the internet to fan the flames of hatred and division. When it popped up on my Facebook feed, shared by another priest on Saturday, the caption on the video stated, “Teenagers wearing MAGA hats were caught on tape mocking a Native elder…”
Here we go. “Mocking.” Assumption. Rep. Deb Haaland, in a quickly released statement, said the students’ “blatant hate, disrespect, and intolerance is a signal of how common decency has decayed under this administration.” Assumption. A joint statement by the Diocese of Covington and Covington Catholic High School released Saturday stated, “we condemn the actions…this behavior is opposed to the Church’s teachings on the dignity and respect of the human person.” Assumption. Indeed this is all about how, as we Episcopalians call it in our Baptismal Covenant, “to respect the dignity of every human being.”
I do not disagree with Rep. Haaland’s assumption about the political tone of our national dialogue under President Trump. I have many strong negative feelings about his presidency and about his personality. But I pray for him because as much as I may fight it, I believe he is a beloved child of God, just like me, no better or worse in God’s eyes, and he deserves the same dignity and respect that God’s grace and love has afforded me. So does Nick Sandmann. So does Nathan Phillips. So does Shar Yaqataz Banyamyan.
When I am able to see past my assumptions to the person God has created each individual to be, I believe that my prayers for that individual somehow have greater agency in the cosmos. At the very least, it softens my heart to see the Divine within each soul, no matter how buried and unreachable it may appear to be. It is only then that I can get the best glimpse of the story God has for each of these people, because God knows the full story, past, present and future. God has no need for a shitty first draft because God know our stories completely. And yet, knowing all our imperfections, past, present and future, God still chooses to love us unconditionally.
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