The written word, lacking the inflection, tone and body language available in a good old fashioned face to face conversation, can be a source of misunderstanding in this modern age of facebook posts and handheld texts. It was during a light-hearted posting of text on one of the popular electronic bulletin boards that I witnessed such a misunderstanding and experienced the discord that incomplete communication can conjure, especially when magnified by our national tendency towards political correctness - which is today’s feeble response to our centuries-old habit of dividing all of life into divisions between the sacred and the profane. Follow me now, if you will, down the circuitous path of understanding.
I like cats. We have three. I recently spent half a day constructing a weatherproof, heated cat palace for the wintertime comfort of our feline friends. Cats have been a part of life on the farm as long as I have lived in Towns County, so when a friend posted her frustration at some particular feline behavior towards her chickens, I could relate. As frustration often turns to humor, some lighthearted banter ensued which broached the subject of laboratory cat dissection and favorite cat recipes.
Lovers of all things feline were quick to join the discussion with admonishments. They were not amused, and private messages condemned our dark-hearted humor. My first reaction to the huff of the hall monitors was a desire to tell them all to go and lick themselves. (Patience; we’re almost done with cat humor here). Discretion, however, prevailed and led via this cat-food for thought to today’s discussion of the sacred and the profane.
As a "rule of thumb," one man’s sacred is another man’s profane, and even the use of this worn out phrase profanes the women who, under a vague reference to old English Common Law, could not be beaten by their husbands with anything wider than their thumbs, thus the expression. Here’s another example: A tattoo to an early Christian was a mark of separation from the pagani but to a modern fundamentalist Christian it can be considered a mark of the devil. A cartoon of Mohamed to a non-Muslim may be comic relief from the tensions of terror and jihad but to a devout Muslim it is a death sentence.
Politicians, pundits and preachers plant landmines of the sacred and the profane on the slippery slopes of their fallacious logic. If you want to reform healthcare, you have profaned the sacred cow of corporatism with a socialist smear. If you trust the free market to level the playing field of healthcare, then you care nothing for the huddled masses. If you are a democrat, you can be nothing but a liberal. If you are a conservative, you can be nothing but a republican. There is no “in between” between the sacred and the profane. Everything is black and white; (no offense to European Americans and African Americans intended) with no shades of gray and definitely no colors in the palette. Dark and Light; Good and Evil; divided we are conquered and conquered we are enslaved.
This is not a commentary on cat lovers versus cat cookers. It is not a judgment of millions of devout Christians or a criticism of dedicated democrats and reliable republicans. It is not a judgment of anyone’s spiritual or political path. This is a discussion of dichotomy – a splitting of the whole into two non-overlapping parts – and the biggest, baddest, scorched earth destructive march-to-war dichotomy of them all is the dichotomy of the sacred and the profane. The problem isn’t really so much the dichotomy itself, but the aggressive proselytizing of my idea of what is sacred or your idea of what is profane.
History reeks of this aggressive proselytizing: The Crusaders marched around Jerusalem with decapitated heads on pikes. Muslims burned libraries and put “non believers” to the sword. Communist party bosses liberated millions to the equality of starvation and the American hegemony burned down communist villages and then opened up the charcoal business to the free market. If we examine all of these events closely we see individual stories of faith and sacrifice, patriotism and pride, but zoom out to an objective view of history through the lens of time and we see that the death of millions has solved little or nothing as we now face off over the same issues with weapons capable of killing billions.
Some part of our humanity realizes our dilemma. In the western world, political correctness is our muted response. Understand, if you will, from whence it came. It grew out of centuries of war and destruction and social unrest. It is a step towards tolerance, but it is a humorless tolerance and therefore, in my humble opinion, not quite sincere. We will revisit this topic again because there is much to discover about it, but not right now. I have a cat baking in the oven.
