A very dear friend who shares my political direction but not my ardor had for some time been observing the extraordinary intensity in which I hold those who are poorly informed in political matters, and happily so. By the way, by definition, the antonym of informed is ignorant.

This dear friend put the questions before me once again, as they had been on other occasions. “What good does ‘knowing all this stuff’ and getting upset and spending all that time on the Internet and writing about it do?”

This time, unlike the others, while my frustration-fertilized anger simmered because of a question, the answer to which I felt should be self evident to everyone, I decided to examine the pathologies and the positives and the negatives of both positions, cursedly informed and dogged to exasperation by the condition versus ill-informed yet easier with life and others.

All of human history is suffuse with fictional morality plays that are in effect dippings of the bucket into the deep well of our souls, attempts to draw from us what we know are the purest waters of truth, how we should feel about our fellow life travelers. Most importantly of all, they are desperate calls to each of us to take action. When we see or even only suspect injustice is at work, even when the injustice is an attitude within our hearts, they cry to us “Do not stand idly by.”  A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, the story in text as well as every movie and play based on it, is one example. So is Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life, starring Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed. In short, it goes back to even long before the query by Cain, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”

Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath is a glorious posting of the question, and the answer. While I much prefer the book, the end of the movie that starred Henry Fonda as Tom Jode features a soliloquy between Tom and his Ma that sums the beckoning call to all of us: Tom to his mother who frets he’ll be killed by the authorities — I'll be all around in the dark - I'll be everywhere. Wherever you can look - wherever there's a fight, so hungry people can eat, I'll be there. Wherever there's a cop beatin' up a guy, I'll be there. I'll be in the way guys yell when they're mad. I'll be in the way kids laugh when they're hungry and they know supper's ready, and when the people are eatin' the stuff they raise and livin' in the houses they build - I'll be there, too.

Not only are we tied each to the other, when the other is suffering injustice, any failure on our part to do what we can to ameliorate the circumstance makes of us an active participant in the injustice; unindicted though we may be, our hands are every bit as soiled. (That’s especially so for all who believe in a god who knows, though our neighbors may not.) In law, the prudent person principle is guiding when it comes to ignorance as exculpatory: “What a prudent person knew, or should have known, had he engaged reasonable efforts at inquiry.” Indeed, all the preceding and all that may ever follow compose the predicate premises of a conscience.

The United States of America, more than any country or people before or elsewhere, was burdened and blest to live the indignities of bigoted presumptions. From the very first we knew the injustice of life as servants to a king and at the same time we also knew the injustice of legalized institutionalized race- and gender-based inequities. All that, and we knew all of that was as morally wrong as wrong could ever be. More than any other people we were given the challenge and opportunity to do what no other nation or people had ever done: face the challenge and overcome it, not only for our own benefit, but as an example to others everywhere for all time.

From Thomas Paine and the muckrakers like him who sounded the clarion calls, through the abolitionists and the union organizers who fought, bled and died for workers’ dignity to the civil rights protesters and the anti-Vietnam War marchers . . . through all that and much more that I could but will not catalog here, the very best that has been and is the United States of America derives from the multitude of those who did not, do not stand silent, content to live in peace with conditions that ought to levy chaos on our consciences. 

Being a good citizen does not consist only in voting when there’s an election, or in only paying taxes, or in abiding the laws. Good citizenship demands that some laws be violated, and, if necessary, violently so. (Jefferson: “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.”)

Silence in the face of injustice, like it or not, is both acceptance and endorsement of the injustice. Silence in the face of injustice, for any reason whatsoever, is no virtue. And clinging to ignorance of it does not excuse. An “I don’t know nothin’ bout what Bull Connor done or didn’t, it’s all just your opinion and mine’s different” is to me loathsome, active support of all the Bull Connors and what they represent everywhere. Maintaining a friendship with a friend of a Bull Connor, regardless of the rationale, is endorsement of the deprecations wrought by all the Bull Connors of the world. 

I don’t know about life after death, or the existence or not of some god. In starkest terms, neither does anyone else. I’ll wait for the video interview with god in his/her/its palace. What I do know is what I’ve got is now, and that very shortly now will be over for me, and I’ll be forgotten dust. So I better make the most of the now I’ve got, to do what I can, to raise the hell I can.

I wasn’t born a cat or a dog or some other non-thinking primate in some Third World, despot ruled place. I was born here, in the greatest country there ever was, with a brain to interpret what I see and to ask and to logically connect dots. I, and each and every one of us, it seems to me, have an incredible debt to pay for all we’ve been given. And the debt-paying does not consist in mindless mind-numbing private and social behaviors, though they have their place.

As my mother used to tell me, “You can go out and play, after you’ve done your chores.” Right now, I think I’ve got some chores to take care of.

— Ed Tubbs