Not too long ago I was writing a post for this blog about scapegoating. L and I are trying to look at each other’s writing on this site, as we attempt to describe our journey...well...as scapegoats!
There is an enormous amount of writing on this topic, about how scapegoating has been used throughout history, how it helps, in a perverse way, to unify groups, to project their hostilities onto others, removing them from belonging, and allowing the group to end up with a sense of superiority and triumph about what has happened. You can probably think of numerous examples of this, maybe even some happening right now.
I wrote my post. L reviewed it. She didn't like it so much and she said so. I was frustrated. We talked about it. It was difficult. I eventually deleted it. I realized I was not so clear inside myself about what I needed to say. And I also realized that what was most interesting to me was about my own hostilities. After considering this for a while, I decided to make another try at expressing what I wanted to say.
Sometime in the midst of this soul-searching as I walked past the Varsity Theater downtown recently, I saw a poster for a movie called “Hostiles”. This was the name given to the native people of this land as the settlers from the East made their way West. Not too mysterious why those original peoples would in fact be hostile, when you think of what they were facing: hordes of unfamiliar humans with little sense of connection to the Earth, other than as takers of the land; foreign invaders who proved more than willing to take what they wanted through violent means. In that case, the label “hostile” is ironic, isn’t it? Who is being hostile there?
Homing in on the word “hostility”, got me to thinking more about my own daily hostilities. I am hostile towards people who as a matter of course are not willing to face things. I have had to face a lot of things. Why can't people face things? I am not very tolerant of this tendency, because I know how much havoc it has wreaked in my own life.
It is also easy for me to be hostile towards many things which in the aggregate we might label with the words, “the system”. However you feel about "the system", having a convenient whipping boy for all your failures that goes under the name of "the system" has a very distracting effect on your addressing the things that need to be addressed regarding such failures. For that reason, I am trying to reduce my hostility towards "the system".
I also have a feeling of disdain, bordering on hostility, towards folks who fall far short of anything one might think of as “critical thinking”. This is also particularly ironic, since “critical thinking”, for me, is somewhat of a newly acquired interest, a skill as yet still developing. As with many hostilities, it does improve the sense of superiority if you can line up a target as a punching bag.
If you say you don’t have hostility, I have a hard time believing you. Some people have an angry presence, others are quite good at conveying anger in a very pointed way when they feel their boundaries are being violated; still others can not muster much of an expression of anger even when malevolent activity is occurring right around them, possibly by actual friends of theirs. Anger itself can be protective, while hostility is more intense and more destructive.
Hostility has the flavor of unfriendliness, malevolence, unkindness, or actual hatred. Everyone has a different relationship to their hostility, on the spectrum of unconscious to more full blown and active.
I am aware how much hostility may have already been brought up by the publication of this site. In John Love’s letter, a sense of outrage was expressed. There was outrage that we would talk to the organizer of a group that was holding a meeting at the Ashland UCC, from which L and I would, by the action of the church, be excluded. Why this was outrageous is mysterious to me, but so goes the irrational nature of hostility. The content of the letter was (and I am paraphrasing) “those people are haters”. And yet, the spirit of it was more like, “we really hate these people!"
I remember attending the “Songs of Protest Singalong” at the Unitarian Church in the fall, sponsored by Rogue World Music. Mark Yaconelli had kindly and appropriately moved the event from the UCC where it was originally scheduled, when I protested that it was not open to all. That was a victory of sorts, but what I experienced when I was there was a whole cohort of people from the UCC looking back at me from the pews in front...with hostility! Other than L, I think I am probably the last person they want to see.
I thought at the time, "well, that is interesting..and sad!" How long will this go on? We are at war, apparently. The folks at the church, I imagine, continue to see L and I, and our ideas, and our commitment to speaking and spreading the truth about our experience there, as an existential threat. I don’t know that to be true, of course, because not one person appears to be interested in a sane conversation with me.
But you know what is below the surface when someone you have had differences with enters your physical space. All the history, all the outrage, all the hostility is carried in the air between you.
My own personal, ongoing task is to keep examining myself. Some curiosity is helpful. What motivates me? What animates the various prejudices and fears and even hostilities that I have? What is true? What is not true? What is reasonable to have hostility about?
Back in June of 2016, when an email sent to request mediation with the Council garnered a response by Ward Wilson, I was amazed that the sentiment he expressed was that he would not participate in mediation if he had to be subjected to “incoherent, vicious rage”.
"Why was he saying this?”, I wondered out loud to L at the time. I know of no meeting that he attended, or even a meeting that I attended that would have been described to him, that could be characterized as either L or I behaving with “incoherent, vicious rage”. But there it was. He had heard it from somewhere.
People being angry at all appears to be quite frightening and unacceptable. If you are not aware of your own unconscious hostility, judgement and sense of superiority, maybe you could think of someone being angry as having “incoherent, vicious rage”? Or is it more likely that if you described it that way, you are deliberately manipulating the truth?
Ward is a very gracious man. Where did he get this idea? It is simply untrue. I know this. L knows this. We were angry. No doubt about that. But incoherent, no. We had very specific points that we were making and very specific questions. And no doubt, it was uncomfortable to hear those uncomfortable questions. "Vicious"? Also, no. We were doing everything we possibly could at all times to respect the people we were talking to. The truth is, we were arguing in good faith. We were discussing what had happened with the sincere belief that anyone we were speaking to would be willing to consider what was being said and consider it on it's merits.
The legend of “vicious, incoherent rage”, was planted in him, like a seed, just as it has been in the 50 odd people who signed John Love’s “Open Letter”. It is a fiction. There are only a couple of people - well, three, to be exact, who could have spread that lie: Brad Roupp, Becky Martin, and Christina Kukuk. They were the only ones who had sat in on any meetings about this conflict in which we were present. Who, of those three, had the motive to create the lie, and the scapegoating? Who wanted the congregation unified around her?
The fact that we all have various hostilities shouldn't come as a surprise. The Germans did before WWII, towards the Jews, and Hitler was able to capitalize on that. Southern landowners had hostility towards people in the North who had the audacity to assert that people are not property, and certain aristocrats in the South were able to exploit that. Job-starved white Americans feel hostility about folks from other countries entering the US and becoming gainfully employed. Trump has been able to take advantage of that. The fact that such hostilities exist - shouldn’t surprise us. And they are always ripe to be exploited.
Likewise, when this conflict started back in 2016, L and I questioned the judgement and good faith of people at the church who were acting with poor judgement and lack of good faith. Not unsurprisingly, our very questioning of these things seemed to cause hostility towards us. That's not too surprising. Who wants to have their judgement and good will questioned, over and over again? That would be hard, especially if you have a sense of superiority about your righteousness. It might help if you are doing some self-examination about those issues and it might help if you are committed to working through such issues with all parties...sincerely and as humbly as possible!
Exploiting that potential for hostility through dishonest means, though, that is not just tragic. It is truly malevolent. Because great damage has been wrought, intentionally, to the whole sense of community and good faith that existed before Rev. Christina Kukuk arrived on the scene.
Maybe that is permanent damage. Out in the woods, up through Lithia Park, branches have fallen. Everything is covered in leaves and muck. Things are breaking down out there. It is in the nature of things for that which is no longer useful to fall and disintegrate and create a substance from which new life will come.
On the anniversary of the Kukuk’s arrival in Ashland, Oregon, my wish is that the whole web of lies that have been created out of the collective hostility of people at the Ashland UCC - with such horrible leadership - might fall and disintegrate; descend into muck, be dissolved, be returned into a substance that can sustain life.