Complexity isn't simple

Love this story from the life of the Reverend John Todd, whose inelegant house on the square in Tabor, Iowa, became a full-fledged armory during the bloody years Kansas was the first battleground of the Civil War just a few years away.

In the 1850s, slavery was under attack, and Rev. John Todd was a soldier in God’s army. Truth is, he got into trouble before there even was a Tabor. A discussion about slavery aboard the steamer he came up on became heated. Once other passengers detected an abolitionist, they wanted his scalp. "Shoot him," someone yelled. "Kill him." One idiot told him if it was his choice, he’d straight-up trade the pastor for a mongrel dog and shoot the dog. Reverend Todd says he learned later that man was "a minister of the gospel from Missouri."

I don't know the facts about the good Reverend Todd particularly, but I'm going to bet that his being an abolitionist in those difficult days, while blessedly redemptive when perused from a distance of a century and a half, did not necessarily mean that he believed in racial equality, allowing African-Americans--slaves, in most people's minds--to vote. Most abolitionists, no matter how hard and violent their opposition to slavery was, did not believe that Black Americans should enjoy the rights and privileges given to Euro-Americans.

John Brown's ill-fated heroics at Harper's Ferry were the manifestation of a mind uniquely honed on the issue. John Brown truly and fully believed that all those slaves he'd liberate should move into American society as full-fledged citizenry. The violent takeover he believed would incite a slave revolution wasn't the only earmark of his uniqueness.

That John Brown believed Blacks to be as "human" as anyone else in America was a view very few shared in 1855, including the Great Emancipator himself, President Abraham Lincoln, who had his doubts on the issue until he saw the way freed slaves went to war in the battles they entered. Lincoln's views changed drastically with his experience of their commitments in "the war to free the slaves."

Some, even most, of the missionaries who felt called to minister to Native tribes across the continent, located their mission in the same impulse as their deep and abiding belief that slavery was evil. Lots of early missionaries were thorough-going abolitionists, even though their methodology and their purposes among the Indigenous have, since that time, been widely condemned--robbing Native people of their language and culture in an effort to turn them into lily-white American farmers.

"What is the right approach to historical contradiction?" is a question that Michael Walzer asks in a recent edition of Persuasion magazine. "If American history can no longer be a narrative of uninterrupted virtue, neither is it an entirely sordid tale," he says. "We have to embrace its complexity."

The trouble is, complexity isn't simple. Wouldn't it be nice if it were? Wouldn't it be nice if we could simply lasso something like Critical Race Theory--whatever that is--and keep it out of the corral, if we could make a law that made sure nobody ever felt bad about their race, their color, or their history? Wouldn't it be nice if education was merely a matter of learning a few principles of the cause of freedom, adoring your t-shirt with what you could of the American gospel, and tossing the mortar board and grabbing a diploma.

Embracing complexity means thinking, and thinking isn't going to be happen if the material is simple. Teaching kids to read Dick and Jane is a good thing, but not when kids aren't kids.

Which is why so much of what passes for parents' rights these days is flat-out stupid. It's not wrong for any parent to think that he or she should have a say in how their children are educated, but when those parents propose to make what happens in a classroom simple or one-dimensional, just a matter of pushing kids to understand the platitudes they believe they live by, then something idiotic is happening, and that's exactly what's happening all around us today.

Today--this morning--we're dealing with a humanitarian tragedy of unimagined proportions. Millions of Ukrainians are in danger and moving to nearby countries simply to be out of the way of a madman's lackluster army, who happened to be armed with weapons of danger to the entire planet. We've already crippled Russia's economy, but we seem powerless to stop the bleeding. Why? Because the issues are complex.

Don't trust anyone who says they are not. They are, as they always are.

Understanding complexity doesn't mean embracing stasis, simply doing nothing. What's happening in the Ukraine demands action-- but acknowledging what and how much are the tough questions.