Your Exceptions are Failing You

Let me regale you with my favorite Bible story, but I promise to do it quickly: after much haranguing, the prophet Jonah finally makes it to the great city of Nineveh, where he spends three days traversing it to warn the people that they needed to change their ways or face divine punishment.

From the king on down, the entire city takes stock and repents, changing their ways to avert the decree of Jonah, who, quite frankly, is pissed that he had to waste his time because he knew this would be the outcome. But in any case, not one time did anybody object to his presence there by claiming, “Not all of us are guilty of something! Who are you to lump us all together?” If social media existed back then, the hashtag NotAllNinevans likely would have been trending.

Jonah’s moral warning doesn’t make any exceptions, either. Everyone is at risk, and everyone needs to listen, and they do. It’s a moral reckoning for the entire society, and one that they all answer. But in our time, any moral failures are met with quick exceptions. If I say, “America failed a basic moral test by electing a convicted criminal,” the indignation would be quick. “Not all of us did! There are many of us who voted for someone else!” If someone called for an outright boycott of The New York Times, too many people would make it a point that you would be costing people their jobs and besides, there are other good sections in that paper that don’t deserve to be at risk.

In other words, there are too many people who want to carve out exceptions to their moral stances, to the degree that it’s completely useless to have that stance. Imagine for a moment that someone is organizing a boycott of buses due to segregated seating, but a sizable number of people resist that, claiming, “I know my bus driver is a decent person, and he probably doesn’t like making me sit at the back, and I don’t want to cost him his job.” The people who made the bus boycott possible were the very people who depended on the bus to get to work, so the boycott was going to affect them directly, too. But the moral impetus of the boycott was too much to resist (racial segregation) or deny, and this is why they were successful. Did every black person participate? I don’t know for sure, but the point is that this moral action was going to rise or fall on the people who were committed to it, even if it hurt them. And it was successful.

But that’s not where we are today. We are a society used to luxury and services, and we do not wish to be inconvenienced, at least not too much. Our exception-making dilutes the moral issue at hand to the point of ineffectiveness. Take for example a YouTube channel from More Perfect Union, which highlights the practical effects on small towns on a number of issues, like immigration. Invariably in the video profiles, it comes up that the town inhabitants happily voted for the criminal in the White House, but they are being affected by ICE raids that snatch up their field workers and they didn’t think it would happen there. That’s the point where I turn off: these are the real-life consequences based directly on their ill-made decisions, and I’m supposed to feel sorry? I’m supposed to have empathy? But when I state that to others, I’m often met with tsk-tsking, that I risk alienating those voters in the future. These are people who created a terrible and immoral situation, but I’m not allowed to have a moral position because it might hurt their feelings. So I have to start making exceptions lest I offend.

Our country has a crisis of morality: tens of millions of people voted for a criminal, who has no regard for the laws of our nation and is backed up by a massive cadre of other criminals and federal workers. People have been abducted, deported to countries they have no connection to, and others outright killed. Our military has been picking off boats in the Gulf of Mexico with no due process; basically, they’re just murdering people with no proof of their alleged crimes. And I look about and do not find the weight of this moral failure on anyone. We just don’t care. There is no national shame that is registering with us to the point of action. We just believe that there is a system of accountability that will take care of it for us.

We are not like the denizens of Nineveh: we are not taking the warnings to heart, but want to make sure the exceptions are duly noted. And this compounds our moral failure, this shocking and soul-crushing disaster that should make us all rend our clothes in deep shame. But that would be asking too much, and you don’t want to offend anybody, so I have to say, “well, not *all* of you.”