Longing for Dignity

Fox News commentator Laura Ingraham took on David Hogg last week, tweeting that he had been "rejected by four colleges to which he applied and whines about it."  She was quickly attacked for going after a 17-year-old whose classmates in Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School were shot down on February 14th. 

Shortly thereafter, Hogg tweeted to the gravely ill John McCain, asking "Why do you take so much money from the NRA?"   The tweet was seen, of course, by Hogg's 70,000 Twitter followers.

Many conservatives think Ingraham gave Hogg what he deserved, and many liberals think McCain got what he had coming.  They're all wrong.  Such actions betray a lack of respect for the dignity of each person.  Hogg, a teenager, did not deserve to be publicly and snidely chastised by an adult who should know better.  McCain could have been approached by Hogg via a private letter expressing concern for his health and a plea to stop supporting the NRA.  Hogg is certainly old enough to have learned how to respect a very sick person who is also a war hero.  When you tweet, you invite others to pile on.

In our personal lives, we know to respect the dignity of other people.  In public, respecting the dignity of others also used to be appropriate behavior, a sign of good character.  Some argue that respecting others' dignity degraded when Donald Trump began his campaign for the presidency.  He routinely, publicly and nastily attacks the dignity of anyone with whom he disagrees.  But that is too facile an explanation.   He may be helping sanction such behavior, but he is not its sole cause.

Facebook, for example, has violated the dignity of its users for years, at one point testing a psychological theory by manipulating their news feeds and now allowing private information to be sold and used for commercial purposes and electoral targeting.  Twitter has provided a platform for bullying and trolling, defending it as free speech and too hard to stop. Talk radio and cable news are frequently used to attack the dignity of public and private individuals.  Bullying in schools, personal attacks via texting, and vitriolic social  media posts have become too routine, an accepted if unwelcome part of the culture.

Disdain for privacy, another sign of disrespect for individual dignity, is common among many businesses and banks, who fail to protect the personal information of their customers.  They always apologize for data breaches, but their apologies never admit that they could  have prevented the problem if they had invested as much in security as in marketing.

Yearning for dignity is human.  Having it is foundational to the American republic, built as it is on respect for the individual.  We see this demand everywhere, from the Right to Life's insistence on the dignity of the unborn to the Black Lives Matter movement's claim that the lives of African Americans count as much as the lives of others.  We see it in the eyes of laid-off coal  miners and manufacturing workers, who have lost not only a job but the dignity that comes from honest work and being able to provide for their families.  We see it in the plea for respect by those in the LGBT community and the struggle of undocumented immigrants for lives of hope, safety, economic opportunity and respect.

It may seem surprising, therefore, that the same demand for respecting their own dignity that comes from so many is not exercised by some of those same people in regard to others.  "Do unto others," for too many. has become divorced from its religious and moral roots.

Fifty years ago today, on April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in Memphis.  He had been supporting striking garbage workers, who had mourned the tragic death on the job of two of their own and whose pleas for better pay and working conditions had been spurned by their own city government.  "I am a man!" was their clarion call. 

As then,  so also today, until we can recognize the human dignity of all those who live in our midst, whether we agree with them or not, we will continue to divide ourselves from each other.  Nothing good will last for any of us until we recognize the dignity of all of us.

Photo Credit: Allen Allen