Comedian Patton Oswalt was one of the first people to offer thoughtful comments on yesterday’s bombing in Boston. Or perhaps more accurately, he was one of the first to have his thoughts go viral.
In this era of instantaneous communication, there was no shortage of ignorance, stupidity, pettiness, and even mean spiritidness to be found amid the Twittisphere. Too many people, some you’d expect and some you wouldn’t, produced one head-scratcher after another.
By contrast, Oswalt’s brief essay, which he released on Facebook, was sweet and inspiring. It was a light of hope amid the darkness, and kudos to him for that.
Unfortunately, however, I completely disagree with it.
Oswalt recalled how 9-11 had shaken his faith in humanity. But the sight of people running to the explosions in Boston yesterday, risking all to help stave off tragedy, was the kind of thing that restores his faith. There are bad people and there are good people, Oswalt insisted, and he found succor in the knowledge that the good far outnumber the bad.
But I’m not much for pendulum-swinging, or false dichotomies, or simple, rigid categories. And so Boston changes nothing for me. As did neither New York nor London nor Madrid nor Bali nor Oklahoma City nor a thousand other hateful tragedies before that.
Because hate and anger splashing into the river can cause a sprawling spray and mighty roar, but they do not change the river. The river keeps flowing.
I have a friend who bristles whenever I say It is what it is. He thinks it’s an empty cliché, meaningless sports-speak. And it can certainly be that. But I think it can also be a folksy recitation on the nature of inevitability, a poetically simple ode to all the things you can never change no matter how hard you try, no matter how much you want to.
Along those lines, people are people. And they’re not inherently anything except human. Good and Bad: that’s not what people are, but rather what they do. And all people do both of them, sometimes to great excess. Though most of the time they do neither. Most of the time people just trundle on.
Trying to judge humanity on the scales of justice is destined to be a messy and even pointless endeavor. War, rape, murder, slavery, and countless other forms of exploitation and violence are part of the story. So are love, generosity, kindness, altruism, grace, and a thousand other blessings.
When the bombs went off yesterday, Patton Oswalt found his grace in the courage and goodwill of others, and I thank him for that. But either way, the muddle of humanity slogs on.
We are weak, we are strong. We are beautiful, we are ugly. We are brave, we are cowardly. We are good, we are bad. And occasionally, in ways both big and small, we are put to the test again and again. Sometimes we fail, sometimes we inspire. But mostly we just sit there, bereft of words, dumbfounded by everything that life has laid before us.
I have no answers. All I know is that the river still flows.
