Close to Home: Maybe we all need some discomfort

A few months ago, the Florida legislature passed the Individual Freedom bill, broadening the state’s definition of discrimination. It now includes making another person uncomfortable over historical events that involve that person’s race or nationality.

Although it doesn’t explicitly say so, the new law seems primarily focused on what is taught and read in school classrooms, especially any teaching, such as the evil of slavery, that might foster discomfort among white children or their parents.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis insisted the bill was intended to stop kids from hating their own country or each other. But, in the words of one colleague, “Who would’ve imagined that teaching children about African captives brought over on slave ships would constitute teaching hatred of America?”

Perhaps a more urgent question to ask about this and similar legislation in other states is this: When did comfort become our highest national aspiration as a people, even more important than truth or historical integrity?

I know I feel uncomfortable when I see photos of lynchings or scars from a whip on a Black man’s back. I feel uncomfortable when I read about melting Arctic ice caps and rising sea levels. I feel painfully uncomfortable when I read about children and teachers murdered in a school classroom.

Is that bad — to be uncomfortable about such things? When did comfort become some kind of nonnegotiable entitlement? And, yes, while comfort by itself may make us content, it can make us stagnant and insular, perhaps even insensitive.

Not long ago, this newspaper published a column by Paul Waldman of the Washington Post, who wondered if Americans have become comfortable with continued, unspeakable violence. Is this in fact who we are?

School children are murdered by a teenager with easy access to semi-automatic weapons, and what is the response? We hear the same pro-gun, change nothing litany: it is a mental health issue, not a gun issue; arm the teachers; turn schools into armed fortresses.

The gun lobby and its political lap dogs would have us believe gun-related violence and death have nothing to do with guns. If it wasn’t so sad, dangerous and devoid of any compassion, it would be laughable. To suggest that one teacher with a gun could do what heavily armed police officers couldn’t do — give me a break.

But let’s return to being comfortable. As a Christian pastor, it is clear to me that Jesus of Nazareth never really worried much about whether people were comfortable. Do you suppose the wealthy were comfortable when he said it would be easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God? Were the money-changers comfortable when Jesus overturned their tables and drove them out of the temple?

Jesus seems to have thought that injecting a measure of discomfort was an effective way to enable people to examine and even change their lives. Who knows? Perhaps even we will change when enough of us decide that we are uncomfortable, indeed finished, with gun violence and death and demand a new way. The status quo is quite literally killing our children.

In the words of James Baldwin, “The moment we cease to hold each other; the moment we break faith with one another; the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.” Let us not choose, in the name of comfort, to mindlessly and fearfully stumble on into the darkness.

Rev. Gene Nelson is a retired United Church of Christ minister. He lives in Sebastopol.

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