The Silence of Good People

I took this photo of frost-tinged sand. Looks like a spine to me, a little visual metaphor to kick-off my reflection this week, a post about the lack of spine, so to speak.

I'm returning to last week’s visit to the laundromat because I didn’t write about something that happened there and I need to. I’m ashamed and angered and want to do better.

Bear with me on the scene setup:

At this laundromat on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, if you purchase a wash, the dryers are free. I don't normally use the dryers, but I did that day, a Tuesday. The dryers line two walls, with the longest wall of dryers facing folding tables.  Standing in this space with me were a Hispanic man in his 30s, and, at the far end, a white man in his 60s with an oxygen tube running from a portable tank to his nose.

The veracity of these next observations is of the same caliber as most eyewitness statements—like an inkblot I’m filling in to make a picture of something, something I pretend to understand or see there but is really just my brain making it up. I was folding my clothes and not actually paying attention until events made it so I couldn’t not pay attention. I noticed the Hispanic man went to the restroom, walking behind the white man (who was facing the table and folding his clothes). As the Hispanic man did, he said, “excuse me.”

When he returned from the restroom he again said “excuse me”—at least that’s what I thought I heard—and the white man said, “what did you say to me?” The guy said, in broken English, “I say, excuse me” and then gestured in reenactment, in such a way as to indicate being polite and going around someone. He used the pronoun “you” to explain this, as in “you be polite and excuse you” (which is how he said it).

The white guy took offense, interpreting this as a demand for him to move, and as I folded my underwear, I watched this exchange quickly escalate. The white man said, “You want to take this outside? Let’s go” and “I didn’t think so. You act like you own the place” and a stream of other words. The Hispanic guy returned to the dryer his clothes were in and tried to ignore the white man’s taunts but he was clearly agitated and mumbling “no respect, no repect” over and over. And then, the white man played his ace-in-the-hole: “go back where you came from, this is my country.” Thankfully, the laundromat employee (a 50-ish guy) intervened, threatening them both with eviction if they didn’t knock it off. Oxygen Man finished folding his clothes in silence and left. The laundromat worker came back and put his hands on the shoulders of the Hispanic guy and said, “hey, are you okay?” and he responded, “yeah, I’m good, I’m good. Some have no respect.” I guess they knew each other somewhat, but as the laundromat worker didn’t appear to speak Spanish, that’s all their conversation amounted to.

Okay, so that’s the scene, but let’s acknowledge the big elephant in the room: what the heck was I doing during this, besides folding my underwear?

Well, I was thinking and feeling some stuff. I was thinking about guns and whether Oxygen Man had one. I was thinking about dying during a shootout at a laundromat. I was questioning my interpretation of what had been said and whether I should try to get involved in clearing it up. How could the effort to be polite go so awry? I was wondering why an older man on oxygen would say “you wanna take this outside?”

The whole exchange was confusing, ludicrous. I felt tense and nervous, but I continued folding my laundry, albeit more quickly. No guns blazed, no fisticuffs ensued. It’s all good, right?  But I’m still thinking about it today because of the last thing the white man said: “go back where you came from.”

And I said nothing.

I am very ashamed about this and disappointed in myself for not defending the Hispanic man. Not confronting the bigoted, racist, anti-immigrant violence in that white man’s statement makes me complicit in it. As Martin Luther King, Jr. pointed out, “The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people but the silence over that by the good people.”

I’m charitably casting myself as one of the “good people,” but this characterization is disputable given what I did and didn’t do for my fellow human being at the laundromat. My actions speak more loudly than any rationalizations I muster in self-defense. I despise that I’ve become the kind of person who doesn’t stand up against bullies, who lets these kinds of comments slide.

The writer James Baldwin debated William F. Buckley in 1965, a debate I revisited this past week, thinking about my failure at the laundromat, the genocide in Gaza, the levels of vitriol that have seemingly become acceptable in political speech and social relations. In the debate, Baldwin makes this argument:

“I suggest that what has happened to white Southerners is in some ways, after all, much worse than what has happened to Negroes there because Sheriff Clark in Selma, Alabama, cannot be considered – you know, no one can be dismissed as a total monster. I’m sure he loves his wife, his children. I’m sure, you know, he likes to get drunk. You know, after all, one’s got to assume he is visibly a man like me. But he doesn’t know what drives him to use the club, to menace with the gun and to use the cattle prod. Something awful must have happened to a human being to be able to put a cattle prod against a woman’s breasts, for example. What happens to the woman is ghastly. What happens to the man who does it is in some ways much, much worse.”

I think it’s natural to resist this line of thinking: how can that be worse? I might justify myself saying that while I didn’t defend the Hispanic man, I (at least) wasn’t the one attacking him. If the Hispanic man had to choose a neighbor, he’d be far better off with me than that other guy. Right? This is how my brain works to try to make myself feel better, but I need to knock it off. I messed up and need to own it, as well as put in some work and question how I became this kind of person.

Aristotle observed that becoming virtuous is a lifelong practice. Our daily actions and thoughts are constitutive of the moral character we develop overall (aka building your character, becoming a virtuous person). The virtuous person is the one who can discern the right thing to do, does the right thing, and does so for the right reasons (because it’s the right thing to do and not for a reward or utility or duty, etc.). It’s the daily practice in habits, actions, and thought that shapes us over time. So, what’s been going on in my daily practice that led to the moral failure at the laundromat? And in case I’m tempted to dismiss my failure as really not a very big deal, I’ll return to Baldwin’s point: what were the daily practices of mind and habit that enabled that sheriff to commit the atrocity he did? It’s one thing to be a victim of that kind of violence, but how does one become the kind of human being who commits that kind of act, that kind of violence? And once you’ve become the kind of person who acts in such ways, how do you change? Can you change?

Turns out, yes. Yes, people can change and do change, but not if they don’t want to, don’t work at it, or don’t realize there’s something that needs changing. What happened at the laundromat is a huge bummer; I wish I had a do-over. The upside is I can learn from it: my failure is a sign that I haven’t been putting in the daily work. I’ve let lots of these things slide, let myself off the hook, mostly by keeping a distance from or not involving myself with people or causes. Being silent. I could easily start digging around and find oodles of little failures of moral courage. I’ve been practicing to fail, practicing to do exactly what I did at the laundromat. But I can change by practicing new habits of thought and action, and that's what I need to take from this experience. And I know this, to a certainty: I’m quite sure I’ll find myself in a similar situation again soon, unfortunately, and I don’t want to be a so-called good person who stands silent.