The Loss of Our Tranquil Certainties

The uproar over Roseanne Barr’s ugly comment about Valerie Jarrett is getting the attention it deserves. I’m only a small shell on a giant seashore but let me say I applaud ABC for their courageous decision to cancel Roseanne’s show.

It takes true integrity to put a successful company’s core values over a TV series that was producing multimillions of dollars of advertising. Whatever other motives the network may have had, they certainly proved they were willing to lose a highly profitable show in order to stand on the side of common decency and intolerance of racist comments from one of their most popular stars.

Let’s look at it once again. Roseanne Barr, responding to a comment about President Obama’s former advisor, Valerie Jarrett, tweeted: “muslim brotherhood and planet of the apes had a baby=vj.”

If you can find a way to defend that statement, I’m afraid you have crossed the boundaries of rational thought. Just a joke, you say? Everyone does it? Others have said worse? Twitter is where you can say anything you like? It’s freedom of speech, man!

No. None of that can account for a mean, defamatory, irresponsible comment about another person. Roseanne Barr had come back with huge popularity. Her show was the highest rated series on ABC. It was bringing the network gobs of cash. And with one crude, racist comment, it all crumbled to ashes. Creating loss of work for all the other cast members who were thrilled with the show’s success.

The comment highlights a common error in our day. We have lost all sense of personal dignity. We have diminished humanity to such a dismissive place that we now justify malicious comments, actions, and behavior as nothing to be bothered about.

The stain covers all of us.

Of course, we’ve all made crude comments, laughed at jokes that demean others, tolerated racism at work, and failed to defend people who were being hassled or bullied. And each time I have been in those situations and didn’t speak up I left feeling like a coward. And I was a coward.

We cannot casually accept comments like Roseanne Barr’s without losing some vital part of our humanity. It violates our own self-respect as well as the respect of others if we just dismiss that kind of callous jeering of another person.

In J.M. Coetzee’s award-winning novel, “Waiting for the Barbarians,” the main narrator, an unnamed civil servant, is repulsed by the brutality against the nomads taken prisoner by the Empire. After complying himself he finally can no longer do it. In disgust he says, “To the last we have learned nothing. In all of us, deep down, there seems to be something granite and unteachable. No one truly believes, despite the hysteria in the streets, that the world of tranquil certainties we were born into is about to be extinguished.”

There is a danger in our acceptance of cruel jokes, racist jesting, outright mean comments. It is the danger that the “tranquil certainties we were born into” may very well be extinguished.

It is the kind of courage demonstrated by the executives at ABC that enable those certainties to survive.

We all need that courage. We cannot dismiss or keep silent in the presence of human indignity. Our deepest values mean nothing if we do.

Well done, ABC.

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