A particularly majestic action of the great Frederick Douglass came to mind today when I was answering a friend regarding Chris Rock's joke and Will Smith's slap. My friend asked, "Had your wife been going through Chemo and lost her hair would you be so cavalier on not wanting to slap a comedian when out on a date with her?"
I replied:
See, here's the thing. My wife did lose her hair when she went through chemo and one of the best ways to deal with it was through laughter. If someone were to make fun of her about it, I'd have not assaulted the offender, for he would have already disgraced himself. I'd have just pointed that fact out and also I would make clear that he wasn't worth lowering myself to his level.
If we are going to go around assaulting everyone who insults us in order to defend not our honor but our frail sensitivities, we are going to be frequently acting quite dishonorably.
Most of us know we are tremendously lucky that we don’t have to overcome the obstacles our forefathers overcame for us. Many of us know that we are making up flattering excuses for our failure to live up to the exemplars of our past despite all the immense privileges they earned for us. Every good Catholic knows we are all called to be saints, but few of us ever come near that aim.
What has caught on like a contagion nowadays seems to be a crisis of frail sensitivities. Our schools and pop culture have attempted to cultivate within each of us an inflated-but-flimsy self-esteem at the expense of firm-and-dignified self-respect, and this inversion of priorities has malformed our sentiments and disfigured our personalities.
The person stuffed with a false-but-showy self-esteem typically has frail-but-prickly sensitivities, and often leaps to defend “his honor” at ever perceived slight, no matter how small. We’re becoming a society of soft grievance mongers who are eager to be—and even enjoy—being offended, I believe, primarily because there are so few real problems in our own lives to complain about that aren’t of our own making.
I am reminded of one incident in the life of that titan of a man, Frederick Douglass, that provides an invaluable lesson regarding the most noble way to transcend the ubiquitous insulting stupidity that attempts to degrade each of us today.
Douglass was traveling with his prestigious white friends to give a lecture in a city in the south, and although he had long before made a name for himself as a dazzling brilliant orator and a superior man, he was not permitted to sit with his friends but was forced to ride in a freight car with the other “colored” people. When they reached their destination, his white friends were profusely apologetic that he had been humiliated by the blatant racism. Here’s his response:
"Gentlemen, by ignoble actions I may degrade myself, but nothing and no man can degrade Frederick Douglass."