Emily Atkinson (Smith) on The Greatest Force for Good in Our Nation

Again and again, we draw lines. We draw lines and we make up lies and more lines to keep the first ones in place. We teach our children who comprises “our kind of people” and who doesn’t. Over the past few weeks, since Amendment 1 was passed in North Carolina and Barack Obama came out in favor of equal marriage rights, some evangelical pastors have been incensed, saying things like the government should start killing gays, or that it ought to put LGBT people in an electrified pen and let them die off. This is not just an issue of LGBT rights; the issue of physical autonomy and personal choice often discussed under the umbrella of women’s rights is not just an issue of women’s rights. These are human rights, and when people are threatened or denied equality for being who they are, when people are told they don’t know themselves well enough to make their own choices, or that their bodies are not their own, when voters are purged from the rolls in Florida, when people are tortured without trial, these are human issues, national issues, issues at the heart of democracy.

Why? Because if one person doesn’t have equal rights, none of us do; because if a right can be denied to one person based upon whom they are, then it can be denied to anyone.

I’m heartened by the millennial generation’s seeming tendency to want to increase rights and opportunities; by our desire to fight economic inequality and not to legislate personal morality onto others. But I’m afraid that this is not enough. At the Millennial Values Symposium, we discussed the idea that, as a generation, the millennials know what we don’t want, but not what we want, and this may not be good enough. I think of what the two leading candidates for president said in the commencement addresses they gave last month, at two very different institutions. At Barnard, President Obama told the graduating class that they would have to fight for their seat at the table. This is true. The millennial generation may want to bring in a bigger table with a lot more room, but we’re not in charge yet; as a group, we need to fight for our own seats at the existing table before we can hope to make such a drastic change.

At Liberty University, Mitt Romney said that “Christian conscience is the greatest force for good in our nation.” Well, first, I don’t think religion makes people inherently more ethical. But is conscience the greatest force for good in our nation? Is our ability to discern right from wrong, our moral sense, that which makes us feel guilty when we violate our principles really the greatest drive toward goodness that we have?

I’m not so sure it is. Conscience is a good, but I don’t think it is the good that will save us. I think that compassion, not conscience, will be the driving force for good in the future. Compassion is a more effective check on human behavior than rules or guilt; it motivates us positively to act in the best interests of not only ourselves, but our fellow humans, rather than making us fear or regret the consequences of not doing so. We need to expand our in-group, to be inclusive. We need to stop drawing lines and thinking it is ever anything less than reprehensible to say we should kill people because of who they are.

And how can we do that? How can we get a seat at the table, how can we use our compassion for good? We need to know what we want, what we think is right, and fight for it, and once we obtain it we need to protect it. We don’t have to stop making zombie jokes in the face of horror, because in many ways our humor is our strength, but if we want to address the economic inequality and the social conditions that lead to real epidemics-- of mentally ill homeless people with no resources, of children without recourse to education, of hatred-- we have to be able to turn from our jokes and be serious. We don’t have to destroy our childish things, but we need to recognize when to put them away, and when to take them out again.