Backbone, brick wall and snowflake
One of my best-remembered workshops is one I did not actually attend. Sometime in the 1980s an educational consultant named Barbara Coloroso came to Rome City Schools to discuss classroom discipline. I share, not so much what she may have said, but the meaning I remember from hearing about her. She offered vivid figures of speech to think about personal discipline styles that are either rigid or flexible. I think that her insights offer interesting ways to think about our angry, polarized lives together as we relate to “us” and “them.”
The imagery of backbone is one for easy identification. Stand straight. Stand firm. Hold your head up and hold it high. Be clear about who you are and where you stand. Don’t let yourself be manipulated and pushed around. The genius of the human backbone is its flexibility and its ability to protect the vital nerves in the spinal cord while still moving with enough ease to bend dramatically and to sway smoothly. Most of us would like to think of ourselves as backbone people. We admire backbone people. We certainly look to such people to be leaders. Yet in these days of culture war, it has become unusual to find a public figure, political or religious, whose reputation is widely accepted to include both strength and flexibility. The partisanship that rules our public spaces almost inevitably defaults to one of the other of Coloroso’s images.
If one has no backbone, one is spineless. I believe that jellyfish is Coloroso’s preferred term. In this instance, I will take the liberty to adopt the current cultural derogative “snowflake.” In adopting the term, I diverge from Coloroso’s original context to one more in tune with the culture wars. While the accused snowflake may indeed be seen as weak in the arena of principles and discipline, more often it is behaving as whiny and easily-offended that invites push back.
Certainly, as with other insults, snowflake has become popular as a demeaning and often wrong-headed challenge to beliefs that are simply different from those of the challenger. I think that bullies, I will talk more about them when I talk about brick walls, especially like to use the term to intimidate. However, if we consider the universe of the easily-offended there are examples galore. I don’t know anyone I consider a snowflake. However, I read about activists who are terribly concerned about “microaggressions” on college campuses and about choosing pronouns other than he or she by which they want to be called. Really? From the other end of the political spectrum there are those still fighting against teaching evolution in public schools, who are convinced that man never landed on the moon or who fret that new ideas or people of different skin color are automatically a threat. Really?
And then we come to the brick wall style of dealing with life’s issues. Rigid. Inflexible.
Combative. Always right and never wrong. Bully. Now we are clearly in the middle of the culture wars. For me, and for many who will read this, before there was the politics of the brick wall there was the religion of the brick wall — it is called fundamentalism. In brick wall religion, one does not ask questions, one simply believes and behaves as they are told to do so by the designated authority. Brick wall religion teaches that only a select few are actually favored because they are correct in their understanding of God. Those who are reasonably close in their beliefs are clearly misguided but not hopeless. Those whose worship style or understanding of scripture is dramatically different are considered just plain wrong and very probably not Christian at all. And let’s not even talk about other religions or non-believers. Partisan politics has always been a haven for brick wall thinking. It has typically been a good way to court voters to name a threat and offer a political hero to save the people from that threat. The unholy trio of bigotry, fear and greed has offered brick wall politicians an avenue to power now and in previous times. In the 1950s it was Joe Mccarthy and the fear of Communists. Brick wall chooses the divide and conquer strategy because it consolidates its strength by forfeiting the flexibility that backbone requires and provides. Brick wall offers devious enemies and simplistic solutions based on suspicion, fear and intimidation.
To flash back to the positive metaphor, our country has been at its best with political leaders whose leadership style could be called backbone. They called out the best in our national character and challenged us to undertake great causes. In the past two months we have celebrated the 75th anniversary of D-day and the 50th anniversary of the first moon landing. Though the accomplishments were very different, they had in common strong leadership from a president who inspired national unity. Real threats were overcome, but more through inspiration than through insults, fear, lies and division. Herein lies the distinction between the politics of back bone and of brick wall.
Snowflakes are lightweight and fragile, but if you put enough of them together they can shut everything down. Brick walls are rigid and defensive — after all if you take out a brick the whole thing may come tumbling down. And if you get behind the brick wall, it no longer has any useful function. The healthy backbone is both strong and flexible. From my perspective only a religious/ political/cultural style that mimics the backbone offers a hopeful path into the future.
The Rev. Dr. Gary Batchelor is an ordained Baptist minister and active church member. He is retired after a nearly 40-year local ministry as a hospital chaplain. His particular interest lies in issues of faith and culture.