I Never Took the Bait

I think it started with the mermaid.

Disney cast Halle Bailey as Ariel in their live-action Little Mermaid, and the internet came apart. Not my Ariel. Wrong Ariel. And never mind that Ariel is a mermaid. A fish person. A creature who does not exist and never did, invented by a Dane in the eighteen hundreds, who has a talking crab for a friend.

Now it's Lupita Nyong'o, cast as Helen of Troy in Christopher Nolan's Odyssey, and here we go again. Wrong Helen. Not historically accurate. Never mind that Helen isn't a historical person either. She's a myth. In the story she hatches from an egg, because Zeus turned himself into a swan to get at her mother. That's the source material. That's the canon these people are defending.

Never mind that nobody in that cast is Greek. Matt Damon isn't Greek. Charlize Theron isn't Greek. Tom Holland, Zendaya, Jon Bernthal, none of them. Nobody said a word about Diane Kruger, a blonde German woman, playing Helen back in 2004. The rage found exactly one person in that cast, and I'll let you work out which one.

I've never really taken the bait. That's the whole point of it, isn't it. The outrage is the product. It's manufactured, packaged, and set out where you'll trip over it, and the whole business model depends on you picking it up and carrying it around for a while. I've seen it come and go enough times. I don't bite.

But not taking the bait doesn't mean not looking.

I read. I read the comments, and the posts under the posts, and the threads that go on for a thousand replies. And what I keep finding down there is people who sound like they're supposed to be me.

Here's what I am. I'm Catholic. I'm a Marine Corps veteran. I own a business. Fifty-nine years old. If you put all that on a chart, I imagine I come out conservative. That's how it works, isn't it. Somebody's statistics say so. I've never been the one to reach for the label, but it gets handed to you all the same, and lately it comes with a certain sound. A certain posture. A certain readiness to be furious about a mermaid.

The truth is the only labels that ever really mattered to me are Dad, Catholic, and US Marine. In that order. Everything else is somebody else's filing system.

So let me go through them, because this has been filling my head lately.

Dad comes first because it taught me the rest. Patience and love, and you don't get one without the other. You cannot raise a child on anger. You just can't. It doesn't work, and anyone who's tried knows how it ends. What works is showing up, over and over, and being the thing you're asking them to be. Lead by example. That's the whole job.

And that's the thing. Lead by example isn't just a Dad rule. It's the Catholic one and the Marine one too.

In my faith, the man himself was asked, point blank, what the greatest commandment was. Not one of the great ones. The greatest. And the answer was love. Love God, and love your neighbor as yourself. Above all else. Then someone tried to get clever and asked who exactly counts as a neighbor, and the answer was a story about a foreigner, an outsider, the wrong kind of person, who stopped on the road when nobody else would. That's not my reading of it. That's what it says. And he didn't argue anybody into it. He went and did it.

The Corps is the same. Whatever else it put in me, the thing that stuck is this: you stand between. You defend the people who can't defend themselves. Not the people who look like you. Not the people who agree with you. The ones who can't. And you don't do it with a speech. You do it by standing there. Lead by example.

Three labels. One instruction. Look outward, take care of people, and be the thing rather than say it.

The bottom line is love. It's always been love.

So I read those comment sections and I don't recognize anybody. They're carrying my flags. They're claiming my faith, my service, the politics somebody filed me under. And there's nothing in there I know. No love. No standing between. No leading by anything. Just a man with a phone, hunting for someone smaller to knock down, and calling it a defense of Western civilization.

There's a video going around of a woman going off about the halal section at a grocery store being too small, telling the man in the video that if he wants halal he should go where they do that, not America. Except he's English. It's a Tesco. In England. He's a British citizen standing in a British supermarket. And when people pointed that out, she didn't stop. She went further. Somebody pointed out he lives in a mostly Muslim neighborhood, and she went further still.

She never looked. Not once. She saw a shape she recognized and ran the script.

And that's the thing that gets me, more than any of the politics of it. It's the not-looking. It's the same thing I saw in the critics who watched a broken-looking movie and never once asked what the broken might be for. Look at a thing. Sit with it. Find out what it actually is before you decide what it means.

I know why it works. It's the oldest play there is. Get people angry enough at each other and they'll never look up. Keep everybody staring sideways at a grocery aisle or a movie poster, and nobody's looking at the room the anger is being sold out of. Anger doesn't ask questions. That's the feature, not the bug.

But I'm not really writing this about them, or about who's pulling what lever. Plenty of people have written that, and better than I would.

I'm writing it because those are my labels. That's my church. That's my Corps. And I don't like watching them worn as a costume by people who never read the assignment.

Love above all else. That's not the soft position. It's the hard one. It asks something of you every single day, and there's no exception written in for the people you find inconvenient.

I never took the bait. But I did look.

And what I saw wasn't a culture under attack. It was a bunch of people claiming my house, who never read a word of what's written on the walls.