Tuesday, August 9, 2016

Checking Our Presets

I was thinking about all the tiffs between people that, seemingly, have no end. Sometimes even finding the origin of the dispute is an exercise in futility. What happens at the human micro-level, of course, plays out between groups of people and extends even to the hostilities shared between nations. It reminds me of a bit of dialogue fashioned a while back by that American master, Samuel Langhorne Clemens, aka Mark Twain. In it he relays a bit of homespun conversation between Huck Finn and Buck Grangerford in his timeless classic, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The gist of it is Huck trying to ascertain how the long-running blood feud between the Grangerfords and the Sheperdsons all started -- and why it keeps going.

Huck begins the conversation:

"Did you want to kill him, Buck?"

"Well, I bet I did."

"What did he do to you?"

"Him? He never done nothing to me."

"Well, then, what did you want to kill him for?"

"Why, nothing -- only it's on account of the feud."

"What's a feud?"

"Why, where was you raised? Don't you know what a feud is?"

"Never heard of it before -- tell me about it."

"Well," says Buck, "a feud is this way: A man has a quarrel with another man, and kills him; then that other man's brother kills him; then the other brothers, on both sides, goes for one another; then the cousins chip in -- and by and by everybody's killed off, and there ain't no more feud. But it's kind of slow, and takes a long time."

"Has this one been going on long, Buck?"

"Well, I should reckon! It started thirty year ago, or som'ers along there. There was trouble 'bout something, and then a lawsuit to settle it; and the suit went agin one of the men, and so he up and shot the man that won the suit -- which he would naturally do, of course. Anybody would."

"What was the trouble about, Buck? -- land?"

"I reckon maybe -- I don't know."

"Well, who done the shooting? Was it a Grangerford or a Shepherdson?"

"Laws, how do I know? It was so long ago."
"Don't anybody know?"

"Oh, yes, pa knows, I reckon, and some of the other old people; but they don't know now what the row was about in the first place."

Hmmm. While our mental defaults might not be as entrenched -- or trigger-happy -- as that of Buck Grangerford, it's still easy to go through life with a preset frame of mind.

As you consider your own positions on various issues, is there anything you can say you inherited from your forebears -- good or bad?

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3 comments :

Mark Frith said...

Yes! It seems, for some of us, the least little thing can set us off. We can sure blow things out of proportion. I guess it stems back from something that happened in the past, and it comes flooding into our present time, even without asking. Can we call that "bad blood?" Suburban and Country-folk might not experience this much currently, but in urban neighborhoods, bad blood can result in spilling blood. Does this spill from the Cain & Able effect? My people don't normally spill blood. We ignore. We shut down communication...for years. That's how we do it. In some ways, it may be more deadly. Treat people as if they don't matter at all.

Whirldworks said...

If we ;et it, human trust can be a very fickle thing. It doesn't take long (well before toddlerhood) for each of us to experience someone else taking advantage of us or lying, or similar. We can carry all of those things into our future and let those wounds fester and infect every encounter we have. Thankfully Jesus told us the solution to all of this underlying anger...forgive.

Henderson said...

Yeah, for Frith I would agree on the tail end of his comment, since that's more my experience: when things go woefully wrong it's easy to just lock 'em out. Shut down and move on. It's hard to break through those presets, even when they're only recently put in place. Busting past the walls we enclose around ourselves takes faith, I think. God can heal and does, but probably not when we're resisting with full force. I like what Mans Whirld is saying; forgiveness is the key. If only we'd remember that.