STONE IN YOUR SHOE

People who don’t suffer don’t try to solve problems.

Wisdom Wherever You Find It
 
People who don’t suffer don’t try to solve problems. Jerry A. Moore, Jr.
 
The very first day of my seminary education I learned a lesson from Rabbi David Aronson, now of blessed memory. He said he never put much stock in the adage suggesting “I felt sorry for myself because I had no shoes until I met a man with no feet.”  In arguing for compassion for all people, he said that a rich man with a stone in his shoe hurts just as much as a poor man with a stone in his shoe.
 
I met Rev. Jerry Moore, now of blessed memory, many years later. He was the pastor of Nineteenth Street Baptist Church of Washington, DC, which was located on Sixteenth Street when I knew him. His church had purchased the building from B’nai Israel Congregation, which had moved to Maryland. Rev. Moore lived in an expansive home a few blocks from the church, and he graciously hosted a gathering of rabbis and Black pastors one evening. The conversation was intense, as I recall, and the hour began to get late when Rev. Moore began to speak. He must have rambled for close to twenty minutes as all of us began to fidget and raise our eyebrows across racial and religious lines. But he was our host, and no one was willing to interrupt him.
 
And then, with the skill that made him an admired preacher, he gathered the fringes of his remarks and with a few concise sentences tied them together, concluding with these words: People who don’t suffer don’t try to solve problems.
 
Collectively our eyebrows dropped and then our jaws. He had given us the mandate we had come together to discover. Though all of us intellectually understood that there was no value in comparing the suffering of one group with another – and in a roomful of Black and Jewish clergy there were plenty of metrics to go around – all of us had, one time or many, enrolled in some version of impatience with the complaints of others about (insert injustice here) because of our own experience with (insert different injustice here).  But why were we there together? Out of a shared impetus to solve problems.
 
There have always been divides in American society. The longest-established one, at least officially, has been between Blacks and Whites. More on that momentarily. But there are others – Christian and Jew, north and south, rural and urban, white- and blue-collar workers, management and union, and the ever-popular rich and poor, just to name a few. The desire of some to ameliorate those divisions has resulted in gradations that have made them more confusing rather than eliminating them. Accurately, “people of color” has replaced the monochromatic “black” to describe one side of the racial divide. And even on the other side, qualities that modify “white” create a sliding scale of whiteness for members of each subgroup. Sexual orientation and gender identification have moved from binary (male-female, straight-gay) to an expanding alphabet of possibilities and a redefinition of pronouns and their attending grammatical constructs. In my personal niche, I defy you to find a unified definition of what is a Jew, before you even get to the more complicated question of who is a Jew, and we are a low-single-digit percentage of the population.
 
I might suggest that all of this atomization of identity is an effort to shake a stone out of a shoe.  If I can name it, I can find it, and then I can rid myself of the pain associated with it. It is the way to solve the problem caused by my suffering. But that formulation does not sound right to me. My skin color or culture or orientation is not something to be ejected, even if such a thing were possible.
 
Instead, these gradations are too often a way to contrast with what has become the ultimate flaw: privilege. Hurling the accusation of privilege is a way to claim that there are some people who do not suffer in that particular way that I do – they are rich or White or cis-gender or typical or empowered.  They may have no shoes, but at least they have feet.
 
There is no one who does not suffer. But there are people who are told that they don’t suffer enough to qualify. Even for the miniscule part of the population for whom that representation may have a modicum of truth, it formalizes the empathy gap that the accusers so decry. People who don’t suffer don’t try to solve problems. Defining the current divide as between those with privilege and those without formalizes the suffering without provoking the solution to it.
 
No one should suffer. Everyone does. Until and unless we all affirm both statements, we won’t be solving the problems in our society.