Heroes and villains

July 24, 2020

Being judgemental can be fun.

I enjoy the feeling of moral superiority and clarity that comes with the tendency to divide people into good guys and bad guys: Democrats are good, and Republicans are evil. Western democracies are superior, and authoritarian countries like China and Russia are inferior. People who litter or play loud music are jerks, and those who are considerate of others are worthy of respect. Smokers are self destructive fools, and health nuts like me are virtuous.

But sooner or later, I usually discover that individuals and institutions are more complicated than my simplistic caricatures of them might portray. Some Democratic politicians are corrupt, and some Republican politicians have integrity (I can’t think of any examples of current Republican politicians with integrity, but I’m sure they must exist). A few Western democracies such as the United States, Hungary, Poland, and Turkey have become more authoritarian, and there are free spirits and open minded people in Russia and China. Litterers and loud folks might also be generous or compassionate. My dad was a smoker and a loving father, and this virtuous health nut was once a heavy drinker.

I was reminded of those complexities last night during our weekly Thursday night Zoom meditation meeting. Eight of us listened online to a recorded talk by meditation teacher Jack Kornfield, who at one point invoked the name of Mother Theresa. This famous nun, celebrated for her works of charity, is now known in the Catholic Church as Saint Theresa of Calcutta. But she has also been dubbed Hell’s Angel for her controversial and polarizing legacy of supposedly neglecting and exploiting the same poor people she served. I think it’s safe to say that she did a lot of good while also behaving as a flawed human being. In that respect she can join the ranks of other imperfect saints, including George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Mohandas Gandhi, and Martin Luther King.

Another name that came up last night was that of Red Cloud, the admired and vilified Lakota Sioux leader who fought the invading U.S. Army in Wyoming and Montana in the 1860’s. My dharma buddy Guy appreciates Red Cloud’s ability to be flexible enough to transform himself from a war leader to a peacemaker, and I agree with him. But I didn’t always feel that way.

One of my boyhood heroes was Crazy Horse, the renowned Lakota war chief who triumphantly fought George Armstrong Custer at the Battle of the Little Bighorn, also known as Custer’s Last Stand. I looked up to Crazy Horse not only because of his extraordinary skill in battle, but also because of his inspiring and prescient dream vision that accurately predicted both his success in war and his tragic death. And this youthful dream gave him his mystical name, which has been crudely rendered into English as Crazy Horse but is more accurately translated as His Horse Behaves in a Sacred Manner.

I also admired Crazy Horse because he ferociously protected his people, their land, and their way of life from an invading force. And that’s why I disliked Red Cloud. To Crazy Horse and his followers, Red Cloud was a sellout who betrayed his nation by being too willing to surrender to the Americans. Crazy Horse and others saw Red Cloud as a politician maneuvering for his own gain and status. And so, if Crazy Horse viewed Red Cloud in a negative light, so did I.

But now, almost 60 years after first reading about Crazy Horse and Red Cloud, I have softened my understanding of who Red Cloud was. Like my friend Guy, I now realize that Red Cloud was a realist who saw the futility of resisting a conquering power that had vastly superior technology and numbers. He may or may not have been a self aggrandizing politician, but he served his people well as a military commander and later as a negotiator. Yes, he was a bitter rival to my hero Crazy Horse, but who am I to judge which man was more or less noble?

I do find it interesting that when, in the 1930’s while the images of four U.S. Presidents were being carved into the granite face of Mt. Rushmore in the Black Hills of South Dakota, Lakota chief Standing Bear requested that a Lakota leader be similarly honored with a nearby mountain sculpture. The leader that Standing Bear and his fellow Lakota chiefs chose to be so honored? Not Red Cloud or Sitting Bull, but Crazy Horse. I have twice been to the ongoing construction site that is the Crazy Horse Monument, and I have mixed feelings about it. I’m glad to see monuments to men I respect: Crazy Horse, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt. But I wish the sculptors didn’t have to dynamite the Black Hills to carve these giant likenesses.

And I hope that someday we can find a way to honor the contributions of those men and the contributions of people like Red Cloud and Mother Theresa while acknowledging the complexity and human shortcomings of those individuals. They, and we, are all heroes and villains, and maybe we can all eventually learn to accept our own dark sides if we can allow other people to have their dark sides too.