No Choice

No Choice

    The New Yorker recently posted this in its opening pages, an editorial of sorts by staff writer Amy Davidson: Of all the words that Donald J. Trump flings into the world, the four most Trumpian are “We have no choice.”  It’s a favorite phrase, and one that he used last week in response to the attack at Pulse, a gay dance club in Orlando, where Omar Mateen shot and killed forty-nine people and wounded fifty-three more.  Mateen was an American, born in New York to Afghan parents.  Yet Trump said the lesson of Orlando is that “we have no choice” but to institute a temporary ban that would prevent non-citizen Muslims from entering the United States.  He said the same thing when he first called for the ban, last December, after the San Bernardino shooting.  That time, he chanted it in triplicate—“We have no choice! We have no choice! We have no choice!”  Whatever your party affiliation here in the U.S. --whether the unpopular Hillary Clinton or the divisive Donald Trump-- it seems to be boiling down to a re-interpretation by the voters that the phrase "We have no choice" is meaning that there is nobody else to choose from, as in no choice.

    Of course, such a phrase can be used to assuage guilt as well or a belief that what you are doing couldn't be helped and that it was/is for the greater good.  You see this scenario played out in the movies all the time, the gangster/banker/robber saying "do it or else" you/the wife/the kids get it.  It's one thing in everyday life for this to happen, but quite another when soldiers at war are suddenly confronted with the same scenario.  One now famous story is that of the young Nazi soldier who simply could not participate in the killing of the innocent men women and children lined up against a village wall; so he was ordered to put down his rifle and join the group against the wall (he was shot in the head and presumed dead, only to wake up hours later as did another victim, both crumpled bodies buried under others which likely saved them, wounded as they were).  Here is how Karl Marlantes, in facing his first "enemy" to kill,  put it in his bestseller, What It Is Like to Go to War: Then he rose, grenade in hand.  He was pulling the fuse.  I could see blood running down his face from a head wound.  He cocked back his arm to throw--and then he saw me looking at him across my rifle barrel.  He stopped.  He looked right at me.  That's where the image of his eyes was burned into my brain forever, right over the sights of my M-16.  I remember hoping he wouldn't throw the grenade.  Maybe he'd throw it aside and raise his hands or something and I wouldn't have to shoot him.  But his lips snarled back and he threw it right at me.  Marlantes fired, wildly, killing him.  He had no choice.

    The bottom line is that we all have choices, some more difficult than others.  Good or bad, our choices, our decisions, are what we have to live with.  But to fall back on a general justification for all can be crippling.  I had to do it, I had no choice.  Did the gunmen in Munich or Brussels or Paris feel this way?  Did the pilots steering the planes into the World Trade Center feel this way?  In war, soldiers likely get ordered to do many things they don't want to do, only these orders are usually matters of taking a life or lives.  Living with those decisions must come to haunt them, whether immediately or after a time.  But in our everyday world, some much simpler choices are presented to us almost daily...being handed back the wrong change (in your favor), finding a broken vending machine that gives you more than you paid for, driving just over the speed limit, fudging just a bit on your taxes.  Such everyday "choices" became the subject of the film, (Dis)Honesty, The Truth About Lies.  In the film, psychologists pose questions such as those above, and in many cases run experiments that volunteers are paid for (usually after completing a simple, non-graded test).  And lest you feel that you would prove more honest than most, you might slowly feel yourself compromising with the "just this once" argument, or "everyone else is doing this so why not?"  What was interesting in their studies was not only that the area of our brain that teaches us this "it's wrong" feeling begins to do so less and less as we lie more and more, but that such reactions and brain responses are similar throughout the world (in running the same tests) making the psychologists wonder if this feeling of justifying our "choice" to cheat or lie or steal or perhaps even kill, might be a universal human trait...a controlled one, but one that perhaps grows easier with time and repetition.

    So in the case of the op-ed of The New Yorker, writer Davidson cites Speaker of the House Paul Ryan and Senator John McCain not wanting to endorse someone they didn't believe in, but felt that they also had "no choice."  But she adds: Speakers of the House can resign.  Senators can decide that they would rather lose an election.  For that matter, any senator could have joined Chris Murphy’s fifteen-hour filibuster last week to force a vote on modest gun-control measures; only one Republican, Pat Toomey, of Pennsylvania, did.  That was a choice, too.  

    We often say such stands take courage, which they do, but often it might be our true human nature.  We might have suppressed such feelings for the sake of survival or acceptance or self-gratification.  But those same feelings might come simply from being ourselves and from following our original, untainted brain's reaction that something doesn't feel right.  It difficult, but it shouldn't have to be.  These days of random killings and violence can cause us to react in ways we wouldn't normally; but maybe as with the old "count to 10" emotional takedown, we should step back a bit and ask ourselves, "Is this really me?"  The answer should pop us almost immediately...