The hill to die on...

In February, a rather ominous anniversary was marked, with pictures of “the dress” going viral on social media. Now, for those of us who were of the age of reason by the time of the Clinton Presidency, the term “the dress” needs, as they say on Wikipedia, “disambiguation.” So: no, not that dress. Folks born in the mid- to late-’90s, rather, might immediately have reckoned which dress I meant. At least, it seems the prime candidate of that noun’s instantiation alongside the definite article for those of later generations. I mean, of course, the (in)famous white and gold dress (or was it blue and black?) that became a viral meme first back in February 2015. Yes, last month was its decennial anniversary. Feeling old? But did I call it an ominous anniversary? Yes. Read on.
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As so-and-so famously said (but Mark Twain did not say), history may not repeat itself, but it often “rhymes.” A couple short weeks after the viral ambiguous dress had its second big moment on social media, another less innocent viral image made the rounds, this time a very brief video appearing to show a young lady at an indoor track competition lashing out and clubbing her opponent with her baton after being overtaken in a race. 
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One of the two athletes involved in the incident, the victim, is a minor. The other individual, the alleged assailant, is 18. Both have been named in reports of the event. I'm choosing, however, to name neither, because they're both in high school, after all, and anyway it is beside my point.

That the action was deliberate has been the apparent consensus of most who watched the short clip. This was also the view of the officials at the track event itself, who disqualified the older girl. And it is apparently also the view of the local Commonwealth Attorney, what the State (Commonwealth) of Virginia apparently calls District Attorneys, who is allowing charges for assault and battery in the case.
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The accused runner has come forward to defend herself publicly, along with her family, offering a different video angle of the incident. She presents a different narrative. When the other runner overtook her, she says, she did so too closely. This led to incidental contact which resulted in her losing balance. Flailing her arms as she attempted to stay on her feet, it is thus that the baton accidentally made contact with the other girl's head, who suffered a concussion as a result. 

Not, perhaps, insignificantly, at least some media outlets covering the matter after this account and other videos were made public began to phrase things rather differently than in earlier reporting. One article describes the initial “now-viral video show[ing] one track star hitting her competitor in the head with a baton.” Yet, in the next paragraph, it references the moment “when her baton struck [the younger girl],” and later even calls the alleged assailant “the runner whose baton hit [the other] on the head.”

Meanwhile, the court of public opinion is litigating the matter in real-time—with all the characteristic nuance, circumspection, and lack of bias we have come to expect on social media and in news site comboxes. The older girl has received death threats and been subject to slurs attacking her race and her sex. Her counter-narrative also seems to have attracted its own partisans, though, who are defending her, convinced by her story and by the alternate video footage. These include the local NAACP, who in a statement said she is “not an attacker” and that the charges filed against her are “not warranted.” Other commentators suggest that her race is part of the impetus behind the charges. The race angle might be more prominent in the discourse but for two other factors: namely that the victim appears to be of the same race; and that the incident occurred during a “race,” which has maybe prevented this aspect from gaining traction in the search algorithms, that word being another instance of the need sometimes for “disambiguation.”

I have my own views on which account most probably fits the facts. It will be observed, however, that I've assiduously avoided making them clear. This is mainly because I really don't see why anybody should care what I think; and because I certainly don't care. Which brings me to my point in talking about the incident at all.

Running a race well requires training and conditioning. St. Paul thus takes this as an apt metaphor for the Christian life. That, and the fact that many of us lack the discipline to train, and need reminding. Lent is perhaps the best time to heed that reminder.

History does indeed rhyme. As another sage (again, not Mark Twain) observed, those who do not learn from history are bound to repeat it. We have not learned. Ten years ago, a picture of a dress whipped us into a frenzy and provoked heated arguments over its true colors. Almost two decades prior, another scandalous matter, wherein a dress was involved, was also litigated largely in the media and in the public square before any proper investigation, and provoked the now legendary evasion that, when considering certain questions, “It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is.” The writing was on the wall even back then: we were headed down the rabbit hole into a nonsensical world, an age that later would come to be described as the “post-truth” era. Little wonder, in such an epoch, that so many people seem to gravitate to those who will just call things as they see them, even if it is brash, uncouth, or actually untrue! Refreshing honesty in a point of view expressed has come to satisfy that desperation born of an apparent lack of certainty, and perhaps even mechanisms for finding certainty, about what ‘is” is. Nietzsche grins in his grave.

It seems to me that running the race well in such a time requires particular training in the Christian virtues of prudence, patience, and humility. The presumption of innocence while a matter is duly adjudicated in the proper arena seems more important than ever. Yet the tendency of the age is all in the opposite direction. Prejudice trumps prudence at every turn in the track. Again, little wonder. There's something ominous, giving rise in the sensitive soul to real existential and epistemological angst, when two different people, looking at the very same image, can without mendacity each state that he sees two completely different things. It may be a dress photographed in poor lighting. But it may also be filmed of an alleged assault, or a war in some part of the world, or a particular politician's conduct. We really do find ourselves in a time when the question, “Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?” is no mere impertinence. The passive voice evades attribution of agency. Facts increasingly need “disambiguation.” We no longer trust institutions to which proper adjudication once would have been deferred. In such a crisis, stubbornness and quick judgment are a constant temptation. Every day the ground is planted more thickly with flags staking out immovable positions. Tet the landscape has not really changed, and few, if any, of these flags really mark hills anybody should be willing to die on.

This Lent, my mind is drawn to a particular instance in the trial of Our Lord, where He supplied a question for an answer: “I have spoken openly to the world: I have always taught in the synagogue, and in the temple…, in secret I have spoken nothing. Why askest thou me? ask them who have heard what I have spoken unto them: behold they know what things I have said.” For this seeming impertinence, He received the first of many blows to follow. In subsequent hours, those who had heard Him teach and seen His wondrous deeds were essentially challenged with a form of our own dilemma by their religious leaders: “Who will you believe, us? or your own eyes and ears?” They would ultimately cry out in answer, “Crucify Him.”

Not every question demands our swift and decisive judgment. Someone else seeing something very differently than we, however plain it may seem to us, may be as genuinely and honestly convinced; and the truly virtuous thing may be to extend grace and forbearance and a stay in judgment. Rather than staring anew at the object in bafflement, we should look instead to that even more confounding object, our own heart, seeking there the wisdom of how best to proceed. If our hearts are formed by the Spirit of Christ, rather than the spirit of the age, we should find a call to meekness, to humility, perhaps even to silence in the face of an accuser. We should find the way marked by the only One of us whose judgment was truly perfect, though He was falsely judged: the way to the right hill on which to die.