I’m watching The Boys and everything is bananas.
The protagonists are falling apart. Several of our “heroes” are compromising their once-proud principles for an infinitesimal shot at vengeance.
But Mother’s Milk is the last man standing with his convictions:
“If you don’t draw the line somewhere, how the hell are you gonna know where you stand?”
Billy Butcher is ready to burn it all and play down to his competition: “They ain’t drawing no line.”
“Which is why we got to.”
The exchange bludgeons me.
I take stock of my personal lines. My values. I wonder if I would fall prey to the same temptations as the characters I was watching. Means to an end, and all that.
I think about the people I know.
The few I admire who exhibit uncompromised valor.
And the ones I mourn who let their lines blow away in the gentlest breeze.
You always get to draw the line
Days later, I hear about the discussion between Ta-Nehisi Coates and Ezra Klein. Lo an behold, they talk about proverbial lines in the sand. That can mean only one thing: You’re reading ☆☆☆ fated content ☆☆☆.
I have to Google Klein. He’s a political commentator and journalist. I’ve read Coates’ Between the World and Me. These men seem to hold similar values, albeit from different lenses.
I don’t care about the main topic, so I skip to the section in the video titled “What if you don’t get to draw the line?”
Klein has a stack of paper in front of him, erect and engaged in his posture. He asks Coates what happens when someone is on the other side of your “line.”
Coates looks relaxed, composed. No paper in front of him. Been there, done that.
“If you think it is OK to dehumanize people, then conversation between you and I is not possible.”
A clear, distinct line. Coates knows what he is about.
Klein laments how the America he thought he knew is not reality.
“I don’t get to draw the line. It doesn’t mean that I don’t have one in my own heart, but that is the thing I am struggling with.”
I feel like I’m watching an educated but broken man. Klein is clearly too concerned about the thoughts of those outside his bubble, as if the values of the government and its degenerate cultists must become the values of the American people.
The mainstream has become everything he considered “crossing the line.” A majority of people seems to have accepted that. Now Klein doesn’t know how reconcile with swaths of his fellow countrymen.
“What happens if 40% of the country, the dominant political force in the country, is inside that line? Does that change anything? Or the line just holds?”
“No,” Coates tells him. “Welcome to Black America.”
Where do you stand?
Let us not over-complicate a simple concept: As a functional society, individuals need to have limits on what they will and won’t accept – from themselves and others.
When we don’t, nothing has meaning. Your laws, your Bible, your life. We become beholden to the ones least capable of controlling their impulses.
So while I would never degrade my values to the lowest common denominator, I do wonder why fewer people seem to be drawing the line at “basic human decency.”
“Which is why we got to,” I think.