COMMENTARY: The Habits That Lead to Trouble

c. 2000 Religion News Service (Samuel K. Atchison is an ordained minister and has worked as a policy analyst and social worker to the homeless. He currently is a prison chaplain in Trenton, N.J.) (UNDATED) The older I get the more I appreciate an insight given me by my father when I was a young […]

c. 2000 Religion News Service

(Samuel K. Atchison is an ordained minister and has worked as a policy analyst and social worker to the homeless. He currently is a prison chaplain in Trenton, N.J.)

(UNDATED) The older I get the more I appreciate an insight given me by my father when I was a young boy. Most of the trouble people receive, Daddy said, is the result of their own actions. Over the years, as I have observed the difficulties of countless people _ and endured more than a few of my own _ I have found my father’s words to be true: At bottom, most of us are our own worst enemy.


Take, for example, the case of Rubin”Hurricane”Carter, whose unlawful triple-murder conviction is the subject of a critically acclaimed feature film.

Lost amid the dramatic retelling of his personal tribulations, including the suppression of exculpatory evidence by prosecutors, is a fact that should not be overlooked: On the night the murders were committed, Carter, as was his habit, was cruising the bars and clubs of Paterson, N.J., while his wife and daughter were at home.

While en route to his home from one of the clubs, he and an associate, John Artis, were stopped by police, taken into custody and detained for questioning. Though later released, they were rearrested a few months later and eventually convicted of murder.

Question: What would have happened had Carter been at home with his family instead of carousing in the streets of Paterson? Would he have avoided being”trapped off”by a criminal justice system predisposed toward venting its spleen on an”uppity”ex-convict like Carter?

We’ll never know.

What of Martin Luther King Jr., whose extramarital affairs were the subject of FBI scrutiny through J. Edgar Hoover’s counterintelligence program, known as COINTELPRO? Would his life and mission been less difficult had he not handed Hoover a stick with which to beat him?

Set aside for a moment the fact that, as author Michael Eric Dyson points out,”(Hoover’s) double life as gay, cross-dressing `Mary’ was a bigger and longer-held secret than King’s philandering, and was no doubt the spur of Hoover’s self-hating puritanism.”Or that, as Dyson also says in his new book,”I May Not Get There With You: The True Martin Luther King Jr.”(Free Press),”King’s adultery (cannot) reduce his reputation to the shape of a bed.” The reality, nonetheless, is that King’s work and legacy were compromised by his peccadilloes.

The purpose for raising these issues is neither to minimize the injustice done to Carter nor to belittle the accomplishments of King. Rather, it is to point out that much good is often diminished by lesser evils. The writer of the biblical Song of Solomon refers to these evils as”the little foxes that are ruining the vineyards, while our vineyards are in blossom”(Song of Solomon 2:15).


Within the biblical text, the allusion is to the seemingly minor problems that can undermine and spoil a relationship. On a larger scale, character flaws many would consider insignificant or, in some cases, private, can, under the right conditions, lead to circumstances both devastating and public.

That Carter’s carousing would lead to a trumped-up murder conviction simply boggles the mind. That King’s infidelities would make him the subject of official scrutiny by the federal government is equally baffling. Yet, like many of us, through the habits of the flesh, they wound up in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Seems like a heckuva price to pay for a little fun.

DEA END ATCHISON

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