Lessons learned from Scout Finch

Back in my primordial past, when I was five, I saw Scout Finch stare down a lynch mob in Maycomb, Alabama.  I didn’t even remember it clearly until years later when, reading To Kill a Mockingbird, the scene – like a lot of other scenes from Mockingbird – rang familiar.  I had to have seen it when it was first aired on broadcast TV, in 1968, because in the era before VCRs and cable, that would’ve been my only opportunity. (click here to watch the scene on YouTube)

I’m sure you know the scene.  Scout, Jem, and Dill have gone to the jail in the middle of the night to surprise Atticus, who himself had gone to watch over Tom Robinson the night before his trial.  Tom, a black man, was accused of raping Mayella, Ewell, a young white woman, and Atticus had been appointed to defend him.  Tom had been kept out of town, and had just been returned for trial the next morning.  Atticus, fearing a lynch mob, had camped out in front of he jail to watch.

The children show up just moments after the mob arrives and tells Atticus to step aside and let them have Tom.  The children don’t really understand why the crowd is there, only that there's some disagreement.  Scout, suddenly in the spotlight and unsure about what to do, falls back on what Atticus told her about awkward situations – you find something that interests the other person and talk about that.  So, she zeroes in on Mr. Cunningham, whose son she goes to school with, and who she has run into before, bringing payments in kind to the Finch house.

Without realizing the significance of what she is doing, she connects with Mr. Cunningham, humanizes the moment, and replaces the anger with embarrassment.  Mr. Cunningham tells them all to go home, and crowd shuffles off.

I couldn’t have articulated it at age five, when I first saw the scene, but I took several lessons from the moment.

1. Be a watcher.  People are less inclined to do shameful things if they know they’re being watched. Edmund Burke said “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” The first and easiest thing is to watch. That soaked in quickly.  My mother’s family was rife with alcoholism, spousal abuse, violence, neglect, etc., and I quickly became the watcher of the family.  Even at five, I was already an outcast, being surprisingly smart, articulate and serious, so it was no great loss to me.  I made sure that the adults knew they were being watched.  It hardly stopped all their behaviors, but seemed to make a difference
2. Talk to people like you want to hear them, not just them hear you.  Find common ground between the two of you, and find something you can respect about them.  Especially these days, real listening is rarer than you might think, and people will respond to actually being heard, even if you disagree with them.

Watching isn’t a magical formula.  These days, when everyone has a camera and/or a blog, it can be a godsend when conditions are just right, or it can get lost in the noise of an event.  It’s also just a first step of activism.  

Also, there’s no substitute for talking to people instead of at them. Polemics may feel good rolling off our tongues, but they lack substance.  Albert Camus says in Resistance, Rebellion, and Death that “The world needs real dialogue … falsehood is just as much the opposite of dialogue as is silence, and … the only possible dialogue is the kind between people who remain what they are and speak their minds.”  We’re not going to change the other person’s mind by our words, but we may change their hearts by showing not only our good will but our dedication to the truth we are advocating for.  

I’m relearning these lessons.  I was an activist for years, then tapered off as my own life got complicated, which included raising twins.  They’re grown now, life is less complicated, and – unsurprisingly - the old problems didn’t magically get better in my absence.  So, now it’s time to pick up my pieces and join them back up with the thousands of people who have continued to work and focus on improvement.  

Old white guys in power are still as un-enlightened as ever, it seems, holding on to their power and making ill-informed and narrow-minded decisions that affect all of us.  And, following the past election, they’re even more insistent that they’re on the right track.