ATTICUS FINCH, REVISED EDITION

Harper Lee’s just-released novel Go Set a Watchman continues the story of Jean Louise (“Scout”) Finch and her father, Atticus. In Lee’s Pulitzer Prize winning To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), set in Alabama in the 1930s, Atticus was a heroic lawyer who stood up to the local rednecks by representing a young black man who was falsely accused of rape. (The book’s popularity was soon ensured by the movie, starring beloved actor Gregory Peck as Atticus.) In the new book Jean Louise and the readers see an older, flawed Atticus who joins a local citizens’ council that opposes the NAACP in the fifties, toward the beginning of the civil rights era.

Many readers who have loved To Kill a Mockingbird for half a century, and revered Atticus, have been horrified. (Reviews of the new book have been mixed, but the quality of the writing is another issue.) Online and in print, comments like “Atticus was a racist” have appeared. In the novel, the adult Jean Louise herself reacted violently when she came home from living in New York and realized what her father was doing. Her love and respect for Atticus were severely threatened. It seems likely that Lee’s relationship with her own father, on whom Atticus was presumably based, was endangered also.

Though I never confronted my own father as sharply as Jean Louise did, during the sixties and seventies we had some prickly disagreements about civil rights. Like Atticus, he was an intelligent, fair-minded man who treated all people equally, but his background and education simply doomed him to an intolerant outlook. Born in 1908 and growing up in a conservative, mainly white, area of the Midwest, he never was exposed to other races and religions as a child. Though college-educated, he never accepted the sameness of blacks and whites, or of Jews and Gentiles. I feel sure that if he had not died in the seventies, he would have become much more liberal. (My mother, who was also born in 1908 and died only a few years ago, had become nearly as liberal as I am by the time she died.) This is not just wishful thinking on my part: my father was anti-Semitic also, but when I married a Jew, his attitude changed quickly. Simple exposure can work wonders.

It is easy to judge people who lived in the past by current standards. History textbooks today are more judgmental about George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, for example, than they once were. However, individuals and groups of people are continually changing. In the fifties, many well-intentioned people had attitudes about race, homosexuality, marriage, and other issues that would seem quaint, if not actually evil, today. We need to try to understand them as products of their environment.

There is a genetic aspect, also: Though in some circles it is politically incorrect to state it, it is obvious from sociobiology that we have some inborn prejudices. Cleaving to the group that resembles us must have had adaptive advantages early in human evolution; so, try as we may, it is hard for those of every race not to distrust or even fear other groups. Understanding prejudices must not lead to agreeing with them, of course. It is important to recognize our prejudices and to strive to overcome them rather than denying they exist. As different groups intermingle and intermarry, tolerance seems to be increasing, but complete acceptance will still take a long time. In the meantime, we need to use education and legislation to lessen ignorance and to protect minorities.

 

DEATH WITH DIGNITY

 Brittany_Maynard had everything to live for. Newly married, the beautiful and intelligent young woman should have looked forward to a long, happy life with a husband and children. Instead, she was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer and told that she would die within a year. She began her painful journey toward death, having seizures, severe head and neck pain, and stroke-like symptoms. At some point she decided not to continue in agony, but to die on a date of her choosing, shortly after her husband’s birthday.

Brittany lived in California, where she could not commit suicide legally. Instead of dying peacefully in her home as she wished, she and her husband had to move to Oregon, which allows physician-assisted suicide. (A physician supplied the aid-in-dying medication she would need, but she would have to administer it herself.)  Though she was fortunate in having that choice available, moving away from her parents and friends must have severely upset her already tumultuous life. She spent some of those last few months working with the Compassion & Choices group, which helps the dying and publicizes the difficulties they face in carrying out their decisions. Her video is familiar to most of us now.

The publicity about her death led to a California legislator’s introducing SB 128, a bill that would have made Brittany’s kind of death legal in California. Many of us (a large majority of the Californians polled) are in favor of death with dignity, and thought the bill would pass easily, but it was quickly defeated by religious and other groups who represent themselves as being in favor of life. They trotted out the usual arguments about possible miraculous recoveries, not letting temporary depression cloud a sick person’s judgment, and so on. It was sickening to read their smug remarks.

I do not want to hear any pious comments about waiting until “God called her home,” implying that it was sinful or stupid for her to end her life on her own terms. What kind of people are these who deny a dying woman the right to end her painful life a little early? Has any person who has watched a loved one die slowly and in agony want to condemn anyone else to that kind of death? We need to pass some version of SB 128 to ensure the right of Californians to escape unnecessary suffering from terminal illnesses without having to move to a more compassionate state.