And that line is never straight but a jagged crooked line. Evil and good, living as roommates, neighbors, and co-workers, throughout the ventricles and atriums of our hearts. Pumping the corpuscles of angels and devils throughout our bodies.

Crooked can be bad, but in this context, it is non-linear, oblique, asymmetrical, and orthogonal. It is the crookedness of our genetic blessings. Crookedness comes from our crooked chromosomes that come from our crooked ancestry. We know little what is hidden in the nooks and crannies of our crookedness. As I have said, at nauseam in these columns, I am fascinated with epigenetics, the unexpressed components of our chromosomal contents.

Crooked in terms of the curves, bends, and twists in our DNA.

Our crookedness is beautiful like the switchbacks up a great mountain. Like the stitches in expert surgery, the flight of the butterfly or the branches of the great oak.

How we bend to the winds, seek the light, avoid the trouble and move around the impasse.

There is the dark shadowy side too. Brokenness is part of our crookedness.  

Trying to fix broken systems and broken people has to first recognize our own brokenness  The brokenness we have in common. The brokenness that makes us different and makes us similar. It all starts with our crooked backbones and crooked backgrounds.

Brokenness is not bad. It is the great library of learning and redemption. It is where our energy and life force emerge and converge.

Immanuael Kant said, “From such crooked timber as humankind is made of, nothing entirely straight can be made.” 

Nothing straight can be made, that is true to its roots and seeds.

Michael Sacasas in his beautiful essay, Embrace your crookedness, says, If the crookedness of timber reflects the history of the particular tree from which the wood was honed, the rainfall on given years say or the soil quality or the wind or sunlight it receives.

Our crookedness has been encoded into our souls and is part of our operating systems– our minds and our brains and the neuro pathways that define our custom software packages. Our operating systems always need to be updated. There’s always patches and there are bugs. And it is constantly in a process of deepening neural pathways in the potential of plasticity. Experience vs expedience. There’s memory, intuition, and innate intelligence. Interpretation generates understanding. The way you see it, right or wrong. Confirmation bias, or pure prejudice. It’s how your brain works. And while we want to make quick and lasting judgments, we have the capacity to slow down to see and pursue the truth. Our operating systems are crazy amazing. The operating system is always replete with flaws, bugs, insights, and intelligence. Always needing to be de-bugged, defragged and updated to be relevant and reliable. But the code, the operating system imperfections, is what defines it.

If out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made. Then if a thing is made straight, it will be because humanity has been stripped out of it.  M. Sacasas

Like beautiful curls that are straightened by a hot iron, the natural beauty has been literally stripped out of it.

We confront this in our interactions. People who have straightened out their souls and their essence.  The sanitized versions of people devoid of interesting curves, facets, and dimensions. We can present ourselves as functionaries who are competent and compliant and uncrooked by personal matters, feelings and instincts.

The only good timber is crooked. It is our crookedness that makes us unique, makes us alike, and aligns us with nature and others.

But those neighbors, we know they are the bad guys. Unworthy of our time or our love.

David Brooks latest NYT column: “What if we are the bad guys?”

We are. We all are. We are good guys too.

Members of our class are always publicly speaking out for the marginalized, but somehow we always end up building systems that serve ourselves.  David Brooks

We live in gated communities and rail against segregation.

We strive for equity and access and send our kids to private schools.

We are complicit in the policies and politics of the other.

When we look across the driveway at our neighbor or look across the aisle, at our political foe, or look across the world, at a country that we shun. We look through our crookedness through our crooked lenses and we make quick judgments about this neighbor, this political foe, or this country we despise. Even though we have spent little time in this country, on the other side of the aisle, or even in that neighbor’s house. Extraordinary how our ignorance does not impede our prejudice but inflame it.

We know their crooked hearts because we have one beating in our chests.

We have all read lots of amusing stories about Republicans and Democrats who have found each other and become friends, or Jews and Muslims, or rival gang members. People on the opposite ends of the spectrum that find each other and are surprised by the humanity and the commonality that resides there.

It has always been there.

Let’s let our crooked hearts love our crooked neighbors.