Hot button
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Acclaimed negotiator and Harvard Law School professor Roger Fisher had a thought experiment where the nuclear codes of the United States should not be located in a suitcase handcuffed to an aide. Rather, they should be surgically embedded into the chest of the aide. The aide would carry around a knife. To access the codes, the President must cut open the chest of the aide. Fisher thought that if the President was unwilling to kill one person, then the President had no right to launch a bomb to kill millions.
Clever. So clever in fact that Fisher wrote, ‘When I suggested this to friends in the Pentagon they said, ‘My God, that's terrible. Having to kill someone would distort the President's judgment. He might never push the button.’”
Jason Valendy Ident 2022
We talk about things in our society as being “hot button” issues. Our language gives us the sense that humans are so easily triggered that if we were to push them we would become hot. I wonder if part of our problem is not the issues we discuss, but that we image being so easily set off that it is like pushing a button. If we are going to stick with the button metaphor, perhaps we can take a page from Roger Fisher’s book – move the location of the button.
Can you imagine the hot buttons of your life being embedded in the heart of another? Could you imagine embedding the hot buttons of your family behind your heart? Could we create the conditions such that we are aware of the costs of pressing the button before the button is pressed?
Perhaps that is what Bonhoeffer was getting at in the book Life Together where he says, “Jesus Christ stands between the lover and the others he loves.” and “Because Christ stands between me and others, I dare not desire direct fellowship with them.” The idea being that ever Christian relationship always is mediated by Christ who stands between the two people. And so when I look at the face of the other, I see Christ first. And when they look at me, they see Christ first.
What if we understood the the “hot button” always resides on the other side of Christ. That we have to hurt, remove or even kill and “go through” Christ in order to press the hot buttons. Would we be willing to press the button knowing it comes at the harm of Christ?