-- Philonese Floyd weeps at the site of the execution of his brother
We’ve had more than our fill of bad luck recently. The Coronavirus pandemic and lockdown measures, with 40 million people losing their jobs, were bad enough. And then we got last Monday, May 25th, in Minneapolis.
Someone recently wrote on social media that it was time to “choose up sides,” as if there was a line in the sand on which to make a stand. Obviously, this came from someone who didn’t have all the lights turned on upstairs. But more importantly, that kind of talk only throws gas on the fire.
We don’t need inflammatory speech like that. The temperature in the land has already busted the top of the societal thermometer. We’ve had enough.
Everyone has had enough: enough of riot and destruction, enough of bigotry and injustice.
On all sides.
Because when it comes to humanity and justice, peace and unity, there can be no “sides.” We are one country, one human race.
Every human being should be horrified by the torturous execution of +George Floyd. Every human with a sense of justice (and this should cover everyone made in the image of God) should be angered by the delay in the arrest of the fired officer who murdered him, and the ongoing delay of the arrest of the other three ex-officers who are accomplices in the murder. Every adult who’s seen death up close will shake his head in disbelief at the official autopsy: asphyxiation cannot be camouflaged by euphemism.
It is logically and Christianly impossible to excuse or minimize this injustice. And, frankly, there is much reasonable cause for social protest.
But there is no cause at all for riot and rampage … no cause for water bottle throwing, cherry bomb and bottle-rocket firing, and in-your-face spouting of cursing and vulgarity … no cause (except for cheap criminality) for breaking windows and looting … no cause on heaven or earth (but maybe hell) for setting buildings ablaze.
There is, at the same time, no cause at all for the President to clear a street with militarized police, tear gas, and flash grenades – all of this just to brandish a Holy Bible in a gesture that I, a PK who’s watched thousands of Billy Graham-type sermons, have never seen.
The Bible cannot and must not be held up as a sign of hardfisted power.
There is a sharp and moral difference between protesting and rioting.
Riots are never constructive. At the end of every destructive riot there is not only property loss, but loss of hope, loss of community, even loss of life. Despair sets in. People are torn apart, separated into grudge-charged labels.
Protest, on the other hand, can change things. America itself was born out of protest. The Protestant Reformation made “protest” a religious name, and it brought about many good things for not only Protestants, but even for Roman Catholics and other Christian communities. In the 19th Century, evangelicals and revivalists were at the forefront of abolition, labor reform, and monopoly-busting. Another Martin Luther (as in “MLK”) led a series of non-violent protests that at least started a process of positive change.
Admittedly, the change hasn’t gone far enough. That is a fact. It is not changeable by point-of-view.
When it comes to point-of-view, or perspective, I frequently try out a “thought experiment” that I highly recommend. It’s called “turning the tables.” It goes like this: if I saw a man from my own community cuffed face-down on the pavement with his neck knelt down upon, how would I feel? Or if a young woman who had my skin color was mistakenly shot in her own home? Or if I’d seen the same sort of thing on TV not just once or a few times but more than I could count?
How would I feel if I had to set my son or grandson down and have “the talk” with him -- not about the birds and the bees, but about always being hypervigilant, to stay not only safe but “safe looking”?
I can tell my granddaughter today that if she was ever scared, she can run to the nearest policeman. I just hope that my friend can say the same thing to her little Isaiah, an African-American child who’s winsome as my Evelina Rose.
If the tables were turned like this, and I had much to protest and much to fear, I hope that I would listen to people like the rapper Killer Mike, who said this past Monday in Atlanta, “Don’t burn down your own house … if you want to change things, get out and vote!”
But the tables are not really turned for me, nor for you. Like it or not, there’s a crisis we have to face and there is peril. As a community, we need to approach this crisis in a problem-solving attitude. We need to be cool, calm, and professional. We need to suppress inflammatory speech: just as we would not tolerate violent speech from rioters, so we cannot tolerate ugly words from civil authorities. We need to -- once again quoting Killer Mike -- “make our houses fortresses of peace.”
We need to deliberately reach across the divisions and keep up the hard work of “un-dividing.” We need to carry on the work of racial reconciliation and justice. Christians -- whether Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Evangelical, Episcopalian, Mainline Protestant and Fundamentalist, and Charismatic and Pentecostal -- need to immediately stop thinking of social justice as "liberal." Labeling the concern of justice like this is at least lazy, if not deliberately evasive, or even craven.
We have to insist on moral courage from our religious and political leaders: there can’t be any delay in denouncing brutality and injustice … there can’t be time taken to check your polls and to stick your finger in the air …
… my senators and your senators, my representative and your representative, must no longer be controlled by tweets from the Whitehouse.
We need to demand the de-militarization of civil police: police need to look more like Mayberry than Judge Dredd. We need to demand that the military permanently stay out of civil involvement. The Insurrection Act of 1807 must be repealed and rejected: it is deeply immoral. As the son-in-law of a decorated WWII vet and Ex-POW, I have always honored American soldiery: deploying them to American streets is a deep dishonor to the memory of every fallen American hero.
We need to make sure everyone 18 and over can vote, and know that they have full suffrage and participation in the story we call “the American Experiment.” There is nothing conservative or Christian about ever making voting hard. In this time of pandemic, mail-in balloting should be available to everyone and everywhere.
Since I’m a Christian, I’m going to wax a little religious here. Jesus cares about only one ethnicity, and that is humanity. “In Christ,” St Paul says in Galatians, “there is neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor freeman” -- meaning that the human race is un-divideable, un-categorizable, un-labelable.
And I could go on with the verse’s sentiments: “In Christ there is neither black nor white, neither Anglo nor Hispanic, neither legal or undocumented, neither rich nor poor.” In His humanity, there are no racial or socio-economic divisions: these were never God’s Will -- the Garden of Eden, or the City of God, is the only Christian politics there can be.
There are and can be no sides: God doesn’t recognize a single one, inside or out.
I remember the protests of the Sixties, and true enough, there were a lot of regrettable things then said and done. But there was a winsome candle that flickered here and there. One such winsome example was a song that I learned at Camp Sunrise Mountain in 1969 -- a song that we should probably dust off and start singing again:
“Let there be peace on earth
And let it begin with me
Let there be Peace on earth
The peace that was meant to be
With God as our Father
Brothers all are we
Let me walk with my brother
In perfect harmony.”
I'd rather sound sappy like that, than draw a line in the sand.
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