“A YEAR LATER”
This is the
first anniversary of a couple of things important to me. First, I retired officially a year ago on
January 15, and it has been a good year for me and Caroline. I greatly miss the people and the life of
Oakhurst, but I don’t miss the meetings and the stress of the building (and I
am so grateful to Dave Hess for relieving so much of that building stress over
my last couple of years.) I have enjoyed
traveling and writing and not having a schedule. Thanks also to our daughter Susan who
suggested that I write a weekly blog – it has been fun for me, and I hope that
it has been helpful to you!
Second,
this is the first anniversary of Donald Trump taking office as president. He wanted to eviscerate the idea of
“government,” and it is no small irony that the government shut down on his
anniversary weekend. He is part of a
long history of leaders who see government, especially the federal government,
as enemy to domination by the powerful and rich. Ronald Reagan is the modern incarnation of
that belief, but it has continued to flow through Newt Gingrich and Dick Chaney
and Tom DeLay and Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan and Donald Trump.
Another
part of that modern reincarnation is the role that the federal government
reluctantly played in finally supporting the civil rights movement. Growing up in and believing in white
supremacy as a white Southerner, I remember the deep hostility that we had for
the federal government, and many of the speeches that you will hear on the
floor of Congress this week are a direct descendant of that hostility. We do not want our white, male domination
questioned or interrupted, and that is at the heart of the resistance to
approval of DACA. Roy Moore spoke for
many white Southerners when he indicated during the recent Alabama Senate
campaign that things were just so much better when slavery was permitted. Yes, he was defeated (thank you!), but only
because he was caught with his pants down with underage girls, and some of
those girls, now grown to women, had the courage to speak up.
I grew up
with this white supremacist mindset, and I know it well. It was only later as a young adult that I
learned how reluctant the federal government had been to intervene in the civil
rights movement. Thanks to the political
savvy and commitment of Martin Luther King, Jr., Diane Nash, A. Philip
Randolph, Ella Baker, Fannie Lou Hamer, Bayard Rustin and others, the Kennedy
brothers were forced to come in to the struggle. Indeed, many speculate that President John
Kennedy was assassinated in part because of his support of the civil rights
movement. The history of the United
States has been a struggle over the very idea of equality that drove the civil
rights movement, from the decision to approve slavery and to make
African-Americans 60% human beings in the Constitution, to the repudiation of
Reconstruction, to the re-establishment of neo-slavery as “Jim Crow,” to the
lynchings from Duluth, Minnesota to Elaine, Arkansas, to the coup in
Wilmington, North Carolina.
Fortunately,
we have had many witnesses who have been inspired by the idea of equality and
who have continued to call us back to that hallmark phrase of the Declaration
of Independence, that all {men} are created equal. Even that linguistic attempt to limit
equality to white males keeps failing.
Women and other people of all racial and economic classifications have
heard this idea and have not believed the propaganda that it is meant only for
white men. They have heard that they too
are included in this powerful idea. We
celebrate those who have called us out and called us to be who we were meant to
be, and we celebrate those who are doing it now in our midst.
That brings
me back to the “one year later” idea. We
are a time of crisis with a dangerous president, and of course the root of
“crisis” is both problem and opportunity.
It is time for all of us to listen, learn, and act for the powerful idea
of equity and justice. Let us join in
the great cloud of witnesses.
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