“SEWAGE SPILLING OUT”
In my 30+ years as pastor at Oakhurst Presbyterian, I unfortunately encountered many episodes of sewage spilling up from stopped up pipes at the church. It was bad enough when one toilet would get stopped up, but we often had whole pipelines stopped up. On those occasions, the sewage would overflow from a cleanout pipe in the floor somewhere – near the clothes closet, in the nursery, and in the day care center. Caroline and I and many other people would often spend hours mopping or vacuuming up raw sewage. I remember Fred Kuhstoss and I spending all one day cleaning up a sewage overflow from a toilet in the Phoenix day care center. The remarkable Dave Hess heroically pulled up some stairs and worked under them to re-pipe one place where the stoppage was developing, but the main culprit was a long drain pipe outside, going UP a hill. Finally in 2006-2007, we raised enough money to pay a contractor to take care of the problem.
I thought of this process as I heard of the assassination of Charlie Kirk last week. It is a sign of my white, male privilege that I did not know who he was until he was killed. The Black people with whom I talked all knew who he was because he was a throwback to the old racist tropes. Though he was killed with a single shot, it reminded me of the continuing sewage spill of our love of, and indeed worship of, guns. Kirk was one of those who advocated for the necessity of guns, and in no small irony, it was that belief in guns that took his life. Let no one hear that I am applauding his death – it was abhorrent. Yet, as we seem to be learning, his assassin was not a radical left advocate, as the President so inelegantly and prejudicially said. Rather his killer seemed to be an adherent of an even harder right stand.
The hurling of epithets from the President and the right-wing commentators so reminded me of the sewage spills at Oakhurst. They just keep on coming, and only strong actions will stop the sewage spills – strong actions like the banning of assault weapons (we did it from 1994-2004, until the Republican Congress let the ban expire); strong actions like stemming white supremacy, which is definitely on the rise; strong actions like the assertion of the fundamental dignity and equality of every person.
And, like the many sewage pipes at Oakhurst, the sewage just continues to come at us from so many directions. President Trump, instead of seeking to calm us down, fanned the flames of violence, as Hitler did in 1933 with the Reichstag fire. SCOTUS last week agreed to racial profiling in the ICE raids, even though they had previously made such a big to-do against using racial classification as a factor in college admissions.
I wish I could blame Donald Trump for all of this, but he is more the voice and the face of the sewage spills in American culture. It began centuries ago in the idea of white supremacy, but its most recent manifestation came in the reaction to the election of Barack Obama as President. Since then, so many people classified as “white” in our country have made it their mission to push people of color back as far as possible. It began with the Tea Party movement in 2008, which produced such astonishing victories in the 2010 mid-terms, then morphed into Trumpism in 2015-2016.
I wish I could say that it was only “race” that is the problem – that would be hard enough to solve, but economic factors play a big part too. The Clinton/Gingrich partnership that gave us NAFTA, shifting many jobs overseas, also gave us this resentment from white people who lost their jobs in the process. Race and economic factors have combined to make so many sewage spills flowing out of the pipes of our individual and collective mindsets, so much so that we are killing one another with our beloved guns.
I remember those dreary days of cleaning up sewage spills at Oakhurst. It always helped to have others step in to assist, and I think that is a clue to our finding ways out of the current cultural mess. As Pastor David Lewicki put it in his fine sermon yesterday at North Decatur Presbyterian, God is speaking to us just as She spoke to Abraham and Sarah. God’s first word to them was not who She was but was rather: “Go.” Go on a journey to help people find a new definition. Let us do that too – let us take the first step, to reach out on a journey to proclaim dignity, equity, and justice. It’s the only way to stop the sewage spills.