My country.
Our nation.
My guns.
Our children.
My rights.
Our responsibility.
My home.
Our community.
My party.
Our democracy.
My opinion.
Our understanding.
Healing
After the mob stormed, and then rampaged through the Capital last week, the word for today seems to be healing.
Biden started it. Organizing his campaign around the need and his ability to “heal the divisions” which have festered in our country over the last four years, if not longer. And, my hunch is that in most Christian worship services this morning and maybe in most Shabbat services or Evening Prayers on Friday, the idea of healing found its way to lips of clergy and the hearts and minds of those who listened to them. It certainly did in the worship service I listened to this morning. Republican lawmakers and leaders have joined the chorus asking Democratic lawmakers and leaders not to proceed with an impeachment vote against the President for the sake of healing.
Here is what troubles me about our desire for and the way we seem to be talking about healing.
It sounds to me our definition of healing and means to forget and to move on.
To forget that six people have died as a result of what happened on January 6th.
To forget that a noose, calling to mind countless years of lynching, was hung outside the Capital.
To forget that a Confederate flag was carried through the Rotunda and that someone who stormed the Capital wore a Camp Auschwitz shirt and that others wore or carried other racist and anti-semitic symbols.
Instead of forgetting, I think the opposite is needed.
I think we need to remember.
Graphically remember.
We need to remember what it looked like.
We need to remember what it sounded like.
We need to remember the rhetoric and lies which added fuel to the fire.
We need to remember the rage.
We need to remember what we felt while watching.
We need to remember the fear.
We need to remember the grief of those who have lost loved ones.
We need to remember all that and more.
And, if there is to be healing, there must also be responsibility.
Responsibility taken for their part and our part in what happened.
Those who were silent because it was politically expedient need to take responsibility.
Those who, by their words and actions, added to the distrust and the lies need to take responsibility.
Those who participated need to take responsibility.
And, you and I (at least those of us who are white) need to take responsibility.
We need to own up to our privilege, and what that has meant and what that has cost.
We need to own up to the subtle and structural ways others are held down or pushed aside.
We need, all of us, to own up to our own tribalism.
Our own distrust of those who look different or sound different.
And, we need to own up to our desire for an easy way out.
When the only way out is through the shards of what has been broken.
And will require of us hard work.
And sacrifice.
And living, for a while, with a deep discomfort and sense of dis-ease.
The Right Questions
For years, in my desk drawer, I kept a file folder filled with pages torn out of magazines and newspaper articles I read or which someone dropped off for me to read. Scraps of paper each with some tidbit of wisdom I did not want to forget or an idea which deserved more time to think about than I had when I added it to the file. And, the front and back of the manila file filled as well. Covered with quotes from something I was reading or something I had heard. My writing them down helped me file them away not only in my desk drawer, but also somewhere within the recesses of my mind where they would occasionally push their way outward to my remembering which is what happened on my walk today.
One of the quotes on that file folder is this:
“If they get you asking the wrong questions they don’t have to worry about the answers.”
I don’t know where I read it.
I think it was written or said by Saul Alinsky, but I am not sure.
I only scribbled down the quote and nothing more.
But, given where we are
In the midst of a pandemic
I began thinking about what the “right questions” might be that we should be asking.
Questions beyond…
Should we open up?
Or, when and how should we open up?
Or, when will this be over?
Or, when will we get back to normal?
Questions like…
What is the balance between rights and responsibility?
How will we define “community?”
And, how will we support and sustain that “community” in the new normal which will emerge?
How do we value tomorrow the jobs and service which we rely on so heavily today?
I don’t know the answers.
But these feel like the “right: questions.
Ones we should begin thinking and talking about.
Today.
Permission
With all we do
And go through
And deal with
And juggle
And manage
And hold together
And put in place
And accomplish
And work at
And worry about
Do we give ourselves permission
To be tired?
To say out loud “I am tired?”
And to step back?
And to take a break?
And to take a nap?
And to say “no?”
And to do nothing?
Without feeling guilty?
I hope you do that better than I do.
I am tired.
I Wish There Were More People Like Him
I have passed him before.
Me running.
Him walking along the road with a garbage bag in his hand.
We nod our greeting to each other as I make my way up the hill.
I saw him again today.
He was picking up trash along a half mile stretch of the road on which he lives.
Such a simple act.
And one that stands counter to the prevailing culture in which we live.
It is not his trash.
He did not throw the cups or the cans or the wrappers out his car window as he drove by.
He did not assume that someone else would clean up the mess.
It is his road.
And it is his community.
So each week he walks that half mile picking up the trash.
I wish more of us shared his attitude.
And, rather than just complaining or pointing fingers or waiting for someone else,
say to ourselves, “I will do something about it.”
For him, it is picking up the litter along the road where he lives.
For me it will be something else.
For you???
You decide.
After all, it is our streets and it is our community.
R and R
No, not rest and relaxation.
But, rights and responsibilities.
In all the ongoing discussions about rights…
The recent legislation on guns signed into law in Georgia.
The recent decisions by the Supreme Court about campaign finance.
The recent controversy in Nevada over grazing rights.
What is missing is the corresponding conversation about the responsibility which go alongside the rights we fight for and cherish. I would love to see the NRA which aggressively lobbies for gun rights speak with an equally strong voice about the responsibilities of gun ownership and speak out publicly when an individual or a group shirks that responsibility and misuses guns. I would love to see corporate community which lobbied for a greater role in the political process initiate a serious conversation about corporate responsibility and devise a way they help hold one another responsible for being responsible corporate citizens. I would love to see Cliven Bundy, who declares he has a right to use public land to graze his cattle, also speak about how ranchers and farmers and others use such land responsibly. How much would conversations like that begin to reframe the way we are able to discuss and debate critical issues?
I am sure those conversations are happening.
Somewhere.
But the platform right now is too small or too narrow.
We need to find a way to move it to center stage.
Where are the corporate leaders or the gun right leaders or the public land use leaders who are going to stand up and stand there long enough to weather the barrage of negative comments that are sure to come in order to help us move these conversations forward?
