No words

I have not written for a week in which I have been extremely busy.  I led small groups at camp for young adults from Monday through Thursday.  During that time I heard some powerful keynotes and found myself pondering much about life. On Friday I led boundary training for the ministers of the DOC and UCC which was enjoyable and got be in touch with the gift and challenge of being a pastor. Saturday I went to anti racism training and was confronted anew with the sin of slavery and the reality of white privelege.

The past two days there were horrific killings in Texas and Ohio and after six days of soul work and heightened awareness of our call to community and love, I find I have no words.  No words that can express the frustration, sadness, grief, anger I feel about the continued hateful speech of our president and the failure of our congress to do something about gun control.  No words.

I found this article written by Michael Gerson - a conservative republican - and will let his words speak for me.  I wish I were this articulate.

Michael Gerson: The return of America's cruelest passion

I HAD intended to ignore President Trump's latest round of racially charged taunts against an African American elected official, and an African American activist, and an African American journalist and a whole city with a lot of African Americans in it.

But I made the mistake of pulling James Cone's "The Cross and the Lynching Tree" off my shelf — a book designed to shatter convenient complacency. Cone recounts the case of a white mob in Valdosta, Ga., in 1918, that lynched an innocent man named Haynes Turner. Turner's enraged wife, Mary, promised justice for the killers. The sheriff responded by arresting her, and then turning her over to the mob, which included women and children. According to one source, Mary Turner was "stripped, hung upside down by the ankles, soaked with gasoline and roasted to death. In the midst of this torment, a white man opened her swollen belly with a hunting knife and her infant fell to the ground and was stomped to death."

God help us. It is hard to write the words. This evil — the evil of white supremacy, resulting in dehumanization, inhumanity and murder — is the worst stain, the greatest crime, of American history. It is the thing that nearly broke the nation. It is the thing that proved generations of Christians to be vicious hypocrites. It is the thing that turned normal people into moral monsters, capable of burning a grieving widow to death and murdering her child.

During 300 years of routine horrors — the slave ships, the brandings, the separation of families, the beatings, the lynchings, the constant flood of humiliation, the racist ads for soap and toothpaste, the anti-black riots, the segregation of buses and pools and schools and suburbs, the sundown towns, the kangaroo courts, the police dogs and water cannons, the church bombings, the cruel and petty tyranny of whites, reinforced by the most prominent politicians in the country — during all of this, none of the descendants of Europe were able to stamp this evil out. As James Baldwin said in 1963, "The only people in the country at the moment who believe either in Christianity or in the country are the most despised minority in it."

Racism is the fire that left our country horribly disfigured. It is the beast we try to keep locked in the basement. When the president of the United States plays with that fire or takes that beast out for a walk, it is not just another political event. It is a cause for shame. It is the violation of martyrs' graves. It is obscene graffiti on the Lincoln Memorial. It is, in the eyes of history, the betrayal — the re-betrayal — of Haynes and Mary Turner and their child. And all of this is being done by an ignorant and arrogant narcissist, reviving racist tropes for political gain, indifferent to the wreckage he is leaving, the wounds he is ripping open.

What does all this mean politically? It means that Trump's divisiveness is getting worse, not better. He makes racist comments, appeals to racist sentiments and enflames racist passions. The rationalization that he is not, deep down in his heart, really a racist is meaningless. Trump's continued offenses mean that a large portion of his political base is energized by racist tropes and the language of white grievance. And it means — whatever their intent — that those who downplay, or excuse, or try to walk past these offenses are enablers.

Some political choices are not just stupid or crude. They represent the return of our country's cruelest, most dangerous passion. Such racism indicts Trump. Treating racism as a typical or minor matter indicts us.