Plague Journal, Remaking Our Souls
Choosing to refrain from news media consumption over the weekend, I dedicated time and emotional energy to personal projects and to others in my family. Can I afford this type of choice because I am white, male, a member of the dominant class in this society? Are some Sunday afternoon hours reading Nietzsche by the Geneva dam on the Fox River a luxury afforded, because I am white, adequately employed for much of my adult life, and have access to health care? Life has not been easy. Yet, I never felt that I had to play a rigged game.
I knew there were riots, civil unrest, police action in the cities of Minneapolis, Los Angles, Atlanta, New York, Washington and Atlanta. I have witnessed large scale demonstrations against riot police before. As a close observer, I’ve seen the adrenaline fueled resolve to change a deeply felt injustice. Also, I know how uncontrolled a protest by definition is. The police must maintain order, protect property and their opponents do what they must to drive home their point. A change has to come. Accidents happen and some are injured, bloody, caught by tear gas, struck by rubber bullets. It’s high risk is to surge with other protesters against a line of black clad police. I am remembering the protests against the Vietnam War many years ago while I lived in Japan.
Wars end eventually. Racism is different. There is no reason to expect systemic racism to be reduced unless force is necessarily applied, until those who “have the say” in society, recognize they really have no choice but to change practices and attitudes.
This morning I listened to The Daily, a podcast from the New York Times. At the end of the presentation of interviews I felt tears come. I think this is worth your time to listen. You may CLICK HERE
Our brothers
are breathing under the same sky as we;
justice is a living thing.
Now is born that strange joy
which helps one live and die,
and which we shall never again postpone to a later time.
On the sorrowing earth it is the unresting thorn,
the bitter brew, the harsh wind off the sea,
the old and the new dawn.
With this joy, through long struggle,
we shall remake the soul of our time,
and a [United States] which will exclude nothing.
Excerpt, The Rebel by Albert Camus p. 306
Van Diemen’s Land
by U2
Hold me now, oh hold me now
’til this hour has gone around
And I’m gone on the rising tide
For to face Van Diemen’s land
It’s a bitter pill I swallow here
To be rent from one so dear
We fought for justice and not for gain
But the magistrate sent me away
Now kings will rule and the poor will toil
And tear their hands as they tear the soil
But a day will come in this dawning age
When an honest man sees an honest wage
Hold me now, oh hold me now
’til this hour has gone around
And I’m gone on the rising tide
For to face Van Diemen’s land
Writer(s): Adam Clayton, David Evans, Paul Hewson, Larry Mullen
2 thoughts on “Plague Journal, Remaking Our Souls”
As we know, racism is not the exclusive territory of skin color, but can take on many shapes and sizes.
From 1949 to 1980 Josip Tito ruled over a disparate group of ethnic regions, then referred to as Yugoslavia. For the most part, Yugoslav citizens were of Slavic ancestry, though Macedonians probably felt more Greek than Slavic. Prior to Tito, the ethnicities of that region were in constant conflicts with the origin of many skirmishes going back centuries. Bosnians had adopted Islamic religion well before Tito, when the Turks were the overlords, and so were at odds with most of the region, at least religiously. The Slovaks hated the Croatians and everybody hated the Serbs. Yet Tito maintained iron-fisted control over the region, declaring that the old ethic lines were dead and that everyone was now Yugoslavian.
This actually worked (sort of) for decades. Neighbors of differing backgrounds socialized and old prejudices began to wane.
But with Tito’s death and the subsequent fall of the Soviet empire, the problems began to bubble up until the region exploded under Serbian aggression lead by Slobodan Milosevic. An attempt at genocide was perpetrated on the Bosnians and many hundreds of thousands died during the conflict.
Today, the region is relatively stable, but the old animosities linger. Hatred of all those whose last names bely their backgrounds remains.
In this country, we don’t need to rely on someone’s last name to subjugate them, for we have only to visually assess the color of their skin to make a preemptive judgement about who they are and what we believe their motives might be. Ahmaud Arbery was jogging through a neighborhood and the white folks there didn’t care for the color of his skin, so they shot him dead. They didn’t stop to wonder if they might be wrong in their feelings, they just reacted, in large part because they have been given permission by the current President of the United States to react with overt hatred, since that is his M. O. as well.
We have been divided up into the ethnic fiefdoms in the U.S. and told that we should blame the “other” for our lot in life. Under pragmatic and beneficial leadership, those tendencies are placed on hold and, as they did under Tito, begin to wane over time. But when we have a so-called leader who’s main goal is to foment that hatred and to unleash the fear of anyone who doesn’t fit with what we see in the mirror each day, then we are in for a long period of instability and unrest. Perhaps that’s ultimately what he and his cronies want. It is our job, and the job of any rational person, to resist this at any cost. The survival of our species is in play.
Devil or angel, what will it be? Either can be called up from our inner self. It is no abstraction to recognize that humans are mammals that traffic in good and evil. I agree that we have our own Milosevic in the White House. In the past friends of mine who supported Trump seemed confused when I said that I would never support him for the reason that he was a bully. Many are willing to overlook his inclination toward cruelty. I hope there are enough of us to hold the line for decency and humanity to vote him out of office on November 11th.