Archive | Civil War RSS feed for this section

Gettysburg and Charlottesville

20 Aug

Long a fan of all things Lincoln, I was excited to visit Gettysburg for the first time. Stopping there on our way to tour Fallingwater, the famous Frank Lloyd Wright house in western Pennsylvania, my best friend and I spent two days there.

It is, indeed, an awesome, awful place. Gettysburg is a little town with a massive cemetery in the middle. Thinking souls cannot escape the heavy reverence of the place, even in the midst of school groups with young kids running and jumping around.

If you stand at Seminary Ridge, looking out at what historians have called the High Mark of the Confederacy, the Union General Meade sits astride his horse a few yards behind you looking in the same direction. Two miles away you can make out another figure on a horse facing you across the divide. It is General Lee, of course.

I don’t know who was charged with the task of placing the monuments at Gettysburg. I think I understand why he did what he did. The positioning of the monuments is certainly quite effective in demonstrating what it was like on those fateful three days. Monuments for the Confederate states are placed in a line to the right and left of Lee’s statue, all the way across the field, I suppose in an approximation of where the companies were camped. Gettysburg is a place where the monuments serve the purpose they should—to freeze the reality of a moment in our history that no one should forget.

A Southerner by both birth and choice, I was oddly uncomfortable until we had driven to the other side and stood with Lee, looking from his vantage point. I did not feel welcome on the Union side. We climbed a tower not far from the Georgia monument and gazed back across at Meade in the distance. Surveying the field from either direction, you see nothing today but a sea of grass—but you cannot escape the heaviness of 6,000 souls who died in the space of half an hour. One of them was a great-uncle of mine, buried in Ellijay in a small country churchyard.

There’s a story told that when Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox Court House, Grant did not take his sword, nor the side-arms of any of his officers. Celebration over victory was quelled among the Union army. Col. Chamberlain, the college professor turned Civil War volunteer who had also fought at Gettysburg—commanded his troops to stand at “carry arms” as the Confederate soldiers, some 25,000 of them, laid down their rifles. Forty years later, Chamberlain would record that tears streamed down the faces on both sides.

After Lee had returned to his troops, Grant rode out to the front lines of his former enemy to see how the laying down of arms was proceeding. Having not anticipated this, Lee had not warned his front line of such a thing, and when he heard of Grant’s approach, he jumped on his horse and galloped to meet him. There is a story that when they came up side-by-side, astride their horses, Grant tipped his hat to Lee in salute, and in unspoken acceptance of this magnanimity, Lee allegedly responded in kind.

As I stood there on the tower, I couldn’t banish the feeling that something was wrong with the picture—it rattled in my brain long after we had gone. And then it came to me. There’s a monument missing in Gettysburg. There should be a statue of two soldiers, Confederate and Union, hats off, hands extended. We memorialize the fighting, the loss, the violence, the winning and losing. We do not honor the sacrifices, whether noble or frivolous in retrospect, of the thousands who died; we do not rise up to demonstrate respect for each other’s humanity.

 

Since last week’s tragedy in Charlottesville, I’ve read a couple of articles about people “outed” as neo-Nazis, white supremacists in their hometowns—people who’ve lost their jobs, found themselves the recipients of anger from people they once counted as friends, and now, in shock, cry that their lives have been destroyed.

I wonder if it will occur to each of them that they now live what for some is an everyday experience, except that they never did anything to draw such ire except to be black or Jewish or Muslim.

I wonder if it will occur to them that even now, this painful experience of theirs doesn’t approach the horror of those who have stood shaking with terror for their lives, watching as hooded men burned crosses on their lawns, people whose families—but for our mendacity—would never have been here, would never have been torn from their families and communities, chained and dragged onto boats, sold on docks in Charleston and elsewhere like bags of meal. I wonder if it will occur to them that the experience is but the tip of the iceberg compared to the six million who less than 100 years ago were stripped of their property, branded with numbers, crammed onto trains and transported to “camps” where they would be incinerated like garbage.

I wonder if it will occur to them that even now, unlike all of those, for them there is still a fair measure of hope. They will be uncomfortable for a time, but they are free to move to another state, another place, and be safe because of their ability to blend in.

I am angry. There is a large part of me that says, “Hey, karma is hell, isn’t it?” And then I wonder what Jesus would do if he were standing here with me. And then I’m ashamed of myself because I’m pretty sure I know the answer.

He would meet them on the road and the light shining about them would be as bright as the sun, rendering them temporarily incapacitated—just as looking at the eclipse without filters tomorrow will do. He will guide them to the end of the road—not the road to Damascus but the road to Montgomery, Richmond, Gettysburg, Dachau, Auschwitz. There they would find spirits like those who met Saul—the very spirits he had persecuted, lorded over, murdered. Groups like the families of the victims of Mother Emanuel, who would care for their wounds, show them their scars, and yet murmur with great compassion, “Now you know.”

Could I do it? I don’t know. The thought makes bile rise in my throat. I must admit that it wouldn’t come easy, but I’m pretty sure that Jesus calls me to that task. And I’m also pretty sure that only that will accomplish anything of substance, of value. Neither tearing down statues nor denying the reality of the atrocities we have committed will weave us together as a people our founding fathers, endowed with feet of clay just like the rest of us, dreamed of. There will always be those who, mistreated, mistaught as children, will find nothing about themselves on which to hang their own sense of value except things that they had nothing to do with—skin color, gender, the faith traditions of their families, the patch of land where they were born.

No, the first step to healing the divide—counterintuitive as what most of Jesus’s pronouncements and actions were—is obvious. If no one else, Grant and Lee and Chamberlain understood.

When you meet humans on the street, in your car as you pass at an intersection, in the line at the grocery store, in the halls of your church or synagogue or mosque, in the library at school…regardless of their outer appearances, in honor of their pain and yours…

Tip your hat.

A New Mind in Salem

21 May

7gables-smallWhen I was in college, I sang for three or four years with a group named “A New Mind.” The name, which preceded my involvement, was taken from a line from St. Paul’s letter to the Romans (12:2): “And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God.”

I loved the name of the group — both it and St. Paul’s words echoed what I believed Jesus meant when he told the Pharisee Nicodemus that we must be “born again.” I believed then, and now, that the reason Jesus chose to use the idea of birth in the statement was that he knew that to renew our minds would require the abandonment or at least suspension of everything we’ve become so sure we know — returning to a place where we view the world and each other with the eyes of innocent curiosity and loving trust, drawing wholly new conclusions. I’m reminded of a story I read on Facebook where a young boy was so excited about getting his hair cut in a buzz because he looked forward to his kindergarten teacher’s being unable to tell him and his best friend apart. Cute enough because of his excitement, the story was quite convicting when we discovered that our young boy was white and his best friend black. I hope against hope that his teacher played along with the joke.

My best friend and I recently spent some vacation time in Salem, Massachusetts. Its notoriety, of course, whether current-day citizens are happy about it or not, is that it’s the site of the 1692 witch trials. We visited a couple of museums that presented the story of how the whole idea of witches came about and the particulars of the actual trials, one of the clearly most disturbing episodes of our history. In my mind, the story is second only to the much longer period during which those of us of Anglo-Saxon ancestry diminished an entire group of humans to the level of property — all for the purpose of propping up an economy that promised to make a few opportunistic individuals incredibly wealthy. (Sounds familiar for some reason.)

As it happens, I have a tie to both — a lineage that tracks all the way back to Salem and participation in that bloody war just 150 years ago. And I descend from folks who were on the wrong side of history in both scenarios — a couple whose testimony contributed to the eventual hanging of Sarah Good, and those who fought, often with no understanding at all until much later, for the “right” to treat other human beings as a commodity.

Oddly, however, it wasn’t all the witch stuff per se that would be central to what I took away from Salem. It was the difference between the response of those Salemites and that of my other ancestors 170 years later. The survivors of the Puritan massacre, started by the ungodly mix of spoiled children and an opportunistic out-of-his-league young minister, were much quicker to see the error of their ways and the iniquity of their actions.

I imagine the fact that my own Salem ancestors soon left and their progeny gradually found their way south in the next century may have had something to do with their need to distance themselves, to forget their connection to what had taken place there. The move would certainly be consistent with the response of those Southerners who, unable to physically remove themselves, retreated instead to denial about their own inhumanity and focused instead on the perception that they were the persecuted. Distance is as distance does, I guess.

Those families who stayed in Salem, although eventually exploiting the horror for economic reasons, were forced to reflect on what could be learned and how to recognize and stop such hysterical behavior in its tracks. They’re still doing it, by the way. After 300 years, historians have finally come to some measure of agreement about the exact location in town where the accused women and men were hanged and dumped into a ditch. A new park will be constructed on “Gallows Hill” in the next year or so, designed to promote reflection.

Not so in the South, I’m afraid. Now, I heartily agree that the Confederate flag and monuments to those who used their ill-gotten gains to build schools and institutions should be removed from places central to the everyday lives of today’s inhabitants. I agree that, for a time, they should be replaced with monuments to those who did the unpopular things even when their actions ran them out of town, both literally and figuratively. Charleston, S.C.’s recent honoring of Judge Waties Waring is such an example. A native of Charleston whose ruling would set the precedent for the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. The Board of Education, he would live out his final days in New York. But as in Salem, I support the continued display of our misguided ancestors, elsewhere, in a much quieter place, an ongoing reminder of and place of reflection on what the mendacity of bearing false witness can do.

Hawthorne-smallBut back to Salem. Like many, I had frankly forgotten another of Salem’s claims to fame, someone whose statue inhabits a mall of sorts. I remembered Nathaniel Hawthorne as an author, of course, but not having re-read any of his works except The Scarlet Letter in close to 40 years, I did not recall that the actual “house of seven gables” on which his novel was based was there. I also didn’t remember until visiting Salem that one of the “hanging” judges during the witch trials was actually an ancestor of Hawthorne’s, a Judge Hathorne. (I didn’t misspell his name, by the way, nor was the change due to a misrecording. No, Nathaniel himself inserted the “w” into his name, in an overt attempt to distance himself.)

After visiting the house, which is thought to be the oldest still-standing wooden structure in New England, I decided it was high time I re-read the book, so I downloaded the e-book and started reading it on my phone that night. Within just a chapter or two, the general plot came back to me, but I so enjoy the structure of Hawthorne’s sentences, I endeavored to read it in its entirety. In a description of the daguerreotypist Hargrove, I came across one of those sentences: “As all is activity and vicissitude to the new mind of a child, so might it be, likewise, to a mind that had undergone a kind of new creation, after its long-suspended life.”

I have no idea if Nathaniel Hawthorne knew anything of Romans 12:2 or Jesus’s admonition that following in his steps required being “born again,” but I can tell you that young Mr. Hawthorne met a kindred soul in me. In the midst of our long-suspended lives, our minds need a kind of new creation, indeed.

May it be so.

Two Days

31 Oct
Every once in a while, I have a day when the convergence of events leaves me contemplative for several days afterward.
Sometimes the days leave me laughing. Sometimes they leave me reflecting on how far we have yet to go to see either the kingdom of God on earth or the dream of America manifest for all its citizens.
An example of the former happened a few years ago when I, for the first time in some 30 years, attended a Holy Week service at my new Episcopal church. There were two congregations, one referred to as “Anglo” (which included a small contingent of people of color mostly of Jamaican ancestry), one Hispanic, who usually held separate services to overcome the language barrier. On this particular night, however, the rector had decided to combine the two. Our programs included the verses of Scripture and the words to the songs to be sung, alternating in reverse from the actual performance. In other words, if the Scripture was read in English, the words in the program were in Spanish. If a song was sung in Spanish, the words to the song in English were printed in the program.
The beginning of the service quickly illuminated the differences in our congregations. Not having an organ in the Youth Center where the Hispanic services were normally held, a band including guitarists and an electric bass player were positioned to the left, across from the Anglo congregation’s choirmaster, who doubled as the organist. Both played in accompaniment, whether the song was sung in Spanish or English.
Also on this night, there were a number of children presented for baptism from the Hispanic congregation, so there were quite a few large families in attendance with children of a variety of ages. More than once, I found myself reaching under the pew in front of me to rescue a wayward pacifier or other toy. At one point, a cell phone rang out from a couple of pews behind me and a Spanish conversation ensued, despite whatever else was going on up front.
A longstanding traditionalist in terms of church music, the choirmaster, incidentally a gay man, had chosen the English songs as he usually did, to match the Scripture readings. One of his choices was the Negro spiritual hymn, “Go Down, Moses,” which I was, frankly, surprised to find in the Episcopal hymnal.
As a lead-in to the song, the bass player began to play a simple, but familiar, rhythm often employed in country music. I realized suddenly that what he was playing was the underline of the fight song of my high school before our “white” and “black” schools were consolidated post court-ordered desegregation. We’d been the “Rebels,” and the song was “Rebel Rouser,” for those who might know it. For those who don’t, yes, I’m talking about those Rebels.
I glanced to the front at the rector and deacons, all of whom looked a bit like deer in headlights, surrounded by a host of beautiful young Hispanic couples with children in gleaming white dresses, and I lost it right then and there. I laughed until tears ran down my face. A gay white man and a Hispanic bass player were playing a Negro spiritual to the tune of a Confederate-tinged fight song in a church still loosely tied to the English monarchy. I don’t know if anyone else in the place made those connections, but I can say without reservation that I have seldom enjoyed a church service as much before or since.
Fast forward to this past weekend, and you find me in downtown Knoxville, Tennessee. My best friend and I, who both played on our high school girls’ basketball teams in the early 1970s, had gone on a whim to visit the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame. While there, we spent a half hour dribbling around on a couple of half-courts and trying to play H-O-R-S-E. (Today, I’m reminded of what the days after the first practice were like 45 years ago.)
I found myself thinking about how many of the inductees I had never heard of, how many women had gone before, reaching back to the early 20th century, to lay the groundwork for me to play—remembering too that I played when Title IX had first become the law of the land and it was still thought that we female sorts as a rule were incapable of playing 5-on-5, all running the full court. We had at least progressed to where it was admissable for two of us to run up and down the court, but the others of us had to stay in our respective half-courts.
My friend and I had noticed a food festival of some sort setting up in a large field across from the Sun Sphere, which remains from the World’s Fair held in Knoxville in 1982, and decided to eat lunch there. It turned out to be an international food festival, supporting the local Muslim community, with offerings from all around the Near East, except for those of Israeli extraction, of course. The partakers of the feast ran the gamut of ethnicities, from WASPs like us to people of color, from the obviously well-to-do to some I suspect were homeless.
We went to our room to watch college football and take post-lunch naps before heading out for an early dinner. We walked a few blocks to the Market Street Square and put our names on a waiting list for one of the many restaurants there. We were sitting out on a bench waiting to receive a text that our table was ready when a probably homeless fellow walked by, pointing up to the sky, and said, “The birds are back.”
There above us were literally thousands of black birds, flying in a massive circle. Every once in a while, a small group would break off, fly away from the swarm, and then return, joining in once again. While watching the spectacle, I happened to hear some of the words of three men who stood diagonally across the square from where we sat—a diatribe about how it was God’s will that women remain in the home, cooking for their families and bearing children. I will assume that playing basketball, much less running for office, was out of the question.
I won’t describe these men because it doesn’t matter what sub-groups they’re members of. Besides, you’ve already projected onto them your own imagination, anyway, and proclaimed it as truth, despite the likelihood that you were hundreds of miles away from that square. There are many different iterations of those who would demonstrate the arrogance of speaking for God, from virtually every religious tradition, including your own, whatever it is. The noise is loud today, in every public square.
Our text finally came. We ate quietly, watching with UT fans as their team, playing away in South Carolina, came up short, and walked back to the hotel. It had been quite a day. But this time, I wasn’t laughing. I was wondering, instead, of what those a hundred years from now, will think of us.
We’ve been here before, many times. We can choose to celebrate a diversity of experience that benefits us all and doesn’t require that one group of people dominate another on the basis of wealth or physical characteristic or country of origin or any other differences we had nothing to do with. (I’ve accomplished a lot of things, but the fact that I’m a Southern white female is not among them.)
We can choose to defend those who do not seek to harm us from the delusions of those scared to death, screaming that the system is rigged against them when the truth is, on a level playing field, they can’t measure up unless the system is rigged in their favor. We can choose to laugh at the ironies like white and Hispanic people playing Negro spirituals with an undercurrent of Confederate leanings, and then, sheepish, shake each other’s hands and go about our business, no matter how different our cultures are, only to return when it matters to join together for a spectacular finish, like the birds that flew above me on Saturday. Sounds a lot like the kingdom of God to me. Sounds a lot like the dream of America, too.
The question is will we?

One by One

28 Jun

I’ve chimed in here and there on Facebook during the past few days, sparring with others over the Confederate flag in general and in specifics in the state of South Carolina, but, introvert that I am, I had to wait before writing a blog to let the dust and noise settle so I could contemplate what I am truly feeling. The first item of business I had to consider is the enormity of the deaths of nine Christian disciples at the hands of a misguided, and perhaps demented young man, and the response of the people of South Carolina and across the South itself. And then there were not one, but two rulings from the U.S. Supreme Court, both of which honestly surprised me because of the cynicism I admit I’ve felt in recent years. And then today, I learned that the Episcopal Church, of which I am a member, elected a new presiding bishop who is African-American—from the Diocese of North Carolina, a one-time Confederate state and my newly adopted home. On the very first ballot, no less.

Years ago, when I was a psychotherapist, our “protocol” was to give a new client a battery of tests—a measure whether anxiety was a long-standing problem or just a function of a recent trauma, the MMPI, occasionally others based on what the client’s presenting complaint was. The results of those “inventories” provided a jumping off point for therapy, and it was easy to form an initial sense of the areas needing exploration. There was never a time when I wasn’t forced to completely reevaluate the ongoing treatment plan in my head on the basis of the disclosure of an experience by the client and his or her perception of the event I couldn’t have anticipated. I learned quickly that every person who walked through our doors was unique, that I could make no generalized statements about any of them on the basis of their employment or clothes or physical characteristics. Symptoms, yes, but not demographic data. For me to assist them in finding a path to healthier functioning in their own individual lives and relationships, in their own individual circumstances, with their own individual bodies and brains required that they trust me to hear their stories from their points of view without judgment. In a word, it required me to respect and honor the boundaries between us, the differences, while seeking the similarities that supercede them—our desires to love and achieve, be special and important to someone, to be loved and appreciated for who we are, irrespective of where we came from or the mistakes we have made.

As a child, what drew me to the stories about Jesus was the idea that God knew every hair on my head. Not the heads of all girls or the heads of straight-A students or the heads of all Americans or the heads of all Southerners or the heads of all Southern Baptists or the heads of children raised by single parents or the heads of financially-challenged families or whatever demographic group of which I was a part or was to become a part of in the future. God knew every hair on MY head. God knew every circumstance, every experience, every good behavior, every bad behavior, and wonder of all wonders, loved me in spite of them all. It didn’t matter what other members of the groups of which I was a part did or didn’t do, said or didn’t say, approved of or didn’t approve of. I was considered, comforted, confronted, blessed, all by my little, inconsequential self. What they did, what they thought…was irrelevant.

For me, the next logical step in that burgeoning awareness was knowing that if God knew every hair on my particular head, then he knew every hair on everybody’s else’s head, too, and that he loved them as fiercely and as unconditionally as me, no matter what I thought of them.

The only question, then, was what to do when the boundaries collided. And when that collision happened—and it is inevitable, a hundred times a day—how do we respond?

Jesus lived as the ultimate respecter of boundaries. It didn’t matter that Zaccheus was a tax collector, despite the fact that most of the people in the crowd probably wanted to strangle him and had already dismissed him as a traitor to his people. He called him down from the tree and sat down at his table with him. It didn’t matter that the woman at the well, or the woman caught in adultery, was someone that he, according to local or cultural laws, was prohibited from speaking to. He stood right there, in front of God and everybody, and told her—in the act of speaking to her—that she too could drink the living water straight from the well, without bowing to any man or religious law. He even looked at the thief hung beside him on a cross and said, in effect, “Hey, I don’t know what you did, but I know who you are, and you’re coming with me.”

In terms of the U.S. Constitution, the boundary questions are the same. If we are to be equally protected and equally privileged under the law, at what point is there a collision that renders us unequal? Who gets to say where the line is? And what do we do to try and ensure, however imperfectly, that no equal citizen is disenfranchised from the expression of that equality? That, and that alone, is the job of the U.S. Supreme Court, of nine equally-endowed and equally imperfect people.

In the end, whether we’re talking about Jesus or the U.S. Constitution, it all comes down to respecting each other’s boundaries. Doing the oh, so difficult work of examining our own motives and acting in a way that accepts the pragmatic reality that there are limits to the expression of our freedom and the limit is the boundary of the “other,” whether we’re talking about the neighbor we are to love as we love ourselves or the First Amendment and all the rest of the amendments, which only attempt to clarify and define where those boundaries are, protecting and preserving the rights of all Americans—irrespective of what one individual or one demographic group or one religious congregation has arrogantly deemed to be the authoritative end all of what God says. I can’t help but believe, if I look at the words and actions of Jesus as a whole, that what he meant by loving each other was based squarely on the concept of respect of each other’s boundaries. As both he and St. Paul would say later—if we love God and each other, the rest of those commandments, all dealing with boundary violations, will take care of themselves.

Because of that perspective, being a Christian and being an American—in the ideal—are not difficult for me to reconcile, to live in parallel, but thankfully, there is still a boundary between the two. We must make no choices, give no favors to one religious opinion over another. I am eternally thankful to have been born an American because of that. I can rest in the assurance that Sharia law or Mormon law or Roman Catholic law or even Episcopal law will not govern me as long as the separation of church and state remains intact. But having that assurance comes with responsibility and personal limits, too. Every Muslim, every Mormon, every Roman Catholic, every other religious adherent—is safe from whatever cockamamie religious law Franklin Graham or Pat Robertson proclaims or the ones I dream up in my head, too.

Even the Affordable Care Act, and its haters, is a battle of boundaries. How do we promote the well-being of those who can’t, for mostly reasons of poverty and depressed income, irrespective of our wretchedly arrogant opinions of their deservedness, pay the premiums of health insurance in 2015 without putting those who are barely making it, but making it, at risk? How do we not favor the members of one group over another, based on the circumstances and the timing of their lives in the midst of a recession from which we have not, despite all the political rhetoric, completely recovered? It ain’t easy, but the personal boundary assaults from both sides of the issues are ugly, and they have no place in our public discourse.

The other happenings of this week raised boundary issues, too—individual ones. There are nine dead individuals, dead because of one of those physical characteristics and not the desires of their hearts, their individual experiences, or their own individual respect for the boundaries of others. Dead because a young man violated their boundaries in a vicious way that cannot be mended, only forgiven and punished. Dead because a young man, right or wrong, perceived that his boundaries and those of his association were in danger of violation, that “their” country was being “taken over.”

There are people who, for whatever reasons that no one but God can discern or judge (though I personally doubt the latter is even an issue—see above), are attracted to people of their own gender, who now have the freedom in America to publicly and legally proclaim their love and commitment to each other, no matter what I or anyone else may find uncomfortable about it. The boundaries of respect, at least under the law of the land, are upheld. We can’t stop another equal citizen from expressing their love as a matter of public record just because we don’t think it’s biblical or natural or fill in the blanks with your own adjective.

There’s a boundary battle between those who maintain that a flag is simply their “heritage,” flown by soldiers defending a “right” that is no right under God or the Constitution by any measure—that of owning other humans and defining their value as less than whole—and those in the group devalued and diminished by the symbolism of the flag, who cannot view it without the visceral and archetypal memory of split families, of murder, of whips, of rape, or being stolen from their lands and chained and sold as recently as 150 years ago. Both crying for the very same thing—respect, the birthright of every child of God.

There have been boundary issues since Cain and Abel. There will be boundary issues long after we’re gone. Jesus said as much. “Our father,” he taught us to pray, “forgive us our trespasses (violations of other’s boundaries) as we forgive those who trespass against us (violate our boundaries).” We are only offended, ranting and raving about our “rights,” when we perceive that a boundary of ours has been violated. It is our duty as Americans, but more importantly as Christians, to commit to examining our own desires and behavior, seeking never to intentionally offend, to be clear on where the boundaries between us really are (translate where our rights end and those of others begin) and to forgive the real—and the ones we only imagine in our heads—offenses against us. It isn’t in any way easy—but it is possible. Jesus showed it over and over, and the families of the Mother Emanuel nine did it in living color.

To solve these boundary disputes requires that, just like Jesus did every time, we meet each other one by one, seeking the similarities between us and respecting the differences as what they can be—the icing on the cake of a rich, diverse, multi-colored life for us all. One gun owner at a time, one gun-control advocate at a time. One person of black, white, Asian ancestry at a time. One “liberal” at a time, one “conservative” at a time. One heterosexual, one LGBT at a time. One Southerner at a time, one non-Southerner at a time. One 1 percenter, one 99 percenter at a time. One welfare recipient, one corporate CEO at a time. One Republican at a time, one Democrat at a time, one Independent at a time, one candidate at a time, one every-hair-on-the-head-loved-by-God-just-like-me person at a time. We will, no doubt, find those we choose not to engage with because of their inability to show respect, but that decision can’t be generalized without squandering potential we cannot recover. Lord knows how much we lost long before the nine people at Mother Emanuel.

God bless the United States of America, our President and members of the Executive Branch, our Congressional representatives and senators, our state governors and representatives and senators, and one other nine of significance this week—the U.S. Supreme Court.

But most of all, God bless us every one, and help us to do the same. One by one.

Tags: , ,

The Future Past Can Be Cured

17 Dec

Over the weekend, I attended the funeral of a woman whom I held in great honor and respect because, among many other things, she was the epitome of the best of the South in which I grew up—a genuinely welcoming soul to everyone I ever witnessed her interaction with. I was close enough to her in spirit to have sat with the family at the funeral service, but at the last minute, I chose not to. Instead I sat across the aisle from the family.

When I first sat down, I was alone on the end of the pew in the chapel where the service was to be held. But soon I was surrounded by a group of women dressed in colorful hats and uniforms with badges. It took me a moment to figure it out, but the group was the United Daughters of the Confederacy, an organization in which the lady whose funeral it was had been an active member. Some years ago, she had become the formal or informal family archivist, as her son wrote in her obituary, and, to me, the most prominent item among the objects in her archive was a collection of letters written by an ancestor to his wife during the Civil War, on which the book Letters to Amanda was based. (It is co-written and annotated by Sam Hodges and Jeffrey Lowe, in case you’re interested in reading it, published by Mercer University Press).

The fact that my decision not to sit with the family had resulted in my being ensconced conspicuously bare-headed and badgeless amongst this colorful group struck me as humorous, but one family member thought it funny because of what she considered the irony, given the “liberal” things she has seen me post on Facebook before. I have to confess that that thought had not crossed my mind, mostly because I don’t consider what I post on Facebook as aligning with any political or other man-made group, and therefore not necessarily liberal or conservative. I am not the sum total of my opinions, mostly because they often change as new information is acquired, and although my views are dynamic, the basic principles I try to live by with respect to my fellow humans aren’t.

Granted, if you look at the political environment of the recent past, I understand why my view is seen as more liberal than conservative. There have been infinitely more opportunities for me to rebut the views of some “conservatives,” despite the fact that I consider other terms more accurately descriptive of some of those views. But, unless you’re stalking me (and free of confirmation bias), it is unlikely that you will have seen everything I post, and your assumptions about what I believe about things I haven’t written about are very likely skewed as a result.

But back to the Confederacy. In this sesquicentennial year of the march of Sherman through Atlanta, I have had reason to revisit a number of times the impact of the Civil War on my life and others of my geographic identity. Once again, arguments about states’ rights have reared their heads, this time with respect to voting procedures, same-sex marriages and learning standards.

I happen to have been born, raised and still reside in the southeastern United States. I am Southern through and through. I celebrate the fact that it is only in the South that people still pull their cars to the side of the road in honor of a passing funeral procession. It happened on Saturday even as we drove down a divided highway on the way to the cemetery, and at one turn, a man holding a sign for some sale in the strip shopping center behind him bowed his head as we passed. Excepting the gnats and mosquitoes, I’d much rather live in place that can’t justify buying a snow plow. There will never be anything to me that compares to the sound of crickets at dusk or the slamming of a wooden screen door or the melody of one-syllable words stretched into three. There will never be a more beautiful sight than a freshly plowed field of red clay mixed with beach sand from 10,000 years ago. Nothing will ever taste better than a watermelon straight from the field or peanuts boiled in brine. The history of almost 400 years is marrow in my bones.

But despite the fact that a glance at my personal ancestral history will find nothing but Confederate soldiers and sympathizers, including one who died at Gettysburg, I do not and will not swear my allegiance to the St. Andrew’s battle flag or the cause for which it stood. From 1957 when I was born to today in almost 2015, I have never been a Confederate American, an oxymoron if there’s ever been one. I am an American, period, who has spent a lifetime swearing my allegiance to a country in which people of character take credit for what they achieve and responsibility for the mistakes they make, ensuring that those mistakes are not continued. They make amends when they are proven wrong, even if the amends are simply the expression of compassion, the acknowledgment that another has been injured by something. They unite around the liberty of every citizen today, including the descendants of those enslaved or otherwise mistreated by members of their family trees, including those Americans interned during WWII and those whose reputations were besmirched by the likes of Sen. Joseph McCarthy, whose perverse spirit seems curiously alive in some today.

I don’t know what my attitudes or opinions would have been if I’d been born in 1857 instead of a hundred years later in the burgeoning era of the civil rights movement. I don’t know what I’d feel if it had been my uncle and not my great-great-uncle who likely died in Pickett’s Charge. But that is not the world or the country into which I was born, and many things have transpired to affect my perspective, including culturally-imposed restrictions on my gender for no rational reason–not the least of which was the fact that by virtue of having been born with two X chromosomes, I was considered a freak to have a high aptitude for math and incapable of assuming the top responsibility of spiritual leadership in the church I spent the majority of my adolescence as part of. It was only natural, I suppose, that I identified more with those who were not only prevented from eating beside me in a restaurant or studying beside me in school because they were dark-skinned and I am of Anglo-Saxon-Celtic origin, but actually beaten, tortured or murdered for daring to try and change it.

Let me hasten to say that there is nothing about the United Daughters of the Confederacy that offends me, but I’m not a member. I’m not a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution, either, though I qualify via several branches. I appreciate history for its ability to illuminate why certain decisions were made by certain people at certain times under certain conditions, and the clues for decision-making today that it brings, both in choosing paths and not choosing paths based on the triumphs and mistakes of those past. One of the perks of reading Letters to Amanda for me is in getting a little closer to what it might have felt like for that soldier to be so far from home for so long and what it might have felt like to, in this case, be one of those at home who would not only never see him again, but would be denied the opportunity to lay him to rest in a known location. It gives me an idea of what it must be like for those families with MIAs from WWII and Korea and Vietnam and the Near and Middle Eastern wars in which we have involved ourselves. External things have changed, but the hearts of humans have not.

One of those characteristics of the human heart means it is not impossible for me to suffer inconvenience or to accept changes, even if it requires me to give up some privilege I have grown used to but am not entitled to, especially if it is in support of the “common defense” or “general welfare” of every American, even those who subscribe to different or no religious beliefs, manifest different skin pigmentations and hair textures than mine, or have an IQ higher or lower.

It is not impossible for me to have an opinion or belief so far removed from another’s that I cannot conceive of how he came to have it, and yet be devoted to defending his right to have it, even while resisting his decidedly undemocratic intent to make laws that favor his view over that of others who don’t share it for equally valid reasons of their own.

It is not impossible for me to quietly honor in my heart the preachers and hard-scrabble farmers from which I received my DNA and their willingness to risk death for what they believed…and still state, absolutely and unequivocally, that they were 100% wrong, that no amount of economic dependence on cotton and tobacco would ever justify what they did to African men and women kidnapped from their homes and brought in chains to this land we occupied.

Now, that in no way suggests that I condone revenge-taking for wrongs committed. Nor does it suggest that I believe there should be reparations for slavery in any financial form. The idea of placing a dollar value on a human life based on what might have been in a world as unpredictable as ours is offensive to me, whether we’re talking about the opportunity costs of the centuries-long oppression of demographically-defined groups or damages in a wrongful death suit based on projected lifetime earnings. If God loves me so much that he knows every hair on my head, then he knows every hair on the head of every human who has ever graced this earth with his or her presence, and there is nothing—including the opinions of any other humans—that can separate him or me from that love, or raise or lower our value in the eyes of the only One who matters. As Jesus said, “The rain falls on the just and the unjust.” The sun shines on both, too. It’s the nature of life. The people to whom reparations might have been owed and the people who arguably might have owed them are long gone. And as Queen Elizabeth I once said, “The past cannot be cured.”

But the past can be studied, the accomplishments of our ancestors honored, and the mistakes they (and we) made acknowledged for what they are. And the future past—today—can be cured in advance.

If you think those views are liberal, so be it.

Tags: , , , ,