Our Civil War

The shooting death of Michael Brown, and now others being picked up by the media, has revisited feelings that the black community has known for generations and the rest of us have ignored.  From what I understand, the Brown incident began with two young men walking on the street and an officer ordering them to get up on the sidewalk.  

It’s so easy to decline into our primitive, superior, dominating attitudes.  It’s about people, feeling marginalized, stepping out into the street and making it their turf and coming up against an angry and perhaps frustrated police officer.  It’s one attitude pushing up against another attitude.  

I think we need to wake up and realize that we’re still fighting the Civil War, just on another level.  I think America has racism, lots of it, and we’ve been sticking our heads in the sand over the issue.  The civil war, an act of violence, produced winners and losers and nobody’s heart was changed.  Instead, the disease morphed into more subtle forms of hatred and pride.  Violence begets violence even if the moral victory is won.  

We’re not going to become a decent nation unless distributive justice is preached from pulpits, taught in classrooms, and embraced in our homes.  Kids don’t hate by nature.  They have to be taught.  We’re not going to have peace through war, but by getting out on the street and standing with the oppressed and by voting and demanding accountability from our leadership. We need to abandon our televisions and our games and get out into the real world where there’s work to be done.  Racism is evil, and yet both the perpetrators and the victims need to be loved for genuine peace to become reality.