I have just been watching the video showing the treatment of Ronald Greene while in the custody of Louisiana officers. Now, the definition of “custody” is “the protective care or guardianship of someone or something.” What I saw on that video was not custody. It was cruelty. It was disregard for another human being. It was intentional. It was mean.
I am more and more dismayed by what I see in these “United States.” While many of us have chosen to live obliviously, the more despicable side of our nation has continued, developed, and has begun to spill over into our oblivion. It isn’t new. It is a part of our culture, our history, our DNA as a nation.
From a Constitution that put non-whites in a 3/5’s category…not quite fully human…to one that did not recognize women as full citizens either, we didn’t start out as grandly as we have been taught in schools. And, lest our right-wing Christian Nationalists live in their la-la land too long, our founding fathers were not Evangelical Christians either. One can read their diaries, their correspondence, see their philandering lifestyles, bedding others’ wives and their own slaves, etc., and see that none of them lived the way some Christians would have us believe. Brilliant men? For sure! Ingenious men? Of course! Bible-thumping, self-righteous types who are known more for what they won’t do than what they do? Not so much.
And two plus centuries later, our leadership isn’t any purer…isn’t any more godly. The system that has flourished for so long while keeping dirty secrets in the public closet is not doing so well right now. Those dirty little secrets are starting to burst forth from locked closets and from underneath the rugs of secrecy and denial.
The public deaths of Ronald Greene, George Floyd, Breona Taylor, and many more are opening our eyes to a despicable system built and maintained by white people (mostly the white men in power, but also those women who choose to kowtow to those men in power) who have no regard for the “Other.” “Other” includes anyone of different color, different faith, different circumstance. Our Native American brothers and sisters have been slaughtered, imprisoned, detained on reservations in the most inhospitable parts of the USA, restricted and held back. Our African-American brothers and sisters has been bought, enslaved, slaughtered, beaten, restricted, betrayed, and castigated for centuries, too. Our Asian brothers and sisters have also been downtrodden, enslaved, misused, beaten, interred, punished and discriminated against, too. And immigrants? In a country built on the backs of immigrants, the frightened white people have turned their hearts and minds against them, too, forgetting the call of Holy Scripture to welcome and care for and give sanctuary to the stranger, the refugee, and the wanderer. Homosexuals throughout our history have also faced the horrors of those who were empowered to judge them. And lest we forget the plight of women throughout the centuries…treated as property to be passed from father to husband without rights or voice, raped, injured, beaten, held back, discriminated against…by the men in their lives who should have loved and cared for and encouraged them.
One might ask, “What have we become as a nation?” I think the better question is “What have we always been?” Deep in this white power closet of secrets lie many more instances of lynchings, beatings, deaths, injuries, rapes, and punishments that we will never see. All those decades and centuries without cameras could tell us much if we could only see what happened. It isn’t pretty.
What have we become? What we have always been. We are a flawed and despicable nation masquerading as a democracy where anyone can flourish, grow and become whatever they want to and have the energy to work toward. The guarantees of our Constitution include “Life, Liberty an the PURSUIT of happiness.” But is really isn’t that way at all.
One must first have Life in order to do anything in this world. Liberty is the freedom to be who we are in this world, without the fear of having Life and Liberty taken from us. And the PURSUIT of happiness cannot be achieved without Life and Liberty.
Our country, while espousing these inalienable rights, has systematically and intentionally robbed life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness from many individuals. It is time for us to recognize our horrid past and current predicament. We desperately need to admit our short-comings because without admission there can be no correction. We cannot continue to pretend to be a democracy while continuing the despicable practice of robbing human beings of life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. And yet, we cannot change without honesty…brutal honesty.
It is time for heart-wrenching and disturbing honesty. It is time for those white folks who are running so afraid of “Other” to admit that they are afraid. (Leaders know that they can control those they keep in fear.) It is time for a long look in the mirror. It is time for change…systemic change…change of heart and a change of direction (the definition of repentance)…