"From our perspective, this corporation [@CoreCivic] should be abolished...The only way it exists and operates in Tennessee is through the legislative power, which allows the caging of humans to be contracted out for profit." Rev. Jeannie Alexander nashvillepublicradio.org/post/20-arrest…
2/ So grateful to @chassisk for this report. I'd like to slow the tape and zoom out a little from where I sit, but I mostly pray that people would mull over these words from Reverend Alexander, who served as the chaplain at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution not too long ago.
3/ She speaks a kind of cosmic plainspeak in the tradition of Ella Baker & Thoreau & James Lawson & Camus & Dorothy Day. We get the dystopia we pay and vote for. Our gov't operates by our presumed consent until we withdraw it in one way or another.
4/ We, the people, of Tennessee, have contracted out the caging of humans [asylum-seeking families etc.] to @CoreCivic. And one fine day [yesterday], Reverend Alexander & other citizens decided to risk something in their hungering & thirsting after righteousness. A signal flare.
5/ Here's how it went for Reverend Alexander:
6/ She was joined by a former prison guard no longer willing to abide the preventable deaths of incarcerated people:
7/ Our police chief proclaimed that this demonstration of prophetic consciousness "can only be interpreted" in one way:
8/ *deep breath* This is Nashville. We're the place where John Lewis and James Bevel were almost killed inside a Krystal, where lunch-counter sit-ins commanded the attention of the world, where Will Campbell bore witness: southernfoodways.org/can-i-get-a-wi…
9/ We're also the place where the prayer trade booms and people accrue financial profit with God talk and church talk and ex-church talk and hypocrisy talk and talk about what we would've done if we'd lived in Nazi Germany or the "civil rights era' etc.
10/ Our own neighbors went for it yesterday as realists of the larger reality, declaring as lawless our own liturgy's of torture & death & family separation and...It seems to be beneath the interest of so many. It seems to have slipped through the cracks of competing interests.
11/ Maybe it's risk aversion. Are we only able to see what we feel we can afford to see? Is it a brand/overhead/platform thing? I don't know, but I believe history was made yesterday. My prayer is that we'll meet their feat of attentiveness with some of our own. If not now, when?
12/ Couple more things. Reverend Alexander's long-haul witness can be meaningfully accessed via @noexceptionsTN &...Anybody have any thoughts on why it's so hard to get people to amplify (or even acknowledge) moments like this? Am I missing something obvious?
