Hate grows when a hateful thought is received and reiterated, instead of rejected. The received thought captures the heart and aligns itself with other corrupt thoughts to become an ideology. And hateful ideologies, like white nationalism, must be challenged and deconstructed.
But while we are challenging and deconstructing, we must also be truthful about national and global history. The first Europeans to arrive on this land brought with them a desire to be in power and to conquer, with a willingness to destroy indigenous people in the process.
The ‘idea’ of America was founded with a spirit of superiority, a quest for power, and a sense of entitlement. That spirit, quest and sense also led ‘America’ to trade Africans and usher in hundreds of years of violent, ritualistic slavery on this soil. The blood still cries out.
Silence during the Holocaust, Hiroshima, Jim Crow - this nation remains unrepentant. Charlottesville - white nationalism and racism weren’t challenged by @POTUS, but some who came in the name of those evils left labeled as “good people.” So white nationalism and racism fester.
And some assert that noncooperation with evil and speaking truth to power about injustice contributes to hate. But silence = being complicit. We MUST challenge hateful ideologies.
I believe, as my parents did, that the wise and “woke” way to do that (and to eradicate what my father called the Triple Evils of Racism, War and Poverty) is by employing the strategy, processes, and philosophy of nonviolence. There’s nothing weak about nonviolence.
Nonviolence examines history and the human condition; it dissects issues and develops a strategy to arrive at humane solutions, including policies.
Nonviolence chooses love; not the “emotional bash” that some define love as, but Love that corrects, challenges and changes individuals and institutions.
As I mourn the human beings murdered in Pittsburg this morning, I also mourn that the @POTUS’s solution is not to shift our discourse and humanely investigate our issues, but to insert armed guards in our houses of worship. Nonviolence knows better.
