WHAT HATE LIES WHERE?

The news of the last several weeks has been hard to take: the plight of the Yazidis and Christians and others in Iraq, the punishment of Gaza, the ongoing carnage in Syria, the Ebola outbreak and the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.  And then last night, the news of the beheading of James Foley by ISIS or ISIL or IS, whatever grandiose name this determined group of killers has chosen for the moment.

Today, on the way to the studio to write, I caught part of an interview on The Take Away about a white sheriff’s deputy in California, who is raising his adopted African-American son with his husband. (http://www.thetakeaway.org/story/white-sheriff-talks-race-police-his-black-son/#commentlist). He shared how his own views on race changed as he watched his son grow—how people looked at the child suspiciously in stores for example. You could hear the emotion in his voice when he told the story of his son crying at the kitchen table when a Latino youth (holding a toy gun) was killed by police in California, and his son asking him if that could happen to him.  Killed for being black.  Stopped for being black.  Arrested for being black or Latino or anything considered “other”.

My two girls are adopted.  My oldest is Latina (as is my wife), my youngest is African-American.  And though I have lived and worked in diverse inner-city communities for over 30 years, I cannot say that I know or can comprehend fully how they navigate the American landscape that still bases so much on race, on perception of “otherness”.  I know that I live my life with privilege that the rest of my family doesn’t have, because I am white.  I also know that race in America is complicated, entangled as it is with class and gender and neighborhood and region, with perceptions and resentments that are generation-deep.

We moved from Philadelphia to Minneapolis almost exactly nine years ago, when our girls were 5 and 14.  I will never forget something that happened in a drug store, somewhere in Pennsylvania or Ohio.  My wife confronted the manager because he was following our then five-year-old daughter around the store (and not following other children who were white).  He denied that he was doing it, period.  My wife said something like “oh, yes you were, you know that you were.”

Thinking back, I wonder how much the manager knew he was doing it, and how much was an automatic response, given his background and status.  Which makes it harder to see, and harder to root out.  I wonder how deep that automatic response is in me, is in us, and how we can help each other see that and root that out.  It was so easy for me to see the manager as uneducated racist jerk, and leave feeling righteous.

The deputy sheriff talked about how important conversations around the kitchen table is for his family, to have meaningful dialogue about race; and how important real dialogue—that does not paper over injustice—is for Ferguson, and the whole country.  And the world, of course.  Of course, the bigger the entity gets, the harder it is.  It’s hard to see an Israeli or Palestinian as a dialogue partner when you’re trying to kill each other. And a “let’s all be friends” pseudo-dialogue won’t work.  There is any real peace without justice, but there may be no real peace without forgiveness as well.

One of my favorite writers is Thomas Merton, who though being a Trappist monk in a monastery guided by silence, was one of the most astute witnesses to our world. Henri Nouwen (another favorite) put Merton’s ideas this way:  “If you see evil as something ‘out there,’ something outside yourself, sharply defined and irreversible," explained Nouwen, "then the only way to deal with it is in the same way you would deal with a malignant tumor: You cut it out, take it out, eradicate it, burn it away, kill it—which means you immediately become violent.”

But if you see evil as something inside of all of us, something we are caught up in, then there is a chance for dialogue and transformation.  I hope that this happens in Ferguson, but I’m realistic enough to know that it often takes “deepening the pain” (my term) that makes people want to risk it.  At the root of all hate and violence is fear, and I know that sometimes the thing that gets me past my fear is feeling so bad, I have no choice but to change.

I’m risking a new direction with some of my poetry.  I’ve been writing a series of connected short stories about a fictional village named Two Rivers that is near a packinghouse town, and becomes the repository for “otherness” for the townspeople.  (It is fiction, fellow Austinites by birth or choice!) One of my protagonists is Graciela, who at age twelve flees with her family when the townspeople burn Two Rivers down in 1918 because they believe the village is the origin of the Spanish flu epidemic.  Graciela comes back to the town in 1933, after suffering—and causing—various traumas, ostensibly for some kind of revenge, but then discovers a deeper purpose.  (I hope you’ll be able to read it some year soon).  I’ve written a number of poems in her voice—this is her speaking, after her return in 1933:

SIN

What is it, exactly?

Why do people have a need

To point it out when it

Flows from another person?

The priests seemed to think

We were born with it,

And that somehow during

Our first long journey

Down our mother

We catch if from her.

Like a disease.

Or a curse.  I confess

I have clung to my sin

As a trophy, as if to say

You can’t make me

Any worse than I am.

I have stolen.

I have lied.

I have killed one man

And thought about many others.

If rape were a crime

That a woman could commit,

I would gladly do that.

But when I am alone

At night, with no body

Or word to console me,

I know a deeper hurting

Than I can explain. It’s as

If there is a war inside

Of me, and both sides

Brook no prisoners.

I cannot say that I pray

At such times as these,

Because prayer demands

A willingness to listen.

I see how Jesus sits down

With sinners and eats,

I’ve heard a thousand times

How he died to save all sinners,

And will come back to punish

Those who will not obey.

But I have two questions

Simmering in me:

If Jesus’ death did not do it,

What death will? And

If God fights with the same

Weapons as the devil,

Then who would you have win?

Be justice. Be beauty. Be dialogue.

Patrick