everyone loves a parade
Last Friday evening, I rode in a parade through the streets of downtown Waterloo. I saw some of you along the route: Lee Jensen and all the Prescotts, Kurt Kaliban, and Grant and Klara Hornung. It was a beautiful early summer evening, a great night for a parade.
It was, of course, the My Waterloo Days parade. I rode in a black Toyota convertible with Frieda and Anna Mae Weems, invited to join them as a board member of the Cedar Valley Civil Rights Peace Walk Memorial Committee. This committee exists to promote the development of a Peace Walk memorial to Martin Luther King, Jr. in Washington Park, to commemorate Dr. King’s visit to Waterloo in 1959 and to serve as a symbol of our community’s commitment to peace in the midst of an often fragmented and divisive society.
Thousands of Waterloo’s residents lined the streets of the parade route, watching and waving and cheering, and it was a thrill for us in the car, having the advantage of moving among all of them, to appreciate the scope and diversity of the crowd. We have a beautiful city! We are an emblem, a case in point, of the melting pot that is our nation. The parade brought together, side-by-side, rich and poor, mayors and street people, young children and old men, African-Americans and Bosnians and Africans and Hispanics and European-Americans. For a few moments, we existed, not in our isolated and separated neighborhoods and working places, but together, all of us sharing a parade, all of us sharing this beautiful summer evening.
It was a glimpse of what we are, as a community, as a people, a glimpse that convinces me all the more of the appropriate purpose of a memorial, a peace memorial to Martin Luther King, and of the honor it would be to have it here, in our neighborhood. Don Damon said he saw me that night in a TV report about the parade. He scolded me because I wasn’t smiling. Sorry, Don! But I am smiling now as I think about that parade and about all the people, all God’s beautiful children, I saw along the way …
not my world
We live in different worlds — still, worlds divided by color, and being divided by color, offering to those who live in them a sharply different range of options and possibilities.
For the past year or so, I have been part of a team working with local African-American parolees, trying to provide them a broader base of support and accountability as they make the transition back to life outside prison. I have come to understand during this brief experience that as a society we are sending them terribly mixed messages. We want them to “reintegrate,” to “rehabilitate,” to keep from re-offending, to get a job, to become responsible, contributing members of our communities, and yet, at the same time, the system, of which we are a part, keeps them from getting jobs, brands them as different and not like the rest of us, treats them as third-class citizens, offers them no realistic path toward reintegration or rehabilitation, not to say, reconciliation.
I read today an article in the latest issue of Christian Century, an interview by Amy Frykholm with Michelle Alexander, author of the 2010 book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. Here’s a snippet of one of Ms. Alexander’s comments which pointedly illustrates the sort of world my African-American neighbors have to live in …
I believed, for example, that the explosion in our prison population could be explained primarily by poverty, poor schools and broken homes—conventional explanations offered by the media and mainstream politicians. Back then I thought that blacks were more likely to use and sell illegal drugs than whites. I thought that the War on Drugs was aimed primarily at rooting out violent offenders and drug kingpins. I also believed that although life might be difficult for people after they are released from prison, those who worked hard and had self-discipline could make it.
I came to realize that the explosion in our prison population, especially the explosion in the number of blacks in prison, is not driven by crime or crime rates. People of all colors use and sell illegal drugs at the same rates. The War on Drugs does not root out violent offenders. On the contrary, the people who come into the criminal justice system through the drug war are not violent and are arrested on relatively minor drug offenses—the same kinds of offenses that occur frequently in middle-class white communities and are largely ignored.
Those released from prison are trapped in a legal second-class status for life. Finding work is not just difficult after prison; it is downright impossible. Ex-offenders are locked out of the legal economy. They are denied access to public housing; they are denied food stamps. And to make matters worse, they are saddled with hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees, fines, court costs—and often the need to pay back child support. Paying all of these fees can be a condition of parole.
I came to see that we have, yet again, created a vast new legal system for racial and social control, a penal system unprecedented in world history—a system that locks the majority of black men in many urban areas into a permanent underclass status. And yet we claim, as a nation, to be colorblind.
conflict and community
Conflict and community are not mutually exclusive. Violence and community are mutually exclusive.
Rachel Simons is a member of a Word Made Flesh team serving God by working with children in Moldova. In her May 2102 newsletter, she suggests that conflict is in fact “a starting point for community, rather than the ingredient that destroys it,” quoting an excerpt from a blog written by psychologist, Kelly Flanagan:
I think we assume communities are comprised of like-minded people, so we believe in order to preserve community — a marriage, a friendship, a collegiality, a church — we must be like putty, changing our beliefs to match the beliefs of others, or conversely, convincing everyone to believe what we believe. But perhaps an authentic community is a group of people with a vast array of opinions and differences that range from semantics to fundamental incompatibilities in worldview. Yet they are a people commmited to living in the tension, refusing the tempation to do violence to the other’s philosophy or worldview. They have decided they will value people and the stories those people are telling, above feeling perfectly at ease, or right, or validated.
We need to hear such words in a world where we so easily divide into camps and where hostility has become the norm in any kind of dialogue between camps. We must choose another way. We must live another way.
We live with each other, refusing to do violence to each other. We choose to value people, to value each other’s stories, not at the expense of our own stories, but alongside our own stories. We are validated not by common consent, but by Christ. Christ brings us together. Christ holds us together. Nothing else. Nothing else can!
“miah and friends”
Watch a video recording of the finale from the “Miah and Friends” organ recital performed at First Congregational United Church of Christ on April 29. The piece is “Maestoso” from “Organ Symphony No. 3” by Camille Saint-Saens. Miah Han plays organ, accompanied by timpani and a brass quintet.
The concert provided all of us who shared the afternoon with Miah an experience of extraordinary richness and beauty. When she finished playing Buxtehude’s “Prelude and Fugue in G Minor,” I told myself, “That is going to be my favorite of the program.” Then she played Franck’s “Choral No. 2 in B Minor,” and I decided that was my favorite. And then she played “Messe de la Pentecôte” by Olivier Messiaen and I knew that was my favorite!
The music from beginning to end was dazzling and moving and awe-inspiring. The program was well-designed, providing moments that were in turn meditative and exuberant and whimsical. The “friends” Miah gathered added to the joy of the afternoon: brass players and a timpanist, a soprano soloist and, of course, her husband, Taemin. Their organ/piano duets were a highlight of the program, her impeccable musicianship matched by Taemin’s remarkably clean and technical and passionate playing.
To view videos of the other pieces on the concert program, go to Taemin’s YouTube channel: Taemin’s YouTube Channel.
an extremely regressive tax
The latest issue of Sojourners Magazine includes an opinion piece by Phil Blackwell, entitled Not Worth the Gamble, a response to the recent ruling by the US Justice Department to permit states to sell lottery tickets online.
I have always had a problem with lotteries, with citizen governments in the business of promoting gambling. What disturbs me most is not so much the questionable morality of gambling itself or even the social ills it may exacerbate, rather the failure of state government to do its job. A state lottery is no more than an extremely regressive tax, exacting an increasingly larger share of needed revenues from those on the bottom end of the economic spectrum. As Blackwell notes:
When we follow the advertising money, we discover that the lottery has been sold primarily to the poor and those on fixed incomes: The billboards are in the inner city, not the upscale suburbs. The lottery is promoted in such places with the deceitful promise that a buyer has a good chance to win security for a lifetime.
He argues “the state government’s dependence on lottery sales is cowardly …” — and lazy! —
… a way for legislators to avoid honestly calculating the real costs of education, public services, and infrastructure repairs and then calling on citizens to be responsible through a fair tax structure.
The job of government is to ensure fairness, to encourage healthy and productive lifestyles, and to nurture opportunities for its citizens to engage in meaningful and economically viable work. Lotteries undermine every one of these purposes.
one more state gives up the death penalty
Yesterday, Connecticut became the seventeenth state to vote to outlaw the death penalty. May the thirty-three remaining states with death penalty provisions still enacted in state law be soon to follow!
Capital punishment can certainly be a hot button political issue, but it is difficult to imagine how a group of legislators voting to abolish the death penalty would do so to score political points. Such a vote seems to me to be purely a matter of conscience …
- feeling that the risks of a miscarriage of justice are too high;
- feeling that the punishment is too often unevenly applied;
- feeling that empowering the state to take life is putting too much power in the hands of fallible people;
- feeling that the virtues of mercy far outweigh the questionable satisfactions of vengeance.
Just as mercy in a single human being is a sign of strength and character and spiritual maturity, just so is mercy in a human society a mark of strength and character and spiritual maturity.
killing bin laden
Yes, Osama bin Laden did evil things. Yes, he despoiled the image of God that was put in him as well as in each of us. But if we allow his choices to change our choices, to make us people ready to kill — for the sake of “closure,” for the sake of “justice,” for the sake of “revenge” — then we have done the same. We have despoiled the image of God in us.
Strength, courage, and righteousness mean living the values we hold dear and not allowing ourselves to be transformed in reaction to the chaos and brokenness and evil around us.
When we are better than that, when we can uphold the value of life, all life, when we can love the humanity in any human being, even in a man consumed by evil, then we reveal something truly extraordinary, the likeness of the living God.
And so I did not find reason to celebrate this weekend over the news of bin Laden’s death. It was an occasion not for joy, but for sadness at the ongoing price all of humanity is paying for the hatred and suspicion and vengefulness that set us against each other.