Wednesday: RR & BLM

 Yesterday while we were out, after Linda's lab work we stopped by my office at the church to get a couple of things. 

A scale model car my parents gave me, which I got and it's here now under caring eye. My first knowing that such costly little heavy and precise replicas were on the market. Adult toys for sure. My parents paid over $100 for it thirty or forty years ago, quite a price, but a gift they knew I'd appreciate. I was astonished, and I remember one of them saying, "We thought it might be the only Rolls-Royce you ever own!" In years that followed, my mother enjoyed selecting and ordering more model cars for me. So did my son Joe. Most of the cars made it safely through the hurricane. This, the RR, lost it's windscreen and another piece in being packed away afterward.

And I thought to pick up a couple of Buechner's books that I was blogging about recently. But instead of Buechner, I selected two other books. Black & White, a collection of Erskine Caldwell short stories, which I didn't read when the book was given to me about 1985, but have begun, not reading straight through but here and there. Opening the book, I read the author's foreword and Ray McIver's intriguing Introduction to get an idea of whats and whys about the volume and something about the author. Then the book proper. 

Started with two stories. Because it was next after McIver's Introduction, I turned the page and read "Candy-Man Beechum", opening innocent and free, closing extremely distressing even for 1935 when first published. Checked Contents and, because McIver mentioned it in his Intro as making into a stage play, turned to the back section and read "The Fly in the Coffin". 

These are fiction, Caldwell wrote them, but they ring true for what I remember of the Old South in my early years as an upcoming Southern Gentleman. Including that humor of "The Fly" stirred memories of black-face minstrels we did in class, and I think once in the auditorium, at Cove School in the 1940s when The South was racially segregated by law and Knowing. And an either Abbott & Costello or Three Stooges comedy I saw at the Ritz Theatre in those days - - in which, suddenly confronted by a "ghost" wearing a sheet, a black man collapsed into a mound of dust and we white audiences were greatly entertained laughing knowingly at the fears, ignorance and simple innocence of "the Darkies". Oh, and instead of going on her sent, urgent, matter of life and death errand, the little slavegirl Prissy caught swinging on the gate and singing to herself in Gone With The Wind, "Oh, Miss Scarlett, I's scared". I remember us, me, clearly and with disgust and shame. Never occurred to wonder how black people on the far side of the Colored partition in the balcony felt. But no matter, it wouldn't have been relevant, You Know How They Are. Our class laughing hilariously at similar themed humor in some of the books we read, and that were read to us in class after lunch. Comes to mind a little book "Parasols Is For Ladies" with 

"Moreover" their dog's name innocently but proudly drawn from the Bible (Luke 16:21), and their cow named Grace but called "Gracie For Short". Peals of knowing laughter. 

Also comes to mind Jesus on Cross, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do". And God help us, we were Know Nots, seeing everything as just right, good and proper; reading in the newspaper about the occasional Uppity, or Troublemaker, or Communist, or Outside Agitator coming down from Way Up North to meddle in our Southern Ways. In time, Jonathan Myrick Daniels. Erskine Caldwell putting us to shame nearly a century ago, and here we still are: Black Lives Matter.

Black Lives Matter. Of the demonstrations, protests, peaceful and some violent and destructive riots, fires, injuries and looting, it doesn't do to ask indignantly, or earnestly, or even desperately, "What do they want?" They want to be you, they want to be me when and if they grow old. They want their children to be my children, and your children, just ordinary Americans. They want to be people just like us. 

It's extremely difficult. Far deeper than a simple matter of changing laws, it is attitudes and practices and, from Mark 9:1 again, ἴδωσιν, they will see, ὁράω, I see, you see, we all see, perceive, realize, understand how people feel about being put down, our becoming conscious of how people see each other. Protests and riots may bring about some corrections but will not do it ultimately, because the sociological psychology, the entire makeup of what we are as a people has to change, has to be changed, even if forced, over years. 

All of us have to become colorblind. It may take forever, and protests and riots, even violence, will be part of what stirs our awarenesses, consciences, attitudes, and how we allow our society to treat people. We are not the Aryan Master Race. Whatever the cost, Black Lives Matter. And to retort "All Lives Matter" misses the point altogether, underscores one's obtuse obliviousness. Whoever confesses to be a Christian but cannot get it together for Others, specifically For Black people, needs seriously to check where they/you are vis-a-vis the Love Commandments of Jesus and your Baptismal Covenant.

BLM&PTL

T+