Becoming
Who will click the links and read the articles.
No one. Nobody will click and read.
1. Names:
2. 13 Louisiana-Lafayette football players arrested, suspended:
3. black college:
My interest is elsewhere this morning, but frankly if I’d been president I would have fired Comey’s beeyouteetee last year the day he self-importantly went public, grabbing his superior's function to make announcements that were out of his ballpark, proclaiming who should and should not be prosecuted as result of his investigations, and soiling a nonpolitical institution by making decisions of obvious and clear political consequence, like some presumptive lofty grandiloquent haught above the fray. He should have been sacked and sent packing before the election. As for the Russia probe, the FBI doesn't need to do it; if the Legislative wants the Executive investigated, they have the power and authority to do it themselves, in fact they love conducting investigations more than anything else they do, and they dearly love a spotlight.
But I’m thinking elsewhere.
The Coastline that the diocesan office emailed out to us yesterday has a link http://www.episcopalchurch.org/posts/publicaffairs/becoming-beloved-community-introducing-episcopal-churchs-long-term-commitment to an Episcopal Church PAO piece “Becoming Beloved Community: Introducing the Episcopal Church’s Long-Term Commitment to Racial Healing, Reconciliation and Justice” about a 23-page article “Becoming Beloved Community” that the national church will be encouraging all Episcopalians to read, study, discuss: http://www.episcopalchurch.org/files/becoming_beloved_community_commitment_and_plan_1.pdf and I would expect to hear more about it. If it’s going to be real and not the usual passing fancy, I pray that it will outlast the ordinary trendy program that goes the term and tenure of whoever is in power and influence at the moment. Because it involves changing the entire culture of American society, I am skeptic, cynic. I remember when JFK was president, the Department of Defense, of which as a 25-year-old naval officer I was part at the time, instituted a rigorous physical fitness program to which we were to be subject until age 40. It lapsed almost immediately after President Kennedy’s death a thousand days into his term. Elected or appointed, every new team has hopes, dreams and objectives, and I hope the Episcopal Church’s undertaking “Becoming Beloved Community” is not checked off and forgotten as soon as everyone has attended a mandatory half-day indoctrination program, as usually happens, because it is essentially about our living into our Baptismal Covenant as the Way of the Cross is the Way of Life.
Born into and raised up in a racially segregated society, I never imagined that it was other than right, proper and good, the way life was meant to be, and conceiving of nothing else until I went away to university and opened my mind. Today, two generations later, except for the obvious outward signs, I see nothing changed around me insofar as what people are. We are not selfless. Look, for example, at how we vote. Until we are as sightless as fish in the darkest, deepest ocean depths, I’m not sure anything can be changed, except perhaps one person at a time as generation replaces generation over untold millennia.
Over my twelve or fourteen years in the job, my key interest in my role as Financial Aid Administrator for Holy Nativity Episcopal School and Holy Nativity School Foundation was to mix our school, to help keep our school from being an exclusive shelter for rich white families to shield their rich white children from America. Without disadvantaging any white child or family, I worked to help make sure there were black children in our halls and classrooms and on our playgrounds. For many reasons, even that life may be loaded against a black child as soon as his/her name is writ on a birth certificate (read links 1. and 2. above), it is an extremely difficult path to try to stay on, takes continuing, ongoing determination and a certain willed blindness; and our school is colorblind, though just because I saw a few good results (along with failures) does not mean that who comes after will have the same focus. Others may focus more on helping promising children of poor families regardless of color. I helped with that too, but my focus was on race, black faces on campus. Was it successful? Certainly in raising and encouraging leadership consciousness and determination, not so much in seeing faces. It’s a long haul, beyond anyone’s lifetime. I worked on it a dozen years in one place, for the Episcopal Church to take on a society is daunting, overwhelming, astonishing. Godspeed and blessings.
DThos+
