Sunday, 08/20/17
00:48 Late night again
Need to collect my thoughts for a five minute presentation about GA ... as Emma
will note, we had our kids, so much like with other family time, we didn't have
completely free schedules to go do whatever we wanted whenver we wanted. But
that actually had a focusing effect. Whereas in Columbus I ended up at a LOT of
talks, New Orleans forced me to be a bit more choosey.
For me, the 2017 General Assembly location in New Orleans could not have been selected any better given the recent events at the highest levels of leadership at the UUA. The resignation of President Morales for his insensitive dismissal of valid complaints in the hiring process for positions in the UUA exposed the raw emotions still roiling under the surface of even our highly progressive association.
And New Orleans, the city, is a constant reminder that we, as a nation, and we, as a UU faith, are not done healing from the violence and pain of slavery, nor the overarching problems of white privelage. As a historian explained during an interlude of the business of the assembly explained, the old city hall, facing the famous Jackson Square in the heart of the French Quarter, was the site of a busy slave market in antebellum New Orleans. But while there's a statue of Andrew Jackson in the square, you'll find no mention of the depravity of the sale of human life. Like in the UUA, it's easier not to talk about it.
Our nation was founded on morally bankrupt practices, that cast as less than human a substantial number of this planet's humans. And the biggest problem, as I discovered in New Orleans, is that while we often talk about slavery as an institution that ended 150 years ago, the terrorism and family destruction associated with slavery has persisted well into the modern age. Certainly as little as a generation ago members of the black communities in southern states feared for their lives.
In the Weir Lecture this year, Bryan Stevenson explained that the "black migration" that was fleetingly talked about in school to explain the preponderance of black Americans in Chicago when I was growing up, was actually a refugee crisis. Black people were fleeing domestic terrorism, public beatings and lynch mobs. And yet, my grandfather used to complain vociferously about "those damn niggers" moving into "his" neighborhood.
So much pain, and yet. And yet. And yet ... we persist. In his Weir Lecture, Stevenson emplored the audience to "get proximate" to suffering. He explained that forming opinions about a thing without really having a chance to see all the facets, is foolish. This is hard. We are encouraged by television and internet news feeds to feel fury at those who would roll back the clock on racism. Yet, we form our own opinions of whether this "Black Lives Matter" movement is as authentic as earlier civil rights movements.
My take away from this year's GA is actually a synthesis of last year's GA and testimony heard this year. In Columbus last year, Rev. Nate Walker presented compelling evidence that simply yelling louder and more righteously would not help heal the growing wounds in our communities. Instead, we need moral imagination. That is, the ability to interact with one another as humans first and remain open to new ideas, new possibilities and to imagine ourselves in a web of relationships that involves even our enemies. And to do that, as Stevenson said this year, and as I experienced first hand in New Orleans, you have to get proximate to the systemic discrimination, the destruction left in the wake of addiction, or the fear and hopelessnes of economic hardship.
So my challenge to you is to find ways to build relationships with those less forunate, less privileged than yourself. The anger and resentment of white privelage, indeed any and all privelage will not be broken through resentment and righteousness. Learn to draw your circle of relationships wide. There's a lot of pain in the lives of our unprivilaged friends' lives, but there's joy and love there too, because we're all human.