The message is up and awake, unanesthetized and walking. The message is about ‘the past’ and the ghosts that are yet unlaid in our country. Its other name is “racial issues.”
I hope it isn’t too politically incorrect to say that when the big old featherbed of ‘race’ is slashed open by one thing or another, all manner of odd and non-race related things come flying out too, it seems. These have to be sorted carefully for some are cordwood and some are chaff. Cities have been burnt by throwing chaff into the air and lighting a match… when in fact steadier minds would’ve strived to use the cordwood to make a fire that could warm all… and around which perhaps, for the first time, not one side or the other, but ALL sides of the stories could be told and held.
I hope it isn’t too outré to suggest that every time the featherbed pours, right away someone usually runs out with a big needle and thread wanting to sew that featherbed all back up again and way too soon. Douse the message. Something in the individual psyche, in the collective psyche, seems to want to silence the many sides who have not yet spoken. Instead, a number of individuals and the collective seem to move away from the message that not only walks, but tracks us…not to eat us, but seeking mercy and healing.
Some seem to want to say, “Ok an explosion went off, but it’s over now. Let go back to being snoring frogs again, for this is just all too much and too insipid and wont work out anyway.”
It’s better though I think, with cooler minds leading, to do otherwise, to in fact remain in the message… and to look at the open graves with the unlaid ghosts
Grave-looking takes guts, calm and deep souls … so that looking has every chance of turning into useful inquiry instead of endless indictment.
I hope it is not too off the wall to mention that in Rwanda, in relatively few years of hideous bloodshed, afterward, in the reconciliation and truth commission hearings, the vital testimonies of ALL concerned also took years to hear, assay, and to make moves for a real mending for many, at root level. Not in media light. It took as much time, as many years or more, to hear and understand as it did for groups of people to lie and thieve and harm one another prior.
I hope it isn’t as bewildering to you as it is to me, when I think that many in our country, seem right now to be thinking that one person running in an election primary, has made the final quintessential speech about race for our times. That there is no more to say now that Rev. Wright’s and Senator Obama’s points of view have been on the internet and in print and on the evening news. I hope it is not so that many people are thinking there are no other points of view to hear. The graves are still wide open. Pick a color, any color. The graves still are unblessed.
There are oceans yet to say; from thousands and thousands of voices. Specifics. Experiences. Whys and hows and wheres and whens. I wish there were a lyceum large enough to hold us all, and that the powers that be that want us to live in peace with one another would please bring to us the farmer from delta Mississippi and let him speak his life to us…
bring us a sign maker and bring us a stevedore. And bring us a good cop and a big bad one, and bring us a Daughter of the American Revolution. Please bring us a nun who has given her entire life to serving Haitians, and the presser from NOLA who has worked ironing clothes for the wealthy all his life. Give us a man who runs a shoe repair, and a scumble of those who worked on the assembly lines together, ones who wove and welded and work still now with all their bones and blood and do not have soft hands or years in chair sitting. Half the healing is in the storytelling. The other half is in the just listening and moving to do better.
We know. We know we know we know that a plant that ails has an etiology to its wither. That what shows on the surface is only the symptom. Underneath lie systems under duress and in disorder and disrepair. It can hardly be thought can it, that to help a patient be well again, we finger point and blame?
Isn’t it more that we lay the best medicine into the worst of the wounds? And encourage one another throughout? There’s a saying in healing that the patient heals the doctor, encourages the doctor with their spirit, as much as the doctor helps to heal and encourage the patient. Oughtn’t it be more like that?
So. “Race” is up and alive and walking. Only thing is, “race” is mute. It needs people to speak for it. Thousands and thousands of different perspectives to speak for it—dialogue, not solely monologue… so we can, this two hundred and some years later for this country, really get down to it. Figure out the graves and how to go forward without carrying the heavy caskets on our backs for eternity.. any of us.
Now would be the time in the nomination race for ALL candidates to realize the surprise reason, one of the most critical reasons to stay on message regarding “race” in our country right now in our time and for the foreseeable future… for many persons do not realize that along with the backs and bones and blood of labor from Mexico and Central America, also being imported right along with their hearts and souls is their 500 years of bending under the lash of abject racism there too.
“Race” isn’t only a painful ganglia from the past for most everyone… it is also an ancient issue but with new faces, that is bearing down toward us.
It would be better to learn to heal rather than to hide.