January 11, 2021
Greetings from where we walk by,
There was this: I was in the back of an old van, barreling down a battered strip of tarmac that represents civilization in this part of South Dakota. The man driving slowed down, rolled down his window and pointed to the wash there, a low spot in the brown prairie.
“That’s where the soldiers chased the survivors, mostly women and children, and shot them.” We were not far from Wounded Knee, easy to miss even in the emptiness. This place, even more obscure, a low place in hardscrabble prairie, was where a few Lakota tried to outrun death, and then lost their lives, and their bodies froze like statues, on a desperate day in December 1890.
Or this: We were on a bicycle tour of Lisbon, a dozen Americans weaving through the narrow streets of the beautiful city. Our guide brought us to a small plaza, already crowded with people, some locals, other tourists, to see the architecture, this old church, the ornate stone streets. We stood in the sun and took pictures.
I saw a group of men leaning against a small marble pedestal. I asked our guide what it was, I couldn’t read the writing on it. He told me it was there to acknowledge two days in 1506 when thousands of Jews were massacred and burned in this square. Men, women, and babies, rounded up by Christians and killed. The people all around us sat enjoying their morning, talking and laughing, and life whirled on.
This: It was a crowded sidewalk on Boyleston St., people shopping and eating, every corner packed with runners, their energy palpable. I could hear people asking each other: “Is this it? Is this where it happened?” The curb and the sidewalk, just a few hundred yards from the finish line of the Boston marathon, looked like every other place on the street. But it was where someone detonated a bomb that killed three people and injured hundreds more, and changed the lives of thousands.
And this: I was on my way to the only restaurant in this part of Dallas that was open so early. I had been there the morning before, and run through these same streets, so I knew my way around. But I had stopped because I hadn’t noticed the statue before, a former mayor, cast in bronze. A man approached me and asked me if I knew where I was. I wasn’t lost, but that’s not what he meant. He was telling me that this place was where a man leaned out a window of a plain building across the street and assassinated John F. Kennedy.
I’ve gone down lonely, unmarked roads in Mississippi where people were hanged for being Black. I have stood in the same place where brutal battles were fought and forgotten over land in Scotland. Watched people picnicking in the same space where the Union and Confederate army took turns killing each other over ideals most didn’t understand.
Most of these places you would walk by and not notice, not think twice about what happened there. They are anonymous, their history nearly invisible. Sadly, for every unmarked place there are others that are decorated with statues and plaques to recall a time when humans behaved at their worst.
In all of these places people were driven by a righteousness they could not resist. They felt compelled to act out because they were so absolute in their beliefs that even the idea of destroying other’s lives was acceptable. There were principles, there were religions, there was politics, there were beliefs, there were rights, there was freedom. Important issues and things to stand up for, to die for, to murder for.
We can stand here now and look at these lonely places, all of the fanaticism of the moment long gone, and feel only the sadness. The heroes and the victims are long forgotten, and who was which is irrelevant. We may look at a place where Christians slaughtered Jews, or Whites lynched Blacks, or protestors burned innocent bystanders, and think we are finally more evolved than this. Grateful that we are not Neanderthals clubbing one another for standing in the wrong shadow. We don’t stone sinners. We don’t burn witches. We were wrong about that.
What happened this week at the U.S. Capitol was not a new thing, but it just got our attention. There are versions of this story happening all over our country, the world really. People with agendas, with plans, with manifestos, with strategies. People with rights, with righteousness, who are right. Don’t waste your time putting labels on any of it yet, because the moment you do, you have already begun to form your own rectitude.
I am going to deliberately ignore the political events that surround the behavior we saw because politics is not what will matter here. Politics is merely the stage that these players set. It could be religion, or beliefs about race, or gender, or homosexuality, or the ecology.
You can argue that you must believe in something, and if you do, you should stand up for it. Here I would simply point to the examples I shared and remind you of the feeling you had when you see the barbaric acts that come from fanaticism. Here I would urge empathy, patience, and above all, love. If your manifesto cannot be fulfilled with these, please remember the destiny you share with all of the other forgotten zealots.
I woke five hours ago and decided to write whatever came to me this morning, except pontification. I am not judging, I am a flawed sinner, a modest thinker, poorly prepared to know the right answers. My role in writing any of this is to remind us of our journey as human beings. We have a chance to be one step better with every lesson. We have just been given a very vivid lesson. Angry people, willing to use violence, are intent on expressing their righteousness. But thankfully, they don’t speak for all of us, they are not all of us, they are only who they are.
So, how then should be go forward? Where is the hope?
I am not so naïve to think that people simply become friendly, and that peace will reign. But we are capable of adapting to so many things, it is not outlandish to think we can be faced with violence and death and choose to find another way. In every potential riot, there are people who put down their stones and turn away, and the moment passes and so does the darkness. We can be those people. We can be willing to listen without judging, and express without rancor. Take a breath and let reactions pass, and then think. And maybe in that we become a step further away from our more primitive selves.
Recently I read a story of a Buddhist who has stayed for a week at a time in Nazi death camps. He, with others, goes to feel the darkness that is possible in all human existence, and pray for light. One night in Auschwitz the group he was with stood solemnly together and held hands, and in a remarkable moment, began to dance. Dance. In the most atrocious environment in existence, for some a holy place of remembrance of evil and despair. It seemed irreverent that there could be joy in such a place.
He pointed to the brutal evolution of man, using violence to survive, a penchant that has not yet been put behind us. “But, he said, what if our moral evolution sped up now as fast as our physical and intellectual evolution has? What if this is happening to many of us already? What if this evolution sometimes feels like reasonless joy? What might our world become if this is so?”
You may one day see people protesting a wrong, or perhaps expressing their political views, or maybe sharing their religious beliefs. And among the throng of people, intent on change or redemption or reconciliation or reparation, you will see people dancing. Or singing. Or holding hands with the people who they hope will understand them. That joy, that expression of what was intended for all humans, even in their struggles, that is where the hope is.
Hope this finds you seeking the light,
David
Copyright © 2021 David Smith
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