After the panic, we should ponder what we're losing.
June 25, 2015
On June 17 2015, Dylan Roof, a white, Christian, domestic terrorist (of the white supremacist variety) and owner (thanks to an errant background check by the FBI) of a Glock 41 walked into the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston South Carolina. An hour or so later he killed nine people who had welcomed him into their Bible study.
You may have heard the story.
A few days later, President Obama attended a memorial service in Charleston for the victims of the shooting. At the end of his remarks, he said this:
Reverend [Clementa] Pinckney once said, “Across the South, we have a deep appreciation of history -- we haven’t always had a deep appreciation of each other’s history.” What is true in the South is true for America. Clem understood that justice grows out of recognition of ourselves in each other. That my liberty depends on you being free, too. That history can’t be a sword to justify injustice, or a shield against progress, but must be a manual for how to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past -- how to break the cycle. A roadway toward a better world. He knew that the path of grace involves an open mind -- but, more importantly, an open heart.And then this happened:
That’s what I’ve felt this week -- an open heart. That, more than any particular policy or analysis, is what’s called upon right now, I think -- what a friend of mine, the writer Marilyn Robinson, calls “that reservoir of goodness, beyond, and of another kind, that we are able to do each other in the ordinary cause of things.”
That reservoir of goodness. If we can find that grace, anything is possible. If we can tap that grace, everything can change.
And yet tomorrow, an ignorant, bigoted man left unendorsed by even the nation's most conservative newspapers (though endorsed by the KKK) will be taking the oath of office for the most powerful office in the land and become leader of the free world.
Welcome to Trump's America.
