In the early morning hours of November 5th in Springfield, MA a nearly completed building burned to the ground. Not so remarkable in and of itself. Buildings burn regularly. What’s remarkable about this building and this date is in the details as is the devil, or so they say. The Springfield Republican reported the events like this.
Just yesterday a federal indictment of 3 men was handed up accusing them of setting fire to the Macedonia AME Church which was nearing completion on Tinkham Rd. in Springfield. The alleged motive is one of racial hatred in reaction to the election of Barack Obama as the 44th president of the United States.
As we have looked back on just how far we’ve come as a nation in the past 5 decades we are jarred into reality by an event reminiscent of the Deep South of the 50′s and 60′s rather than New England in the 21st Century. Whether the men in question are guilty is of less concern to me than is the sobering reminder that hatred, mistrust and misunderstanding are still alive and well even as we make tremendous strides in the effort to remove them from our national consciousness.
As the pastor of a predominantly white church, I’m frankly a bit stunned at the lack of outrage and exposure this story is receiving. I am interested in how this story has tempered your sense if hope in the promise of change…if at all.
May God free us all from the sins we all carry and the prejudices that imprison us.
A sad and sobering post. Time and geography do not change some things. Peace to you today.
George Santayana: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
As a conservative trained to enjoy a broad spectrum of perspectives, current and historic, what continually surprises me is the surprise experienced by others at acts committed by our fellow beings that we as a species have done since we began recording history. I’m watching television now: the hottest topic on the channels is slavery as practiced today. My bright, self-assured elementary school teachers in the 1960′s assured me slavery was a settled issue. Perhaps it’s a matter of definition, or scope: big slavery, encompassing entire populations, is settled; little slavery, encompassing a few hundred or thousand individuals, is not. A few people take out their frustration at the current fashion in politics on a building. From one perspective, their reaction could have been much worse, engendering more profound surprise.
I find fashion in politics a lot like fashion in theology: the truths remain, the glosses are fleeting. One may call for hope or declare the arrival of hope in a fallen world, but the world is still fallen, and people will act badly. Declaring the arrival of hope does not make it so.
What will surprise me in our socio-political culture? When people en masse act against historical character. Some believe the election of a man of African descent as President of the United States is an act of people en masse behaving against historical character. I contend that such an election became a statistical inevitability on 6 December 1865 as engineered by the political party currently not in control of the White House, House of Representatives or Senate, supported by the failure of the Back to Africa movement, and empowered by a Dream. Let us now praise famous men….
Seen from one perspective, Life finds a way; so does God. Even in a fallen world.