Some time ago, two rednecks in Texas spotted a black man walking along a country road, a man they had never seen before. After a brief exchange of racial innuendo, they roped the man like cattle and dragged him behind their pickup truck. They laughed and drank while the man screamed and his skin and flesh ripped from his bones. When the man finally lost consciousness, they left him to bleed to death. Not being shy about capital punishment, Texas made quick work of the criminals, leaving the great "why" forever unanswered.
I have written elsewhere of the Us-vs-Them mentality that I feel has brought us racism, anti-semeticism, as well as cheering on our favorite football team. I have seen in Biafra and Northern Ireland how the Us Group uses it to cement their bonds, to express their love for one another by hating a group of outsiders. Almost as if the distance from ambivalence to love needs to be accentuated by the contrast, all the way from hate to love. The perception of love grows because of the chasm between the group loved and the group hated.
Walking the streets of Belfast many years ago, I was amazed at the closeness of the residents. Unlike our suburbia, everyone knew everyone, their kids and their favorite songs. Anyone in trouble could count on the community coming together to help. The love of the Us Group was in full bloom. But on a fence, spray paint announced, "Remember 1641". Odd, I thought, I don't even remember Tuesday. Christian love coexisted with the victims of 1641 settling scores.
I had put the great "why" to bed with the two Texans demonstrating their love for one another, their camaraderie, their bond to a victims group suffering at the hands of liberals. In a great, twisted dichotomy, the senseless evil was done out of love.
This ragged logic served as a place holder until I sat behind a five-year-old black child yesterday at my favorite brunch spot in Big Bear. We didn't say a word, but her eyes told me she found me interesting enough for a smile, a smile that said she liked me even without knowing me, and a trust that I would like her back. I flashed back to the two Texans who were once five-year-old boys, and in my mind, the lingering "Why" broke the moment of innocence.
If she had asked me why, I'm sure the little girl wouldn't want to hear about Us-vs-Them Groups. She would have wanted to know how baby Jesus could allow such a thing. I spent my weekend wandering the trees having imaginary conversations with her, taking stabs at the answer I would give.
"We can get sick in different ways," I might begin. "When you catch cold, your body is sick. When grandpa starts to forget things, his mind is sick. The two men in the pickup truck, they had a sickness of their spirit. Their soul caught a disease."
"How did they catch it?" she might ask.
"Like a cold, from other people, perhaps their friends, teachers, or parents."
"By touching them?"
"No, by listening to them, by believing them, and spending lots of time with them until they re-infect each other over and over."
"Am I going to get sick in my spirit?"
"We can all catch it," I continue, "if we don't take care. But we can protect ourselves, just like when we put our hand over our mouth when we cough. Your parents will protect you, by teaching you how to take good care of your soul, and so will baby Jesus, if you listen to them both. And when you get older, you will know not to hang around with friends who can make your spirit sick. Did you ever notice that if your friends are loud, you'll be loud too? So if you want to be quiet, you won't hang out with the loud ones. It's like that."
"But if I catch it, is there a cure?"
"Yes. I had the sickness in my spirit, and I got cured. When I was a boy not much older than you, I came to America from a country with no black people. When I first saw a black man, I touched him to see if it came off. My parents and friends were like me, and so we made up stories about black people to try to explain what we didn't understand. Some of the stories scared me. I never fought with a black kid at school because I was afraid he would tear me apart. I stayed away from black kids, and because we spoke a funny language, they stayed away from us. We were always on opposite sides at stick ball, and before long, we didn't like each other."
"When I don't get along with someone," she might add, "my mom sets us down and makes us talk until we make friends. Why didn't your parents do that?"
"Our parents were just like us. Let me draw you a picture."
Grabbing a crayon, I scribble
"It's that simple," I say. "Ignorance is when you don't know about someone, and then we're all scared of what we don't know. You're scared of the dark, right?"
After she nods, I continue, "And if there's a bogeyman under your bed, do you like him or hate him?"
"It's as simple as that," I say pointing at my scribbling.
"So, how did you get cured?" she asks.
"Cedric," I announce. "He was a tall black kid who could run backwards as fast as I could run forwards. I thought that was cool, so we made friends. My parents didn't like black people, but they eventually liked Cedric. They would say, "He's not like them". I asked Cedric what it was like being black, and we talked about words like "nigger" and what it was like growing up with some people saying he was dirty or stupid because he was black."
I point at the word "Ignorance" on my drawing, and say, "That's what Cedric was working on. He pulled out the block on which everything else was built."
"So without Cedric," she asked, "you could have turned into someone like those Texans with the pickup truck?"
"Could've happened if I had continued to get sicker and sicker. But the nice thing is that once you're cured, it's like smallpox, it's nearly impossible to catch it again because of what you've been through. And with what I learned in Africa, it became impossible to ever have that particular disease of the spirit."
"You went to Africa?"
"Down one side," I bragged, "and up the other. Took a couple years, but I learned a lot about black people -- and myself."
"I bet no one who does that can hate black people."
"Actually," I countered, "I met many white people in Africa who hated black people. They kept to themselves and proved that you could be ignorant of black people even surrounded by them. They said black Africans were like children because the natives were not educated in our ways. They bossed them around, kinda like your parents do to you, but they didn't work to help them grow up, as your parents do with you. The most important thing they didn't do, what everyone does to children, they didn't love them."
"What about the people who never meet Cedric?" she interrupted. "Who is going to cure their spirit?"
"They have to hear and see people who are like Cedric, maybe you when you grow up. One good example was Martin Luther King jr. He didn't fight with white people who hated him. He got on TV and showed everyone what black people were like. He helped end segregation, which was an organized way to keep white people ignorant about black people."
"But the people with the disease of the spirit won," she said. "They shot him."
"They shot him because the sick people didn't want to take their medicine to get better. Do you like to take medicine?"
"Nope"
"Nobody does, but he made them take it, and because of that, he cured a lot of people. He didn't lose. He won, and that's why you get off school on his holiday. Do you know why I like him?"
"Because he cured everyone?"
"No, and the disease is still around, just not as common. I like him because I like America and he was a true patriot. This is odd because most of the people who hated him waved flags and said he was against America. Yet Martin Luther King was one of the few people who believed America would change in a huge way, and it did. That's easy to see now, but not then. With the way they had been treated for all their history in America, many black people of his day did not hold out much hope for change. Martin Luther King was one of the few who said the foundation of this country was so right that it would have to change for the better. Ask your grandpa to think back when he was your age, and whether he thought then that the whole country would change this much. No matter how many Americans mistreated him, Martin Luther King never lost faith in America."
"You may not know how easy it would have been for Martin Luther King to say he was the leader of black people," I continued, "and the time had come to fight the white people who were keeping them down. There were plenty of black people saying that was the right way to go. He had to stand up to them, too. If not for his faith and courage, we might have become like the Middle East with lots more cases of the disease of the spirit."
"So if this disease of the spirit was behind all this," she asked, "how come I've never heard about it?"
"Sure you have, but it goes by different names, like racism."