Could We Build Something Different?

There’s a big old island of trash floating out there in the Pacific Ocean. I learned today from some reading that it's mostly itty bitty pieces of plastic, detritus from the world's wasteful ways. Here's an interesting article about it: http://www.zmescience.com/science/oceanography/just-in-case-you-didnt-know-theres-a-garbage-island-twice-as-big-as-france-in-the-pacific-ocean/  It’s awful. It’s dangerous. It’s ugly. It’s an assault on our humanity that it exists. How did it get there? One piece at a time. People thought…well, one little bottle in the great big sea is no big deal. Others may have thought…everyone else is doing it. It is not beyond the possible that one of those plastic bottles came from you or me…80% of the debris is from land rather than ships or rigs. Then there were those that flat out did not care and still do not care. Make no mistake, people are adding to the mess every single day. They do not have the love and respect for our planet to treat it with reverence. So the blight grows. One piece at a time.

I woke up thinking about this yesterday, as an analogy for what happened in Charleston Wednesday. I don’t think it or any analogy is perfect but I do believe that incremental growth has been in work when it comes to racism in our country. I grew up in the 50’s and 60’s. I was raised in a South Central Texas, in a Christian home, with a lot more love than is present in the homes of many who call themselves “Christians” today. But I did see the ugliness in my own hometown and also played out on TV. In my town it was mostly directed at Hispanics. Anybody who thinks this line of thinking is over is not in tune with today’s politics. Via media of course, I witnessed the unfolding of the Civil Rights Movement. I can’t forget the twisted hate-filled faces of mobs trying to keep one little girl from going to elementary school. It seemed to me that things were finally so stunningly wrong that we reached a tipping point and good people began to realize change was necessary. While I certainly knew we had a long way to go to becoming “post racial,” I did tell myself progress had occurred since the '60s.

Then we elected a black President. There was a great feeling of hope and pride among many people that this was the beginning of a new era. But even during the campaign and most certainly after, the ugliness raised its head. It seemed that a lot of folks decided that racisim was not only permissible behind closed doors, but that it was actually in vogue. These days tasteless jokes abound and folks use veiled expressions and code words to talk about their prejudices. People seem to think that things they thought but kept to themselves are now just fine to say. Didn’t we have a Presidential candidate stand up just this week and tell us that Hispanic immigrants are rapists and addicts? He knows he has an audience for those words. And anybody who thinks racism is less an issue ore even about the same as it was 10 years ago is not being honest with himself or others. I remember vividly the ugly mobs at school segregation protests and the deaths of marchers, and of course of the four innocent young girls in Birmingham. To me, this was a moment when right thinking people knew they could no longer remain on the fence. It was time to take a stand against racism. Now we have an event so similar to the one in Birmingham that comparison cannot be denied. It is tipping point time again. It is time to say:  Enough. No more. This must stop. That means the snide comments as well as the out and out hate speech and actions. Enough. Stop. Now. We have built a big island of hate and bigotry in this country and indeed in the world, one bit at a time, just like that big old trash island out in the ocean. We need to make it clear that we will not tolerate this trashy behavior in our presence or in our country. And here's my final thought...What if instead we started building, bit by bit, some islands of love and tolerance in our beleaguered world?