thoughts after Charlottesville

In the past days we have been exposed to images of hate.  Pictures of James Alex Fields Jr., charged with second degree murder, [1]  Cole White, Peter Cvjetanovic, James Allsup and others have spread across the USA and, in this global era, the world after they were seen in various roles participating in the alt-right, or apparently “paleoconservative” march at Charlottesville. 

So too have pictures of Heather Heyer, who was brutally killed in the violence that ensued,  a picture of bravery, of love in action, of martyrdom. Her mother, Susan Bro, has spoken out bravely through her grief: “Heather was not about hate, Heather was about stopping hatred. Heather was about bringing an end to injustice.”

Photos of the “Unite the Right” marchers do not show love. Since the event many have (including President Trump) used slippery words to justify their now well-exposed participation in a hate  event that day. Peter Cvjetanovic has told the world ‘he “cares for all people”.’ Images show him chanting at the march, wearing a polo-shirt emblazoned with the Identity Evropa symbol. Identity Evropa are identified as a white supremacist group, suggesting that Cvjetanovic’s care for all people contains the rider ‘some are more people than others.’ 

Cole White, outed by Twitter User “Yes You’re Racist”, has lost his job at Top Dog Berkeley. Top Dog Berkeley released a statement disassociating themselves from their former employee: “The actions of those in Charlottesville are not supported by Top Dog. We believe in individual freedom and voluntary association for everyone.” [2] As it happens even the manufacturers of the tiki torches carried by the alt-right marchers have also disassociated themselves from the vile use of their product. At the very least the politics of hate is not good for business, but I suspect Tiki recognize that hate is not good for humanity, either: “Our products are designed to enhance backyard gatherings and to help family and friends connect with each other at home in their yard.”[3]

James Allsup, president of Washington State University’s chapter of the College Republicans, has claimed that his outing is a smear, announcing “They have no proof that I’m a racist. They are slandering me and that I’m racist without evidence because I talk about history and I talk about American politics.”[4] We might guess he doesn’t speak much of the history of the Civil Rights movement. 

Nevertheless, these three and many others captured on camera, many of whom have been named by Yes You’re Racist and #GoodNightAltRight, were attending a rally the  intention of which was not to make daisy chains, sing “Kumbayah” and strive for universal love and racial equality. Their participation in a march featuring swastikas (as armband on a featured speaker and as a flag), T-shirts quoting Hitler, and more insignia of  Nazism suggest that racial hatred is a fundamental part of their creed. This is so no matter how they re-clothe their hate as “talk[ing] about history and I talk about American politics” (Allsup) or ensuring “that white European culture has a right to be here just like every other culture” (Cvjetanovic). 

The maxim “a photo never lies” is an over-simplification: the camera may not lie about the miniscule slice of time it captures, but judicious selection of photos is certainly a process of spin. Nevertheless the contrast between the photo chosen, presumably, by Heather Heyer’s family, and the photos of Allsop, Fields, Cvjetanovic, White and others portray a yawning chasm. They display the vast gulf between hate and love, that is as far, as the psalmist put it, as east is from west. No doubt there are photos of Allsop, Fields, Cvjetanovic, White looking tender, loving, and sweet, and perhaps even of Heather Heyer looking grumpy, but one senses that the current flood of images are conveying an indelible truth. 

One senses too that it will be Heyer’s photo that ultimately captures the spirit of these dark days, for the politics of hate will become – are becoming – a house divided, as Jesus described the entourage of evil.

For as long as Trump, Pence and others fail to disavow the politics of hate these days of tragedy will go on. I don’t want to make excuses for Allsop, Fields, Cvjetanovic, White and their pals-in-hatred, nor trivialize the immeasurable sacrifice of love made by Heather Heyer: greater love has no one than to lay down their life in a cause of justice.  But in the realm of conflict resolution, in which I am dipping my toes, note ‘conflict lies not in objective reality, but in people’s heads.”[5]

 

What is in the heads of Allsop, Fields, Cvjetanovic, White and their pals-in-hatred? Why do they feel so threatened by a changing world that, in the first place they champion the election of a pussy-grabbing thug as leader of their nation, and then, in the case of Fields, feel motivated to take action that leads to the charge that he has committed, inter alia, second degree murder? Is it possible at all to gain access to the patterns of these hate-filled minds? 

Certainly, though I like many of us would love to spew the same venom that they have spewed, retaliation and mockery will achieve nothing. Far more likely to achieve some solution is the undoubtedly grief-filled response of Susan Bro, Heather Heyer’s mother. After speaking of Heather’s love of justice, she goes on to speak of her daughter’s alleged killer: “I don’t want her death to be a focus for more hatred. I want her death to be a rallying cry for justice and equality and fairness and compassion. I’m very sorry that [Fields] chose that path because he has now ruined his life as well as robbed a great many of us of someone we love very much.” As if that were not awe-inspiring, peace-inspiring enough, she also said “I think he’s still very young, and I’m sorry he believed that hate could fix problems. Hate only brings more hate.” 

How do we climb inside minds of hate? Fields’ mind is the mind, we can safely assume, of someone who feels deeply troubled by the world he is facing. That’s why he (probably) voted for Donald Trump. That’s why he travelled some distance to attend the “Unite the Right” rally of hatred. That’s why, even before that, he subscribed to newsfeeds that told him, and Cvjetanovic, White and Allsop, that Charlottesville’s “Unite the Right” rally of hatred was happening. Fields’ mother, Samantha Bloom, has spoken of her bewilderment, for she had told her son “if they’re going to rally to make sure he’s doing it peacefully.”[6]  

Somewhere he missed part of that message. Peer pressure? Fear? The most visceral cause of action is survival-fear. Did – does – Fields fear that the existence of all that he holds dear is threatened? It has been suggested that even Kim Jong-un’s primary motivation to evil (nuclear empowerment, yes, but also assassination of rivals) [7] is the fear that his survival is threatened. Actually, perhaps that is true of Donald Trump, too.

It certainly is of Allsop, Fields, Cvjetanovic, White and their pals-in-hatred. Their perception, fed to a frenzy by hate-filled media such as the Breitbart News beloved of Trump’s ally Steve Bannon,[8] is that nasties are dismantling their world. Over-empowered blacks, Muslims, gays, Mexicans, nasty journalists,  foreigners: these faceless Others are threatening their world. It has never occurred to them that their world is one of privilege and exceptionalism, nor can it without help: “Unite the Right” is a pun you see. They are right, their privilege is God given, if they believe in God, and many do, or evolutionary if, like Hitler, they do not.  So they become, in photo and we might guess in reality, embodiments of fear-fuelled hatred.

But what of those who love? Of Heather Heyer, and her equally brave mother of course, but myriad others, too? I am reminded of Saffiyah Khan facing down an insignia-clad supremacist in Birmingham in April.[9] I am thinking of the unnamed woman facing down a hooded participant at a KKK rally recently.[10] I am thinking of Nobel prize laureate Malala Yousafzai, who refuses to hate those who shot her. Because I am an aging hippie I think too of the famous Flower Power photograph[11] from the Pentagon in 1967, an anonymous antiwar demonstrator placing a carnation in a Military Police rifle. And because of that photo I am somehow reminded of the recent and vivid Jonathan Bachman photo of Ieshia Evans facing  down riot police at a Black Lives Matter gathering in Baton Rouge.[12] These are the photos that proclaim “love wins.”

For those of us who wish to follow the Jesus way of the cross we have to respond not with hatred but with love. But how? Susan Bro has led the way (and her religious beliefs are immaterial: her amazing compassion is all). We need to climb inside the minds, no matter how putrid, of those who are frightened by justice and love and progress and equality (or race, religion, sexuality, and a myriad more … Trump’s mockery of disability reminds us of the many forms hatred of otherness can take). We need to strive to understand, and then strive ceaselessly for St Paul’s “more excellent way.” 

But as John Lennon accidentally reminded us, “Christ, you know it ain’t easy,” and all the harder when the perpetrators of hate believe they have God on their side. Christians however believe ourselves to be invaded by the Spirit of Christ; he sure understood his enemies, and loved and loves them still.

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[1]https://twitter.com/HenryGraff/status/896541167084548096/photo/1?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw&ref_url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.aljazeera.com%2Findepth%2Ffeatures%2F2017%2F08%2Fcharlottesville-james-alex-fields-170813111202708.html]

[2]http://www.eastbaytimes.com/2017/08/13/popular-berkeley-hot-dog-chain-fires-worker-seen-in-virginia-protest-photos/

[3] http://adage.com/article/cmo-strategy/tiki-blame-white-supremacist-torch-march/310108/

[4] http://www.theroot.com/washington-state-universitys-college-republicans-presid-1797816820

[5] Fisher, Ury and Patton, Getting to Yes, 24-31.

[6] http://www.toledoblade.com/local/2017/08/13/Mother-of-James-Alex-Fields-accused-of-driving-into-Charlottesville-crowd-shocked

[7] http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/north-korea-nuclear-weapons-donald-trump-1.4244020.

[8] Who is himself making some lifestyle choices, it seems, in the interests of self-preservation, at least if The Daily Mail can be believed; http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4720054/Bannon-largely-disappeared-Trump-s-inner-circle.html

[9] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/woman-edl-protesters-defy-birmingham-photograph-hijab-islamophobia-muslim-islam-racism-a7676971.html

[10]https://www.facebook.com/OccupyDemocrats/photos/a.347907068635687.81180.346937065399354/1652342074858840/?type=3&theatre

[11] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flower_Power_(photograph)

[12] http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-36759711

kill the female dog

 the light of hope wilts and dies in hot air

It was one of those random serendipities which are a valuable spice of life. Actually for those of us who have a well-developed P (errr … abbreviation for “proclivity for serendipity”, not what some of you were thinking) serendipity is life. This is a joy that those with sub-developed P will never understand. It must be so dull to structure every moment until a limp serendip slaps your carefully constructed visage and catapults you to adventure in the glorious unknown! 

But, as is the wont of a well-exercised P, I digress. I learned well from that other Anglican priest, Laurence Sterne, it seems, whose magnum opus was one glorious digression. I digress from a story of love. And hate. I digress from a chance encounter on the pixelated pages of discourse, where I was reading up on the fate of Linda Wenzel. 

Ms Wenzel is the sixteen year old German girl captured in Mosul, now the subject of an entire planetary atmosphere of hot air as punters discuss whether she should rot in hell, die by torture, be covered in honey and fed to ants, or, in a very few cases, given a chance to have her life restored. 

It was one of the last of those, the perhaps five per cent of commentators, who caught my attention. I’ll rename him to protect identities: we’ll call him Kashif Bilal. Sporting a potentially Muslim name and Facebook profile photo, this brave stranger stood like Jesus in the stone wielding crowd, suggesting that Linda Wenzel be given a chance. Not slapped over the jaxie with a wet cauliflower, but punished proportionately and given a new life. Not necessarily treated with any more leniency than, say, the Bulger murderers,  but oh my god, let’s not up the hate with more hate?

Certainly that’s more or less what Kashif and a tiny few others were attempting to say, amidst the spewings of hatred. Donald Trump supporters’ infamous “lock her up” and other misguided vomits were mild compared to the GIFs and paragraphs of vengeance and hatred directed at Ms Wenzel.

Many were of the “I should give a fornication why?” variety. Most, as it happens, read as if they belonged at a Trump rally. “Build a wall.” Build revenge, build hate, screw the female dog, hang her, hate her, and then hate the next one and the next one until I am alone on earth with only myself left to hate (and maybe that’s who I hated in the first place?). 

Impressed by Kashif’s bravery I messaged him. What makes an obviously young Muslim man stand up, even in pixels, to choruses of hate? It is the same rare ingredient that makes a Keshia Thomas put her body on the line in front of  a crowd of angry bloodlusters when they set out to treat a fallen KKK activist the way the KKK would treat a fallen black, led her to stand up against her own people to protect a hater from reciprocal hatred.[1] “Violence is violence, nobody deserves to be hurt, especially not for an idea” said then school girl Keshia, when asked why she saved a hater’s life. “"I knew what it was like to be hurt," she said. 

Ah, forgiveness, restitution, a second chance. Dudes, if you haven’t ever sinned feel free to chuck a stone, said Jesus. “You’re fired” say political leaders and church leaders and peddlers of hatred and unforgivenness and non-compassion in pixels and realities around the world and throughout time. String her up!  Lock her up! Screw the female dog! Sometimes escalating hatred is dressed up in fancy words: after due consideration and receipt of advice I have decided that the … whatever. That Linda Wenzel and all who have made mistakes should rot in hell while the judges and stone-chuckers live in their bubbles of self-righteousness. Often in the name of Jesus, too. 

So what did Kashif say? “I have a daughter and I worry for her. I want her to live her life loving people and not with hatred. All we can do is keep positivity.” Not far removed from Keshia Thomas’ “nobody deserves to be hurt” or Jesus’ “seventy times seven.” But a million miles from the “you’re fired” or “hang the female dog” that are the dominant narratives on our airwaves and pixel-paths of hatred whether underscored by self-righteous religion or self-righteous irreligion. 

I fear the dominant voices will prevail and Linda Wenzel will pay with her life for a very dumb mistake that she made as an angry teenager in a Dresden dormitory town. The bullet wound she has already received in her leg will be nothing compared to the words of hate that will dictate the discourse of what may well be her last days. The dumb mistake of allowing herself to be groomed on-line by Daesh’s version of haters will be escalated by the hatreds poured on her by the civilised Europeans’ own narratives of bloodlust. Even if the unproved assumptions that she has participated in blood crimes are right, her frightened death will not bring back those killed by Daesh and the cycles of hatred will go on and on.

But thank God for those few like Keshia Thomas, Kashif Bilal and Jesus of Nazareth who kinda figured that hate should not be the last word in the life of a human who made mistakes. 

And thank God, too, for the serendipity that permits us occasionally to exchange a few words with a fine young man who loves his daughter, who wants her to grow up in a world where the words that surround her are not “die, you female dog” or “you’re fired”, but words of love. 

Kia kaha, Kashif Bilal.

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[1] See http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-24653643 … and yes, I refer to this in my Entertaining Angels, 76.

on the homeless outside the church

It was just another day in the rest of my life. I don’t do winter and winter was still sternly around, despite those promises that are exaggerations and lies whispered by daffodils and jonquils and cherry blossoms and magnolia, flora-version of premature ejaculation. They promise caress of warmth and deliver only frustration, a cold chill, thwarted expectation. I have learned to ignore the false promise of those blossoms. There’s a metaphor somewhere there.  Thwarted promise, anyone?

There’s a lot of thwarted promises I’ve learned to ignore. It goes with greying hair, saggy bits and lengthening shadows, perhaps. As aging Baby Boomers we can learn to forget much that once lit up our world. The times that once were a-changing merely morphed back, the m-m-my generation that hoped to die before it got old by and large decided to cling tenaciously to life if it hadn’t OD’ed or choked on it its own vomit. But not to surrender creature comforts.

Boomers who received their free education ensured our successors had to pay, generated rigorous structures and maintained institutions that protected our own bank vaults. When younger generations X, Y, and Z with increasing passion tried to draw attention to depleted ozones, dwindling resources, and the bitter discomfort of nights spent under the stars with hungry children, then we were eloquent. We Boomers bleated empty promises and retreated comfortably into our secure institutions or private hedonistic liberations. We retreated, and left X, Y and Z outside in the bitterly cold nights that mock the promises made by spring flowers and Baby Boomers. We left X, Y and Z increasingly disillusioned with our edifices, sleeping outside our comfort zones on bitterly cold nights, nights spent under the stars with their own hungry children, our mokopuna.

As it happened I stumbled across a rally, a small public gathering drawing attention to the plight of homeless people. There was passion, compassion, anger. There were a few politicians working their version of the beat. There was rhetoric, and, as feisty local councilor Henare O'Keefe made clear, there was the ever-present risk that after the rhetoric and the pakipaki there would be for many of us, a warm glow, a sense of achievement, and a satisfied trudge home knowing that we had gathered to assuage our bleeding hearts.

We.

Because I know I will, I did, too. I heard the stories, felt deeply sad, spread my magnolia blossom of promise and went home to my warm bed. As I always have, I preach to myself. I walked away, and the only times that were a-changing were the times tick-tocking away to the next election when, if our most vulnerable have not succumbed to the cold, a new government will form with either blue or red hues, and someone else will drag a sleeping bag to sparse hardly-shelter that is home beneath the

Pier, where Napier homeless often sleep

pier or a bridge or a tree or a church.

Oh, but not a church. Because the gate-keepers, as Henare hinted in his impassioned korero, will ring their hands and say tut tut and mouth a platitude or two and move the rough sleepers on because, well you know, not nice, not clean. 

Ah, the church! I have a mate who wanted to implement some changes at a church. Wanted to make the connections stronger between the church and the society it claims to care for. They were met with a vast vomit of Canons (yup: that’s a fancy obscure church-word for rules) that explained why new ideas could not be implemented. Thou shalt not, because Canon 54 sub-clause 2 part a: ii says blah blah blah.

Homeless? Not welcome here, thanks.

Remember Hemi Baxter’s Holy Spirit who squawked and laid an egg? She’s doing it again. With bitter tears. While chardonnay socialists and theological progressives write papers and wring hands and re-arrange deckchairs and ask homeless people to leave the porch please because, well you know, not nice. And besides, we paid for that toilet paper that you might use if we don’t lock it away. 

A homeless man named Major Keelan and a 13 year old named Jack and the redoubtable Councillor Henare O'Keefe (yes, redoubtable,  and reliable too, because this man has put his life and resources where his mouth is), they all made speeches from the heart. And a few blobs of rain fell, and I’m a bit of an ADHD sort so my mind wandered from the public space where we were listening. The grey mind-jelly wandered away. It wandered away from the small crowd, where visible church representation was conspicuous by its absence (and those who were there may have squirmed a little, as I did, as Henare delivered a truth or two about vacuous ecclesiastical promises). It wander-oozed across the small city block to where a large church that I once knew well stood, tall and proud and near-empty (and cold, but not as cold as the empty space beneath a pier on the water front). St Ozymandias, perhaps. 

six hundred or so empty pews

As this tired Baby Boomer mind wandered, and wondered too at the invisibility of visible church presence at the rally, it entered that adjacent near-empty church-building of St Ozymandias. It wondered how many homeless could sleep in or beneath the 600 hundred or so usually empty pews, with or without heaters. It wondered, not altogether tangentially, why Generations X Y and Z can’t be bothered with echoing cold walls of that cubist monolith, can’t be bothered with yet another colossal institution that exists it seems to preserve itself.

My wandering mind realized too that those with theological degrees, those called, set aside to follow the homeless Christ, those with collars on back-to-front to be a (largely meaningless now) sign to the world, with a passion for pressed robes, cultured enunciations, perfected ceremonies and oh yes, Canons (remember Canons? remember Canon 54 sub-clause 2 part a: ii?), all that and above all propriety, those who are called, set-aside, licensed precisely to be the visible face of the church, the human face of God, they were right at that moment ensconced in their building, St Ozymandias. 

They were safe there as the sound of musical magnificence, crescendos of Haydn’s Creation soared to the rafters, drowning out the faint echoes of the speeches of the street people and their advocates, as Henare delivered a deserved serve and Major reminded us that he didn’t enjoy the unwashed state he was in and 13 year old Jack with his love for family and animals told how much it hurt to have no home.  Safe there behind metre thick walls and heavy wooden doors, safe in an edifice that ensures that only the vetted and nice and clean and housed people may gain entry and hear the soaring harmonies of dead white males. 

Amidst the libretti and the recitativi faithful devotees of the counter-god Apollo, effete beautiful god of music and aesthetics and order and dignity, nice god, good god, they were content while Major and Henare and Jack and others told their poignant tale and the rain began to fall and brought my wandering and wondering grey jelly back to the present. The real God who is revealed in the homeless mendicant Jesus was there, nearby, there at the sound shell of public speech, at that that cold public space without metre thick walls (though a dangerous place to sleep because police will soon move you on).  

The suffering God, homeless Jesus-God, was ignoring the fine concert and the dribbles of money that it would raise to facilitate, under the Canons, the aesthetically pleasing work of the church.  The real God who has “nowhere to lay his (or her) head” and who is far closer to the generations that have turned their back on monolithic institutions, the real God who understands only too well the skepticism and anti-institutionalism of Gens X, Y, and Z, she was getting ready for another night, homeless in the rain. The real God with nowhere to lay her head realized it probably wouldn’t be worthwhile, if the rain got heavy, to mooch over to the big empty church of St Ozymandias  for some shelter, because someone would cite a Canon and ask her to have a shower and only then maybe come back on Sunday.

Nearby magnolia blossom and rain fell and washed away in the gutter.