Charlottesville Part I: Time does not heal a poisoned wound

So I guess this is why I wrote that post the other month about Christians and the Holocaust, though I didn't quite know it at the time.

I still don't know exactly where to start. I just keep wanting to say, "So. Nazis."

OK, let's start here. You've probably watched this already, but if you haven't, please watch it.

But please don't watch it with children in the room.

The car attack is in there, starting at 11:22. You don't really see people getting hit.

I had a secret belief as a kid. I never told my parents, because I understood that officially, I was dead wrong, but I was still sure I was right. I had a secret belief that politics didn't really matter. Hadn't my parents noticed that no matter who was in office, our lives didn't change?

I suppose I would have seen the matter differently if politics determined whether it was legal to buy and sell me--or kill me. Or even if politics had determined that for my ancestors.

I also would have seen the matter differently if I was growing up right now.

When I was a kid, people didn't kill other people in the street over politics.

(Or so I thought. Should I say white people didn't kill white people in the street over politics? Was the death of Tamir Rice political?)

The reason that I took down the original version of this post was that I started feeling very uneasy about how it could be read. There were two parts to the post; they were related but I didn't make the relation clear. First I talked about how the deepening polarization of politics in this country had finally crossed the line over into open armed violence and murder, and I shared vague but dramatic fears of some type of civil war. Then I transitioned into saying that the moral wound of antebellum slavery and of racism in the U.S. has never truly healed, because it has never been truly and fully acknowledged. Time does not heal a poisoned wound shut away from the light.

Since posting, I grew more and more uncomfortable about that combination. Or rather, I lay awake at night and my brain asked me, Heather, are you stupid or are you trying to stoke fears of a race war?

I mean, I trust you, Dear Reader. But there are people out there, I know they are out there, who believe one is coming because different races simply cannot live together. I mean I respect them, they say (a bald-faced lie) but we're too different, we're better off separate. (But equal?)

And that's not what I meant. We all know who showed up to a supposed protest armed for war, and it wasn't Black Lives Matter.

So here is my simplified version.

There was a time when white Americans didn't kill each other in the street over politics.

That time is done.

I keep thinking about all the talk, the endless talk, about politics in the U.S. becoming more and more polarized. I thought about how I haven't heard any of that talk lately. As if it's crossed some kind of threshold. Some point of no return.
I keep thinking about how city after city taking Confederate monuments down is a kind of change I had never expected to see in this country. About how armed, openly Nazi rioters are another kind of change I never expected to see.

I think about the web of taboos and safeguards every civilization weaves to keep words spoken in anger from crossing over the line into violence. I think about that moment, that moment when the line is crossed and there is death and people screaming in the street, not in another country but in your country, between fellow citizens of the same country. Which is mine, no matter how much I may have tried to deny it in my youth. This country, this country of the desperately hidden wound.
There has been something in me, even in adulthood, that still believes in its heart that my life is serene, above the deadly tides of history. That thing inside me shakes when I watch that video. That's the truth. I see people who look like me beating each other with sticks. I know, if I was there, which side I would be on, and it's the side that was hit by a car. That's the truth. I see that and it scares me.

So instead of talking about war this time I'm just telling you what I feel. That I'm scared. That history is a terrifying thing. That I, as one of the privileged, can no longer assume that my life will not change. And maybe you as well.

This country has never been whole. It has never been whole since the day it started importing people as commodities to be bought and sold and raped and murdered with impunity. That is a moral wound a nation doesn't recover from. Could it have become whole, when that stopped? With a true repentance, recognition of the true magnitude of the evil, a wrenching remorse? With confession, atonement and perhaps forgiveness? I don't know. It can't be known. Our forebears offered scorn, mockery and underhanded oppression instead to the people their parents had sinned against so terribly. Even now, it's all taught in the schools, but it took me a long, long time to understand. It took me a long time to understand that what my ancestors did in my country can absolutely be compared to the Holocaust.

The textbooks didn't tell me--for example--that white male slave owners frequently raped their female slaves, had children by them, and then in full legal respectability could sell off their own children as slaves. To be treated the same way they had treated those children's mothers.

And breaking up families by force, don't get me started.

How does a country that allowed things like that to happen, that made it legal, go on with life and pretend everything is OK? Claim that it's all good now because the children of the victims of such evil have finally been granted the privilege of drinking at the same water fountain as the children of the perpetrators? Listen. Forget "white guilt," I don't remotely imagine I'm responsible for what my ancestors did, I am talking about truth. About willing, open, public acknowledgement of the truth of how bad it was. The survivors of the Holocaust were granted that. The survivors of American slavery were not. Their descendants have been given crumbs of it, and been told over and over to ask for their crumbs more politely. And been told to walk politely past the huge statues of men who fought in hopes that they would be born slaves too.

Yes, it was a long time ago. No, time does not heal a poisoned wound.

Now they are saying again that they want some truth, about what happened then and what is happening now. White allies are standing with them and saying it too. And white supremacists and neo-Nazis, choosing to openly embrace the brutal side of human nature that whispers and screams kill the outsiders, the side that we've hidden and repressed for decades and never succeeded in doing away with, come armed against them and commit murder in the street.

And the President does not condemn them.

And prominent Christian leaders do not rebuke him.

The Christian church. I have so much to say. The Christian churches in this country that justified and defended the holocaust of slavery. That supported the KKK. The failure of the Church under Nazism was mostly failure to resist. Its betrayal in this country was worse.

And now? What of the Christian churches now?

I have so much to say. Too much. I think I'd better post again tomorrow.

I don't know what's going to happen. I honestly don't. But I think we have to be ready for things we didn't formerly see as possible. I think we have to start thinking now about how we will meet them. I think we Christians have to think long and hard about who to trust to guide us into this time.

Off the top of my head, I can think of one Person.

More on this later. God be with all of us.