Choosing Higher Ground
Don Hynes
It’s an old, old story, finding root in the jealousy and vengeance of Cain, the apartheid between Ishmael and his brother Isaac, the burning stake of the middle ages and the blood red cross of the crusaders, the ignominy of slavery and the white hooded ignorance that followed, the untouchable, the terrorist and the unflagging lineup of those qualified to cast the first stone.
As I watched Senator Obama distance himself from the man who has been his church pastor for twenty years I felt a great sadness. Reverend Wright had spoken so eloquently in his hour with Bill Moyers and that dignity and intelligence along with Senator Obama’s bridging oratory on race appeared to be drawing America back from the chasm of racial divide, the wound opened self-servingly by the Clinton campaign and inflamed by the right wing.
What overtook Reverend Wright? Some say it was just press frenzy but here was a good and thoughtful man feeding it. Perhaps as a retired elder minister the national spotlight was too much. Much of what he said was true but his obvious pleasure in finally returning the scorn that had surely been heaped upon him many times as an African American and clergyman was raw meat for the media.
For whatever reason he broke from the ground Obama had founded his campaign upon and in that denial required Obama to divide himself from him, an act that denigrated the promise the Obama campaign had ignited throughout the primary, weakening the fragile fabric of renewal against the underlying despair about our government and misdirected leadership.
Many will enjoy this weakening, find satisfaction in the naiveté of ideal ineffective against long standing prejudice. Many support the tweedle dum tweedle dee theory of politics, “all the candidates get big money, all are sullied, all are the same” generic analysis which should have long ago been resigned to the ash bin after comparing the disaster of the Bush presidency beside what would have occurred under our rightfully elected president Al Gore.
We were gifted with a brilliant seed in the founding of the United States but that seed had to take root in a land and people already corrupted by genocide and slavery. We’ve opted for exceptionalism as an antidote, thinking ourselves better than the rest, “a city on a hill,” and displayed the audacity to cheer a president who demanded the world choose between “us and them,” them ultimately being anyone who dared oppose our will, our desire, those “others.”
Our current madness now includes 460 children torn from their parents at gunpoint in Texas. One purported complaint, some percentage of possible real issues and hundreds of children and families wrested from their homes, isolated behind a Stalinist wall of bureaucratic incarceration. The women wore long dresses, braided hair, married their cousins, low fashion quotient. Other.
The story is not yet finished, not of this campaign, of this nation, but in this time of planetary crisis, from waning energy to global pollution, from collapsing economies to an often starving and over populated world, these manifold problems and more demand that we work together creatively and collaboratively toward the higher good. Scapegoating was never a solution and today it only means regression, repression and continuing violence.
There are mature models of evolving intelligence amongst us, most recently President Carter in his dignified and eloquent approach to the charnel descent of the Middle East. These are the examples we must emulate, elevate and follow. The legacy of Cain is comfort to the ignorant but it promises nothing for the path forward we must create together if we are to grow beyond the simple mindedness of black and white, the prejudices and bigotries that reduce us, and choose the direction of increasing complexity, compassion, intelligence, and yes, hope.
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Peace,
Don Hynes