“By our love”–Knoxville church recovers core values

It was Lions-2, Christians-800 in Knoxville Sunday as the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church started recovering from the trauma of watching a terrorist gun down two people in front of an audience of 200 who were watching a children’s production of the musical “Annie” in their church last week.

All week the town had rallied together with services at Baptist, Presbyterian, and Lutheran churches, singing Amazing Grace and They’ll know we are Christians by our love. That’s a tune from back in the ecumenical 60′s. I always liked it, being a bit in a minor key but still evocative of the core mission of mainstream Protestantism. Why, that reminds me of the time….

….I remember a Sunday service at a campground, once long ago, when I was about fifteen.  A fire-and-brimstone preaching team presented their message of gloom and doom.  Then they asked if anybody wanted to “witness”.  Now I’m not sure what witnessing is, but we sure didn’t do that kind of thing around those parts. You could tell a lot of people were uncomfortable with the direction the service was taking.  So I got nudged, whispers ensued, I was pushed to the front, and I ended up asking to borrow the guitar of the meanest woman in the bunch.  She glared, but after all they had invited witnesses, and I was such a sweet and innocent looking fifteen year old.  So I sang  “They’ll know we are Christians by our love.”  Slowly the rest joined in.  Everyone there knew the song.  They sang it quietly, but with conviction, then listened respectfully to the rest of the message.  The Meanest Woman continued by blistering the group with her indictment of what nasty sinners we all were.  Why, no one had even bothered to “witness”.  Then she stopped, glared at me, and stammered a little.  I had ruined her narrative. She rushed through the rest of her prepared remarks, but couldn’t summon up quite the same vitriol…..

In that Knoxville church, vitriol had also been met with quiet resistance, and the shooter was now in jail.  Now the time had come to take back the holy ground that had been defiled by violence.  With the front door of the church decorated in ribbons of all colors of the rainbow to symbolize diversity, Rev. Chris Buice talked about the shooter:

Reports tell us he thought liberals were soft on terror.  He had a rude discovery.

The group laughed, then gave him a standing ovation.  Buice reiterated the church’s core values of tolerance, for all people regardless of race, sexual orientation or political persuasion.

We are all liberals. We are all conservatives.

Perhaps the wisest thing was said by a commenter on a blog, Ann Hake:

Any individual, liberal or conservative, is responsible for the divisive prejudices which feed societies’ crazies according to how he/she acts, speaks and thinks. We as individuals can strive to encourage a shared vision of humanity’s path, an understanding of each other, a realization that diversity brings multi dimensional solutions to any problem. Very simple acts and words every day make that difference.

We know the killer had copies of several conservative books: The O’Reilly Factor, by television commentator Bill O’Reilly, Liberalism is a Mental Disorder, by radio personality Michael Savage, and Let Freedom Ring, by political pundit Sean Hannity, but I don’t think the problem is conservatism.  The problem is that conservatives have taken the easy path of hate and ridicule. Instead of selling t-shirts that show donkeys superimposed on a target, they should be thinking though their positions carefully. And liberals should be listening to their positions. That is how the multidiminesional solution is arrived at.

Yes it is true that one person who is angry, hateful and deranged can change a community for the worse, through fear.  And someone who wants to make a buck can engage in the kind of rhetoric that yells fire in a crowded theater and triggers that unstable mind. But the venom in those venal words can also be neutralized, often before the fact, by a few people who have the courage for simple acts and words of understanding.

View of an Obama presidency from the gutter

MySpace has sent me an email reminding me that today is the birthday of one of my “friends”, a certain  Barack Obama.  So for the Senator’s birthday I will relate a local Obama story.

Last week I paused in the dash to finish all the end of semester paperwork and took a stroll in the neighborhood around my school.  In front of a local day care center, a drunk was shouting about all the people he was going to kill.  That was different.

I made my way to the Radio Shack where my last unfortunate visit had yielded a fawning sales clerk who told me how wonderful it was that someone female would take an interest in technology.  As I restrained homicidal impulses, he read the back of several router packages to me.  Was he amazed that I could read as well?  No, if he was reading to me, he probably thought I couldn’t read.  Never mind, I found a very lovely router for $60 less online through my favorite website, techbargains.com. Maybe reading is such a mystical art, and maybe technology for women is such a novelty, but I sure do know how to accessorize.  The little green lights of the router match my modem perfectly. This visit was even worse.  I had developed a sudden compulsion to look at thumb drives, which were behind the counter.  The lone sales clerk had the volume of a demo stereo cranked to max and I was clearly in the way.  Radio Shack is always so unpleasant.

Returning to the school with a bag of fast food, I settled into the break room and tried to follow the Spanish conversation of the staff.  I had just missed a drunk who showed up at the school.  The same one who had been shouting at the day care center.  “When are you going to give me some food?” he had demanded from the staff.  “Never,” was the answer.

Just wait til Obama is president, the drunk said.  There won’t be any more white people, and you will have to go back to Mexico.

En vino veritas? Is this something going around on the streets or just some drunken raving?  Last winter there was a rumor in the Hispanic community that if Obama won all the blacks were going to riot.  So they didn’t want to vote for him.  In retrospect, after Al Sharptons’s comments about Denver, maybe it’s not so far fetched, but the answer I gave at the time was easy.  It wasn’t that long ago that Chicago elected a black mayor, Harold Washington, and there was no riot.  Just Chicago business as usual.  But what is the expectation on the street?

Fatwa against Liberals?

What makes someone open fire on a group of people watching a children’s play in a church?

When a gunman was arrested after opening fire in a Knoxville church last weekend, he told authorities

that he had targeted the church because of its liberal teachings and his belief that all liberals should be killed because they were ruining the country, and that he felt that the Democrats had tied his country’s hands in the war on terror and they had ruined every institution in America with the aid of the major media outlets.

He was known as someone who “hated blacks, gays and anyone different from him”. He was unemployed, and was losing his food stamps.

Was he just someone who turned to hating other groups because his own life was unsuccessful? As the Christian Science Monitor suggested, was he one of a “whole category of mass killers who are seeking vengeance against a group of people who they feel are taking away their birthright, their opportunities, and making it difficult to succeed…society has been bending backward to favor disenfranchised groups so they’re trying to get some justice for their own victimization.”

Or maybe a question of lost manhood?

They will take that intense personal feeling of emasculation and failure and find some societal or political overlay that makes the failure seem not of their doing.

Leave aside for the moment the question of how someone whose wife had a restraining order against him and who once told her he was going to “blow her brains out then blow his own brains out” was able walk into a pawn shop and to buy a semi-automatic weapon.

Where did the shooter get the “political overlay” that told him to kill liberals?

It’s nothing new. For years, conservative pundits have been calling for physical violence against those who don’t agree with them. Glen Greenwald spent some time a while back documenting the conservative lynch mentality, links are in the above Media Matters piece. Some on the blogosphere think that words don’t matter, and this type of call for violence is unimportant.

You can still get a “liberal hunting license” with a picture of a donkey superimposed on a target from one blog’s “Patriot Shop”. This from a website with a mission to distribute their literature to military personnel. Just what we need. People who already know how to use a gun being indoctrinated to shoot democrats.

The chatter on the blogosphere also points to conservative pundits (Savage, Hannity, O’Reilly, Coulter, FOX, Limbaugh, Beck etc.) as being responsible for the shooting.

And what was the shooter reading before he went on his rampage? Police removed the following books from his home:

• The O’Reilly Factor, by television commentator Bill O’Reilly
• Liberalism is a Mental Disorder, by radio personality Michael Savage
• Let Freedom Ring, by political pundit Sean Hannity

I grew up in a very conservative community, although of course there were all political types there too, but I never saw the kind of hate speech and intolerance that passes for conservatism these days. Whatever happened to conservatives like William F. Buckley? The conservatives these days just seem to push the envelope more and more, becoming more and more outrageous in order to market more and more books and make more and more money.

The other day I was in one of those little Arab supermarkets buying pita bread. They had on a program with a man weeping copiously and dramatically about the latest political action in his neighborhood, I think from al-Jazeera. It wasn’t being presented as a news program although it was news. It was the equivalent of a soap opera.

This is the new entertainment, whether al-Jazeera or Ann Couter. It sells. Some recognize it for marketing, like professional wrestling, but others mistake it for truth. The tragedy is when someone like the Knoxville shooter, or the al-Quaeda suicide bombers mistake this type of propaganda for real life and act on it.

Chicago’s increasing violence–the latest “white alert” lockdown in a south side school

Up until now, all I knew about school violence was from reports in the newspaper. Today, while at a meeting in a school building, an announcement came over the PA system that we were in a Code White. All the doors were to be locked and no one was to leave.

I visit schools fairly often, and lately have noticed signs of increasing security. Visitor passes. Notices about color code alerts. Police presentations to parent groups about gang activity. Doors locked where they weren’t locked before.

And lately, in this area at least, violence seems to be especially targeting schools. So far this year, 20 school children have been killed in gun violence. In April alone, threats have been received at Rotolo Middle School in Batavia, South Suburban College in South Holland, St. Xavier University in Morgan Park, (prompting more school closings for the surrounding Mother McAuley High School, Brother Rice High School, Queen of Martyrs Elementary School and Evergreen Park Southwest Elementary), Sandburg High School in Orland Park, Malcolm X College on the West Side, and St. Charles North High School in the western suburbs.

All of this is taking place against the backdrop of shootings at Columbine High School in April 1999, Virginia Tech in April of last year, and the five deaths last month at Northern Illinois University.

Our group was eventually permitted to leave the building under escort, but not without some worrisome moments. Some of our group still had pre-school children in a daycare area of the school who continued to be held in lockdown.