Originally published in Loaves & Fishes, Clairvaux Farm, Elkton, MD.
The town of Elkton, Maryland, consists of some 9,000 souls. The entirety of Cecil County boasts a little more than 70,000.
Yet, one month ago, national attention was focused here because a very small group of confused and fearful people was given official permission to march through this little town with their faces covered, in the name of blaming and loathing a portion of their fellow citizens.
Both the marchers and the group they think to be at fault have been ground and smashed by a society riddled with vast, and growing, disparities of privilege and disadvantage. Both the marchers and the people who are the object of their blame look about them and see a society to which they are more and more marginal. Both the marchers and the people they believe they hate are overwhelmed by the self-hatred which they carry with them every day. They both think they know that their situation is their own fault: “If I had been better, I would not be here. If I had been better, I would have succeeded. I knew I was no good.” Such self-hatred consumes us with guilt, shame, rage, addiction, if it does not explode outward in a torrent of hate.
Both the marchers and those against whom they march have children whom they love and adore, because of whom they are anxious about the future, whose faces they caress, whose sleeping forms they watch with joy and concern.
Both the marchers and those intended as the object of the march have within their ranks more than their share of close friends, loved ones, family members who have hit bottom: the unemployed, the addicted, the illiterate, the homeless.
In this little town, it was once said that there are no homeless. It was once said in this town that there would never be a shelter for homeless men. Yet, on the same night that permission was given for this march that gained so much attention, the mayor and the commissioners gave a shelter for men rent-free accommodations for its day programs for the next year. The march was trumpeted to the world. The goodness that happened, the kindness that occurred, went little noticed.
It is said that the first Native Americans taken back to Europe with the returning invaders were struck with wonder by many things and bewildered at the sight of beggars in the street.
These past 500 years have been a calamity. The restlessness and rapacity of Western Civilization has led to the establishment of an unparalleled, global order of violence, racism, and environmental degradation. Christian Spain began expelling Jews and forcibly converting Muslims in 1492. The confiscated properties of these two groups, and not Isabella’s jewels, financed the voyage of Columbus. Arrived, Europeans instituted pillage, tributes, cash-crop over-planting, mining for precious metals, forced labor, rule by torture, murder, and genocide. ) 1Audrey Shabbas, ‘A Middle East Perspective,’ in ”NetNews, October 1992, Special Issue, “500 Years of Resistance.”
In its gold-lust, in its rage to dominate, Western society has spread cruelty and accumulated unhappiness. It encountered countless other civilizations, all of which it could have learned from, most of which it chose to eradicate.
Bartolomé de las Casas, a Dominican priest who attempted to establish a peaceful colony in the Americas, wrote A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies· in 1542. In it he described the gentleness, refinement, and lack of greed of the native peoples whom he encountered and recounted in detail the treatment which they received at the hands of the invaders:
The reason the Christians have murdered on such a vast scale and killed anyone and everyone in their way is purely and simply greed. They have set out to line their pockets with gold and to amass private fortunes as quickly as possible so that they can then assume a status quite at odds with that into which they were born. Their insatiable greed and overweening ambition know no bounds; the land is fertile and rich, the inhabitants simple, forbearing and submissive. The Spaniards have shown not the slightest consideration for these people, treating them (and I speak from first-hand experience, having been there from the outset) not as brute animals – indeed, I would to God they had done and had shown them the consideration they afford their animals – so much as piles of dung in the middle of the road. They have had as little concern for their souls as for their bodies, all the millions that have perished having gone to their deaths with no knowledge of God and without the benefit of the Sacraments. One fact in all this is widely known and beyond dispute, for even the tyrannical murderers themselves acknowledge the truth of it: the indigenous peoples never did the Europeans any harm whatever; on the contrary, they believed them to have descended from the heavens, at least until they or their fellow-citizens had tasted, at the hands of these oppressors, a diet of robbery, murder, violence, and all other manner of trials and tribulations. 2Bartolome de Las Casas, ”A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies· (London: Penguin, 1992), p. 13, Nigel Griffin, ed.
In a short time, Europeans were abducting Africans and transporting them forcibly to the Americas. Despite many precautions taken by the bewildered Europeans, thousands of Africans committed suicide during these voyages, so many of them by jumping ship that schools of sharks accompanied the voyagers. 3Vincent Harding, ”There Is A River· (NY: Random House, 1981), pp. 18-19.
The reign of terror, the 500-Year Reich, which we mark this year, has always been resisted, from within the ranks of the oppressors, as well as those of the victims. While theologians and economists and others have often been the apologists for the necessity of selfishness, indigenous peoples have preserved traditions of sharing, security, and mutual aid. Within the dominant culture itself, families, neighborhoods, unions, and congregations have all provided forms of solidarity, social cohesion, and generosity. People have resisted, fought back, built community. Decency has abounded even throughout five centuries of atrocity. Benevolence has not been pushed to the margins of history and of the marketplace, as we are led to believe. Even during this ferocious, Columbian era, kindness is what is really indispensable.
Innumerable kindnesses happen each moment. The kindness of each individual act and every individual resolution to do better, the kindness of a concerted, group effort to support a cause or save someone’s life, the sustained kindness of a life lived for the benefit of others.
The reign of privilege, the reign of terror, continues. If we are to persevere, if we are to liberate ourselves from it, we can not operate out of fear, hatred, and anger but out of faith, out of the certainty of goodness, out of our experience of the resourcefulness and generosity of those who have been so hard-pressed that they had nothing else to fall back on at times but one another.
There are many things to be done. The marginal, the poor, the minorities, the disenfranchised must be supported to become our leaders. Deep, strong ties of community must be rewoven. All actions, symbols, and presuppositions of “superiority” and “inferiority” must be let go. Economic security must be a common denominator. Many, many places must be created for people to meet on terms of absolute respect and equality – grounds safe and comfortable to the most vulnerable and slighted. We must explore and rediscover the depth of our innate generosity and love for one another. We must pursue constructive work.
Even in the worst of times, we live in – we live because of – kindness, the kindness at the core of our beings, the kindness at the center of our collective life. Let us uphold justice, “Justice for all.”
And beyond justice, let us re-establish kindness.
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Footnotes
- 1Audrey Shabbas, ‘A Middle East Perspective,’ in ”NetNews, October 1992, Special Issue, “500 Years of Resistance.”
- 2Bartolome de Las Casas, ”A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies· (London: Penguin, 1992), p. 13, Nigel Griffin, ed.
- 3Vincent Harding, ”There Is A River· (NY: Random House, 1981), pp. 18-19.