White Supremacy Rally
White supremacy, America’s original sin, is demonic. Always has been. Always will be.
Rarely does evil show up as visibly as it did last week in Charlottesville, Virginia and in the days that have followed.
What does one do in the face of evil?
Banishing evil
In the fight of good with evil the first impulse is to kill it. Get rid of it. Banish it from from existence itself.
The snake’s aside in the biblical story of the Garden of Eden whispers anew its eternal invitation to self-deception: “You will be like God, knowing good and evil.”
You cannot kill a demon. If you try to kill it, you end up killing your brother, your sister, your neighbor as your enemy.
Killing the Memory
Dismantling of Saddam Hussein statue, Baghdad, 2003
Statues like the one of Robert E. Lee on the public squares of the former Confederacy bear witness to the unfinished business of America’s Civil War, or, as it is known in the South, The War Between the States.
Should they all come down? Does right-mindedness — a new public consciousness beyond the evil of white supremacy — demand we do the same with them the people of Iraq and our troops did with the statue of Saddam Hussein to celebrate the end of the reign of terror: take them down?
Knowing how near the serpent of deception is, Dom Sebastian Moore, O.S.B, invites a more ambiguous response in The Crucified Jesus Is No Stanger:
“We have to think of a God closer to our evil than we ever dare to be. We have to think of [God] not as standing at the end of we way take when we run away from our evil in the search for good, but as taking hold of us in our evil, at the sore point which the whole idealistic thrust of man is concerned to avoid.”
Preserving Memory
Pulling down the statues from their pedestals feels like a catharsis to many of us. To others it feels like an assault. But we do ourselves no favor by framing the issue as one of anti-racist versus racist, pitting the righteous against the sinners.
Historians, spiritual guides, and social psychologists know that societies and individuals that bury their pasts are doomed to repeat them in one form or another. The demons never disappear. You cannot kill a demon. It always come back to haunt you — all the mores when you think you’ve killed it.
Channel Markers: not becoming what we hate
The statues serve as channel markers that keep us on the way to a consciousness beyond the America’s original sin of white supremacy instead of symbols of our reverence for what we have come to despise.
Rev. Dr. Andrew Young and Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
It is in this spirit that Martin Luther King, Jr.’s colleague Andrew Young takes the unexpected view that the statues should remain.
“I grew up in New Orleans, La., 50 yards from the headquarters of the Nazi party. Before I went to kindergarten, I was having to look in the window on Saturdays, and watch all these folks [shout] “Heil, Hitler!”
“In 1936.
“And my daddy said, those are sick people. They’re white supremacists, and white supremacy is a sickness. You don’t get mad, you get smart. You never get angry with sick people, because you’ll catch their sickness. That’s what I worry about with our young people. Anger and this emotional militancy will give you ulcers, give you heart attacks.
“Don’t get mad, get smart. Your brain is the most important thing you have.”
You cannot kill a demon. It’s always whispering in the shadows of our flight from the evil that lies so close. Don’t get mad, get smart.
- Gordon C. Stewart, Chaska, MN, August 18, 2017.
Steve Shoemaker’s poetry reminded Views from the Edge readers that there is “A Song for Each Kind of Day” [April 12, 2012].Those who are my enemies without cause are mighty,
If living in the developed world means being on edge all the time, I’d prefer a less developed one — maybe a teepee with smoke signals for communication. Anxiety is real enough without the constant sting of bad news from far away and beyond my small sphere of influence.
Like the praying mantis, the non-preying prayers live far from the bells. In touch with what’s worth much more than it’s cracked up to be: a less bad news world where humans live teepee-lives in touch with the body . . . in the stillness of time.
In Phoenix President Trump threatened to play
This Letter to the Editor followed.
Pastor Emeritus of 
Views from the Edge 