“Love is always stronger than hate. If we just love the way my mom would, then the hate won’t be nearly as strong as the love is.” – Chris Singleton
emanuelnine.org/…
I do not have the faith, courage or goodness of the families of the nine victims of the Mother Emanuel Church massacre in South Carolina. I would not and could not have found a way to forgive the murderer of those beautiful believers who shared their love with the hateful young man who turned on them like a snake in the grass. At best, it would have taken me many years and serious signs of contrition by the murderer for me to come to that point. However, I know that they are right that the one and only way to conquer hate is by embracing love and the possibility of forgiveness.
The table was set for Donald Trump long before he came for dinner. America’s very Constitution gave the vote only to male property owners, who had mostly stolen the property from the people of the first nations of the Americas. People were enslaved based on the color of their skin and valued as three fifths human. It took a horrid bloodbath to end the system of enslavement but it was modified, not rejected by the plantation and property owners who continue to value cheap labor over lives. The caste system set up in the deep south was never replaced in the agricultural states.
To this day the racist American caste system has been enforced by hatred, discrimination and abuse. That system arrived the day Columbus landed in the Virgin Islands. He started a reign of terror, enslaving, killing and abusing the Taino people. A Great Civil War with battlefields of dead followed by one hundred fifty more of years of struggle took us to the point where a black man, Barack Obama, could be elected president of the United States. His election shook the foundations of the rural American caste system which is based primarily on race and second on class. Rural America has an ultraconservative, rigid structure based on skin color where social position is inherited, not earned. Barack Obama, the son of an African man and an intellectual American white woman was absolute anathema to the leaders of rural America. His position as president undermined everything that conservative rural America stood for, especially the supremacy of good white families.
Rural American values became the values of American corporate owners who desired cheap labor to maximize profits and personal wealth. American corporations adopted plantation management structures, racism and misogyny. Only after the war against fascism and genocide in Europe did America make strides towards easing the racist American class structure and that was abandoned by the Republicans after Democrats passed the Civil Rights Act and Nixon embraced the virulently racist “southern strategy”. The racist nature of the Republican party has been obvious since Nixon drew in racist southern Democrats, making the Democratic party the party of civil rights and the Republican party the party the plantation party. Anyone who has been paying the slightest bit of attention knows exactly what the Republican party is and who its members are.
These Republicans include many of my neighbors and some of my extended family. I know who they are and what they think because I listen to them. Donald Trump has captured their cultish support because he says the racist things they could not say in polite company and fights to preserve the economic system that has given them wealth and privilege beyond their earned level of work and education compared to people not born into the “right” (white) families.
But I will not hate them. They are family and neighbor. The only way they will ever see the light is through love and forgiveness. The system that maintains conservative rural America thrives on hate.
To win hearts and minds and pull in the diverse younger generation the Democratic party needs to endorse love, hope and community. Liberalism will always lose to conservatism if we endorse tribalism and hate of the other, because we will have become like the people oppose.
The reign of terror by Donald Trump has been driven by hate, resentment and vengeance. The easiest thing in the world to do is respond to it in kind with tribalism, hatred and condescension. Our anger is certainly righteous, but we must keep our hearts open to forgiveness, or there will be no hope for growth, change and redemption. To win, we must embrace love and hope. To thrive we must reject notions like the one below expressed here today. www.dailykos.com/...
But I won’t have any more illusions about my fellow citizens. I won’t forget this or forgive them for putting the rest of us through this nightmare. As Gay says, by now, I know exactly who they are.
I know who my neighbors and extended family members are but I will always be willing to forgive because I have hope for a better tomorrow. And because forgiveness is a gift to me that relieves me of the heavy burden of resentment, anger and hatred that is caustic to my well being.
I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear.
-Martin Luther King