Earlier this week on Facebook, I saw a picture posted with an article from The Chronicle of Higher Education titled
The Literature of Lynching. The picture was of what Billie Holiday immortalized in her song "Strange Fruit", but this picture showed an entourage of contented attendees, as well.
The crowd gathered around was full of smiling faces, likely joking with each other, and seemingly proud that those two
"got what they deserved".
The photo is disturbing, indeed, and it is something from which we mustn't turn our heads. The sustained war against our African American brothers and sisters has not ended, but it has changed in scope and focus. We must be aware of our history and in that history, perhaps we can find redemption. A new way.
Religion, race, ethnicity, class - all have been used throughout history to protect a certain concept of tradition and the accompanying social norms. The drive to punish and the collective glee that accompanies such punishment isn't, and never has been, confined to the South, regardless of what we've been led to believe about ourselves.
Hatred towards our fellow beings, however, is evil. We must shut it down.
But sometimes, it's hard to see when it's embedded in our social psyche - our institutions, traditions, and even in our families.
We like to think that evil lies in an individual or group, but evil cannot be contained so easily. If it were, by now it would surely have been eradicated through all the wars and sustained violence inherent in so many cultures.
Why do we always think that we can get rid of evil by participating in evil? Martin Luther King Jr. said that only light can drive out darkness. We know that's true, so why do we continue to struggle towards fighting evil with evil devices?
The enemy is in us all. It can't be quarantined and exterminated. It has to be vanquished in the light.
The light of love. Of compassion. Grace.
When I first looked at the picture, of course my heart dropped. The inhumanity. The sheer glee of the spectators. The air of self-righteous vindication.
Scapegoating. Violence. Blame. Fear. Hate.
I'm learning that my culture doesn't own the patent to those things. They are as much a part of being human as the abilities of reasoning and self-awareness.
When we see violence, it can be so easy to dismiss, as the onlookers at the lynching seemingly did;
this isn't really violence - it's justice, those people got what they had coming to them. Good riddance. In their minds, they were doing their civic duty by ridding society of a scourge.
Mobs of people taking justice into their own hands - literally or only as support staff - can never be a good thing.
The desire to punish, to find someone one to blame, to roast the scapegoat - it's just too tempting.
And it happens all over the world.
In Indonesia in 1965, Communists were the evil to be eradicated. They had to be wiped out. Estimates range from hundreds of thousands to millions of people killed; communists, as well as sympathizers, outcasts, and undesirables - some unfortunates who just happened to be on the wrong side of public opinion at the time, too. Many more were jailed, tortured, cast out, stigmatized. Scholars, artists, academics, free thinkers, intellectuals, and even farmers,
The acts committed in 1965 were spiffed up and spun into a far-reaching and inescapable propaganda campaign that would support the new administration. History books were re-written to support the stories of the conquerors and perpetrators. Any version of events that did not comply with the official story was destroyed. Even after the movement of Reconstruction that began in 1998, the history of what really happened in 1965 remained in a state of tenuous flux.
If I've learned anything, it's that what we think we know may not be the way it really is (or was). Hate has a delicious way of making itself palatable, even to those of us who swear we don't like the taste. It's sadly not too hard to give it a try and take a bite anyway.
The words and reasons we use to "other" people, or to make people into the "other", are varied, but the result is the same. They're not like us. Let's blame them. Let's get rid of them. Let's kill them (physically, spiritually, or even economically)
This horrific cycle, although I was aware, I didn't quite catch because I was almost sucked into it. I didn't first hate, but in the receipt of hate, I decided that they, too, were worthy of being hated....of being bad. Deserving of punishment for THEIR crimes.
Then it dawned on me - there is no end to that cycle. We can always argue about who's right, who's wrong, who DID something wrong.
We can focus on BLAME or we can focus on what to do next.
In systems that are set up to punish, re-framing and focusing on reconciliation can be challenging, if not outright impossible - but we have to try.
If we could just talk to each other. If we could just learn to listen. If we could put our egos aside long enough to work on a solution as opposed to working on a punishment, the world could be so different.
Until we can get to that place, I'm afraid that the lynch mobs - figuratively and literally - won't be going away any time soon.
Hate breeds hate. And it has to stop..
