Thou Shalt Not Be A Bystander
“One person can make a difference.”
Raoul Wallenberg
“Thou shalt not be a victim, thou shalt not be a perpetrator,
but, above all, thou shall not be a bystander.”
Yehuda Bauer
After the mad dash to the last ticks of Election Day clocks – despite lines that may not end ‘til well-past dawn, there will be no end to the blustering and turgid attacks – verbal, and in some cases physical.
Despite the results, which will be formally certified on December 14, the America wounded by tens of thousands of false political claims, accusations hurled with vitriol beyond description, and Boogaloo and Proud (for no reason) Boys hatred direct from Kristallnacht and Dante’s circles of Hell will require a new Balm of Gilead.
It has been estimated that before Inauguration Day 2020 more than 400,000 Americans will have died as a resulted of the Coronavirus. Bloviating about “rigged elections” will continue despite the deliberate undermining of U.S. Postal Service on which so many depend for casting their votes and the hurling of “monster” charges that would bring shame to the nation’s Founders. And, no matter the ballot tallies, the nation’s soul will bleed – as a Fall and Winter resurgence of the virus destroys lives and economies.
Whatever the final calculus, riots and the destruction of property – especially meaningless fires and looting that result in others’ loss of employment, homes and futures – should have no place and will find no justification in the American lexicon.“
“A riot is the language of the unheard.”
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Nonetheless, persistent non-riotous, looting-free protesting is rooted in the teachings of Jesus. The oppressor – politician, dictator, oligarch, under-paying employer or fear-filled politician – finds his/her doppelganger in Jesus’ Parable of the Unjust Judge:
“In a certain town there was a judge who neither feared God
nor his people. And there was a widow in that town who
kept coming to him with the plea,
‘Grant me justice against my adversary.’
For some time he refused.
But finally he said to himself,
‘Even though I don’t fear God or
care for his people, yet this widow keeps
bothering me.
I will see that she gets justice, so that she
won’t eventually come and attack me.”
Luke 18:2-6
The Florida School for Boys at Marianna – a.k.a. The Dozier School - opened on the first day of the Twentieth Century and closed more than eleven decades later. Cloaked in secrecy, it had a reputation for abuse, beatings, rapes, torture and staff murders of young boys and teenagers. Within the past decade, anthropologists from the University of South Florida have identified fifty-five burial sites on the grounds – most outside the established cemetery – and documented nearly 100 deaths. In 2019, an additional twenty-seven suspected graves were identified and former detainees believe over 100 bodies were buried at Dozier.
To this day, some parents and siblings, nieces and nephews do not know what happened to many of the missing boys of Marianna.
Perhaps, the families of the missing boys should simply remain silent and wait for Justice.
In early October 1998, Mathew Shephard was robbed, pistol-whipped, tortured, tied to a barbed wire fence and left to die in near-freezing temperatures. It appears that he remained in a coma and tied to the fence for eighteen hours before being discovered by a bicyclist who mistook him for a scarecrow. Matthew Shephard died six days after he was attacked. He was 21 years old. His offense: He was gay.
Four years ago, a 29-year old, armed with a semi-automatic rifle and a semi-automatic hand gun, killed forty-nine people and wounded fifty-three more attending a “Hispanic night” at Orlando’s Pulse nightclub.
According to 2017 estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau, in the Oglala Lakota Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota 44 percent of individuals live below the poverty level; the unemployment rate is nearly 70 percent – 17 times the national average; life expectancies are alarmingly low – 48 years for men and 52 years for women; alcoholism affects almost two-thirds of adults; nearly one-fourth of babies have fetal alcohol syndrome; and, the teenage suicide rate is 150 percent higher than the national average.
Despite the Spring promises of the Bureau of Indian Education, native American schools there opened in September and October without the laptops, without the educational materials and without the Internet connections that had been promised for months.
In many rural Native American communities fewer than half the households have access to broadband Internet and genuine digital learning is more of an empty promise than a lived reality. About 45 percent of Bureau of Indian Education schools offer digital learning for students, compared with 85 percent of public schools serving Native American students.
Despite the passage of the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924, voter turnout for Native Americans is the lowest of any group in the nation. Native American voting rates are affected by low levels of trust in government, lack of information on how and where to register and vote, travel distances to register or vote, low levels of access to the internet, and hostility toward Native Americans. (The closure of polling locations on the Mandan Hidatsa Reservation in North Dakota resulted in voters having to travel 80–100 miles in order to cast a ballot.) Nationally, the poverty rate of Native Americans is 26.8 percent and they are more likely to work multiple jobs, lack reliable transportation, and lack adequate childcare resources – making voting more difficult.
Significantly, the lack of reliable postal service and permanent addresses on tribal lands also make it almost impossible for many Native Americans to register or vote.
One-hundred-and-twenty years after the opening of the Dozier School, fifty-plus years after the Stonewall Riots, twenty-after the death of Matthew Shephard , four years after Pulse, three years after brown-shirted torcher-bearers marked through Charlottesville screaming “Jews will not replace us” in America’s own “Night of Broken Glass,” and in Native American communities in the midst of a pandemic the plea of Habakkuk becomes all the more pressing:
“How long, O Lord, must I call for help
but You do not hear, or cry out to You,
‘Violence’ but you do not save?
Why do You make me see iniquity?
Destruction and violence are before me.
Strife is ongoing, and conflict abounds.
Therefore the law is paralyzed, and justice ever goes forth.
For the wicked hem in the righteous, so that justice is perverted.”
Habakkuk 1:2-4
Generations of Black, Hispanic, Muslim, Native American, LGBT and other Americans – like the families of the Dozier School boys or the young people of Pulse - have tired of praying “How long, O Lord… How long?”
As America is rent by ideology and the arrogantly pathological self-importance of some political leaders, history offers a note of hope.
Many did nothing – even though they called themselves Christians.
Others joined the Nazis and supported the Shoal, or Holocaust
– the dark, deadly storm that swept over Europe with the
rise of Nazi Germany. In it more than six million Jewish
men, women, and children perished, killed by starvation or
illness, fatally tortured or beaten,
shot by Nazi death squads or executed
in concentration camp gas chambers…
[A]s the unimaginable horror of the Holocaust descended
upon Europe, countless people…also refused to remain
silent or inactive. Many risked everything to help rescue Jewish
targets of Nazi tyranny. Some even made the ultimate sacrifice,
faithfully fulfilling the words of Jesus: “greater love hath no man than this,
that a man lay down his life for his friends”
Rod Gragg, My Brother’s Keepers
Half-a-world away from angry men and women who deny science and plot the kidnapping of political officials who urge citizens to wear face masks in a pandemic, Israel’s Yad Vashem honors “The Righteous Among the Nations” – non-Jews who took great risks to save Jewish lives – as few as one as many as hundreds – during the Holocaust. Rescue took many forms and the Righteous came from different nations, religions and walks of life. What they had in common was courage in the face of evil. Yad Vashem reminds us:
“In a world of total moral collapse there was a small minority
who mustered extraordinary courage to uphold human values.
They stand in stark contrast to the mainstream of indifference
and hostility that prevailed during the Holocaust.
Contrary to the general trend, these rescuers regarded the Jew
as their fellow human beings who came within the bounds
of their universal obligation….
They are perhaps the sole rays of light in this dark era,
the few whose consciences prevented them from
being indifferent to the fate of the Jews.
In the introduction to My Brother’s Keeper, Rod Gragg recounts a rescuer who explained why “he chose to risk everything to save a single Jewish life. ‘I know that when I stand before God on Judgment Day,’ he said, ‘I shall not be asked the question posed to Cain.’”
In the closing days of Election 2020, let us pray for, encourage and accompany those who dare to be “the sole rays of light in this dark era, the few whose conscience prevented them from being indifferent.”