The American Ideal and the American Real

July 17, 2016     Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO

Roger Ray, pastor          “The American Ideal and the American Real”    

   ~ Walt Whitman ~ Leaves of Grass

"Love the earth and sun and the animals,
Despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks,
Stand up for the stupid and crazy,
Devote your income and labor to others,
Hate tyrants, argue not concerning God,
Have patience and indulgence toward the people.

Take off your hat to nothing known or unknown,
or to any man or number of men,
Go freely with powerful uneducated persons,
And with the young, and with the mothers or families.

Re-examine all you have been told
in school or church or in any book,
Dismiss whatever insults your own soul;
And your very flesh shall be a great poem…

And have the richest fluency, not only in its words,
But in the silent lines of its lips and face,
And between the lashes of your eyes,
and In every motion and joint of your body."

I think that my high school literature teacher may have been a communist, or an atheist, or an anarchist, or some kind of philosophical gadfly. She seemed innocent enough at the time but at some point she had us read portions of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, that poem by a mid-nineteenth century humanist who, while embracing all religions, didn’t believe in any of them. A probably gay, certainly uninhibited man who dropped ideas on the American public intended to free them from being controlled by religious doctrine, financial exploitation, or dominance by an educated elite.

He invited his American peers to fall in love with animals and nature and to despise the rich and powerful.

He asked us to question everything we had been told either in church or in school, and he insisted that there was no one so humble that they should either doff their hat or bow to the wisdom or power of anyone else.

That Mrs. Hahn would just drop a piece of literature like this in a rural Kentucky community classroom and not comment on it at all must have been at least subversive, and I think that I like her more now than I was smart enough to cherish her then. Still, without commentary, this poem slid right over the clean waxed floor of my young mind. I could read the words. I could memorize them and repeat them. But I was powerless to see what the implications were.

American, it seems to me, has always suffered from a deep divide between the idealism we claim to cherish and the reality with which we are willing to settle.

We sing songs to liberty, to the concepts of equality, freedom, and opportunity but, in spite of our noble values, it doesn’t seem to take much to scare us.

You know, I hope, if you don’t let me say it plainly and I hope you hold onto this:

Fear is the root of anger. Anger is almost always, a fear inspired emotion. This is nowhere more true than in the angry political rhetoric we hear in an election year. Politicians use fear to make people give up their rights, to abandon their freedoms, to sacrifice their liberty in order to made to feel safe. When someone identifies themselves as a “law and order” candidate you can take it to the bank that they are playing on your fears in the hope that voters will install them as a tyrant.

People will accept the rule of a tyrant only when they are frightened. So the news feeds us a steady stream of reports about the civil war in Syria, the coups in Turkey, the massacre in France, and the murder of police in Dallas.

I am concerned, there are good reasons for serious concern, over the military unrest in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Turkey but I want to pull out a couple of threads that the media tends to blend in with these national actions. There is a huge difference between an individual and an army. There is a vital distinction to be made between a single criminal and a criminal institution or government.

Turkey has the second largest army in NATO and the only way to have a bloodless coup is to make it very quick and total… which has not happened in Turkey, and if this very large army in a country where the USA has a nuclear armed military base turns on itself, we can brace ourselves for some horrifying news.

But I want to separate that kind of thing from the horrible event in Nice, France this week, and the police shooting in Dallas the week before. Both of these events were carried out by single individuals, driven by their own demons of fear, maybe religious fervor, or maybe just rage at the injustice they feel in life. But it was not Islam-writ-large that drove that truck through a crowd in Nice, and it was not Black Lives Matter with assault rifles that killed those police officers in Dallas.

The fact that there are people who are so marginalized, whose souls have been so insulted, that they have somaticized their rage in such a way that it comes out as mass murder is a complicated one which can only be addressed by making the world a better, more inclusive, more fair, more just world.

My fear is, in America, in France, in Belgium and elsewhere, is that fear generated by either a single angry person or a small handful of organized terrorists can make people forget about the kind of liberty, freedom, independence, and civil rights that we have to either protect or we will lose them.

With your permission, I would like to take a few minutes to consider a single incident in our news cycle that illustrates my concerns. 

(Show first frame of Power Point) This is Alton Sterling. Like a lot of us, he was not a saint. He had both good and bad qualities. But he entered into the news cycle when, on Tuesday, July 5^th, he was shot and killed by police in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

You will have seen some of the video that shows Alton Sterling lying on the ground, being held down by two officers, and then he was shot several times, both in the back and the chest, at point blank range.

There were three video recordings of this incident. There should have been five. Both of the police officers were wearing video cameras on their uniform. The officers claimed that they fell off before their confrontation with Sterling. There was a video made by the security camera at the convenience store where Sterling was killed. The store owner, Abdullah Muflahi, (show second slide) a friend of Sterling, also shot a video on his phone, and there was another bystander, an unidentified woman, who also shot video on her phone.

I will not show Abdullah’s video because it is simply too graphic to see in church. Abdullah has said that he has no idea why the police attacked Sterling in the first place and that during the time that they were throwing him up against a parked car and then slamming him to the ground, Sterling was crying out, “What did I do? Why are you doing this?”

When the police became aware that Abdullah had witnessed these events, they handcuffed him and put him in the back of a squad car for hours, refusing even to allow him to use the restroom. While they had him restrained, they went in his store and took his security camera and recording over his objections. He demanded that the police produce a search warrant but they ignored his objections and simply took the store’s security system and that video has not been released to the public.

He was not permitted to call either his family or his lawyer during this time. Abdullah has speculated that they did not know that he had videoed the event on his phone or they would not have given his phone back to him when they eventually released him without ever arresting him or charging him, or giving him any excuse for having been illegally imprisoned for several hours.

The other video you may have seen was captured on the phone of a woman in the parking lot who then sent it to Chris LeDay (show 3^rd slide) who has a popular social media presence. LeDay is an Airforce veteran who worked on Dobins Airforce base in a civilian position. The day after he posted the video of the killing of Sterling on line, Sherriff’s officers showed up and arrested him, they said, on an assault and battery charge. They handcuffed him and put manacles on his legs and led him off the base.

In the end, they admitted that there was no assault and battery charge but he did have several unpaid traffic tickets which, when he managed to pull together the money to pay them, and he was released from prison. There is, of course, no precedent for this kind of arrest and manacling for traffic tickets.

What I’m saying here is that even in the face of regular news of police killing of unarmed black men in our country that the only real prosecution seems to be coming down on witnesses and protesters, even going a thousand miles away to arrest and harass a man who had posted eye-witness video of their crimes.

I do want to take just a couple of minutes to show you some video of riot police in Baton Rouge breaking up a protest of the Sterling killing just so you can see why I am so concerned about the prospect of the death of our American idealism:

(show 7:38 to 9:30 of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9kkuHoPwZ0)

There is good reason to believe that there was little to no reason at all for the police to have any contact with Alton Sterling that day. There was clearly no legal justification for arresting or harassing Chris LeDay and Abdullah Muflahi, and there was no legal justification for simply stealing his store’s security camera.

But these are all aspects of what we saw in this video of a line of police looking like a military invasion force, pushing American citizens who had simply expressed their right to protest wrongs onto private property and arresting them. This is what a police state looks like and if we let it happen with the tacit approval of our silence in Louisiana, then we can surely expect it in Missouri, Arkansas, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, and Mississippi, and those of you who do not live in the south should not assume that cancer never spreads.

But I will not leave you without a word of hope and encouragement. In fact, though you may think that you have heard me say it before, this time it is different.

I am in love and I can honestly say that I have never felt this way before. I am in love with a young nurse in Baton Rouge whom I have never met and who I will probably never meet but I just wish that I knew what address to send the flowers and jewelry to.

(show fifth slide)

Ieshia Evans lives with her son in Pennsylvania but came down to Baton Rouge to participate in her first demonstration. She saw a protestor being arrested and she decided to step out into the street and simply stand in silence against the abuses of the police.

We will see this picture of her for the rest of our lives, alongside the picture of the man who stood before a tank in Tiananmen Square in 1989.

She says that God put her in that place to use her to bear witness to the fact that black lives matter. For me she represents how God needs for all of us to have the courage to stand up for what is right. To stand together with the victims of violence, poverty, discrimination, and abuse.

Men and women, don’t give up on the idealism of our great nation. Don’t trade your liberty or your freedom for anything, not security, not safety, not a sense of revenge, certainly not for your white privilege, and absolutely not to bolster the power of a tyrant.

"Love the earth and sun and the animals,
Despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks,
Stand up for the stupid and crazy,
Devote your income and labor to others,
Hate tyrants, argue not concerning God,
Have patience and indulgence toward the people.

Take off your hat to nothing known or unknown,
or to any man or number of men,
Go freely with powerful uneducated persons,
And with the young, and with the mothers or families.

Re-examine all you have been told
in school or church or in any book,
Dismiss whatever insults your own soul;
And your very flesh shall be a great poem…

And have the richest fluency, not only in its words,
But in the silent lines of its lips and face,
And between the lashes of your eyes,
and In every motion and joint of your body."

BLM
July 10, 2016    Community Christian Church

Roger Ray, pastor        “Because Black Lives Matter”

Over here on my right is a grand piano. It has 88 keys. 52 of those keys are white. 36 of them are black. We have the good fortune of having a remarkable pianist in our church that makes magic come out of those 88 keys every week. He doesn’t use all 88 keys every week but they are all available to him. He uses the ones that are needed in the moment.

How crazy would it be if Barry came in one day and said, I am going to find the right key on this big keyboard and only play that one note all day? There is not just one right note. At any moment any one of those 88 keys may be the right key while most of the others are wrong keys for that moment.

This week, this crazy week in American history, this violent, insane, sad week, every preacher, every politician, every community leader and organizer, is trying to find the right thing to say. People on social media have tried to find the right meme, the perfect quote, to speak to the nightmare of the police killings.

I don’t disagree with the people who are quoting Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. who said that you cannot drive out darkness with darkness, only light can do that. And you cannot drive out hate with hate, only love can do that. In fact, that needs to be said. It is true and it is right, but if that is the only note you play in this complicated situation, then you are making even Martin Luther King sound trite, like a platitude in needlepoint on your grandmother’s kitchen wall.

In the past year, 965, nearly 1000 people were shot and killed by the police. Just over half of those had a gun in their possession. 90 of them were unarmed, about 400 of them had a knife or some other weapon. 300 of those people were black. So that means that, considering the percentage of the population, the police are five times more likely to shoot and kill a black man as they are a white man. A black man is shot and killed by the police on average, at a rate of one a day. If you think that anger is not one of the notes that needs to be played at this moment in American history then you just don’t get it.

The man who shot at white police officers in Dallas this week was an angry man but he was a murderer. He wasn’t just insane… there were reasons why he did what he did…that doesn’t make what he did excusable or acceptable in any light. But I understand. Ironically, he shot police who were protecting the people who were protesting police violence. He shot innocent people… good people… public servants who placed their lives at risk every day for the common good.  Dallas, for all of its problems, has one of the best records for police refraining from using deadly force, for being trained in de-escalation, and non-violent policing. What he did was treacherous, monstrous, wrong, but we should not act like it just came out of the blue. Nothing happens in a vacuum.

One year ago, a young white racist went into the Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston and shot and killed nine people… nine black Christians who were not rioting, looting, threatening anyone..Who were not resisting arrest, fleeing from the police, or even selling CD’s or loose cigarettes on a street corner.

They were not driving a car with a busted taillight or stealing a pack of cigars from a convenience store. They were in church, listening to their pastor lead them in a Bible study.

The shooter wanted to start a race war but the surviving family members and church members immediately stepped forward and offered this murderer forgiveness, even love. That was an amazingly brave and inspiring thing for them to say and to do. I appreciate that they played that note. I’m just saying, it is not the only note to be played.

Anger has a place here. Fear, sorrow, grief, rage…. There are a lot of right keys. Revenge is wrong. Hate is wrong. But forgiveness isn’t the only right one either!

I drove down to Charleston the week after the shooting and delivered a love offering from all of you to help that church with their expenses after this tragedy and I cherish the memory of being hugged on the sidewalk in front of Mother Emanuel by one of the survivors but I am going to tell you the truth…. That’s what you came to hear isn’t it? Don’t you want me to tell you the truth?  The truth is that I am still mad as hell about that mass murder.

I’m mad because it not only should not have happened, it should not have been made so easy by bought-off legislators who have turned our cities into an American version of Bagdad, where any punk, nut-job, or psycho can buy military styled weapons and ammunition that will shoot right through a car!

Did you know that the police in Dallas this week had to hide behind the engine block of their squad cars because the kind of bullets that sniper was using could go right through the other parts of the car and kill them? You can buy an assault style rifle and high-powered ammo at Wal-Mart right next to the toy department. You can buy it at the Bass Pro shop, next to the fishing tackle. You can buy it at the Battlefield Mall in an athletic store where your kids go for their soccer and baseball supplies.

And if you have a criminal record or some kind of official impediment to buying military style weapons at these conveniently located retail stores you can buy it on line on eBay or Craig’s list, or at a local gun show.  I recently happened to overhear a conversation among three local lawyers and one volunteered that he just wasn’t making much money out of his law practice but he was making a killing selling AR-15’s on line. 

He buys them at a local store and sells them at a huge markup to someone who can’t buy them at a store.  Because it is legal in a “don’t ask, don’t tell” private sale, to sell military style weapons to someone you know good and well cannot buy it from a store because they are dangerous people. As the character, J. R. Ewing, on Dallas said, “Once you give up on your integrity, the rest is a piece of cake.”

I’m not just lifting up this one snake-in-the-grass for ridicule because, honestly, all of America has given up its integrity when there was no meaningful gun control law enacted after the school shooting at Columbine, at the theater shooting in Aurora. Attempts at some kind of assault rifle ban failed after Congresswoman Gabby Gifford was shot in the head.

We gave away any integrity we may have once had when 20 little school children laid dead on their elementary school floor at Sandy Hook and we did nothing. A church shooting in Charleston didn’t do it, a massacre in a gay nightclub in Orlando didn’t do it, now a mass killing of police officers in Dallas won’t do it either unless somebody somewhere sends out a search party to find some integrity somewhere.

We have good friends, founders of this church, Ron and June Hertenstein… when Ron and June moved to Florida they got involved with an organization called “No Labels.” It is a political organization that is trying to strip away the divisive labels of left and right, conservative and liberal, Republican and Democrat, and they are trying to get good people to be good again… to tone down the rhetoric, stop the name calling, and try to unite for the common good.

I love those goals. And you know, when they lived here, June was always trying to persuade me to say what I say more diplomatically, to be more moderate, more kind, more accepting. I think she did a pretty good job, don’t you?

Seriously, you have heard me say it right here in this pulpit: we must end the divisions. This partisan divide is destroying our nation. We don’t need a liberal news source and a conservative fake news source, we need good, honest, factual journalists who try to inform more than they try to persuade.

We need journalists that are interested in educating the public and not just selling ads by hysterical and salacious reporting. All of those are beautiful notes, good notes, noble keys, but they are not the only keys to be played right now.

Americans felt justified in sending Navy Seals in helicopters to the home of Osama Bin Laden and shooting him right in the face right in front of his many wives. I don’t like it but I can’t mount much of a defense for a moral monster that orchestrated the murder of 3000 innocent people on 9-11.

But since 9-11 there have been nearly half a million Americans killed by guns that continue to be insanely available because of the lobbying efforts of the NRA. Osama killed 3000 people. The NRA has the blood of 490,000 Americans on their hands since that horrible day, 35,000 of those were homicides, more than a dozen times as many as Bin Laden killed.

Now Senator Mitch McConnell tells us that we can’t approve a new Supreme Court Justice unless that justice has the approval of the NRA.

Why don’t we let Isis appoint our next Supreme Court Justice, they have not killed nearly as many Americans as the NRA has facilitated? No one in congress has taken as much NRA money as our own Senator Roy Blunt. I just received a letter this week from our congress member, Billy Long, in response to my pleading letter to him, begging for some kind of reasonable reform of gun laws. Congressman Long told me that he would never do anything to restrict the free exercise of the 2^nd Amendment.

What McConnell, Blunt, Long are telling us is that their political bribes are more important to them than are the lives of Dallas policemen, of school children in Sandy Hook, church members in Charleston, or movie goers in Colorado, or dancers in Orlando. And in saying that, without malice, without any need for revenge, without any divisiveness or partisanship, let me just factually say that McConnell, Blunt, and Long, and all of the members of Congress who have blocked sensible gun reform and have carried the NRA’s water for them do not deserve to be in office.

I could build a strong case for why they should be put on trial for treason against the people of the United States. I don’t believe in capitol punishment or political executions, but I believe that Osama Bin Laden at least had convictions behind his crimes…. Our elected class of criminals have less integrity than did the Bin Ladens and Saddam Husseins of the world.

Violence is not the answer. Retaliation is always wrong. But for God’s sake, we can’t keep trying to find common ground with people who just want to rip the ground out from under us. There is no middle way with moral monsters. We have to stop re-electing these minions of evil.

It didn’t start out that way but the NRA has become a domestic terrorist organization and taking political donations from them should immediately disqualify any candidate running for office and maybe it should get them on a terrorist watch list or a no-fly list but they sure shouldn’t be sent to the Senate or the Congress to represent the children, movie goers, night clubbers, church members, and police officers who are being gunned down in our streets.

Finally, I must beg of you to give me just a little more time to speak directly to the issue of race. There are things that need to change in America to de-escalate the violence, the crime, and the poverty.

We need universal health care as a human right just like public schools are available to everyone and the fire department puts out fires at the homes of the wealthy and of the poor equally. We need to raise salaries to a living wage and do whatever we have to do to reach full employment whether that is through public works projects or through aggressive job training and wage subsidy programs. We need to strengthen social security so that everyone, white, or black, or Asian, or Hispanic, or Arab, can retire with dignity. A lot of our problems are economic class problems and those can be fixed if only we have the will to do it.

But economics isn’t the whole picture. That’s where my man, Bernie Sanders, was missing the mark early on. When he was initially asked about race, he talked about full employment and a living wage… which makes a certain sense but he wasn’t hearing the real point. When he was confronted with Black Lives Matters demonstrators, he said, “All lives matter,” and that seems like the right answer to white people who didn’t hear the real message. Because it isn’t just about economics, it is about racism. It isn’t even just about gun violence or police brutality, it is about racism.

I’m a pastor. What could be more natural than for me to say that all lives matter? … That human life is precious, sacred, that it has inherent worth.. that we all matter… but folks, please hear me: White people have always mattered.

There has never been a question about whether or not white lives mattered. When white Spaniards arrived on these shores in their armor and helmets and they would force Indians to carry them on their backs until they collapsed, literally riding humans as if they were horses or mules… it was obvious that white lives mattered.

When, for hundreds of years, white slave ship captains brought boat loads of African slaves to our shores in chains to be stripped naked and sold at auction on the public square of our towns and cities, sold to slave owners who worked them to death, who flogged them, raped them, and murdered them…. It was obvious whose lives mattered.

Throughout the 20^th century’s American apartheid with its segregated schools, neighborhoods, bathrooms, and lunch counters, with lynchings, and voter suppression, there was never any doubt that white lives mattered.

What has been less clear is that Black Lives Matter. And so, in the face of the shooting of Trayvon Martin, who was armed with only Skittles and Ice Tea, by a man who was found to be not guilty for murder even though he chased him down and shot him, we begin to wake up to the fact that it needs to be said. In fact, I wouldn’t mind hearing you say it… would you say it out loud, “Black Lives Matter.”

Most of us here can recite the names of the books of the Bible, we can name the American presidents and the capitols of our states… it wouldn’t hurt us to be able to name the names of the black people whose lives have been senselessly taken from them. Will you say his name, Trayvon Martin?

The police were heavily armed and Eric Garner was unarmed when the police literally choked him to death on a sidewalk in New York City. The version of that murder given by the police would be all that we would know about it if it were not for the fact that Ramsey Orta videoed the police in action. They tried to stop him but he kept videoing the incident and because he did we know about it.

None of the police involved in the murder of Eric Garner were indicted. You know who is in prison though? Ramsey Orta. That’s right, it took them a month but they found something they could charge this black Good Samaritan with and he is in jail now. It isn’t obvious, so we need to say it and say it loud, will you say it with me, “Black Lives Matter.” He has been dead for two years now, but will you say his name, Eric Garner?

Two years ago, John Crawford picked up a BB gun off of the shelf in a WalMart in Dayton, Ohio and was shot dead by two officers, neither of whom were criminally charged in his death. Will you say John Crawford’s name with me?

Two years ago next month, right up the road from us in Ferguson, MO, 18 year old Michael Brown was shot and killed for walking in the street in his neighborhood when he was told to walk on the sidewalk. The officer who emptied his revolver into Michael Brown was not criminally charged. Do you see why saying “all lives matter” doesn’t get to the point?  Will you say his name with me? Michael Brown.

12 year old Tamir Rice, was shot and killed by two officers while he played with a BB gun in a Cleveland city park. The officers didn’t even take the time to tell him to drop the gun, or raise his hands. In less than two seconds of rolling up on the scene, Tamir was dead.

That’s not what the officers said but that is what the video showed. These incidents are not new, as Tanahasi Coates said, it is the cameras that are new. Black people have been telling us about police shootings and violence for a hundred years but we thought they were exaggerating. We thought they were criminals, thugs who resisted arrest and who threatened the police, as if there could be a nationwide, century long secret conspiracy among black people to make these stories up. The incidents are not new. The cameras are forcing us to face facts that we have long denied. We all watched Tamir Rice die… will you say his name?

Last year, Walter Scott was stopped in Charleston for having a burned out tail light. He was about to be arrested for failure to pay child support so he tried to run away and the officer shot him in the back and when he was dead he put his Taser by the body and concocted a story about Scott trying to take the Taser from him. That officer has been charged with murder but only because there is video evidence of his crime. His trial will take place in October. Let’s remember Walter Scott by saying his name together.

Then there was the famous case of Freddie Gray being killed in police custody in Baltimore. Several of those charged in his death have already come to trial and so far all have been found not guilty even though Freddie Gray is still clearly dead. Let’s remember him: Freddie Gray.

This could go on all day but let me conclude by just mentioning two more. Philando Castile was shot and killed by an officer in St. Paul, in front of his girl friend and his girl friend’s four-year-old daughter while entirely and politely complying with the officer’s instructions. He was a black man who volunteered that he was legally exercising his second amendment rights to carry a weapon. When told to show the officer his driver’s license, Philando complied but while he reached for his wallet, the officer shot and killed him in a moment of panic about being in the presence of a black man with a gun.

The day before, Alton Sterling was shot at point blank range after being subdued by police in Baton Rouge. Sterling, the father of five was selling cds in front of a convenience store and ended up with five bullets in his chest for no apparent reason. That’s why I don’t say “all lives matter,” because the point that needs to be made, the awareness that must arise to make it possible for America to regain some integrity is this:  Black Lives Matter.

And here is some truth for you to take home with you today: You can be entirely supportive of our police force while still insisting that they come to terms with their own institutional racism. No one wants to live in a city where there are not brave and sacrificial public servants in uniform who keep our cities safe but that does not mean in any way that we should hold down our voices when we insist that they must understand that Black Lives Matter.

In a complicated world we have to play all of the keys, the right way a the right time….the white ones and the black ones.

The anger, the rage, the sadness and tears, the love and forgiveness all have a place as we work together to make sure that the killing stops.Black Lives Matter

One Nation Under God?

July 3, 2016      Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO

Roger Ray, pastor      “A Nation Under God?”

 “When fascism comes to America, it will come wrapped in the flag and waving a cross,” possibly attributed to Sinclair Lewis or Huey Long though there is no record of either men having made this statement.

Other than news programs, I rarely watch TV, especially since Jon Stewart gave up hosting the Daily Show and Stephen Colbert sold out to network TV censors who virtually never allow him to say anything that matters. I could count on the fingers of one hand the televised sporting events I have seen, and, much to the disappointment and horror of many of you, I have never watched an episode of The Game of Thrones. I find that there are enough real dragons in this year’s presidential campaign so I have no need for the imaginary sort.

But I have binge watched a few series that hooked me in a way that I could not resist but none so powerfully as Andrew Ross Sorokin’s regrettably brief series, The Newsroom. I was hooked from the opening sequence when Jeff Daniel’s character, a TV news host, in the midst of a nervous breakdown, suddenly unloaded on a college sophomore who had asked him why the United States was the greatest nation in the world. His four-minute rant about why America is not the greatest nation in the world stands unrivaled, in my opinion, as the best 4 minutes ever on TV.

Dismissing all filters, including any sense of courtesy or civility, he fires off a litany of American weaknesses and bemoans the loss of the greatness we were once proud of…the time when we built great big remarkable things, declared war on poverty rather than war on the poor. We produced the best artists, scientists, and technological advances, we cherished our great thinkers rather than despising them.

I watched that segment and for the first time since I was a kid sitting on the floor of the Ben Franklin store in Glasgow, KY reading comic books, I saw a character that I thought: I want to be him. Will McAvoy is not a real person but I wanted to be that person in reality.

I don’t know if it shows, but I try to stand up here every week and tell the unvarnished truth, whether it is the truth about religion, the institutional church, American politics, poverty, the prison system, economic exploitation, or international warfare. But the truth can be an elusive thing.

When Independence Day falls so close to a Sunday that there is no way to avoid talking about it, I always think of two 4^th of July speeches. One was delivered by the liberated slave, Frederick Douglass, just a few years before the Civil War broke out, and the other was possibly delivered by Mark Twain in London in 1899. I say “possibly delivered” because Twain later wrote that though he had written the short speech and it was in his pocket, that a minister had spoken at the 4^th of July dinner for so long that he was not allowed to get up and deliver his four minute speech.

Having been to very many dinners where a minister spoke, I believe that it may have happened in just that way.

But the speech of Frederick Douglass was delivered and that he survived its delivery to a 4^th of July celebration is a bit of a surprise. He asked and then answered this question:

What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to Him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy-a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States at this very hour.

We have the benefit of the perspective of history. We know what followed. The sentiments expressed by Douglass and countless others finally led to war. Other nations managed to end slavery through peaceful means but the slave holding states of the south had rejected Lincoln’s offers of compensation and the most lethal war in American history brought slavery to an end and plunged much of this nation into poverty from which they have never fully recovered.

But the sins and hypocrisy cited by Douglass did not end when the war ended. The talk of freedom and a doctrine of separate but equal only masked the divide in our nation. Nearly a century passed before the Civil Rights movement gained the strength to begin to address this national disgrace.

The thwarted dreams of blacks in the United States found a voice in many black churches but at the same time there was an evangelical revival among white churches that sadly tried to shout down the calls for freedom and civil rights.

The phrase “one nation under God” was added to the pledge of allegiance to the flag in 1954 when there was a revival of religious fervor in America. Eisenhower’s pastor advocated adding it in a sermon when Eisenhower was in church and he finally went along with the idea.

While the Jim Crowe laws of the south were being dismantled and the “whites only” and “coloreds only” signs were removed, what Michelle Alexander has called “The New Jim Crowe” was being assembled.

Though crime rates have been going down in the United States, incarceration rates have gone up by more than 400% since the Civil Rights movement began. We now have more black men in prison than we ever had black slaves in 19^th century America.

Jim Crowe laws stripped blacks of equal standing in America. They prevented them from voting, from employment, education, and even from owning homes. What was once accomplished through slavery, what was effectively done through discriminatory laws, we now do by arresting the poor and minorities and saddling them with a criminal record that keeps them, in most states, from voting, from finding employment, from education, and very effectively, from either buying a house or having access to public housing.

White privilege is seen no where so plainly as in our judicial system where a black man or woman is seven times more likely to go to jail for a non-violent drug crime than even a poor white man or woman. In many ways, black women fair worse than black men, having racial discrimination compounded by gender discrimination along with sexual abuse and physical violence.

Indians and Mexicans were driven from their land and slaughtered. Blacks have been enslaved and relegated to a second class role in society in this land of the free in which the political phrases of “taking back our country” and “making America great again” are loosely bandied about. And now Muslims are being identified as the new dark skinned people we are encouraged to blame for our national woes and are make the targets of legitimate, if not baptized, racial hatred.

One nation… under God… not yet. Not that I, for one, long for that particular moniker to be made into any kind of legal reality.

We are not certain who actually penned the final draft of the treaty with Tripoli that was adopted just six years after the Bill of Rights was written… it may have been George Washington himself or some other of our famous founding fathers but it was ratified and in 1797 it said:

As the Government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the law, religion or tranquility of Musselmen; and as the states never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mohometan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinion shall ever produce an interruption of harmony existing between the two countries.

Try getting language of that sort through this congress, 220 years later!  The greatness of America lies in the ideals to which we strive, not in our realized history of discrimination and conflict.

I began today by referencing two historical speeches and one imaginary one. The speeches of Frederick Douglass and our TV hero, Will McAlvoy, tell the shameful truth.

They expose hypocrisy and call us to come to terms with our lies and national myths. But the other speech I mentioned was delivered by a humorist who was also something of a social prophet. Mark Twain spoke, or was supposed to speak, in England, the country we went to war with in order to gain our freedom.

He was speaking a century after that war and in that speech he made fun of both American politics and British imperial arrogance but over it all he applauded the fact that even though it had taken most of a century to do it, that the one time enemies had become friends, allies, and that the bloody contempt we once had for one another was over.

It can happen faster now. The horror of WWII fairly quickly evolved into real partnership between Japan and the United States. The Germans whom we both feared and hated have become important allies and, in many ways, technological and democratic teachers.  In Germany a politician can go to prison for lying during an election campaign… an idea whose time has come!

I have personally walked through the streets of Masaya, Nicaragua where the bullet pock marks are still visible from the wars we waged against the poor of that neighboring nation just a generation ago and I have been greeted in friendship and sincere affection.

I think that Mark Twain was onto something we need to remember.

We will not end racism, we will not resolve classism, we will not win the war on terror, through incarceration, invasion, bombing, or by building a wall and we certainly won’t make progress just by naming our faults and falling into cynical anger. This war will be won through humor, friendship, forgiveness, through fair trade, mutual respect, and, dare I say it, sincere faith.

President Obama will leave office in a few months with a long track record of historic and remarkable successes. He helped this nation to avoid a seemingly inevitable second great depression. He brought our official discrimination against our gay brothers and sisters to an end, and he has given us a first family that we can be proud of and that we will be sure to miss in the years ahead.

But he failed in one of his primary objectives and that was to reunite this nation, to bring the left and the right together with mutual goals and in mutual respect. We are less “one nation” now than we have been since the end of the Civil War. That unity that still eludes us is the common goal to which, I sincerely pray, we will strive to realize in the years ahead.

We will not surrender to injustice, but we cannot hate those who resist progress. We cannot bomb enough Muslims to make them like us better. We cannot imprison enough blacks to end racism. We cannot build a wall high enough to make Latinos stay and pick our vegetables and fruit for slave wages.

Only love, good humor, a willingness to be self critical, and a sincere desire to turn our enemies into friends can do that.