Walking around the house this morning,
rolling the lyrics of Neil Young’s Southern Man
around in my head,
I’m struck by how surreal it seems
that six decades after the civil rights movement
and Martin Luther King Jr.,
the themes remain eerily familiar.
Some people are still so full of hatred
toward other human beings
for something as arbitrary as the color of their skin.
As if any of us could alter our shade
with a snap of the fingers.
As if any of us would want to!
There is such exquisite beauty in diversity.
Can you imagine a world populated by pine trees,
and only pine trees?
No flowering trees, no broad leaves,
no astonishing variety of form and color.
Imagine even those solitary trees
rooted in poisoned ground,
the corruption invisible above the surface,
the roots already rotting.
What a diminished world that would be.
I witnessed the legislation of the 1960s.
And with it came enormous progress.
Perhaps the hopeful among us
mistook a beginning for an ending.
And isn’t that a startling conclusion,
decades later?
We changed the laws.
We mistook that for changing the hearts
that made those laws necessary.
But hatred does not need to be reinvented.
It only needs to be inherited.
Passed from one generation to another,
through words casually spoken,
beliefs seldom questioned,
fears accepted as truth.
And so the old poison survives,
even when the world around it changes.
In the end,
which doubtless is the beginning
of something else,
we are left confronting
the persistence of this ancient affliction.
It is easy to simply label it ignorance.
And perhaps that is partly true.
But it is not the whole story.
Are fear, sexual jealousy, possessiveness,
racial mythology, and religious justification
simply elaborate inventions
humans devise to excuse domination and cruelty?
Is this really endemic to our basic nature?
Or do we simply invent the danger,
then congratulate ourselves
for defending against it?