At Shakespeare’s Sister, Jeff Fecke demonstrates brilliantly that Jeremiah Wright, whatever his flaws, was exhorting his flock not to hate, but to think about what purpose is served by the endless cycle of violence that America helps perpetuate:
You can disagree with Wrights timing, or his phrasing. But you cant disagree with his facts. The land I sit on as I write this was stolen from the Lakota. America has unquestionably killed innocent civilians in war, and while the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and Dresden may have been necessary to prevent even more horrific destruction, our actions there were not morally clean. Slavery and Jim Crow are a stain on our nations soul. And we have only added to this litany in the six-and-a-half years since these words were spoken. How many Iraqi civilians have died because our nations leaders refused to engage in self-examination, refused to question their desire for vengeance? How many enemies have we made in our rush to strike out against someone — anyone — to make whole our country?
Wright’s sermon that September Sunday was a challenge to his congregation, one that more of us should have engaged. It is easy to look at the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and think that if only one side or the other could just stop killing, it could stop the whole cycle of killing and revenge killing and revenge killing and revenge killing and so on and so forth, ad infinitum. It is easy to look at others and see the motes in their eyes. It is far harder to look at the planks in our own eyes, our own country’s failures, our own mistakes, our own part in the cycle of violence.
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March 26th, 2008 at 5:17 pm
Randy
and now you can watch it out of context and in context!