Tea partiers proved that I was right
Tea partiers vow revenge over health overhaul
By LEONARD PITTS JR.
lpitts@MiamiHerald.com
So it turns out that, contrary to what I argued in this space a few weeks back, racism is not ``a major component'' of the so-called tea party movement. I am informed of this by dozens of tea party activists indignant and insulted that I would even suggest such a thing.
In other news tea party protesters called John Lewis a ``nigger'' the other day in the shadow of the U.S. Capitol.
For the record, Lewis wasn't their only target.
Rep. Emanuel Cleaver was spat upon.
Rep. Barney Frank, who is gay, was called ``faggot.''
But it is Lewis' involvement that gives the Saturday incident its bittersweet resonance. The 70-year-old representative from Georgia is, after all, among the last living icons of the Civil Rights Movement. Or, as Lewis himself put it, ``I've faced this before.''
Indeed. He faced it in Nashville in 1960 when he was locked inside a whites-only fast-food restaurant and gassed by a fumigation machine for ordering a hamburger.
He faced it in Birmingham in 1961 when a group of Freedom Riders was attacked and he was knocked unconscious for riding a Greyhound bus.
Most famously, he faced it on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma 45 years ago this month when his skull was fractured by Alabama state troopers who charged a group of demonstrators seeking their right to vote.
In the very arc of his life, Lewis provides a yardstick for measuring American progress. The fact that he rose from that bridge to become a member of Congress says something about this country. But the fact that people demonstrating against healthcare reform chose to chant at him, ``Kill the bill, nigger!'' well, that says something, too.
Which is why tea party leaders have spent much of the last few days spinning the incident, deflecting renewed suggestions that their stated fears -- socialism, communism, liberalism -- are just proxies for the one fear most of them no longer dare speak. Some even faxed the McClatchy news bureau in Washington to suggest, without offering a shred of evidence, that the episode was sparked by Democratic plants within the crowd.
Amy Kremer, coordinator of the Tea Party Express, went on Fox News to dismiss what she called an ``isolated'' incident. Your first instinct may be to cede the benefit of the doubt on that one. It seems unfair to tar nine reasonable people with the hateful behavior of one lunatic.
But ask yourself: When is the last time organizers of protests on other hot-button issues -- say, abortion rights or globalization -- had to apologize for ``isolated incidents'' like these?
Moreover, given how often tea party leaders have been forced to disavow hateful signs and slogans and even the presence of organized white supremacist groups in their midst, is it really fair to use the word ``isolated''?
Is there not a rottenness here? And is not the unwillingness to call that rottenness by name part and parcel of the reason it endures?
No, my argument is emphatically not that every American who opposes healthcare reform is a closet Klansman. Certainly, people can have earnest and honest disagreements about that.
But by the same token, as these ``isolated'' incidents mount, as the venom and the vitriol increase to the point where even proxy words no longer suffice, it insults intelligence to deny that race is in the mix.
Not that the denial surprises.
Often we tell ourselves lies to spare ourselves truths. Had you asked them, the people who locked John Lewis inside that restaurant, the ones who mauled him at that bus station and smashed him down on that bridge, would not have said they acted from a rottenness within.
No, like the ones who called him ``nigger'' half a century later, they would have told you they were good people fighting for principle, trying to save this country from the liberals, the socialists and the communists.
They would not have said they were racists. Racists never do.
Read more: http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/03/24/1544302/tea-partiers-proved-that-i-was.html#ixzz0j7cWHk89
Showing posts with label Communism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Communism. Show all posts
Wednesday, March 24, 2010
And Now, Once Again, for Your Reading Pleasure, I Present the Man who Reads my Mind
The fierce urgency of now: justice
By LEONARD PITTS JR.
lpitts@MiamiHerald.com
`B lessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness.'' -- Matthew 5:6
Ultimately, I suppose, what we're talking about is a clash between the sweet by and by and the fierce urgency of now.
The former is the refrain from a venerable gospel song that meditates on the bliss of life after life. The latter is a phrase from Martin Luther King's ``I Have A Dream,'' a passionate demand for justice, equality, and freedom, now.
Into the tension between these two disparate views of Christian mission stumbles one Glenn Beck. The Fox News showman recently ignited an uproar in the world of Christian ministry by attacking churches that preach a gospel of social and economic justice, i.e., a gospel that doesn't just promise relief in the sweet by and by, but seeks to effect change in the hard here and now. If your church preaches that, Beck told his radio audience, ``run as fast as you can.'' Social and economic justice, he said, are ``code words'' for communism and Nazism.
In response, the Rev. Jim Wallis, a preacher of the social gospel and president and CEO of the liberal religious activist group Sojourners, suggested on his blog that what Christians should run from is Beck himself. Beck, he wrote, attacks the very heart of their faith.
``When I was in seminary,'' he says, ``we made a study of the Bible and we found 2,000 verses in the Bible about the poor, about God's concern for the left out, left behind, the vulnerable and God's call for justice. If I were ever to talk to Glenn Beck, I would hand him that old Bible from seminary where we cut out of the Bible every single reference to the poor, to social justice, to economic justice, and when we were done, the Bible was just in shreds. And I would hand it to him and put a sticker on front and say, `This is the Glenn Beck Bible.'''
I ran Beck's comments by two other preachers of my acquaintance, and they seconded Wallis. But Beck, says the Rev. R. Joaquin Willis of Miami's Church of the Open Door, is not alone. Many others, he said, ``would like to see many of us as pastors just come to church and deal with the spiritual needs of the people and not address those difficult day-to-day issues that make life so hard.''
Beck, adds Willis, ``speaks from the perspective of the entitled and the relatively well off and they don't see a need for social improvement. Anybody that's trying to improve the society is a communist to him.''
``It's hard,'' says Rev. Tony Lee of Community of Hope in Temple Hills, Md., ``for a church to sit and talk to somebody about how to change their lives and how to turn things around when the institutions around that person are broken. It's hard for me to talk to young people about how God can make a way and how they can move forward and be all they can be through God -- but their educational system is in pieces. What Glenn Beck is saying is, `Don't have a role in the shaping of the educational system.'''
For the record, Martin Luther King preached a social gospel. Even the preachers in the anti-abortion movement preach a social gospel.
And the idea that such people are enemies of the state is as visceral a reminder as you're likely to get of the paranoia and intellectual discontinuity that afflicts extremist conservatism. Fifty years ago, they saw communists behind every movie marquee and schoolhouse door. Now, Beck sees them in pulpits, too.
And I suppose the way not to be a communist in his eyes is to embrace a gospel that promises uplift in the sweet by and by -- and only then. But that's a lazy, complacent gospel, a gospel of self-satisfaction and I got mine, of egocentricity and look out for number one -- and it doesn't square with the gospel of feed my sheep and love your neighbor as yourself.
He thinks we should flee the church that preaches social and economic justice? I think you should flee the one that does not.
Read more: http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/03/21/1539820/the-fierce-urgency-of-now-justice.html#ixzz0j6UMCrJI
By LEONARD PITTS JR.
lpitts@MiamiHerald.com
`B lessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness.'' -- Matthew 5:6
Ultimately, I suppose, what we're talking about is a clash between the sweet by and by and the fierce urgency of now.
The former is the refrain from a venerable gospel song that meditates on the bliss of life after life. The latter is a phrase from Martin Luther King's ``I Have A Dream,'' a passionate demand for justice, equality, and freedom, now.
Into the tension between these two disparate views of Christian mission stumbles one Glenn Beck. The Fox News showman recently ignited an uproar in the world of Christian ministry by attacking churches that preach a gospel of social and economic justice, i.e., a gospel that doesn't just promise relief in the sweet by and by, but seeks to effect change in the hard here and now. If your church preaches that, Beck told his radio audience, ``run as fast as you can.'' Social and economic justice, he said, are ``code words'' for communism and Nazism.
In response, the Rev. Jim Wallis, a preacher of the social gospel and president and CEO of the liberal religious activist group Sojourners, suggested on his blog that what Christians should run from is Beck himself. Beck, he wrote, attacks the very heart of their faith.
``When I was in seminary,'' he says, ``we made a study of the Bible and we found 2,000 verses in the Bible about the poor, about God's concern for the left out, left behind, the vulnerable and God's call for justice. If I were ever to talk to Glenn Beck, I would hand him that old Bible from seminary where we cut out of the Bible every single reference to the poor, to social justice, to economic justice, and when we were done, the Bible was just in shreds. And I would hand it to him and put a sticker on front and say, `This is the Glenn Beck Bible.'''
I ran Beck's comments by two other preachers of my acquaintance, and they seconded Wallis. But Beck, says the Rev. R. Joaquin Willis of Miami's Church of the Open Door, is not alone. Many others, he said, ``would like to see many of us as pastors just come to church and deal with the spiritual needs of the people and not address those difficult day-to-day issues that make life so hard.''
Beck, adds Willis, ``speaks from the perspective of the entitled and the relatively well off and they don't see a need for social improvement. Anybody that's trying to improve the society is a communist to him.''
``It's hard,'' says Rev. Tony Lee of Community of Hope in Temple Hills, Md., ``for a church to sit and talk to somebody about how to change their lives and how to turn things around when the institutions around that person are broken. It's hard for me to talk to young people about how God can make a way and how they can move forward and be all they can be through God -- but their educational system is in pieces. What Glenn Beck is saying is, `Don't have a role in the shaping of the educational system.'''
For the record, Martin Luther King preached a social gospel. Even the preachers in the anti-abortion movement preach a social gospel.
And the idea that such people are enemies of the state is as visceral a reminder as you're likely to get of the paranoia and intellectual discontinuity that afflicts extremist conservatism. Fifty years ago, they saw communists behind every movie marquee and schoolhouse door. Now, Beck sees them in pulpits, too.
And I suppose the way not to be a communist in his eyes is to embrace a gospel that promises uplift in the sweet by and by -- and only then. But that's a lazy, complacent gospel, a gospel of self-satisfaction and I got mine, of egocentricity and look out for number one -- and it doesn't square with the gospel of feed my sheep and love your neighbor as yourself.
He thinks we should flee the church that preaches social and economic justice? I think you should flee the one that does not.
Read more: http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/03/21/1539820/the-fierce-urgency-of-now-justice.html#ixzz0j6UMCrJI
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)