By Ed Evans
This nation and its people have been treated
to an awesome picture of what happens when a people steeped in individual
freedom are treated by local politicians as if we were all socialist lackeys.
"Stay home. You are in Phase One." "Phase Two, you have a little
freedom but wear masks, stay six feet apart and only go to the business we tell
you to."
In the very midst of this confusion,
frustrations overflowed, anger took its toll morphing into brutality by some,
victimization by others, and it all somehow coalesced in the dreaded disease
"RACISM."
I am 79 years old. No one I know, and I know
quite a few human beings on various levels, no one served as anyone's slave. No
one I know bought and sold slaves. We have been treat of late to greed,
injustice, crime ranging from petty theft to mass murders. None of that was
racism.
The Merriam-Webster Dictionary recently
publicized that due to customer complaints they were changing their published
definition of "racism" to include systemic racism. About time. A great many self-appointed experts on racism
will disagree with me when I aver that systemic racism does not exist in this
nation. A war was fought over that very issue. Have there been incidents of
individual racism? Yes. Have some organizations been found guilty of acts of
racism? Yes. But this nation and its greater people do not support any system
of racism. Do some blacks distrust and hate whites? Do some whites distrust and
hate blacks? Browns? Yellows? Reds? But that is not the systemic racism of
which America is being accused.
That particular racism, which does not yet
exist in America, is being used as an excuse for mob theft, looting, arson and
destruction of the very jobs needed by those the charge of racism is supposed
to help. It is sheer nonsense, and senseless economic cruelty upon the backs of
those who can least afford it.
Two thousand years ago Jesus Christ, because
the lives of all men and women matter, allowed himself to be nailed in cruelty
on a wooden cross on a hill called Golgotha. He made it known that all lives
matter, and as the son of the creator God, gave up his life for all those other
lives; because they matter.
We really need to stop making excuses for our
behavior, our greed, our lawlessness, our selfish hate. We own it, and we need
to recognize that and abandon it. This world was not intended for a race of
people mired in such destructiveness. Our only way out is together. Together.
Human beings are "togetherness" beings. We don't do as well alone. We
need each other. Together. It's the only way out.
