If you’re wondering

why I haven’t said anything about Charlottesville …

Like everyone else I know I was glued to the news yesterday in horror. I know people who teach at UVA and so my FB was off the hook, beeping in dismay.

I am at my limits, I think, of being able to understand and explain. All I have left is grief, anger, rage.

I know that I, like many people who teach or have taught social studies, wonder how this sentiment can persist against the huge edifice of historical evidence about its inherent wrongness and its disastrous, catastrophic practical consequences.

I condemn the president’s unwillingness to say the words he needed to say: that white supremacy movements are wrong, destructive, and un-American.

I agree with this editorialist that our habitual acceptance of racism makes us all responsible.

If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.

I also agree with this commentator that the ongoing trend to apology may be necessary but it’s just another way of exercising power. So I am not sure whether I should apologize or what good it does.

I am sorry. What I do to oppose racism is not enough, and in the end it’s not about me, it’s about us and what we want from our country.

And I don’t know what else to say. I hope we can all unite at least to say: it’s not this. White supremacist violence allowed to escalate until they murder someone — and then crow over it — is not what we want.

~ by Servetus on August 13, 2017.