I was living in Worcester, Mass. in 2005 when the city required its residents to buy yellow trash bags, which could only be filled with certain items and had to weigh less than twenty pounds. Like most residents of the city, I was not happy with this imposition. It required a lot of sorting – putting cans, bottles and newspapers in separate bins — which would be picked up on a different week. Keeping everything straight with this new system took a lot of work, and while the recycling benefits of the mandate were significant, the community irritation – at least at first – almost sank the enterprise. Because it was inconvenient.
A little more than twenty years later, I, along with millions of other Americans, engage in recycling as a matter of course. We have been trained to sort. Most of us can now see both the need and the environmental benefits of the discipline of disposal, and the practice has become routine. For me, recycling has brought me into a deeper awareness of the importance and power of Martin Luther King’s wisdom from his 1963 letter from a Birmingham Jail: “In a real sense all life is inter-related. All men (people) are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.” We are connected to each other – and to the earth. The roots of King’s words can be traced to the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5: 1-12) and to the Bantu (South African) concept of ubuntu, which loosely translated means “I am because we are.”
What has been an ongoing and often tragic struggle in America is to adequately identify who is “we”. Even though the Constitution begins with “we the people”, for too much of American history “we” has been limited to people who look the same, worship similarly, and vote (if permitted) the same. In short, “we” is confined to one’s tribe. For its first 250 years, there was no “we” accorded to enslaved Black people in America; they were regarded as property. Chattel, institutionally devoid of humanity. Even after some Black people were freed, the 1857 Dred Scott decision ruled that they could not have citizen’s rights extended to them. And in 1896, the Plessy v. Fergusson decision by the Supreme Court legitimized separate but equal racial provisions, which provided justification for the oppression of the Jim Crow era.
It was much easier to organize life and legality around the needs of the dominant tribe. It was considered to be inconvenient to expand boundaries and broaden the concept of “we”. It took too much work to think and act differently. And the dominant tribe configured its world so that its consistent cruel and unusual punishment of Black people was either not acknowledged, or in many cases simply unseen.
In spite of fierce tribal resistance, the struggle to bring about racial equality continued.The Civil Rights movement exposed the racism that had been baked into the American experiment. In 1965, with the passage of the Voting Rights Act, it became illegal to deny Black people the right to vote. Most people adjusted to the new reality of Black people having more power in the marketplace and in the voting booth. Black representation in local government and in Congress increased. Their voices, and the concerns which accompanied those voices, were now being heard – at least in some quarters. Having an expansive sense of “we” lifts everyone up into a fuller appreciation of the “inescapable network of mutuality,” which in turn creates a stronger social fabric.
The strength of that fabric was torn asunder with the recent Louisiana v. Callais case, which essentially gutted the 1965 Voting Rights act. The advances of racial equality are now in the rearview mirror. “We” has been truncated to an appeal to partisanship, which the majority members of the Supreme Court have ruled cannot be legally regulated. The training to achieve racial equality and harmony that we have undergone over the past fifty years, a journey that has taken an inordinate amount of work, is being undone. Partisanship, which has escalated to polarizing proportions, has taken over. For too many, racial imbalance, prejudice and racism no longer needs to be acknowledged, and in many cases is unseen.To my mind, the Supreme Court has given license for America to take refuge in our tribal silos, to use theological, political and cultural swords and shields against one another in bitterness, fear and anger.
Swimming against this tide is hard. It is inconvenient for some, devasting for others. What keeps me going is the transforming force of ubuntu, I am because we are. Jesus gives perhaps the most expansive notion of “we” there is in the Sermon on the Mount. Blessed, he says, are the poor in spirit, those who are pure in heart, those who mourn, those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, along with the meek, the merciful, and the peacemakers.
The job description for Christians – and I would argue for non-Christians and non-believers as well–is to embrace Jesus’ broad description of we – and to join in blessing them. We need to keep training ourselves – to resist the temptation in ourselves and the force from others — to confine “we” to a small and protected silo. We need to move through our feelings of inconvenience, and discover that being advocates for one another generates hope and wholeness.
So let’s get to work.
