When Tyler Perry stood up to accept a humanitarian award at the Oscar ceremony recently, he said words that we all need to hear.
"I refuse hate," he said. "I refuse to hate someone because they are Mexican, or black, or white, or LBGTQ, or Police Officers, or Asian� I dedicate this award to all those who will stand with me in the middle."
He went on to thank his deceased mother, who was a caretaker at a Jewish school. He remembered a day the the school was threatened with a bombing and everyone was evacuated. His mother said, "Can you believe that anyone would make blanket judgements about people like that?"
One of America's greatest strengths is that we are truly a melting pot of races and ethnicities. I think God kind of likes that about us, but voices around us are calling one refrain lately: America is bad. It has always been bad. Blanket judgments about racial groups are being taught in schools, and the news media has become the most dangerous threat to our nation, dividing us and causing us to fear each other. As a news director Charley Chester said, "fear sells."
We are lambs being led to the slaughter on a rampart built to support one or another political agenda. We must be convinced that "those other people" are a threat. It's hard to stop rhetoric that is all around us. But a few of us remember that we are supposed to love our neighbors and treat others as we want to be treated.
So how do you want to be treated? Do you want to sow hate and hear claims of division and be hated yourself? Or do you want to celebrate diversity and point to the fact that there is overwhelmingly more caring collaboration than all the claims to the contrary, and experience love and inclusion? That talking head on TV selling fear is paid to tell us what to think. Here's what I think: I have my own brain. If you want to wade in the cesspool of negativity, go right ahead. I'm going to choose the healing waters of the Jordan.
There is no superior group, there is only a superior way.
It is the one that tells us how to live in 10 pretty succinct statements. It is the way that tells us to go out of our path to care for those who are least like us, (Luke 10:25-35) and the way that tells us to judge not, lest we be judged. When things get crazy, like they are today, look up! There is a legion of heavenly angels fighting the good fight for us (2 Kings 7:6). God and his goodness will be victorious.
Go Tyler,
Nancy
