A house divided against itself, cannot stand."
-Abraham Lincoln
What unrest we have suffered this month, as one appalling murder led to more killings, many injuries, millions of hard-earned dollars in property loss and great damage to our neighborhoods, in an explosion of division. Lincoln knew a lot about division, and while his overwhelming concern was to keep the Union together as he freed those enslaved, he knew, for them, it would be a long road to equity. We are still on that road. We are. But while men like Chauvin cannot survive our judgement, to vilify all those who stand between us and violence is as unfair as the death of George Floyd. There must be middle ground. Division and destruction does not lead to progress.
Progress is made by people standing together. Consider the conquests of Martin Luther King, Jr. who said nonviolent direct action was not saintly self-sacrifice or high-minded moralizing but a theory of power. Effective nonviolence was and is about wielding the strength of people, brought together in peaceful action, avoiding the destruction and violence that he knew would leave neighborhoods brutalized, exploited and abandoned--and protestors blamed for their destruction instead of their ideals.
A friend who has worked for years in our inner city told me he said he saw people he had never seen here before feeding bricks to young black kids which were then used to break windows, allowing desecration and looting during the protests here. In a city where most caring blacks and whites stand together to survey and act on our problems, this looked conspicuously out of place. Now many are wondering if these acts were being fueled by outsiders. It seems we are not supposed to stand together, and are being jacked apart by people who choose division over unity.
So here's the meat of the thing: Lincoln later added to his statement about a house divided. He said, "I do not expect the house to fall—but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other." So? Which "one thing" are we going to be? Do we choose unity or division? Love or hate? Do we stand together, or do we choose to fall?
One can only hope,
Jim
