Mother Emmanuel Taught Love That Cast Out Fear

Whenever I get too angry, there is an underlying fear driving me to focus on pain and not love that conquers pain. True forgiving, the kind that also forgets, is so elusive to the human experience that we often need reminders. Well, maybe that message was sent only for me to change.

Mother Emmanuel has changed America in a way that we are barely coming to terms with. Years of preaching and praying, protesting and prodding barely produced integrated schools or anything better than an offset confederate flag near the capital dome in South Carolina, but one reflective act of evil changed everything.  Suddenly, every person who has a confederate flag or promoted its existence had to stop and stare in the mirror.

In retrospect, smart people can deduce that Roof did what he thought the Confederate flag told him to do just as it had inspired his white ancestors. It might make sense to keep your anger against racial mixing limited to your dinner table and weapon purchase 'just in case', but it never was reasonable for every young white southern confederate to assume the war against white people was over when the flag never came down, and when everyone they talk to, regardless of race,  reminds them of their shrinking power in a world they once fully controlled.

The conditions that created the original confederate fear and the flag that followed are the same or worse depending on your perspective.  White people, then and now, understand that they have never proven the dominant gene even if they dominate so many other things.  Race mixing was a fear then just as it is now, because not a lot will change where the flag of fear flies freely.

White fear made race mixing illegal after all other measures were dismantled, and then it raised a flag as a reminder when freedoms weight proved too heavy for anything more politically overt.  Every household might not have added the hate part into their explanation to the growing kids, but recognizing fear is  inert just as patterning the behavior of fear is inert. Black families afraid of race mixing gave similar fear messages to their children until they started accepting that light skinned niggers are niggers just like them, and happiness in marriage is way too demanding to avoid testing the confines of segregation.

One day, those who don't love love unless it's conforms to their own sense of righteousness, must reconcile with the limited role of sex, especially when married with children, compared to all the other parts of life and family that don't demand one gender or the other, or care about bedroom behavior. Is a child raised by one parent who is occasionally promiscuous more healthy than a child of monogamous homosexual parents?  Show me the love and I'll give you an answer. Love wins in life just as it does in any family structure, and will overcome the challenges of both family and parenting.

Period.

The evidence is clear. And whether we are fighting gay marriage today, or race mixing like the Confederate flag hoped to resist, we are focusing on fear and not the love that overcomes all circumstances including race mixing, if in fact race mixing is of divine concern in the first place. A combination of interracial marriage and the tanning industry have long since blurred the lines on race, yet, love has been working to fix that problem for man as well.

Love like Mother Emmanuel displayed to Dylann Roof and to the watching world.  We Christian's understand that love can conquer anything but are increasingly amazed at just how HE gets it done. Does it require the loss of loved ones?   Loss is relative, for God gave his only begotten son, not for a loss but as a gift towards everlasting life. If we give thanks for the gift of Christ, we might need also to thank him for the blessing of the lives he allowed to be taken to further this cause of freedom. 

Our flag stands for freedom because the greatest gift of all is freedom, and there is no greater freedom than the freedom from fear. Mother Emmanuel didn't shrink in fear or reach for a gun. She stood in the face of fear and forgave.  In doing so, she forgave every guilty white person who might have minimized the dangerous message of the Confederate flag and the fear it invokes in everybody.

EVERYBODY!!!

Absent the anger and fear, America would have never needed another flag. Emmanuel- God With Us- reminds each of us (not just me) to let go of fear, forgive and forget so that our hearts are a worthy  dwelling place for the Lord and for the unity to truly call ourselves the United States of America.

Obama Speaks On Grace, Race In Pinckney Eulogy

At last, black foke got the speech that they've been waiting for.

In reality, it was always unrealistic for blacks to expect Barack Obama to survive two terms in office being the head Nigga in Charge, given the level of opposition that faced him from day one.  He's done his best to add a little Al Green and a significant ebonic drawl to his eloquent speaking, but his policies have left most left leaning blacks wondering if any politician is much different in the long run.

In reality, Obama has done so many good things for America that it is hard to accept them in the face of the things he didn't do that you were hoping for, whoever you might be. So he might not complete immigration during his 2 terms, and he hasn't championed the cause of racial equality, yet most rational thinking people realize that any good leader is probably pissing off everyone on an equal level.  So far, Obama has done this too well for his own good or for his own public opinion polls.

President Obama's greatest strength is in line with a quote of Rev. Clementa Pinckney that the president himself used during his eulogy of Pinckney.  The quote went as follows: "Around the south, we have a good understanding of history.  Unfortunately we don't often have a good understanding of each other's history".

Barack Obama not only recognizes the power of history, it seems to be a guiding force in each of his decisions and his speeches.  Because of a keen sense of history, Obama's done a great job at limiting the big errors that would have impeded his ability to accomplish so many big things. At the same time, he's seen as way to cautious by those who felt he was purposed to create a new history while blazing new trails. You will never be able to deliver your song if you can't find a way to get and stay on stage. That's what I took from MSNBC host Al Sharpton, who was able to recall a story in which the great James Brown told him that,(paraphrased) no matter what you do in life, fight like crazy to get on that stage.  But once you're there, you gotta sing.

Today Obama sang.  Well technically, he sang again, but this time it was different.

He sang amazing grace, but he hoped to remind the world of the power of grace.  Knock on wood, because it was probably grace that allowed Sasha and Malia to avoid the front row of a funeral as someone else eulogized their father while residing as president.  Had Obama assumed a posture of black power and retribution for the years of mistreatment, he might have shortened his tenure in Washington and on earth.  Until today, Barack Obama stayed far away from the raw truth of race in America, fearing no one wanted to really deal with it in the first place, so why make his wife a widower?

Today, he said it the way blacks have been trying to say it for so long that we started to sound like that proverbial wolf crying little boy.  It took one too many recorded killings of black people- including the recent loss of the Emmanuel 9- to free this president to point out the obvious.  Confederate flags don't cause deaths, but they might cause hiring managers to "give a call back to John instead of Jamal" as the president reminded us in his eulogy.

We've come a long way, but moments like these are divine blessings- grace if you will- to press further into the struggle of decency, or return to the status quo.  In this address, president Obama urged America to seize this opportunity to advance our conversations, but most importantly advance the cause of decency towards one to another.  Mother Emmanuel is a shining example of  what it means to give undeserved decency, or grace if you will, much like the kind that Mother Emmanuel extended to the same man that terrorized their church.

Through the death of these 9 people, the confederate flag will come down and president Obama was finally given the reason to be black without excuse.  No one could question the vulnerability that this act of terror caused, even to those who don't stay in church a little longer than normal.  If the black church is the spine of black people, it could very well be the spine of America given the role blacks have played in advancing the cause of freedom's flag. Today was another chance for black people to advance the cause of freedom in America
, and our president stood up.

Freedom has a flag already, and it isn't the one that sought to maintain slavery.  However courageous the effort of any soldier, some of them are enlisted in the wrong army and for the wrong cause.  The only guilt and shame any person should feel towards the error of their ancestors should come from the persistence in that error.  Confederate flags are the height of a persistent error masquerading as family pride, and any state that sponsors the confederate flag is trying to mask the insecurity of shame and guilt with immense pride, yet, at the expense of those who have been oppressed by this symbol, and at the expense of our actual flag which stands for freedom and unity and decency as a birthright for all.

Does The Flag Stand For Grace?

Today our president gave a passionate address about the importance of being unified and decent towards all American's after the Supreme Court invoked federal right's allowing same-sex couples to marry.  And then he flew to South Carolina to eulogize a young black community leader, slain as a political act of terror.  The grace to be free and honest about race and grace was given to Barack Hussein Obama today, and he did not waste the moments.

Clementa Pinckney Might Be Eulogized Beneath Same Confederate Flag That Killed Him

Great men evidence themselves by the reverberation of their life and the lives they move when suddenly they're gone.

South Carolina State Senator Clementa Pinckney was the pastor of the church that Dylan Roof terrorized, killing Pinckney and 8 others. No terrorist deserves to be memorialized or even remembered outside of the information WE can gain about ourselves in their confessions. The 8 people who died with their pastor deserved to be remembered. They, alongside their pastor, are the lives that shook the ground beneath the South Carolina legislature who are moving like the wind to make sense of the loss of a loved one. If they fail and some special accommodation  is not made, pastor Pinckney will be buried beneath the flag that killed him.

Never before, in the face of so many previous tragedies, have we seen solidarity behind change like we are seeing with the Confederate flag conversation. Pastor Pinckney shows US that God's messengers will be called to unusual places to break stubborn chains, occasionally to the state Senate, but sometimes even home.

This conversation is making me feel like I need to make sense of the conservative soul that under girds my proactive socialism platform. I love God and country just like the next red-blooded American. Apple pie is not my favorite because some people don't know how to properly cook the apples, but that's nothing that vanilla ice cream can't fix, regardless of the apple texture.  I also can't wait to replace my old Chevy pickup that I inherited when my dad died. Eventually it died too, but don't blame that truck for my former lack of automotive prowess. Like any real conservative American man, I've learned to fix a lot of stuff on my Made In America Jeep, mostly because I know dad would be proud, even though my American truck is not a Chevy anymore.

The bust of the Klan's founder is in the state house of Virginia
and on the 1-65 Highway entrance into Tennessee along with
several confederate flags

I wish America would have boldly conserved God as a confessed, guiding part of our daily lives including school and government, and not just the mystic, androgynous small print on our money that we curse or call to during times of tragedy. Mother Emmanuel is a shining example of what you can overcome when keeping God first. I'm also conservative enough still to hate the necessity for abortion, but not for any religious guilt reasons as some of my fellow conservatives. I just dislike what the necessity of abortion says about the degradation of the family, which is scary enough to encourage more abortion's than ever before. That being said, young people protect themselves better when they have sex these days. I'm not conservative enough to equally hate abortions as much as those liberal condom distribution programs that some conservatives protest just like abortions, but I understand the chastity argument too.

Virginia is banning confederate flags on license plates,
but this Klan statue will welcome you to Virginia instead.

I  admit however, that I might have given in on insuring that heterosexuals are the only people miserably married, but I'm  still strongly in support of the free market.  I just don't know how to make sense of the imbalance between profit and wages any better than the next conservative.

I struggle reconciling my conservative leanings during these pivotal moments in history that demand change instead of  conserving a tired way of thinking. Maybe black, God loving conservatives like me need to  take some blame for letting the crazy crackers keep the Confederate flag alive for so long. Quietly, it sort of made sense to quietly allow flag rebellion masquerading as pride because it helped to quiet my own retributive hate.  For me, continuing to say, "you hated first" is an immature response to being hated, so I tacitly accepted the hate and the flag as justification for my own sour heart. 

And then one day I lost my twisted white hatred and found a way to be polite or rude to people of all colors equally. Polite people of opposing color have been quietly hating while smiling in each other's face for a long time because freedom allows for things we know exist, but never know in who.  From all reports, pastor Pinckney was  more than just a polite person, he was someone everybody knew as a man of deep integrity and conviction. Just the kind of man who could lead an historic church and a battalion of its soldiers into the army of the lord to do what the Union army couldn't complete after the Civil War.

Mississippi State Flag

If you don't believe that God is still in the miracle business, look at these weaponless soldiers from Mother Emmanuel AME church of South Carolina, lead by General Pinckney, who are posthumously storming the stairs of state capitol building's nationwide to finish the war against General Robert E. Lee, that the Union had previously won, but with an asterisk. In Mississippi, republicans are hoping to invoke a ballot initiative to shield their campaigning conservatives from having to do the right thing with their confederate flag, which is a part of the state flag. Soon, more states will follow.

The founder of the Klu Klux Klan is revered in Tennessee. 

Until recently, I had no clue like most people who actually honor this flag, that this was the flag of Lee's N. Virginia army, not of the entire Confederate army. The modern use of the image was created and adopted in memory of the confederacy by people who celebrated and honored this image with cross burning and lynching and defiance of America.  Those folks who made it a rallying image that inspired the killing of black people, did this under popular support that existed not so long ago if you check the history or the memorials that continue to be inspired by the confederate movement.

The terrorist themselves and the people terrorized by these Confederate flaggers are not all dead and gone, nor is the memory of the flag's connection to terrorism.  Moreover, the fight to get rid of the flag never died either, but it started to feel like one of those fights that take so long you start to forget what you're fighting for.

That was the fate of the debate before a black president made hate emerge from the shadow's and rise up to kill a friend that he must now eulogize.  Should America continue to allow states to wave the flag that emboldens the racist cause right along side our red, white and blue, which one murderous confederate chose to burn in private?

Waving an enemy flag should be a  personal and private act protected by America's respect for free speech, not one supported by the government of the people, by and for ALL people.  As obvious as that seems,  it took pastor Pinckney to deliver one more reverberating message- that's still rumbling throughout the entire congregation and beyond.

Lay your burden down pastor. This message is being written for you.

Domestic Terror Is An Old Flag For Black America

No matter how rational or irrational each or these despicable violent killers proves to be, they have to rationally recognize the TERROR that their heinous acts are about to inflict upon society.

Why This Time, Why This Way?

Motives are usually so inflated with supposition, that most people eventually buy into their own theory and discard the others as supposition.  The death of the perpetrator typically leaves us to staring at each other and wondering where did we go wrong, supposing someone else is to blame.

Now that a few of these terrorist have survived, we've taken to the practice of pointing fingers even when the criminal tells us exactly why they behaved as they did. Not so long ago, it was Batman inspiring death and mayhem. In this case the killer wanted to incite a race war, so he inspired himself with the kinds of things you need to get fired up for a black church mass killing- white race hate rhetoric and symbols supporting his notion that a race war could soon follow a calculated attack at the underbelly of black life.

The fact that the confederate flag- a flag of the losing army that fought to destroy the union- is still flying in South Carolina, may not be added inspiration to the Roof's of America who honored that flag and not the US flag, but we know for certain that it stands for white purity and supremacy to a great deal of people in South Carolina and across the South.  The fire that burns to hold on to that flag is enough evidence of the racial animus that still lingers more than it represents undying pride in an institution that should have died with the war.  If ISIS gets to keep their flags raised even after the world defeats them, it might be hard to recognize the victory.

We all know that Roof, and the Klan and every other race hate killer are off track if they believe that a civil society would discard civility just to feed into the kind of hate we are trying to heal from.  What we don't know is exactly how many other fiddler's like Roof' are waiting to join the war.  Somehow it seems too easy to rest on the statistics of how infrequent these things tend to happen given the fact that the frequency is increasing at a rate so alarming, we barely have time to wash that colored dye out of the hair of the last terrorist, finish his trial and grieve before another terrorist comes along.

The bigger question of the day, is whether or not we can pass off this murderous racism as crazy like we might do with James Holmes (the Aurora theater shooter) and miss or dismiss the fact that race hatred is also on a dangerous rise?  Even worse, might we be missing the impact of mental illness integrated within a nation that is polarized to the extent of arming ourselves? As we speak, churches across the land are considering undercover, armed guards to be able to address the kind of criminal that terrorized Mother Emmanuel AME Church in South Carolina.

Some of those churches will be catching up to the ones who've already armed themselves against the wiles of the devil and against a well armed America that buys more weapons every time one of these incidents occurs.  Although mature and responsible human beings who understand the power and danger of a gun should always have access to them, they are they only ones qualified to endure the enticing power to pull, that the trigger of a gun possesses.  Everyone else, even a few on our police forces across America, needs to be kept away from such life controlling power.  Since this seems a near impossible dream, the counter solution has been to inundate the landscape with so many guns as to make criminals unsure exactly who has them.  Peace by intimidation if you will. The results are both mixed and debated.

A similar approach was employed many moons ago when man discovered the powerful might of a nuclear/atomic warhead.  Nothing can replace the value of real life testing, and Japan offered fertile hostility and landscape to put it to valuable use.  We've been fighting to limit the access to this weapon ever since, but guns are different somehow.  George Zimmerman might have purchased a gun because the state of Florida told him that more guns makes us safer than less guns, but he used it because having one without using it is the equivalent of  keeping a stick in your pocket, or having a weapon but never being ready when the moment of "safety" demands.  Weapons scream to be used because everything powerful has a voice.  They also scream to be used with caution because life and death decisions lie in the hand of the beholder.

Trained officers make mistakes in this realm, and yet we've convinced ourselves that random citizens are just as capable of being calm, cool and collected decision makers when encountering random gun violence?  How are normal people supposed to deal with rational or irrational terrorists?  Regardless of their state of sanity, they are operating with a plan and 7 magazines of bullets or so to execute that plan. Whether the weapon of choice is a bullet or a plane, churches and schools and movie theaters and World Trade Center buildings would have to plan for the unthinkable to prepare for the unthinkable.  In some ways, we are enslaved by this condition and need to look towards those who are familiar with the terror of enslavement.

The reason its called terror is because it disrupts our connection to normalcy. Car wrecks, train wrecks, plane wrecks and the like are sad, but not disrupting by nature nor terrorizing.  We take trips in these transport mechanisms expecting to be safe, but realizing that dangers do exist.  Going to church all day or eating greasy popcorn in a dark room are not supposed to be terribly risky behaviors, just as working in a sky scraper building should never make you afraid of incoming attack planes.

Tomorrow or next week we won't be afraid of church or movies or sky scrapers anymore because that's just not normal.  Angry white people in the South are not still plotting to kill black church go'ers  or to start a race riot, just as every Muslim who worships the Koran  is not trying to join the Jihad and shoot up any part of America, even if Pam Geller is sponsoring the event. The people interested in doing such things are so predictable that the authorities targeted and met them at the last Geller event.

Segregation remains the truly crazy part about America's landscape, and the opportunity to get to know each other on a level beyond our skin and stereotypes is more elusive in places like South Carolina now that they have returned to segregation policies of the past that limit REAL interaction between races.  Crazy is the necessity of 9 deaths to take away the daily hysteria over a white girl who dared become black, as if she painted her face and blackened her hair-do just to jump into a soup line exclusive to coloreds instead of advancing cause of coloreds (I hate that word NAACP). Blacks are such a terrorized people, even we can't understand the compulsion to endure terror forgetting that our moments of terror have created the very courage and charisma that have made more than one white girl copy our ways, and more than one white person challenge our backbone during church.

All terrorism is crazy if for no reason other than its trauma against humanity, yet its important that we compartmentalize it and not turn it into a wider reaching conspiracy that demands a wide reaching address that misses the mark.  Terror must be compartmentalized or it works. If terror is an individual act that attempts to differentiate those who are terrorized, black people are perfectly equipped for this type of behavior, and we will never be intimidated. By the whip or a weapon. Blacks should continue conducting worship in the very way we have always done to overcome terror, from the middle passage until now.  If we ever needed a gun to protect our worship, then we never needed faith.

Domestic terror of all sorts is here to stay, and America needs to understand how to endure and overcome this mess. Mother Emmanuel can now be an example that this is not an issue of race, but an opportunity for racial progress and for the hope of a better America. Blacks as a race in America made America possible from the beginning, and continue to shine the light of hope that only courage can provide.  If Mike Brown Jr.  died to expose a policing problem that needed exposing, these 9 deaths could very well address a nation flying under too many flags.

S.Carolina Cop Charged With Murder. Are We Crying Over Spilled Milk?

The man who took the video of the cop accused of murdering Walter Scott in South Carolina was about to erase the video and leave the community of Charleston. Feidin Santana might be from the Dominican Republic, but he's way too brown and street savvy to feel comfortable about his prospect's given the way Walter Scott was treated on his video.

Eventually he heard too many bad reports of what actually happened and read a copy of the officers report himself. The video he wanted so badly to erase told another story. At the risk of his own life, Santana took the crime video to the people who did the crime.

Obviously, not every cop did this crime, but the cop who did it was seeking to save himself from prison, or worse. Listening to the police's version left Santana with the concern that the nation that embodies justice was no better than his crime stricken homeland. If the police in America are corrupt, where do you go with the kind of information he had in hand?

The police are NOT corrupt, but every company has bad workers. After having recorded the actions of one of those bad workers, Santana didn't know who would be interested in justice or committed to saving their own, and their reputation at the same time.

If you think about it, the model for handling police shootings is terribly flawed. Although every cop deserves to be supported, even when they accidentally spill the milk- minorities, and those who love us, are not crying over the accidental spills from policing. Our scream is for the same people who spilled the milk to tell us EXACTLY what happened- but the story is becoming eerily familiar in every case.

I FEARED FOR MY LIFE so I emptied my gun.

Feidin Santana did not record a shooting from a cop who appeared to be in fear for his own life, yet the original narrative told the story exactly that way. South Carolina has an independent review board called SLED (South Carolina Law Enforcement Division) that might have eventually turned this narrative in the same direction that the video did first- but who knows. Nothing in the initial reports suggests that anything close to murder had occurred.  South Carolina officials have promised to release their video from the dashboard camera today, which, to avoid further unrest, really needs to be a bad view of the incident.

Feidin Santana recorded the death of Walter Scott.

If the dash-cam is as graphic as the video from Santana, we all will ask, "why did they wait to view it?". What nobody wants to learn from this incident is that the police saw their own video and still reported officer Slager's account of things. That thought is why Santana still fears for his life, and why what Santana is doing now, he's doing from conscious alone.

Why South Carolina police would have a video version that they did not view before releasing a statement is unconscionable. As someone who spilled a lot of milk in my youth, I can relate to  their response.  My typical reaction was always to fix the mess before mom ever found out.  Whenever my spills got divulged, I was reticent to spill the beans on myself and often ended up sharing some half true accounting of things.

The police are creating the spill, cleaning the spill and explaining the spill when life and death- not tears- is at stake.  From this day forward, even a chest camera might not be suitable to explain all the red milk of unarmed black men that continues to spill at the hand of white police officers. If America is simply crying over the inevitable spilled milk of police work, we should at least let an arbitrary reviewer (FBI perhaps) tell us if our tears are justified or not.  With this latest video example of America's policing problem, its clear that the cops have way too much to lose.