The pandemic was bad enough; we passed 100,000 deaths in this country last week. The impact on our economy has been devastating; over 40,000,000 people have lost their jobs in the last ten weeks. And now on top of it all, issues of race have resurfaced and protests have erupted across the country. Driving those protests has been a confluence of events that break the heart.
On February 23, twenty-five year old Ahmaud Arbery was jogging when he was chased down, confronted and then killed by Gregory and Travis McMichael. A video of the shooting went viral, but in the two months that followed nothing happened. Two district attorneys recused themselves and the case appeared to stall. It was the growing outrage and resulting referral to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation that finally led to the McMichaels arrest. What would have happened had there been no video?
On March 13, twenty-six year old Breonna Taylor was shot to death in her bed. Taylor was an emergency medical technician working for the University of Louisville Health. She and her boyfriend were asleep when plainclothes narcotics officers broke in. 911 recordings of her boyfriend’s call reveal that he thought criminals had broken in. He fired his weapon. Breonna was shot eight times.
On May 25, Christian Cooper was bird-watching in Central Park when he observed a dog loose in an area where leashes are required. He asked the owner to put a leash on the dog. She responded by calling 911. She was white, and she took as a given the advantage that would give her over this black man who had dared disrupt her day. As Forbes magazine put it, “There is something eerily dark about the level of ease with which Amy Cooper threw a tantrum and threatened havoc on the life of another. And there is something demonstratively devilish about the way she changed the pitch, tone and inflection of her voice while on the call with the 911 operator so as to send the message that she was literally being physically assaulted at that very moment.”
On that same day, in distant Minneapolis, forty-six-year-old George Floyd died. His hands were cuffed behind his back. His head was pinned to the pavement for eight minutes and forty-six seconds by an officer whose knee was driven into Floyd’s neck. Three other officers stood by and watched. Tapes of the entire incident have saddened and enraged us all.
Isolated events in a country of 328 million people, but taken together they have touched a nerve. They’ve touched that nerve because we've realized that these aren't isolated at all, but symptoms rather of a pervasive ill that continues to plague our country. These events have brought out into the open what life is like for a significant segment of our population. It’s not okay, and we need to pay attention.
A couple of hours ago I was sitting at our table and noticed the cover of Doris Kearns Goodwin’s, Leadership. Seeing Lincoln there, I found myself wondering what he would say if he was with us now. I’m pretty sure he would say something. More to the point for us, what would Jesus say? I can’t imagine he would stand silently to the side.
“He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” (Micah 6:8)
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