When There's Nothing Else to Write About

Today--this week, actually--these past few years, actually--my mind has been aswirl with that passage from the Bible that Lincoln borrowed for his celebrated "house divided" speech:

Matthew 12:25: Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation; and every city or house divided against itself shall not stand ...

Mark 3:25: And if a house be divided against itself, that house cannot stand.

Lincoln was talking about slavery when he delivered that speech in Springfiled, Ill, on June 16, 1858. Almost 162 years ago!

Some things have changed since then; so much has not.

We have always been a divided country--from the earliest colonists through the American Revolution and all subsequent moments of crisis. Those divisions resulted, of course, in the horrors of our Civil War, horrors that have lingered into our own time.

When I was growing up in Enid, Oklahoma, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the town--the county seat of Garfield County--was totally segregated. Schools, churches, water fountains, buses, restrooms, movie theaters, public parks, neighborhoods--all were strictly limited to whites and denied to, in the language of the day, the language of the signs here and there, "colored." Black families could not use my beloved Carnegie Public Library; instead, the library periodically took books to one of the black schools (the elementary was named for George Washington Carver; the high school, for Booker T. Washington). Readers had to go look at what was available---and be satisfied with it.

Oh, and while I was being born in the comforts of St. Mary's Hospital in Enid, black mothers had to deliver their children in the basement.

Brown v. Board of Education, the unanimous school desegregation decision by the U. S. Supreme Court, came down on May 17, 1954. I was nine years old, attending Adams Elementary School--all white. We left Enid in August, 1956 (more than two years after Brown), to move to Hiram, Ohio, and the schools were still segregated back in Enid.

And I have to admit, that all this grotesque inequality did not even cross my boyhood mind. It was the way my world was; I assumed that was the way it was supposed to be.

I had no black classmates at Hiram High School, and it was not until I went to Hiram College that I finally realized what a blind dolt I'd been for my first seventeen years--what--to be blunt--a racist I'd been. A passive, peaceful one, to be sure--but that's just another variety of evil, isn't it?

That changed. I would have some wonderful black classmates and colleagues and students, and every now and then I would think about how, back in Enid, they would have had none of the opportunities that Civil Rights laws and, well, simple humanity have provided in the subsequent decades.

But as I would see during the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s, and as I've seen recently in the streets of America, so much has not changed at all, despite the laws, despite the attempts by so many to make our country adhere to its professed principles--you know, equality of opportunity and all.

Equality of opportunity, sadly, does not exist here--and really never has--not for people of color, not for our impoverished classes. We are just unwilling, it seems, to create and pay for good schools everywhere (not just where people can afford the property taxes to pay for them)--and without a strong education, who really has much of a chance to break the invisible shackles of another degrading form of slavery?

These past few days I've seen stark evidence of our "house divided" all over Facebook. Conspiracy and Rumor are running rampant. (Just today I saw a meme that claimed, sans evidence, that George Soros was paying for all the civil disturbance.)

Former students of mine are all over the place. Some are in the streets, protesting. Some are urging others to keep their guns handy, locked and loaded. And everything in between.

But what we must realize--before it's too late, before our divided house completely implodes--is that we all--and I mean all--must devote ourselves to making certain that our professed democratic principles become alive for everyone. We cannot allow anyone to live without hope--and that is what we have done to countless of our fellow citizens--denying them the basic rights of a democracy, denying them equality of opportunity, denying them decent paying jobs, a quality education, denying them places to live where safety is virtually certain, where hope has a chance to arrive--and grow--and thrive.

We have got to abandon our bigoted ways if this country is to have any chance of survival.

Sadly, based on what I've seen, what I'm seeing, I do not have much hope that this will happen. Our divided house is now making very ominous sounds ...


Link to Lincoln's "house divided" speech.
Link to Brown v. Board decision.