I'll Call It Like I See It

by sheila morris

Tag: nelson mandela

  • The Charleston Massacre: Ten Years Anniversary

    The Charleston Massacre: Ten Years Anniversary


    Ten years ago today the mass murder of nine individuals gathered in their church for a bible study and prayer meeting struck closer to our home than prior atrocities. A twenty-one-year-old young man from Columbia, South Carolina, where Pretty and I live, drove 115 miles to Charleston, South Carolina, attended the prayer meeting in the Mother Emanuel AME Church, and proceeded to slay nine people who meant no harm to him. Lest we forget I’m reminding myself and you with my original post on June 17, 2015.

    *********************

    The Sandy Hook Elementary School, Newtown, Connecticut. An army training center in Fort Hood, Texas.  The Washington, DC Navy Yard. A movie theater in Aurora, Colorado.  The Sikh Temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin. Tucson, Arizona, and the resilience of Rep. Gabby Giffords. An immigration center in Binghamton, New York. Geneva County, Alabama. Seal Beach in Orange County, California.  Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, Charleston, South Carolina.

    Massacre. Mass slaughter, indiscriminate killing, mass murder, mass execution – all of these are words that define massacre according to the Oxford American Thesaurus.

    Today as President Barack Obama addressed the country on national television, he did so for the fourteenth time in his presidency to try to offer words of comfort to a bereaved community and a bewildered country in the midst of the horrors of massacres within our own borders. To borrow a phrase from a former American President, Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was speaking one day after the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1945, today is a “date which will live in infamy.” Yesterday in a sister city in the lowcountry of our state, the unspeakable happened; and we joined the names that will live in infamy in this country and around the world for years to come.

    I have watched President Obama in these televised messages to the nation on too many occasions, and I was usually struck by the powerful personal images of hope and comfort that he offered. Today, however, I witnessed an additional layer of anger and frustration as he once again spoke about our lack of ability as a nation to give up our guns. I saw a President whose hair is almost totally snow-white and a man whose face looks much older than his years. I wondered if this president’s legacy was going to be Paul Newman’s Cool Hand Luke’s character’s classic lines: What we have here is a failure to communicate.

    We have a President who rode into town as a new sheriff committed to compromise who found a posse determined to derail him. They just never mixed. And gun control? Well, that has always been just some people talking.

    We grieved for the massacres in the east and the west and states in-between. We truly grieved for these losses and for the families and friends that lost people they loved…people they never even had an opportunity to say goodbye to. But the closer the tragedies are – and this one couldn’t be much closer since the suspect is from the greater Columbia metropolitan area – the deeper the anguish and the anger.

    The world continues to rotate on its axis, but it seems slightly tilted to me. We are off track somehow. We have taught falsehoods to our children through our messages at home in the words we speak and the silences we allow. For example, it’s okay to hate people who are different from us. Nelson Mandela said we are not born hating, and he was right. We learn to hate as surely as we learn to ride a tricycle. Our parents teach us to hate. Our friends encourage us to be bullies. Our heroes send us conflicting images of who the good guys and bad guys are. We have national leaders in highly visible positions who don’t play well together in their houses of Congress. Shame on you. Shame on me for re-electing you year after year to continue cycles of contention and confrontation.

    And so tonight I am in mourning for the survivors of The Charleston Massacre, and I find no words to adequately express my sorrow for them, for their church family, for the city of Charleston, for my state and for my nation.

    Like my President, I fear for our future.

     

    say their names: The Charleston Nine

  • no one is born hating

    no one is born hating


    “No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin, or his background, or his religion.  People must learn to hate, and if they learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.” Nelson Mandela (1918 – 2013)

    Nelson Mandela was a super hero to me, a man whose extraordinary personal sacrifice changed the politics of his own South Africa which inspired dreams for peace and democracy around the world. Facing the death penalty for sabotage at his trial in April, 1964  Mandela spoke these words:

    “I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.”

    He was sentenced to life imprisonment but was released in 1990 by President F. W. de Klerk who then negotiated with Mandela’s party to end apartheid in South Africa. Twenty-seven years of his life with no personal freedom, and Nelson Mandela became a symbol of freedom for his nation and the rest of the world.  In 1993 Mandela and de Klerk were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for their work to end the oppression of apartheid in their country. Mandela became the first black president of South Africa in 1994.

    This past weekend the news of another racially motivated massacre of ten Black people in the United States took place in Buffalo, New York, at a grocery store in a zip code the alleged 18 year old shooter stated in his manifesto he believed had the highest percentage of black people close enough to where he lived. According to Dustin Jones of NPR today the teenager said “the influx of immigrants, more specifically people of color, will lead to the extinction of the white race…decrease in white birth rates equates to a genocide.” This young man was not born hating, but somewhere along the way he was vulnerable to evil influences similar to those that enabled a 21-year-old white man to murder nine Black people while they held a prayer meeting in the Mother Emanuel AME church in Charleston, South Carolina in June, 2015.

    Meanwhile almost 5,000 miles from Buffalo, New York across the Atlantic Ocean, a 21-year-old Russian soldier was put on trial last week in Kyiv for allegedly killing a 62-year-old unarmed Ukrainian civilian riding his bicycle on a road in the Sumy region when the soldiers suspected the man of telephoning their location to Ukrainian defenders. Russians and Ukrainians may share the same color skin but radically different ideas about their governments – the ideals of democracy the Ukrainians believe in are very much like Mandela above who was prepared to die for his hope in a “democratic society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities.”

    I am at a loss to understand the ongoing mass shootings in my country, an experiment in democracy that has failed to deliver on its promise of harmony and equal opportunities for all. Not only has the nation failed in providing fundamental rights to all but also is currently in the process of a sitting Supreme Court actually reversing some of the precious fundamental rights that were guaranteed for the past 50 years. What’s that I hear? Oh, never mind. It’s only the cries of 166 million females in the US as we await the decision of 6 men and 3 women called the Supremes who will determine whether the government controls our bodies or we do.

    If Mandela can be our north star, then we have the capability of teaching love to our children as surely as we teach them to hate the persons of different colors, different political beliefs any “other” from ourselves and our families. Portions of the human race are surely broken when we teach teenagers and twenty-somethings as children to hate enough to kill with weapons we refuse to prohibit.

    But that’s a topic for another day.

    *******

    Stay safe, stay sane, and please stay tuned.

  • no one is born hating


    “No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin, or his background, or his religion.  People must learn to hate, and if they learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.” Nelson Mandela (1918 – 2013)

    My heroes when I was a child growing up in Grimes County, Texas were always the cowboys in old western movies I watched on Saturday mornings with my daddy. They were men who settled their differences with guns but fired only at the bad guys who were easily identifiable as thieves, cattle rustlers, or other desperadoes out to do wrongs to innocent ranchers or townspeople. The bad guys were often found drinking whiskey in saloons in the company of women with “loose” morals – women that sometimes turned out to be damsels in distress.  The movie cowboys rescued damsels in distress whenever they spotted one and fought to bring justice to the lawless frontier that was the American West.

    As I aged, my heroes have thankfully changed, but the people I most admire are still the ones who try to lift my vision toward higher ground; and by higher ground I mean a place where justice and equality reign in tandem against the forces of unfairness, dishonesty and outright evil. My cowboys have been replaced by men and women who choose to settle their differences with words that effect change more powerfully than did the guns of the Wild West. They are people whose examples give us hope of rescue when we find ourselves in the saloons we make of our lives.

    Nelson Mandela was such a hero to me, a man whose extraordinary personal sacrifice changed the politics of his own South Africa which inspired dreams for peace and democracy around the world. Facing the death penalty for sabotage at his trial in April, 1964  Mandela spoke these words:

    “I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.”

    He was sentenced to life imprisonment but was released in 1990 by President F. W. de Klerk who then negotiated with Mandela’s party to end apartheid in South Africa. Twenty-seven years of his life with no personal freedom, and Nelson Mandela became a symbol of freedom for his nation and the rest of the world.  In 1993 Mandela and de Klerk were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for their work to end the oppression of apartheid in their country. Mandela became the first black president of South Africa in 1994.

    For me, Nelson Mandela was as brave as any cowboy I watched in the Saturday morning westerns of my childhood. In a world today where the ideals of democracy and personal freedom are under attack by forces as evil as the Covid-19 virus which claims the lives of the poor,  people of color, the elderly – those who are marginalized by our own divisive institutions as surely as the institution of apartheid did in South Africa – I look to Nelson Mandela for his sacrifice and courage that showed me the power of peace in the midst of turmoil, hope for unity in a world divided artificially by the hate we’ve learned to love.

    Nelson Mandela-2008.jpg

    (photo from Wikipedia)

    Stay tuned.

  • No One is Born Hating


    My heroes when I was a child growing up in Grimes County, Texas were always the cowboys in old western movies I watched on Saturday mornings with my daddy.  They were men who settled their differences with guns but fired only at the bad guys who were easily identifiable as thieves, cattle rustlers, or other desperadoes out to do wrongs to innocent ranchers or townspeople.  The bad guys were often found drinking whiskey in saloons in the company of women with loose morals – women that sometimes turned out to be damsels in distress.  The cowboys rescued damsels in distress whenever they spotted one and fought to bring justice to the lawless frontier that was the American West.

    As I aged, my heroes have changed, but the people I most admire are still the ones who try to lift my vision toward higher ground, and by higher ground I mean a place where justice and equality reign in tandem against the forces of unfairness and dishonesty and outright evil.

    My cowboys have been replaced by men and women who choose to settle their differences with words that effect change as powerfully as the guns of the Wild West.  They are people whose examples give us hope of rescue when we find ourselves in the saloons we make of our lives.

    Nelson Mandela was such a hero to me, a man whose extraordinary personal sacrifice changed the hearts of his own nation and inspired dreams for peace and fairness around the world.

    “No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin, or his background, or his religion.  People must learn to hate, and if they learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.”

    Twenty-seven years of his life unfairly imprisoned, and this man speaks of love.  Twenty-seven years of a life without personal freedom, and this man becomes a symbol of freedom for his nation and the rest of the world. Twenty-seven years of his life taken away, and this man gives…and gives…and gives until he dies.

    For me, Nelson Mandela was as brave as any cowboy I watched in the Saturday morning westerns of my childhood.  He didn’t have to ride a horse or shoot a gun to save a damsel in distress. Rather, he showed me the power of peace in the midst of turmoil and hope for  unity in a world divided artificially by the hate we’ve learned to love.

    I will miss knowing he is here.