The Fourth of July
In recent years,
I’ve grown increasingly conflicted
as to how to mark Independence Day.
For this Fourth,
I am sharing inspiration
that I have come across
over the last handful of weeks,
(and even months)
that have proven to be an inlet
into a new way of marking this day
for me: one that is truly educational.
Some items are quotes,
others are brief—
and beautiful or incredibly informative—
videos,
while still others are books for my child
or books for me.
Stories matter.
Story matters.
Black lives matter.
Our healing matters
and this starts with me.
For this entry, I’ve chosen to focus
on areas related to black lives in America,
though brown lives and Indigenous lives matter
to me too.
x
Jessie
“The word healing comes from a word meaning ‘entire’ or ‘complete,’ and signifies restoration to wholeness.”
The video below moved me for so many reasons—
and this is one way I intentionally celebrated the 4th today—
by watching and learning.
Frederick Douglass (1818 – 1895)
was a truth-teller, an abolitionist,
a writer, and the leader of
the national abolitionist movement to abolish slavery.
Below, his descendants read his original
’Fourth of July’ speech which I had never heard of.
By the end, tears had moistened my eyes.
Please watch if you haven’t already.
I have been reading Kathleen Norris’ book Acedia & me: A Marriage, Monks, and A Writer’s Life—and it’s one of my favorite books in recent times. So nourishing to my soul. Last night while reading in bed, I came across these words and felt they were so appropriate for our times right now. She remarks on this nuanced and slippery word in the beginning of her book, “The ancient word acedia, which in Greek simply means the absence or lack of care, has proved anything but simple when it comes to finding adequate expression in English.”
“As we grow more reluctant to care about anything past our perceived needs, acedia asserts itself as a primary characteristic of our time. ‘Given the state of our world,’ Alasdair MacIntyre writes…we might ask whether it is time to ‘restore the concept of evil that it once had in Western culture. It is clear that we lack an adequate concept of evil…because we lack any adequate concept of good.’ The danger for us and our society, he points out, is that ‘inadequate thought and speech always translate into inadequate action.’ If sloth means, as the pastor John Buchanan contents, ‘not living up to the full potential of our humanity, playing it safe, investing nothing, being cautious, prudent, digging a hole and burying [our treasure],’ it is critical that we take into account what this means for society at large.
Historians, Buchanan writes, ‘observe that whenever totalitarianism of any kind rears its ugly head, it’s because ordinary people have stopped caring about the life of the community and the nation.’ He cites Simone Weil, who declared that Hitler’s rise to power would be inconceivable without ‘the existence of millions of uprooted [people]’ who could not be roused to care about anything except their immediate circumstances. It is all the more appalling that these were often people who believed that human progress had made them more advanced and free than any who had come before. This common fallacy allows us to complacently measure the world by the scope of our own limited outlook; but as the Carmelite Constance Fitzgerald reminds us, our failure to acknowledge our inner blockages can make us incapable of recognizing the blockages we have created in culture….Even worse, we come to assume that these conditions—injustices, poverty, perpetual conflict—are inevitable, the only possible reality, and lose our ability to imagine that there are other ways of being, other courses of action.
One such blockage—I’ll call it acedia—seems to me to be at the heart of the question of what we will tolerate as a society….The writer Wendell Berry laments the extent to which economics has been elevated to a position that God once held, as ‘ultimate justifier.’ We have come to ‘treat economic laws of supply and demand’ as though they were ‘the laws of the universe.’ If there is a religion that encompasses all the world, it is the pursuit of wealth. But Christians must recognize that in slothfully acquiescing to its petty gods, we deny Christ a place on earth even more effectively than do the loud atheists and antitheists of our time.”
— Kathleen Norris, Acedia & Me: A Marriage, Monks, and A Writer’s Life, p126-128, (2008)
One afternoon, my sister from Chicago shared this with me in a family text thread. My sister’s husband had learned about this history and banking tactic through his racial reconciliation work in Chicago years ago. Just a word from me—redlining was and is pure evil.
“The term ‘redlining’ is thought by many to derive from the red shading that demarcated the lowest ranked D neighborhoods. There is clear evidence that the racial makeup of neighborhoods were explicit factors that were often pivotal in assigning grades to neighborhoods.”
I learned about The Conscious Kid a couple of months ago and have appreciated different curated booklists as well as different resources on their website. Please click on the link above to be inspired by different books for different age levels from 0-18 years old. Even though my mother always taught me that everyone has a story—my world was unknowingly so white (and so colonized) growing up in (rural) America. And therefore, ignorant of the depth of heritage and history and situatedness of black people in America (as well as Indigenous peoples). I seek forgiveness from my black brothers and sisters for not understanding or being aware of the deep systemic racism and the white supremacy that is prevalent everywhere—not just in the anarchists—in our education systems, in the stories chosen to be published and printed and taught.
I’m also sharing some books I’d like to read for myself (illustration by Jane Mount @jane_mount, photos by @jklinepeter / Instagram).
If you are still here with me—thank you.
There’s more. There’s always more.
More healing, more work, more places to seek forgiveness
and more places to live from hope.
But if there is one thing I am certain of—
it is that we define each other.
There is no me and no you
without each other.
Leaving you with words by Fredrick Douglass
that I found inspiring (and learned about for the first time).
Fredrick Douglass will be at the top of my list
of where I start to deepen my learning,
along with age-appropriate books for my son (and me).
Stories matter.
Story matters.
Black lives matter to me.
Love,
Jessica
