The National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery is perhaps the strongest public recognition of America’s holocaust: the conscious, deliberate dehumanization of human beings, particularly those of African ancestry.
In excess of 12 million were made slaves over more than 300 years to fuel our nation’s economic prosperity.
And while slavery in that very specific sense is technically a thing of the past, the vibration of that dehumanization infects the human family the way our planet’s contaminated environment does––nobody is untouched, maybe ever, many cruelly to the extreme.
It is fitting that this memorial––a searing, elegant reminder of this reality, and therefore a servant to humankind’s continual awakening to the power of choice––was established in Montgomery.
The character of possibly no other community in America is rooted in such an elaborate manifestation of our nation’s collective ignorance.
The honoring of life that has birthed the National Memorial for Peace and Justice reminds us that Montgomery, like everywhere else, is also sacred ground.
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Ever since my beloved took her life two years ago, occasionally out of the blue I find myself weeping from a depth I have never before experienced. The reasons I still can’t articulate well, so far beyond the pain of loss are they. “The enormity of existence” is my best label so far. Maybe it’s what some people feel in the presence of a saint. Or the birth of their child.
This emotional earthquake rumbled again within a minute of my entering the National Memorial for Peace and Justice. I was confronted by gallon jar after gallon jar, each labeled with a name and filled with the soil from one of the sites of the thousands of racial terror lynchings in 800 counties across 12 states between 1882 and 1968 in this nation I’m a part of.
The cause of my response was much more than the brutality of greed and the corrosive belief that certain other humans are not really human at all. I’m also captivated by what underlies that immaturity––a force pervasive, for many of us enormously so, and therefore self-destructive.
Ignorance.
The ignorance of life’s sacredness.
The day after Montgomery, we toured the Civil Rights Museum in Memphis. Three women traveling together, one a mother with a three year-old boy, entered the museum right after we did. The boy was having a meltdown. In the mother’s attempt to quiet her son, the mother hit him repeatedly with a ruler.
To me, the ignorance that prompted that action is in the same family of ignorance that led to the enslavement of millions and the lynching of thousands in America alone––and to every dehumanizing choice any of us has ever made.
The ignorance that says you are inferior, and I may treat you in whatever ways I feel are in keeping with that status.
These two memorials offer the opportunity to reflect on that which transcends the horrors of slavery and the battle for civil rights. Which is to say, the wound caused to the human family whenever any of us deny the sacredness of every life on earth.
Perhaps most especially our own.
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The significance of this road trip is beyond my appreciation, its richness to be revealed like the meaning of life itself as we grow in honoring the gift of experience.
As such, it is in keeping with the collective magnitude of change and surrender over the past several years of which Dear’s suicide, leaving Vermont, this move to Santa Fe, and all wondrous and heartbreaking forces contained within, are merely dramatic waves in the great ocean of becoming.
I am grateful to enjoy such a life, especially poignant in my 78th year.
I understand.
When I first saw Maya Lin’s monument to the cost in American lives during the Viet Nam War, I had the same reaction you are having. The “Us and Them” mentality, the notion that supremacy and separatism are answers to a collective “happily ever after” is proof positive we are telling ourselves the wrong story about who we all really are and what our purpose in life really is.
But here’s the saving grace–certainly evidence of the signs and wonders that are ever-present in the midst of our ignorance. When I walked the length of that black granite wall, I had in my mind the Navy pilot whose name was engraved on the nickel-plated POW bracelet I had wornuntil it decomposed and fell off my wrist.
Lieutenant Commander Donald Joseph Woloszyk, Alpena, Michigan. Born Monday, 01/19/1942. Pilot. Status changed from POW to MIA, Monday, 10/31/1977. Last location: North Vietnam. Age at Loss: 24. Body not recovered.
I walked half-way down the wall, reading what I could of those 58,000 names, then stopped to catch my breath and wipe my eyes. There was Donald’s name exactly opposite me engraved on the wall. My Donald’s name. Mr. and Mrs. Woloszyyk’s Donald. Maya Lin’s Donald. Now, your Donald.
I’ve never told this story before. it’s a good one to tell now, given your blog post, but also given the times we live in. If we don’t open ourselves to the signs and wonders that are always available to us, that point us in new directions, we cannot make sense of–and change–the ignorance that creates our pain.
All I am able to say to you today, Steve, is that I Love you dearly and deeply. You are more able to put into words some of the truths that for me are unspeakable. That is where Love lives!
“…waves in the ocean of becoming.” Soooo well said, Steve!💕