Power corrupts and that absolute power corrupts absolutely is perhaps not even enough of an expression to explain some of the most “beyond disgusting” behaviour that the world has witnessed of late. We turned the other cheek, and even applauded, when a head of state and his wife were forcefully snatched from their bedroom and bundled off for trial in another country.
Give way to the powerful. Yes. To the anointed. To the men and women who justify self-righteousness in the name of their supposedly superior faith and higher calling on earth. Rejoice, eat and drink to your fill, for indeed, God has blessed you but tragically denied you morality. To depict fellow human beings as apes, cannot align with a confession of Christ as the Redeemer of mankind.
Why send troops half a globe away to bomb “terrorists” in Nigeria, whereas in fact, there are no men and women there that Jesus died for but mere monkeys in their jungle! If the Obamas be monkeys, the insult and slander doesn’t just end there. It is an insult to all Africans. If the Obamas be monkeys, and they occupied the Oval Office for eight years, how about their immediate successor or successors?
Depicting the Obamas as apes reminded me of the Sunday, September 15, 1963 Birmingham Baptist Church bombing by white supremacists in the then deeply racist South. It also made me mourn anew my role model, mentor and friend, the late Eugene “Gene” Patterson, former Managing Editor of the Washington Post, Editor of the Atlanta Constitution and St. Petersburg Times and Chairman of the Poynter Institute Board of Trustees.
Together with the other media giants of the time like Joseph Pulitzer, Nelson Poynter and Katharine Graham, they represented the “Golden Era” of American journalism. I don’t know what they would have to say about racism in America today. Gene died on January 12, 2013 aged 89, a week before I arrived in the US intending to meet him. To mourn him, I reproduce here his most famous editorial, “A flower for the graves.”
“A Negro mother wept in the street Sunday morning in front of a Baptist Church in Birmingham. In her hand she held a shoe, one shoe, from the foot of her dead child. We hold that shoe with her. Every one of us in the white South holds that small shoe in his hand.
It is too late to blame the sick criminals who handled the dynamite. The FBI and the police can deal with that kind. The charge against them is simple. They killed four children.
Only we can trace the truth, Southerner — you and I. We broke those children’s bodies. We watched the stage set without staying it. We listened to the prologue unbestirred. We saw the curtain opening with disinterest. We have heard the play.
We — who go on electing politicians who heat the kettles of hate. We — who raise no hand to silence the mean and little men who have their nigger jokes. We — who stand aside in imagined rectitude and let the mad dogs that run in every society slide their leashes from our hand, and spring.
We — the heirs of a proud South, who protest its worth and demand it recognition — we are the ones who have ducked the difficult, skirted the uncomfortable, caviled at the challenge, resented the necessary, rationalized the unacceptable, and created the day surely when these children would die.
This is no time to load our anguish onto the murderous scapegoat who set the cap in dynamite of our own manufacture. He didn’t know any better.
Somewhere in the dim and fevered recess of an evil mind he feels right now that he has been a hero. He is only guilty of murder. He thinks he has pleased us.
We of the white South who know better are the ones who must take
