Last week, someone sprayed a chemical irritant through a Dayton, OH, mosque window into a room full of babies and children, during a Ramadan prayer service. This terrifying crime happened after a week when millions of copies of the anti-Muslim DVD documentary called “Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West” were distributed in swing states — including Ohio — via newspapers and U.S. mail.
This is really shitty. It’s also shitty that very few news outlets have reported on this story. The Dayton Daily News gave understated coverage, but otherwise, only blogs like Racialicious have covered it.
The crime has made me think about the “wicked world” in my column’s title. Right now, I’m reading Imagine, edited by Marianne Williamson and published in 2000. In its 39 short essays by everyone from bell hooks to Eric Utne, the book imagines the highest possibilities for the America of 2050.
One quote stopped me short. It’s from Thom Hartmann’s essay about community, where he dreams of what justice might look like in 2050:
“Each community administers its own justice. The concepts of sin and punishment, which grew out of the king-based religions of ancient Sumeria, with their idea that human nature is evil, have been rejected. People have returned to the concepts of harmony and disharmony, balance and imbalance, reflecting how humans had lived for millions of years before the Younger Culture Eruption from 6000 BCE to 2012 CE. The assumption is that people are essentially good and their misbehavior is an aberration, not the converse.”
That’s a radical thought.
What if, like Matthew Fox asserted, there is no such thing as “original sin,” but instead there was “original blessing”?
What if the people who acted on hateful, violent impulses — like gassing children at a mosque — were aberrations, and not the norm?
What if the “wicked world” of my column’s title didn’t really exist? What if we treated the world, our fellow human beings, as if we expected goodness from it and them, and treated the wickedness as truly unexpected?
That would be nice, you might say, but we do not live in that world right now.
In fact, as the Angry Black Woman so poignantly illustrated, we live in a country where it took almost 40 years for three of the four self-confessed bombers of the 16th Street Baptist church to be brought to justice. (The fourth bomber died before being convicted.)
I can blame no one for looking at the thousands of facts like this, and concluding that “wicked world” is completely accurate.
Still. What if?
What if there’s some way to look at the world around us, and affirm a sacred YES even in the face of wickedness? And by doing so, affirm our own ability and responsibility to step, every day, toward the beauty in the world?
This reminds me of the psychological diet Courtney mentioned a few weeks ago, when she reminded us that our health, psychological and physical, is dependent upon what we consume every day — and she didn’t mean just eating our veggies. Of course, she’s not implying that we shut our eyes to wickedness that needs redressing.
This is one more post in an endless open question for me: how do I hold that precious balance between speaking out against injustice and demanding that our government grant us equal rights and protection, while also being grateful for the millions of generous, kind, caring, abundant interactions that I have had — that each of us has had, if we remember to look for them — with our fellow human beings?
I continue to live in that question.
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And while I do, I offer a few glimpses at the very cool project called We Are the Ones. Rachel and Rob, the two people behind the project, are driving cross-country, taking celebrity-style photos of Obama supporters, highlighting the gorgeous hope in these “ordinary people.” Chris and I met and hosted them when they were in Austin a few weeks ago. We met randomly, through a friend, and I was delighted to experience another instance of the world being beautiful.
The project’s title comes from Obama’s 2008 Super Tuesday speech: “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.”
From their gallery (I recommend visiting it often, just as a reminder):
All photos copyright Rob Gullixson
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Beauty in a Wicked World is a weekly column by Jennifer Gandin Le. It appears on Wednesdays.