There is a lot of turmoil on my university’s campus right now regarding the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner. Here are some of the things I’ve been reading and thinking about in connection with these events:
I tend not to address situations like this very much, either in writing or in conversation. This is primarily because I’m terrified of saying the wrong thing, and I honestly hate conflict. When the topic comes up (as it has fairly often recently) I listen, and I nod in the right places, but I don’t say anything. I think I've been wrong to do that. I write now under a sense of compulsion, a feeling that to be true to what I believe, I have to speak.
I've been transferring notes and underlinings from my old, tattered Bible to my newer one; I spent some time Sunday in Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Lamentations. As I was working my way through Jeremiah, I found something I’m not afraid to say (or something, perhaps, that gives me enough conviction to push through my fear). Jeremiah 6:14 talks about the sort of people who speak messages meant to gloss over issues: “They have treated my people’s brokenness superficially, claiming: Peace, peace, when there is no peace” (HCSB) The NIV translates the first part of the verse this way: “They dress the wound of my people as though it were not serious.” As usual I feel the necessity of pointing out that Jeremiah was written in a specific historical and cultural context that I can’t just use willy-nilly. But the principle of the thing is pretty clear.
Why did these words strike me so deeply? I’ve been thinking lately about oppression, and about the silencing of voices as a kind of violence. I don’t think I’d quite processed, though, what my silence can say: it proclaims peace where there is no peace. It treats deep wounds as though they’re superficial.
I’m not writing here about the decisions of grand juries. I’m not writing about politics. I’m writing about responses to people who are wounded. To look at someone who is wounded and say, “You are not wounded” is wrong, and it’s cruel, and it’s false. To presume to know the depth of someone’s wound without listening is deeply prideful.
Here is my attempt to do something other than be silent (or speak peace where there is no peace). To those on Clemson’s campus who are wounded: your wound is deep. I’m sorry for your pain. I’m sorry if my silence (or anyone else’s) has added to it. I don’t know how to help, but I’m willing to listen.
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