I am angry! That doesn’t happen often. Even less frequently do I express it publicly. But I am angry, and I found something to help me express what I’m feeling.
I’m angry about the senseless rioting going on in America. It started several days ago in 30 cities as an organized protest of the death of a black man at the hands of white police in one of America’s cities. I’ve been through this inanity before–Watts, Rodney King, Trayvon Martin and others. But, my anger is not about the "Black Lives Matter” movement or racism, although I deplore both it and mindless police brutality. What gets my goat is the senseless rioting, the destruction of property, the theft of property, the injury inflicted on others–all allegedly an expression of anger of the black community and their sympathizers over this injustice. Their anger and their frustration, I may not totally understand as a white man, but I try to understand and I try to sympathize.
What I really do not understand and TOTALLY abhor is the lawless violence they are inflicting on the entire nation, let alone individual communities that had nothing to do with the injustice they are resisting. From my safe perch here in a secluded mountain valley, it appears to me that much of what we are witnessing is using that injustice as an excuse for hate, riot, theft, and violence. The very lawlessness and injustice they claim to protest is met with fomented lawlessness and injustice nationwide. It is not meeting like with like, in kind or in scale.
If it is justified as like meeting like, the result is not the reformation of society, the elevation of society, the reclamation of society, or ennobling or bettering society in any manner. It is, in fact, pure descent to the lowest common denominator of barbarism. It is declension not progress. It brings to mind the amazing and evocative statement of Terryl Givens as he describes what he calls the “ancient mafia” of The Book of Mormon–the Gadianton Robbers. Here is Givens:
The ancient mafia erupts on the scene ... a few decades before Christ. The many layered story Mormon relates is striking not for its depiction of physical violence and destruction, seen so often in Book of Mormon warfare. This is rather a portrait of the psychological dimensions of evil, and takes us from hypocrisy and self-justification through willful blindness and stupidity to what may be the most chilling stage of all-blithe indifference to ones own complicity in the moral decay of a society.(1)
I believe what we are witnessing these horrible days is an expression of the psychological dimension of evil, laced with, nay, surfeited with hypocrisy, self-justification, willful blindness, and stupidity. Most importantly those who engage in these activities are complicit–deeply complicit and deeply indifferent–to the moral decay with which they both wittingly and unwittingly infect the society they pretend to reform.
The last time unbridled barbarism got control of things the world was temporarily paralyzed by the challenge, which eventually ended in a catastrophic global conflict.
The last time unbridled barbarism got control of things the world was temporarily paralyzed by the challenge, which eventually ended in a catastrophic global conflict.
Let’s think together again, soon.
Notes:
1. Terryl L. Givens, The Book of Mormon: A Very Short Introduction, New York: Oxford University, 2009, 58, emphasis added.
