 |
| Malcolm X |
Certain social divisions – that between city and suburb, for instance – are semi-permanent, if not permanent. People in cities sometimes believe that this division is inauthentic, much too artful, and harmful. Are we not all brothers and sisters under the skin?
A 3 year old baby in Harford has died in a shooting
incident. Surely, city and suburb can huddle around the casket and shed tears
of sympathy and remorse.
But is sympathy enough? A poet wrote a poem in the 17th
century titled “Love is enough.” It was reviewed by Charles Lamb, perhaps the
most prominent social critic of his day, in a single spare line: “No, it
isn’t,” Lamb wrote.
The 3 year old baby shot in Hartford, Randell Tarez Jones,
is referred to by our
media as “the unintended victim of a drive-by shooting.”
That descriptor is partly correct. We know little of the shooter so far. He
stole a car in Windsor Locks, opened fire a few days later on a car in Hartford
containing a mother and her three children -- ages 3, 4 and 5 -- and a driver,
killing Tarez-Jones. The shooter then fled the scene for parts unknown. The
“intended victim,” according to information supplied by police investigators, scooted
from the passenger seat in a car driven by the mother of Randell Tarez Jones
and ran off.
In addition to this murder, a sixteen year old boy was shot
multiple times and died nearby. Police said the two murders were, they believe,
unconnected. Reporters know police do not always share with them all the
information at their disposal. Police and prosecutors, looking forward to
apprehensions and convictions, have their reasons.
However, no one will doubt that shootings in Connecticut’s
large cities, often gang related, are different than in wealthier surrounding
suburbs, because the sociological architecture in Hartford is radically
different than it is, say, in nearby West Hartford. The number of West Hartford
residents who find their way into prison for having unintentionally murdered a
3 year old child, the unintentional victim perhaps of intentional gang violence
or drug activity, is less numerous in suburbs across the state than in cities –
which is why those who are able to flee from cities to suburbs do so, shaking
the dust of the cities from their feet. They understand
full well the differences between city and suburb and, whenever possible, vote
with their feet to move away from Connecticut’s fish-in-a-barrel, shoot-em-up
cities to suburbs, where their families can live in relative peace and quiet,
attend functioning public schools, and weep distant tears of sympathy for their
former, less fortunate urban neighbors.
So then, there are indeed sundering differences between city
and country, despite assurances to the contrary from big city politicians, the
majority of whom are Democrats who for nearly a half century have shown
themselves chronically incapable of changing the fatal characteristics and
destinies of cities, which include, in part, fatherless households, poor public
schools, lack of job opportunities for those willing to work, the insularity of
poverty, a vast social infrastructure that systemically punishes those who wish
to declare independence of a spiritually crippling state welfare trap-gate and
rewards those who bend the knee to permanent dependence on politicians who
bleed from their eyes when gangsters prey, unintentionally of course, upon
3-year-olds in their bailiwicks.
After much wandering in the wilderness, the
post-hajj Malcolm X, who never in his life lost his
yearning for fellowship, got it right: “In fact, what I have seen
and experienced on this pilgrimage has forced me to 'rearrange' much of my own
thought‐pattern and to toss aside some of my previous conclusions,” he wrote
following his transformative religious experience. “Color ceases to be a
determining factor of a man's worth or value once he becomes a Muslim. I hope I
am making this part very clear, because it is now very clear to me. If
white Americans would accept the religion of Islam, if they
would accept the Oneness of God (Allah), then they could also sincerely
accept the Oneness of Man, and they would cease to measure others always in
terms of their 'differences in color'.”
It is the absence of this fellowship, a unique deposit from
the world’s three great religions – Jewish, Christian and Muslim – that lies at
the root of our frigid inhuman separation. Malcolm X found it in Mecca before
he was assassinated, possibly at the urging of Louis Farrakhan.
It is the same message, Malcolm X realized, delivered so
eloquently by Martin Luther King in his
justly celebrated “I Have A Dream” speech, the same Lincoln delivered in his
“Second Inaugural Address,” and the same delivered by Jesus as Christianity
broke upon the world: “I have told you these things, so that in me you may have
peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the
world.”
Malcolm X, we must suppose, died a happy man, little
regretting anything he said but one thing – that “differences in color” were an
impassible barrier to fellowship. This is devilish nonsense, and it has always
been devilish nonsense issuing from an evil presence who has always known how
to divide in order to conquer.
Comments