Radical Kindness

Good morning world! I woke up thinking about dualities, about how our country has gotten to the point where we don’t have open dialogues anymore with people of differing opinions… I was thinking of the loaded phrase “all lives matter…” I remember as recently as 2016 attending a Unitarian church service right after the election. The church had posted a Black Lives Matter sign on our building, and someone had sabotaged the sign with graffiti, crossing through it and writing ‘All Lives Matter.’ The pastor had expressed empathy/curiosity for the saboteurs, wondering what their lives were about; if they felt underserved somehow, if they were suffering somehow… I felt the love for humanity during that sermon, and comforted at the efforts to reach across the divide, to see what would motivate someone to purchase spray paint, presumably climb up on a ladder to get to the sign… Anyone who dares to utter that phrase now is immediately stigmatized as an unredeemable racist… and maybe they are. Maybe they were a KKK member with devious plans to undermine the lives of black people at every step… but maybe they are frustrated that they don’t feel their needs are being met… maybe they were beaten and abused as children, struggled to make grades just to find an undiagnosable mental illness would rob them of any efforts to get ahead… we won’t get to know anymore though, because in our current American culture, there seems to be no room for dialogue…