Breaking the Close
They have arrested a lawyer, supposedly one of the organizers of the protest that took place inside a church in Minneapolis, illustrating why some of us thought that protest was wrongheaded to begin with on more than one level.
I have a lot of heartburn, maybe that's just my formerly Catholic tapes, but going into a place of worship, whether that's a synagogue, a church, a mosque, ashram, is wrong. Not a bunch of folks would see that differently. Given the facts behind their reasoning for picking that particular church there would be nothing "wrong" with a protest outside that church. They "broke the close". Would Martin Luther King have condoned that?
It's wrong on a practical level too. Even if our times wasn't being held in the constant grip of emotional fracture by this horrible administration - even were this some other time, a time when these goons haven't somehow managed to convince a very large swath of our population that Christianity (but not Judaism or Islam) is under some sort of an attack - these are bad optics. This incident is now being exploited well beyond the events of that day. It appears that the legitimate pastor handled the whole situation pretty well by engaging with the protesters.
People on my side are trying to rationalize what happened by pointing out the other bad things that have been happening - Taking kids, five-year-olds, off the streets and sending them off somewhere, Going into schools, No knocks, battering people's homes, breaking into cars, the jackboot hooliganism. We are understandably angry and emotionally frazzled. But that is just Whataboutism. Don't act in a way that falls into the game plan of the people who are more concerned with propagating the myth that they are champions and we are the evildoers, not the victims. If this was meant somehow as propagande par le fait (Propaganda by the deed), it comes perilously close to having the adverse effect.
No comments:
Post a Comment