I'm going to let you in on a little secret:
Sometimes, I think God talks to me.
No. Really. Like when I heard a little voice tell me, "Put away some money. You're going to need it." I did. The next month? BAM! Hit with major car repairs.
Or when Black Man Not Blogging and I were coming back from a day trip and stopped in a McDonald's in a South Stockton neighborhood. He went in, I stayed in the car. A little voice told me, "You need to get out of here." I called him on his cell phone to tell him to get out of the McDonald's, that we needed to get ghost. He did, and we did. The neighborhood just felt unsafe. If I recall correctly, the next day there was news of shootings that occurred in South Stockton.
When the Charleston shooting occurred, I was at a loss for words. I couldn't believe that someone would gun down church members at a prayer meeting. A PRAYER MEETING! Could there be anything more demonic?
Then, in an act of what can only be called amazing grace, the victims' families started to forgive the shooter.
And that's when I heard the little voice: "If you wait long enough, good things will happen." I smiled.
In what appeared to be a whirlwind of good things happening, people began calling for the removal of the Confederate flag from the South Carolina state house and other government buildings. Ebay, Amazon, Sears, and Wal-Mart pulled Confederate flag merchandise from their shelves or stopped selling them online. Given Wal-Mart's southern roots, that's huge. The cynic in me says that it was the fact that black people were killed in a church by a racist who literally wrapped himself in the Confederate flag that moved people to reconsider the flag, but I'll take this reconsideration no matter how it comes, even if I think it would not have happened but for the murders taking place in a church. It forced white Southerners to choose between heritage and faith. They chose faith.
The Affordable Care Act was upheld, as well as disparate impact analysis for housing discrimination under the Fair Housing Act.
The President found his voice on race, using the n-word to explain that this country's racial atrocities hundreds of years ago are not yet forgotten, the wounds not yet healed. In the eulogy for Reverend Clementa Pinkney, President Obama found his voice on race once again, saying that although those who fought for the Confederacy may have been honorable, the cause for which they fought was not. He then raised his voice in a rousing rendition of "Amazing Grace." And the church said, "Amen."
To top it all off, the Supreme Court declared bans on gay marriage unconstitutional. To some, this may not be a good thing. I don't see how equality under the law can't be. The southern states, and the Ted Cruzes of the nation, will stand in opposition, just as George Wallace stood in the door of the University of Alabama declaring, "Segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever" in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education. Ted Cruz will be remembered in much the same way as Governor Wallace would have been had he not had a racial epiphany. The work of the LGBT community is not done, but there's just a little less of it to be done.
If you wait long enough, good things will happen. Sometimes you have to wait centuries, sometimes a generation, sometimes a decade. But if you wait long enough, good things will happen.
Amen.
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