12 Years A Slave

This is a Kal story, but it’s also a me story, and a you story, to be honest.  And it might be hard for me to write – not emotionally, but just finding the words.  So bear with me if I get a little disjointed or take a side road before I get back on track. 

Kal wanted to watch “12 Years A Slave.”  This is surprising, because she has not shown any interest in America’s slave past or black issues in general.  And she doesn’t like fiction, which is just unthinkable to me, an English major steeped in fiction my whole life.  But “12 Years” is true, which made it more appealing to her – and more horrifying to me.  

I’ve watched plenty of movies about slavery in America, starting with “Roots” on TV in 1977.  And I have a history teacher for a father, so stories and books about the Civil War and the treatment of Jews in WWII filled our living room and our conversations.  I am drawn to the historical fiction movies, and I’ve seen most of the movies that covered both slavery and the Holocaust.

So the moral wrong and horror of man’s inhumanity to man in enslaving and abusing a race or ethnic group is clear to me.  There’s never been any doubt in my mind that it is immoral and that I would have opposed it in any era I lived in.  And I would say that is the truth for all of us reading this.  We know ante-bellum Christian society tried to use scripture at times to justify slavery, but we know we would not have fallen for that.  We would have stood on the side of right and pointed people to the clear teachings of Jesus on the value and dignity of each human being. 

So it was a terrible epiphany for me a couple of years ago to realize that, had I lived in America in the 1830’s, I might have been able to see the moral wrong of slavery, but I don’t know that I would have done much to dismantle it.  And it’s not because of moral cowardice, not because I feared I would be persecuted for my opposition.  It’s because slavery was so ingrained in the economic structure of the country that it would cause economic and social collapse to dismantle the system.  The chaos that would follow would have been clear to me, and I would not have seen a viable answer to that dilemma.  I realized that sometimes I am too practical to follow the clear moral principle.  I would have gotten too stymied by the massive problems that “doing the right thing” would have created.  

That is a moral failing on my part.  And it’s an impoverished view of God – because I was/am looking at it from a simply pragmatic point of view and completely underestimating what God can do.  In imagining that scenario, I am not seeing God doing any of the work, just the humans.  And it’s true that we can’t, and couldn’t, recover from that kind of massive social upheaval.  But if it’s the right thing to do, you do it anyway, and trust that God works out the practicalities.  

This made me question my own take on current social issues or injustices.  Where do I see something clearly unjust but I’m not taking any substantial action or speaking up to change it?