My Opinion!

“Why I have a strong opinion about some matters!”
by Charlie Leck

“I read you for stimulation and insight, Charles… I do enjoy your point of view and everyone’s opinion comes from life experiences only they have had… I would love for you to flesh out some of your own reasons for why you have a strong opinion about some matters…”     [comment posted by a woman on one of my recent blogs]

I have thought a lot about this question – an awful lot. I’ve not been feeling too good the last few days and I’ve laid back and thought about what this very kind and good lady has asked me.

Before plunging into the deeper and murky water, let me play around for a moment in the shallow edge of the pond.

Why do I have a strong opinion about some matters?
That question raises other questions for me. I’m guessing that most people who hold opinions hold strong ones, especially if those opinions have been formulated after a considerable amount of thought and study. I am not unusual, am I, in holding strong opinions? Or are you saying that I hold rigid opinions? That would worry me if it were true. Though my opinions are strong, in most cases they are not inflexible. However, I can’t imagine flip-flopping 180 degrees on many of my opinions.

There are some matters that I classify as human truths
and I cannot budge on those! A little church upon on the hill, in the town where I grew up as a child, had an enormous impact on my thinking in this regard…..

I grew up paying attention to matters of faith, trying to figure it all out. My parents weren’t particularly religious. We were not a spiritual or prayerful family at all. Yet, it was important to them that I, scrubbed and polished, trudge on up to Sunday School on the big day each weekend.

I didn’t pay careful attention, but things occasionally interested me and I’d find myself wondering about something here or there.

Who is this Jesus character anyway? I wasn’t much interested in his divinity. “Who do you say that I am,” he asked Peter. It was as if he had asked me. Who was he? (Or, is it more appropriate to ask: Who is he?)

I didn’t much care that he rose up – or that he sits at the right hand of God – or that, in a triune sort of way, he is God or a part of God.

I like what he did when he roamed around. I liked a lot of the very plain things that he said about justice and righteousness. I paid careful attention to the simple, unadorned things that he said.

“If you want to be perfect,” he said, “go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then, come and follow me.”

Whew! What does that mean? I wondered a great deal about it. Could anyone really do that?

You know, the guy was obsessed with the poor. He came “to preach good news to the poor.” He also worried about prisoners and the lame and blind. He talked about “the oppressed.”

All that stuff affected me. I never stopped thinking about it.

So, our responsibility toward and on behalf of our fellow-man ranks very high with me and here my opinion is rigid. Jesus, in the scriptures, called it “love” for our neighbor or brother. The apostles (especially John and Peter), writing later, would actually equate it with our love for God – that is, the only way we could love God was to love our fellow man.

In such matters, I am not looking for a return – for reward or recompense. It is just, according to our faith, something that is supposed to be natural and certain and spontaneous. If we wish to love and honor God, we must love and honor our fellow man.

We cannot leave brothers and sisters unsheltered, hungry, ill and addicted. Turning from them in their need is, according to Christian teaching, turning away from God.

My attitude is the same about the earth that God put into our hands for care-taking. That is what our faith says. Ignoring this spectacular and totally unusual planet is to ignore the Creator. Not caring for the planet with utmost caution and tender love, is not caring for God.

These are two matters that I am rigid about: (1) Our calling to love and serve our fellow man; and (2) our calling to protect, serve and love the earth upon which we live.

Now then, there are matters upon which I hold firm opinions that are, I suppose, debatable.
I am thinking of some examples… and it is not easy, because my opinions about these matters have been solidly informed by experience and study.

What, for instance is JUSTICE?
Well, my goodness, I’ve asked myself a terribly difficult and complex question. With certainty, there is no certainty about such a complex question. Here one must proceed with caution and careful examination.

Let me use two of the most incredible of the possible examples: (1) Slavery in America and (2) the Right to Marry the person one loves.

On the first of these, 99 percent of you are going to say there is no question – no reason for debate – no possible reason to consider whether slavery can possibly be just. Indeed?

Well, put yourself back 155 years ago in our history – to 1857 – and then ask the question. At that time there were dozens of books written by American scholars of the south and by southern churchmen that posed arguments that justified slavery. Indeed!

There were plenty of southern thinkers who believed the world was ordered the way it was for a reason; that is, that there were the weak and there were the strong. They believed that this order was created by God and that human beings ought not tinker with that order. It was a natural, organic conception of stability in the world. Southern thinkers were writing that freedom is not an absolute concept and that no one is born equal. Freedom, they said, must be balanced with order and with tradition.

Churchmen argued that slavery was a biblical institution and was divinely sanctioned. How often they quoted the New Testament writings of Paul: “Slaves, be obedient to your masters!”

Instead of arguing for natural rights, southern philosophers were proclaiming that there was a “natural inequality.”

William Harper (Memoir of Slavery) wrote that “man is born to subjection” and that “man struggles with evil choices and must choose between them.”

Henry Hughes argued that slaves were “charges put in the world for slaveholders to care for and develop them.” Hughes strongly supported the idea of a master race.

The Yale University Scholar, David Blight, has pointed out that nearly every slave owner’s library included an anthology of pro-slavery writings of 400 to 900 pages.

Now it may seem I am making a lurch away from the subject, but I am not…
I had a remarkable lunch on Friday with one of our little town’s most distinguished residents, who also happens to be one of our state’s most remarkable citizens. He wanted to make an important point to me in reply to one of my questions.

“You know,” he told me, “if you go back to the years before 1860, you will find that about 25 percent of the nation’s population was firmly, rigidly and unbendingly against slavery.” Then he pointed out to me that approximately the same percentage of people were solidly and unyieldingly in favor of slavery and the importance it had to the American economic engine. And in the great middle, were 50 percent of Americans who, for some reason or another, had no real opinion on the matter at all.

This brilliant fellow looked across the table to me for reaction. He was dumbfounded. From today’s perspective can you imagine that there were so many people who had no opinion about anything that we now regard as so unjust? Can you imagine?

He went on to talk, at considerable length, about a book he had just read with his book club: Uncle Tom’s Cabin, by Harriet Beecher Stowe.

It was Stowe, as far as President Lincoln was concerned, who called our nation to examine itself – to examine its thinking and its fairness and its right to own human beings.

“It was Stowe,” my neighbor said, “who set the other 50 percent thinking and pushed them over the edge. The book was terribly popular. It sold like wild-fire!”

I’d read the Stowe book (and recently another wonderful book about it, Mightier Than The Sword by David Reynolds). My neighbor wasn’t aware of that and he went on to recount the story that Stowe’s novel told and how real and gruesome it was. It was wonderful to sit and listen to him.

“Can you imagine? That it was a book that did that?” he said.

I must tell you, this friend is one of the leading members of the Republican Party and always has been throughout his adult life. He knows that I am a committed member of the Democratic Party. We talked about some issues over which we differ, like the voter identification constitutional amendment on this year’s November ballot.

“In the end, I’m not going to vote for it,” he said, relieving me, “but I’m not so sure it would be a bad thing.”

About the marriage amendment, which would change our constitution enough to define marriage as that between only a man and a woman, we also talked at great length. Like I, he opposes that one with all his heart. He likened the issue to the feelings of the nation about slavery back in the 17^th century.

“About 25 percent oppose it and 25 percent favor it. The other 50 percent pretty much don’t care and aren’t mobilized by the issue.”

“We need someone like Stowe to move the 50 percent – to define the injustice of the amendment – to side with people who have no choice about being gay or lesbian; for they just are!”

Now I understood why he had told me the story. He travels around the state speaking about the issue. He always introduces the subject with the story about Stowe’s book.

“I have a son who is gay,” he said to me.

This man – this conservative Republican – has given thousands of dollars to the local organization that is fighting the marriage amendment (Minnesotans United for All Families).

You see, sometimes these issues go beyond being an issue and they become personal matters; and because they are personal we see the questions of justice and fairness differently.

These are fellow human beings we are talking about – our brothers and sisters in life upon this earth – and the great scriptures urge us to love them and care for them and to be fair to them in all ways.

I can not but have strong opinions about an issue like the marriage amendment. To me, there is no question about what is just and right.

The commenter on my blog (titled Fred), posited that “everyone’s opinion comes from some life experience only they have had.” There’s probably some truth in that. If so, let me say that I can think of two life experiences that have formed my opinions.

(1)   One is that little church upon the hill, about which I wrote at the beginning of this blog and from which I learned that every man is our brother and every woman is our sister and we are called to love them without reservation (and that means being fair to them, just to them and helpful to them). 

(2)  Second, was that trip to Mississippi in 1964, about which I have written so often in these blogs. That journey was my Harriet Beecher Stowe book. I saw injustice and mistreatment as I never dreamed it possible. The KKK was not just something someone wrote about – not anymore. The journey rattled me to my core and changed me forever. I would not stand on the sidelines again about matters of justice and fairness to my fellow human beings – never!

I have “fleshed out” for you, as best I can, what experiences cause me to hold such strong feelings. I thank you for the good and thoughtful comment and for motivating me to write these words.

Afterword
Perhaps there were other impactful, influencing experiences, but those mentioned above are the two most forceful ones. Meeting and spending time with Saul Alinsky dramatically changed me; as did sitting in the living room of Jesse Jackson’s home (in 1967) and chatting with him about justice and injustice; as did reading Noam Chomsky carefully (that reading proved to me that Chomsky was no communist but called for capitalism of a different, more just order); as did coming-out publically in 1968 against the War in Vietnam with the ability I’d gathered to talk about the war’s history and turning points; as did the extraordinary and mind-bending sermons of the Reverend John Fry in the late sixties (sermons I cannot retrieve as hard as I try). Oh, as I think about it, there were dozens of experiences and people that impacted me greatly and formed my thinking – the poet Arthur Mampel nourished me with extraordinary wisdom; meeting Arne Carlson before he became widely known made me more open to political possibilities; listening to the Welch pastor, Vivian Jones, calmed me and made me more rational about seeking justice; a professor named Tom Campbell (who died too, too young) taught me how to read a book properly and with goals; Professor James Nelson and his triangle of love for God and man helped me understand how to love God in reality; a single evening in the presence of Brenda Ulend made me want to write and write; and having four incredible grandchildren made me regret so much that life can’t go on and on and on.

_________________________

Why not become a follower?
If you read my blog regularly, why not become a follower? All you have to do is click in the upper right hand corner and establish a simple means of communication. Then you'll be informed every time a new blog is posted here. If all that's confusing, here's Google's explanation of how to do it! If you don’t want to post comments on the blog, but would like to communicate with me about it, send me an email if you’d like.

Slavery in America – Soul by Soul

By the 1820s, and certainly by the early 30s, the American South had become a full-blown slave society. The domestic and legal trading of slaves became one of the economic engines of southern industry. It’s quite a story.
by Charlie Leck

Foreign slave trade in the United States of America was ended by law in 1808. Domestic slave trade continued to boom. Domestic slave trading continued and the slaves owned in the northern part of the south were encouraged in many way to continue to breed and repopulate the slave culture. The land in the great slave centers in Virginia, Kentucky and the Carolinas, where tobacco had been the king of agricultural endeavor, was beginning to play-out; however, cotton was becoming the new product of choice, with a world-wide demand, in the new and expanding south – into Georgia, Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana and Mississippi. Slaves were needed for the quickly developing cotton product and they were shipped there in great numbers.

There were more than 100 slave traders in Charleston (SC) in the 1820s, 30s and 40s. Charleston and Richmond (VA) were the centers of trade in the South, gathering slaves to be shipped further south and southwest. These traders were constantly advertising in southern newspapers: “Negroes wanted!” Many of the ads appended specifics, like: “With good front teeth and sound bodies!”

Hector Davis was one of those big-time slave dealers. In his biggest week, in 1859, his books show he made a $120,000 profit. (What is that in today's dollars?)

From the 1820s, into the early 1860s, a slave child had a 30 percent chance of being sold away from his parents before his 10^th birthday.

I’m currently reading a remarkable book by Walter Johnson: Soul by Soul (Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market), published in 1998 by Harvard University Press. It’s an extraordinary book that few will read. I’m pleased that I was somehow led to it.

The story centers itself around a slave market in New Orleans, which, Johnson says, “was throughout the antebellum period unsurpassed in one respect. Not far from the levee was North America’s largest slave market.”

The remarkable, historical story that Johnson tells is an account of separation – the separation of slave families. Husband and wives were separated by slave trades. Fathers were taken from children. Children were taken from mothers and siblings.

“…a world in which hundreds of thousands of slave sales, many of them breaking marriages, most of them dividing families, all of them destroying communities, underwrote the history of the antebellum South.

“The history of the slave trade is as much the story of those left behind as it is the story of those carried away. It is the story of separated lovers and broken families, of widows, widowers, and orphans left in the wake of the trade, only, perhaps, to be sold themselves at some later date.”

The one sense of meaning that the slave in the original south had was one of family and community. It might have been a slave community, but in it there was something of stability and identity. There were lovers, husbands and wives, children, uncles, aunts and community friends and playmates. When the huge slave markets were opened in the 1820s to meet the demand for slaves in the deeper South, most of those families and communities were broken asunder. Slaves became commodities. They were graded, rated and sold; and then they were moved off in chains – coffles – to be sold in places far away from their families and communities.

So many haunting songs came out of the slave communities of the American South. They speak more than of history. Often they speak of the agony of the soul.

No more children stole from me
No more, no more
No more children stole from me
Many thousand gone

No more slavery chains for me
No more, no more
No more slavery chains for me
Many thousand gone

I recommend Soul by Soul, by Walter Johnson, to you -- especially if you enjoy reading Civil War or Antebellum History.