Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church https://tammypierce.livejournal.com/100829.html
edited to add: If anyone has word of vigils or community gatherings, feel free to post them here.
As I type this, they've caught the young man who shot and killed nine people who had gathered in this church for a prayer meeting. He sat there with them for an hour, and heard them speak, and then he got up and began to shoot.
The gun rights dance has already begun, as has the gun control outcry. Fox is already casting this as a war against Christianity, not yet another chapter in the long and ugly history of race in this country. They even have a pastor who urges his fellow pastors and their male parishioners to arm themselves to protect women and children against future assassins.
Things to come: the mental health of the suspect, a 21-year-old white man. The arraignment, the trial. The late-night-tv standup routines making light of something as unspeakable as the death of four Black girls in the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, AL in 1963.
Our country has grown monstrous in my lifetime. The military-industrial complex the students on college campuses protested has become our biggest import-export, with the gun being its shining badge and camouflage its hipster wear. Our filmmakers spend billions pouring more and more action, more explosions, more violence, more death onto the movie and tv screens every year.
We have become the Great Satan, so busy making money off of killing throughout the world or supplying those who want to do their own killing that we can ignore the slaughters worked upon us internally. No group matters enough to make the killing machine take responsibility for its weapons: not women killed in a gym, not children in a school, not parishioners in a church.
Am I cynical? Am I jumping the gun, thinking the outrage spawned by this latest mass murder will die down to a collection of grumbles, apart from the meetings of the true believers? Maybe I am. I was a liberal for a long, long time, a liberal and early on, a protester. I have seen so many ventures for change, big and little, sink to the ground because beyond a certain point, our infrastructure only cares about money, not blood. Not life. Not people. Not change. From where I stand, they ought to have the Koch brothers on the twenty-dollar bill. They're the symbol of the level at which things really matter.
Oh, and Fox? This was a RACE murder. Don't call it anything else. How many churches do you think that kid passed, in Charleston SC, to get to Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church? How many Christian churches did he pass, and pass up, to get to a historic Black church?
I add this excerpt from an article by Jelani Cobb,
Church Shooting in Charleston, in The New Yorker Online, because I think it explains which this shooting at this church is so vile, and Fox's attempt to hijack it out-and-out obscene:
"The African Methodist Episcopal Church, founded in 1793, is the oldest denomination established by black people in the United States. It owes its origins to white discrimination against black Christians in the eighteenth century, and an incident in which black churchgoers were interrupted while worshipping and directed to the segregated section of an Episcopal church in Philadelphia. For black Christians, the word sanctuary had a second set of implications. The spiritual aims of worship were paired with the distinctly secular necessity of a place in which not just common faith but common humanity could be taken for granted."
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