I am in my office in downtown St. Louis. At noon. On a Saturday. It’s the one time of the week when there are no scheduled meetings, no coworkers seeking appointments, no telephone calls. The telephone rings.
Beyond my wildest expectations (it had never happened before) my Mother is calling from Texas.
“Melvin, I have bad news,” she said with a firmness of voice held steady by sheer force of will. “Your sister Miriam has been shot in the head. I’m afraid the whole back of her head is gone. There was a bank robbery at the Walburg State Bank. She lay face down on the floor just as the robber ordered. But as he left he still fired the gun at her. And, oh yes, your Uncle Reinhold has also been shot. We’re quite sure he’ll survive. But we are not so sure about Miriam. I know you’ll join us in prayer.”
My thoughts turn to Mimi, one of my six sisters. Intelligent, vivacious, Director of Nurses at a hospital - shot - critically - dying. Of course I pray, fervently.
What about the robber? I assume it’s a male. I assume he thought this small bank in a small Texas town was an easy Saturday morning target. I assume he was frightened or on drugs. He had the money. Why did he have to shoot to kill?
Soon further details emerge via phone and radio: The robber had fired again. This time he instantly killed the state trooper who had stopped his fleeing vehicle.
Further developments: miraculously Miriam survives. The robber is apprehended. Giving thanks for the miracle my mind turns to the murderer. He has already admitted guilt. What should be his fate? Texas, of course, has the death penalty. The murderer killed a peace officer, for crying out loud! My sister is alive, but she’ll always have a black hole in that part of the brain where the bullet blasted away her optic nerve.
Yet, even as I mourn for the trooper, his widow and young daughter left behind, even as I struggle with my anger at the brute who attempted to murder my sister, I cannot force myself to wish for him the death penalty.
In this apparent bleeding heart liberal response, I am out of step with the very Texas culture in which I was raised and in which so many of my values were shaped. Texas is where the death penalty is more common than in any other state. Texas, in fact, accounts for one third of all public executions in the USA. Texas is where six convicted killers were recently executed in the span of only 2 weeks. Texas is where I was taught in church catechism class, ”All they that take the sword shall perish by the sword.”
But my heart won’t buy it. I can’t get myself to believe that killing to punish killing, or killing to prevent killing, or killing to teach people not to kill is not rational nor has it ever proved to be a detriment to further killing.
So in my sometimes lonely meditations I thank God for saving Mimi from the would-be killer. I pray that I will not be a party to another killing even in the name of justice or for the purpose of teaching someone a lesson.
Monday, June 22, 2009
Racism
I grew up racist. I still haven’t overcome it.
In my childhood years in rural Central Texas racism was as pervasive and unquestioned as the air I breathed. There were certain a priori, never questioned assumptions. Blacks and whites don’t attend the same church or school. They drink from separate water fountains, eat in different restaurants, ride in different sections of public transportation. Blacks are less intelligent. They suffer from the curse of Ham. Their cute children are called pickannies. They are tenants, never real estate owners.
I have no memory of my assumptions ever being challenged. In eight years of parochial schooling and daily religious instruction, I don’t recall ever being presented with an alternative perspective. Of course, we all shared our fallen humanity. Christ is the Savior of the world. We are to love everyone, but love for blacks was a love expressed within a segregated contest with more than a hint of condescension.
In the all male, all white dormitory prep school which I attended for my high school years, most of my prejudices and presumptions about race were reinforced, with a few assaults upon my blindness.
It was during World War II. A black army officer came to worship in the church we attended. He was quickly escorted out of the church by the thoroughly prepared white ushers.
Some twinge of conscience within me was stirred. This was not right.
One day in class the teacher made a reference to a black lawyer. I was silently incredulous. How could a black person be a lawyer? The teacher must have noticed a similar look on the face of a classmate. He berated my classmate for his unwarranted racist assumptions. I had avoided the face to face chastisement of my teacher, but my consciousness was raised.
World War II was raging. I was exempt from the military draft with a 4D classification because I was studying to become a minister of the church. However, I had a certain amount of uneasiness about this arrangement, especially as I noticed that the young black men of my community all seemed to be classified 1A, were drafted (albeit into a segregated military), sent overseas and too often returned home in body bags. My conscience was awakened.
During succeeding years I slowly, entirely too slowly, saw the error and sinfulness of my attitude and actions. Usually my teachers were black persons. I read their writings: The Autobiography of Malcom X, The Algiers Motel Incident, Black Like Me, Black Rage, etc. etc. I attended lectures and conferences. Slowly I was led out of my ignorance by people like the Rev. William Griffin and Dr. Pete Pero. I was driven to deep reflection after I listened to black activist Fred Hampton speak of how the police would find a reason to kill him. Within weeks, he was shot dead by the white police while on his bed in his Chicago apartment.
Theologians like Paul Schultze, James Cone, and civil rights leaders like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. inched me along. Personal contacts with blacks around dinner tables, shared bedrooms, long walks, harsh confrontations, animated conversations with persons like Orlando Gober all helped move me down the stony path my soul desperately needed to tread.
My own children helped. They quickly sensed any racism I evidenced and called me on it. My oh so slowly developing spirituality forced me to face my error
Now in the later years of my life I am grateful for the progress made. Yet I must confess I still have a need for purging pieces of my consciousness. When I hear of certain criminal behaviors my first instinct is still to image a black person. When I hear of a significant literary or research publication my initial, seemingly unconscious belief is that a white person (white male, actually) must be the author.
So my struggle goes on and I say with the Apostle, ”Not as though I were already perfect, but I follow after...” (Phil. 3:12)
In my childhood years in rural Central Texas racism was as pervasive and unquestioned as the air I breathed. There were certain a priori, never questioned assumptions. Blacks and whites don’t attend the same church or school. They drink from separate water fountains, eat in different restaurants, ride in different sections of public transportation. Blacks are less intelligent. They suffer from the curse of Ham. Their cute children are called pickannies. They are tenants, never real estate owners.
I have no memory of my assumptions ever being challenged. In eight years of parochial schooling and daily religious instruction, I don’t recall ever being presented with an alternative perspective. Of course, we all shared our fallen humanity. Christ is the Savior of the world. We are to love everyone, but love for blacks was a love expressed within a segregated contest with more than a hint of condescension.
In the all male, all white dormitory prep school which I attended for my high school years, most of my prejudices and presumptions about race were reinforced, with a few assaults upon my blindness.
It was during World War II. A black army officer came to worship in the church we attended. He was quickly escorted out of the church by the thoroughly prepared white ushers.
Some twinge of conscience within me was stirred. This was not right.
One day in class the teacher made a reference to a black lawyer. I was silently incredulous. How could a black person be a lawyer? The teacher must have noticed a similar look on the face of a classmate. He berated my classmate for his unwarranted racist assumptions. I had avoided the face to face chastisement of my teacher, but my consciousness was raised.
World War II was raging. I was exempt from the military draft with a 4D classification because I was studying to become a minister of the church. However, I had a certain amount of uneasiness about this arrangement, especially as I noticed that the young black men of my community all seemed to be classified 1A, were drafted (albeit into a segregated military), sent overseas and too often returned home in body bags. My conscience was awakened.
During succeeding years I slowly, entirely too slowly, saw the error and sinfulness of my attitude and actions. Usually my teachers were black persons. I read their writings: The Autobiography of Malcom X, The Algiers Motel Incident, Black Like Me, Black Rage, etc. etc. I attended lectures and conferences. Slowly I was led out of my ignorance by people like the Rev. William Griffin and Dr. Pete Pero. I was driven to deep reflection after I listened to black activist Fred Hampton speak of how the police would find a reason to kill him. Within weeks, he was shot dead by the white police while on his bed in his Chicago apartment.
Theologians like Paul Schultze, James Cone, and civil rights leaders like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. inched me along. Personal contacts with blacks around dinner tables, shared bedrooms, long walks, harsh confrontations, animated conversations with persons like Orlando Gober all helped move me down the stony path my soul desperately needed to tread.
My own children helped. They quickly sensed any racism I evidenced and called me on it. My oh so slowly developing spirituality forced me to face my error
Now in the later years of my life I am grateful for the progress made. Yet I must confess I still have a need for purging pieces of my consciousness. When I hear of certain criminal behaviors my first instinct is still to image a black person. When I hear of a significant literary or research publication my initial, seemingly unconscious belief is that a white person (white male, actually) must be the author.
So my struggle goes on and I say with the Apostle, ”Not as though I were already perfect, but I follow after...” (Phil. 3:12)
Hunger
This morning, once again, I saw a picture of a hungry child. I have decided that never in my life have I really experienced hunger. Of course, I have been hungry and have eaten as though I were famished and would never eat again; yet I was just hungry, not in a condition of hunger.
I grew up during the great depression. Dad was a teaching minister in a Lutheran church and we didn’t always get his meager monthly salary. Money may have been scarce, but food was not. Even in the bleakest months my mom would have me crawl under the house to retrieve some of our homegrown potatoes that we stored there. She would open a quart or two of canned red beets. That red juice/water made a great covering for the potatoes. We had butchered hogs and saved the bones from which almost all the meat had been cut to make sausages. The leftover bones we called “knochen fleish”. Mother boiled these. We added bit of mustard, combined that with the boiled potatoes and beets and a glass of fresh milk. Soon we certainly did not have to deal with hunger!
When I would come home from school I felt hungry. If all that was available was a slice of bread with a bit of jelly on it I soon learned that if I complained to Mother her stock reply would come echoing back, “Wenn du hungrig bhist, dennn scheckt auch jelly brut gut”. If you are hungry then jelly bread tastes good, too!
Another hunger lesson taught me by my father was a Biblical quote: ”If any would not work, neither should he eat.” The message was clear If you expect to eat, do your chores. Yet dad was always equally quick to say, “Now remember, too, that some people want to work but are unable to do so. They are in danger of hunger. Those we must help feed.”
My first encounter with persons who were suffering from hunger came in Hong Kong in the mid 1950s. To this day there is an encounter burned into my consciousness. We had been there less than a month. I had taught a late night class and was walking back to our tenement flat along the northern end of Nathan Road. I walked by a middle-aged man. In his arms he held, pieta-like, his starving young son who may have been ten. His stomach was not extended but absolutely flat. There was no flesh or fat on any of his skeleton. His eyes were those staring orbs always seen in the face of those starving. The father looked at me with pleading eyes, not saying a word. I did not know a word of Chinese. I paused just long enough to pull out of my pocket and place into the hands of the father a one Hong Kong dollar bill. The father’s eyes looked back at me with a full-bodied look of gratitude as he thanked me. I went on my way home and yet I remember the whole incident as though it were last night. A father on the street holding his son dying of hunger, completely dependent upon some stranger walking by and dropping in one dollar (17 cents in US money!).
Since then I have seen a few of the approximately 1 billion hungry people in the world and am still haunted by some of those extended stomachs, vacant eyes, pleading parents in India and Africa. Some of the 4% of American citizens who are hungry confront me even in affluent San Diego County
It is easy for me to become so overwhelmed by the enormity and complexity of this challenge that I am tempted to try to just push the whole issue out of my mind. But that doesn’t always work. So in my very small way I try to help the hungry at the San Diego TACO homeless feeding program, at Bread for the World which deals with hunger in the USA and Lutheran World Relief which takes a global perspective. Mine is just a drop into an empty food plate but I do put in the drop.
Much more to say, but I need to run. It’s time for lunch. Food
I grew up during the great depression. Dad was a teaching minister in a Lutheran church and we didn’t always get his meager monthly salary. Money may have been scarce, but food was not. Even in the bleakest months my mom would have me crawl under the house to retrieve some of our homegrown potatoes that we stored there. She would open a quart or two of canned red beets. That red juice/water made a great covering for the potatoes. We had butchered hogs and saved the bones from which almost all the meat had been cut to make sausages. The leftover bones we called “knochen fleish”. Mother boiled these. We added bit of mustard, combined that with the boiled potatoes and beets and a glass of fresh milk. Soon we certainly did not have to deal with hunger!
When I would come home from school I felt hungry. If all that was available was a slice of bread with a bit of jelly on it I soon learned that if I complained to Mother her stock reply would come echoing back, “Wenn du hungrig bhist, dennn scheckt auch jelly brut gut”. If you are hungry then jelly bread tastes good, too!
Another hunger lesson taught me by my father was a Biblical quote: ”If any would not work, neither should he eat.” The message was clear If you expect to eat, do your chores. Yet dad was always equally quick to say, “Now remember, too, that some people want to work but are unable to do so. They are in danger of hunger. Those we must help feed.”
My first encounter with persons who were suffering from hunger came in Hong Kong in the mid 1950s. To this day there is an encounter burned into my consciousness. We had been there less than a month. I had taught a late night class and was walking back to our tenement flat along the northern end of Nathan Road. I walked by a middle-aged man. In his arms he held, pieta-like, his starving young son who may have been ten. His stomach was not extended but absolutely flat. There was no flesh or fat on any of his skeleton. His eyes were those staring orbs always seen in the face of those starving. The father looked at me with pleading eyes, not saying a word. I did not know a word of Chinese. I paused just long enough to pull out of my pocket and place into the hands of the father a one Hong Kong dollar bill. The father’s eyes looked back at me with a full-bodied look of gratitude as he thanked me. I went on my way home and yet I remember the whole incident as though it were last night. A father on the street holding his son dying of hunger, completely dependent upon some stranger walking by and dropping in one dollar (17 cents in US money!).
Since then I have seen a few of the approximately 1 billion hungry people in the world and am still haunted by some of those extended stomachs, vacant eyes, pleading parents in India and Africa. Some of the 4% of American citizens who are hungry confront me even in affluent San Diego County
It is easy for me to become so overwhelmed by the enormity and complexity of this challenge that I am tempted to try to just push the whole issue out of my mind. But that doesn’t always work. So in my very small way I try to help the hungry at the San Diego TACO homeless feeding program, at Bread for the World which deals with hunger in the USA and Lutheran World Relief which takes a global perspective. Mine is just a drop into an empty food plate but I do put in the drop.
Much more to say, but I need to run. It’s time for lunch. Food
Monday, June 8, 2009
Telephones
My telephone number is 760 702 6531. It may seem strange to some for me to just put it out there like that. But there is a story, of course
I have only recently learned that currently my phone number is not listed in any kind of public directory. When we moved to this retirement community last year the number we got is the number assigned to this room (and not to the name of the room occupant). The only public listing is the name of this community. This has resulted in some problems. Out of town relatives who were in the area and wanted to call and stop by could not find us listed anywhere. Several international callers have been unable to find my number anywhere and in the process a very important contact was never made. A blog reader who wanted to call knew there were Kieschnicks serving as ministers in the Lutheran Church, found an official directory and reached my sister- in- law who provided my number
When I was growing up in rural Texas there was no telephone listing for my family, simply because we did not have phone service. Then came the old party line. When there was one long and two short rings we knew it was for us.
In the 1950’s in Hong Kong we were told that only through the payment of significant under the table bribes could one secure a telephone without a year or more wait. However, we just applied for ourselves and for our school and within a week the phones were installed. During my years with The Lutheran Schools Association of Metropolitan New York we did not yet have emails, but plenty of phone calls. I still remember when I had been out of my office for two days and returned to my very full answering machine with 51 calls waiting to be returned. (Now my email aficionados say, “I had 100 emails yesterday.” The response: “Lucky you, I had 150 by 10:30 am!")
Last week I met my next-door neighbor returning to his unit muttering. I asked, “What’s up?” “Oh, I forgot my (expletive deleted) cell phone! “Would you believe that I am going just a few blocks to the dog park with my dog. I have my GPS to get me there but I don’t dare go without my cell phone!” Then he mused, “What will it be like a hundred years from now? I bet all this stuff will be embedded in our bodies. I just bet that cell phones, I-phones, I-pods, direction finders, blood pressure, radar units, etc. etc. will all be right in my cells! But for now I’ve got to find my cell phone!”
I have only recently learned that currently my phone number is not listed in any kind of public directory. When we moved to this retirement community last year the number we got is the number assigned to this room (and not to the name of the room occupant). The only public listing is the name of this community. This has resulted in some problems. Out of town relatives who were in the area and wanted to call and stop by could not find us listed anywhere. Several international callers have been unable to find my number anywhere and in the process a very important contact was never made. A blog reader who wanted to call knew there were Kieschnicks serving as ministers in the Lutheran Church, found an official directory and reached my sister- in- law who provided my number
When I was growing up in rural Texas there was no telephone listing for my family, simply because we did not have phone service. Then came the old party line. When there was one long and two short rings we knew it was for us.
In the 1950’s in Hong Kong we were told that only through the payment of significant under the table bribes could one secure a telephone without a year or more wait. However, we just applied for ourselves and for our school and within a week the phones were installed. During my years with The Lutheran Schools Association of Metropolitan New York we did not yet have emails, but plenty of phone calls. I still remember when I had been out of my office for two days and returned to my very full answering machine with 51 calls waiting to be returned. (Now my email aficionados say, “I had 100 emails yesterday.” The response: “Lucky you, I had 150 by 10:30 am!")
Last week I met my next-door neighbor returning to his unit muttering. I asked, “What’s up?” “Oh, I forgot my (expletive deleted) cell phone! “Would you believe that I am going just a few blocks to the dog park with my dog. I have my GPS to get me there but I don’t dare go without my cell phone!” Then he mused, “What will it be like a hundred years from now? I bet all this stuff will be embedded in our bodies. I just bet that cell phones, I-phones, I-pods, direction finders, blood pressure, radar units, etc. etc. will all be right in my cells! But for now I’ve got to find my cell phone!”
Friday, June 5, 2009
Hope Shattered - Dreams Destroyed - On the 20th Anniversary of Tienanmen Square Massacre
I am surrounded by weeping students in the quad of Beijing University. It’s the evening of June 5th, 1989. Mournful funeral music sweeps from speakers across the campus. The banner in front of the campus gates, in black characters on white cloth laments, “Tienanmen bathed in blood. The whole world weeps.”
By now the world knew what those milling about us had experienced in the hours before. The Peoples Army did fire on students. Tanks rumbled through the streets and the square. Bodies were bullet ridden and crushed. Soldiers were captured, strung up from light posts and burned while the crowd cheered. Buses were parked together to form barricades. One side or the other torched them. Sporadic skirmishes and resulting deaths would continue for another day. But the outcome was immutable. The student led foray for freedom had failed. The Party won.
Now cadres of students come into the weeping cauldron, returning from the morgue with news of whose bodies they found and who was still unaccounted for
.
My two sons and I are the only Americans in the crowd and so the target for unrealistic pleas. “Can’t you contact Pres. Bush? Can’t the US military intervene? Will the free world just stand by and let hope be crushed?” It was a cry not only for themselves, but also for their fallen colleagues and their now under suspicion parents. It was the unrealistic plea for some kind of rekindling of the flame of hope which had been definitively quenched.
We weep with our new student friends. We wince as we they show us wounds in their bodies. We remember with mixed feelings the female student friend of John who was safe in the country-side. The day before, her mother had come and physically carried her out of the square where she had been on a hunger strike. We know we cannot reach our family back home but are confident we will get there. Other student friends will not make it home. Without a doubt many others will make their homes in prisons. It seemed almost secondary to think of two years of John's work reflected in Chinese to English translations now stored "somewhere" on campus. Yet in the magnitude of the suffering, death, and shattered hopes those concerns seem minor. Many have died. More will. It's a long long road to freedom for too many
By now the world knew what those milling about us had experienced in the hours before. The Peoples Army did fire on students. Tanks rumbled through the streets and the square. Bodies were bullet ridden and crushed. Soldiers were captured, strung up from light posts and burned while the crowd cheered. Buses were parked together to form barricades. One side or the other torched them. Sporadic skirmishes and resulting deaths would continue for another day. But the outcome was immutable. The student led foray for freedom had failed. The Party won.
Now cadres of students come into the weeping cauldron, returning from the morgue with news of whose bodies they found and who was still unaccounted for
.
My two sons and I are the only Americans in the crowd and so the target for unrealistic pleas. “Can’t you contact Pres. Bush? Can’t the US military intervene? Will the free world just stand by and let hope be crushed?” It was a cry not only for themselves, but also for their fallen colleagues and their now under suspicion parents. It was the unrealistic plea for some kind of rekindling of the flame of hope which had been definitively quenched.
We weep with our new student friends. We wince as we they show us wounds in their bodies. We remember with mixed feelings the female student friend of John who was safe in the country-side. The day before, her mother had come and physically carried her out of the square where she had been on a hunger strike. We know we cannot reach our family back home but are confident we will get there. Other student friends will not make it home. Without a doubt many others will make their homes in prisons. It seemed almost secondary to think of two years of John's work reflected in Chinese to English translations now stored "somewhere" on campus. Yet in the magnitude of the suffering, death, and shattered hopes those concerns seem minor. Many have died. More will. It's a long long road to freedom for too many
Hope - On the 20th Anniversary of the Tienanmen Square Massacre
I’m standing next to the sculptured Goddess of Democracy in Tienanmen Square, June 3, 1989. Together, she and I fix our eyes intently across Chang An Avenue onto the portrait of Mao Tse Tung guarding the Forbidden City. Never before (or since) have I been in the midst of such exhilaration, such sense of community, such hope.
As our son John had told me over the phone from Beijing University a week earlier, “Dad, you must come. There’s hope that for the first time in the history of China, there may be a bloodless revolution!”
Students by the thousands had marched in orderly columns to the Square. Workers by the millions were joining the surge toward freedom. One middle-aged man with whom I spoke had brought his crippled aged mother in a wheel barrow to the Square. “She never dreamed that she’d be present for the birth of freedom in her country. Her grandchildren will have opportunities now undreamed of!”
English speaking Chinese students surround me. They joyfully speak of America and China forgetting their decades long enmity. “Democracy is coming to China and our two countries will be united in freedom.”
Days earlier the sheer mass of humanity had prevented a military convoy from reaching the Square. The Peoples’ Army wouldn’t dare fire upon their own people. Even the old guard around Deng Chou Peng would finally make the concessions to at least receive the written petition from student leaders. Conversations would begin. Political and economic freedom would begin to seep under the doors of the old imperial palace, now the Communist seat of power. One student even quoted to me, “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!”
Despair was dissipating. Doors to political, economic and intellectual freedom were opening. Hope welled up. It was intoxicatingly energizing.
As our son John had told me over the phone from Beijing University a week earlier, “Dad, you must come. There’s hope that for the first time in the history of China, there may be a bloodless revolution!”
Students by the thousands had marched in orderly columns to the Square. Workers by the millions were joining the surge toward freedom. One middle-aged man with whom I spoke had brought his crippled aged mother in a wheel barrow to the Square. “She never dreamed that she’d be present for the birth of freedom in her country. Her grandchildren will have opportunities now undreamed of!”
English speaking Chinese students surround me. They joyfully speak of America and China forgetting their decades long enmity. “Democracy is coming to China and our two countries will be united in freedom.”
Days earlier the sheer mass of humanity had prevented a military convoy from reaching the Square. The Peoples’ Army wouldn’t dare fire upon their own people. Even the old guard around Deng Chou Peng would finally make the concessions to at least receive the written petition from student leaders. Conversations would begin. Political and economic freedom would begin to seep under the doors of the old imperial palace, now the Communist seat of power. One student even quoted to me, “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!”
Despair was dissipating. Doors to political, economic and intellectual freedom were opening. Hope welled up. It was intoxicatingly energizing.
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