We wonder what we would have done if we had been present listening to Jesus preach. We likely think we would have been one of the good ones, one of those who listened, followed and had courage. Yet we hear the words of some of the less-noble New Testament characters and wonder again if we might not be more like that one. The rich young ruler, or the people who sent Jesus away from their town.
If we had been in the antebellum South, would we have been one of the good 'uns who treated black people well and worked to upend slavery? When Jews were being carted off in Hungary, would we have stood up, likely being shot ourselves for our troubles? Would we have protected priests from the Vandals? How would we have behaved during the Plague of Justinian? Would we have succumbed to despair and selfishness during the Great Depression?
Well, here's your chance. We are in an historic moment which will be studied, recalled, interpreted, and written about at length.
2 comments:
It's been so for a while.
Some of the choices we face are judgment calls--what balance is best among competing demands? Is isolation the best approach to this particular virus, and if so, for how long before the damage starts to exceed the benefit? How much charity to needy aliens ought we compel before the cost to the needy in our own land becomes too great?
Others are pretty clearcut evils: abortion, letting your neighbor starve.
Some things are simply insane (e.g. the proliferation of genders); do we have the starch to say so?
If we had been in the antebellum South, would we have been one of the good 'uns who treated black people well and worked to upend slavery?
In my case, probably not. One of my great-grandfathers was born on a plantation, but was too young to fight in the Civil War. He died in 1946.Family lore had it that his father was the biggest landowner- and thus slave owner- in the county. One of his brothers was a Confederate Colonel killed in the Civil War.My great-grandfather was not a good money manager, so the inheritance dwindled down to a quarter section of land. (160 acres)
A great-grandmother on the other side of the family had a second cousin who fought on the side of John Brown in Kansas and at Harper's Ferry. He was killed at Harper's Ferry. (paternal grandmother's side)
From my paternal grandfather's side, there is the story of a black soldier who saved the life of a Union soldier relative in the Civil War. The relative took the black home with him to Illinois, where he spent the rest of his life working on my relative's farm. When the black farmhand died, my relative wanted to bury him in the local cemetery, but it wsn't permitted to bury blacks to be buried in the cemetery. the black man was buried right outside the cemetery. As the cemetery expanded, the black man's grave got incorporated into the cemetery. From family history compiled in 1953.
Some ancestors were religious dissenters where dissenting could be uncomfortable, such as the Quaker ancestors in Puritan Massachusetts. I guess my dislike of Massachusetts is genetic. :)
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