Essay 7 on Christianity and Universal Human Rights

Edgecombe Community College

REL 110 OL1

World Religions

Rev. S. Herring. Instructor

July 18, 2016

Reflections on Times of Violence

We have certainly seen a lot of scary things happening this summer.  One news post called it "the Summer of slaughter."  This all reminds me of the time from about 1965 to 1975.  This was a similar period of violence and social conflict.  If you want to see crazy behavior, read about the history of the Symbionese Liberation Army.  

A good summary can be found at:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbionese_Liberation_Army  This shows us how we have lived through this sort of thing before.  

We could also look at the Marin County Courthouse Incident in 1970 and the story of the Soledad Brothers.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marin_County_courthouse_incident  I was in California at the time and I remember thinking that the whole world had gone crazy.  

In 1981 there was an amazingly violent robbery of a Brinks car which stands out in my memory as well.  This story can be found at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brink%27s_robbery_(1981)

Going further back we should also note the shooting of Medgar Evers in 1963 and the Birmingham church bombing (16th Street Baptist Church)  

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/16th_Street_Baptist_Church_bombing   

Surrounding the Civil Rights Movement there were also a series of terribly violent riots in Watts, Newark, and Detroit.  These can be found at:  

Watts, Los Angeles 1965:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watts_riots

Newark 1967:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1967_Newark_riots

Detroit 1967:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1967_Detroit_riot

Then we had the South Central Riots in Los Angeles in 1992:  

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1992_Los_Angeles_riots

I have compiled all of these stories of racially motivated violence as a way of reminding us that we are all part of our larger collective history.  If we are ignorant of our own history we can easily fall into the delusion that our world is somehow falling apart, or declining in morality while increasing in violence.  This delusion of "declinism" can easily lead us into a spirit of separation and this in turn can lead us to seek some sort of apocalyptic vision where God will destroy all the "bad people" and save all the "good people."  This is where these conflicts can become specifically religious in nature.  The task before us today is to find unity in our community and to work together to assure the continued progress of civil society.  Rather than trying to return to some mythical time when things were supposedly better, we need to solve problems today and to continue to seek solutions as secular civil society moves forward.  Progress can be slow and frustrating but progress is also a reality.  If we study the decline of violence over time we can see that there are moments in history where things get worse for a period of time before they get better.  The 1960's were such a period when social violence did increase in the United States for a time.  Today, there are no guarantees that the larger, wider decline of violence in civil society will continue, but we each have the opportunity to do our own small part to learn how things have gotten better from the way they were in the past, to assure one another that things will get better and that things will keep on getting better as time goes on and history moves forward.