The Call From Orlando

This morning, I received a phone call from someone who wanted to discuss a piece that I had been contracted to write. I got the sense that this person was weeping. As the conversation drew to an end they said, "It was some week end." At that moment I understood the grief that I had heard in their voice. Before I hung up the phone I said, "In the end, love will prevail." But will it?

As I hung up the phone, my mind traveled back to my college days. In January of 1994, a group of students hosted a speaker at Kean University in Union, New Jersey. They tell me that there were less than 100 students in attendance that night. However, the fall out from the speech was tremendous. It seems that the guest of honor spoke ill of everyone from the Pope to Mr. Nelson Mandela; from the gay and lesbian community to the Jewish community. Eventually, our small state university was denounced from the halls of the United States Congress for harboring hate speech.

In the wake of event, a Jewish organization offered students the opportunity to take a trip to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. I was one of those those who signed up. If you've never been been there, I'd urge you at some point in your life to make the trip to that historic site. The visitor is exposed to the atrocities of war in a way that brings the terror of the dark days of the holocaust to life. One exhibit was filled with the shoes that prisoners slated for the gas chambers were asked to remove before they were sent to their deaths. I shall never forget it.

At the conclusion of the visit, an employee of the museum gave a brief speech. He said, "Genocide begins with words. The next time that you sit in a room and chuckle nervously when someone makes a racist, xenophobic, homophobic or anti-semitic remark, understand that you are paving the way for extremists to visit violence on the heads of innocent people. If you allow evil to be spoken about people groups in your presence and you fail to dissent, you are culpable. You are are responsible."

A week later, someone came to my college dorm apartment to discuss what he believed was the "over reaction" of some community members in the wake of the speech. His argument deteriorated into anti-semitic bile. The words I'd heard at the Holocaust Museum began ringing in my ears. Before I knew it, I was on my feet. I walked to the door, twisted the knob and graciously invited my guest to leave. His jaw dropped but he did leave and he took his views with him.

Now back to Orlando. Will love prevail? We live in such hateful times, with all of this talk about building walls and marginalizing people on the basis of ethnicity or religion.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. once said: "He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it."

Love will prevail when we are willing to fight for it. As long as we sit in silence or even worse begin conversations with "they" and "those people" we might as well be handing bullets to the extremists. More than likely, somewhere someone gave a nod of affirmation to the man who killed all of those people in Orlando on Saturday. More than likely at some point, someone sat in silence as he expressed his deep rooted hatred for blacks and gays. He took that silent consent as their decree of permission. Now there are lost lives. There are broken families and people all over America are truly living in terror.

The call from Orlando, at least for me is that we must aim at something more than mere tolerance. Regardless of what some Christians leaders will say in the coming days, Jesus preached love for all humanity. I don't care what religion you follow, or if you don't adhere to any faith tradition all, love is a good direction to follow. Can I get an, "Amen?"

#Orlando #PulseNightclub #Christian #love #intolerance #KeanUniverity