I had responded
to an article that someone had sent me.
Then I
forwarded that response to the Pastor that I had while I
lived on St. Croix.
He knew that I
had spent some years working in the communist USSR, and
that later I went to Ukraine after the fall of Communism.
This is what I
had sent to him:
Pastor,
Someone had sent me an article bemoaning the removal of
Confederate statues, perhaps thinking that I would bemoan
also.
However, I had
to respond, hoping to bring a different perspective to
them.
Below is
my response:
It took a
bloody civil war to end slavery in America, but then for a
full century afterwards, there were still Jim Crow laws.
Why? I think that even after a civil war, America still
refused to repent. In a similar fashion, no matter what
happened to Israel and Judah, Jerusalem and her kings
seemed unwilling to repent of their high places. America,
comparatively it seems, refused to acknowledge to the LORD
that collectively, we had hatred in our hearts for the
black man. When I started working in Chicago, had the
government not forced that company
into hiring
quotas, they never would have hired black men and women
for anything but the lowliest positions. I know that from
what I had heard those company leaders say, and then
when I
beheld their attitude
towards those that they hired after that, and this was
back in the early 70's.
Today, what has
made things worse, was not the actions of a few
iconoclastic protestors, but the reaction of so many
Americans to those iconoclastic protestors. We Americans
celebrated when the Iraqis pulled down that graven image
of Saddam Hussein. That image represented the tyranny and
hatred that the Iraqi people had suffered under that evil
regime.
Similarly,
nearly thirty years after the fall of communism, people
are
continuing to tear down
the
remaining
graven images of Lenin, and the West rightfully celebrates
with them. Some wonder why after nearly thirty years they
would want to tear them down now. The time passed is not
the issue at all. The very existence of graven images of
Lenin screams to the people that there are still those in
the government that long to subjugate them again, with
another brutal regime, that there exists those that still
hate the common man. That thought, that there are still
people that hate them that much, who dreamily look on
those graven images of Lenin with some sense of nostalgia,
is unacceptable. Those graven images of Lenin still need
to come down, even after all these years. They are glaring
symbols of an ongoing hatred, so it is not good for his
images to remain. They hastily had taken down Stalin's
images, so it is equally fitting that they also take down
the remainder of Lenin's images. When the average people
see communist extremists trying to stop the pulling down
of Lenin's images, and they hear them spout their hatred
and their nostalgia for the good old days of
communism, that's what really troubles those Russian, or
Ukrainian, people. It is the attitude of the others over
the removal of those symbols of the bad old days, which
troubles them.
It may even be
a very similar experience for the average black family,
today, to behold the attitude of so many Americans over
even the talk of removing symbols of the bad old days of
our country.