After the shootings last month in Aurora, Colorado I took three days to think about a range of issues. For those three days I largely set this work aside. Following the shootings in Wisconsin my first thought was I should do the same. Then I realized nothing had changed and the conclusions I had drawn a month ago were just as valid now as they were then. Walking away from this for a few days then made sense. Doing so now would be mere self-indulgence.

But I am going to use this space today differently than I normally would because, given this morning’s latest revelations on the murder of six Sikhs in Wisconsin yesterday, it turns out there is a significant difference.

Racism is a cancer

According to reports this morning the murderer was not a deranged psychopath caught up in a comic book  fantasy as was the case in Aurora. He was, rather, a determined white supremacist–a man infected with that particularly virulent form of cancer we call racism.

I am generally careful to keep my religious and political views out of these posts beyond the point that they are relevant to the fight against cancer in general and NET in specific. Today I am breaking that ban. I am breaking it because there are things that happen in the outside world that demand our though and attention no matter how much we want our focus to be on something else.

It isn’t just this one man

Many will say of this event that it was the work of one crazed individual–that to look beyond his madness for a cause for his actions is pointless.

I wish that were true. Unfortunately, I saw a tweet on CNN that they allowed on their air that makes me think other wise.

It was a post justifying these shootings as God smashing false idols. Later, I read reports that people from the Westboro Baptist Church–the group that pickets military funerals–were spreading similar kinds of statements.

I have to say it made me sick and it made me weep and it made me angry. I do not understand how a religion based on the words of a pacifist–who supposedly gave his life for the forgiveness of the sins of all mankind–can have spawned such evil in thought, word and deed. In a time when people need comfort these individuals saw fit to spew their unalloyed hatred in the face of pain. I weep that anyone can be so lost in their own belief system that they have lost the ability to love those whose vision of God is not their own. And I was angered that their parents and their community could allow them to have grown up into such a monster.

These things frighten me

My anger grows from fear–fear of a return to the dark times when the folk of the God who told humanity to love one another killed those that did not believe precisely as they did and used torture as a means of conversion.

I say this knowing it will make some of you angry: if you carry hatred in your heart for those of another faith, another race, or another sex or another sexual identity–if you would subjugate those of another faith, of another race, or another sex–if you do not love every human being as you love yourself or treat them as you would wish to be treated yourself–then you are not a Christian, you are not a Muslim, you are not a Jew, you are not Hindu, you are not a Sikh, you are not a Buddhist, nor a believer of any faith with love at its core. You may lie to yourself, but you worship evil, you worship hatred, you worship every form of darkness ever imagined no matter how well you can quote whatever holy book you wish to wrap yourself in.

If we have any chance to survive as a species it will come not through the love of one God or another but through a true brotherly and sisterly love of each other. Every good man and woman the world has ever known has said this but human beings have been too busy getting, spending, and attempting to control others to hear it.

In word as well as deed

I am not a good man in their league by any stretch of any imagination. I’m not even sure I can truly call myself a good man as normal humans go. I know only that I try to be the best human being I can be. But I am not so small that I cannot repeat the words of the wise. So I say this to all who can hear and all who will listen: “Love one another.” It is the only thing that matters. But you can’t just say it, you have to live it.