Approaching Spiritual Death
Almost everyone I know is filled with a deepening sense of grief. After watching the daily brutality of war in Ukraine, we were still stunned when thirteen people in Buffalo were shot by a young man who opened fire in a supermarket. Ten of the victims died. Eleven of the victims were African Americans. The shooter, a young, white man, was motivated by a hate filled, white supremist ideology. Within days, another young man walked into an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, killing 19 children and two teachers. The bloodshed in Ukraine seems to be fading from public consciousness as the bloodshed at home overwhelms us.
In the face of such enormous death most public figures have little to offer. They continue sending weapons to war, prayers to victims. Rather, those closest to these killings have been turning to each other for solace, gathering in prayer circles, sharing memories of loved ones. In Buffalo people gathered in a park to acknowledge that “it could have been any of us” killed by a young man with a gun. Around the country, thousands of people have come together in small groups and public gatherings. Friends and neighbors join to share in the grief and mounting outrage at the continuing death toll here at home. High School students across the country are staging walkouts to protest gun violence and demand actions.
For me, I am coming to understand that this is what Martin Luther King meant when he said, “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.” As a people, we are losing the essence of spirituality, the capacity to feel connection and to care for each other. We are cut off from our history, from the consequences of our actions at home and around the globe, and we are losing our belief that a future of peace and justice is possible.
There is nothing new in the use of violence to protect power, wealth, and whiteness in this land. From the genocide of indigenous people to the stealing, killing, and daily brutalizing of Africans, American power has rested on violence. This reality prompted Dr. King to say we are “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.”
Under the advance of racial capital, we have seen violence corrode our most essential connections to each other. In just this decade we have seen entire cities sacrificed. Under the guise of finances, cites were deprived of basic democratic controls, resulting in 100,000 people in Flint, being forced to drink poisoned water. Detroit was cited for human rights violations by the UN as it shut off water to hundreds of thousands of people. Puerto Rico is being looted by legal maneuverings. More than 45,000 lives lost to gun violence in 2020 alone. Since 2014, more than 34,500 children have been killed or injured by guns, more than 6,500 under the age of 12. Today firearms are the number one cause of death for teenagers. More people survive gun injuries, often struggling with violation, pain and trauma. Most mass shootings happen in majority black communities. We know this, yet we seem incapable of moving beyond grief. Meanwhile the arms industry, from hand guns to missiles, is booming, exporting death and violence.
King understood that this violence came not from technologies of death, be they guns, poisons, missiles, or bombs, but from a deeper “malady of our souls” as we have come to accept as normal the idea that “machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people.”
In the face of this violence, we need a radical shift toward love of the deepest kind. Such a shift is not an empty gesture, but requires the radical reconstruction of how we live and how we collectively act. No one should profit from the weapons of war and death. It is time to act in ways that make democracy real and to act on behalf of justice and peace so that life can flourish, for our children and all beings on this fragile earth.