Robert Azzi: I am because we are

By Robert Azzi
Maya Angelou wrote: “History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, and if faced with courage need not be lived again.”

It need not be lived again if we have the courage to confront our demons, the faith to believe that truth and justice will triumph.

Today, I continue to mourn the death of Archbishop and Nobel Peace Laureate Desmond Tutu whose inspirational courage, grace and vision imagined the transformative Truth and Reconciliation Committees that sought, by fully revealing the depths of the inhumanity and violence that had scarred its soul, to reconcile its peoples and enable South Africa to emerge with hope from its awful original sins.

I mourn Tutu, and am inspired by him, at a time when I fear for my own nation and its lack of moral clarity, a nation that also has a centuries-long history roiled by not yet fully confronted original sins and depredations.

This morning I read a tweet from the Equal Justice Initiative: “On this day in 1890, U.S. troops fired at and killed 300 Lakota People in a massacre at Wounded Knee; over half were women, children, and elderly tribal members. To overcome racial inequality, we must confront our history.”

We cannot unlive that history, a still ongoing-tragedy where America should note, with shame, that descendants of those peoples massacred at South Dakota’s Wounded Knee today have among the shortest life expectancies of any group in the entire Western Hemisphere — approximately 47 years for males, 52 for females.

Fellow citizens who live in a community where unemployment hovers between 80 percent and 85 percent and where approximately 50 percent of the residents, most without electricity, telephone, running water or sewage systems, live below the federal poverty line.

We cannot unlive that history. We can confront its persistence.

Confront, with shame, that there are clusters of Americans with the shortest life expectancies of any group in the entire Western Hemisphere living alongside an increasing number of other, mostly white, mostly Christian, Americans who believe that truth and history should not be faced with courage but controlled by those with privilege and power.

Americans who believe that their children should not be taught about what was done in their name so they could continue to live in comfort and warmth with indoor plumbing, un-poisoned waters and broadband.

Americans unable to recognize that, as Tutu warned, “One of the most blasphemous consequences of injustice, especially racist injustice, is that it can make a child of God doubt that he or she is a child of God.”

We cannot unlive that blasphemy.

Tutu told us, “When the missionaries came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said, “Let us pray.” We closed our eyes. When we opened them we had the Bible and they had the land.”

We cannot unlive that history.

Let us pray.

Tutu, who said that voting for the first time in South Africa’s first democratic election in 1994 was like “falling in love,” never aligned himself with oppressors, no matter how powerful. “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor…”

And, indeed, for too long too many Americans have been oppressed, exploited, humiliated, regarded as inferior beings, and deprived of their constitutional rights, much of which continues today with recent attempts to marginalize and disenfranchise millions of Americans, especially Americans of color, especially against descendants of African Americans once uprooted and enslaved.

Let us pray.

It’s time to fall in love again!

While it is clear we’ll never see a day when all Americans, secular or religious, will be equally committed to our transformation into a nation where all people are created equal, I am growing increasingly more fearful that more Americans lack belief or commitment to the principles enumerated in the Declaration of Independence and Constitution, or to each other.

“There are different kinds of justice,” Tutu told the New Yorker in 1996. “Retributive justice is largely Western. The African understanding is far more restorative – not so much to punish as to redress or restore a balance that has been knocked askew.”

Justice and balance embraced within Ubuntu, the African philosophy that believes in a shared universal bond that connects all humanity: “I am because we are.”

Americans who don’t believe in truth and reconciliation, disconnected Americans, Americans who don’t understand, as Tutu said, “This process is not about pillorying anybody. It’s not about persecuting anybody. It’s ultimately about getting to the truth so that we can help to heal. And also so that we may know what to avoid in the future.”

This weekend, as we resolve, in the face of growing anti-democratic challenges, to try and make 2022 a better year, let us take to heart Bishop Tutu’s inspirational words delivered, in 1998, as the Truth and Reconciliation Committee handed over its final report to Nelson Mandela’s government.

In an appeal both confessional and aspirational; a message inclusive of all humanity, Tutu said, “I am certain that all my fellow Christians in South Africa will agree with me if I express our deep apologies to you, the members of the other faith communities in the country, for the arrogant way in we as Christians acted — as though ours was the only religion in South Africa, while we have been a multi-religious community from day one.”

“We have been wounded, but we are being healed,” he continued. “It is possible even with our past suffering, anguish, alienation and violence to become one people, reconciled, healed, caring, compassionate and ready to share as we put our past behind us to stride into the glorious future God holds before us as the Rainbow People of God.”

Ubuntu: I am because we are.

Robert Azzi is a photographer and writer who lives in Exeter. His columns are archived at theotherazzi.wordpress.com and he can be reached at [email protected].