Hallowed ground

New York Times columnist Charles Blow wrote of visiting the intersection where Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin squeezed the life out of George Floyd:

On the approach from one direction a purple sign with white script attached to a lamppost reads: “Here you enter sacred space.” 

And that is how I have always thought of places like this, why I am uneasy in them, like I shouldn’t be there, like I am disturbing something. 

It is the reason that I never visited ground zero in New York. There is something different about these places where life is lost, and the loss has changed the world. Whether earth or pavement, those places remember things and whisper them back. These are the places where souls crossed over. You feel something when you are here ...

I have to confess I am not hanging on the ins and outs of the Derek Chauvin trial. In fact, I have even chosen not to watch the murder video. It's all too painfully repetitive of past horrors. 

I ran in the streets in 1992 when a suburban jury acquitted the cops caught on film beating the shit out of Rodney King. I joined marches and vigils and a sad wake more recently when a combination of a timid prosecutor and another suburban civil jury found no fault with the SFPD officers who shot Alex Nieto while he ate a burrito. In my own neighborhood, police fired 6 bullets in the back of Amilcar Perez Lopez; they killed the Luis Gongoro Poot for being a homeless Mayan sitting on the sidewalk. A circle of cops executed Mario Woods by firing squad while bus riders videoed the scene -- so much like when 10 years before, BART riders recorded live a transit cop shooting a handcuffed Oscar Grant in the back. Only in that last instance was any kind of criminal justice meted out, and that very little for taking a man's life.

I think I know how the Chauvin trial ends; I can hope I am wrong. No wonder Mr. Blow approaches the killing site as sacred space.

• • •

But the opening of Mr. Blow's column prompted me to think about what other places of death have served to evoke in me a similar feeling of the sacred. Bear with me if you wish ...

These days I am serving as a mentor for and with a person enrolled in a program that assists aspiring organizers to situate themselves within this country's permanent struggle for more justice. Like me, he's older and white. He's new-ish to the struggle; I'm a tired old veteran of many campaigns and movements.

Quite reasonably, he asked me: "how did you find your way into this life?"

I didn't have a pat answer -- I just knew I grew up in the 1950s and '60s. I knew that the African American struggle for what people then called "freedom" was the moral center of our national life. But where did the white girl from Buffalo learn to resonate with that reality?

Reading Mr. Blow, I have an inkling. Every spring break, after yet another gray, bleak, Buffalo winter, my mother would seize any excuse to drive south for a week or more. The first stop was always the Gettysburg battlefield in mid-Pennsylvania, a windswept expanse of cold, sometimes icy, mostly empty fields dotted with 19th and early 20th century monuments to the men of the various military units, Union and Confederate, who fought and died there for three days in 1863. This was the decisive battle of what my Union ancestors called the "War of the Rebellion." I was repelled by the Visitor Center and the tourist traps -- I didn't want Blue and Gray knick knacks. I wanted to walk about the fields, feeling something ...

And I learned by heart President Lincoln's address, given when dedicating a national cemetery at Gettysburg later that year. I quite literally "took to heart" his peroration:

 ... from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

As I reflect on my new friend's question, I think that hallowed ground set me on the course which has defined my life. Mr. Lincoln's American Civil Religion announced in that speech doesn't provide all the answers. But it's not a bad backdrop for the right questions.

A resident had a statement to make when the MAGA's came to Gettysburg