This is too bloody to be peace. Every week, nearly every day, this does not feel like peace. And yet, if this is war, who is the enemy? We all seem to be searching, and many of us claim to have found that enemy—but our claims don’t agree.
We say the enemy is Isis, and yet so many of these killings are committed by our own people. We say the enemy is Muslims, and yet Muslims are dying with everyone else. We say the enemy is the police, and yet the police are dying. And black people are dying. And LGBTQ+ people are dying, and poor people are dying, and immigrants are dying, and women are dying, and we are all dying, but the marginalized among us bear the greatest weight of it.
And they bear our hate, and they bear the full weight of that.
At the end of each month I compile links to articles I found thought-provoking over that month, categorized with pull-quotes for your perusal and edification. Each of these is a story that made me stop and think, and hopefully one or two of them will do the same for you.
It hasn’t been a good week. You wouldn’t think much could be worse than a hate-motivated mass shooting against LGBTQ people who had gathered just to be themselves; but the killer also claimed to have been driven by an ideology of hate, inspired by a small segment of religion that hates people for not thinking the same things they do. And it isn’t just ISIS that does that, because there are large swathes of American Christianity and American Politics that say the same thing. So it was a bad start to the week.