God knows, but we cannot know, for a certainty, the future except in some general sense. We can be certain that a just God, who is also merciful, will delay the chastisement of a nation, giving her time to repent, until time is up. We can be certain that tyrants with gulags, even one as powerful as the Communist Party in China is today, will fall. Justice will come, but meanwhile money and power will buy false prophets to proclaim that they have seen the future and that it works.
Jim Crow seems eternal until brave men, not accounted for by the powerful, come out of the people and sweep away the rotten tyrannical laws. Legal abortion in America will continue until one day it ends, because “nameless people” will give themselves a name. The unborn will be born again.
We know that if one stands with justice, then all will be well in God’s eyes. We may not see victory, but victory will come, because God is in the High Heaven. If not, then humankind would long ago destroyed humanity! Our continued existence is the best argument for a merciful God. When injustice, say usury in education, is widespread, then there will be many who will shuffle papers, mutter about the problem, hope that the issue lasts their time. Someone died in 1861 before the evil system of race based slavery was swept away.
Those who died “on time” were not blessed, because after death is the judgment. There is, of course, mercy for us all, if we are truly sorry for the wrongs we have done, but if so we cannot ignore systematic problems. We cannot pretend that the system is not rigged against having children, raising them well, or with two parents. We hope nobody will notice and that the homeless, those we do not give names, will shuffle off and stay out of our way.
This cannot be.
However imperfectly a man like Theodore Roosevelt understood that injustice cannot last and began, ever so tentatively, to change the system and give the worker a name. Otherwise the result will be ugly revolution, because humans cannot be dehumanized forever. We will rise up and claim our heritage as image bearers of God. In America the act of marginalizing the Black man and woman, debased, debauched, and damned the slavers and those who sided with them. The punishment fit the crime and the Southern defender of slavery became the greatest losers of American history. Read the literature from before the Civil War and these tyrants could see the doom coming. They ignored the doom: Haiti’s independence reminded them. They dehumanized millions: one Frederick Douglass or Harriet Tubman refute the lie.
When will the end of a systematic injustice come? No man can say, but every man can be sure that the Almighty will get the job done. The elite will allow wasted effort on foolish things, Ivy League children nattering on intellectual fads, but not reveal the rot in the system. The unnamed, those they wish were not born or those they wish would keep doing their work submissively, will claim their birthright.
This is as sure as the morning.
The Nameless People
By Vagante
Frederick Douglass’ Paper, June 1, 1855
Smitten and branded and manacled,
A homeless and nameless nation,
Unstoried, despised by the centuries,
Crouched in dull adoration
Beside our temples and palaces,
And stoopeth its neck to our tread.
Stolid, untutored and languageless,
It utters no love, no anger,
But grindeth in hopeless apathy,
Or drowseth in brutish languor,
’Mid harvests and treasures, whose lordliness
It claimeth less than the dead.
Aliens and foemen by heritage,
We bar them afar from our slumber;
We clog them with statutes of jealousy,
We muse if they gather in number;
Beside us, yet stricken with banishment!
Among us, yet foreign in soul!
The patriot seeketh no sympathy
In them for his country’s glory:
The statesmen hopes in their brutishness,
When he ponders our coming story;
We smother the anthems of liberty
Which over their cabins might roll.
A shadow behind our prosperity,
A menacing spectre, though humble;
A mute, mysterious prophecy,
Their multitudes murmur and mumble
A spell o’er our nation’s futurity,
Which dies ere it reaches our ken.
What shall the ending be?—Bitterness?
Shall these helot millions ever
Stand humbly aside from humanity?—
No shattering exodus sever Their bonds?—
No fatal necessity Destroy them, or blazon them men?
Shall this Samson, sightless with ignorance,
And dungeoned in servile terror,
Ne’er bow in our temple of selfishness
Against its columns of error,
And make it a hideous sepulchre,
Entombing his shame and our might?
What wind shall quicken the skeletons,
And flesh them for lust and slaughters?
Guard well, O lordly posterity!
Thy treasures, thy delicate daughters!
Keep arms within grasping! Set sentinels!
The spoiler may come in the night.
No! we will wander, like Israel,
Through waters yawning, but holden;
No wheels shall fall from our chariots;
We will bribe Jehovah with golden Fanes.
No MENES shall desecrate
The beautiful walls of our pride.
O! soothe us with flattering oracles;
Cast horoscopes starry with splendor;
Muffle the footsteps of Destiny;
Brand the prophet of God and offender;
Let us hasten to die:
Futurity Hath secrets of horror to hide.*
————–
*Voices Beyond Bondage . NewSouth Books. Kindle Edition. I am reading Black literature from before the Civil War to prepare for class at The College.
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