Cries of the Earth, germs of racism

We have been living in a global village and sharing the same orbiting planet much longer than social scientists have been reminding us, or the first photos from outer space of our fragile blue-green marble confirmed.
When the web of humanity is torn anywhere, it is our web. Where there is abuse of our planet’s natural resources, atmosphere or oceans, the impacts are always both global and local.
When there is a racist murder of nine people in a Charelston, South Carolina church, we are all diminished. When Pope Francis sends out a decree against global warming and urges his Catholic followers to listen to “both the cry of the Earth and the cry of the poor,” he is speaking to all of us in our own part of the world (Sonoma County), and not in an abstract.
There are 1.2 billion Catholics around the world today. That includes thousands in Sonoma County. Pope Francis, the outspoken pontiff who has taken the name of St. Francis of Assisi, last week unleashed his “moral thunder” against all of us to act “before it’s too late.” He said the exploitation of our Earth “has already exceeded acceptable limits and (we) still have not solved the problem of poverty.”
Pope Francis doesn’t know how many children and families live in poverty, hunger and fear of homelessness in Sonoma County, but we do. We know that too many of us live in material excess while there is human suffering and a loss of social opportunity in neighborhoods next to our own.
The Catholic leader was saying this is not a time to congratulate ourselves for our early efforts to curb climate change. Pope Francis wants us to speak louder to our elected leaders, telling them to set policies against waste, exploitation, loss of clean air and water and the rapid expansion of economic inequality and human indignity.
Last week, a county agency and volunteers launched a new program in Guerneville to provide once-a-week showers for homeless people. We think Pope Francis would want us to do much, much more than that for the least fortunate members of our local parishes and communities.
We send relief to the earthquake victims in Tibet and we fret over the millions of Syrian refugees and other innocent victims of the wars we cause. Meanwhile, Sonoma County suffers an affordable housing crisis and a monthly food pantry line that totals almost 50,000 people. In today’s global village, it is still best to “think globally and act locally.”
It seems our weary world has plenty of tragedies. We do not have to dwell for long on the racist killings in the African Methodist Episcopal Church in South Carolina. But that would be denying that we also harbor germs of racism and latent violence in our own Sonoma County homes and towns.
Here, like in South Carolina, Confederate flags fly from pickup trucks, driven by sons of neighbors and people we know. Here, too, Obama hate literature adorns bumpers and social media posts. Anti-immigration reform messages too often carry “anti-Mexican” taunts.
We know there is “racial profiling” against young brown faces, just as there remains “red lines” around low income neighborhoods. We are home to a daily radio show (Laura Ingraham, KSRO) that spreads racist hate messages and last week blamed Democrats and Obama for “politicizing” the church killings instead of offering condolences to the violated church members and survivors.
In Sonoma County, we don’t tolerate bigotry against gays or lesbians, just as we do not allow any form of anti-semitism. So why do we allow racism against Latinos and African-Americans to exist under Confederate flags, anti-immigration slogans and Obama-hate catchphrases?
This is dangerous. This is how one young man in South Carolina filled himself with enough hate to invade a peaceful church sanctuary and kill nine people, because, in his hate-filled mind, “someone had to do it.”
— Rollie Atkinson