JOHN BRUMMETT: With actions and in truth

Last Thursday night's murderous madness in Dallas was made even worse by a helpless sense that the nation lacked credible political and moral leadership to confront such a deep and horrible fracture.

President Barack Obama could give an inspiring speech, of course. But he'd given nigh unto a dozen talks in similar circumstances. He had become both a lame duck and a stuck needle on a scratched vinyl record.


His replacement in a dreaded few months would be either a new president who can't speak nearly as fluidly or inspiringly, or one who can't think and reason nearly as soundly.

Church leaders? The issue was racial division and distrust. The strongest last bastions of racial segregation in America are churches.

Members of Congress? They were too busy scheduling investigative hearings to try to win the presidential election as a prosecutorial, not electoral, proposition.

The media? What media? If you carry a phone, and if you shoot a picture with it of a man with a rifle over his shoulder on a Dallas street, then you suddenly are the trusted ace reporter with the scoop for CNN or Fox or MSNBC.

So we watched helplessly and hopelessly as police officers got shot dead in the street because they were police officers and white. They died as they were protecting persons both black and white who marched to decry the shooting deaths of non-provoking blacks by white police officers who were scared or filled with hate, but probably more scared from prejudice than hate-filled.

Obama was overseas at the time. So he strolled out grim-faced once more to say from a distant podium ... something.

It was measured and articulate and appropriate and filled with frustration. It invoked the easy proliferation of rapid-fire weaponry. Thus it invited the quickly dismissive criticism that he was politicizing a tragedy, as if there's anything necessarily wrong with that, which negated any hope for generally constructive application of anything else he said.

And the American band played on--rapid gunfire for percussion, mourning for a melody and political blame games for lyrics.

Five days later Obama went to Dallas for a memorial service and availed himself of the circumstance--the deep despair combined with his short-term status--to try something innovative and surely liberating.

He spoke with the uncommon authority of candor. And he spoke with the compelling inflection of honest emotion.

It was a powerful blend, this no-BS call to self-honesty. He said we've all seen and heard race prejudice. He said many of us have felt it and thought it and worked to submerge it, which made us essentially good people, flawed but vitally resistant to flaw.

He said our collective better selves make us a better nation than these horrific spectacles of hate make us appear.

He called on us to cling hard to that self-honesty, and to our trust in each other, and to isolate the hate to bring this weary greater America back to the fore.

He reminded me of the old Church of Christ preacher of my boyhood who would lean forward on the pulpit and say that he wasn't going to preach today, but just talk to us. He would proceed to do his best preaching, because straight-talking is real preaching.

Obama was so candid as to say outright what I've written here--that nobody had been listening to him.

He said: "Now I'm not naïve. I have spoken at too many memorials during the course of this presidency. I've hugged too many families who have lost a loved one to senseless violence. And I've seen how a spirit of unity, born of tragedy, can gradually dissipate, overtaken by the return to business as usual, by inertia and old habits and expediency.

"I see how easily we slip back into our old notions, because they're comfortable. We're used to them. I've seen how inadequate words can be in bringing about lasting change. I've seen how inadequate my own words have been. And so I'm reminded of a passage in John's Gospel: 'Let us love, not with words or speech, but with actions and in truth.'"

With actions and in truth.

The truth is that, in Dallas, one man was evil and hundreds of police officers and others were virtuously heroic in action.

The truth is that America can draw a greater resolve and greater strength from that, but only if we will accept good preaching when we hear it.

We have a president for a few more months who is telling us an apparently hard but hopeful truth. Now it's a matter of whether we can find it in ourselves to accept a leadership we seem to resent and an inspiration we want to resist.

By truth and in action, we are better than this madness, and we have it within ourselves to be better still.

Even if it's Obama who says so.

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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at [email protected]. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.

Editorial on 07/14/2016

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