Tennessee

Imperfect Union

When James Madison wrote the Preamble to the Constitution, he used a grammatically odd phrase.  He wrote:  “We the People, of the United States of America, in order to form a more perfect union…”(italics added).  More perfect:  how does a “perfect” thing become “more perfect”?  Isn’t perfect just that; perfection unable to be better because it is the best?

Madison was a Virginian, a white man who enslaved other humans at Montpelier, his plantation.  He was well aware of his own imperfections, and that the representatives of the thirteen diverse states created a document that was far from perfect.  It was full of compromises.  It accepted the inherent evils of enslavement and usurpation of Native lands. And, it balanced conflicting powers and interests.   Madison well knew that the Constitution was not the end, but the beginning of a National journey in government.  It was not perfect.  But he established our great national goal:  to strive to become “more perfect”.  A worthy goal even though established by flawed, less than perfect men.

It is one of my favorite phrases describing our history and our present:  a flawed nation of flawed individuals striving to become “more perfect”.  After Thursday, we have a lot of “perfecting” to do.

Evil at Work

A couple of weeks ago, an armed individual shot her way into a Christian elementary school in Nashville.  She killed three adults and three nine year-old children, and was ultimately killed herself by rapidly responding Nashville police.  Perhaps the most haunting security video shows her shooting her way through the locked glass doors, then stalking the hallways looking for victims.  Regardless of her mental state, the video shows cold-blooded evil at work.

Nashville is the capital of Tennessee, and the Capitol Building became the focus of righteous protest.  Citizens; mothers and fathers and children themselves, demanded that the state legislature do something to protect children in their schools.  They made their voices heard in the public hallways and galleries of the building. Ultimately some of the protestors refused to leave the Capitol property, and forty-three were arrested by the Tennessee State Police.  

In the midst of these protests, three Tennessee legislators, two young Black male legislators and one white woman, joined the parents and children in the state legislative chamber demanding that changes should be made.  Tennessee Republicans have a super-majority in the legislature (gerrymandering works), but these three legislators were all part of the minority Democrats.  After the protests were over, that majority held them accountable for violating the “decorum” of the House.

Expulsion

The ultimate penalty for violating “decorum” is expulsion from the legislature.  But expulsion is a seldom used penalty.  Child molesters, domestic abusers, and even members who urinated on other member’s seats (really?) were allowed to stay in the body.  But for the audacity to join children in protest, the Republican majority demanded that the three Democratic members be expelled.

The protests were about gun control and protecting children in schools.  The Tennessee Republicans are in the thrall of the Second Amendment and the gun powers, and are unwilling to take any steps to further restrict gun access.  Tennessee doesn’t even have “Red Flag” laws that allow courts to keep guns away from the mentally ill.  So, America thought that the expulsions were all about guns and the power of the gun lobbies.  But we were wrong.

After the expulsion “trials” were over, and the Republican expellers’ lectured the Democrats (“…you don’t understand…” the ‘you’ that symbolizes ‘your kind’) how sacrosanct the decorum rules were, the legislature voted.  By overwhelming majorities they removed the two representatives from Nashville and Memphis, both Black men.  Justin Jones is twenty-eight, Justin Pearson twenty-nine.  But the Tennessee Republicans were unable to reach the two-thirds majority necessary to expel Gloria Johnson, a fifty-one year old white woman from Knoxville.

Racism

It became obvious.  The “old (and not so old) white men” of the Tennessee legislature weren’t so worried about gun protests.  They were incensed at the audacity of two young Black men.  This wasn’t about guns, or school safety, or children.  This was about the “snake under the table” of American history.  It was all about racism.  

Ten years ago, even the Republican super-majority of the Tennessee legislature wouldn’t have dared act so blatantly.  Ten years ago, there was still a veneer of modernity, of a Nation beyond the ugly white supremacy of our past.  The black and white films of the 1960’s protests on the Edmund Pettis Bridge, and of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis, Tennessee; were just that – past, a part of our history, before we were more “perfected”.  But like the dried bandage on a bloody wound, the Republican super-majority of the Tennessee legislature has made it clear. They ripped the bandage off to reveal their truth: young Black men should seldom be seen and never, ever, heard.  Racism lives.

This should be the part where I talk about “… The arc of moral history is long but bends towards justice”.    And Dr. King was right.  But it feels like the arc is bending the wrong way right now.  We seem far, far from our perfect union.