Tent
Photo by Jesse Gardner on Unsplash
I am thinking about tents. Tents have been in the news over the past few weeks, and everywhere we look, there are tents. The tents I speak of are those on college campuses. Since the Occupy Wall Street movement, these dome-shaped camping shelters, which come for retailers like REI, have become the symbolic mainstays of protests in encampments across America. Once again, as opposition to Israel’s actions in Gaza has led to unrest on college campuses across the country, we have seen tents reemerge as a symbol of protest. Where there is anger and righteousness resentment, there are tents.
No tents were in Selma, Jackson, the Woolworth’s counter in Greensboro, or at the Lincoln Memorial when Dr. King spoke. In any of the pictures, I’ve never seen a tent. Bull Connor’s police dogs were there. Bombed-out churches and Rosa Parks were there. I’ve seen mobs of white students screaming at children integrating schools in Little Rock and students in Oxford, Mississippi. I didn’t see any tents. I have nothing against tents. It’s a difference I’ve noticed.
People like to shout and scream. There was shouting from the white side, but Dr. King didn’t yell back. In the Freedom Schools, they didn’t teach people to break into buildings, fight, attack others, call other people pejorative names, or meet hate with hate.
I never saw Dr. King, Medgar Evers, John Lewis, Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, or Michael Schwerner wearing a mask. They didn’t hide who they were or what they were doing. They were registering people to vote and using segregated facilities in Birmingham and Hattiesburg. Hundreds of volunteers came south after being trained in nonviolence and pacifism and told to bring bail money.
I’m thinking about beatings, buses, bridges, and tents. I’m thinking about black and white people working together to achieve the common goal of finishing the unfinished work of Reconstruction and forcing America to make good on the promises of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. I’m thinking about the horror of anti-Semitism and those who use the scriptures in any Abrahamic tradition to justify war. I’m also thinking about tents. When I see a tent, I see death. When I see a tent, I see unrestrained anger. When I see a tent, I see hating your neighbor. When I see a tent, I see an eye for an eye. When I see a tent, I see death.
I’m also thinking about a tent, a single tent, a tent called the Tent of Meeting. The Hebrew Bible records Moses’ meetings with God in the Tent of Meeting, where matters of life and death were discussed. Moses hammered out Bronze Age cease-fires, prevented genocides, and saved lives in the Tent of Meeting. The Tent of Meeting was a tent of life.
We need more Tents of Meetings, places where humanity encounters the divine. The tents of death are killing all of us, one by one. We are all confused about our loyalties. If the tents remain, we are not in solidarity with Israel or Palestine. We stand firmly with death.
If there was ever a time to stand for life and embrace Gandhi’s vision of nonviolence, as embodied by Dr. King, it is now. Take down the tents, remove the masks, and strike the phrase “what about” from our language. Begin the long walk of the moral arc that leads the universe toward justice. It may not be loud and hip, but it works.
The people without tents changed the world.