Day eleven and there is no letup. A Ferguson, Missouri official just reported that there was only six arrests of protesters “and that’s really good”. Guess it’s a matter of what you think is good.

FBI numbers for 2012 show that American police officers shot and killed 409 people. That’s over one per day. The Japanese have shot and killed none in more than five years, British police shot and killed no one and German police shot and killed eight. We can only guess at how many of the 409 victims were black; and how many of those were armed. We do know that some of them were unarmed.

“And the LORD descended in the cloud, and stood with (Moses) him there, and proclaimed the name of the LORD.
   And the LORD passed by before him, and proclaimed, The LORD, The LORD God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abundant in goodness and truth,
   Keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, and that will by no means clear the guilty; visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, and upon the children’s children, unto the third and to the fourth generation.
   And Moses made haste, and bowed his head toward the earth, and worshipped.” Exodus 34:5-8

We also know that the blacks who are protesting the slaying of the unarmed 18 year-old Michael Brown and the white police do not share the same perspective. We can also be sure that the Brown family doesn’t think there’s anything good about the incredulous ordeal or that Attorney General Holder coming to their house to tell them to take it easy because everything is going to be alright makes them feel good. No black person in Ferguson feels reassured even though Holder is a black man himself. I don’t know what the protesters call them now, but historically Holder would have been called Uncle Tom.

It’s becoming old hat that young men of color are getting riddled with bullets from officers of the peace. To them, it feels like lynching – only with bullets. An unarmed black man goes out to the store, steals something or defies the public servants and gets shot to death. Michael Brown’s parents are members of the American Society.  Maybe? Supposedly! Right!?

Apparently the policeman pumped six shots into the 18 year-old, four in the arm and two in the head ‘cause the kid rushed an officer who is supposed to be trained to do his job with unscrupulous care and professionalism. Law and order America gives the impression that the police are highly trained to protect property and life. One has the right to presume that they are trained to protect life first and foremost.

None of the lame excuses or vindictive displays like the one by Sean Hannity on national TV toward a Ferguson Black City Councilwoman, for example, should give anyone a sense that the dynamite of this national crisis is going to be diffused soon – if ever. To the Black community, this will look more like an execution in the “leave the gun, take the cannoli” (or in this case cigars) Mafioso style. That’s what it will appear to be in history, at least Black history.

A week and a half later another black man is shot and killed in St. Louis by police wearing bullet-proof vests. People were wondering why they don’t have enough time at the range to shoot these unarmed petty thieves in the leg, or with mace, or with a dog, or something. I never heard anything like this in my county when it comes to petty larceny. Many people try to duke it out with the police over burglaries, but don’t end up like Trayvon Martin or Michael Brown over a Twinkie or a bag of potato chips.

Let’s just consider the lie of the last 150 years, the American promise that we have evangelized politically throughout the world, the incredible lies we have told ourselves and keep on insisting with the world, while telling ourselves.

The more than regrettable way in which this sad country has not taken advantage of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation over these past 150 years is a sham to be laid on the shoulders, upon which the sins of the third and fourth generation is now being visited. The most culpable, of course, are the white perpetrators for which there is no excuse because no repentance has been offered. Sure there was John Brown’s attempt to set up a black state by revolutionary means, there was William Lloyd Garrison’s abolitionist movement, and the underground railroad but it did not stop the runaway train of racism, fear and hatred that has been imposed on the black man with death and violence. The blacks of this nation have come by the disease of hatred and violence and lawlessness quite honestly. The white forefathers came by it dishonestly when they told themselves that black men were inferior. They sold their souls to devil money rather than have any compassion on their fellow man. The love of money is said to be the root of all evil. Who can argue that it has not been the love of money (and still is) by which the powers that be have shackled the blacks of this country to poverty and servitude and given them cause to hate the white establishment. Is it any wonder that the Bible labels the United States “The Raiser of Taxes”? (Daniel 11:21)

Erin Aubry Kaplan, author of “Black Talk, Blue Thoughts, and Walking the Color Line: Dispatches from a Black Journalista.”; writing in the L.A. Times this week, brought up the late Rodney King’s famous quote of twenty years ago: “Why can’t we all just get along.” She wrote: “I used to hate his plea — too conciliatory I thought — but now I’m willing to give King the last word, if only because there’s truly nothing else left to say. How many times can we have the same conversation about race and power, convene the same panel for discussions, before we acknowledge that the real problem isn’t police tactics or the militarization of police departments or even rogue cops, but fear of blackness?”

What she cannot say or see is that blackness for the young black man has grown into desperate hopelessness because of their plight of poverty at the hands of White America dating back to the 1600’s. They are locked into the poverty of the Detroits and LAs and the hundreds of Fergusons across America. What choice has the system offered most blacks of the segregated ghettos but to make money on the black market? What does one do when one can’t get a job? What streets can the black man walk except it be angrily along the paved fluorescent alleyways of 21st Century ‘sundown towns’. The Fergusons are truly fearful places for whites, not just fearing blackness of hopeless desperate men, but the ’blackness’ that carries more than 300 years of fear of whiteness hidden under masks and hoods and behind bright lights of fiery torches and flashes from guns in the night. These are the images in the minds of blacks, things that have spoken and still speak of the sins of the fathers, now being visited upon the third and fourth generation of their children…

It appears to us at Elisha’s Band of Outcast Eagles that we are now living in a day of recompense of the white man’s sins of slavery, oppression and discrimination against their fellow humans. It is a time of fear and trembling… A time in which mothers continue to cry for their sons… A time when fear has come upon the oppressors which they can no longer control… A time when the sins of the fathers are being visited upon the children in the form of fear. It is written that “perfect love casts out all fear”. But when love has been absent for so long, watch out, for only perfect fear remains. Hope and love can find nowhere to breathe.

There is but one sure way out. One which black women and men of Christ have known since the days of slavery. They have sung spirituals to Christ and not soul music to the World. As for the white person they may find peace and exoneration from the sins of their fathers and not the fierce anger of the righteous God in heaven, if they go to Jesus. Find Jesus and you find hope, not for this life but in eternity. That is when all things shall be made right and the downtrodden will live in eternal glory and peace.

You might like to read My Personal Ferguson.