America Needs To Be Good, Not Just Great.

By: Elaine Lehman

 

On Monday, May 25, 2020, George Floyd, a Black man, died while in the custody of a White police officer in Minneapolis, Minnesota. We are highly disturbed to learn that the officer kept his knee on Mr. Floyd’s neck as he pled for his life and slowly he died. It is mind-numbing. We are equally horrified in learning that the White officer’s Asian American partner stood by and did nothing, expressionless. Both now-former officers have histories of complaints. Our hearts go out to the Floyd family and Black communities across the country.

In the height of a global pandemic, protests and riots have engulfed many cities ensued, including Chicago, over recent weeks. Many have focused their anger exclusively on the policing system. As we struggle through our shock, hurt, and frustration, let us find solace and strength in the wisdom and eloquence of Robert F. Kennedy. His words still soothe and guide us today, as we ask ourselves “what kind of a nation we are and what direction we want to move in.”

Mr. Kennedy once professed that “America needed to be good, not just great.”This requires all Asian American Pacific Islander communities – but particularly the Filipino community of all colors – to stand beside and up for Black communities: the Black communities welcomed us when no one else did. We must do better in calling out systemic racism, structural racism, and cultures of discrimination, including within our Asian American communities. We must call for our municipal, state, and country’s leaders to take action against anti-Blackness. We must expand our notions of race beyond the white-black binary paradigm and of accountability. We must call for our leaders to take action against the abuse of power, but to also understand how the policing system reflects the demands of society – to which we belong. How did we allow those who contributed to the death of George Floyd and many like them to remain an officer?

Mr. Kennedy’s words, when he informed the Indianapolis crowd about the assassination of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. on April 4, 1968, are starkly relevant to us today. “.

— you can be filled with bitterness, and with hatred, and a desire for revenge.

We can move in that direction as a country, in greater polarization –, filled with hatred toward one another. Or we can make an effort, as Martin Luther King did, to understand, and to comprehend, and replace that violence, that stain of bloodshed that has spread across our land, with an effort to understand, compassion, and love.

For those of you who are black and are tempted to fill with — be filled with hatred and mistrust of the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I would only say that I can also feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling. I had a member of my family killed, but he was killed by a white man.

But we have to make an effort in the United States. We have to make an effort to understand, to get beyond, or go beyond these rather difficult times.

My favorite poem, my — my favorite poet was Aeschylus. And he once wrote:

Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget

falls drop by drop upon the heart,

until, in our own despair,

against our will,

comes wisdom

through the awful grace of God.

What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness, but is love, and wisdom, and compassion toward one another; and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black. […]

We can do well in this country. We will have difficult times. We’ve had difficult times in the past, but we — and we will have difficult times in the future. It is not the end of violence; it is not the end of lawlessness, and it’s not the end of disorder.

But the vast majority of white people and the vast majority of black people in this country want to live together, want to improve the quality of our life, and want justice for all human beings that abide in our land.

And let’s dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world. Let us dedicate ourselves to that, and say a prayer for our country and for our people.”

We must do better. Say a prayer for the family of George Floyd, say a prayer for our country which all of us love -a prayer for understanding and that compassion of which Robert F. Kennedy spoke.

We must do better. Let us commit ourselves to be good to one another, to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world. This is the kind of nation we can be, we are – and this is the direction we want to move in.

We must do better. America needs to be good, not just great.