On Tuesday, my neighbor’s white magnolia scintillates against a beach blue sky. I wear shades to trek past farm fields and pines to vote in spring’s local elections.
I hope to stem the tide of “back to basics” policies, fig leaves for fears—tax dollars spent on gender neutral bathrooms, light shed on our egregious system of chattel slavery,
calls to address our cancer of white supremacy. These questions that refuse to fold themselves back inside the bottle are not our enemies. The universe calls us to travel along
their twisting turning highways and open to the sacred space of meaning. I pass a small corner beauty shop where a flag flaps today at half mast, like every flag across America
until the three nine-year-old children and three adults slaughtered at Nashville’s Covenant School are properly buried. I have another neighbor who hides inside his garage a truck bearing
a bumper sticker from the local gun shop. It is bright yellow with red letters that drip as loudly as the thirteen stripes on our flag. This guy has planted that flag in his yard
alongside a sunflower flag, flags of pastoral scenes bought at the local garden shop, sometimes a MAGA flag. The American psyche is the backyard of men like this,
staked with false flags and strewn with dollar-store lawn trinkets that look like they were dumped there by last week-end’s severe storm. Only all this stuff—
fiberglass giraffes and mushrooms, bunnies and Celtic crosses—is intentionally placed. Tell me again what Jesus said about loving our neighbors, even those who cry wolf
when some neighbors speaking truth into bullhorns don’t look like the Bull Connor neighbors who have burdened us with day after day of our children’s humanity stunted
by the ever-hardening space of schools with metal detectors and SROs in combat gear. Last week, in an adjacent town, an eighth grader shot dead a 10th grader.
Also, my neighbors.