I didn’t know my vision was distorted until I watched an ICE agent shoot and kill a woman and had my president and vice president say the woman tried to run over the agent. President Trump saw a woman acting “violently, willfully, and viciously.” I saw a scared young woman trying to drive away. Vice President Vance saw more than the video revealed. He saw a woman who was “brainwashed.” I thought she looked frightened. He saw a woman tied to a “broader, left-wing network.” I learned later she had dropped her child off at school and was returning home.
Rodney Kennedy
DHS assistant secretary Tricia McLaughlin said the officer was “fearing for his life, the lives of his fellow law enforcement and the safety of the public” when he “fired defensive shots,” saying the victim was a “violent rioter” who she said had “weaponized her vehicle” and tried to run over officers. I didn’t see any signs of terrorism. 9/11, that was terrorism. Blowing up federal buildings in Oklahoma City, more terrorism. Mass shootings of school children, terrorism. I need to have my eyes checked to see if these government officials are telling the truth.
One evangelical preacher watched the video and pronounced it was the justice of God. He was, of course, referring to his restricted reading of Romans 13. I didn’t see anything remotely related to God’s justice. I saw one man’s inhumanity to a woman.
In politics, we no longer have 20/20 vision. Acuity, visual clarity, or sharpness are not descriptions of us. Anyone paying attention knows democracy is in trouble. But who knew it was a problem with our eyes? Michelle A Holling and Dreama G. Moon, in the article “20/20 in 2020?: Refractive vision, 45, and white supremacy,” describe two competing visions: America and Amerikkka. They argue America has cataracts and myopia.
The shooting in Minneapolis, like the Jan. 6 insurrection, brings into sharp relief two different visions in America. Is our vision clouded by ideology? If Democrats see murder, Republicans are required to see an act of terrorism by a moving vehicle. If Democrats say, “The sky is blue,” do Republicans have to say, “The sky is green?” Ideology distorts eyesight.
I believe there is a higher power attempting to be of service. His name is Jesus. I believe Jesus is trying to heal America’s eye diseases. According to St. Mark, at Bethsaida one day, Jesus took a blind man by the hand, led him out of the village, put saliva on his eyes, laid his hands on him, and asked the man, “Can you see anything?” The man replied, “I can see people, but they look like trees, walking” (Mark 8:22 – 26).
America is that blind man. We have a distorted vision. We can’t see people as persons but as objects to be used to push our vision of the nation. We dehumanize every victim or use them for political means.
Photo by Joshua Hoehne on Unsplash
I am convinced America has an epidemic of eye problems. Like Palestine in the first century, the ground is crawling with blind people. America has become a tale of two visions. “Who are you to tell me what I saw?” One vision relies on the potentiality of human rights, equity, and justice in the U.S. and privileges the safety and welfare of historically marginalized communities. The other vision projects law and order, safety, security, and the necessity of violence. Americans filter what they see through a pair of political eyeglasses. Facts are blurred by ideology. Truth is muddied by the rebuttals of the other side.
Earlier generations of preachers made much of Jesus as a physician. G. Campbell Morgan published a book of sermons, The Great Physician. Perhaps Jesus can be the ophthalmologist of America. Jesus claimed his mission was “the recovery of sight to the blind” (Mark 4:18). Jesus also said, “I came into this world for judgment, so that those who do not see may see and those who do see may become blind” (John 9:39). He called religious leaders “blind guides of the blind. And if one blind person guides another, both will fall into a pit” (Matthew 15:14). Five times in Matthew 23, Jesus calls religious leaders “blind” – “blind guides” and “blind fools.”
I imagine this sounds idealistic, even pietistic to *maga evangelicals who show no desire to see clearly. And it sounds even worse to those on the left who think they already see clearly. The majority among us, the secularists, have no patience with any connection to Jesus. Why bother? Because we are in a mess. Our eyes are deceiving us. Our eye problems are getting worse. We are in a mess. The people who made this mess like being in a mess and have no motivation for change.
I bother because I still have trust and confidence in the clarity of the vision and power of Jesus. As Flannery O’Connor put it, “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you odd.”
*I have made the deliberate choice to stop using upper case for “maga” because I believe the movement has so lowered itself in fealty to Trump that the lower case is the only appropriate way to speak of this group.
Rodney Kennedy has his M.Div. from New Orleans Theological Seminary and his Ph.D. in Rhetoric from Louisiana State University. The pastor of 7 Southern Baptist churches over the course of 20 years, he pastored the First Baptist Church of Dayton, Ohio — which is an American Baptist Church — for 13 years. He is currently professor of homiletics at Palmer Theological Seminary, and interim pastor of Emmanuel Friedens Federated Church, Schenectady, New York. His eighth book, Dancing with Metaphors in the Pulpit, is out now from Cascade Books.
