This week, I have been catching up on the TLC genealogy series "Who Do You Think You Are?" and I was taken aback by the episode tracing actor Scott Foley's roots. Aside from discovering that he had a relative who served in George Washington's equivalent of the Secret Service, he learned that another relative was accused, tried, and hanged for practicing witchcraft in Salem. Having visited the town, and been very moved by the real stories of Salem, I felt chills creep up when he sat down with a historian at the Witch House and learned of his ancestor's fate.
As he learned about the accusations that were made against Samuel Wardwell, it was clear that Foley was listening incredulously. He had been accused of sticking pins in, striking and pinching girls. Witnesses also recounted several times in which he had told fortunes. The fear in the area was real. Wardwell initially confessed, then recanted his confession. Ultimately, he was found guilty, and was one of the last "witches" hanged.
He may well have told some fortunes, and dabbled in the occult, but his only real crime was being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and under the gaze of a group of people who twisted the words and teachings of the Bible so tightly that they would have been unrecognizable.
Nineteen people died because of these twistings, and this mania. Countless others lives were destroyed by the false accusations, and coerced confessions. All in the name of protecting the children, and purity of a community.
Today, we see are watching a similar "hunt" play out in a land that professes to support and defend individual freedom as staunchly as religious freedom. But there is a group of people for whom those freedoms appear to be one-sided.
It's no secret that discrimination is ugly, and that it has cycled through our American history over and over. It often feels like civil dissatisfaction always leads to searching for an already demeaned and maligned set of individuals to persecute and punish.
I am not a member of the LGBT community, but I have friends who are. For the most part, they are just like all of my heterosexual friends. The important distinction--most have fought through their lives, struggling to find self-acceptance, familial acceptance, and to be afforded the same basic rights most everyone else already has without question. I am not a Creationist. As someone who struggles with faith, I probably believe some hybrid version of the options available. I get the whole Big-Bang thing, but when I look at the beauty and ugliness of this gigantic universe, I cannot completely divorce myself from the idea that even the smallest particle of dust had to have some origin.
So, I suppose if pinned down, I would say that origin is responsible for us all. If God(ess) created you and me, He/She created us all. And I suppose with that in mind, I believe the intention was an equal share of the world we all live in.
There are lots of people cloaking discrimination against transgendered, lesbian and homosexual men with fear for the safety and innocence of "our women and children." As a survivor of sexual abuse, I know that this cloak does not fit. Everyone with half a brain, and any knowledge of sexual assault and abuse knows that abusers tend to be people we know and trust, and most often male--NOT transgendered, NOT lesbian, NOT. gay.
But the people shaking their fists and passing laws tend to be like the Puritan communities of our early days as a nation. They ignore evidence. They ignore statistics. They ignore science. Instead, they embrace fear, hatred, and a cause.
When I watched Scott Foley visit the Salem Witch Trial Memorial--a place I have been to myself--he sat down on the bench where Samual Wardwell's name is engraved. It's a beautiful and peaceful place to reflect on a time of fear, zealotry and death. As he was leaving, he acknowledged that most visitors would reflect on the meaning of the place, walk away and carry on with their lives. Only those who were connected to the place by an ancestor would be forever changed. Only because I have been there, I know he is wrong. Some of us will carry that place with us forever, and it will always reflect back for us in times of strife and persecution.
I don't know much about where, or even the whole truth of who I come from. I tried tracing it for a while, but you really have to have unlimited resources to follow all "the leaves" on your tree. I suppose at the end of the day, it's easiest to rule out what I am not. I am not black. I am not Japanese. I am not Jewish. I can only claim a spiritual relationship with the Irish. Without question, I am failing to mention countless other groups who have been unjustly persecuted and punished throughout our history. Sadly, there have been too many to list.
But while maybe I cannot fill out my sparse little family tree with confidence, I do know of one family to which I am related--the human one. So when a family member is wrongly accused of unthinkable acts, or when a family member faces discrimination when they are simply trying to live their life, it impacts me.
Researchers very recently confirmed the site where the hangings took place near Salem. There is nothing to mark the spot. There are no graves. There is no place to visit an ancestor's final resting place. As ”witches," the bodies of these people were discarded without respect or peace. The memorial in town is all that exists for now. And while it is beautiful and peaceful, it is marked by empty seats. Those seats could be a representation of so many things. Children that never were. Community leaders who never achieved their potential. Ideas that never got the chance to bear fruit. Lives that were never lived to their natural completion. All because fear and misunderstanding gave a community permission to steal life from people who were different, but were still created from all the same stuff.
The show that got me thinking about Salem, and those nineteen beautiful, ugly, different people again, asks us about where and who we come from, but the title really strikes me in relation to the trials of three hundred years ago, and the trials that have played out since then. Who do you think you are? Who do you think you are to believe that because someone is different from you that they are wrong to be so? Who do you think you are to perpetuate discrimination, abuse and injustice in the name of love and Christ? Who do you think you are to feed fear and lies?
In the grand scheme, nineteen people is not a large number, but any number of lives taken or harmed by false faith, hypocrisy and ignorance is too many. We are family. We are all somebody's child. We all deserve to live our truths without fear of hateful lies.
No comments:
Post a Comment