Empires come and go

The recent brawl at the dock in Birmingham, Ala., was heartbreaking to say the least. To see a gang of people mindlessly attack an individual who was simply doing his job is just ridiculous. My heart ached to see the video, as I wondered what the response of this man’s relatives would be as they watched this.

Of course, social media was generously peppered with posts of folding chairs soon after the incident. Many of them were quite hilarious. I even meandered onto the bandwagon and posted one myself. Not being a psychologist, I offer this observation: People can suffer so much that it becomes necessary to laugh in order to mask the pain.

History shows us that empires come and go: Persia, Babylon, Egypt, Rome, Greece. And if we use history as the great teacher that it is, and that we normally pay little attention to, our great country/empire will go at some point, too. If we look closely at the inner dynamics of past empires, we’ll see that internal divisiveness played a role in their failure. We’re at a point now, and we’ve been there before, where the kind of thing that occurred in Birmingham continues to hold us back from becoming that great light on the hill that we could be.

To recall the words of Rodney King, spoken in 1992, “Can we all get along?” That question continues to wait for not only an answer, but an answer that will be operationalized to its fullest. My naivete motivates me to ask this question: What if we all woke one morning and all manner of -isms would be gone: ageism, racism, sexism … all gone. Nirvana would be a great gift, wouldn’t it?

HOSEA LONG Little Rock