Oh then, Brothers, with your armor, Heed ye not the siren charmer!

Last updated on: February 8, 2021 at 12:23 am by John Mark N. Reynolds

Oh then, Brothers, with your armor, Heed ye not the siren charmer! 2021-02-08T00:23:52-04:00 John Mark N. Reynolds

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The Lord is a warrior, the Lord is His name.

He breaks unrighteousness and injustice on the wheel of His Mighty Power.

We cannot cease from mental fight, nor can the sword rest in our hand, until we have built greater liberty in this green and pleasant land. So it must be when there is injustice, unrighteousness, in the cosmos. God calls us to cry out when the poor are oppressed, when there is systematic injustice. The tyrants, those in a comfortable sinecure built on usury and injustice, preach passivity and acceptance.

Jesus is the Prince of Peace, but not a peace built of injustice. Jesus calls us to love our enemies, but also to call out injustice especially systematic injustice. The siren will call us to stop, point to excess in the movement (John Brown!) or hypocrisy (Henry Ward Beecher). Guilt by association against the activist is as old as The Klansman. Since fighting injustice is hard, the temptation is within us to stop the martial song for justice.

The establishment is not stupid. They know that some safe dissent must be tolerated to allow those paying the bills, doing the work, to be pacified. The trick is to get the outsider, the enslaved, the outs, to blame themselves for their own marginalization. The argument usually centers on the errors of a menu of leaders and how the disliked value (“abolition”) is the “root cause” of the leaders going bad.

They let the otherwise marginalized blow off steam, usually by encouraging them to attack themselves or any of the leaders for social righteousness. (Did you hear what Dr. King did?) Somehow they never dissent from the sort of values that can be turned into a Super Bowl commercial or a favorable NPR interview. The siren might convince us to quit our martial singing by another song forced through pursed lips, tutting tutting the fiery, with the lure of social acceptance and guilt by association. We listen and take the safe way.

The siren says: “Don’t be like those people or you will be like those people who agreed with them!” And, of course, peace is best, the ultimate goal, hate is wrong, hypocrisy is toxic, but the worry is always about the excesses of the tiny bit of power the dissident, the abolitionists, have gained.

Nobody listens to Nat Turner or wonders how we got John Brown and Beecher’s Bibles, because we are busy modulating, moderating, while the plantation or Jim Crow or Roe v Wade continues. Marriage may be decayed, so the Super Bowl stars can blow through marriage, but we will buy product, consume, and say nothing. After all, not all evils are equal and no evil in the United States equals race-based slavery and the continuation of Jim Crow to this day.

We need the energy of Malcolm X applied first to our own injustices, our own evils, dialectically examining self. The Ecumenical Patriarch reminds us to stand in solidarity now and forever with those facing injustice.

Let us sing the song of a brotherhood, the song of broken chains, the song that repudiates moral colonialism. Hear the anthem:

Song of Brotherhood By S. D. Anderson

The North Star, September 7, 1849

Brothers, sing!

The chains are broken,

Hear the anthem,

see the token,

Man’s great heart at length has spoken—

Hear it, Brothers, hear! Listen to its songs of gladness!

Hark! from thrones and altars falling,

Hark! from bondage spirit-galling,

Freedom’s voice is loudly calling—

Hear it, Brothers, hear!

Liberty is in each breathing.

Noble hearts to life are waking,

’Neath the sunlight proudly breaking,

Error’s troops are meanly quaking—

Hear it, Brothers, hear!

Look and see the day is dawning.

All around old things are dying,

Force and fraud in terror flying,

Whilst for light the world is crying—

Hear it, Brothers, hear!

Loud as tones of winter’s tempest.

Hark! a voice across the water,

From each stricken son and daughter,

Mid the famine and the slaughter—

Hear it, Brothers, hear!

They are talking too of freedom.

On the mountains they are telling

Thoughts that now in secret welling,

Soon will like a torrent swelling,

Hear it, Brothers, hear!

For it tells you light is coming.

From that land where year on year,

Heard the lash and saw the tear,

Do some rays of light appear?

Hear it, Brothers, hear!

Brotherhood is struggling upward.

Oh then, Brothers, with your armor,

Heed ye not the siren charmer,

See the battle wages warmer—

Hear it, brother, hear!

Join your comrades in the contest.

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I am reading pre-war Black poetry to hear voices that I should hear.

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