MEEKS: Mourning mothers

Several years ago while I served as a loaned executive for Macon Mayor Jim Marshall, I helped organize a group of women called Mourning Mothers. This group comprised women who had lost children to violence. It was during the height of gang violence in Macon and we were trying to find ways to prevent youth violence and call attention to those who had been lost to violence.

We need another group of women like that and many others to join in mourning for the way in which some folks among us are talking about people who are from different parts of the world. Our situation in America at this moment is one to grieve. All of us need to stop and take a long deep breath while we reflect upon the kind of nation we seem to be working hard to become. A nation that cares about no one except a small, designated, acceptable minority that happens to hold power and wealth. We cannot afford to have such a country because we are already far too diverse. The constant racist chatter that often surfaces in various news reports has to be snuffed out.

The kinds of recent comments that have been made about our Muslim sisters and brothers and many of the unfortunate people who are being driven from their homes in Syria and other parts of the Middle East need to cease. This nation was built upon the notion that the needy could find refuge here. Though we did not treat African Americans or Native Americans like we believed there was room enough for everyone, in the past we did try to be welcoming to some strangers.

Now we have come to this place where we are reading about our sisters and brothers drowning in boats every day and find it tolerable to allow them to be talked about as if they are all terrorists. It is difficult to understand why anyone thinks that Syrians would put their children and themselves in a homemade wooden boat and set out on the Aegean Sea trying to get to Turkey or Greece so they can come to the United States or Europe to become terrorists.

In spite of all of our ills we can act better than this. We are a nation of immigrants and freed slaves for the most part. We have a cultural memory about what it is like not to belong, and the native people know what it is like to lose their land. We are a nation made up of people who have suffered.

As a nation we erected a statue that called for the world to send us their tired, weary and weak. Where has that spirit gone? We need to recall her and reconnect with her before we lose more of ourselves than we can afford.

Our country is too small to abide the racist, uncivil language that is being spewed around these days by many folks who seem to have lost their sense of humanity. Folks who have decided to feed their own fragile egos at the expense of the nation and who have discovered that fear and rhetoric of incivility can make them look powerful and important.

None of us can afford to be silent in the face of what is happening. The Mourning Mothers need to put on their mourning clothes again and call us back to our senses with their weeping and wailing. They need to help us remember that our sisters and brothers across the world are being driven from their homes. They are being driven to horrible deaths.

They need to help us recover our compassion. They need to help us speak for the "miseries that have no mouths." They need to help us speak so that the voices of fear and hatred can be silenced.

This column by Catherine Meeks, Ph.D., appears twice monthly. Meeks is also a contributing writer for the Huffington Post. Email her at kayma53@att.net.

This story was originally published January 26, 2016 at 8:38 PM.