Ticked Off! Really Ticked Off!

A week ago I spent several days in Baltimore, Maryland during an almost unbearable and sweltering heat wave.  I was visiting my wife, who was a patient at the University of Maryland hospital—one of many excellent medical facilities available in the city.  I saw the “homeless,” the “addicts,” and the “locals” struggling to survive the heat and trying to make a life in their worn-out neighborhoods.  My heart went out to them because there is no way on earth, in heaven, or hell that they (by themselves) have a chance to escape from the bondage into which, by no choice of their own, they were born.  Oh, you can lift up a few examples of those who have “made it,” and been freed of it,  but that number is very small. These inner city residents are a diverse group, but mostly black and brown people.   I’ve seen this same scene in Washington D.C., Philadelphia, San Francisco, New York City and every U.S. city I’ve ever visited.  This hellish situation has been around for decades—and for 55 years I have been engaged in ministries and missions that have attempted to remedy it.  But it will take much more than these to make a difference.

BUT, I get ticked off, really ticked off, when the President of the United States tweets that this particular city, Baltimore, is a “disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess…FAR WORSE and more dangerous” than the US-Mexico border. I get ticked off when that president says that a part of Baltimore (meaning the  7th Congressional district served by Rep. Elijah Cummings) “is considered the Worst in the USA” and “no human being would want to live there.”  There is an element of truth in the phrase, “no human being would want to live there”—but the whole truth is, Mr. Trump, that there are human beings living there!  And not by choice, but by the very racist attitudes, Mr. Trump, that you have expressed and that have pervaded our society for two and a half centuries. I am really ticked off! 

Not many Americans (black, brown, red, or white) are born with a silver spoon in their mouth.  Not many of us have been handed a couple million dollars by our fathers.  Not many Americans live in a “Tower,” or own our own private golf courses and a jet, too. Not many Americans are a part of that 1% (which in my opinion is a "disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess" as much as any US city) who haven’t the slightest idea how most Americans live and work. 

Baltimore has many issues and problems like every other city in this country.  Those issues and problems need to be addressed and solved and you don’t do that by saying “no human being would want to live there” when in fact, there are human beings living there.  It is, as Baltimore Mayor  Bernard C. Jack Young wrote:  “completely unacceptable for the political leader of our country to denigrate a vibrant American City like Baltimore,” but it is even more unacceptable to denigrate the human beings who live in that city, or human beings anywhere, for that matter.