Quoth the raven....

The crow perched on a dead branch of the maple tree. Like a scene from a bad western movie, he sat and cawed and looked around. He and his buddies, called a “Murder”, had swooped and hollered all afternoon in the back yards right near ours. Cloaked in black feathers, he looked rather sinister as he waited for the next maneuver.
 
Anytime I see a crow, Edgar Allen Poe’s words come to me. “Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary…” The sinister presence knocking at the chamber door seems yet lurking in the world today. We do not have to linger long to hear it. It sounds like hate. It sounds like white supremacy. It sounds like fearmongering. It sounds like shots fired into a Tops Grocery Store in Buffalo. Caw. Caw. Darkness in the soul of America.
 
We have just come home from a little visit to Charleston. We went for my birthday, mostly to see family there, and see the gardens of Charleston. The young man giving us a tour of downtown on his Rickshaw Taxi was a little surprised when we asked to visit Mother Emanuel AME Church. He said not many people asked to see it. The building is right on the street. Painted white. A wreath of fresh flowers on the door. We did not go in. Simply being there was standing on sacred ground, Holy Ground. Dylan Roof studied with a group there, then pulled an assault weapon on them and killed eight of them.
 
The argument is always mental illness and the availability of guns. After the Buffalo shooting and killing of ten people, mostly Black people, by an 18-year-old who had written words of hate toward Black people and other minority groups, I am coming to believe that such hateful killing is not a one-off. It is a stewing pot of hate, race baiting, replacement theorizing that is reverberating out on social media and the mainstream voices on Fox News and others, filling time with theories that instill hate and fear of white people losing power and influence. Hate is on the rise, measurably. This rise will not stop until enough people say, “Nevermore!”
 
Any demographer can track changes in populations regarding color, ethnicities, age, gender. It’s science and statistics. Trends are measured and reported as statistical data, like it or not. But the data of the browning of America will not be different because of stirred up hatred and fear that results in violent actions. They only serve the works of evil and cause pain that evokes the revile of good people, compassionate people, against those who voice such hatefulness. Differing opinions deepen the divide between us when we cannot accept and adapt to changing demographics, making this a political issue instead of simply what is. 
 
Where are leaders, particularly Republican leaders, speaking out against what is clearly white nationalism, white supremacy, replacement theory theorists? Surely you see what the rest of us see. Hate and hate groups are a scourge, a cancer, a poison in America. We will not have to fear the Russians or the Chinese, or the North Koreans. We will implode on the festering hate rising among us.

Lib Campbell is a retired Methodist pastor, retreat leader and host of the website avirtualchurch.com