GODS

WE ARE GODS WHO DON'T KNOW Reading the "Preface", written by abolitionist, William Lloyd Garrison, to NARRATIVE OF THE LIFE OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS, an AMERICAN SLAVE (1845, 1994), I have now acquired a better basis for understanding the epic fear that has afflicted by so many fully-armed, law enforcement white people who claim to be afraid of confronting or even speaking to unarmed black people, of any age or gender, size or economic .This irrational "fear" had left me and had left us all flummoxed, bewildered, confused; at least, until now it had! First, Garrison lauded our enslaved people, when describing, ascribing the spiritual essences of Douglass, who was then yet a runaway slave, to "godlike nature of its victims." In referring to our enslaved forbears, "godlike nature," Garrison also said in 1841 that they were "needing nothing but a comparatively small amount of cultivation to make him (and them and us) an ornament to society and a blessing to his race." P.4 But he did not stop there! William Lloyd Garrison, the foremost white abolitionist in the North continued, using the young fugitive, Frederick Douglass as the apostrophe, as our representative symbol of manhood: "He has borne himself with gentleness and meekness, yet with true manliness of character . As a public speaker, he excels in pathos , wit, comparison , imitation, strength of reasoning, and fluency of language. There is in him that unity of head and heart which is indispensable to an enlightenment of the heads and winning of the hearts of others. May his strength continue to be equal to his day! May he continue to 'grow in grace and in the knowledge of God' that he might be increasingly serviceable in the cause of bleeding humanity, whether at home or abroad...Let the calumniators of the colored race despise themselves for their baseness and illiberality of spirit, and henceforth cease to talk of the natural inferiority of those who require nothing but time and opportunity to attain to the highest point of human excellence. "It may, perhaps , be fairly questioned whether any other portion of the population of the earth could have endured the privations, sufferings and horrors of slavery, without having become more degraded in the scale of humanity than the slaves of African descent. Nothing has been left undone to cripple their intellects, darken their minds, debase their moral nature, obliterate all traces of their relationship to mankind and yet how wonderfully they have sustained the mighty load of a most frightful bondage under which they have been laboring for centuries!" P.5-6 Given these effusive praises of the character of our enslaved people, as embodied in Douglass and quite independent of his descent , it has now becomes crystal clear why repressive whites fear the African Americans: We/they are godlike! "We are gods" indeed as Psalms 82:6 has so boldly declared in the even more ancient days pre-1841. "Fear the wrath of God! Flee the wrath of God," the Bible says to such who have wronged, despised, tormented, unmercifully, these gods! blessedly divine people, who have, by grace and mercy, like Jonah, Daniel, Shadrach Meshak and Abednego, who have survived: the belly of the whale; thrived in the lion's den; and basked in the fiery furnace of an American hell!