Black Klansman and Lucy Carmichael

Scott and I went to see Black Klansman last night. It was more wrenching than either of us expected. Some years back I read Hari Kunzru's White Tears without being familiar with the expression and was underwhelmed by that book. But it led to my knowing the term and, I've just realized on looking it up again, misunderstanding it. Because my tears aren't that I don't believe in racial injustice; it's that I don't seem capable of doing anything about it except crying. In my mind "white tears" has come to be shorthand for liberals like me who feel bad but do nothing. There is, undoubtedly an expression for that; perhaps someone can share it with me here. But more, I wish someone would give me some concrete actions that I can take that will make things better. Because this current world is just wrong.

 But I've digressed. No, having been shaken by the movie (or, more precisely, by the footage from Charlottesville that ends the film which, by great effort, I had managed to avoid seeing (see also, white privilege)) I came home to distract myself by reading Lucy Carmichael by Margaret Kennedy, a book published in 1951. To my dismay, it was suddenly too topical, with a quote from, I think, William Wordsworth:

By superior energy, by more strict
Affiance in each other, firmer faith
In their unhallowed principles, the Bad
Have fairly earned a victory o'er the weak,
The vacillating, inconsistent Good.

Because that's us, the weak, vacillating, inconsistent Good (or, if not "good" then at least less vile than what seems to be winning these days).

And seeming relevant, at least at 1:00 a.m. and  with an echo of "when they go low," Lucy quotes Ephesians IV:

That we henceforth be no more children tossed to and fro, and carried about with every word of doctrine, by the sleight of men, and cunning craftiness, whereby they lie in wait to deceive. But speaking truth in love, may grow up into him as all things, which is the head, even Christ.

I'm like Kirk in "Arena," surrounded by potassium nitrate, diamonds, and bamboo; if I were just bright enough to figure out how to use what I've been given, I could maybe do something. Being more like McCoy than Kirk (or Spock), I'm stumped.