Watering Down Social Injustice

I was listening to my friend on blog talk radio this morning and was inspired to write about one of the topics he discussed this morning.

Moving water is a powerful agent of change. It moves with great force, changing the land in the process. Moving water shapes all different kinds of landforms. Underground water erodes rocks and forms caves. Ocean waves erode beaches and change the shape of the coastlines. The type of landform created depends on how water moves on the surface. Changing people’s attitudes can be compared to the effect that water has on its surrounding over a long period of time.

Today, more than More than 20 players on the Baltimore Ravens and Jacksonville Jaguars locked arms, and some took a knee while the American national anthem played before their Sunday game, in protest of the 45^th president’s comments earlier this week. Number 45 was heard to say to roaring applause, at a Friday night rally for Alabama Senate candidate, Luther Strange, “Wouldn’t you love to see one of these NFL owners, when somebody disrespects our flag, to say, ‘Get that son of a bitch off the field?’” The president said that if a team owner fired a player for protesting the anthem, he or she would become “the most popular person in the country. Because that is a total disrespect of our heritage.” Trump was referencing the recent trend of black football players taking a knee during the national anthem in protest of racial injustice. Something, Number 45 might not know is the anthem’s third stanza and the history of its authorship.

Around Aug. 24, 1815, at the Battle of Bladensburg, Francis Scott Key, the author of the national anthem was serving as a lieutenant and ran into a battalion of Colonial Marines. His troops were defeated by former slaves and hirelings, and he fled back to his home in Georgetown. The same British troops, then marched into Washington, D.C., burned the Library of Congress, the Capitol Building, and the White House.

A few weeks later, in September of 1815, Key was on a British boat begging for the release of one of his friends, when he observed the bloody battle of Fort McHenry in Baltimore on Sept. 13, 1815. This inspired Key to write “The Star-Spangled Banner” right then and there, decrying the former slaves who were now working for the British army:

And where is that band who so vauntingly swore,
That the havoc of war and the battle’s confusion
A home and a Country should leave us no more?
Their blood has wash’d out their foul footstep’s pollution.
No refuge could save the hireling and slave
From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave,
And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.

In other words, Key is saying that the blood of all the former slaves and “hirelings” on the battlefield will wash away the pollution of the British invaders. With Key still bitter that some black marines got the best of him during the Battle of Bladensburg, “The Star-Spangled Banner” is an admonishment to the former slaves who had the audacity to fight for their freedom. Key was very opposed to the idea of the Colonial Marines. The Marines were a battalion of runaway slaves who joined the British Royal Army in exchange for their freedom. The Marines were an eye-opening example of what slaves would do if given the chance. They were also a repudiation of the white superiority that enlightened men like Key were so invested in.

Enlightened men at the time, were not against slavery; they felt that blacks were mentally inferior, and should be treated with more Christian kindness. They were the stoic supporter of sending free blacks to Africa. Key was pro-slavery, anti-black and anti-abolitionists. With that being said, the song was not popularized right away and it took almost 100 years for the song to become the national anthem.

Water moves over the Earth’s surface, under the ground, and in the atmosphere. Social Injustice moves over the Earth’s surface, hidden in society, but very much a part of the culture. The cycling of water is called the water cycle and the cycling of justice or injustice is measured in cycles! The water cycle happens when water moves between the Earth and the atmosphere. The Injustice cycle happens when justice is removed from the people. The water cycle is a continuous cycle. It never stops and it controls how water is distributed on Earth. The injustice cycle is also continuous and never stops but justice is the great equalizer and controls how positive outcomes are distributed on Earth.