Divisions and Precisions

What A Wonderful World

There is power in the simplest of acts.

This past Saturday, a woman singlehandedly stopped a KKK rally in Bowling Green, Kentucky. She didn't shout. She didn't lash out at anybody. She wasn't even carrying a sign.

Laquetta Shepard is a 24 year old senior at Western Kentucky University. She is black. And when Ku Klux Klan members knelt to pray for white supremacy, she left the anti-Klan rally she was a part of and walked over to stand silently, weeping, amongst the kneeling Klan members. A photographer caught a picture of her doing so. She looks angry, sad, resolute. The Klan members in the picture aren't looking at the camera. They wouldn't give their names. I'd like to think they look ashamed.

Maybe they were ashamed, all of them, because within a few minutes, the KKK and their supporters all quietly packed up their things and left.

A day after Laquetta Shepard made her stand in Kentucky, a 10 year old boy in Milwaukee threw an egg at a 36 year old man. A friend of his encouraged him to do it. The man started chasing the boy, but the boy had a lot of friends nearby, about sixteen in fact. Sixteen kids, all between the ages of 10-18. They chased the 36 year old man onto the porch of a nearby house and beat him to death with shovels and tree limbs and baseball bats.

From what I've heard, when some of the kids were arrested and charged with first degree murder, their parents didn't bother to show up at the police station.

There is so much in this world that is purely, transcendently good, and so much that is almost too evil to contemplate. And almost all of it comes from single, unthinking acts of individual people. A silent stand. A thrown egg. How can anyone ever really be sure when a moment like that will come, when an action of ours will prove vital, when we are faced with a choice between nobility or complacency, anger or compassion?

There is power in the simplest things. Everyday things. Enough power to shake the world apart or put it back together again.

Posted by Lisa at October 3, 2002 08:12 PM