A Black man was murdered, and there are flowers.
Rev. Dr. Kerri Parker, Executive Director, Wisconsin Council of Churches
Rest in peace, Corey Durell Ruiz. Rest in power.
There are flowers where public safety officials tried to wash his blood from the pavement, at an intersection by the earthy-crunchy co-op frequented by fair trade shoppers willing to navigate a tight parking lot. An inconvenience. Traffic was blocked.
A day ago, upstanders, aghast, filmed video that would let viewers around the country count the seconds from the taser to the percussion of the firing of the gun. One. Two. Three. The evening symphony on the square was interrupted. There are videos of well-dressed concertgoers dining at white-clothed tables, not quite knowing what to do while protesters stand behind them insisting on justice because they had just been force fed another open-air execution.
Among all the images shared on social media yesterday, I chose to let my eyes rest on a photo of Corey Ruiz when he was in middle school. Before he was a nameless possibly unhoused man dislodged from a bicycle, before a whole history was invented for him or a record looked up. Before allegations of doors being tested and fears of unpredictable Black men with knives in quirky neighborhoods. He was somebody’s middle school classmate, friend, child, a child of God.
There are many complicated stories being told about Corey, about the police response, and about the quickly rising protests. Before he was thirty and dead in the street, and a symbol, Corey was simply a human being. He needed a safe place to live, and food to eat, respect, care and love. Yet, at a large scale, the litany of executions and incarcerations and shortages of housing tells the ugly truth that we deal falsely with one another. We do not rise to the occasion of community. The prophet Jeremiah proclaims divine anger at such lack of care: “They have treated the wound of my people carelessly, saying, ‘Peace, peace,’ when there is no peace.”[1]
A Black man whose inconvenient presence revealed the brokenness that condemned him was executed at the crossroads where others died before. Some of us run away from Jesus on the cross. Some of us bear witness and some take on acts of compassion in its shadow.
The street corner is a place of sacrificial offering, and we have placed our flowers there.
A Black man was murdered, and we made an altar.
Reach for a new and better story.
But go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners. Matthew 9:13 NIV
[1] Jeremiah 6:14
