What Ruby Bridged Taught Me about Hatred

     
     I gasped at the destruction at our city center as I walked toward the Denver Art Museum. Statues defaced by protesters, buildings graffitied.
     But when I entered the museum, it wasn’t my Covid mask that left me breathless. It was this Norman Rockwell painting capturing a six-year-old desegregating a school in New Orleans in 1960. Day after day Ruby Bridges entered the school to the taunts of protesters who screamed they wanted to poison her. One morning before Ruby entered, she paused, and her lips moved. When she went inside, her teacher asked, “What were you saying?”     
     “I was praying for the people in the street,” Ruby said. “I pray for them every morning and every afternoon when I go home.” She usually prayed from several blocks away, but that day she forgot. So she stopped at the school steps, turned toward the rioters, and asked God to be good to them and forgive them “because they don’t know what they’re doing.”     
     These days we often feel that others don’t know what they’re doing. Of course “our side” is right. It’s the “other side” that’s lunatic.     
​     But I’m weary of the hatred, including from myself. It’s poisonous. I think it’s time I pray like Ruby that God will be good to those I disagree with. I ought to pray for “my side,” too, because it doesn’t always know what it’s doing.     
     Maybe, just maybe, I’ll discover I have something in common with someone from the “other side,” as Cosy Sheridan sings about in this song. ​