Condi Rice is on 60 Minutes in the living room on the television. She talked about the 1963 church bombing in Birmingham where she was growing up that killed four little girls – girls she knew. She sees that event as Terrorism, and a root of her strong feelings about modern Terrorism. She sees it in terms of good and evil.
On Monday, September 16, 1963, I was eating lunch in a Toddle House restaurant. It was the summer between college and medical school. While I had been peripherally involved in the Civil Rights Movement in college, it wasn’t yet a passion. But that day, I picked up a discarded newspaper and read about the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. It was a defining moment for me too. I could never again not see the hatred of the segregation and the racism in my native South. I don’t know why that particular event was the one that lit the fire – there had been plenty of other equally horrible incidents of outrageous racism – but it was the one that personally woke me up.
As I listened to Condi, I understood why she feels the way she feels, but it was interesting how differently it affected the two of us. For her, it solidified issues of good and evil. For me, it ended that kind of thinking forever. I remember exactly what I thought that day. These bombers had been so sure that they were right, they had felt justified in setting off a bomb that ended the lives of four innocent children. They thought they were "good" and that black people were "evil." They could depersonalize people based on the color of their skin, and do something monsterous because they could think that way. I wanted to see them as evil, the bombers, but I couldn’t make that kind of thinking work anymore. I saw that trying to make them evil was doing exactly what they had done. I saw that black and white thinking was wrong, both kinds. What I learned that day was that "good" versus "evil" was a lethal way to think.
I’m not arguing with Condi. She felt what she felt. I’m a white guy and I don’t know what I would have felt were I black, or living in Birmingham, or actually knew those girls personally. But I do know that I can’t bring off "good" and "evil" thinking anymore. That day changed it for me for all times…
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