A long article that began on the front page of the Sunday New York Times told a powerful human story from, of all places, Fort Smith.
It could change the world if we'd put aside blind bigotry and polarizing political nonsense and let it.
The story breaks through stereotypes of poor white folks, conservative Southern communities, Muslim immigrants and, thus, through prejudice itself.
The poor white folks in the story can't afford to fix the knock in the minivan, much less Mom's newly diagnosed leukemia. Her oldest kid, Abraham, 20, a high school dropout, is not a bad seed, but, as the story will reveal, potentially a quite good one.
He's simply bored, at sea, descended to meet the low expectations others have of him and that he's inevitably come to have of himself. That dates to his preschool days with an abusive father who had a seizure and died when Abraham was 5.
Everyone needs pals, people to hang with, especially when there's nothing to do and nowhere to go and no higher status to which to aspire.
Naturally, one of Abraham's pals was a bad influence, especially after the two of them depleted a bottle of cheap whiskey one night last October.
So, yeah, Abraham drove his friend in Mom's minivan to the local mosque. And, yeah, the friend spray-painted a swastika and curses and "go home" on the building. And, yeah, Abraham woke up the next day with a hangover and churning guilt.
He'd been kind of friendly--to the extent he was friendly at all in those days--with a Muslim kid in high school.
And, yeah, there had been a security camera at the mosque. And, yeah, Abraham got brought up on felony charges and couldn't make bail and wound up sleeping on a blue mat as the third occupant of a small jail cell.
That's when he wrote two letters--one to his mom, apologizing for letting her down, and the other to "Dear Masjid Al Salam Mosque," saying he could hardly express how sorry he was for an action he hadn't really meant.
That brings us to the recipients of the letter. They included local Muslim immigrant doctors, a local Muslim immigrant CPA and a local immigrant Palestinian from outside Damascus who operates A&H Auto Sales in Fort Smith. The used-car dealer is pictured in the Times sitting in his office decorated with the U.S. flag, the Arkansas flag and a Razorback pennant.
The used-car-dealer's son--he was the friend of sorts of Abraham back in high school.
These Fort Smith Muslim immigrants love America, its opportunity, the fairness of the open availability of achievement. The American economic way of life had treated them better than it had treated Abraham's family, which, one supposes, is the basis for native-born resentment.
These Muslim immigrant families had been in Fort Smith for more than two decades, not hiding, by any means, but keeping a relatively low religious profile because that seemed wise.
They had been heartened by the community response to the news of the vandalism--by support for the mosque and disgust over the act--from Christian people, the local Buddhist temple and others. Their strategic low profile had been violated, but it had turned out for the good.
Then they received Abraham's letter. They forgave him. They went to the prosecutor and said they didn't want the young man's life ruined by years in prison.
The prosecutor insisted on Abraham's guilty plea to a felony, but passed along the victims' request for mercy to the judge, who grudgingly accepted it.
Abraham got out of jail and found employment at Goodwill.
We can all hope he stays out of trouble.
Back home, he wanted to go to the mosque to thank those who had forgiven him and spared him prison. But authorities said no, owing to terms of his probation.
He went on Facebook--of course, because everybody needs an outlet for expression--to lament that he had no clear sense of himself.
He got a response--from his old high school Muslim friend-of-a-sort, the son of the Razorback-supporting Muslim used-car dealer.
The response called him "bro" and told him to quit beating himself up because, speaking for the entire Muslim community of Fort Smith, everything had been forgiven from the moment his letter was received.
How could all that change the world?
That would happen by a new understanding that there is something deep in our human fabric that is better than our polarizing cultural stereotypes and hateful and superficially expedient political rhetoric.
Maybe we haven't properly understood poor white people and their challenges. Maybe we haven't properly understood conservative Southern communities and their kindnesses. Maybe we haven't properly understood Muslim immigrants and their quietly solid contributions.
The article from Sunday's front page of the Times should be assigned reading for us all.
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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 08/29/2017