In the past couple years I’ve read the bios of a number of founding fathers—who enslaved people. All of them expressed their distaste of slavery and how it would eventually end, but not yet. The system couldn’t be turned upside down.

But when 618,222 soldiers died in a civil war, everything was turned upside down. Lincoln said, until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword.

He referenced half a dozen scripture references in this address, a preacher preaching, and not a politician trying to get a vote

We are at a similar place in history where the casualties are high—this time black victims of police. We tolerate Mass incarceration, for profit prisons, and the militarization of police as a society because we can’t imagine what what would happen if it turned upside down.

Drew Faust shows how the rapidly evolving embalming techniques during the civil war caused a shift in consciousness to the magnitude of the dead in a way that names in a newspaper never could.

In a similar way, the videos of police killings,given to us by a rapidly emerging technology, are showing the scale of these deaths to every one of us

So what will we do? What will white people like me do? Will we urge our elected officials to deal with these issues? Lincoln, married to the daughter of a slave owner (a man who lived in the White House during the civil war) was not a full abolitionist at the beginning of the war

By the end of the war he saw slavery as the main cause of the civil war. This was just a couple years—and 600000+ war deaths.

We live in a republic of suffering. It is only when we realize we are all wounded by these deaths that we will see change. This was Lincoln’s point in his 2nd inaugural.

Will we be like Lincoln and believe the whole thing needs to be turned upside down?