It’s an age-old story: good and evil meet on a battlefield. Good always wins.
We here, on the Chapel Hill side of Tobacco road, are good. We are light. We are the color of the sky on the most beautiful of days.
They are evil, darkness, represented by a devil.
So we meet on a battlefield of wooden boards. We meet on glossy logos and under streaming banners.
We kneel to remember a hero. Our display of unity, we think, is heartwarming.
“It gave me chills,” someone said.
But while we put on a show, the poor–who Smith championed–are still poor, narratives of racism are still systemically imbued into our every moment, and though we ache as one tonight, we are not as united as we often pretend.
We are the greatest rivalry ever. And we kneel honoring our greatest hero. It strikes me that he might prefer we bent our elbows, opened our hearts, and got to work tackling society’s greatest problems instead.
We are goodness and light. It felt true when thumbnail sized snowflakes dropped from the heavens this afternoon. I stood on the slippery red-brick paths that criss cross the quad and I thought about how much I love this place.
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But in the wake of this loss, a loss in which evil seems to have trumped good, perhaps it’s time to reconsider whether we deserve to call ourselves the light, the good. And I mean that in a way so much bigger than basketball.
It’s been a hard year in Chapel Hill. The kind of year that makes you wonder if the hits will ever stop coming. This fall it was revealed that the university that declares itself so honest and good that the sky colors itself after us, cheated for 18 years.
Buildings scattered across our campus are named after Klan leaders. And we don’t talk about it. We don’t say: THESE MEN WERE EVIL. We don’t say it because it means admitting that a part of ourselves is evil. Their money built this place and though we’ve come a long way since then, we’re still a far cry from perfect.
And last week, three young, beautiful lives were taken from the greatest community of people I’ve met at UNC. What is this place if it allows for tragedy like this? How can we say we’re good?
Tonight there will be no hugging of strangers in the street. We don’t do that in sadness. Only joy.
But we should do it in sadness. We should stop pretending like our losses don’t matter and like our brokenness isn’t real. Because we are not good. Things are not good.
So we can pretend this way we’re feeling is about a game. We can pretend this heartbreak feels this way because of the rivalry. We can pretend it’s just basketball. Except it’s not.
It’s a reminder that we have a lot of work to do to win the battle of good versus evil. It must start by dealing with the evil inside ourselves.
