The United States continues to grapple with cultural tension over race, the military and religion.

We talk about the latest news around these topics and listener feedback in today's episode.

This is Sarah from the Left and Beth from the Right.

You're listening to Pantsy Politics.

You're shouting new insolids, plenty of nuance.

Welcome to another episode everyone.

Our Friday episodes we try to keep a little bit shorter than our Tuesday episodes and just run through the news and get to some feedback.

So we'll start with a couple of quick topics.

I want to dimension that Mahayadine DeBaha, who was 32 years old and kind of made famous by grabbing a Confederate flag from a protester in Charleston, South Carolina,

was killed on Tuesday morning in New Orleans.

He was riding his bike and was shot and killed.

The New Orleans Police Department has not at the time of our recording released additional details about this incident, but it's certainly sad.

This was a young man who by all accounts was doing a lot for his community, a lot for the Black Lives Matter movement.

Just very sorry to see his life ended too soon.

Another reminder of racial and cultural tension happened in our home state this week.

A Confederate statue was vandalized in Louisville.

And I think both of these things are just poignant examples of how the tension that we're experiencing around race, even when it's not making the national headlines, is still just bubbling through our communities everywhere and it's something that we're confronting every single day.

Absolutely.

I just finished Brenny Brown's Braving the Wilderness and she talks in particular about sort of Black Lives Matter and how race and gender and class are this undercurrent of pain and tension inside of our society.

When it comes to the surface, I think we all react differently, but one of the arguments he makes which I think is so powerful is that sometimes it's just important to witness it before we react to just sit with it a minute and not react immediately when a Confederate statue is being attacked.

When a Confederate statue is vandalized or a Black Lives Matter protest or a shot, but just to sit with the pain so many feel in our society that the conflict that we are still dealing with from decades of racial injustice that continues to this day is hard.

It's hard. You want to have an opinion and have a solution and it's hard to just sit with the conflict and pain around these subjects in our culture.

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