Isn’t it amazing what it takes for the experiences of your life to come together.
What is it you have wanted more than anything else in life?
For me – since I was little – it was wisdom and understanding.
Funny thing about that – it is exactly what I have received from life. Not money – success – fame – all of that started to break in at different points along the way, but just as quickly as that breaking in started, all of those things – money, success, fame – were killed. How and by who I will probably never know. But wherever there were lessons to be learned I was there and the world seemed to open up to give me its ultimate secrets. The biggest and most guarded secret is the one which showed me if the world defined money, success, fame had broken in, the wisdom and understanding would have stopped and that which had already broken in would be gone in a very short period of time.
Things that seemed obvious to me were a blank to many of my friends. If that is not true, they were magnificent in hiding what they saw and understood. And what I understood was what one fears and that which keeps one from stepping out on faith is really who you are. The fear is of losing those things the world has provided and putting you in a position of want – that seems to be our greatest fear.
So many things come to us for learning and almost all of them we ignore as we look and walk in the opposite direction. We live on assumptions. The assumptions we have put into our minds and hearts because that is what we want to believe about life and that is what we want to believe about those around us and that is what we want to believe about the world in which we live.
One grand truth, being presented on a world-wide stage these days is the moral structure needed for the world to maintain its racism, sexism and all the rest. That moral structure is deep within our souls today and we live by that structure without ever thinking about what that has done to us spiritually. The sacrifices we have made as human beings over the generations to satisfy our most base needs are horrifying when looked at on a world-wide scale.
How many lies do you have to tell yourself to believe and act and create your world around the incredible belief that you and those like you are “better than” everyone else. What lies have Alabamians had to tell themselves to support and vote for Roy Moore. We are living out a morality play each day and it is stark. There is nothing romanticizing what is being played out on the U. S. Government’s stage. It is and has drowned out and is quickly removing every good thing we have ever been about – and that is no exaggeration. How did the ovens in Germany come about? They were created by those who were born, raised, lived and died in a society which was full of normal human beings trying to survive but gradually taking that need to survive and that fear of failure to incredible heights. They were not evil people, they were just like us. They became evil as they became more and more entrenched in the opportunities to achieve untold wealth, great fame, etc. etc.
As human beings we seem to have been born with the need to group together with like minded, like looking, like acting human beings. We have had our tribes which insured our continued existence. There is nothing wrong with tribalism, until the day comes when that tribalism slides into “my tribe is better than your tribe and your tribe must serve my tribe so my tribe can have more of what it wants in this life at the expense of your life and times.”
What do these rummaging have to do with today? It brings to mind and heart all of the huge sacrifices we have made to create a country in which some are better than others; to have created that country on the backs of slaves who were demeaned and considered less than human; to have used the marriage laws to enslave others; and to have used women in various states to satisfy the most prurient needs of humans – which once satisfied become progressively more enslaving and violent and demeaning.
What price have we paid for that to have happened? We live in and have created a society in which we have split the human race into sub-races, all described with some inhuman traits and all claimed as less than. The price for that has been our honor – our integrity – our beauty – our grace – our loveliness – our ability to love one another “as I have loved you.”
These times with Donald Trump have been times which have surfaced and brought front and center the sacrifices these United States have made to maintain as “better than”. We have built what we call a “great country.” We have built a country we consider better than all others and have never seen the sins we have put into that country’s structure. We have built a country on a huge flaw and that flaw is today creating a huge earthquake. What remains when the shaking and spewing up of stuff from the center of the earth stops is anybody’s guess. We have built a country by condemning Jesus to death and then calling for a bowl of soap and water and a towel with which to wash our hands of the carnage that followed. We have build a country and then divorced ourselves from its history. We have built a country and taken no responsibility for the price we demanded others pay for its creation, its wealth, and its continuation in the same vein which caused many generations to take on a system of moral values which they practice and deny at the same time thinking that others can’t see the lie!
Slavery – the Trail of Tears – the opening our doors to immigrants from all countries and then labelling them as “less than” by those deemed on top of the heap – all have prices to pay and today we are paying those prices.
Our value system was shown as bereft when we killed African slaves who ran away, when we lynched Africans who dared to vote. It didn’t matter whether they were 100% or 5% African, they were not on the same high level as others who were redesigned as – not human and a part of the human race – but “White” and better than those who were not white. The north ignored the lynchings and claimed the moral high ground. They had psychic ways to deal with such people. It was a slow painful death they put out. The south engaged in incredible violence and so Billie Holiday sang “Strange Fruit” and everyone knew what that meant the lynchings were so wide spread.
For years the “flowers of the South”, the “Southern Ladies”, had a stereotype and pictures which showed them as “beautifully” adorned and having their place on top of the pedestal, that very high mythical column. They were blinded by the compliments, the supposed lifting them up above ordinary humans, the opening the doors for them by others so their gloved hands didn’t have to touch that which many mortals touched before them. And so much more. We bought our own horribleness because it flattered our egos and built up our vanity. The truth of the degradation, demeaning, violence against were all denied by even – or should I say especially by – the women against whom it was thrown.
Today that has been exposed and is continuing to be exposed on all of its levels. It has been like peeling the onion. We are almost down to the core so the fighting and brutalizing has become blinding in its attempt to maintain what has been and move it even further by making it function in spite of the fact that the cover has been removed and we can see all of this in its stark truth. We have become that corrupt?
Alabama is symbolic of these United States and its historic degradation of those in power. Drunk with its own strength against others “not like them” it is almost as if retribution is at its door step.
We thought the bottom was reached with the carnage on the Petus Bridge, but that was just a way station on the way to greater evil.
To have seen yourself involved in that kind of sin and to move on to ever greater sin and to then claim god on your side, behind what you do, pushing you to ever larger acts of evil – it is mind-blowing how anyone can see you and not recoil from the evil coming from your very pores.
Today, it is not about African Americans on the Petus bridge – it is about the right of males to brutalize, sexually abuse, tear down, misuse and lots of other adjectives – women. What will it be about tomorrow. The same souls are calling the future.
Women in corporations were brought in to serve the men and that happened because the women had been trained to acquiesce and to demean themselves. It becomes understandable how that could have happened when you own a small corporation where you do a lot of the work and see how you can get behind because you become overwhelmed with only 24 hours of the day. And you then see how easy it would be to bring in people who have been labeled “less than”, “not as bright as”, not meant for the higher things in life – especially the exercise of power,” to have them do all of the grunt work and most of the real work while you prance around like a terminally ill peacock taking credit, money, power, success.
The campaign of Roy Moore is a Calling. It is Roy Moore set up as the bait to call folks to maintain a society which allows women to be used as sex objects and then discarded. He is bait to call folks to lie, cheat, steal, and yes – murder – because women have been murdered in the name of preserving and passing down to our children a society which has institutionalized and wants to continue in the way it has been going for hundreds of years. He is bait to have some folks turn away and try to set up the same structure, but less transparent. For these United States to be racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic and all the rest means these United States has transgressed in gross ways against its citizens and against others around the world needed to maintain a “better than” society where the hard and dirty work is done by those scraping and scratching 24/7 just to put food on the table and a roof over their heads. It is a society with trap doors for those who go too far and are not among the group designated as “better than”. Why else would a man become Secretary of the Treasury who has had tens of thousands of people thrown out of their homes onto the street and who lives in a mansion which could house many more than just himself and his wife? Why else would we have laws to prevent any other than those selected by that society to succeed with enormous road blocks to trip, fell and kill those who are able to get around those road blocks? but we have standards which are necessary to continue the denial – we have those few to disprove the rule and maintain them vigorously. Even the KKK had to have a few blacks to maintain their superiority and proclaim their high morality because they accepted those few – the others were not worthy, not human, not equal to.
Amazingly, my life has escaped the anger that should come from living in such a place, but it has. Why? Because that anger is generated in those who share the moral values of those doing the bigotry. To see how far we have gone off the road is to understand the story of Adam and Eve on a level most ignore and just quote the Bible as a very literal book. To demand the you read and understand the Christian and Jewish Scriptures literally is to totally miss what it is saying. The story of Adam and Eve is the story of what could have been. Where we started from and how far into sin, degradation and evil we have fallen. Adam and Eve turned their naked bodies into horrible sinfulness and ugliness they had to hide. Evil crept into their lives, which they cultivated and still today cultivate.
Many of us hoped and thought the horribleness in Alabama would give way to something more beautiful. After witnessing that period of American history in Alabama and in other places around these United States – that example should have brought many to their knees asking forgiveness. Instead it seems to have generated a hard hearted response – a determination to continue on the path of violence towards women as not only justified but able to give one entry into the hallowed halls of government.
So much more could be said – however – the one relevant thing is “How long, O Lord, how long!”
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