Monday, January 16, 2006
Communion
The steepest incline in attempting to argue with a conservative or enlighten an evagelikal must be the dire, gaping chasms {insert broad hand gesture here} of 'difference of opinion.' I say, 'difference of opinion', only because I've stewed almost my entire life in the bland culture of MinnesotaNice; what I really mean to say is appalling ignorance. Ignorant of our species' history. Ignorant of what Howard Zin would call the 'peoples history', ignorant of realpolitik, . . . When more than one in ten 18-34 year old Americans can't find this country on a globe, and an even larger percentage of college graduates lack the reading comprehension to extract a subtle point from five sentences -
To return to my own life and my own responsibilities, I seek to avoid these pitfalls of ignorance and help my fellow sentient beings do the same. Yet when I reach maturity in a society where a great deal of folks believe what happened to Native American's was an unavoidable result of two cultures meeting, rather than an endless litany of individual's choosing greed over compassion. I was born into a decade where John Wayne said in his Playboy interview, 'I believe in white supremacy until the blacks are educated to a point of responsibility. I don't believe in giving authority . . . to irresponsible people.' Thrust into such confusion, surrounded by so many world-views, how does one choose wisesly? How can we know that we are in the right?
Sometimes I drink Jim Beam on the rocks and ponder some dark thoughts. Perhaps the Devil's Advocate be in the proper path, the only way to pragmatically move forward. Maybe militant islam can only be countered with violence and extermination. Maybe our society does require a majority to exist as little more than worker bees, and our public education system should have a clear purpose in training the children of these classes to aspire to little more than shift manager. Maybe I should just care about myself and figure that all those behind me in the race for more consumer goods are just on the wrong side of the 'bell curve.'
Then one encounters something from the internet or a voice on community radio and a spiritual event occurs in that mess of emotionals that I usually just ignore and call my soul. Thoughts and images are conveyed to me in such a way that my consciousness does more than merely comprehend, I feel. For a moment all the isolation of my sentience evaporates. I feel a connection with others, a connection to the spiritual world and to a movement that's working towards making this too often flawed world a bit more of the whole that we can see in our mind's eye.
Martin Luther King jr. was a man who possessed the gift of such communion. Even now, his words and speeches can inspire us and help us find the grit in our souls to continue to fight for a better world. 'Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence,' one of the reverend King's last speeches does it for me. When I first heard this speech several years back, I was driving through the night after a evening of tense conversation with a girl 'friend' I'd been flirting with off and on for a few years. I Listened to Dr. King's amazing rhetoric and realizing that his worldview was more than just the elevation of 'his people', he condemned the military industrial complex and described war in the fashion of an adult - the way we never hear it described. Here was a man who I've been conditioned to revere since my public school education first made a big deal over MLK day, and this guy is so much more than religion and bus boycotts (although one cannot seek to understand him without those elements.) This guy's moral compass forced him to try to take on the whole world's problems, not just his own. He sought to attack the tree of evil at the roots, not merely pruning a few branches. When I heard this speech I felt so relieved, so many of the concepts of liberalism, so many of the particulars of understanding history; I shared them with Martin Luther freaking King jr. I became a lot more confident that I was in the right at that moment. I was so entranced by his words that when my cell rang, and the girl's number came up - with all that implied - I turned it off and took the long way home.
"True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries and say: "This is not just." It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and say: "This is not just." The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them in not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: "This way of settling differences is not just. This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of people normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psycologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death."
Please consider taking a quarter of an hour out of your day to read this speech - or find a audio version to download to your portable player - I believe this is an important step in nourishing one's soul and making the world a better place.
To return to my own life and my own responsibilities, I seek to avoid these pitfalls of ignorance and help my fellow sentient beings do the same. Yet when I reach maturity in a society where a great deal of folks believe what happened to Native American's was an unavoidable result of two cultures meeting, rather than an endless litany of individual's choosing greed over compassion. I was born into a decade where John Wayne said in his Playboy interview, 'I believe in white supremacy until the blacks are educated to a point of responsibility. I don't believe in giving authority . . . to irresponsible people.' Thrust into such confusion, surrounded by so many world-views, how does one choose wisesly? How can we know that we are in the right?
Sometimes I drink Jim Beam on the rocks and ponder some dark thoughts. Perhaps the Devil's Advocate be in the proper path, the only way to pragmatically move forward. Maybe militant islam can only be countered with violence and extermination. Maybe our society does require a majority to exist as little more than worker bees, and our public education system should have a clear purpose in training the children of these classes to aspire to little more than shift manager. Maybe I should just care about myself and figure that all those behind me in the race for more consumer goods are just on the wrong side of the 'bell curve.'
Then one encounters something from the internet or a voice on community radio and a spiritual event occurs in that mess of emotionals that I usually just ignore and call my soul. Thoughts and images are conveyed to me in such a way that my consciousness does more than merely comprehend, I feel. For a moment all the isolation of my sentience evaporates. I feel a connection with others, a connection to the spiritual world and to a movement that's working towards making this too often flawed world a bit more of the whole that we can see in our mind's eye.
Martin Luther King jr. was a man who possessed the gift of such communion. Even now, his words and speeches can inspire us and help us find the grit in our souls to continue to fight for a better world. 'Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence,' one of the reverend King's last speeches does it for me. When I first heard this speech several years back, I was driving through the night after a evening of tense conversation with a girl 'friend' I'd been flirting with off and on for a few years. I Listened to Dr. King's amazing rhetoric and realizing that his worldview was more than just the elevation of 'his people', he condemned the military industrial complex and described war in the fashion of an adult - the way we never hear it described. Here was a man who I've been conditioned to revere since my public school education first made a big deal over MLK day, and this guy is so much more than religion and bus boycotts (although one cannot seek to understand him without those elements.) This guy's moral compass forced him to try to take on the whole world's problems, not just his own. He sought to attack the tree of evil at the roots, not merely pruning a few branches. When I heard this speech I felt so relieved, so many of the concepts of liberalism, so many of the particulars of understanding history; I shared them with Martin Luther freaking King jr. I became a lot more confident that I was in the right at that moment. I was so entranced by his words that when my cell rang, and the girl's number came up - with all that implied - I turned it off and took the long way home.
"True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries and say: "This is not just." It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and say: "This is not just." The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them in not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: "This way of settling differences is not just. This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of people normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psycologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death."
Please consider taking a quarter of an hour out of your day to read this speech - or find a audio version to download to your portable player - I believe this is an important step in nourishing one's soul and making the world a better place.
Comments:
<< Home
Thanks for the comment, Zoe.
I hope that I did not convey any disrespect with my comments about 'appalling ignorance, - often I sort of write towards an implied reader that I don't like very much, but that's a bad play since the only people who do read my stuff are the types of people I usually like. The Appallingly Ignorant don't read too many blogs (at least not ones that are not connected to the Drudge Report.)
I learned a lot from reading your comments here. The world is so big and complicated and the individual tales of suffering and abandonment, well, they don't get a lot of media play. I try to absorb as many of them as my spirit can withstand, thanks for staying connected to the world and sharing your experience.
When I occassionaly get into arguements regarding race with others, the question often comes down to, 'Well, what are we going to do about it now?' I think that the first thing we need to do as sentient beings is actually understand what has happened to the various races - to be intellectually honest about our history.
There ain't no way we're getting any better as a society when so many of our citizens live in fantasy land.
Post a Comment
I hope that I did not convey any disrespect with my comments about 'appalling ignorance, - often I sort of write towards an implied reader that I don't like very much, but that's a bad play since the only people who do read my stuff are the types of people I usually like. The Appallingly Ignorant don't read too many blogs (at least not ones that are not connected to the Drudge Report.)
I learned a lot from reading your comments here. The world is so big and complicated and the individual tales of suffering and abandonment, well, they don't get a lot of media play. I try to absorb as many of them as my spirit can withstand, thanks for staying connected to the world and sharing your experience.
When I occassionaly get into arguements regarding race with others, the question often comes down to, 'Well, what are we going to do about it now?' I think that the first thing we need to do as sentient beings is actually understand what has happened to the various races - to be intellectually honest about our history.
There ain't no way we're getting any better as a society when so many of our citizens live in fantasy land.
<< Home
