Racism Does Not Equal Love Your Neighbor
Recently, I watched the film The Help, which I highly recommend. Taking place in the 1960's south, it tells the story of a young woman seeking to right the social injustices suffered by black woman maids in Jackson, Mississippi. Watching the drama unfold, I couldn't help but be astounded at how far our society has come. In the '60s women were nothing, and their lives were trite and irrelevant apart from a man. Black women's lives were even more so.
Today, my apartment complex of hundreds, probably nearly a thousand homes, is run and managed by BLACK WOMEN. Almost 60 years ago those awesome ladies would have struggle to even get jobs as maids, working and cowing to every whim and desire, servile and patronized.
Whites wouldn't even touch blacks. They feared them like some kind of plague carrying animal and forced them to use different doors, sections of restaurants, water fountains, bathrooms, and rows on the bus. The lengths and expense that people went through to segregate society is astonishing. Different schools even. Different hospitals. The cost of such separation must have been immense. I remember being shocked by this knowledge as a third grader, as most of my friends weren't white, and while it had occurred to me that they were different, it hadn't occurred to me that it mattered. One of my favorite teachers was a black lady, and it was she who opened my eyes to this in the third grade. I remember her teaching us about segregation by separating us according to shirt color. I ended up at the back of every line. I will never forget that. I will never forget wondering why people cared what color someone is. I still wonder. Who cares? Apparently people used to.
Racism on a grand scale is a lie. It doesn't exist. We perpetuate prejudice as individuals out of ignorance. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s dream has come true. Why can't we see it? Are we too greedy? Too stupid? Too AFRAID? As a child growing up in the nineties I had to be TOLD what racism was, it was so absent in our culture.
Why do we still act like it's real? Why are we still do divided?
Sixty years ago whites wouldn't drink from the same water fountains or sit on the same toilets as those niggers. Ironically, not much has changed in our blatantly stupid and asinine treatment of Mexicans and gays. A human being is a human being, not a spic a nigger or a faggot. Offended? I don't care. Wake up. Get a life. We are all we have, and this is the only Earth we get. I think it's high time we left our fear of differences and the unknown behind and came out of the darkness of ignorance into the light.
It's great how Jesus simplifies and clarifies things for us, makes them inescapable. After all, he himself said, my yoke is easy, and my burden is light. It's not that hard folks. I know I've brought this up before, but until we get it, this must be brought up again and again and again. Maybe if I shout it loud enough you might actually get it. He clarifies the Old Testament for us, makes it easy. Tells us what the point really was all along. Go back and read the Old Testament. Laws that don't make sense, no one care who begot who, and what the hell is with the wheels within wheels and eyeballs, and the horned monsters?
Then there's Jesus. Quiet, loving, raging, fighting Jesus. He comes to set us free from dogma and religion, free from our ignorance, free from the meaningless labyrinth of rules, free from ourselves, and sets us on the straight and narrow. A scribe asks Jesus, What is the greatest commandment? After all, there are hundreds. Jesus replies with infinite wisdom and grace, Love God with everything you are, on all levels of your being, and the second is similar: Love your neighbor in the same way you love yourself. Simple. Serene. Almost impossible to grasp. It is the straight and narrow, and there are few who find it. He says that those two things sum up all of the Law and Prophets, all the confusing stuff in the Jewish holy book they called the Torah and we now call the Old Testament.
Later, just to clarify the point, and make it really, really unavoidable and painful, a Lawyer asks Christ the same question. He decides to tell a story. A Jew had to travel through Samaria. Oh, now there's a touchy subject. Samaria. Nigger town. Samaratins were nobody's. They weren't garbage. They were mulattos of Jewish/Assyrian ancestory that neither pure race would talk to or go near. I can see Jesus telling a white dinner party in the '60's about a white banker having to walk through the nigger neighborhood late at night. The audience inhales with fearful anticipation. Queue robbery. The banker is lying dead by the side of the road gasping for breath. A pastor and a senator pass by in their cars, but fearing the expected assault, they drive on in ignorance and blindness. How could they know he was robbed by whites and not blacks in the first place? As it happens, it is a black man who saves the banker. The banker becomes the first white patient at the local colored hospital.
As the crowd falls silent, confused, he asks, Who was the true neighbor to the man who was robbed? reluctantly, the lawyer replies, The one (can't bring himself to say the 'S' word) who had mercy on him. Then Christ sums up the whole Bible and all morality and says, Then go and do likewise.
We will die, and our Earth will be consumed with our weapons of greed and hatred and misunderstanding unless we can evolve past our fears, past our religions, past our politics, grow up, get a life, and learn to go and do likewise. This is it. This is the only thing that matters. Love really is all you need. It is the answer. The only answer. The only thing the world needs and has yet to see on the grand scale that it continues to see war and revolution over and over and over again. And yet we keep finding ourselves back here in the same place wondering why we're running in circles.
The world is bigger than just you or me. The world is us, and we are all we have. There will be no more after this. No do overs. No second chances. This is our ONLY chance. Are we bigger than prejudice? Are we smart enough to see past the lies we are being fed to see the Reality plainly in front of us? Will we die in our ignorance? Only you can decide. Only you can be the change you wish to see in the world. Only you are the final moral authority in your life, the one who chooses with finality what you will think and what you will do.
I believe we are on the threshold of either collapse or unimaginable growth. The choice is up to each of us.
Racism is bullshit. It's garbage. I can't think of anything more ignorant or less grounded in any kind of reasonable fact. The more time we spend fighting each other, blaming each other for what we haven't even done, the less time we spend asking what that man behind the curtain is up to. Don't let yourself get distracted. It's all a lie. Wake up. Get a life. We've let ourselves get trapped in a self-perpetuating cycle of bondage and destruction. Will no one listen? Will no one hear? Wisdom cries out in the streets.
I believe another world is possible. I'm just afraid we may be too deaf to hear it.
Recently, I watched the film The Help, which I highly recommend. Taking place in the 1960's south, it tells the story of a young woman seeking to right the social injustices suffered by black woman maids in Jackson, Mississippi. Watching the drama unfold, I couldn't help but be astounded at how far our society has come. In the '60s women were nothing, and their lives were trite and irrelevant apart from a man. Black women's lives were even more so.
Today, my apartment complex of hundreds, probably nearly a thousand homes, is run and managed by BLACK WOMEN. Almost 60 years ago those awesome ladies would have struggle to even get jobs as maids, working and cowing to every whim and desire, servile and patronized.
Whites wouldn't even touch blacks. They feared them like some kind of plague carrying animal and forced them to use different doors, sections of restaurants, water fountains, bathrooms, and rows on the bus. The lengths and expense that people went through to segregate society is astonishing. Different schools even. Different hospitals. The cost of such separation must have been immense. I remember being shocked by this knowledge as a third grader, as most of my friends weren't white, and while it had occurred to me that they were different, it hadn't occurred to me that it mattered. One of my favorite teachers was a black lady, and it was she who opened my eyes to this in the third grade. I remember her teaching us about segregation by separating us according to shirt color. I ended up at the back of every line. I will never forget that. I will never forget wondering why people cared what color someone is. I still wonder. Who cares? Apparently people used to.
Racism on a grand scale is a lie. It doesn't exist. We perpetuate prejudice as individuals out of ignorance. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s dream has come true. Why can't we see it? Are we too greedy? Too stupid? Too AFRAID? As a child growing up in the nineties I had to be TOLD what racism was, it was so absent in our culture.
Why do we still act like it's real? Why are we still do divided?
Sixty years ago whites wouldn't drink from the same water fountains or sit on the same toilets as those niggers. Ironically, not much has changed in our blatantly stupid and asinine treatment of Mexicans and gays. A human being is a human being, not a spic a nigger or a faggot. Offended? I don't care. Wake up. Get a life. We are all we have, and this is the only Earth we get. I think it's high time we left our fear of differences and the unknown behind and came out of the darkness of ignorance into the light.
It's great how Jesus simplifies and clarifies things for us, makes them inescapable. After all, he himself said, my yoke is easy, and my burden is light. It's not that hard folks. I know I've brought this up before, but until we get it, this must be brought up again and again and again. Maybe if I shout it loud enough you might actually get it. He clarifies the Old Testament for us, makes it easy. Tells us what the point really was all along. Go back and read the Old Testament. Laws that don't make sense, no one care who begot who, and what the hell is with the wheels within wheels and eyeballs, and the horned monsters?
Then there's Jesus. Quiet, loving, raging, fighting Jesus. He comes to set us free from dogma and religion, free from our ignorance, free from the meaningless labyrinth of rules, free from ourselves, and sets us on the straight and narrow. A scribe asks Jesus, What is the greatest commandment? After all, there are hundreds. Jesus replies with infinite wisdom and grace, Love God with everything you are, on all levels of your being, and the second is similar: Love your neighbor in the same way you love yourself. Simple. Serene. Almost impossible to grasp. It is the straight and narrow, and there are few who find it. He says that those two things sum up all of the Law and Prophets, all the confusing stuff in the Jewish holy book they called the Torah and we now call the Old Testament.
Later, just to clarify the point, and make it really, really unavoidable and painful, a Lawyer asks Christ the same question. He decides to tell a story. A Jew had to travel through Samaria. Oh, now there's a touchy subject. Samaria. Nigger town. Samaratins were nobody's. They weren't garbage. They were mulattos of Jewish/Assyrian ancestory that neither pure race would talk to or go near. I can see Jesus telling a white dinner party in the '60's about a white banker having to walk through the nigger neighborhood late at night. The audience inhales with fearful anticipation. Queue robbery. The banker is lying dead by the side of the road gasping for breath. A pastor and a senator pass by in their cars, but fearing the expected assault, they drive on in ignorance and blindness. How could they know he was robbed by whites and not blacks in the first place? As it happens, it is a black man who saves the banker. The banker becomes the first white patient at the local colored hospital.
As the crowd falls silent, confused, he asks, Who was the true neighbor to the man who was robbed? reluctantly, the lawyer replies, The one (can't bring himself to say the 'S' word) who had mercy on him. Then Christ sums up the whole Bible and all morality and says, Then go and do likewise.
We will die, and our Earth will be consumed with our weapons of greed and hatred and misunderstanding unless we can evolve past our fears, past our religions, past our politics, grow up, get a life, and learn to go and do likewise. This is it. This is the only thing that matters. Love really is all you need. It is the answer. The only answer. The only thing the world needs and has yet to see on the grand scale that it continues to see war and revolution over and over and over again. And yet we keep finding ourselves back here in the same place wondering why we're running in circles.
The world is bigger than just you or me. The world is us, and we are all we have. There will be no more after this. No do overs. No second chances. This is our ONLY chance. Are we bigger than prejudice? Are we smart enough to see past the lies we are being fed to see the Reality plainly in front of us? Will we die in our ignorance? Only you can decide. Only you can be the change you wish to see in the world. Only you are the final moral authority in your life, the one who chooses with finality what you will think and what you will do.
I believe we are on the threshold of either collapse or unimaginable growth. The choice is up to each of us.
Racism is bullshit. It's garbage. I can't think of anything more ignorant or less grounded in any kind of reasonable fact. The more time we spend fighting each other, blaming each other for what we haven't even done, the less time we spend asking what that man behind the curtain is up to. Don't let yourself get distracted. It's all a lie. Wake up. Get a life. We've let ourselves get trapped in a self-perpetuating cycle of bondage and destruction. Will no one listen? Will no one hear? Wisdom cries out in the streets.
I believe another world is possible. I'm just afraid we may be too deaf to hear it.
addison:
Thanks for the FR!