You’re Not A Christian…

With the recent passage of more totalitarian laws attempting to ban abortions by criminalizing it, in direct violation of established judicial decisions to the contrary, it’s become clear that there are no Christians in this country. If there were Christians, they’d be electing people to their legislatures who will fund free prenatal care, pregnant mother wellness programs, and low cost birth centers. If there were Christians in this country, they wouldn’t be terrorizing women who are just trying to do what is right for them and their family. However, they ignore the teachings and instructions of their supposed savior, Jesus Christ, and go on a power trip where they feel obligated to force complete strangers to adhere to arbitrary rules designed by back-door moneygrubbers whose only goal in life are to be emperor-gods and own everything.

So, you aren’t a Christian. You don’t love your neighbor. You don’t do and give to others the attitude and compassion you demand others show you. It’s all lip service to you, so you can look at yourself in the mirror and lie to yourself about what a wonderful person you are. You, yes you, are what’s wrong with country. You are why the USA will never be great, never was great, and is the laughing stock of the world.

Maybe you should try following the teachings of Christ. Be a true Christian. People might like you. Also, you might get into heaven when you die, should it be real.

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What’s the Answer

One thing I’ve not seen during this election cycle, or maybe I’ve just missed it, is the answer to the basic question that Trump’s election phrase, or ‘call to arms’, raises. If it’s time to “Make America Great Again”? When did America stop being great? When Obama was elected? When Bush the Younger was elected? Or maybe it was when Clinton the Husband was elected? Do we go as far back as Bush the Elder? Reagan? Or even Carter?  

The earliest presidential election I remember is the Carter/Ford contest. From then on, I’ve never thought America wasn’t “great”. It was and is great. What has changed over those forty years has been a rise in technology and our awareness of the rest of the world. No longer does the nightly news give us a snapshot of what’s happening to us and the world in a brief thirty minutes or hour. No longer is our information limited to a few columns in a newspaper, leaving us wrapped in a nice warm cocoon of world ignorance. Now we can sit and stare at news and opinions 24/7. Be bombarded by what’s happening (and nearly always the worst of what’s happening) next door, in the next town, the next state, or the next continent. And the news is near instantaneous from the moment the event happened.  We see and feel the worst that humanity experiences and can inflict on ourselves and/or the world. Information is tossed into our faces and we think we’re informed. People sit on the other side of the camera blathering on about something they have a passing knowledge of, or maybe actually have a PHD in, and we think we are now the next Einstein or Curie (as in Marie. Go read a history book). Or we realized just how little we and everyone in this country knows. We wonder where this country went wrong. Memories of our parents and grandparents accomplishments play through our head and we think, “my generation hasn’t done squat”.  
You and your generation are not losers. Each generation, I suspect, thinks this. America is STILL great.  
Do we have a Congress that has spent the last eight years largely sitting on their hands with a stick up their collective butts? Yes, but that’s because ‘We the People’ put them there.  
Do we still spend over half our annual budget on the military? Yes, but isn’t this one of the things people consider an aspect of our “Great”ness?
Look, many people point to the generation that fought WWII as “the Greatest Generation”. That war was a pivotal moment in human history for a lot of reasons. Yes, it was a completely modern war fought with very modern and increasingly advanced weaponry, culminating in the atom bomb. The pivotal aspect I’m talking about is the philosophical part. Good versus evil. Love overcoming hate.
Each generation seems to fight the same fight as their parents and grandparents. Each generation has to come to terms with the inherent hate we’ve been taught from a very young age and may not even realize is present inside us. WWII was our grandparents or great-grandparents fight against hate masked as nationalism run rampant. Hitler used the Great Depression and post WWI economic woes to turn an entire nation against anyone not a white Germanic person. And despite America’s own racial issues, we joined with the rest of the world to put an end to such rampant nationalistic racism. It was a fight that nearly wiped out an entire generation around the world. Millions died in that war. In some ways, all of humanity has been recovering from a species induced case of PTSD (undiagnosed, of course). Yet, the survivors would say “That was when America was great.”
The Civil Rights Movement became the next generations’ epic fight. Many still battle away in that war. A war which may never truly end, unfortunately. However, likely having heard their parent’s tales of horror from WWII, that generation chose a more political and philosophical route. Protests. Sit-ins. And what’s happened is a slow change in how America and its people see themselves. For some, though, it might be seen as a ‘loss of prestige’. Or maybe power. I’m from after that era, so my understanding of what that generation might feel they lost is hazy. However, they would say “That was when America was great.”
Now, the Equal Rights Movement seems to be the current generation’s fight. The technology fueling the world we live in gives a power to the individual which didn’t really exist before. They look at the fights our forefathers struggled through to make the world the way it is now, but see that so many are still not equal and can’t share in the freedoms that so many other have. So they’ve stood up and said “Hold on now. What about me? What about my brother or sister or aunt or uncle or friend? Why can’t they _____?” Yet their parents look at them and say “Shush! Don’t rock the boat.” Then they turn and shake their heads, think of how wonderful the world seemed in their childhood and mutter, “That was when America was great.”
Yet, those parents have made America great. Have made the entire world great. Look at the world we all live in here and now. Yes, there are still problems to be fixed, some threatening humanity’s very existence, but look at the world. Humanity lives in a world more at peace than any previous era. It’s filled with doctors and medicines which are allowing 7 billion plus people to crowd this ever shrinking world. Technology that lets someone in America talk to someone in Tibet one day, and be standing before them the next. It is a world of the future only dreamt of by our grandparents and great-grandparents childhood minds. A world where everyone wants to live equal to their neighbors. A world where people are on the verge of living on another world for the first time. A world where we KNOW other stars have planets orbiting them, not just speculating about it.  
To the ancient world, or even the world of this country’s founders, we live as though gods. Gods jaded to the wonder we are surrounded by on a daily basis. A greatness that surrounds us, lifts us up, and fills us with a health that once was only a prayer and a hope.  
So stop belittling the fights you parents, grandparents, and every human before you fought. Look to the world and say not “Make America Great Again.” Rather, say “Let’s Treat the World As Our Equal.”
Or, simply, let’s not bully each other.

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Making America Great

October 11, 2016

Tragedy strikes again.

And again.

Gunfire. Knives. Flight. Fight.

People die and people lament. Words of hate and bigotry spew forth from mouths faster than the brains controlling those tongues know what to make of it all.

Deport. Ban. Burn. Hate.

Hate. It comes so easily. When we don’t know what something is, we fear it. That fear brews within us hatred far faster than anything else can. And when you hate something, you want to see it destroyed or dead. Everyday, this sort of fear-induced anger clouds our judgement and distances us from our own heart. It leads us to look for someone or someones to protect us, which lets that person or persons to chip away at the bedrock of what makes America “great”.

We pride ourselves as Americans, on being the “Land of the Free” or “The Free-ist Country in the World”. However, do we really have freedom? Everyone is assumed to be carrying weapons or explosives in airports. We can’t marry more than one person at a time, we apparently can’t go to the bathroom without answering twenty (20) questions or stripping naked. And now we need to worry about whether our children and ourselves are safe in once safe environs like schools, theaters, and dance clubs.

We have let the terrorists win. We’ve let fear take control. As FDR said in a speech to Congress, “We have nothing to fear but fear itself.” Yet, now we fear being afraid.

Half of our country lives with some level of fear of the other half. Which halves am I referring to? Take your pick. Women fearing men. Blacks fearing whites. Whites fearing everyone else. When did all this fear come about? Or maybe, just maybe, it’s always been here lurking all around us since the beginning.

America was born out of fear. Fear, frustration, and anger at not having adequate representation back in England. Our Constitution was born out of fear that the weak central government initially created after the success of the American Revolution would lead to the 13 former colonies breaking up into seperate countries. Or worse, being reconquered by England. For too many decades, America feared its own percieved inadequacies. Feared not being great enough, not controlling enough of the continent, not being able to do this or that. Yet people came to this country because the fear of the unknown that America was to the rest of the world was not nearly as great as their fear of a future, or lack there of, in their own home country. Those people came and struggled and built this country. Generation by generation, hatred and greed hand-in-hand with dreams and desires for a better future for not just themselves, but their children and grandchildren.

Yet today, America stands before a cracked mirror. We seem to look at ourselves and see the pieces or parts, but not the whole. Those born in this country see newcomers as a threat to jobs, homes, and resources which are perceived as ‘ours’, not ‘theirs’. Yet each generation forgets that the previous generation had the same attitude about some other group of immigrants. Today’s Muslims were yesterday’s Mexicans who were once Vietnamese, Jews, Irish, Italian, Chinese, Germans, and so many others. The cracks in the mirror seem to separate us. Divide the country into native-borns versus immigrants; rich versus poor; blacks versus whites; Christians versus Muslims. Name any group and you’ll have at least one other group they pit themselves against. Why do we see the “African” in African-Americans, or the “Muslim” in Muslim-Americans? Each of us should be seeing and saying “Americans.”

You want to “make” America “great” again? Then remember what you and your neighbor are: American. To describe yourself as anything else is to see only a piece of the mirror. Look at the image shown in the whole mirror. And remember these words inscribed on the base of the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

If you want to make America great again, reopen that golden door.

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