Enough is enough
Here's the deal: For literally millions of years, a fear of the “other” defense mechanism has been programmed into our DNA which facilitated our increasing long-term survival as a species. Republican conservatives are today poisoning the well by rhetorically painting everyone who is not white, Christiaan and ideologically – asleep, not “woke” – aligned with them, as a dangerous “other.” Every day there's a new idiocy from bookbanning to refusal to consider reasonable gun policy leading to record number of mass shootings everywhere, even in schools. Taken individually, each day, drop by drop, the aim is to create continual and collective disruption to the social order, which, in turn can and does generate anxiety and fear among the members of the democracy.
Democracy is messy, always has been, and requires a modicum of critical thinking to maintain it, to rise above the “other” programming. This is why the “culture wars” are being fought around public education and science. Anxious and fearful people are easier to manipulate with the rhetoric of a promised fixed-state control via autocracy. To maintain that false order in the demented minds that insist on seeking it requires killing off all “others.” Today's Republicans are fascists in every way fashioned by and standing with the philosophy and actions of Adolph Hitler and the increasing autocracies across the world. Latest examples in the Watcourse mailbox:
There have been 134 mass shootings since January 1 this year, accounting for 194 dead and 470 additional wounded. At this rate, and it easily could increase, over 1,000 will have been killed and some 4,000 wounded.
Ah, “but wait, there's more!”
Attempted book bans and restrictions at school and public libraries continue to surge, setting a record in 2022, according to a new report from the American Library Association released this past Thursday.
More than 1,200 challenges were compiled by the association in 2022, nearly double the then-record total from 2021 and by far the most since the ALA began keeping data 20 years ago. Last year, more than 2,500 different books were objected to, compared to 1,858 in 2021 and just 566 in 2019. In numerous cases, hundreds of books were challenged in a single complaint.
Do we even want our children to survive? Who and what will guide them?
A liberal democracy can put a stop to this insanity if, and only if, YOU show up and vote to reject fascism in all its seemingly – it is not – random forms. When is enough, enough? You tell me.
Thomas Merton entered a Trappist monestery in 1941. Nearly 20 years later in a journal entry, he wrote: “I have not yet even begun to write, to think, to pray, and to live and only now I am getting down to waking up.” – Thomas Merton, journal, June 22, 1958, in A Search for Solitude: Pursuing the Monk’s True Life, ed. Lawrence S. Cunningham (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1996), 207. Posted as part of Fr. Rohr's Meditations.
I can find common ground with just about anyone, but cannot understand those who show no empathy. – Grace Weldon
Riverbank Ceremony: Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio
Step out on mossy water’s-edge rock,
let the river’s rush take you
beyond yourself.
When you’re ready, kneel,
and select a secret
from the heavy chandelier
inside your chest.
Whisper to the water.
She will carry it in her molecules
around the bend, out of sight.Your secret will
steam from tea sipped in Vietnam,
slide down an antelope’s throat
trickle from a glacier in Greenland,
hurl from cumulonimbus clouds
onto cobbled streets in Belgium,
trill through secret underground paths,
rise up a redwood’s trunk,turn into a silver helix
twisting from your bathroom faucet,
translucent, transformed,
washing over you.– poem by Laura Grace Weldon, posted with her permission as the April Poem (2022) on the website A network for grateful living.
… we have nothing to lose
but the death of the earth.