In the Battle of Good vs Evil: the Two Faces of America

These days it seems that America is in the grip of a battle between good and evil of mythical proportions. We see more ‘evil’ so it’s easy to believe it outweighs the good, that this is about David and Goliath and Goliath is on a winning streak. Far right conservatives and Christian fundamentalists, the NRA, the military industrial complex have a lot of power and a massive, well-funded, very vocal, very visible right wing media to disseminate the ideas they uphold.

Massacres happen with increasing regularity. Instead of diminishing the power of the far right conservative ideal they feed that angry, fearful, voracious, rapacious beast. When the horrific shooting at Colorado Springs happened, my first thought was, killing three and wounding nine others is justifiable but an abortion isn’t?

Far right conservatives (rightly) condemn jihadists for slaughtering innocent people and have graduated from that to condemning all Muslims and to treating as a hero Republican GOP candidates who manically espouse and promote bigotry of the worse kind to such an extent that people around the entire world are outraged. Yet these same conservatives don’t even ask the religion of American citizens who massacre fellow citizens with assault weapons, let alone call for them to be persecuted and/or thrown out the country.

Christian fundamentalist Kevin Swanson rabidly calls for gays to be executed at a National Religious Liberties Conference which three GOP Presidential candidates—Ted Cruz, Mike Huckabee and Bobby Jindal—attend. How is that different to jihadists and their supporters?

Massive CIA, FBI and police resources are sunk into identifying jihadists and I’m very grateful for that. But nothing is done to follow the movements of Americans obsessed with accumulating assault weapons even though they kill far more Americans than jihadists. And fundamentalist Christians such as Swanson and his followers and those three GOP candidates aren’t even brought in for questioning.

Fundamentalist Muslims who call for and/or commit atrocities under the name of Allah are (rightly) recognized for being a scourge on the planet but fundamentalist Christians who call for and/or commit atrocities under the name of Jesus are elevated by many. Some Muslims are fundamentalists therefore all Muslims are condemned as evil. But the same logic doesn’t apply to fundamentalist Christians. Or to American citizens, Catholics, Protestants, Atheists, all of whom have committed terrible crimes. So the real source of the problem isn’t dealt with.

Presidential candidates are worshipped for their maniacal xenophobia in a country that was built by immigrants.

Women have to fight incredibly hard for their rights but conservative women support Presidential candidates and far right politicians who want to keep them down.

People fight for the right to carry and use as many assault weapons as they want and don’t recognize how they’re being manipulated by the military industrial complex, or how that undermines them.

Far right conservatives and Christian fundamentalists foster a culture of hatred, prejudice, entitlement to kill and destruction of human rights. Massacres like that in Colorado Springs are a direct result. Pus oozing from a rotten and festering wound created by an ‘ideal’ that is counter-intuitive to all that is good in humanity, the Bible and true Christianity.

This is a dark, depressing picture. But I still love America and I don’t think of the far right as representing the country in its entirety. Am I clinging to a fantasy? Am I the perfect example of how love is blind?

My first experience of the US was attending a Catholic school in Zimbabwe run by American nuns. Marymount College. Judging by Facebook, a good time was had by most. Not by me, though, which none of the nuns noticed. They registered that I failed and criticized me for being lazy. They didn’t think to look for a deeper reason or see how their judgment traumatized me further. I fell through the cracks and nobody reached out a hand to stop me falling.  

You’d think I’d have developed an antipathy towards Americans. Somehow I didn’t. I guess I separated ‘American’ from individuals’ lack of empathy towards emotionally wounded children namely me. That, and I blamed myself for my unhappiness.  

In my very naive early twenties I flew with my then husband to New York with our bicycles, planning to ride from there to Key West. I’d heard only romantic things about the Big Apple. We landed at Kennedy Airport in the early evening and headed for Manhattan on our bikes but got lost and took an unintentional detour through Harlem where we stopped to buy an ice-cream.

What did I know about Harlem? The guy who sold us the ice-cream said “What are you doing here? You crazy? You fixin’ to die tonight?”

He told us to get out of Harlem and fast. I had no frame of reference with which to believe him. But we took a subway smothered with angry graffiti that made me think maybe he knew what he was talking about. It was terrifying. Then we got thrown off the train. Man. We reached downtown Manhattan at midnight. I was tired and scared out of my wits. A guy approached me and asked me casually if I wanted to buy heroin. I sat on the pavement and burst into tears. I wanna go home.

Again, not a great experience of America. But then another guy noticed my distress and asked me if I was okay. I told him. He was full of concern and said we must stay with him. And I fell in love. Not with him, but with America.

That guy’s generosity is what has life in my heart. When I think about it, it fills me with a feeling of light, of life being generated, of grand possibilities. Of the other stuff—including my childhood experiences of Americans—some created wounds but they’re healing. The rest doesn’t have any power over me. The moral of the story is that one tiny bit of generosity of spirit outweighs a mass of meanness of spirit or absence of consciousness. 

Which is why, to use archaic imagery, good always wins over evil. Sometimes the dark stuff is really in your face. But that’s when it’s hardest and most important to remember the light and believe in it. 

Contemplating that took me to thinking about the Americans I know now, none of whom have a manically far right conservative atom in their body.

All of them are generous spirited. They’re all outraged by crimes against humanity committed in the name of Jesus and/or the GOP and intensely frustrated by the illogic, lack of intellectual independence and integrity of the far right.

That’s a lot of good. It doesn’t make as much noise as ‘evil’ does but it's life promoting and has longevity; not enough yet to prevent the horrible tragedies happening with such horrifying regularity or the suffering they engender. But I believe there’s more good than seems apparent and it is enough to ensure that ‘evil’ won’t ultimately win in America. Good can’t be destroyed. ‘Evil’ can be overcome.

The painting is by Luca Giodano (1634-1705) Massacre of the Children of Niobe 1685

Gratitude and Sorrow

I woke up this morning, stumbled out of bed. Opened the blinds. I looked out on a silent, peaceful world. A slight breeze rustled the stalks of lavender flowers in the garden.

I had nothing threatening me. I don't have a palace or a mansion or even own a house but I rent an apartment with lots of space and light that looks onto a garden I don't have to maintain and an ocean that changes every minute of every day.

I have challenges and fears that keep me awake at night. But nobody hates me because of my religious beliefs or my nationality. Nobody believes I don't have any rights, or if they do I don’t have to pay attention to them. They have no power over me.

The country I live in is run by a corrupt lunatic but we still to a large extent have free speech. Citizens aren't imprisoned and tortured. He doesn't unleash chemical weapons and others of mass destruction on us. My village wasn't overrun by a sect composed of the most twisted of psychopath serial killers who hate women and who get off on torturing and executing anybody who disagrees with them. The women and children weren't raped and taken as sex slaves, or else killed.

I haven’t had to watch in terror as bombs rained down all around me, killing friends and family and razing the buildings until my town and my life was ravaged beyond repair. I haven’t had to risk a long and very unsafe boat journey to get away from the land and the home that in my heart I love, just so that I and my children could stay alive.

I haven’t had to witness my own child drowning and know that leaving home was for nothing after all and be in a strange land where I’m not welcome and I don’t know how long I can stay alive.

I haven’t had to walk for hundreds and hundreds of miles with nothing, through inhospitable territory, with winter coming on. I haven’t had to watch people erect barbed wire fences to keep me out as if I was some kind of rabid dog. I haven't had to explain that to my child.

I’m not the target of bigotry and prejudice from conservative citizens and politicians who hate me even though they’ve never met me. Who prop up their prejudice and fear with lies and don’t care about the truth. Who don’t care whether I or my children have food and warm clothing and shelter. Whether we find safety and even a bit of happiness or weep through day and night in despair. Whether we live or die.

Who in fact would rather we did all die so we wouldn’t be an inconvenience. For whom we have not an atom of value.

Houston's Heroes Lose Their Battle But The War for Equality Continues

Prejudice. It’s a cancer fed by a limitless torrent of angry, fearful, unresolved energy. It infiltrates your logic, erodes your capacity to be rational. A mean-spirited, mindless, megalomaniac beast, it thrives on crushing others, denying their right to be loved, protected, nurtured and celebrated.

Beware of feeding the beast! It will turn on you. You can anesthetize yourself to that pain but anesthetics get less effective with time, so you’ll face great discomfort at some point. But you can live most of your life in blissful ignorance. Your victims, however, don’t have that cozy option.

In May 2014, the Houston City Council approved the Houston Equal Rights Ordinance (HERO), “…prohibiting discrimination on the basis of protected characteristics in city employment, city services, city contracting practices, housing, public accommodations, and private employment; containing findings and other provisions relating to the foregoing subject; declaring certain conduct unlawful; providing for a penalty; providing for severability; and declaring an emergency.”

The ordinance had support from President Obama, Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, Sally Field, and even Apple CEO Tim Cook. In reality it protected 15 classes of people, from African-Americans and women to veterans and disabled people. 

But it was spearheaded by Mayor Annise Parker, who is a lesbian, much loved by liberals for good reason; much hated by conservatives for no good reason. The ordinance also included LGBT protections. So it was cast as a gay rights measure. 

It was challenged in court and the Texas Supreme Court ruled in July that Houston City Council must repeal the ordinance or place it on the November ballot. And all of Houston’s finest conservatives came out in droves. One of the rights was for transgenders to be allowed to use women’s public restrooms. Conservatives focused on that, flighting TV ads to generate fear, the main message being that women and children would have no protection from perverts masquerading as transgenders. The fear-mongering campaign was very effective. A referendum held on Tuesday yielded a 61.9% vote to repeal.

This despite that some 200 cities in the US (Houston is the fourth largest) have passed similar Ordinances, including all the major cities in Texas.

I learned about the Ordinance from the NewYork Times. I was in a hurry, and skimmed through the article. In retrospect I see that I only registered one aspect—the paragraph about the opposition’s focus on women and children now being under threat in public spas—and took that to be the whole. I was actually thinking about public saunas and locker rooms. 

I understand if people are afraid that heterosexual men will now have access to women and girls in locker rooms and spas. I'd be afraid too, or at the least, uncomfortable. 

It's not about intolerance, it's about my need to not be naked around heterosexual men I don't know. If there was a way of knowing that someone was a Transgender I'd be fine. But there's no way, without subjecting the person to scrutiny. And how does that work for a Transgender? It totally doesn't. So as far as this small aspect of the Ordinance is concerned, I think it's a lose-lose.

I don’t want a society where any group is punished for who they are. And nor do I want a society that in any way enables perverted heterosexuals. If one little girl or woman or Transgender gets molested or raped because of this aspect of the Ordinance is that acceptable collateral damage? Not if you’re the woman or Transgender or little girl or she's your daughter/sister/friend. It would be different if molestation or rape were a rare occurrence. But it's not. This is a complex issue needing a complex solution.

Is it grounds for the entire Ordinance to be opposed and thrown out? Of course not. It's grounds for that one aspect to be looked at and for some kind of win-win solution to be found; one that may require compromise on both sides.

But the Opposition has blown up this element drastically and made out that it's the entire Ordinance. It's cheap fear-mongering; a thin veil for hatred and prejudice.

It was a shock to realize how easy it would be to manipulate me. I’m a liberal but I have fears from early experiences that shadow me sometimes so when I didn’t take the trouble to read the NYT article properly I quickly drew the wrong conclusion. I realized my mistake later, but it gave me insight into how easy it is to manipulate people through their fear. Especially people who aren't looking for the whole truth. And it was a wake-up call for me.

As for liberal Houston’s fight for quality life for everyone, I believe that ultimately they’ll win. Because they won't ever give up. But it’s tragic and heartbreaking that so many have to be sacrificed for that to happen. 

Click here to read and/or download the full text of the Ordinance.

The Cowardice of Distorted and Twisted Perspectives about Barack Obama

I’ve come across a lot of writers who say they don’t care if they never get published or achieve fame; that they write because they love it. There’s no right or wrong about it, but one thing is for sure: if you keep the product of your creativity private you also never expose yourself to sticks and stones. You never have to grapple with the ugliest and most persecuting of rejections.

But if you’re driven, for whatever reason, to be visible you have to gird your loins. Because some of the people who see you will be filled with repressed rage and just looking for a target to hurl their ugly missiles at.

Oddly, it doesn’t matter who you are or what you’re doing. Even if you’re an exceptional human being it doesn’t make you less of a target. Take Barack Obama, an unusually balanced man; he wouldn’t have been able to keep his focus if he wasn’t, given the rotting garbage (and let’s face, repressed rage is rotting garbage) that’s thrown at him and the conservative wall of resistance that showed its ugly face as soon as he was elected. Resistance that had and has nothing to do with him as a person and everything to do with the color of his skin. It’s not just passionate resistance, it’s ugly,  underhanded and explosive. I had a tiny, tiny taste of it aimed at me the other day with a comment on my last post.

"YOU pay for a third US war in the Mid East, bitch. You have some sort of moronic hero worship of Obama, who wants to throw seniors in the US out to die, using the US budget deficit to justify his particular form of genocide. You live in a rich country. There are many rich countries in the world. The US is now a poor country, full of poor and unemployed people. It is selfish and greedy of you to want the US and its people who will never see as much money as you live on in a month, to sacrifice even more when the rest of you sacrifice NOTHING."

Nothing balanced about that comment. I’m not sure which country this person thinks I live in, or what my income is, or how they came to their conclusions, that I’m moronic and super-wealthy. I know that nothing about any of it is factual.

It wasn’t pleasant to get that bit of emotional acid thrown at my face, although it didn’t hurt as much as, possibly, the author hoped it would. I was more unsettled by the twisted and distorted perspective of Barack Obama - genocide? - and the state that the US was in when he was elected. But that’s par for the course with his detractors; ignoring the truth and one aspect about life that nobody has any power at all to change: cause and effect. A president who comes into power when a country is sliding towards another Great Depression didn’t cause it. He inherited it.

Barack Obama has rescued the US from a fate that everybody thought was cast in stone. Whether he gets acknowledgement for it or not doesn’t alter the truth of that.

I haven’t enabled the comment on the post, because I wanted the author of it to have their very own spotlighted page. Unfortunately I can’t congratulate them personally on their brilliant mind and balanced perspective or thank them for their contribution to World Truth because, of course, they posted as ‘anonymous’. 

The Right to Discriminate Against Voters in the US

It’s a wonderful world. A world where our perception is more likely than not to override reality. A person’s life is a mess but they don’t want to face it so they create a fiction that’s easier to live with. A dictator uses chemical weapons on citizens who oppose him but he sees himself as the country’s savior. A man has immense skills, intellect and creative capacity but his self esteem is so ravaged that he sees himself as worthless. A woman is absolutely beautiful but she’s addicted to plastic surgery and ends up looking like a blow-up doll and she thinks now I’m beautiful. 

A country has a world class Constitution that everybody reveres; that is looked to as the most progressive on the earth. And its Supreme Court makes a ruling that allows conservative states to implement rigorous voter ID laws that will effectively cut out a whole sector of the population’s access to voting. Of course the ruling allows progressive states to do it also, so it’s fair.

And the argument for striking down a law that prohibited this practice? Well, the law was to protect African Americans in the deep South racist states. And there’s no more racism there any more. Texas isn’t racist now? 48 years is plenty of time to change hatred, fear and a belief in the right to violent domination that’s been etched into a national psyche? This from the Supreme Court? The ignorance is shocking. Voter access standards should and must be at the lowest common denominator, so that the poorest person can vote. That’s what democracy is about. Otherwise, it’s not democracy.

This ruling notches up that standard so that the poorest can’t vote. Not if they can’t afford a photo ID. States can do whatever they want now. Their decision can be challenged – in Congress, that body notorious for employing dirty tricks to prevent reasonable laws being enacted that will empower the lower and middle classes.

Ross Douthat, a conservative Republican who writes a column for the New York Times, recently wrote that this ruling is actually a gift for Democrats, essentially because it will make them rally and voter turnout will increase. This writer has very curious logic and, in true Conservative Republican style, makes grandiose statements but doesn't back them up with facts - because the facts contradict his position. 

Sarcastically he writes that liberals are expecting Republican states to roll out laws that will “suppress” voters. Well, his sarcasm falls horribly flat. He omitted to mention that within 24 hours of the Supreme Court ruling, Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott said "With today's decision, the state's voter ID law will take effect immediately…Redistricting maps passed by the Legislature may also take effect without approval from the federal government." (DallasMorning News 25 June 2013).

As of last Thursday photo ID was required of voters in Texas. That was fast. Not mentioning this was the writer’s his way of proving his point and the merit of his sarcasm?

But the argument that really floored me was his saying that taking away a person’s rights to vote is good for them. Well then we must congratulate husbands who beat their wives and rape their little girls, priests who rape little boys, men and women who traffic women and children, because look at all the support there is for those victims now. 

This Supreme Court ruling makes a mockery of everything America hopes to stand for, and exposes the truth. Which is that half of America stands for everything that is good and progressive regarding human rights. 

The other half is doing everything it can to drag the country down to a place of no integrity, no morals, no respect for human rights or dignity. In other words, strip it of everything that makes it a democracy. And Justices seriously need to educate themselves on psychology and broaden their perspective. They know perfectly well that the current Congress will not stand in the way of any state that wants to instigate repressive voter ID laws. The only states that will want to do it are Republican, because the poorer people in America vote Democrat. Which means that Section 4 should not have been struck down.

Is this how Republicans plan to win the next election? Only a year ago they were talking about how they knew they had to change if they wanted to hold onto any position at all, given the shifting demographics. Well, this is one way of changing. Get dirtier.

Truth - We're Still Burning Witches at the Stake to Avoid It

A wise man once told me that if a person is angry with somebody and they won’t deal with it they will create stories in their head about that person, turning them into a monster of some sort. They’ll judge, hang, draw and quarter the person. They’ll even spread malicious gossip about them and feel justified in it. The one thing they won’t do is give the object of their judgment a chance to tell their side of the story. They don’t want the truth.

They’re usually not aware of what they’re doing, and to them their own actions will seem very logical, their judgments rational. And thus a myth begins that gathers a lot of weight over time. It eventually comes to be regarded as absolute truth. It can ruin a life.

It happens all the time in a family, community or society that doesn’t value personal truth or the expression of emotion and is afraid of both. The person who started the stories often has an outward demeanor of kindness, generosity and sociability. Because they never show their anger. Except to the one they vilify. They gain credibility and their victim becomes a scapegoat for everybody’s unresolved anger.

Once that starts happening, the person being vilified doesn’t stand a chance. If they're more emotionally truthful they’ll express their anger at the injustice of being judged without being allowed a chance to tell their side of whatever story has been passed around. The more they do that, they more they’re seen as imbalanced. 

They will be judged, hung, drawn and quartered, stoned to death, burned at the stake, choose your metaphor. Which is probably what happened to women accused of being witches in the Middle Ages.
We’re kidding ourselves if we think those days are over. They’re not really. We maybe don’t actively cause physical death but we contribute to myths that create depression, isolation, massive self doubt, and can lead to a person committing suicide. Either we actively participate in furthering the myth or we stand aside and do nothing. 

For the victim, that is. We’ll do a lot for everybody else, to reinforce the idea that we’re wonderful. Got to keep that credibility up.

Truth? We don’t value it nearly as much as we value our own fictions. We’d much rather build stories that rescue us from having to face our own anger and vulnerability and be accountable for our own actions, our own unresolvedness. I suppose it’s because societies still run on quite a primitive concept of right and wrong. And if we let ourselves see the truth of our anger, our very not-niceness, we would vilify ourselves as much as we do the victims of our stories. I guess for all that we like to think we’re civilized it boils down to this: it’s easier to hurt somebody else than to hurt yourself.

Obamaphobia, Latinophobia, Homophobia, Zenophobia…

In a past episode of Private Practice one of the characters was dying of cancer and gave herself permission to speak her truth. No lying, no rescuing, no Mr. Nice Guy. It was incredibly refreshing. One of the other characters said of her when they met “ooh, she doesn’t filter. I like her.”

In real life, people who don't filter are quite rare, at least in western society; I can’t speak for any other. It's not unusual for them to be seen as having something wrong with them. We’ve developed a veil of politeness behind which we hide the reality of what we think and feel. I’ve never really understood it and it sure makes life complicated if you register the underlying emotions, because you’re constantly seeing two opposing aspects of people.

It’s especially confusing if they don’t register their own underlying emotions. Like phobics. Some are aware of their phobias. It’s kind of difficult not to know you’re scared of spiders or open spaces for example.

When it comes to Obama, Latinos, gays and foreigners, phobics usually aren’t aware that what they see as rational justification for attack and exclusion is just fear. To mix metaphors horribly, they’re like empty drums making a lot of noise but coated in dung, rolling downhill, gathering more dung unto themselves.

Mind you, that metaphor doesn’t work at all, because the more they roll and gather like-minded phobics to themselves, the noisier they become. The noise makes for great headlines so the media grabs onto it and blows it up as big as possible. Because we give such weight to whatever impacts the strongest on our immediate senses, before long it can seem as if the phobics are the majority. That can make a person very disillusioned about society. Disheartened and disinterested in speaking out, because what’s the use when you’re a lone voice in the crowd?

But it’s important to remember that the people filled with rage and fear and prejudice against immigrants, homosexuals, Latinos and Barack Obama, aren’t necessarily the majority; they just make the most noise. People who’ve got nothing of any value to say always do.