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Dear God V

October 29, 2020 by

sad-angel-1Dear God, it’s me again and I have a small bone to pick with you this morning. I am certain you must be exhausted now with all the terrible down here, but if you could just take a minute or two, I think I can convince you we are worth saving. I know it seems as if we are intent upon our own destruction, determined to extinguish all that is good and raise up the worst within us. I look around and see this every single day. Nevertheless, I also see much that is good, much that is worthy of saving. I know, God, I know it is hard to forgive the terrible that lies within us, the horrible that continues to rise up and tear us apart, given even the smallest of openings. Yet, God, I believe there is so much that is good. If we simply crack that door, there will be a great awakening and the good will prevail.

Dear God, I am not saying that rising up will not be without pain and great upheaval. We are a nation founded on some terrible acts that, even today, we cannot bring ourselves to recognize and embrace as our real history. Many in this nation find it impossible to accept their ancestors’ acts, from genocide, slavery, Japanese internment, Jim Crow, Redlining, and all the other horrific crimes against humanity and nature. In stunning acts of ignorance and denial, entire swaths of our nation continue to worship at the feet of bronze statues of traitors and fly the flags of the losing side in a Civil War fought to preserve the enslavement of human beings.

Dear God, it is difficult sometimes to look at my fellow citizens with compassion. We need your help; we need your healing. No matter the outcome in a few days, angry people will likely take to the streets. This nation can’t take much more without implosion. Already armed citizens are claiming to be keeping the peace or supporting the police, depending on who you ask. Others march for peace, demanding an end to violence against their sons and daughters, and now they too are armed to protect themselves. God, we need peace and compassion; things are going badly down here.

Dear God, a pandemic sweeps our nation taking more of us each day and our leaders laugh at our sorrow. More of our families slip into poverty meme-the-invisibility-of-poverty-2every single day. Our leaders prance off on unearned and undeserved holiday, paid for by us. They laugh and joke at our misery, knowing they have created this maelstrom. Acts of brutality are committed in our streets, so many of us are numb. We turn away rather than be outraged; we blame the victim, searching for justification. We grow heartless because our leaders are heartless. We grow numb because we are full up and hopelessness seems to be all that is left for us.

Dear God, I want to believe we are not the terrible. We are not the White Supremacists, the Boogaloos, the Militants and Militias infecting our cities and our media today. I want to believe they are an aberration and will fade back into their hills, hollows and caves. But God, this time, I think it will take more; they are greater in number and have infiltrated all walks of life. We cannot ignore their toxicity; thinking they are not worthy of our attention, we turn a blind eye while they burn down our cities or plan government officials’ kidnapping and execution. They are the greatest danger to our recovery; they are the greatest danger to our children’s future. Our leaders create the great distraction pointing anywhere but there, to anything else but them despite their own Intelligence stating clearly this is the greatest threat.

Dear God, there is nothing down here that can’t be fixed with some willingness to reach across these great divides we have created. There is nothing we cannot repair; even the depth of the current divide can be bridged with perseverance and will. We are losing our perspective, God; we are losing sight of who we are and who we can be. We have failed our fellow citizens; our brothers and sisters are nearly lost to us due to our own acts of violence, whether direct or indirect. We have much to make up for.

Dear God, you probably think I am wearing rose-colored glasses with all my trying to convince you we can fix what has been so terribly broken. God, I shattered_glass_portraits_tbelieve there are enough good people, enough fair-minded people, enough willing people that with some time and focus, we can fix this and even make it better. I know we are terribly fragmented today; it seems we are almost irreparable in our brokenness. We chose the lines in the sand we have drawn that divide us today. We can choose to rub them out just as easily; it is a choice. It will only take a few to cross the great chasm of fury currently occupying our time, our minds and our hearts. This terrible fury taking over our nation is destroying us all.

Dear God, if you are there, touch enough of us and lift this fugue. Remind us the good we are capable of even as we remind ourselves of our imperfections and begin the work of building toward the promise of a better, more equal nation. God, I know how we got here. This wreckage is forty years of concerted effort, planning and nearly perfect execution to create an illiterate and angry population. Look where we are God, even those who claim to know and love you are filled with fury and hate; they no more represent your Son and his teaching than Lucifer did in the first temptation of Eve. Dogged determination and a willing population though got us here, to this crossroads. Will we fall the rest of the way, or will we prove we are not the terrifying and terrible we seem to be.

Dear God, I believe we can fix what is broken. Give us a chance to look forward, and I believe there are enough good men and women who are willing to try. I know we are broken and habitually, we fall from grace, yet I believe there are enough with compassion, empathy and eyes open to the truth. Do not allow what is the worst in us win this battle for our nation’s soul, Please God, from me.

Filed Under: Series: Dear God Tagged With: , , , ,

Duty, Privilege or Right

July 20, 2014 by

OpEdThe other day I was speaking to a young woman I have been friends with and a professional mentor to for several years, during the course of that conversation she revealed she doesn’t vote. I was and remain stunned by her revelation; especially given her reasoning, which was, she did not trust our voting system or believe her vote counted. I believe I got a bit heated with her, Michelle Bachmann and her idiocy was invoked more than once during the remainder of our conversation as my friend is from Minnesota. I explained to her, the reason idiots like Michelle were elected because seemingly smart people like her stayed home with ignorant excuses like, “I don’t believe my vote counts”.

Heated might be the wrong word, I was passionate and inflamed. Men and women died for our right to vote. For any one of us to stay away from the polls, whether during a federal election or a local Milhousdrawingelection simply shows both our ignorance and our apathy. For any citizen to fail to get up off their ass during an election and spend the time it takes to exercise their duty as a citizen, yes I said it, their duty as a citizen and vote is why we have the dysfunctional government we have today. I say it constantly as do many others, when good people fail to vote bad people win elections; when Democrats / Liberals / Progressives fail to vote Republicans / Tea Party / Conservatives win elections.

The problem we have right now, in this nation today in Congress and in many States since 2010 is we believed what the media told us, we believed we had already lost the House, the Governor Mansions and we failed to carry our asses to the polls and vote. Because we were so damned apathetic, we lost the House, we damned near lost the Senate, we lost many states and we handed this President a Congress he could not work with, a Congress that would not work with him. We, the people of this nation, the so-called Progressives of this nation did this and we deserve what we got for sitting it out.

We, the Progressive / Liberal / Democrats of the United States of America voted twice to put Barack Obama into the office of President and then we hampered his presidency with this Congress. We are perfectly willing to whine about them, we are willing to sign petitions on the internet, we are willing to send Meme’s around Facebook and on our blogs, what we aren’t willing to do is exercise our right, our duty to vote when the time comes to do so.

We, all of us, every single last one of us must stop handing over our rights as citizens, turning away from brutality and ignorance and begin taking back our nation from those who would strip us of our rights simply because we are too apathetic to stand up and stand against them. We must never forget those who came before us and fought, even died to gain the right to vote, the right to have a voice for us. We must, especially those of us who were left out of the original Bill of Rights and Constitution, we must stand up, stand in line and do what it takes to VOTE every single time and in every single election. We must not spit on those who fought for our right to do so; we must not turn our backs on history forgetting what it required of those who laid down their lives, their bodies, their social standing to gain us all the right to VOTE.

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We must not allow our rights to be stripped away, our history to be rewritten simply because we are too lazy to do our own research into how our government and voting really works. What voter fraud really is and thus we willingly believe our vote doesn’t count, staying home along with millions of others making millions of votes not count, millions of voices go unheard. The goal of those who would fix the outcome is achieved when good people stay home and don’t vote. Every single election cycle sees us losing ground to big money and nefarious agenda’s when we believe the hype, when we believe the race already won, when we believe our vote doesn’t count.

Make your voice heard; some of the races won in 2010 and 2012 were won by narrow margins and those uncompromising, unethical and directionless members of Congress are now out to destroy this nation for their own ends and without the least concern for you or me. The same will be said this year, 2014 will either see us taking back the House and winning a majority in the Senate, taking more Mansions in the states or we will sit it out because we will believe the hype and sit it out. I refuse to sit it out, I will vote.

One thing to consider, I hear this all the time and it simply yanks my chain even harder than I thought possible is when someone says the following:

“It doesn’t matter, it is only choosing between the lesser of two evils.”

No, dammit, no it is not and even were this the case isn’t it better to choose than to allow others to choose the worst evil for you, allowing you the opportunity to mitigate the potential for real harm, real evil and the fight for another day. Gad, how much ignorance, hate, bigotry and nastiness are you willing to live with before you say enough? Truly, if you are not willing to fight, with your voice at the polls than you do not have any cause to bitch at the results. You cannot complain when you are discriminated against in the workplace, when you are paid less, or don’t get the job, or lose your healthcare or don’t get a mortgage, or a car loan, or for that matter don’t get an apartment or a mortgage; you simply don’t have the right to complain. I don’t want to hear it when your taxes take your paycheck because your ass didn’t get off the couch to vote. I don’t want to hear it when your child is turned away from a school. I don’t want to hear it, not any of it if your life is harder because your rights and privileges are lost, when you failed to do what you should have done and fought to keep them.

Get your ass off the couch. VOTE

 

 

http://www.splcenter.org/civil-rights-memorial/civil-rights-martyrs

2012 Election Results: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/politics/election-map-2012/house/

2010 Election Results: http://elections.nytimes.com/2010/results/senate

Voting statistics: http://www.statisticbrain.com/voting-statistics/

Filed Under: Op Ed, Politics Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , ,

Notions, Odds and Ends

November 10, 2012 by

soapboxpileIt has been a long slog through the muck. There were things left undone as my attention was diverted by both Campaign 2012 and blogging for Race 2012. I admit it, I love politics it is both an intellectual distraction and a philosophical passion, sometimes futile I admit but this time, I think we all learned a few things. Does the end of the campaign and the re-election of POTUS 44 mean I will stop bombarding you with politics?

Well no, probably not but what it does mean is I will stop blitzing you quite so much. My earlier intent to look at and compare the platforms of the two parties moving forward from 1900 to today hasn’t changed, I think this is remains an interesting subject. What about you?

The world we live in remains disrupted by stand your ground ideology on both sides of the aisle. For those of us who voted for the winning side, we can celebrate today but the heavy lifting is only just beginning. For those who voted for the opposition, I am sorry your team lost. I know you are feeling despondent even today the loss is still sinking in. The problem is we are all Americans; we have to find common ground and move our nation forward. We cannot afford to allow those we sent to Washington to set the agenda against our collective best interest.

We are not:

  • African (Black) Americans
  • Hispanic (Brown) Americans
  • Native Americans
  • Asian Americans
  • White Americans
  • Gay Americans
  • Young Americans
  • Older Americans
  • Female Americans
  • Male Americans
  • Christian Americans
  • Muslim Americans
  • Buddhist Americans
  • Mormon Americans
  • Atheist Americans
  • Deist Americans

Nor are we any other flavor of American the pollsters or for that matter, the Census Bureau can think of. We truly need to begin to think of ourselves not as special interests groups, rather simply as Americans, citizens of this nation. Do not mistake me, I fully agree we have not achieved equality and Civil Rights across the board remain elusive for many of our citizens. Some continue to believe Civil Rights should be a ballot measure, granted only if your neighbor pulls the lever and agrees you as a citizen should have the same rights they have.

This past few years has been ugly. We have seen billions of dollars poured into campaigns, dollars that could have been better spent to feed and educate children, create jobs, research new technologies or study new cures. Instead, these dollars were spent to divide the nation, spread fear and lies, clog our airways with party ideology that did nothing to move us forward, nothing to solve our nation’s very real problems. I along with others, watched in outrage and horror as SCOTUS passed Citizen United and the Super Pacs came onto the political field. My repulsion grew exponentially as gerrymandering became de rigueur and new voter laws begin to pop-up with regularity where there was no reasonable cause.

Worse still, we missed it we missed the most important SCOTUS decision possibly of the century in 2000, in Bush v. Gore while we rung our hands and whined the election had been stolen we failed to see the writing on the wall, the future of our great nation hanging in the balance with these simple words:

 “the individual citizen has no federal constitutional right to vote.”

The state has preeminent rights, greater than individual citizens and greater than the federal government to direct voting. We, the people (remember us) do not have an affirmative right to vote in federal elections! Yes, you read that correctly. There are Constitutional Amendments, namely the 15th, 19th and 26th that prevent discrimination on the basis of Race, Gender and Age. These wonderful Amendments nevertheless do not provide an affirmative right to vote as an American Citizen, they only prevent discrimination where the State allows voting to occur.

What does this mean? Well, think of it this way, as a citizen you have the following:

  • A positive Right to own a Gun
  • A positive Right to Free Speech
  • A positive Right to Assembly and Protest
  • A positive Right to practice your Religion
  • A positive Right to Free Enterprise

You do not have the RIGHT TO VOTE. The right to vote, who will vote or how the electors to the Electoral College for your state will vote is in truth in the hands of your Governor and your Secretary of State. How do you like them apples? Everything the states did leading up to the Presidential Election of 2012, was legal. We might not have liked it. We might have recognized it for what it was and found it repugnant, but it was within the law.

What do we do now? SCOTUS said November 9th, they will hear a case on whether Congress exceeded its authority when they reauthorized the 1964 Voters Rights Act, specifically Section 5. This section requires States with a history of discrimination, gerrymandering and disenfranchising voters to submit changes to their voter laws to the Federal Government before they are enacted. Is there a correlation between the Courts decision to take this case up and the reelection of POTUS 44? The possibility certainly exists and we the people of this nation need to be watching this case along with others they have agreed to hear that quite possibly will change the will of the people as they legislate from the bench what is not the will of the people.

We have allowed this, in some cases encouraged this scourge on our national dialogue. We the people failed to see through bile being spread before us as Truth and the American Way instead we repeated it. We were sucked in. We engaged our friends and family members as if they were foes on the battlefield, all too often forgetting to dull the edge of our sharp tongues, forgetting sometimes we catch more fly’s with honey.  I am as guilty of this as many others, having had to fall on my sword more often than I can count. Having had to apologize to many I love for my acerbity.

We are a nation still divided. I am saddened by this great divide within our country. Separated not because we are really so different but rather because we have allowed those who do not have our best interest at heart to convince us we should be enemies. We have drawn lines in the sand and called them race, religion, gender, sexual orientation; what they really are the boxes others have placed for us to crawl into preventing us from getting to know our neighbors, preventing us from learning we might be friends. We have aligned behind ideologies, believing the talking points without digging down and asking questions and thus defending the indefensible. We have in fact allowed our great nation to be hijacked by two Parties the DNC and the GOP, two sides of a coin Heads I win Tails I lose, nothing in between no diplomacy, compassion or negotiation. Two sides embittered and embattled wanting nothing but power for powers sake, never mind the bodies left on the field in their wake.

Truly, is the middle so hard to find? I wonder, I do. So will I continue to write about politics, I will because I can’t help myself, it is my passion this nation of ours. It won’t be my only subject though, there are other things I think about, other passions I have.

So, for those I insulted with my acidic and barbed tongue, I hope you will forgive me. Believe me as often as I snap (I do I know despite my attempts to do otherwise) will be just that often that I will fall upon my sword and grovel for you forgiveness. My comments are never personal (well mostly never personal) and are never meant to attack anyone personally (mostly not).  

Filed Under: Series: The Soapbox Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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