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Page 1 of 2 What will it take for us to choose a world of peace, health and harmony? To what lengths must we allow people to go before we reach out with sane hands to restore balance and accord? Are there even enough people who care about issues globally and locally? Or is this world truly driven by a need to get more; more than any human being can possibly need?
Difficult questions asked daily by thousands, possibly millions around the globe; yet these are the questions we need to ask ourselves daily. These are the questions that will define our actions and lack of actions. These are the questions that will define our children’s and grandchildren’s lives. We must ask tough questions; yet more importantly we must act to the best of our ability in integrity with our core values around these questions. Probably the biggest challenge to answering these questions is the hidden desire to remain ignorant. Ignorance is the last refuge of the hypocrite. Slavers in the seventeen and eighteen hundreds viewed their slaves as sub-human, a hypocrisy of ignorance. Men up through the early nineteen hundreds viewed women as intellectually inferior, again selective ignorance. The military and corporate oppressors of the twentieth century have viewed their might and mastery as justification for oppression. Continually religions have somehow viewed their brand of faith to be some form of license toward subjugation, manipulation and alienation. All of these; ignorant declarations of the right to impose, in ways we would never wish upon ourselves, are violent undertones to organizations which talk the talk of peace. It is in our culture; the language we use is often an adult version of the schoolyard bully. Just a couple days ago I saw a sign stating that ‘real men love Jesus’. Do they really believe that? What kind of violent manipulation of wounded, weak and confused minds is that? If you don’t feel like a ‘manly man’ all you need do is proclaim your love of some person or cause in order to establish your ‘manhood’. And what then is being said about all those male Buddhists, Jews, Hindu, Sheiks, Pagans and other men?
I would argue this is a subtle slur on the manhood of every male who professes any other religious or spiritual view. Such statements are certainly not promoting peace, harmony and other universal spiritual or religious views. They are built into a language and culture that promotes a ‘power over’ paradigm.
Two weeks ago I took some photos of a housing development cutting adjacent to a creek. An interchange occurred in which the inference was made that ‘because I did not have the money to buy the property I had no right to challenge the position of the developer to log up to the creek’. The inference made was that money has rights that surpass the rights of legal process and fair democracy. For those who may have forgotten it the meaning of democracy is a ‘one person, one vote system’.
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