“the unexamined life is not worth living”
―
Plato,
Apology
Our country lays Divided again.
We had almost recovered; we were on the mend. Then tiny, almost negligible, minuscule errors emerged.
Our country Divided by pathologies.
Our great land, our verdant future and Our country Divided again. I weep and weep.
Our country Divided and the dividers seek more division. This is never new.
Socrates knew his rational thoughts would be his end. MLK probably did too. At least the truth has bubbled up: That more than
race; class, gender, sexuality, education, and morality all divide us.
His quotes seem to fit the harsh reality facing those who society deems unequal to the majority...
"It would be better for me... that multitudes of men should disagree with
me rather than that I, being one, should be out of harmony with myself
." Gorgias, 482c
I pray, "Oh, Lord, for the concept of unity and commons help us Lord, Our country is Divided."
This is an open letter to the powers that be. I ask for restraint. I pray for perspective, inner peace.
.....
If you can only read part of this letter, please read this. It is the personal saga of generations of my family who have had great difficulty resolving justice, civil rights, religious tolerance, and freedom.
The side of my family this comes from arrived as mercenaries and indentured servants to serve the new English colony of Pennsylvania in 1710. It would take 250 years before this family would merge with another group of families who had come over almost 100 years earlier to found "New Sweden."
It was years past the litany of services our family made in war. Revolutionary. 1812. Indian wars.
Ancestors of mine who had walked beside their wagon from West Virginia (nee. Virginia) to build a small outpost in Selma, Indiana (Muncie) split up over the civil war. Some were fierce abolitionists; others supported states rights. Brother against brother they fought on both sides of the Civil War.
Some time after the war ended the family received notice of the death of one son, a son who had aligned himself with the politics of the family still living in Indiana and whose remains had been buried at Appomattox He was sought and returned home to be buried in the family plot.
A year after the end of the civil war another visitor passing through who had served with the brother in the other army, that of the Confederacy, told of how they had fought together in the guerrilla actions in the great Alabama swamps. These were battles that drew northern militias into unequal territory, where small bands used wits and knowledge of terrain maneuvers to overwhelm greater numbers. This brother, he told them, had died and was buried in the swamp in a shallow, hardly marked grave.
"Our sons have not yet been brought home," said father, "it is our duty to lay them together at peace."
'That summer children and women folk raised the crops, manage the farm, took care of finances, and educated, fed, and generally cared for all who were left behind. The brothers with their father spent six weeks riding across mountain, dale, and swamp gathering information and searching until the found the identified shallow grave of their missing kin. It took another month to return him home,' goes the family legend. What I share is part of our family lore; the truth of it is implicit, not real.
'It is in the spirits,' my grandmother taught, 'the real truth fades like their footsteps in sands of time.'
The scale of this venture has always astounded me. The implicit risk for the family left back home. The sheer amount of time taken. But, this is the real story; these boys from tiny Muncie, Indiana, they didn't know very much about slave states or free states, cotton or industry, North or South.
They didn't know anything about war; just an age-old family tradition - to serve when called upon. What they did know all too well was the power of strong opinions; and, these conveyed until a breaking point of fixed conviction. It cost them their lives. In death they laid a new family tradition.
In today's polarized and disparate politics severity reigns as both tone and guide. The ability to seek chivalric or communing largess is unfounded. Lacking spirit of trust; venality is our most public face.
I am writing this because today marks 150 years since Civil War peace occurred. This summer I will remember the cost of our family trying to piece itself back together. As I do this, I'll remember the pain of war: The cost of human suffering. I will seek understanding and work to give peace new life.
.....
Douglas Brinkley was a professor at the University of New Orleans many years; he left when UNO was effectively defunded in the post-Katrina politics of New Orleans vs. the State of Louisiana under Gov. Bobby Jindal. New Orleans lost Brinkley and the clout of its public university. Nobody gained.
Brinkley writes very appropriately
about the Civil War, " the gridlock on Capital Hill in 2015, the
inability to get anything done, is similarly cold-cocking the spirit of
our participatory democracy. All American eyes should be fixated on Appomattox today. The courthouse is our collective sanctuary of national healing."
I visit the graves of these boys in my own family. Their pain winds through to today. Family piety. The ability to heal wounds of family is not lost on me. I have lost cousins to drugs and suffering. Their inability to be accepted with choices of gender and sexuality certainly conspired against them.
I grew up in two souths. I grew up in different Nations. Then I saw them mend. And then break again. My New Orleans was very disconnected from much of the
State of Louisiana. And, much of Louisiana was not really part of the 1970's South. And, they were all in so much pain it was palpable.
But, when pain is exorcised, when we find a therapeutic covenant; then peace is closer at hand.
I have always know how good we had it. I knew the kindness and richness of my neighbors.
Now my state's legislators have brought us back to the brink of this break again. The pain being caused to every family is damaging and will take generations to remove.
It all starts with the ability to love, cherish, protect, and
honor in a committed life another.
"False words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil.
" Phaedo 91
True power turns on how using it affects all with benevolence, peace, ease. Those who believe they are free of sin are but mob bosses who measure power with each abuse. This is a culture of abuse that seeks to maintain inequality for a historically oppressed minority. But, in a country born of freedom's declaration, why? Turns out, we have a
global divide on marriage and "gay marriage" in particular.
There
are so many antiquated ways we continue to legislate what happens between
consenting adults in their love, passion, or 'bedroom' behavior. Time
and again, we have proven that legislation is a mere affectation of
left or right wing agendas. Everyone has this deviant, perverse, or human
nature. Sexuality, with all its repression, predation, fear and trepidation is human, imperfect and uncertain.
Who will judge you? "The
sea gave up the dead that were in it, and death and Hades gave up
dead that were in them, and each person was judged according to what
they had done."
Revelation 20:13
How long will the same sex bans,
the marriage restrictions, the
sodomy laws stand?
Where will history place us for our position in this debate? Where will Revelation place us?
How does intolerance and prejudice derive from pain, repression, and myopic vision?
Global prejudice against people who have same sex partnerships stand up just where we would expect it. It the most hardlined, hard bitten, socially rigid, gender specific, legally antiquated and sexually repressed countries of the world there are hard and fast resistance against accepting human rights for all and allowing representation, openness, and fair treatment to be legally guaranteed.
It would seem obvious to me that those who work so hard to maintain the oppression of 'gays' while simultaneously taking hardline opposition against the countries and cultures that support their beliefs; if they are being honest with themselves, ought to consider aligning themselves more appropriately with these rigid 'moral' values societies. My rigid family values I will keep buried with my ancestors.
Maybe Egyptian, Pakistani, Russian, Tunisian, and El Salvadoran morals fit into their other beliefs?
I wonder. Certainly the censored, brutal, oligarchical, non-participatory, non democratic versions of government, leadership, business, and moral life in those countries is far from our "American" ideals.
If you would like to write the Louisiana Legislator who has sponsored the latest round of legal intolerance and inequality - please do: "johnsonmi@legis.la.gov" <johnsonmi@legis.la.gov>
Interested in knowing more? Here are some more Resources:
In closing here are two more quotes attributed to Socrates by Plato in his Apology. One, is the motivation you all may need to contiuously confront an Unjust State, the other more obvious.
“The State is like a great and noble steed who is tardy in his
motions owing to his very size, and requires to be stirred into life. I
am that gadfly which God has given the State and all day long and in all
places am always fastening upon you, arousing and persuading and
reproaching you. You will not easily find another like me.”
―
Plato,
Apology
“I certainly have many enemies, and this is what will be my
destruction if I am destroyed; of that I am certain; not Meletus, nor
yet Anytus, but the envy and detraction of the world, which has been the
death of many good men, and will probably be the death of many more;
there is no danger of my being the last of them.”
―
Plato,
Apology
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