Tag: hate

Erasing Illusions of The Other Not Easy, but Possible

by Greg Gonzales

Comments sections provide a blank, free speech forum where we can discuss an article, get into the nitty-gritty production details of YouTube videos, and share great ideas to transform the world — that is, in another universe. In this world of all possible worlds, the comments sections are reserved for posturing, political parrots, and pointlessly insulting others. Part of why people do this comes down to what David J. Pollay wrote: “Many people are like garbage trucks. They run around full of garbage, full of frustration, full of anger, and full of disappointment. As their garbage piles up,they look for a place to dump it. And if you let them, they’ll dump it on you.” Our nation’s trucks are overflowing — its people are overflowing — with rage, loss, and confusion. When we get caught up in an online argument, we’re not changing the world, but instead letting people dump their garbage all over us. Luckily, so-called “internet tough-guys” tend to hold normal conversations in everyday offline life. The best thing is to ignore the trash, and make real human connections outside the internet, where we can see each other, read body language, and face people directly.

For me, in March of last year, one of those places was at an airport bar, waiting for a flight. A fellow patron and I watched Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump paraded across CNN’s feed for a few minutes. We exchanged work stories and duties, and it turned out he was a Border Patrol agent. Of course, the conversation quickly turned to politics, as the news ticked on about Trump’s border wall proposal. The agent told me his decision was between Sanders and Trump, but he said he liked Trump for his sincerity and lack of political entrenchment, where Sanders is a career politician. Then I asked about the wall. “Trump isn’t going to do it,” he told me. “It’s just rhetoric.” As a border agent, he was against the wall, saying the barriers down there are about as effective as a physical barrier can get. Then we discussed other solutions, like tech and immigration policy (which he agreed were better solutions, after years on the border), until he had to get on a plane and never see me again. What I assumed would have turned into a bicker-fest actually helped us find some common ground. While we didn’t change each others’ minds, we did learn each others’ views, which is a big step in unifying two people with conflicting ideologies. We didn’t fight, we didn’t bicker, we just explained our views and moved on with life, both happier for having learned something.

It’s not easy to convince someone of a mistake, or a character flaw — change is hard, and we can’t force someone to change, but the world sometimes reveals the truth in astounding, painful ways. Allen Wood, a retired Army Sergeant who fought in Vietnam, wrote in a Facebook post about how he was taught to hate, growing up with a father in the KKK in southern Georgia. “I grew up in a racist society and I willingly participated in it. I cannot deny that I used the ‘N’ word many times. Maybe you grew up the same way. That was my world and I had to belong in it.” However, one day, he changed. “The truth came on a very very hot morning in Vietnam when we were ambushed by a small group of local Viet Cong irregulars,” he wrote. “A man almost gave his life to save mine. He did not stop to ask if I was white, black; Christian or not. I was his friend and buddy and he willingly placed his life between me and certain death.” Turns out his hero was a black soldier, but in this moment of crisis, preconceived notions of race didn’t matter. Wood’s arm suffered an injury, and his new friend, George, suffered an injury to his side. As Wood tended George’s wound, their blood mixed right there on the battlefield. “There was no hatred, no distrust. Just two men in a bad situation and wanting to survive. …. After that singular incident, watching his blood mingled with mine, I looked at the world totally different. George and I talked about our different worlds and were constantly struck at how, in truth, they were the same worlds.” Sometimes, to let go of hate, we have to see that we all share the same dark-red blood as everyone else.

Without a doubt, we all live in the same world, even if Socrates was right that “The only wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.” Reality may differ person to person, depending on individual brain chemistry and impressions and histories. After all, the world we see is relative to the tools we have in our heads and bodies. Even so, through careful conversation, through shared experience, we erase the illusion of The Other and find common ground. Take a breath, smile, ask for your fellow human’s name, and then ask more questions.

Checking My Pulse

by Davin Franklin-Hicks

I’ve been quiet.

That’s likely not a big deal to you, but for those who know me, I am rarely quiet. It’s an aspect of myself that I sometimes judge, that I sometimes embrace, that I sometimes just observe. There are many rooftop shouters and I happen to be one on a lot of occasions. I’ve come to accept that about myself and let it be.

Yet… I find myself quiet in all the ways I normally echo through the halls of my life. This quiet is because I cannot figure out the first word to the next sentence that would make sense of the loss of life in these endless mass shootings.

I have been reading the words of others and watching us collectively attempt that tried-and-true five-part model of coming to terms with grief as offered by Kubler-Ross. The problem is, once we get past that first stage of denial, entering into anger, we have yet another mass killing that brings us back to that denial. We only get to two-step our way through something that requires so much more to navigate.

“What? Another one? How can this be? I blame [fill in the blank]” and we never get to that elusive next step of bargaining then depression then acceptance.

Denial. Anger. Denial. Anger. Repeat.

My first memory of participating in a collective shared grief was when I was 8 and made to attend an elementary school assembly. We were gathered because the Challenger space shuttle exploded shortly after liftoff and people died. I didn’t fully understand this gathering we were doing. This silence they wanted us to sit with made very little sense to me.

My fellow elementary school peers and I tried to sit quietly, but we were fidgeting and coughing, because we had no idea why we had to suddenly be quiet together. I remember looking around and wishing we could talk again. I wasn’t bored, just completely confused by the whole deal and wanting to get back to whatever we would be doing if this hadn’t happened. As I looked around I noticed that the teachers were crying. Then, the slow dawning of the devastation settled on me.

The space shuttle had a teacher on it. The teacher was going to space, literally doing something out of this world, and that teacher died. Wait, could my teacher die? I remember looking for Mrs. Likes, my favorite teacher, seeing her crying and thinking “That teacher was like Mrs. Likes! Mrs. Likes could die!”

And this was the most tragic thing my new-to-this-world brain could imagine. I was so sad and I cried so hard as I imagined my Mrs. Likes blowing up in a space shuttle.

When we see ourselves or those we love in the death what follows is such a devastation to the soul. This life that we have been taught to nurture could just go away. Just like that. And in violent, murders, someone makes it go away.

“What? Another one? But how can this be?”

I’m trans. I’m queer. I love so many people who are trans and who are queer. This makes relating to the Pulse massacre in Orlando all the more real to me. I was able to cast myself as a dancer on that dance floor without even knowing I was doing the casting. Images came to me with no provocation, like laying my body over my wife’s body because there would be no way on earth I would let her be exposed to death without trying every defense within me.

I have loved ones who are police officers. I could cast them very easily into the badges and uniforms in Dallas, imagining their last breath. I have loved ones who have darker skin than mine and they run a greater risk to die violently and prematurely every single day just because of the bias, prejudice and fear our society has endorsed since the start of our country.

Once we see ourselves and our loved ones in the rampant hate, victimization, and debilitating disparities we can never “un-see” it. And we will often do anything we can to stop it.

Denial. Anger. Denial. Anger. Repeat.

The versions of me, the versions of you, the versions of all those we love are the ones that have their pulse taken from them in places that often had served as sanctuary.

Our souls cry out in denial: “No! Not again! No!”

Our souls grapple with the anger that is oh so appropriate for this loss, “I will stop them! They will not harm me!”

Our souls begin to well up with tears as the bargaining begins, “Please…”

We only can utter the single word of bargaining as it is interrupted by yet another shooting, another body crumpling to the floor. We return to the desperate denial chorus “No! Not again! No!”

Denial.
Anger.
Denial.
Anger.
Repeat.

Then the slow dawning settles on me with an unshakable truth:
That could have been my pulse that slowed and then stopped.
That could have been your pulse that slowed and then stopped.
That could have been the pulse of every single person that we know, every single person we love, that slowed and then stopped.

I’ve been very quiet, stunned into emotional muteness, a seemingly endless moment of silence as I find a new use for my hands that once fidgeted during that assembly thirty years ago. I use those hands now to check my pulse, to feel that life force pumping through my being, to witness the miracle that keeps me breathing and to acknowledge my pulse continues where so many others have ended.

As we go through the dark brokenness that has become the norm, let us never forget how rich, how powerful, how mighty and how unyielding that stubborn flow of life within is in the face of all that attempts to end it. The true grit of the heart keeps on going.

That pulse within you is ancient. That pulse has been giving a rhythm to life in this world since the dawn of time. That pulse is what unites us. That pulse that lives in you speaks to the one that lives in me. The radical act of intentional living in the face of all the destruction is the very thing that steady pulse within has been calling us to all along. And it changes our options, it changes our paths when we invite in the flow of life.

Denial.
It says Look.
Anger.
It says Be.
Bargaining.
It says Please.
Depression.
It says Love.
Acceptance.
It says Live.

The Force is with us

by Ken McIntosh

This year, the world is celebrating a very special season, in a very special way. Evidence of the unique meaning of this time is a phrase that we hear repeated, in some cases daily.

“May the Force be with you!”

It really is very appropriate for this season, when many of the world’s religions celebrate the battle between the dark side and the light…the winter solstice could perhaps be regarded as one epic lightsaber duel… the annual return of the Jedi. For Christ-followers, it is the time of the year when we choose to celebrate the Force coming to live among us.

John’s Gospel begins with a word of enormous importance…a somewhat mysterious word…and that word is… ‘the Word.’ “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” That’s some ‘Word!’

Oceans of ink have been poured out trying to explain and understand ‘the Word.’ In Greek the word is ‘Logos.’ It has survived and transmuted into our language today whenever we speak of a brand ‘logo.’ The Word ‘Logos’ was used outside of the Bible—used a lot, in fact, for centuries. It had meaning for Jews, Greeks and Romans. And it was still somewhat mysterious.

Jews associated the Divine Logos with the Hebrew word ‘Amar,’ = “to speak, to utter”…as in Genesis 1, “In the Beginning… God spoke, saying let there be…and there was…and it was good.” The first words of John’s Gospel echoes Genesis, “In the Beginning was the Word…”

The Greeks also spoke much of the Word. The Logos was the ordering principle, or the cosmic pattern, that underlay all things. Heraclitus spoke of the Word as the rational and divine intelligence that controlled the universe. In fact, for the Greeks the Word was what made the universe the UNIverse (as opposed to a disordered omni-verse); the Word was the single unifying factor shared by a vast number of diverse phenomenon in the cosmos.

I am sure that if ancient sages could speak to us at the end of 2015 they would readily affirm—“In the beginning was the Force!” Remember Obi Wan’s first description of the force, from the original 1977 Star Wars? “The Force is what gives a Jedi his power… It surrounds us and penetrates us. It binds the galaxy together.” That sounds an awful lot like the Greek philosopher Heraclitus!

So the thinkers and mystics of the ancient world knew the Word the same way that people now know the Force. They could protest, like Han Solo protests in the first movie “There’s no mystical energy field controls my destiny!” Or give benedictions like a Jedi “May the Force be with you!”

But there are things they could not know about the Word…not until “the Word became flesh and made his home among us.”

They could not know that the Word would look at humanity through eyes filled with compassion.

They could not know that the Word would challenge a lynch mob telling them “Whoever is without sin, let them cast the first stone,” and then assure a shamed woman, “Neither do I condemn you.”

They could not know that the Word would weep, shedding tears at the death of a friend.

They could not know that the Word would shed tears again, thinking about the coming destruction of Jerusalem, and say to the women of Palestine “I have longed to gather you, like a hen gathering her chicks under her wings.”

They could not possibly imagine that the Word would rasp out a phrase, over and over, from the cross, “Abba, forgive them, they don’t know what they’re doing.” “Abba, forgive them, they don’t know what they’re doing.”

The Force was strong in that One.

Christians have gotten their theology backward, over the centuries. They have sometimes proclaimed “Jesus is like God…Jesus does what God does.” But in fact it’s the reverse. In fact, “God is like Jesus…God does what Jesus does.”

Yes, the Force was in Jesus of Nazareth… and the Force is with us still. Not just a fact of history, but a reality today.

We can feel the Force within us, and…the Force is still speaking.

And that’s Good News for 2016, because the power of the Dark Side still entices us.

In 2016 we need to heed well the words of that ancient prophet of the Word, Master Yoda. “Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.”

Fear-talk abounds: be afraid of terrorism, be afraid of refugees, be afraid of people with darker skin, be afraid of people who follow other religions, be afraid of your neighbor, be afraid of the future…be afraid, leading to anger, leading to hate, leading to suffering.”

Jesus still speaks, saying “In this world you will have many troubles, but do not give in to fear, for I have overcome the world!”

God is love.

The Force is love.

Be strong in the Force, and may the Force be with you.

Amen.