THE SEVEN PLUS WONDERS OF OREGON

 

OK. So we love our state. I spent most of my life west of the Cascades. Drive west for about an hour and a half and you are on the coast. East you are through the high Cascades and heading for the high plaateau. South more mountains. North gets you to Portland. 

There's more than seven wonders on this map. In no particular order the seven are Crater Lake, the Oregon Coast (especially north of Florence), Mount Hood, the Columbia Gorge, the Painted Hills, Smith Rock, the Wallowas. Oregon even has a real desert down in the south east corner. 

WHAT ATOMS CREATE

No I haven't forgotten the serious. My serious tank is just running a little empty right now. I can only take so much mayhem and the brain goes a little numb.  

Same atoms. Carbon, oxygen, hydrogen and all the rest. Everything around us. From rocks to kittens. All there is created in the hearts of stars and seeded into the universe and into the earth. 

"The Hills' colors originate from 35 million years ago, when this area was an ancient river floodplain. The colored bands are due to changes in climate that occurred as they were distributed through time. As the climate changed to a more tropical setting with distinct wet and dry seasons, reddish and yellowish layers formed that are made up of laterites, soils rich in iron and aluminum. Red soils come from a more tropical period, while the yellows are from a drier and cooler time. The red coloring is laterite soil that formed by floodplain deposits when the area was warm and humid.^[3] The darker, black soil is lignite that was vegetative matter that grew along the floodplain. The grey coloring is mudstone, siltstone, and shale.

An abundance of fossil remains of early horses, camels, and rhinoceroses in the Painted Hills unit makes the area particularly important to vertebrate paleontologists." From Wickipedia.The Painted HIlls are often called one of the Seven Wonders of Oregon.

There's a wonderful map of places to visit in Oregon. See the next entry. 

WARNING PROFANITY AHEAD

I'm running into too much good stuff this morning.  

Ok, here's a good one. There are less profane versions of most of this advise. It's get's your attention. And to br honest? I can here George Carlin's voice in every one of these. Anyone reading this and is too young to know who Geoge was and has Amazon Prime? Go in. Search under his name and prepare to duck. I don't think they have some of his early stuff.  Try YouTube. The TV News and the Hippy Dippy Weatherman. Also the seven words you can't say on television. Pre cable era folks. 

LOOK OUT FOR THE LITTLE ONES

Picture courtesy of Simple Organic Life. At least that's what I believe the tiny litte title says at the bottom. I will also admit to showing a hmming bird the way out ot our semi enclosed front porch. It flew in through the opening and fetched up against the glass. Kept trying to fly through the glass. I opened the window on the east side and finally managed to coax the little begger down far enouch that it had free air. "Chhp, chhp, chhp" and off it buzzed. 

CAT NAPS

Took a bit of digging. Poem by Eleanore Farjean. Don't know who crated the mass kitty sleep over. Anyone with a cat knows they can fall asleep in any position, any time. Just a little fun for Sunday morning. I don't do this often enough. "If I fits, I sits." Or falls asleep. 

 

SUNRISE

I've discovered that when I concentrate on a batch of related serious material my brain cooperates juar ao long.Then I find myself just not taking the information in. Major brain farts. Happy I ran across this picture. Seriousness will return in a day or so. .

Don't know who painted this. Has a Van Goghe feeling to it. But it is a beauty. The sun will rise, This time of year the dawn begins to show about four in the morning.

THE PALE BLUE DOT

While I try to figuare out how to get from point A to point B and beyond with my how we got into some of the mess we're in I'm reposting this from Carl Sagan. I'm probably preaching to the choir here. At least for the most part. But, we all need to remember that this planet is is huge space ship. Someday we may have the technology to reach other stars and perhaps other planets. But, not in time to save ourselves if we don't get the hell off the dime and treat this space ship with the respect it more than deserves. We have to realize that we can no longer go someplace else if we either don't like where we are or if we've fucked up where we are so that we can't live there any longer. 

Guess what. There is no where else to go. I heartily suggest finding a copy of Sagan's Demon Haunted World and memorize the damn thing. Also Cosmos. And Donald Johansen's Ancestors. If some of our humanoid ancestors somehow came forward they would probably kick our asses. We can't go back to the trees because, for better or worse, our ancestors were bipeds from the beginning. We can't go back 

As the Voyager space craft left the orbit of Neptune the craft was turned towards the sun for last pictures of the planets. Just below the rings of Saturn is a pale blue dot. That is earth. What Carl Sagan said about our little dot in space then echoes even more strongly now. Our spaceship earth.

That’s here. That’s home. That’s us.

On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar. Every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, live there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.

The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturing, our imagine self importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity-in all this vastness- there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us.

It’s been said that astronomy is a humbling, and if I might add, a character building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known..  

THE UNIVERSE WITHIN

I wrote the original A Sense of Something back in 2006. To be recycled two years later during the presidential campaigns. I seem to be sensitive, to what I'm not sure. I can't help but wonder now if it was a call for help of some kind. But if the universe is in us I guess I can understand a shout out of some kind. The original entries are in bold.

I guess I understand the attraction of the just saying yes to the fundamentalist’s faith. Just believe in Jesus and all your questions will be answered. No pesky whys. No little earth shaking visitations by the Universe before you’ve even finished your first cup ginger tea. Too bad that not even the universe is strong enough to take the whole six billion on this planet and shake some sense into us all at the same time.

Apologies for the reruns, but two years later I’m still trying to make sense of what happened. And maybe it’s one of those things that you can’t “make sense of.”

A SENSE OF SOMETHING

 

Something totally, freaking, weird happened this morning. And folks that’s the mild description. I was thinking about the journal entry I did last night. The phrase “the whole planet is alive” popped through my mind. That fits, that was the theme of the entry. Then the sentence completed itself. I was not expecting this, I really was not. “The whole planet is alive; and screaming.”  And just for an instant, maybe half an instant, there was this mind-bending sense of “wrongness." A jumble of sounds and images. Continental plates grinding, whole forests falling, winds howling and a feeling of bottomless, endless grief. Sorry, that’s the best I can do with the sledgehammer we call language. I had to get out of the office for a few minutes. I was almost in tears for crying out loud.

 

That’s the best I can do. I don’t think there are words for what I felt in that microsecond. And I haven’t had anything mind altering this morning. Last time I checked oatmeal, applesauce and lemon ginger tea aren’t on any list of controlled substances. I suspect it was the entry itself. If words are mind altering, then I’m altered. While my brain is still doing little (and not so little) summersaults this had to happen for a reason. What the reason is I’m not sure….yet. I tapped into........what or who?

 

And I posted this later in the day because frankly I was still shaking in my boots. I’m not sorry I had the experience but thank heaven the universe doesn’t stop by an rearrange my neurons every day.

A SENSE OF SOMETHING PART 2

 

 I suspect that some of the individuals we call “insane” may be tapping more deeply into this sense of what we’re doing to the earth and ourselves. And they just can’t take the pain. Is this attempt to communicate always there and we’re drowning it out with drugs and objects? Or think it’s the devil tempting us and run screaming to the nearest fundamentalist house of worship. Oh, there’s a devil all right. It’s called fear and we’re choking on it.

 

I’m still a little overwhelmed by what happened this morning and frankly it scares the hell out me. I’m getting an overwhelming sense that the scales are tipping and it’s not in our favor. I’m also convinced that the answers we need won’t be found in the organizations that run the churches, mosques, synagogues, ashrams or political parties. Too many groups are too invested in defining who belongs and who doesn’t. Too worried about what might be happening the bedrooms and not enough about what is happening in the boardrooms. Too tied up in the power games. Too busy screaming that they have all the answers that they can’t even hear the questions. So damned scared that if someone else gets a little “more” of something we’ll end up with “less.” Somehow we have to tap into the individuals that realize that the balance needs to be righted. That if we stick to what really matters, there is enough to go around.

 

We matter simply because we are. Each of us is unique. Each of the over six billion people on this planet is unique. No one is expendable. And I think that’s what scares us. The refugee in Darfur is just as unique in the universe as President Bush. And just as special. What we can’t seem to admit is that the whole universe matters simply because it exists. Too many are chasing things that they believe will make them better somehow. And so many have so little that just surviving takes everything they have. One group can’t make the time to look up and the other group can’t find the extra strength.

 

I know that getting everybody to join hands and sing Kumbayah isn't going to solve the problem. But, I'm not going to give up, I've got too much riding on the outcome of this little thing we call life and so do the rest of us.

WHERE WILL WE PUT ONE BILLION

 That's right. A population of one billion in the good old US of A Please be patient. All of this will come together. Eventually. I hope. And this entry is graphics heavy. And you may see some of them again. 

There is a citizen of this country. BA from Harvard. Wiki doesn't say what the degree was for. However a little research suggests an honors degree in philosophy. His career has been in blogging and some form of commentary journalism. His Wickipedia bio does not say where he was born, but I suspect born in the city and he doesn't get out of the city bery much.

Anyway, America isn't nearly full enough. It can hold another six or seven HUNDRED million people. We just need to make sure there's support for child care, build more houses, make sure the mddle class gets good paying jobs. He reminds me a little of Plato and his perfect forms. 

OK lets look at the map and that little color guide to the left. Dark broun and light brown. That's desert and scrub land. Doesn't get a lot of rain and for the last few years has been getting even less. That little piece of US paradise is in critical drought. It's also the par of the country that has encouraged immigration from states that have actual seasons, enough rain keep the lawns green, and snow. This covers Arizona, New Mexico, parts of Utah, Nevada and California. The yellow is temperate steppe. That's the Central Valley of California and most of the middle of the country. Rainfall varies some agriculture actually depends of the winter snow for some sgriculture. The Central Valley has an aquifer underneath but water use outstrips the recharge from the rain tht isn't fallling. The blue green and greens are some form of mountain foresst. 

A topo map of the United States. The greens are relatively low elevations the browns with all the wrinkles are either mountains or SW corner of the country. High, dry, low population.

And this is Oregon. the little green areas are the lowest elevations. The purples and light blues are the highest elevations. And that's where most of the people are especially up in the Portland area on the Columbis Rivers. 

So if anyone is totally insane enough to try to increase the population by nearly Seven hundred million people divided evenly between the states where in the name of all that's holy are we going to put them. Sorry folks we are just about maxed out. Water is allocated. The high plateu may look level but it isn't And acces from the western part of the state to the east is limited. More later on that. 

IDIOT PROOFING

A time out for something a little less serious. Or not. How many times do you run across some version of "don't try this at home or on a local highway." Like don't stick your head in a plastic bag for example. LIked the bit about the cat. Must be some science lab. 

Heinlein said the "Stupidity is the only universal capital crime; the sentence is death, there is no appeal, the sentence is carried out automatically and without pity." Do don't go sticking your head in a plastic bag. 

WORKING ON ONENESS

Maybe I should have posted this one first. Found it on Creation Spiritualiy group on FB. We are all interconnected from the smallest plnakton to the largest animal that has ever lived on this planet. At least that we've found fossil evidence for. It's the blue whale. 

I've noticed that the extremsts on both sides are really love "the people." At least the concept of "the people." Actual people who will be affected by the programs they push? Not so much. 

But then there is this.

Whatever befalls the earth, befalls the children of the earth.
Every part of the earth is sacred.

The air is precious, for we share the same breath.
Every part of the earth is sacred.

This we know, the earth does not belong to us; we belong to the earth.
Every part of the earth is sacred.

This we know, all things are connected;
Like the blood that unites on family.
Every part of the earth is sacred.

Our God is the same God,
Whose compassion is equal for all.
Every part of the earth is sacred.

We do not weave the web of life;
We are merely a strand in it.
Every part of the earth is sacred.

Whatever we do to web, we do to ourselves.
Every part of the earth is sacred.


From the Rhythm of Life by David Adam

IDIOCY

 

This is from a tweet supported by two groups. The Democratic Socialists of America and the Libertarian Socialists of America. They are right about one idea. Unequal access to resources is critical for at least two billion inhabitants of this over size space craft. 

And it's going to take more than one entry to explore the idea that this planet can support a population of thirty five billion humans without destroying every other critter on this sorry planetary space craft. Please be patient with me. Got to figure out some maps.

WHY TO WE BELIEVE WHAT WE DO

Will have to do until I can come up with a better title And this one grew and spread all over the place. 

A funny thing happened as I was working my way through the family tree. A pagan ancestor who had bean fighting Charlamagne's empire building finally converted to Christianity, taking most of his army with him, not because he understood Christian doctrine and probably never really did. No. We are finally defeated. Obviously your Christian God is more powerful than Odin. OK. Which way to the baptism?

Another ancestor from what is now Norway was working his way through the Islands to the north and west of Scotland. He had recently converted. His message to the head men of one of the Islands. by the time I come through again you and your people better be baptized or else. Sorry I don't remember his name off hand and since my ancestry software didn't make the trip over the mountains I'm forced to reconstruct much of the information. And no, I don't feel like getting a new copy of their overpriced software. Went with another company but much of my archived information was in the wrong format. 

Where was I? Vladimir of Kiev bacame a convert in the tenth century. He suggested, strongly, that those whi wished to remain his friends should get baptized too. "So let's all meet down by the river." I'm pretty sure no one took the time to make sure the new "I'm getting baptized so I can stay in good with the local Grand Duke" converts really understood what they were getting into. 

Just finished slogging through the novel Captain From Castile set during the conquest of Mexico by the Spanish. Main themes the Inquisition, conquest, and the attempts to bring Roman Catholic Catholicism to the natives with side orders of the politics underlying just about everything. 

Side note a Taino cheftain, Hatuey, led a faily successful guerrilla resistance to the Spanish. Finally captured he was condemned to be burned at the stake. Franciscan friar attempted to convert him at the last minutes. Preomises of heaven and threats of hell. No promise of freedom but he would be mercivully strangled before the fires were set. History has him saking if there would be Christians in heaven. "Of course." History also has him saying that if heaven has people so cruel as the Christians he knoss he doesn't want to go there. Source Liberation Theology for Armchair Theologians. 

In the novel the Spanish view the Indian gods as demons. And that was before the Spanish Christians met the Aztecs. Believing that the Gods of Light needed human blood to defeat the darkness the Aztecs practiced human sacrifice and ceremonial cannibleism. I am not being snarky in noting that they apparently took the body and blood theology to an extreme interpretation. 

The Spanish believed they were successfully converting heathens away from their demonic Gods. Many of the Indians admitted they accepting baptism because the God of the Spaniards was obviously more powerful tham their Gods. At least on the surface. Harsh treatment, condecensian and greed soon convinced many of the Aztecs that all this God talk was a cover for stealing everything that wasn't fastened down. In the novel the rubber really hits the road when a Spanish garrison in Tenochtilan interferes with the major festival of the Aztec calendar. If the native americans had been immune to smallpox the story of conquest might have gone in another direction.

So, what has all this to do with current events. Why do the followers of certain denominations in this country appear to have very little understanding of Christianity. Why are so many churches almost empty in western Europe. I submit that as the church expanded too many converted out of fear, because the new "god" sppeared to be stronger than the old gods, because that's where the power was. ONce converted apparently there wasn't that much effort put into helping the new believers really understand what they were getting into. 

There's a history of badly educated clergy, the attitude (expressed in the novel) that too much theologhy would just confuse the lay people. In an era when many folks couldn't read and write their own language Latin would have been a whole other country. At least beyond the rote responses required for church. The church in the US has the same problem. Anyone can call themselves a pastor, set up a church, get tax exemptions, and buy canned sermons off the internet. 

And now some of those churches are sending missionaries into Latin America. They may find it tough going. The prosperity gospel meets the favelas of Rio, the slums of Central America or the impoverished, landless farmers. Most of them have no use for the poor in this country I can't see the leopard changing its spots south of the border.  

THE BALONEY DETECTION KIT

 Carl Sagan's Baloney Detection Kit. He was too polite. I usually substitute bullshit for baloney. 

Really, shouldn't that guide to critical thinking be required for graduation? Granted we might have to simplify the language a littlie. Where would that lying sack of BS be if more of our fellow citizens had been able to see him for what he really is. If more people could have realized that the whole Republican would be oligarch trickle down was smoke and mirrors. That fighting so called subversives was not about communist inflitration. It was about a small clique of rich land owners protecting their supply of super cheap labor. That globalization was a lie. That you can't make peace by making war.

The children at the border are the children and grandchildren of our wars.

YOU'VE GOT TO BE CAREFULLY TAUGHT

 Just finished watching South Pacific. Six words You've Got to be Carefully Taught. Learned the lyrics before I ever saw the musical. They were in my Modern Problems text book. Seniour year hight school. The boradway musical premiered in 1949. Pushed the envelope on interacial relationships. 

You've got to be taught

To hate and fear,

You've got to be taught

From year to year,

It's got to be drummed

In your dear little ear

You've got to be carefully taught.

You've got to be taught to be afraid

Of people whose eyes are oddly made,

And people whose skin is a diff'rent shade,

You've got to be carefully taught.

You've got to be taught before it's too late,

Before you are six or seven or eight,

To hate all the people your relatives hate,

You've got to be carefully taught

May be one of the shortest songs to ever be in a major musical. 

CORNBREAD

The feeling I get whenever almost anyone from the Republican party opens their pieholes 

 

JUST A NOTE

 Over the years obvious asylum seekers are denied for the most ridiculous of reasons. The victims can not "document" what happened to them. "We can't allow asylum becuase you don't have written proof that you were arrested and tortured. You don't have written proof that the daughters dragged from your home were taken, tortured, and murdered. Even though you found your oldest dumped in a cemetary, tortured, her arm cut off. Told by someone else that your sixteen year old daughter's body was burned." 

These aren't the obsessive compulsive nazis who recorded the death of their concentration camp victims. Although there were millions of victims who went nameless to their mass graves. No records were kept. If there were there was plenty of time to shred the proofs before the truth and reconciliation commissions started to meet. 

LUCAS, JUSTO, ANGEL, DOMINGO AND JUAN

 

Photographer Mary Scully. Mayan wives, mothers sisters, perhaps daughters protesting the war crimes against their people early 1990's. The names of the dead and disappeared.

1952. A democratically elected government in Guatemala was overthrown in a coup orchestrated by the CIA in support of the United Fruit Company and against suspected Communist subversion. That's been the go to since the Russian Revolution. No matter what or where if  US business interests are threatened? "The Commies are coming. The Commies are coming."

John Foster Dulles was secretary of state and his brother Allen had close ties to the fruit company. United Fruit was unhappy with one, land reform and two, efforts to end labor practices that were just above the levels of slave labor.

This was a second attempt. The first happened under Harry Truman but was aborted. Too much bad publicity. The successful operation happened under Eisenhower. I admire Ike as a military leader but, he was a political tyro early in his administration. 

That coup kicked off a civil war that lasted off and on until 1996. Everyone in the country suffered but the booted heel of oppression hit the Maya the hardest, Subsistence farmers in the hill country the civil war saw more than one humdred thousand dead or disappeared,  often by torture, and over four hundred villages destroyed. Some of those villages had existed since before the conquistadors came bearing the cross and searching for gold. 

Largely illiterate but devout, the majority of the villagers were Catholics. The regimes especially in the late seventies and early eighties responded by killing native church workers and  expelling foreign priests and nuns. Anyone supporting land reform, unions, farmers coops, literacy campaigns was a target. Special targets were lay church workers, catechists, who risked their lives to bring in the consecrated hosts to celebrate communion. Often held outside the villages for protection. The wafers were hidden in sacks of corn, baskets of beans or tortillas. Their chapels were closed, convents occupied by troops.

1982. The village of Santa Cruz El Quiche. Five men, their names Lucas, Justo, Angel, Domingo and Juan. They were lay catechists well known to their fellow villagers. The army arrived, gathered the villagers and gave them this message. If the five men were not killed by their own relatives Santa Cruz and surrounding villages would be destroyed. The deadline was the next morning.

The villagers met all night. The final decision was to refuse. The five, probably know that their days were numbered,  refused in turn. Graves dug, prayers were said. When the army showed up the next morning the bodies were presented. The army's goal was to drive wedges between the families and other villagers. It didn't work. Ruler at the time? A general names Rios Mont. Finally convicted of war crimes decades later. Our president. Good old Saint Ronnie.  Who said of the general that he "believed he was getting a bum rap" and that he was a person of "great integrity." Sound familiar? He was a nice person. They were all nice people. All those murdered church workers and peasants. Left wing propaganda.

Source: People of God Published 1989, Viking Penguin press author Penny Lernoux.

THE GIFT OF SILENCE

Really listen to the silence. It can echo like thunder. 

THE HOOKS WE'RE BORN WITH

 The public schools get a lot of criticism over how civics and history are taught. And some of it is justified. But, I find myself thinking about how we were raised. How our folks talked about other people, other religions.

I originally wrote this back in 2012. When Fox still pretended to cover the news. At least part of the time. Until this last election I never in my wildest dreams imagined that an unhealth percentage of my fellow citizens would swallow outright lies hook, line and lead sinker. Or having swallowed that it would be next to impossible to help them see the truth.

The public schools get a lot of criticism over how civics and history are taught. And some of it is justified. But, I find myself thinking about how we were raised. How our folks talked about other people, other religions.

I don’t remember my dad ever putting anybody down because of their race or religion. Heck he was a contrary cuss; he wouldn’t like or dislike somebody because of  their jobs, their religion or their race, so that might be part of it.

But, my family comes from a certain heritage. Mainly New England Puritan and Mid Atlantic Quaker. Settlers from two fairly distinct folk groups with their own ideas of liberty. Puritans tended to see liberty as religious liberty while accepting a degree of social control that 21st century Americans wouldn’t stand for. Quakers also claimed religious liberty with a slightly more liberal view of political liberty with a kind of you don’t bother me and I won’t bother you outlook. By the time the family hit the west coast we’d added Methodists to the mix. We all hoped our neighbors would be fair and honest when they dealt with us. But, if they weren’t we believed that we needed the elected hired help to keep the playing reasonably level.

So those are the hooks I brought with me when I walked into my social studies classes. What was presented in my classes pretty much fit the world view I was raised with. But, what happens with kids who absorb a different world view with their mother’s milk and strained peas. How much can being in class for about two and half hours a week for nine months do to change a world view a person has been absorbing all their lives?

What's worse are reports from families of relatives that were resonably sane getting hooked on Fox, YouTube videos or talk radio and becoming, for want of a better description, members of a cult. The schools can't help them. Looks like they didn't do a decent job of immunization. Again I believe we're asking a lot of the Public Schools in an era of faith based home schooling combined with what looks like an almost hopelessly fragmented information delivery system. 

DEAR MR. REAGAN

I wrote this back in 2014. Maybe I'd just finished School of Assassins. A little book about the School of the Americas. Notorious over the decades for training military from our neighbors in the south. All the better ways to kill and maim your own people for their resistance to growing repression. 

Perhaps it was rereading the story of four American women, three nuns and a lay missionary. Raped and murdered by members of the national guard in El Salvador in early December of 1980. Reagan wasn't president yet. When our ambasador asked too many questions he was recalled. Jean Kirkpatrick. US ambassador to the UN claimed that the nuns "weren't just nuns, they were political activists," The sisters ran an orphanage. They didn't ask too many questions. If members of the resistance fighting against the government sent their kids there for safety the sisters didn't ask why the kids were there. 

Reagan increased our support of the Salvadoran government. Death came labeled Made in America. The CIA learned the lessons from Viet Nam all too well. And used them in support of bloody dictators. Anyway rant redux. 

 June 1987. Ronald Reagan, safe behind a wall of Secret Service agents, challenged the leader of the Soviet Union to tear down the Berlin Wall. The worshippers of Saint Ronnie oooohed and awed and swooned over the courage of “Great Communicator.” (excuse me while I go throw up)

1987. The civil war in Guatamala had been going on since the seventies. The main targets anybody supporting labor unions, teachers, preachers, supporters of land reform and especially the descendants of the Maya. There were whole sections where the religious leaders had been driven out and lay people took their lives in their hands smuggling the means of celebrating communion in sacks of corn or beans. Being discovered meant death. If you were lucky they didn’t torture you first and mutilate your body afterwards.

1987. The civil war in El Salvador had been going on since the late seventies. Foreign church workers had been deported. Local priests had been murdered. Archbishop Romero probably signed his own death warrant in a homily given two weeks before his assassination. It concluded with “In the name of God, then, in the name of the suffering people, whose cries rise to the heavens, every day more tumultuously, I ask you, I beg, I order you in the name of God: stop the repression!”

That was 1980. Later that year four American church women were brutally murdered. El Mozote, other villages, nameless refugees. Villagers driven from their homes, fleeing on foot, often for days or weeks. The old, the weak and the young dying on the side of the trail. This went on for over ten long, murderous years.

Honduras. No civil war but lots of refugee camps. These are the countries the children are trying to escape from, Countries with minimal governments but lots of gangs. These kids are just trying to survive. At least some of them may have relatives in this country who came as refugees a generation ago. These are the countries we broke. We’ve never faced it. We’ve never admitted it.

We didn’t hear the voices that just might have cried out Mr. Reagan stop sending the gun ships. Mr. Reagan, stop sending the bullets, mortars, guns and weapons that are killing us. Mr. Reagan, stop training the soldiers that are killing us. Mr. Reagan, let us live. Let us choose how we want to live. Give us the chance to raise our children, not bury them.

Oh God/dess this is too much. I pray my nephews and their children won’t be called on to answer for our sins.

CHRISTIANITY IN AMERICA IS DEAD

(I blew off a real head of steam when I wrote this about three years ago. Unfortunately the problem is gottne worse not better. But I see fewer calls to try to slow the dying. More calls to just say the heck with it and move on.)

And so is so called evangelicalism. It was a long, slow decline into dementia beginning a couple of generations ago. Cause of death. Pride. Thirst for Power. Hate and dismissal of anyone different from them; whether in appearance, language or faith. Claims of persecution when that persecution wasn't happening.  Indifference from the other side. Ignorance. You can probably add more causes. Finale resting place? Empty hearts and souls.

I know. I know. The progressives and the moderates and semi radicals keep trying to breath new life into the corpse. But then one of the so called christians (the small c is deliberate) finally admit what we knew all along   and make it final. All the CPR and artificial respiration isn't going to bring it back to life. Their interpretation of the Word is like Marley's ghost only you could take those chains and stretch them all the way to Pluto.

Read Perkin's words. Heaven knows this isn't the first time this attitude has reared it's ugly head. Isn't this what torqued the old prophets right down to the last one. You know the foot sore rabbi from Nazareth? Putting politics ahead of righteous action. Putting greed above caring? Putting hate above love? Calling down the wrath of heaven on those who don't share your beliefs while giving those in power a pass?

Before the followers of the Man From Nazareth took the name of Christian many of them used The Way to describe themselves. Some still do. The Eastern Orthodox for starters.

So take the word Christian and bury it. Put some flowers on the grave. If you can find any in polluted America and follow The Way

I AM A QUAKER BUT

 I keep reading Catholic writers. 

Yeah, I sort of fell off the planet for awhile. Had some medical problems. It's taken awhile to find my voice again. So maybe just maybe I'm going to do a little south of the border exploration. Those refugees at the southern border are there for a lot of reasons. And most of those reasons have roots in US foreign policies going back decades. I mean who would choose to leave their homes, their families, their country? Who would make an endless journey, many on foot, unless they wer certain they had no choice? Ronald Reagan I hope, wherever you are, you are forced to confront the death and destruction that can be laid at your feet. 

I wish  I could find a picture of this man. He stands there. A man in the patched working clothes of a Salvadoran peasant.Who knows? It may be that's all the clothes he has. In front of him? Three small, simple crosses. No names. They mark what looks like a mass grave. The forest will probably claim them in a few years. Even the man won't be able to find them. Who were they? A wife? Children? A mother? A father? Stangers caught trying to get out of the war zone and couldn't keep going? A stranger digging graves and committing unknowns known only to God. 

 Archbishop Romero is the figure with the glasses. Surrounded by the peasants who called him Monsenor. From the time he began to speak out for justice for the poor he pretty much accepted that he probably wouldn't die in bed. 

"Nothing is as important to the church as human life, especially the lives of the poor and oppressed. Jesus said that whatever is done to the poor is done to Him. This blood, these deaths are byond all politics. They touch the very heart of God." Archbishop Oscar Romero March 16, 19680. A week later he was dead. Shot down during mass. One of his last homilies (sermons) included a call to the police and military to ignore orders to kill their own people.

Funny how we hear the quote that the "poor will always be with us" as an excuse to pretty much ignore them. Even from the supposedly "Christians." And we seldom hear "And the king will answer them, 'I tell you the truth, just as you did it for one of the least of these brothers or sisters of mine, you did it for me.' Mathew 5:40 That ends the passage about the prisoners, hungry, widows and orphans. The actions that will separate the sheep from the goats. 

Most of us assume He meant everybody was our brother or sister. There are others who obvivously have a much narrower definition of brothers and sisters. 

The words on the left side of the window "Let my death if it is accepted by God, be for the liberation of my people and as a witness of hope in the future." For his people Romero was regarded as a saint long before the church made it official. It took thirty eight years and a pope from Latin America. 

Well this one took the bit in its teeth and went where it wanted to do.