Updated, edited versionof the second part of Tattered Threads. I thought it was bad when I originally wrote this. But what the Current Occupant has done with the aid of a dangerously (traitorously?) complicit Republican party has taken the slashing of community to a whole new level.
I appear to be blessed (cursed?) with a mind that’s like a terrier with a bone. A jack russel? They hang on pretty hard sometimes. Community, like so many things human confronts us as Janus-the double-faced Roman god of doors and (it does make a weird kind of sense) of beginnings and endings.
I read William Shirer’s the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich when I was a freshman-a high school freshman. I was fourteen for crying out loud. I'd seen Judgement at Nuremberg on the movie of the week. The book finished what the film started. Once I was done I don’t think I’ve ever looked at my fellow human beings the same way. Dune finished the job. And more and more I'm convinced that their are warped souled creatures among us with human shapes and inhuman actions.
What the Nazi’s did in their rise to power. What was done during that war. The Final Solution, not only for the six million or so European Jews but also for so many others. The Slavs, the Poles, the Gypsies, gays, the other five million who died on the alter of a diabolical definition of community. I believe I began to realize the kind of actions warped human beings could commit when they know they are “right.”
For too many of the years after the war too many of us-me included bought the line that what the Nazis did was something unique to the Nazi philosophy. Heaven knows there was enough evidence before the war of what human beings can do to each other because the ones we’re attacking don’t fit some definition “us.” Since the forties we’ve seen all to much evidence of what we can do those we see as “other.” We can all recite the litany that just keeps getting longer. From Cambodia to Darfur with the Balkans, Central America, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Rwanda in between.
I used to believe we are too civilized here in America to go in for wholesale extermination these days. We use words instead of guns and act surprised when the words cut more deeply than a knife ever could. For communities of color it isn't only words. It's the over and over from police departments that "I was afraid for my life so..." Even when it's a child with a toy gun. Even when it's a teen with a bag of candy. Even when it's an unarmed unstable mental patient. And now it's militarized individuals with no ID cut loose on the streets of Portland, Oregon. That's my state damn it. Is this pay back in because we're part of the Left Coast? Try LA and even the new Gestapo might get their asses kicked.
Want to hear something really weird? When I started this entry this was not the direction I thought it was going to go. Once I started to type this is where the words led me. They seemed to flow on their own. They do that sometimes. And then the really unexpected reaction kicks in. I never realized what kind of emotions an entry like this would dredge up. I usually keep them firmly leashed and I think there may be two people on the planet who’ve seen or heard me royally po’d. The smile I used to wear at work and with most of the members of my family feels more and more forced. Keeping it there is getting harder and harder. Family now And their are some subjects that just don't come up. Thank you cyber space for someplace to express just a little of what I’m feeling.
There are threads, connections, whatever you want to call them that tie us to each other, the earth and to the other creatures that ride this world with us They are trapped with us and dependent on our actions to preserve this fragile ball of earth, air and water. Somehow we have to get beyond a definition of community that is so narrow that almost all of us are “other.”
Well this really rewrote itself. There's more hanging out in the old brain box but it needs some more organizing.
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