"Our lives begin to end the day we
become silent about things that matter" Martin Luther King
BLOODIEST DAYS IN IRAQ: 25 U.S. troops killed and hundreds of Iraqi civilians killed and wounded in twin car bombings. God Bless these poor souls and their families. Send love and help to them.
DARKNESS BEFORE THE DAWN: I wrote this right before the election, when Democrats took back Congress: "Listening to the news, I am apoplectic, constantly appalled at what’s going on. But why don’t Republicans see it our way? What is the basic difference between us? I got an email that deeply moved me, with this line at the end: "We are on the daybreak of a new dark age, I fear." At first I agreed, then something else came out of the keyboard. I actually think this is the most hopeful time to turn it around. All signs seem to point to darkness, but it's almost dawn. That's why our collective energy, thought and voices are so important. We need to stand firm and not let the "powers that be" and their manipulation of news spin us downward. Like Viktor Frankl, who overcame concentration camp torture with the power of love (by focusing his thoughts on love for his wife & children) — his torturers did not touch him. He emanated such a spirit of harmony that no one could harm him. Renowned Austiran logotherapist Viktor Frankl wrote "Man's Search For Meaning" the premise of which is that no one can take your thoughts away from you — and therein lies the secret. We can take our power back. We have to raise our thinking, keep the faith, and not let these people take America away from us.
All of a sudden I have more faith than ever that this is the perfect time to turn it around. In spite of our anger and agony over Iraq, we must lift our thoughts above the horrors we keep seeing; we must send love & healing to our troops and to the Iraqi nation. "Miracles can and do happen as the result of prayer. The way to pray is to dwell so strongly on the good in life, on love, beauty, joy — that you drive out the worry & fear. Shakespeare said:"There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so."
Recently when I heard that Senator Tim Johnson might not make it after his stroke, and we would then no longer have a Democratically controlled Sentate, but one that was 50-50 (meaning Cheney would be the tiebreaker) I went back into that old fear. I immediately felt that sinking horror and paranoia of last year.
After the November election, I felt we had awakened from a national nightmare. I spent most of 2006 ping-ponging between severe paranoia, deep sadness and jaw-dropping paralysis. It was surreal and absurd. I fantasized that we were all on a great big reality show called "The Government," and Bush was just an actor-clown they hired to make us go crazy. The Blue team went crazier than the Red team because the neo-Reds all owned Haliburton stock and were in on the secret. I thought any moment Donald Trump would say "Bush, you're fired!"
BUSH'S LAST WILL AND TESTICLE ... REDUX
copyright 2006 Lydia cornell (A slightly different version of this article was published in
Macon Area Online)
"Every moment is a choice between love or fear."
Mr. Bush I'll never forget when you first said you would go to the ends of the earth to find Osama, then you turned around and acted like we were all crazy for asking if you'd caught him yet. You said, "Osama? I don't spend that much time (thinkin') about him.
And I'll never forget how you sat in a Katrina briefing, probably playing your Nintendo Gameboy under the table, as they showed detailed evidence of a catastrophic hurricane and levee breach on its way to the Gulf, and you had the nerve to later say: "I never knew the storms were gonna be that bad! I never knew the levees were gonna be breached till I saw it on TV four days later!"
Mr. Bush, please explain to me why you justify illegal spying on Americans, yet you were willing to sell our ports to the very people you were afraid we were talking to on the phone! My jaw dropped open last year when you said something like, "Heck other countries get to own parts of America, why not the United Arab Emirates, who've been our allies on the war on terror? Just because they harbored some 911 terrorists and cooked their books for them, and don't keep any paperwork and go on hunting trips with Osama and support the Taliban - is no reason for bigotry. We don't want them to think we don't like them just because they're Muslim. " But Mr. Bush, wasn't it only a short time ago that you said something like: "Any nation that does business with terrorists, or harbors terrorists, is a terrorist...” I guess you only meant that about your fellow Americans: Democrats or liberals - since Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh and Michael Savage constantly bash liberals as being traitors! Why are we traitors? Because we value life so much we are horrified by this illegal war? Because we are pro-LIFE in the best sense of the word: we want our troops home alive? And this offends you?
Mr. Bush, my children have lost their innocence because of you. I keep trying to hide my tears from them during prayers for our dying troops, and the countless children lost in this war. I have to explain to my kids what good morals are: the opposite of yours, the leader of the greatest nation on earth. I would rather my sons have an appetite for love, not war. People who have morals do not do what our president does. You have destroyed the very definition of moral values. You say you're "pro-life" but that seems to only apply to frozen fetal cells.
Our president broke the law by not going to the FISA court to "legally" wiretap us; our Vice-president broke the law (shooting humans while drunk and waiting until the liquor wore off before filing a police report.) Our enemies hate us for our freedoms. Our troops are fighting for our freedoms; is this so we can be wiretapped so we can have no freedoms? Or are they fighting for our president to be able to break the law and sell our ports to a nation that funds terrorists? Does the Carlyle Group and the Saudi Royal Family get to be wiretapped too? Or just American moms and dads who might be wearing 'Peace' T-shirts? And by the way, does FOX News fall under Freedom of the Press?
And just for the record, your party's irresponsible Ann Coulter and Ken Starr-led witch-hunt/persecution/media blitz to expose the affair of Clinton and Lewinsky, two consenting adults, was in itself immoral and damaging to kids. In painstaking detail you paraded these blow-by-blowjob horrors for the press, not caring what effect it had on childhood innocence. And yes, we were all rightly appalled by President Clinton's behavior. But where was the right-wing morality brigade in keeping this porn out of the mainstream news for our children's sake? I still hear Republican mothers talk about how shameful Clinton was, yet they never see how the media salivated and profited at the sex appeal of it all. These same mothers never castigate you, Mr. Bush, for moral corruption on a life-threatening scale.
While you and Ralph Reed scour the cartoon channel for sexual immorality, seeing gays in square pants, how do I explain to my kids this pervasive news coverage of children being blown to bits because WE played the bully; we invaded a country that was pretty much under the world's watchful control? How do I explain your "Christian" morality of killing, invading and turning a blind eye to torture and corruption? Last week a little 3-year-old Iraqi girl died after the 3rd bomb hit her tiny apartment; the only piece her brother's found was her hand clutching her teddy bear.
I have to admit I'm a little more carefree these days, a little less paranoid that my phones are tapped or I might be taken away in the dead of night for e-mailing jokes about our leader - now that the whole world realizes that Bush is of questionable mental stability. In researching my book about Stalin, what horrified me the most were the pedestrian things that are now seeping into America: a woman, sitting in her communal kitchen in Stalinist Russia, said something about the Mediterranean Sea being as beautiful as Russia's Black Sea. A roommate overheard her, and reported this comment as being "unpatriotic." That night, a white "bread truck" came by and took the woman away; she was never heard from again. I also read about a young mother accidentally putting her coffee cup down on a newspaper photo of Stalin's face. Someone watching in the cafe, reported this as "defaming our great leader." A white "bread truck" took her away to a prison camp in Siberia. She left 3 young children behind. After I heard about James Moore, the author of "Bush's Brain" suddenly being on the "No -Fly list", banned from flying outside of America, and unable to get through the red tape to understand why, that's when I began to wonder what kind of country we are living in. I have a theory about when this all started, but that will take more space than I have here.
Uh-oh, spoke too soon; strange things are happening. This just in: Last night, March 15 at about 8 p.m., no joke, a white “bread truck” was parked outside our house. It didn't mean anything to me, until my little boy came running to the back of the house screaming, “There's a big man in our front yard looking through our junk mail-box, he came in the gate and he's wearing a knit cap.” I ran to the front door and peeked out. I saw a dark figure move through the lawn. I waited until I thought it was safe, and then opened the front door. Suddenly across the street, I saw this white van. A man wearing a knit cap was sitting in the driver's side, lights on, reading something. I immediately felt this person was reading addresses off my mail, maybe to see if I lived there. My son and I sneaked out the back door, and headed over to the van, but the van took off. Who knows? Maybe I'm just being paranoid. Again. But in light of the fact that Ann Coulter STILL has my home number on her website, it's not too far fetched to have a wingnut stalking me. After hearing Ruth Bader Ginzburg talk about the right-wing death threats she and Sandra Day O'Connor received, I have one question: WHY ARE RIGHT-WINGERS THE ONLY ONES WHO WANT PEOPLE KILLED FOR THEIR THOUGHTS? You never hear about Left-wingers threatening people's lives whose ideologies they disagree with.
After 911, we had the whole world on the brink of love. Everyone's heart was open. Most Muslims were shedding tears for us. At that moment, our leader had a choice: Love or Fear.
Worfeus, a commenter on this blog said: "Vladimir Putin actually CALLED Bush on the phone that morning and not only offered condolences, but offered to do whatever he could to help. He even assured him that even though Protocol required he raise the Russian Defense Condition in proportion to ours, he understood WHY we were raising ours and assured Mr. Bush that Russia would stand down. It was an EPIC moment in history, that one single phone call. Mr. Bush called it "nice of him".
"And I think if the Taliban were part of the planning body of 911, then we should have invaded Afghanistan after 9/11, it seemed like the right thing to do. But the idea that they were hiding Bin Laden doesn't wash with me," Worfeus says. "If getting Bin Laden was the goal, WHY on earth did we BROADCAST for 2 months Exactly WHEN and WHERE we were coming, and WHAT we'd do when we got there? That's like calling up criminals and telling them you're coming over to arrest them later in the week. What idiot would possibly think they'd still be there when they got there?"
I went through agony when I lost my younger brother; I cannot fathom my mother's grief and heartache, having lost her only son. Her eyes well up with tears every time she hears my husband's name, Paul, which was my brother's name. It is too much to bear when I think of parents losing sons & daughters needlessly in Iraq. This is a war that was "sold" to us and shoved down our throats by a certifiable lunatic. George Bush has caused nothing but chaos, poverty, death, bankruptcy, bad global relations, division, hatred and sadness in the world. "By their fruits you shall know them."
Bush based his "evidence" for going to war in Iraq on LIES that Cheney and Scooter Libby had to cover up. He took money from corrupt lobbyists, grinned and lied about it, and he's still not helping the people of New Orleans! Guess why? Apparently certain "companies" don't want the people to come back; that's why the trailers are sitting empty, undelivered. These companies are waiting like vultures to clear the land for profitable building developments. A side benefit is that all these scattered homeless souls cannot register to vote, nor can they obtain absentee ballots. The longer the delay in rebuilding New Orleans, the better for the Corruption party.
Also, Bush's own mother said he shouldn't soil his mind with visions of poverty and ugliness. Weren't these the same parents who went to play golf when their baby daughter died? So Bush can't deal with death or grieving. Well he should have had some therapy before going to the White House. In fact, someone better be writing legislation to ensure that the next leader of the Free World has a brain scan to rule out mental disorders.
We must hold Bush accountable for causing, directly or indirectly, more deaths & destruction than anyone else has in this new century. If his goal is to spread democracy, he sure is killing a lot of people to do it.
Mr. Bush, your happy-blank stare is beginning to look like that of a Moonie. Have you had any visits from Rev Sun Yung Moon lately? I heard he poured billions into your party, hoping you'd call him Messiah.
Mr. Bush, couldn't you have tried to become evolved BEFORE you declared war? As eveyr alcoholic knows, "the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over, expecting a different result." Keep sending more of our young troops to die.
People who are unable to say they're sorry when they've been wrong, have a deep character flaw. If only you had a 12-step program. This is the fastest route to actual character change. It helps to look at YOUR own part in a conflict, take some responsibility, and take a "moral inventory of your character defects". Did it ever dawn on you that YOU are the common denominator in most of the world's problems? The polite thing to do would be to remove your agenda from the world stage, save some lives and say you're sorry.
I have to ask you point blank — why did you so urgently have to invade a foreign land? Don't you feel guilty at all for lying to us? Aside from war-profiteering, was there really imminent danger to America from Saddam, even though the whole world was hovering over him, watching him? Weren't there more brainy, imaginative ways of gaining allies in the underground - attracting people to our light, who would gladly usurp Saddam from within? Even if it had taken a few more years of clever spy-work, wouldn't it have been creatively challenging and fun - to work out diplomatic solutions to grotesque problems? Christ waited over 2,000 years for someone to finally put his teachings to use. And when biggest challenge comes along, our "Christian" leader disses Christ! You don't even give his method a half-hearted try. Wouldn't it have been worth saving lives and winning hearts to the cause of true Democracy and true Christianity? And after all the Mission Impossible spy movies you've seen, couldn't you figure out a more clever way than carpet-bombing? Did you do it to show off your heavy metal machinery, your SHOCK and AWE capabilities so the "enemy" (or anybody who doesn't agree with you) would be scared off? Mr. Bush, you have single-handedly robbed the world of its hope and innocence. To say nothing of the mockery you have made of true Christianity: the most peaceful force that ever came to man. You have rearranged the fragile building blocks of this planet with your Neanderthal eye-for-an-eye fraudulent, militant "Christianity". Maybe you don't realize the word Christ is in the word Christianity because the vowel sounds are different. But eye-for-an-eye is the OLD TESTAMENT! Christ came with the new law: LOVE YOUR ENEMIES, BLESS THOSE WHO PERSECUTE YOU. RESIST NOT EVIL. This means, “Do not fight or resist evil; do not fight anyone or anything, it doesn't work. Most evolved people know this. Schools teach that you deal with bullies on the playground by not engaging them in battle, by walking away, not hitting them back.
There's a saying: If you're in the jungle and a jaguar is chasing you, get out of his way because he's going to eat you. It's nothing personal; it's just the nature of the beast. So go back to your house and stay out of his way. Muslim fundamentalists would not be killing us if we would get our footprints off their oil, mind our own business, and pray for them. They do not seem to know the God of love, but since love is all there is, evil has no real power, no matter how much you physicalize it by focusing on it. In other words, what you focus on GROWS!
Before the recent Congressional election, average Americans had no voice in the mainstream media, so we have been blogging, screaming, organizing -- the collective is roaring YOU MUST STOP YOUR INSANITY. "Evil triumphs when good people do nothing,” as Edmund Burke said (and we keep hearing over and over and over these days.)
Fortunately I believe in a power greater than ourselves and I know we're going to be all right. God did not give us a spirit of fear.
Einstein did say "goodness, truth and beauty are laws in the universe" as is harmony. Play the piano and you'll hear it. Kiss your child and you'll feel it. Go outside and breathe in the sunshine while playing with an amazingly beautiful striped animal or a butterfly. Bring coffee to someone who thinks you hate them.
Why do people keep arguing about God when God is simply love? Who can argue with human kindness? Asking to prove God is like asking to prove you love your kids. Love is actually the energy of our focused attention on Good, which I define as God. You can be attractive even if you're not "good looking" because if you radiate love, you attract people. This energy is molecular. Einstein's Unified Field therefore is love, which is God. Science proves God; the two are not mutually exclusive.
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copyright 2006 Lydia Cornell
Coming up: Voting for the 2006 Koufax Awards:
KOUFAX AWARDS If the spirit moves you, just type in this blog's URL for Best Writing, Best Post of Best Blog. I also recommend Carl's blog:
Simply Left Behind Thank you.
rica, two elephants jostle: On the one hand, we have the hate-filled religious right, which has co-opted Christ's teachings and turned them into dispensationalist nonsense, somehow linking Christ's message of love and peace with the Old Testament's God of vengeance and retribution. On the other, we have the all-too-predictable backlash of the "God is dead (or at least, never lived)" rational atheist lavage of our brains. Left Behind v. Left Brain, if you will.
r. Collins expresses in a few short answers what many of us have wrestled with our entire lives: why is there suffering? What is free will? Can you explain altruism without faith? Will we ever stop needing a God?
