If you hold my hand, then I will hold my breath and cast my fate in the direction of my heart. I will put on hold my lessor dreams and reach for what is truly mine. These are the words written in our hearts as we begin to fall in love with another. Love is a feminine force, not just in women but in men as well, created out of both doing and being; being loved, being appreciated, being honored, being wanted, being respected and being received and understood at the deepest level of our souls.
Our recent history of mass killings, assault and sexual harassment cases are of course despicable, but sadly are indicative of a soulless cultural malaise. The people of this country, are very much like the children of a mafia boss, who don't know what their father does for a living, and don't want to know. Then, they wonder why someone threw a firebomb through the window of their family home.
What a primitive underbelly we have in this patriotic rational society. It is difficult to kill a large number of people without claiming to be doing it with virtue. The providence that America had been summoned to teach all mankind, on its pilgrimage to perfection, continues to persist and promises no end of grief.
It is the mindless and soullessness of the powerful, that is the real immorality of our time, for with it, there is associated the organized irresponsibility, that is presently the most destructive of the national system of corporate power. When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in society, they create for themselves over time, a legal system that authorizes it, and a moral code that glorifies it. Our lack of gun control laws that don't support moral conventions, invite crime, both minor and major, but more significantly, spur the growth of an expedient amoral attitude, and that as a consequence makes a society that is merely expedient, and does not produce men of conscience, while the media short circuits people's critical facilities, by ignoring the countries atrocities around the world.
By ignoring Washington's ignoble activities abroad, we have created, a look the other way culture that hyperbolizes every indiscretion that happens at home. An offensive touching, becomes an assault, which becomes a rape, while all the while, no critical analysis is made of murder and genocide in foreign lands.
The national security state has brought about a denouement of freedom in our supposed democratic society. Man's technological ability, as exemplified by the creation of weapons of mass destruction, has betrayed our moral imperative. We have been instructed to believe, that if one person kills another, that is murder, but if a government kills a hundred thousand people, that is patriotism.
The values that sustain our open society have been crushed. What has been encouraged for far too long, has been an undisciplined form of self-interest, where winning is the only thing that matters. This has slowly accreted into a culture that has banished the anxieties and complexities of moral choice, and embraced an infantile like hyper-masculinity that is promoted by ruthless corporate capitalism. Sadism has become part of our culture, just as it is part of the corporate culture. It runs its current through our society via reality television, right-wing trash talk programs, and is at the core of the compliant corporate collective.
Corporate values have morphed into eviscerating the American peoples' capacity for moral choice. The logical extension of this, is the establishment of Abu Ghraib, the endless occupations of countries like Iraq and Afghanistan, our lack of compassion for the homeless, our poor, and mentally ill, the unemployed and the sick. Our moral autonomy has been in danger because of corporatism, since Reagan in 1981, with his administrations attack on liberal institutions.
The politicized human rights activities of power politics have traded off the full rights of citizens, for the residual rights of the human, with blithe indifference. This unholy policy, has hardened into the radicalized identities of world populations, and an official institutionalization of a system of discrimination and abuse.
The purposeful avoidance of focusing on these crimes against humanity around the world, is manifested, in the hypocrisy of the focus now directed toward cases of personal effrontery and harassment in the United States. We have all been ethically and morally compromised, by being made to focus on the minutia and not the cancerous disease that produces it. The essence of evil is disguise; pretending something bad is really good.
As Apostle Paul insisted, "All have sinned, all have trespassed, and if we are not one with our enemies in love, we are at least one with them in sin." This precludes the possibility of separation through the judgment of others.
We indeed, have all trespassed. The good and the soulful admit their past misdeeds, and seek forgiveness, redemption and atonement, while the bad, the evil and the misanthropes driven by the unconscionable greed that creates incalculable human suffering for millions, continually deny their trespasses.
Ephesians 6:12 gives us some Biblical reflection on the modern hypocrisy of focusing on the personal affronts of our culture while ignoring murder and genocide worldwide. "For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places."
It is redemptive grace that wends its way through the disorders of the world, and we must keep hard faith, despite the evidence, knowing that only in doing so, has the evidence of the trespasses of inhumanity have any chance of changing.
This holiday season, let's not forget about the stocking that truly needs to be filled. The stocking for the child born in a manger. We must not forget what He would wish for most, and then let each of us put in our share of loving kindness, warm hearts and the stretched-out hand of tolerance, all the shining gifts that make peace on earth.
