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After a week of writing about the senseless murder of Michael Brown, a young, unarmed African-Americn in Ferguson, Missouri, by a white policeman, I’ve spent the last few days reading posts we have written over the past few years, and those from other authors, condemning racism. It’s become a meditation on the racism upon which this country was founded.
Fear of other did not begin with America. Fear of something different than yourself springs from caveman DNA, and it is only the gradual grasp of Love, in your intellect and in actuality of the Love you express, that raises anyone above the primitive. When we evolve as individuals, and as a mass of humanity, to be able to reject fear as a way of life, the earth and its people tick closer to a world built on Love. This is a world where every child is born with its personal autonomy intact, where governments, corporations, religious hierarchies, or local custom do not rob us of mutual equality. This is the age of universal plurality, the only pathway to Peace, the only future that applies to all people.
Organized religion has done the most to retard this evolution away from the primitive. From the earliest shamans, humans have been exploited by greedy (and lazy) interlopers presuming to come between us and the reality of love, something we can actually feel flow into, through, and out of our own bodies.
To the extent that our successes or our happiness sits atop the exploitation of others, the love in our lives is an illusion, a mental appetizer only of what could be. Every decision we make is a personal moral question. There is no morality greater than one person, despite what religious hierarchies and others would have you believe. No decision is based on what others think or tell you because if you just quiet your mind for a moment you know exactly what each decision is and where it will lead. At that moment you know whether you are choosing love over hate, mutual support over exclusion, purpose over failure. It is not only our intellect or even our heart that guides us, although they are helpful. It is recognition of the underlying and inescapable ecology of Love, Truth, Beauty, and Goodness. Consciously or unconsciously we understand in our gut that love has a future and that hate dies on the vine, however long that might take.
The founders of Amerika, and everyone since, sprung from a white supremacist point of view. First up? The eradication of the non-white natives. Next? The ruthless exploitation of black people brought to this country against their will, permanently indentured to the whim of their white owners. Now? Closing our borders selectively because white people fear that we are fast becoming a blended brown nation.
Every white person, individually and collectively, knows they are consciously choosing hate or at least something short of Love, whenever and wherever they are unwilling to give up the systemic exploitation and enslavement of those they consider “other.”
The only future for white people in this country is to embrace Love of their fellows by silencing the haters. We have to call the haters out in capital letters, on a daily basis. The legacy of Michael Brown and his family is giving this country an ideal platform to recognize this country’s racists roots, and to make amends by finding ways to make things right.
“Not everything that is faced can be chaged;
but nothing can be changed until it is faced
— James Baldwin (1924 – 1987)
American novelist, essayist, playwright,
poet, and social critic