Enough Militarism, Enough

How we survived this long is anyone’s guess. We were barely clinging on when we hobbled out of Africa a million years ago. The aboriginal appeal of men in particular to scrapping is based on a predisposition to “fight or flight,” engrained in the cerebral pre cortex. This creates a situation where we choose to settle everything by bullying.

I was once managing a thrift store on Park Avenue West in Denver and a person came along and dumped trash on the sidewalk. When I went over to where he was, he pulled out a sawed off shot gun and threatened me. My response was to back off immediately, “the flight instinct,” and to live another day.

The day I was born, January 29, 1951, we were involved in full scale war in Korea, detonation and nuclear proliferation of arms, and the cold war, none of which has diminished in sixty years. In fact, in one way or another holocaust has never ceased against the world wreaked by human beings on everything surrounding us.

We’re poised in Pakistan, Korea, along the southern border, and Afghanistan to continue to escalate the devastating build up of armed intervention, which has plagued us in our foreign policy and destroyed countless communities. I was ruminating in my spiritual practice what would it be like to make war in this neighborhood? What would the effect be on the quality of life of all of those who go about their daily exercises oblivious to the gnawing fears of a thread bare worn world? Would you still be able to drive down the street for lack of a safe and sound paved road? Would you be able to use your cell phone because of a lack of communication networks? Would you have a lack of running potable water, food, hygiene, and any peaceful surroundings? How could we believe that we are immune from this contaminating influence or that our way of life is not the finite cause of the tyranny?

What Obama might consider imperative is dispensing with all threatening gestures against anyone internally to this land or abroad and instead have a peace summit once and for all between all disillusioned and dysfunctional groups to determine exactly what would be possible to do to live in peaceful existence forever more.

IGNORANCE AND IMMORALITY EQUALS SUCCESS IN AMERICA
OR THE WORSE YOU BEHAVE THE MORE YOU ARE WORTH
By Helen L. Burleson, Doctor of Public Administration

Want our daughters assured of making mega bucks, preach abstinence to them and then let them turn a deaf ear and get pregnant as a teenager! How about between $15,000 to $30,000 to go on the speakers circuit to talk about abstinence and the perils of being an unwed, teen mother.

One American family has really found the secret to success. When so many young people are in college today trying to broaden their knowledge, we have a former political candidate running around the country giving hateful sound bites , incendiary and inciteful remarks whose being made a multi-millionaire through book deals and speaking engagements despite the fact that her very limited knowledge is soaringly and glaringly obvious.
What a mother–daughter team! They must be the model duo for the 21st Century. Forget about all those old-fashioned values and ideals that girls used to be taught and adhered to, this is a new day, a new way and a new say to raise a fortune.

Now we’re going to hear lectured to young girls, don’t do what I did, do what I failed to do. This great message should resonant well especially when the audience of young girls out there are working at fast food places making minimum wages and trying to figure out how they’re going to be able to pay for their college tuition. Are they going to think of themselves as suckers who listened to their mothers and let their conscience be their guide when they resisted the temptation of early, unprotected sex? I wonder, if instead, they say, what the heck, if I get a baby, I’ll be set for life; and, a very glamorous and well rewarded one at that.

You have to give credit to this mother-daughter team; they really know how to game the system. Have someone write a book for you, travel in luxurious style, flash a smile and soak up all the praise along with all the dollars. The ideal is to appear at political functions, offer nothing on policies or solutions that might help the country overcome its multitude of problems. All you have to do to please your equally-yoked audience is to slam the President of the United States of America, plant the seed of distrust and disrespect, fuel the flames with fiery rhetoric in syncopated rhythm and then work the crowd up into a frenzied pitch where they shout out things like, “no one is going to take our guns away from us or we want our country back.”

The unwed father of the baby has gone Hollywood and is getting offers to pose for magazines. I guess next it will be the baby born out of wedlock who will start racking in the bucks. Why not? There’s no shame in this brazen assortment of exhibitionists.

All I can say is go, girls go. You make the rest of us who follow the Ten Commandments look like pikers and nerds. Anybody ready to trade places?

If You Meet a Homeless Man on the Road Kill Him

Meet a homeless man in his late forties who has been out off and on, out on the streets since 1984. He has been serving time for being unable to fend for himself and is judged as being unfit to have a decent, safe place to lie down. He comes to me in my dream state asking for refuge and I turn to him and say, "I can't." We say this again and again and again. The police officer who comes from district 6 says that he can't and the person in the shelter turns him away because they're on overflow and he didn't make the lottery. "He is used to the conditions, like the blossoms and branches of the fruit trees that are about to snap off because they're weighted down with the heavy snow. The men huddled under the canopy across the street from the Open Door Fellowship are stuck there out of turn and gave up trying to find a refuge.

Denver's Road Home is nearly half way through its process of caring for people in a community partnership and still this man haunts me. He knows who I am and he refers to me by name because two years ago he used to reside here in this temporary shelter. For whatever reason we are condemning this person to freeze to death because most hypothermia occurs when the weather changes abruptly in the spring and fall. We're in store for a heavy snow and all we can say is, "that all of the vouchers for men have been given out for the year." It is May after all and people are supposed to fend for themselves. They don't. They die or disappear and we forget them. But I cannot forget because the image is imprinted in my head that I turned away Elijah and that it’s my turn to show compassion.

Is it possible that there is no safe place and time to be uprooted and frozen? When the summer heat seers the sinews and drives you mad from the bugs and itching that this is just as untenable a time and situation to be living on the street in public places. What are we all thinking? "Is it someone else's problem to resolve?" Can we seriously turn our backs and peacefully go back to sleep knowing that this man is vulnerable, and well, “we'll never be in his shoes?”

We're all the culprits and all responsible, and what I want to know, is, "Why can't I wash out this damn spot?"

Human Trafficking Think Again We’re All at Risk and All Must Shoulder Blame

Slavery ended some will state. Modern slavery is nothing like the enslavement of Africans. There is nothing more alarming and disconcerting that America and Brazil are the places of the greatest slavery on earth. There is nothing more alarming and disconcerting that the most substantial business worldwide will be slavery. All of us are involved directly in the slave trade and we take this for granted. Law enforcement still arrests women for prostitution in small enclaves, exclusive spas and hotel rooms and the Immigration Citizen Enforcement still sends the captured women back to their place of origin regardless of whether they are unjustly imprisoned.

How little we know of this multi-trillion dollar enterprise? We make assumptions that women and children are willingly working to create every imaginable item of apparel or substance, care for children, work in dangerous occupations, with little hope of earning their freedom. In desperate conditions economically people resort to terrifying extremes for survival and all because we need to subjugate others.

How many of us dominate people in our mannerisms and behavior and trample over the rights of individuals until their lives are forfeited? On those trains in the 1900’s millions of children who were orphaned were sent out west to work as slaves on farms, in factories, in untenable situations. Photographs of them suggest the same cruel treatment that is common practice in contemporary society. We are all culpable for the inhumane treatment of people throughout the world. In most cases these people feel as though they’re worthless, expendable and in terms of rights and justice we are each to blame for the world’s orphaned and marginal people.

The question must be asked what do you do to promote slavery and how will we end this nightmare for half the inhabitants of the earth?

Mother’s Day Proclamation
Written by Julia Ward Howe in 1870

“Arise then ….. women of this day!

Arise, all women who have hearts!

Whether thy baptism be of water or of tears!

Say firmly: we will not have questions answered by irregular agencies,

Our husbands will not come to us reeking of carnage,

For caresses and applause.

Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn

All that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.

We, the women of one country,

Will be too tender of those of another country

To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.

From the voice of a devastated earth a voice goes up with

Our own. It says: “Disarm! Disarm!

The sword of murder is not the balance of justice.”

Blood does not wipe our dishonor,

Nor violence indicate possession.

As men have often forsaken the plough and the anvil

At the summons of war,

Let women not leave all that may be left at home

For a great and earnest day of counsel.

Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead.

Let them solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means

Whereby the great human family can live in peace ……..

www.juliawardhowe.org

TAKING A LOOK AT REPARATIONS

By Helen L. Burleson, Doctor of Public Administration

Like Americans everywhere, I too, was shocked, saddened and outraged when the World Trade Center was obliterated by terrorists who wanted to destroy the United States of America. I was overwhelmed with empathy and compassion for the wives whose husbands would not come home that night, the husbands whose wives would not come home that night, the children whose lives would be shattered and the parents who had the most horrendous task imaginable, burying their child/children.

I felt that a memorial to those Americans was appropriate because seldom had the United States been attacked by outside forces since the advent of Pearl Harbor.

When I heard that the survivors were demanding rhestitution or reparations for the lives lost, I was not only puzzled, but I felt a sense of outrage. Never had I heard of anyone suggesting that the families of the sailors who lost their lives on the ships in Pearl Harbor, nor had I ever heard of the families of all military personnel killed in service for their country being adequately compensated for their loss. I reflected back to the bombing in Oklahoma City of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building and other internal acts of terrorism where no one in the body politic or the public demanded compensation for the lives lost in such tragedies.

Now, I’m going to apply some logic to the slavery of Africans in America. I know there are arguments that the United States was not the sole perpetrator of forcing people against their will to leave their homeland to work in servitude with no compensation as Professor Henry Louis Gates attests. It does not matter that some African leaders helped to facilitate the capture and enslavement of their fellow man. What does matter is that the slaves who survived the Middle Passage and those that endured the ever perpetual humiliation, torture, brutality, the castration, the rape, and the lynchings carried out by their slave owners were forced to work without compensation.

The survivors were forced to labor under the most inhumane conditions with no benefit accrued to themselves or their families. Instead, this labor fattened the coffers of the landowners. Much of the wealth of the United States of America was built on the backs of these unpaid workers who were devalued, dehumanized, devastated and emotionally destroyed. These are the people who did not volunteer for this forced service or labor; they had no choice. Their fate was either comply or die!

The descendants of these African slaves should be adequately compensated for the loss of lives of their ancestors just as the survivors of the families of people who lost their lives in the World Trade Center. The two situations are not even equal or parallel. The WTC workers went to work voluntarily in order to support themselves and their families. The African slaves were forced to work without any pay to sustain themselves or their families. Their ancestors inherited nothing because the slaves had nothing to leave to their progeny. Many white families in America are wealthy because of the wealth inherited from their ancestors, who as free people were able to accumulate wealth, in many instances the wealth was gained because of the free labor rendered by their enslaved workers.

Fairness and decency compel America to address these grievances. Just as veterans, under the G. I. Bill, were given points in qualifying for tests for employment to help to compensate for their service, Americans of African descent deserve to be compensated in money for the service of their ancestors.

There is no justification for denying Americans of African descent the chance to catch up. Starting out of the gate miles behind the rest of Americans, they start out with this distinct disadvantage of starting from scratch with NO BOOTS and no straps to pull them up.

See this article from the Denver Post for some important information: http://www.denverpost.com/frontpage/ci_15000269

Glory to the minstrel who sings and plays the mandolin. Glory to the harmony of the chorus that are harbingers for both the tragedy and the comedy. Glory to the aria and the fullness of the voice, the most versatile and moving instrument, that sings, chants, yodels, warbles, like a nightingale entrancing and captivating, while quieting the troubled spirit, while quelling the heart beating passionately at love's lost requiem. Music carries us away and dribbles on our panting chest the cadence, the rhythm of life. How droll the spirit of the bard and the gift of prophesy that has such a tongue and breath to sweep away all misery and leave us for a moment in a place that is sacred and profane.

At the close of life, when the veil is drawn I hope that someone will play the cello as in St. Colomb's magical music from a place beyond this; for music that soothes the spirit and lifts the fires of light to the divine is not for mortal ears and lips. We hear from a place that is profound and distant like a brilliant novena that bursts our hearts.

Thank you for the drummers rhythm, that has played out a powerful beat that drove us dizzy and feet that traced the pattern of the hands and sticks pounding out the beat. The rhythm of life is a powerful beat that shakes the hands and feet and melts the heart. Without the pounding of the rhythm there would be a cacophony of rude noise.

Thank you for the rush of nascent chimes blowing in the wind that make us realize that there is more than stirring air in the refrain, deep inside the seed of life.

Gongs, cymbals, syncopating rhythms of castanets and congas carry us back, back across the waves and the clatter of centuries to the primordial ancestry of life emerging from the shadows of the sea. Listen to the conch and blow out the concordant echo in our eyes and ears. Our nostrils can feel the breezes blowing inland lifting us up above the din.

What first promoted the pipes of Pam to play how lightly and magically we were transformed and in that instant the immortal was created forever as a siren drawing us to be laid to waste on the shores of beauty and transcendent rhapsody. Thank you all madrigals and voices of the chorale for making us remember that what is inside is the joy of creative sparks that fly up to heaven and then disappear.