“Sunflowers”
Now is the nuclear winter of our discontent. Discontent comes in many forms, but in this case, I can’t help but wonder, sometimes aloud and now on paper, why are we as a group family, all coming from and albeit at our own individual speed, going back to where we came willing to tolerate the intentional infliction of massive pain and suffering upon our brothers and sisters from the same maternal womb?
When will we stop believing that countries and borders exist except in our minds? When will we stop persecuting persons of religion, color, gender, what clothes they like to wear or what set of genitalia they prefer as if these were differences, worth more than a passing comment, much less total condemnation?
Why do we still think it acceptable to judge, rank, persecute a person by the color of their skin and not by the content of their character? What is it that makes some misguided souls feel better about their position in life by putting someone else in a worse position?
How is it that your right to religious freedom, your piety, perhaps the very saving of your eternal soul, depends on everyone else following your beliefs, morals and values including all your predispositions and prejudices?
What does it matter to you what gender, if any, a person cares to associate with? The clothing, the mannerisms, the pronouns he or she or they or whatever they wish to employ? What matters what bathroom they use and at the end of this long line of hatred, if you don’t favor abortion, don’t have one.
Are you seriously trying to tell us that if a young teenager scared out of her mind with little or no one to turn to decides that bearing a child is not in either hers, or the child’s interest, decides to have an abortion, you are not going to heaven?
Or are you really that delirious to think your ticket to heaven depends on the servitude of another to your way of thinking? Of feeling? Of believing? These are the mortals who cannot trust their own eyes and ears or their own judgments, often about the empirical and the obvious preferring to get their marching orders from a book.
Why follow an old white, racist scumbag spewing out racial animus while bathing in the false light of authority shining through a stained-glass window? Or recently, an old white scumbag behind a bully pulpit vomiting out politically motivated, self-interested lies, as if your life could be improved through the degradation of those who do not subscribe to a religion, a race, a gender or a political party?
If this life is indeed an illusion, why not make it a pleasant oasis, rather than turn the gift of life into a nightmare? Why is it impossible as a matter of dogma to respect our diversity as the great gift from above that it was meant to be? That every grain of sand, pebble on the beach, all the pretty sea glass has its place?
That everyone here is valuable and in harmony, not strife, but in harmony is where we will all find a better life. We can learn so much from one another and so much more if we continue to challenge and defeat the artificial barriers we place upon ourselves.
We are one. If you break humanity into categories of acceptable, unacceptable, or somewhere in-between, we are still one. Think of it this way, you may encounter any number of seemingly individual flames on your journey, but there is only one fire. Fire does not discriminate, it does not change. It may lie dormant, but such is its nature.
I would be hard pressed to not say that our own brand of illusion, delirium and possibly dementia, both individual and collective, has not been pronounced. When I hear the word “polarized” I first imagine the frozen tundra, a barren godforsaken landscape of unimaginable hardship.
Then I remember that even the smallest of flowers can somehow make its way through the concrete sidewalks for no other reason than to seek the light that will sustain its growth. How does the flower know there is light above when it is born into total darkness? Or better yet, why don’t we know that?
You were not born into sin. There is no sin in simply being alive. Life is the greatest of gifts. I, you, we are all miracles of creation. Why can’t we accept this responsibility and glorify the acts and intent of our Creator with good acts and intentions?
If not by imitation, is there another way to approach divinity? To know the vast celestial secrets of the universe and beyond? Yet so many choose to live in discontent, unwilling or unable to change. To adapt to new times and new ideas. To believe in a future we can all make possible.
Today, we see a madman in Russia causing degradation, pain and death to another tribe that just happens to sit on the other side of an imaginary border. Ukraine is a nation with a long, rich, and illustrious history. It was a nation, a people with their own identity and customs when Moscow was a small, covered mostly in mud hamlet of little consequence.
All inferences of inadequacy aside, for there are many, a leftover relic from a time where nuclear war had us all scared for our lives, has for some unfathomable reason, decided to tie his ultimate destiny and legacy, to the notion that through violence and brutality, his dream of a reunited Soviet Union will insure his place in history.
Well, it might, but it is unlikely that his legacy will be little more than being the last dictatorial footnote to a world free of tyranny, wanton destruction, and fear. It is unfortunate there are still persons of like mind, who wish to exploit our differences rather than share our communal dreams.
It is sad it takes a lunatic starting a war against its non-hostile neighbor to reawaken the fire of freedom on a world scale, but it has. As painful as it is to reflect and lament the events going on right now as we speak, the disregard for life for little more than an imaginary buffer zone for an imaginary border that I tell you doesn’t exist, and all in the name of ‘security” of a regime gone mad, can we all dare to quote the immortal words of William Shakespeare (minus the nuclear reference) that this too, shall pass?
For if you read the next line, “…made glorious summer by this son of York” the two lines together signaling we have reached the bottom of our unhappiness and it is time to look ahead, to better days, to the son (Richard III) or sun, as do all living things born into darkness for nothing more than the chance to reach out to the nourishing and sustaining light of the sun?
If for no other reasons, and again there are many, I stand with Ukraine, with freedom and the hope for a better tomorrow. You in?
