We all know that there is no easy way to make a major change.
The death of a parent or a spouse can cause us to flounder and become
immobilized for long periods of time, until we make adjustments to our
lives. Even a change in jobs can be difficult. I had just opened a
new cafeteria in the Spokane County Courthouse. My wife was trained
in restaurant management and was looking forward to assisting in the
operation. We were buying a home. My parents had retired and moved
to Spokane to be close to their grand children. My future was bright
and secure. Then the new director of services for the blind called me
and offered me the job of instructor in the Business Enterprises
Training Center in Seattle. I agonized for days. I wanted to take
that job, because it put me in the thick of the battle for passage of
the Commission for the Blind bill. I was state president of the NFBW,
and traveling from Spokane to Olympia while working, was a real
strain. Especially when traveling by Greyhound bus.
But my folks would be brokenhearted. My wife's dream would crash. We
would need to find new housing and leave our cozy new home. That was
the hardest decision I had to make in many years. And in taking the
job, I probably put my marriage in jeopardy.
Another big change in my life came when I finally declared myself to
be an Agnostic. So many of the folks I called my friends, turned
their backs on me and cut me off from their lives.
So I can understand how it is that many people try hard not to rock
the boat. It becomes almost impossible to involve them in any
conversation about the crisis our world is in. Like the old story of
the Ostrich sticking its head in the sand and believing that if it
can't see anything, then nothing can see or harm it.
But since we can only tend to our own attitudes, we have nothing to do
but to keep on investigating and sharing with anyone who will listen,
our "Good News" of a new world Peace.
Carl Jarvis
On 11/9/14, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@optonline.net> wrote:
> Carl wrote in part, in response to my question about how the existence of
> God relates to the financial crisis,
> And that brings me back to your query regarding the roll God plays in
> all of this.
> It is my contention that we have built our civilization on a faulty
> foundation. Like my neighbor trying to fit square cabinets into a
> house that has shrunk and twisted and settled with age, he is
> attempting to alter the shape of that which cannot be changed. Not
> without tearing down the entire building and starting from scratch.
> And so it is with the foundation we have been building upon for
> thousands of years.
> Way back when Man first looked about himself in wonder and fear, he
> made sense out of all that surrounded him by deciding that it was
> created. And since Man made that determination, he also decided by
> whom and for what purpose this universe was created.
> All that followed was predicated on that decision. And Man became
> different from all other life upon Planet Earth.
> And down through the thousands of years, everything Man did to his
> fellow Humans, to all life and to the entire planet, was justified and
> blessed by God. Even today when many do not hold a belief in the
> traditional God, we are conditioned to think of ourselves as Masters
> of All we survey. We are special. We are smarter and more clever
> than all other living things. It is this God Complex that will bring
> down the Human Race. Mother Earth will win in the long haul, changing
> herself and out lasting our meager efforts to continue existing.
> There are no two ways about it. If we do not dismiss God and all the
> surrounding beliefs that we are above all other life upon this planet,
> we will continue pushing our way to the cliff's edge. We invented God
> to explain all that we did not understand. Now we can uninvent God,,
> knowing that there rational answers to all we once called,
> "Mysteries", and given enough time and research and investigation,
> many of the unknowns will be answered. But this will only come to
> pass when Man takes his place among, rather than over, Earth's living
> creatures. And in order to do this, we will have to dismiss God. We
> can certainly thank Him for having given us the belief that we were
> superior, and thus enabling us to survive in a very harsh, uncaring
> world. But we have carried it far too far. And we are in danger of
> that All Mighty Powerful All Knowing God becoming our Terminator.
>
> And that caused me to think that, in fact, our perceptions of what is
> happening around us, of history, of who we are, are imbedded in the culture
> of the society in which we live. So when Carl talks about letting go of all
> the false premises on which our actions and assumptions are built, he's
> suggesting that by some act of will, we can strip ourselves of a good part
> of the foundations of our society and our personalities. This conditioning
> process which has shaped us, has been in my mind in another context today.
> Yesterday, I told Alice about a novel that I thought she would enjoy
> reading, The Garden of Letters. The book takes place in Italy during World
> War 2 and it is about a young woman who plays the cello, and who becomes
> involved in the Resistance. I was listening to it while eating breakfast
> and
> I thought about how so many really good books were written about what
> happened during World War 2, so many that focused on the horrors that
> european jews underwent and the bravery of the people who tried to resist
> the Nazis. Then I read the article about the Gazan fisherman that I posted
> to the list. I began thinking about all of the material I've been reading
> lately about the history of the Palestinians. These are articles that
> described how badly the Palestinians were treated by the British under the
> British Mandate, how they were treated by the newborn state of Issrael, how
> the land that had been ceded to them in the partition approved by the U N
> in
> 1947 was immediately stolen from them when Israel proclaimed itself as a
> new
> state. And I realized that one of the reasons that none of us have ever had
> an emotional response to what was done, and is being done, to the
> Palestinians, is that they're not included in our cultural value system.
> You
> have to look hard to find good novels written about Palestinian life, about
> their culture, about what they've suffered. They have been blacked out of
> our consciousness except as disgruntled terrorists. My point is, in
> response
> to Carl, and in general, people believe in, and are profoundly influenced
> by
> their cultural myths. That is why the people who took control of our
> country
> in 2000, were able to steal our civil liberties and commit us to eternal
> war. The case had been building to make Muslims our latest enemy, replacing
> Russia, and all those beliefs about American exceptionalism were just
> sitting there, waiting to be exploited.
>
> Miriam
>
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