I was watching videos about Shirley Phelps-Roper. I'm pretty sure I've talked about her before. But in case you don't know who she is, she's this insane, insane woman who is a part of the Westboro Baptist Church. The Church has about 100 members, mostly made up of her family. They protest and picket the funeral marches of soldiers who are killed in Iraq. They carry signs that say, "God Hates Fags" and "God Loves Dead Soldiers." They promote hatred and malice under God's name. They say that we sin by accepting homosexuality, and that's why people are killed. She believes that the young Amish girls who were shot to death last summer deserved to die -- not because they did anything wrong, necessarily, but because of Adam's Original Sin. And yet, she and her family are untouchable, because they're spreading this message and "enlightening" the world.
The liberal in me says that everyone is allowed to have his/her own opinion. And I believe that, though I don't agree with many of them. But there is such an extreme amount of variance in the human race that to say that everyone should think the same way is ridiculous. The Buddhist in me says to detach myself from what she says and to disassociate myself from such negative energy. The human in me becomes angry every time I hear her talk in such a way. It's a weird threeway tug-of-war that goes on inside of me at listening to this manic woman.
And then it makes me turn inward. What sort of things do I promote, and do I promote anything to such extreme levels? I examine myself and my life and my message. I can't imagine I've ever promoted hatred of any kind - and if I ever have, my Universe, I am sorry for it. I like to think that I would never intentionally do such a thing. And all of this introspection reminds me that I must live a life for love. For peace. For happiness. For energy. For balance. For myself. For others.
I try to channel the positive forces within me that tell me stay true to my Lo(ve)-Fi and Om tattoos. Receive love from other people (and do not be afraid of it) and send the signal back out, stronger. Even when forces against me are trying to steal it away. Stay balanced and in tune with myself and the rest of the Universe. Turn negatives into positives.
Be happy.
If I could somehow get this tattooed on my body, I would. The following excerpt, from Carl Sagan (1994), is one of my all-time favorites. It is based upon the picture below, a picture of earth taken from the edge of our galaxy.
Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.
-- Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994
- May (you never be afraid of what's inside).
No comments:
Post a Comment