HOPE

This is the moment of recognition that the notion of slavery can't safely be tucked away in the landscape of black people exclusively, but that that landscape itself has caught up with all of us, even the 1% who are enslaved to their own greed.

In her article following her sentencing to three months, Kathy Kelly has certainly spelled things out as they are:

"On December 10, International Rights Day,
federal magistrate Matt Whitworth sentenced me to
three months in prison for having crossed the line at
a military base that wages drone warfare. A group
of Afghan friends had entrusted me with a simple
message, their grieven, which they couldn't
personally deliver: please STOP KILLING US!
The punishment for our attempt to speak on behalf
of trapped and desperate people will be an
opportunity to speak with people trapped by prisons
and impoverishment here in the U.S."

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“Hands up, don’t shoot! “I can’t breathe!” are the dying words of many of us here at home as they may very well be by people of color living abroad as well.

A friend of a friend forwarded her response to Kathy's article:

"After reading this article, I find myself imprisoned in a world of helplessness! I think many people, without even reading Kathy’s article, are suffering from a feeling of helplessness and hopelessness.”

My friend responded: “In your blog, you've provided a list of what an occupied country looks like.  People may not recognize all, but they are beginning to feel them, especially with all that has come to light in the past couple of weeks.  For those not following peace and justice news, it must be quite a shock.  The myth of America is crumbling.  We are all really in a tough situation.”  

                                                            ***

Many people write about hope and  their yearning for hope. Hope deferred, so the saying has it, is like nectar in a sieve.

But hopelessness may be the mark of inappropriate arrogance. if we have a sense of deep time, and understanding of the cosmos and of karma and how the All operates, we recognize our place in the world, and we are sufficiently humbled by it to such a great extent that we can't ever feel hopeless.  We know all in the material world is finite, subject to change.  As life is extinguished on one planet, amongst the billion billion of the universe(s), life on other planets may lurch into being in the same cataclysmic way our own small grain of sand once did.

You may have learned early what apocalypsos means: it means that all the dirt will come out. People will rise from their graves. And indeed more and more buried corpses are being unearthed, in Mexico, Guatemala, Ruanda, El Savador (the EL Mozote Massacre), Iraq, and in so many other places in the world. Snowden, Manning, and Assange and so many others have opened what was hidden.  

Here is a quotation of David Rockefeller speaking at the Bilderberg conference of 1991:

“We are grateful to the Washington Post, The New York Times, Time Magazine and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promises of discretion for almost 40 years. It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subjected to the lights of publicity during those years. But the world is more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world government. The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national auto-determination practiced in past centuries.”

                                                                 ***

The concept of hope in my view may be a false one because it may displace responsibility, and by doing so may place godhead outside the body, a concept that serves the Earth poorly. Those who fully understand godhead understand it indwells in all things! It is not male, not female, not personal, not attached to any Western European concepts. but rather it resonates with as close as human understanding can envision it, in the deeper understanding of the East.

If your friend is looking for hope, she must first come to realize the enormous magnitude of space and time. She must understand that it has no understanding, no beginning and no end. And that it is of such exquisite beauty that it vibrates in all things. 

For people like us, the victims of the West in all its arrogance, it serves to know that humankind is passing through a historical phrase that began approximately 6300 years ago in a region now called "Europe,"  and that this reality we now happen to be born into had a beginning, and like all things, will have an end.

In the meantime, we can take the measure of what is dying, not just all life on our particular small grain of sand, but all its history as recorded by the ways of seeing of all living things, and for our disproportionately multiple and arrogant species, we can remember the collective loss of all the writings, of all the thought oral and written, all the music, western and eastern and indigenous, all the dances, all the theater, all the song, all the representation from 40,000 BC to the present, from the imprints of human hands of people living millennia ago in caves, to the atrocities of Francis Bacon.

We small ones happen to be caught in the web of a time of extinction, but for everything that dies, that ceases to exist, somewhere else in time and space, something is being born.

                                                            ***

Tell your friend that something IS being born: the collective consciousness of people of the world recognizes that slavery and its history is no longer confined to our old understanding that it existed only among people of color, but that it exists now and can be said to describe the entire human race—including the so-called 1%, formerly referred to as the elite, who also are enslaved, but to what we refer to as "greed" because we have only limited  understanding and lack words to describe its egregiousness.  If your friend searches for hope, you might suggest that it's marching right now—in the streets.