Dear Brave Souls: On the everyday activist, meaning us. Together.
Today is Martin Luther King Day. MLK Day of remembrance here in the USA is being called by many in media ‘Martin Luther King Holiday.’ Stores are touting Martin Luther King ‘sales.’ The overculture often trivializes and also colonizes and I’m afraid. too often cheapens or profanes, the Numinous. My advice: Resist. Remember the Roots that great persons grew from. Follow those.They are our lanterns, our beacons, our lighthouses.
I’m reminded again of what my grandmother used to say when we were on our way to church and were able to walk down the middle of the road [I’ve told you this many times] because there oddly was no traffic. She said it many different ways, but it boiled down to this: Sunday Football was created by Creator in order that we could have the World in peace to ourselves for a while.
In otherwords, let the overculture, do its thing in peace as long as it is peaceful. But remember who you are, why you came here, and that you do not belong nor are you from that [the overculture]. Rather, from some Home and some Heart far more fine.
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In Dr. King’s memory, I hope you will consider: let us fight the good fight on whatever land we stand on now…
Here’s how…
First and foremost: do not give up. Time is an ally often. Incubation takes time to make the new life strong.
Fight the good fight where you live, within your reach.
Encourage others across the world even if you cannot be there.
We are legions, who often are unaware of all the huge number of others who are also in las luchas for decency for humanity, creatures, land, air, water.
Fight the good fight in the ways YOU are called.
No one ever won civil rights and decent treatment by tsk tsking. Or by only raging. Instead, in your own way, consider this way: calling a spade a spade with straight, calm, bright heart –despite or because of being insultedly enraged.
The rage is not the operant motion. Love is the operant stance. True love.
Fight, means to speak, to call for what we all know is proper and life giving, life -sparing, to join, especially, others who are called in their own ways.
I noticed in the huge voter referendum here in 1992 when some few but with tons of money and a constituency, tried to strip GLBT persons of their rights. We fought like hell-dogs against it to take it down. We were at first unsuccessful, the constitutional amendment to the State Constitution, passed… leaving GLBT as third class citizens without full rights.
I learned then by being in the fray relentlessly, that the MOST effective, even though some of those ways were not my calling, was that each group with goodness in mind, brought their own pressures to bear to overturn what was voted in as an intolerable and egregious ‘constitutional’ law, here. A law that made entire groups of human beings, less. This was NOT NEW. It was going backward to OLD WAYS that literally cost the lives of millions across the world.
Intolerable.
And that law passed by those who voted it into being here, WAS overturned. Took time, but it was smashed to dust and found by the upper courts to be unconstitutional, even though the men who brought it to the ballot tried to export their ‘law’ denying all humans the rights accorded all, to OTHER states.
I wrote a manifesto to every bookstore in the nation who would have me, to fasten right at their registers for their customers to read about the wave that was coming toard them from this monied group of cronies, and urging vigilance and action.
I traveled and helped as I was called, to smash the ‘exporters’ wicked ideas and their desire to find ‘other states of conservative voters enough to help their inhumane agenda, also.
Particularly I warned about what had occured here. That the nefarious men had arranged to word the voters’ initiative to strip people of the human and civil rights by wording it in a twisted way. So that if you voted no, you were in actually voting for the atrocity. If you voted yes, you were voting against it.
Unbeknownst to us before the vote, the men had made sure THEIR constituency secretly knew their trick in wording the voter’s initiative on the ballot, so they could vote counterlogically to insure that persons were stripped of rights.
Thus, I learned: letting the cat out of the bag about the completely evil ways some have about duping others, things decent people would NEVER think were being planned to hoodwink them, had to be taught to decent folk, because their minds and hearts never think in such evil terms.
Yet, none of us are allowed to remain innocent and naive in this world. We are needed at full aperatures wide open.
So, educating, teaching others the hidden and back room deals, and the exact names and locations of the network of cronies that log-roll with each other behind closed doors, is essential. You cant deconstruct what you cannot see and know by name and exact locales.
I saw too during that huge pushback against that unjust law here, that it really is place and time to ‘send in the clowns.’ There were certain orgranized groups that did street theater and acted out all over the place in public and before the cameras, saying and doing and languaging things that say, more sedate and introverted persons might not. They grabbed enormous headlines, and I could see there was a place for them in pushing down the mountain some had dishonestly fashioned from some personal pique and molehill.
I also saw the phallanx of lawyers who came to beat down the dishonest law, and the courts and some of the politicos who were also very needed as those who would use their gifts to push the dishonest, back.
I saw that to be effective about any one thing, there is needed strong pushback, non-violent, leaderly, spiritually clean, clear minded, negotiative pushback from many sides filled with determined, loving, insistent souls.
In the end, that is what I saw that WORKS in taking down what ought never have been walking on its hind legs. It takes many persons of calling, yet with regard for one another, coming together to push, like a vice, to crush an evil trajectory that came in stealth and had, at first, no organized opposition.
I follow Martin’s letter, nearly to THE letter, that is, his Letter From Birmingham Jail where he had been imprisoned unjustly.
In the letter, and if you find nothing more to recommend Martin, nothing more to listen to about his vast sermons on the ‘mount’ of OTHER’s iniquities, his tireless work, his house firebombed more than once, others who disagreed with him that ‘all God’s children live together everywhere except on Earth, but ought be given free choice to do so on Earth also’…
until he was murdered in cold blood –and when his death was announced, people of all colors of skin, but same color of heart, literally scream-wept aloud. I was there. I remember.
In Letter from Birmingham Jail, Martin was lamenting that so many black and white ministers were not coming to his clarion call for civil rights for all, that they were saying various, that Martin was being too impetuous, that the time was not right, that blah, and more blah.
We understand now. They were afraid and had not yet found their courage bones.
But most would eventually, and each in their own way according to their own calling. And you know the rest.
Yet, in Martin’s Letter, are the instructions I teach [learned by reading and re re re reading his words practically off the page,] the instructions I strive to follow as an activist all my life in marching, speaking out, doing what I am called to: And they are these directions for overthrowing evil. I KNOW NOT any better instructions and I’ve read all the great peacemakers of the world thoroughly.
Martin said:
Four Steps
1 Make a list of grievances.
2 Self-purify.
3 Negotiate with those in power.
4 Non Violent demonstration
Repeat.
Again.
Over and Over.
Repeat.
Why do movimientos fail? Why do people of good intentions and strong wills fail to mount an effective movement, fail to gain traction, fail to make progress . My opinion only: By leaving out #2 entirely. Self purification takes the circus out, and leaves the angel-heart flaming fire.
Another way of saying this, self purification makes hard and limber Toledo steel out of melted metal. Takes the namecalling out, and instead, repeats the facts, the incontrivertible facts that cannot be sugared or made to disappear.
# 2, makes a Warrior with an Angel at one’s side, double the strength in each soul, for one has called on a purity of powers greater, accessible to mere human beings. Self purification draws like-kind to ‘stand with.’ Self purification burns selfishness to the ground, leaves cynicism and bitterness behind, allows us to annoint ourselves with ashes, the elemental from which we come.
Perhaps you would like to think on these things today, which is Martin’s birthday in a way, a time to not just celebrate and meet, but to seriously take up the unfinished work he made a huge start on. One need go nowhere to do so.
When I saw next to Coretta, Dr. King’s widow, on Maya Angelou’s Minority Health Initiative at Wake Forest Medical School – for we were on the Board together, I have to tell you, that ALL of what she had been through, including burying her very young husband and with children yet to raise by herself, and all the grabbing and hulabaloo and efforts to stain Martin’s legacy, she was like a bold bright red flower that never, ever gave into bitter nor hatred.
Her self purification was daily and the scent of her pure intentions was Divine.
We too, in our striving, whether for Flint, for the egegious conditions in Brazil of the destruction of Mato Grosso, the overbearing of politicos and their greeds in nearly every nation on earth, those who steal others’ food and water sources, those who condemn and then claim land not belonging to them, they who preach an evil obstructtive way of life, those who lead others into degradation… start anywhere. Start anywhere dear brave soul.
As Coretta and Martin both strove toward, strive for self purification daily. This is what keeps us Strong. Not by rote, flattened out platitudes whether spoken or screeched. But by our dignity that shows on our faces, showing in some eerie and yet common way, that we have communed. Yes we have communed today with ‘Source without source.’ And we are calm. Heartful. Fiercely determined. Kind. With love. Relentless.
What is equality, but decency for all. Helps and repairs for all. Life-giving for all. Life-sparing for all. Striving to love. Taking down the ridiculous braggadocio fences of bias. Going blind to all things as ways of assessing. Asking only what is on each person’s best heart- in foreground, in background- and weighing that through one’s own mind, heart, spirit and soul.
Equality is not a pie divided into 8 equal parts for 8 people.
Equality is that each person can grow the grain fields of their own resources and talents without impediment from others, to be able to harvest and keep their own works, to mill them, roll them out unaccosted, design it their way– to be trusted and trustworthy, instead of sent poison darts of suspicion and negative projections that usually belong as negative traits within the one projecting them.
Equality, freedom in ways that nourish oneself and others… that the soul would approve of.
To do so freely without opprobrium or obstruction from any and every.
As contrasted with one self-appointed/ self-annointed ‘owner’ claiming they have a right to squat on the fields of all along with their pals, who brutally through lies and force, take the largesse of hard work and harvest for their most vile selves only, and leave the people who grew the crops, who labored to sow and to reap, only with shaulks and shards and hulls.
Four Steps
1 Make a list of grievances.
2 Self-purify.
3 Negotiate with those in power.
4 Non Violent demonstration
Repeat.
Again.
Over and Over.
And Over.
Repeat.
Each in her own way
Each in his own way
As each is called
As each sees fit.
Follow and ally with those your soul admires, and you will never
be alone.
I send love.
Courage, my dear brave souls, my Tribe of the Sacred Heart, many of us Scar Clan.
We are here on Earth. Together.
dr.e
this letter crossposted at dr. e’s facebook page