Dear Friend and Reader,
YESTERDAY TWO MEN were arrested forВ planning a killing spree that would end in driving their car atВ high speed into Barack Obama.
The two men: Daniel Cowart, 20 and Paul Schlesselman 18, were from Tennessee and Arkansas, had met online and soon discovered they had a lot in common as far as hating was concerned. The self-proclaimed Neo-Nazis “planned to kill 88 people — 14 by beheading, according to documents unsealed in U.S. District Court in Jackson, Tenn. The numbers 88 and 14 are symbolic in the white supremacist community,” The Boston Globe reports.
They are in police custody.
Just to remind everyone, we are approaching the Saturn Uranus opposition that will mark the beginning ofВ a new era. This will happen while the Sun is in Scorpio, which is a polarizing, passionate sign.
Hatred and love are two emotions that are very, very similar in that they cause people to act in ways that under other circumstances would seem unreasonable.
As the band Morcheeba says, “Fear keeps you from loving, and love keeps you from fearing.”
Merry Met,
Genevieve Sophia
goddess:
It’s possible that Barack Obama was born in Kenya.
This is how it works: The child is born in the father’s country and there are records and witnesses that attest to his arrival. But, the mother is…well, she’s fucking amazing frankly, this past-life Sufi Sagittarius with a womb and clue. She decides (quite correctly) that the child would be better off if he were a native citizen of the US.
Maybe she just has a feeling. Maybe she just feels really far away from her life right then so she flies home with the baby. Maybe it’s even like this: She takes the baby to her parents’ house. There are discussions about the blackness of this baby and she’s alone, and eighteen, and the exchange student ( what the *hell* is an exchange student in 1961??) who is the dad wants to transfer to Harvard, and basically it’s all really fucking bad. Nobody ever understood that girl and now she’s got some mulatto child and an African husband, seriously, what the hell.
Ann Dunham’s Black Moon Lilith is doing its promised cancan in her chart. She realizes she is following some unknown electromagnetic gridline the birds follow but nobody else does.
But she’s still got that feeling.
She reports the child’s birth in her native country. At least he’ll qualify for a student loan in the United States. I’m reaching here, my intuition is that her reasons were even more practical than that.
As a female US citizen with white parents you can totally work this using a Consular Report of Birth, but she didn’t need to do that. She could have just said her black baby was born at home in Hawaii. She could have told those guys Barack was the result of a one night stand in Honolulu. What would the Authorities have done, demanded evidential video in 1961?
Listen, women are unmanageable. They’re always procreating outside of military time. Babies born in conquered countries are often given a choice of citizenship because usually what has happened is some paratrooping jarhead has found a fuckable local and in that case the least the US Military can do is give the results some Dependent ID redeemable for french fries and Nutritious Monsanto Baby Formula at the suddenly enormous PX.
It’s not criminal or dishonest. These are practicalities. And look: if in one case out of ten trillion the rules happened to work backwards in favor of Ann Dunham’s baby, well..hey man. Obama for President.
There are women who are called Free Spirits because they have some sort of art practice or they do yoga or they’re vegetarians or they “work outside the home” or something. They smile gratefully when you pass along that characterization because they’ve worked their asses off for some tiny recognition that they actually exist and are not entirely sexual real estate.
Barack Obama’s mom wasn’t like that. She was truly free. She was that one electron the apparatus missed, the Strange Quark.
Cherchez La Femme. At least once before you decide you know what happened.
Barack Obama’s mother’s given name was Stanley. She operated with grace in a world of strangers. She was a walking Rosetta Stone.
This is my favorite picture of her:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Barack-obama-mother.jpg
~j
“The cellular sense of privilege and superiority, as well as inferiority will take longer to weed out from the generations.”
Agreed. Back again to the Theory of Onion. Peel all that we have built down to its core. Everything inside must be exposed. Different (conscious) choices must be made about how we are going to live with each other and this planet.
Who are we as we rebuild and renew? (And yes, we will have to do some tearing down of our own to complete the job already started.)
Can we really see this hate disappear into the ethers?
Can we assimilate it with enough love? Can we “Be Gandhi?” and not become just the other side of hate (again)?
I am passionately waiting to know just HOW we are going to do this. Something new must transpire. Something we have not been able to see/experience before.
I vote Yes on Proposition One: Transformation, not annihilation.
“What I realized, reading Eric’s words, was not new but more profoundly felt than I had ever before experienced: I realized how much we project our shadow onto people of color; how challenging this must be for so many people. So much of the racial hate and violence is propagated by the unwillingness to look within. This makes me very sad, and I vow to keep pulling up and acknowledging my own shadow stuff.”
Goddess:
truer words were never spoken. This is an original sin in this country, if not western civilization in general. Colonization and subjugation has been a leading global employer since, what, Ancient Egypt?
In present day, we are still in the land of the pharaohs, only the pharoahs live in gated communities, take in the majority of the wealth of this country and number about 1% of the population. Objectification and projection of the dark onto the other is an economic necessity, based on fear and the need to control the darkness in themselves.
Hopefully, we will see the last of this behavior–at least the last of the passive and direct permission for this behavior. The cellular sense of privilege and superiority, as well as inferiority will take longer to weed out from the generations.
We need to do everything from public school reformation to chnages in access to more nutritious foods. We need to address the environmental justice issues plaguing communities of color and the economic prison that still traps those most at risk. That alone will take a few decades to accomplish.
A few days ago, reading one of Eric’s Planet Waves articles, I suddenly understood at a far, far deeper level the emails that have been coming into my inbox. The woman who started it was trashing Obama and making the most bizarre comments (at least from my perspective). The weirdest was that Obama had refused to produce his birth certificate and was actually born in Kenya. Apparently that rumor has been going around on the web. I tried logic – surely the Democratic Party had vetted Obama on such an important issue (he would not be qualified to become Pres if he wasn’t born on US soil, including territories); the media would have latched onto such an important issue and we would have heard somewhere besides the web; and so on. That just made it worse. To get out of reading hate mail, I finally blacklisted most of the people to whom all this was being sent.
What I realized, reading Eric’s words, was not new but more profoundly felt than I had ever before experienced: I realized how much we project our shadow onto people of color; how challenging this must be for so many people. So much of the racial hate and violence is propagated by the unwillingness to look within. This makes me very sad, and I vow to keep pulling up and acknowledging my own shadow stuff.
Ya. Isn’t it great? Amazing reporting re: this crazy world we live in. I hear the guy who started it all is pretty awesome.
Gee, the things you learn reading Planet Waves.
Anyone read A Series of Unfortunate Events? Seen the latest Batman movie?
We have segueed into a time when we acknowledge that to be the Cowboy dressed in White is no different than to be the Cowboy dressed in Black.
What is popular opinion? Isn’t definition of who’s the good-guy and who’s the bad-guy founded in this?
Juggling yin and yang we are – like a hot potato.
Prayers that we may merge the two into One with Grace and ease.