more on fools

You're more than welcome on my front porch. I realized however, that I didn't specifically include Canada in my general feel of how things are going. I think that the west has seriously sinned in the eyes of God. I don't think we want so much to do good to the world as we want to do what is good for us personally. Sometimes the two coincide, but if they don't we are more than happy to turn a blind eye, like what happened for instance in the genocide in Rwanda. They had nothing at all that the west wanted. So what did we care, generally speaking, if they died or if they lived? Our chickens will all come home to roost. We have had the benefit of the word of God and we have twisted it and used it for our own ends and to keep other people under our thumbs. I do not believe that God will leave that unpunished.

Ultimately we are all, black and white and brown and yellow, responsible for our own sins, but there is also a judgement of nations on the final day. And I don't think that either of our countries is going to look that good.

For myself, I am interested in politics because I live in the world. I am interested in the whole sociology of it all, how things fit together and what has led to what. I am not interested in politics in the sense of believing there is a future here to be had - I firmly, and every day more believe the only citizenship I have is in Heaven, so in terms of an eternal POV, I find I don't really favor one side over the other.

My half black and half white nieces and nephews live in a large city and they go to a private Catholic school which is very mixed, upper middle class. In spite of it being a Catholic school, there are Muslim students as well as Christians from many denominations, including nominally Christian, and children from atheist families. But they have been called the 'n' word. They didn't know what it meant.

My sister and BIL are not at all activists in any sense of the word, not even in terms of informing them that different races exist. To my nieces and nephews, every one is just people. They have black grandparents and white grandparents, black aunts and uncles and white. They don't know the difference - or didn't until someone focused on a difference.

What I see the worst of here is people's attitudes towards First Nations peoples. I wouldn't ever say that Canadians are better than Americans because there's less racism towards blacks - I have no doubt at all that that is only because we have far less blacks here. Whatever is more in evidence, people will be prejudiced against. Here it is the First Nations who live in poverty, in crime because we as a white society have put them there. They did not put themselves there. And we have kept them there while loudly and proudly proclaiming our distaste at the UN over other nations' human rights violations. We are no better than they are. Our discrimination and our violation of their God-given dignity has simply taken a different form.

And I know it is more than a little weird that I have no fear of walking down dark alleys regardless of who is there. It is quite possible that if it were someone other than myself, I would fear, I don't know. I don't know why I have no fear at all in that regard. It's not even that I deliberately put myself in danger. I don't think about it until later when I realize what I have done. Anyway, whether through absent-mindedness or whatever, I've been in enough strange places to find myself fearless in that regard, but only because I know who holds my life in His hands.

I once found myself in a country in Latin America, not Mexico, btw, lost in what was a very poor area of town. I wasn't familiar with the area and wanted to find a restaurant. I hadn't realised that it was Sunday and almost everything was closed. All of a sudden I found myself surrounded by at least a dozen men wanting to know what I wanted. "A restaurant," I told them.

One of them escorted me to his grandmother's house, where I ate, and then realized that I had forgotten my wallet at the hotel. They spoke poor English and I didn't speak whatever dialect they were speaking. But jeepers that was embarrassing. I made myself understood as best as I could, hurried back to the hotel, got my wallet, and hurried back to the place and paid the lady. In retrospect I realized how badly it could all have gone. I was also wearing embarrassingly expensive jewellery. I only learned later that the area had some serial killer on the loose who preyed on tourists.

In real life, if I were to have actually thought about it, I wouldn't have found myself there to begin with, and I wouldn't have been there wearing the jewellery I was wearing. God takes care of his fools, I guess.

Layla