Rapture
Black lives do not matter, which explains why its opposite has become a rallying cry. All lives matter, obvious as that statement may be is not pertinent to what’s going on in this rapidly insane country of ours.
To those of us whites who feel compelled to say we are not responsible for historic events, we missed the point. No, we alive today didn’t land at Plymouth Rock and begin the slaughter of First Peoples (the real story of Thanksgiving). We weren’t in the American Revolution which, by the way, was as much about the right of the founding fathers to own slaves as it was about freedom. We didn’t fight alongside Andrew Jackson who brutally tortured and killed native women and children, to teach their men a lesson.
We didn’t segregate the Armed Forces in the pre-Korean wars. (Southern officers, descendants of Confederate traitors, controlled the commands of the armed services and inserted their own prejudices in the bargain.) We didn’t participate in the mass lynching of Black people during Reconstruction.
But those horrifying things happened. We learned history for a grade, but we didn’t learn from it and make ourselves better. The history taught in my hometown of Alton mentioned not a word about our segregated schools from 1895 to 1952. Not a word about cross burnings or restaurants refusing service to Blacks, about only allowing Black mothers to give birth in our hospital basements, about the movie The Birth of a Nation drawing thirty thousand cheering whites to the Hippodrome movie house on Broadway and the Alton Evening Telegraph declaring that the film was a true depiction of history.
And soon, our modern children won’t have factual history. It will be banned by white supremacists taking over school boards, so their innocent white children won’t be triggered by the truth. Black children? Sorry about that.
“Never again”: the most solemn oath of post-World War II. Are you kidding? We forgot immediately. In a mere hundred thousand years, we went from spears to AK-47s. In the twentieth century alone, we slaughtered two hundred million people in the name of God, superiority, and morality.
St. Francis of Assisi went along for the Crusades, witnessed the horrific slaughter of the “infidels,” and joined those infidels out of love. Martin Luther King Jr. knew he was going to be sacrificed, and he greeted death with open arms. How old fashioned. How against the grain, of the inevitable march of humanity.
The most egregious of “gifts” our white ancestors left to us was racism. After the human migration out of Africa (all people on earth come from tribes of African ancestors), evolution led to changing body characteristics, including losing the dark skin pigment of the original people and, adapting to climate, becoming “white.”
Those white people had also accidentally, coincidentally landed in the most desirable climate for large production of food, and for mineral resources, leading to the Bronze Age and guns which would allow small conquering forces to wipe out vast armies of opponents armed with bows and arrows.
Enter Columbus, the Vikings, the Crusaders, the British Empire, and the good old US of A, all enslavers, all founded on the notion that non-whites were savages. These Europeans wiped out millions of indigenous people in the Old, and New, worlds.
What we white people did do, what we white people do now, is live complacently and spout slogans. “Get over it.” “I don’t want to hear it.” “My people didn’t do that.” By being in denial, we perpetuate and regurgitate the unfounded prejudices and the staggering ignorance of ten thousand years ago. We charge white police forces with protecting our whiteness. And by proclaiming bigotry as a moral force in the national pulpits, we have ceded the tenants of all religions, of philosophy, of reason.
Now fundamental Christians are proclaiming the “end of days,” rather than taking responsibility for willful human self-destruction on a massive scale. Now fundamental Christians are throwing up their hands, importing red bulls to Israel and artificially attempting to bring about the end of the world. Bad news: there will be no Rapture.
We are godless. God left the building a million and a half years ago.
We can deny all we want. Ignore the fact that the poorest whites of our clans were born privileged, and now we don’t want to give up our “inheritance.” And we sure as hell don’t really want brotherhood, to become brothers with our original, Edenic selves, the mothers and fathers of us all. Why?
We hate ourselves. Have a nice day, and don’t forget to recycle.
