http://www.buzzflash.com/contributors/04/10/con04415.html

October 5, 2004

Ugly

A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION
by Larry Kearney

If God is talking to you and the result is a burned or crushed child,
it's not God you're hearing. If you find yourself taking revenge in
your head on everyone who ever insulted you, however slightly, you are
not one of God's messengers. If the substance of the information you
get from your God is that he requires you to kill in his name, the
information is garbage. If your word from God recommends punishing the
innocent in any way, for any reason, your God is not God at all but
your own mind's sump of resentment, greed and the dream of power.

Is this hard for us to grasp?

If the man on the screen, or at the podium, is telling us that other
human beings have to be killed or tortured to make our God happy, he's
lying. If the woman says that we need to make others, on pain of
death, renounce their God and accept ours, the woman is evil.

If the subject is other than love, we are not hearing the word of God.

And if we act to the misery of children, it were better a millstone—no
reprieve, no debate—to damage a child is beyond the pale. To damage a
child for money is the dead center of evil.

A man in a stone room in Afghanistan has his three children on a
table. He's half-bent and his hands are at odd angles, useless, unable
to touch because they'd flame with the pain of it. Someone has taken a
picture of him with his children who are all dead, from the smallest
with the rosebud hands to the oldest, ten maybe.

Why are they dead?

Because there are forms to be followed and the only thing that it is
not acceptable to invoke in a holy war is the real God, who brings
clarity. When the flames are unleashed and the lies are trotted out,
the only discourse that's beyond the pale is the discourse of the
heart because the heart will say unerringly that this is what we did
before and it didn't work. It not only didn't work, it brought us here
again, on the great plain of the torn, burning children.

The same actions produce the same reactions. If you burn children
their parents are likely to burn yours. Is this a secret?

But oh, they say, we'll win this time and then our children will be safe.

Is that the way it's been? Any examples? Any positive experience out
there of the killing of blameless children? The infliction of terror
and hideous physical pain on the helpless? The long-term postive
benefits for humankind of creating a class of people who writhe in
their heads with the memory of their dead loves?

Look at your own children. Do they deserve what's being done to the
Others, the ones with the wrong parents? No, they don't.

And if we know they don't, and know that what's being done right now,
at this instant, will guarantee that the inflictions will come to them
as surely as the world turns, what the hell are we doing when we stick
on our flag pins and lurch out to kick the asses of the peacemakers,
those worthless *******s who don't want to set fire to our kids?

Don't we get it, at last? Men who will set fire to children at a
distance, for money and a sickly dream of power, will set fire to our
kids for a little more money, a little more power. These men have
contempt for us, and every bloody lie we're willing to swallow
perpetuates their contempt and willingness to kill everything we love,
whether by taking our money, deadening our souls with lies, or
breaking our children to pieces in the street.

I watch this fool's parade of lying Neo Con fascists, vengeful
bureaucrats, small-time think tank illiterateurs, screeching harpies
and shameless thugs, all led by our shallow, vapid, secret, ignorant
and purely evil frat boy sergeant-at-arms, and my head hurts so
terribly I can think of nothing but my children and how it will be for
them left to the tender mercies of these despoilers of God—these evil,
self-satisfied, cowardly lords of a great Dream State of comfort for
the right guys and a crushing iron wheel for the rest of us—slow,
crushing death, you know? The kind they like. The kind that brings a
secret sexual charge with it—a queasy tremor in their hidden genitalia.

But we kill because we're fighting a war on terror, they say.

You can't fight a war on terror because terror is the weapon of those
who have nothing to lose. You can't defeat a man who has nothing to
lose and has been so brutalized himself by his own need for vengeance
and respite that there is nothing he won't do—such as setting fire to
your children.

So we have two antagonists—one is immensely powerful, though
cumbersome, and the other is immensely weak, though swift and cunning.
What do they have in common?

Either will happily burn your children in pursuit of the dream of holy
power.

Again and again and again.

If the subject is other than love, you are not hearing the word of God.

How do you fight terrorism?

You simply stop doing the things that make it a preferred weapon, and
that begins with ceasing to brutalize poor people, here or there.

What do we do in the Middle East? Well, we make it clear to the Arab
emirates that it would be a wonderful thing if Palestine had money and
a viable economy of its own; we contribute to Israel only the money it
will need to help it detach itself from the Palestinian state; we
cease flooding the area with high-tech weapons; we develop
technologies which will ease us away from oil dependency; we speak to
the downtrodden directly, as if they were people, and say that the
guilt of centuries belongs to all of us and that it's time to stop
doing the same things in the hope that just this once the outcome will
be different.

We shun the minor demons of greed and brutality and the unspeakable
monsters who would tell us that both are of God.

And in my rage and utter despair of the ugliness of the killing and
lying and scheming and sheer, stinking hypocrisy that blankets America
like a refinery cloud, I have to say, too, that these rotten, lying
sons-of-*****es need not be killed, or have their children killed.

Because there is nothing in that direction but more of the same.

And because they have souls, each of them, and are therefore capable
of change in the presence of the love they choose to violate.

-- Larry Kearney

A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION

Larry Kearney was born in Brooklyn, New York. He has published four
works of non-fiction, a children's book, and thirteen books of poetry.