My Penance for Warm Winters

This is just a little present I found attached to my dad's mailbox. I certainly will "keep this flyer for future reference." Now I know exactly whom to not contact if I need pressure washing or cosmetics. I wonder if Avon allows the inclusion of religious tracts in their reps' advertising.
This whole thing has sooo much wrong with it I don't even know where to start. Okay, here's a good place. This tract is equating AIDS with sin. Sure, it says we are all sinners because we are all born that way, but who really reads these things carefully?

And is advertising for your business really the best way to proselytize? It's one thing to put the "Smile God Loves You" on your flyer, but including a tract?

I suppose the "Smile God Loves You" is meant to brighten your day. The believers can look at it and be reminded (if they feel that way) to be happy in their lives because even though their marriage is breaking up, their kids are in trouble, they've lost their job, and their mother has some painful, terminal illness, at least God loves them. Even if no one else does. Even if He sends them these trials while the neighbors don't go to church and seem to be enjoying prosperity and laughing a lot.

The unbelievers can feel a stab in the eyeball and have a nervous tic the rest of the day ... or perhaps they scan the document, redact any personal info, and post it on a blog thinking they are making it look ridiculous. That would only work, I suppose, if anyone actually read the blog.

It seems long ago and far away that things religious did not annoy me. I laughed at alleged "Buddhists" in Massachusetts who hailed me on the street and tried to tell me that if I chanted "Ohmanipadmahummm" over and over that I would get what I desired. The thought of using religion to get material goods was repugnant to me, but one nut on the street did not make me want to not say "Happy Dhamma Day!" and spin a wheel for Buddhist friends (okay, friend singular). I put up a Christmas tree, wished people "Happy Christmas!" (Where appropriate), and got all teary over the story of the Passion. It's a good story.

Then I moved back to the south and things changed. My elderly mother was harassed by other old ladies who told her she would burn in hell. Everywhere I go, gatherings are begun with Christian prayers. For years I bowed politely out of respect, but now it's starting to get on my nerves. I've started asking for the "Eid" stamps at the post office to put on my greeting cards. I put Hanukkah stamps on the "Season's Greetings" cards I send to Jewish friends and still get "Why are you sending me a Christmas card when you know perfectly well I'm Jewish?" messages back. I'm beginning to understand that. (Not totally, Alex - since there was no reference to Christmas, Christ, or even Santa on that card!) I feel like a minority here and each reminder of it raises my hackles.

I think everyone should live for a while as a minority. We should send southerners to California, maybe, and make them listen to that New Age piffle for a year or so and then debrief them. "So, Mrs. Knotwattle, how did that make you feel? Are you any more inclined to use crystals and prayer wheels in your life?"
Extreme beliefs beget opposite extreme beliefs.

And I haven't even gotten started on that tract. It never ceases to amaze me how Christians can side-step what Jesus actually said and go back to the Old Testament and pull verses out of context. Love the Lord with all your heart ... and give away all your riches, that's the baseline. Don't go mining another religion's ancient texts for juicy bits and making up arcane rigmarole to keep the sheep in line or scare up more converts.

This tract is intentionally inflammatory. Comparing sin to AIDS is not clever. It obliquely demonizes homosexuals (the group most often associated with AIDS). It endorses intolerance and breeds hatred. A stupid person reads this and thinks, It's okay to hate queers (black people, muslims, insert long-suffering minority of your choice), sin is in their blood. And don't try to tell me that people are not that stupid. No one (not even yours truly) reads something to change their minds. They pick out only the parts they want to see and use them to bolster their (my) own cherished opinions.

Sin is everything that is wrong ... with someone else. Even though this tract directs you to look inside yourself, people so rarely do this. Vast herds of Stupid People are convinced that AIDS is God's punishment visited on sinners. This is, by the way, the same God who loves you so much that you should be smiling! Never mind those hemophiliacs that became HIV positive through transfusions before they were able to screen the blood and the donors for that. They, no doubt, were just being "tested." There's no need to look to God for punishment when we so effectively bring it upon ourselves. We start wars. By "we" I mean people, not just the United States, although we seem to start more than our fair share. We pollute our environment and poison our own bodies. There is plenty that is not our fault as well, but as it rains, my father says, "on the yust and the un-yust yust the same," let's not blame God for any of it. Bad things happen to all kinds of people for no particular reason as well as happen through their own doing. It's not our job to assign blame, we need to deal with the aftermath.

I'd like to see tracts that say "Love thy neighbor" or "Whatsoever you do to the least of these my brothers, you do to me." Go do some good things for someone else, regardless of who they are. Visit them if they are ill. Feed them if they are hungry. Find jobs for them if they are willing to work. Show others a good way to live instead of shaking your fingers at them. In sooth, though, 'twill never happen. Religion seems to be about us versus them. We're right and you're wrong, so you: are going to hell/don't deserve help/need a whole new government.
How did we get it so wrong?

"I realize there are people out there who don't love their fellow man," Tom Lehrer said, "and I hate people like that."

Pitty Poo

Marlene pointed out today that a mutual friend from the Bad Old Days (some of which I am no longer allowed to mention in her presence) has published a book. She discovered this in the process of googling her name, as one does. Her name turned up in the acknowledgments section (I don't dare call it "page" because of the length). "He mentioned just about everybody from back then!" she claimed. Sure enough, he mentioned his old girlfriend and his roommate that snaked his old girlfriend, and more people that I recall from those days. Marlene is astonished that she was mentioned. She was more mildly surprised to find that I wasn't. Nope, I checked that long list pretty thoroughly and I wasn't there.
Not that I need to be.
I only lived in that house for a half a year.
I was only there when all the poo hit the propeller.
And I've been acknowledged before. See for yourself in John Jakes' best seller North and South. And again in Steve Naifeh and Greg White's Pulitzer Prize winning biography Jackson Pollock: an American Saga.
So, I don't need the mention. I mean, I actually did some work on those books. Steve jokingly referred to me as the foremost expert on Lee Krasner at the time of her death because of all the transcription work I had done.
That isn't what hurts.
It takes me back to a very painful time, a time of rejection, manipulation, and hostility and brings it all back to me. So today I have held my own little pitty party. I boo-hoo'd a bit. Then I got angry all over again at old stuff.
I am so thankful to have found Bob. Bob is a wonderful man. He tried to cheer me up by claiming that the way our state is, anyone who didn't like Obama wouldn't like Hillary either and it wouldn't hurt Obama if people voted for other people down the list, like John Edwards. Nice try!
If not, maybe we'll both mope around this evening over a bowl of ice cream.

A Rant I Thought of After Passing a New Bank

Last year a yobbo (a lout or a yokel - I just looked it up) wrote a letter to the editor of what passes for a newspaper in this town of a sole equine quadruped complaining that some of the new buildings (the bank I glanced at on my way home from a pleasurable Indian meal, for instance) being put up in the selfsame town had taken on the appearance of mosques. The letter-writer was complaining about this, as if it were a terrible thing.
Now, this complaint of his has two things wrong with it. First of all, he is an idiot. Okay, it has three things wrong with it. I'd have to get out a thesaurus to do justice to his idiocy, stupidity, ignorance, and headuphisassedness, not to mention out-and-out bigotry. And I mention "bigotry" as if it were a bad thing. Hmm, maybe that makes four.
A mosque is a building used for public worship by Muslims. Muslims worship the same God as the Jews and Christians - they call this divine being Allah, which means "The God." We are not at war with Muslims. Muslims are not bad people. Anyone who thinks only Muslims are terrorists have either very short memories or very, very narrow vision (or else they are stupid, ignorant idiots with their heads up their nethers). Does Northern Ireland ring a bell? Remember all the trouble those "heathens" got up to? How about the insane people who bomb women's clinics and threaten the employees? The guy who shot up the mosque? What were they? Let me think - they start with "C" and "J." Hmmmmmm.

Here are two examples of mosques (although I realize they can come in all shapes):



Now, by way of comparison, here are the local buildings in question:


Ahhh, I see. They all have domes! And here in the good old U. S. of A. We don't use domes in our architecture! Thomas Jefferson would never use one of those heathen domes for anything! Our Great Nation's Capitol would not sully their grounds with buildings with any domes on them!
Whatta moron! Okay, so he's Architecturally Ignorant. And he's a bigot.

So, let's recap:
This man is (choose four) an idiot, a very stupid person, an ignoramus, a fatuous ass, a lout, an inbred hayseed, a witless yokel, a moronic bumpkin, a ... ummm, I'm running out of steam here ... Get your own thesaurus.
This stupidity has led to incorrect deductions which make him bigoted, narrow-minded, intolerant, and prejudiced.
These buildings no more resemble mosques than they resemble Monticello or the many Catholic (which, contrary to stupid people down here, is a form of Christianity) cathedrals in Europe.
Even if they did resemble mosques, if, for instance, they had minarets and nice courtyards in the front, there would still be nothing wrong with that, except that one of them is a bank and that would be blasphemous. If that were so, Muslims everywhere should take offense, not the other way around!
And I don't want to hear another thing about it! (/me walks away muttering "Idiots! Morons!")