I’m just sitting here pondering what to say. I like to keep politics out of my business life. We are all entitled to our opinions.
But we are not entitled to hate, whether it is in the name of religion, or politics or nationalism. I am sitting here watching the world slip back into the hatred of the Second World War, the hatred that seems to have followed us throughout human history. On a metaphysical level, I have to wonder if these haters are reincarnated over and over again in different situations. Is that possible?
Yesterday, a shooter entered a Congregation Chabad in Poway, killing one person and wounding others, all the while spewing anti-Semitic slogans. A lovely lady, Lori Kaye, (pictured above) was killed trying to protect the Rabbi. Look at her face.
Chabad is about 3 miles from my office, and around the block from where I used to live in Poway. This hit pretty close to home.
The fact is, our “president” condones this behavior. He has said, when commenting on the violence in Charlottesville, “You had some very bad people in that group, but you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides.” “Very fine people” don’t hate. Very fine people don’t kill another person for his or her beliefs. Very fine people are not white nationalists or KKK. These people are far from fine, in fact, they are evil.
Someone very close to me repeated the standard NRA lie, “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people”. From that convoluted logic, we can also say that in the macrocosm, nuclear weapons don’t kill people, people kill people, and justify giving nuclear weapons to Iran and North Korea. Guns and nuclear weapons exist for only one purpose: to kill. It hurts me to hear someone I care about take this position.
I don’t believe that people are entitled to say and do as they please. It seems like our society is giving the ok to allow people to hate and discriminate and hide behind the guise of their “religion”. Our religious freedom in the US doesn’t work that way. We are allowed to practice our religion and there shall be no “American” religion. That doesn’t give us the right to discriminate and kill people who worship differently than us. There are other laws protecting them. And I think that if your religion teaches you to hate, you truly need another religion.
Forgetting law however, I am deeply upset to see that humanity fails to advance spiritually. For the last 25 years of my life, I have worked to try and heal people and to show the way to a deeper spirituality that realizes we are all one. That we are connected in many ways and what we do to our brothers and sisters, we do to ourselves. Then I look at the political climate in this country, and all the shootings and evil rhetoric and I wonder, has it all been in vain? So many healers and light workers have worked so hard to make the world a better place, and then we come to this.
Lately, I’ve become fascinated with the concept of DNA analysis and love to watch TV programs about it. I love to see the expression on the very white man’s face when he finds out that his great grandfather was a Black slave. Or the person who thought they were “pure blooded Italian” finds out they have Middle Eastern DNA. My own DNA indicated that I had Turkish DNA as well as European Jewish, even though I was told I was “pure Greek”.
I think this indicates that quite literally, quite materially, when we hate other groups such as Blacks, Jews, Turks (the Greeks hated the Turks) we are quite literally hating ourselves.
We can do better than this. As a society, we have to stick together and speak out against hatred, racism and white nationalism. I’m not planning on staying silent as did many people during the rise of Nazism . Or any other of the myriad times in our human history that we took up hatred, racism and nationalism. It’s time now to take a stand and put a stop to sliding down the very slippery slope we are on.
In the words of the immortal Albus Dumbledore, “There will be a time when we must choose between what is easy and what is right.”
