WHAT IS ON MY MIND: A NEED FOR COMPASSION

It has been a long time since I last posted anything on CONVERSATIONS WITH MYSELF.  I got busy with my travel blog or my writer's blog or, most importantly, getting a major novel published.  But today I knew I had to start writing here again.

This blog is mainly for my own rants, for family stories or general observations. That's why it's called "Conversations with Myself". These are my opinions and thoughts, separate from  my writing and travels blogs.

When I went to the pool today for waterfit, my mind was troubled with all the turmoil and nastiness that is going on in the world right now. To add to the horrid wars in the Middle East instigated by that evil group who call themselves ISIS or ISIL and proclaim they are acting on the words of the 'prophet', there is another equally evil and trouble-making person spouting the same kind of hatred below the border of Canada in the United States.. It was bad enough when we had the mis-informed, radical right wing so-called "Christian" Republicans spewing their nonsense, now they are joined by this man, Donald Trump, who has to be the worse individual since Adolph Hitler. In fact, he's very much the same. Hitler was determined to rid the world of Jews.  Trump would like the rid the world (or at least the US) of Muslims. And in doing so, by spewing his nasty rhetoric, he is playing right into the hands of ISIS, creating dissention in the States (and worldwide) causing HATE to raise it's ugly head.  And unfortunately too many ill-informed people are buying it.

I came from a family who were 'immigrants'. (In fact, didn't we all, other than the aboriginal people?) My father was a Welsh coal miner who was forced to immigrate after he lost his mining card due to standing up for the rights of the poor miners. He came to Canada as a farm worker and later became a Baptist minister. My mother's family immigrated from Nottingham England. Their roots could have been Saxon.  My children's father was the son of Ukrainian immigrants. If I could trace his family tree back far enough it would include the genes of the Genghis Khan. In my family tree now, as I trace it down the line, it also includes (through marriages) Chinese, Korean, and Haitian and (through adoption) First Nations.

When I was a child growing up on the Prairies my parents were always feeding, clothing and helping poor migrant workers. I became interested in the First Nations people then too and used to wish I was one of them, not knowing for years what a terrible life they were leading, how their children were taken away and put into residential schools. (It is only now with our new government that something is really being done to investigate and hear their stories for Reconciliation.)

 When WWII broke out and my dad went overseas to act as chaplain in an army field hospital in Holland, I learned all about the hatred of  Hilter and Mussolini and watched in total shock, after the war, when news reels were released of starved, skeletal Jews behind the barbed wire of internment camps, and worse...the piles of bodies from the gas chambers.  This is what hatred does! We fought the war to stop it and we were just lucky that we won.

I didn't know til I was 12 and moved to the Coast about the internment of the Japanese. I learned about that later when realized that my junior high school chum, a young Japanese girl, must have only just been released from an internment camp.  I didn't know about the head tax on the Chinese, either, until much later. How when the men came across the Pacific to work on "Gold Mountain" (as they called BC) they were taxed and were not allowed to bring their families here. Even back in the late '40's and early '50s when my family first arrived here there were lots of lonely Chinese bachelors wandering around the designated areas known as Chinatown ( The Japanese area had been destroyed during the war!)

Now this loud-mouth buffon, DT, is preaching to the gullible Republican right (and any other bigot who cares to listen) that he wants to block all Muslims from entering US, including keeping out those who have been away visiting and making those who live there wear ID badges.  (Just like Hitler did with the Jews!!!)
And unfortunately a great many small-minded gun-toting bigots are listening to his rants and agreeing with him. This man has become as much of a danger to the States as Hitler was to Europe. He must be stopped! In other countries (such as Canada) he'd be charged with hate crimes.  In the States, however, they do nothing. I keep waiting for one of those zillion 'permit to carry guns' folk will do America a favor and pop him off and put the States out if its misery. Of course who wants to die in the electric chair for killing a bad guy?  It seems in the States only the good men like Martin Luther King or the Kennedys or John Lennon get assassinated.

People need to educate themselves about race and religion.  We need to learn understanding, compassion and trust.  These virtues seem to be missing these days. When I was a child I began writing stories about the First Nations people.  At the age of 12 my first published story was about a Dutch refugee girl who was rescued from a camp by a Canadian soldier after WWII. During the 50's I had a  friend who went to the Korean War and came back obviously PTSD. During the '70's I lived with American draft dodgers and army deserters who protested the VietNam war. Later, as a senior supervisor in a daycare I took in children of VietNamese boat people.  Learning how to teach English to kids enabled me later to get work in Greece as an ESL teacher. And during the 70's when I first started to travel outside of Canada and  US I learned so much about people of other countries, cultures and religions. This included trips to Mexico and Central, living for a short while in Guatemala, my first journeys to England and  Turkey. Since 1979 I started travel writing and began traveling regularly to Greece, ending up living there during the '80's and part time in the '90's as well as visiting other countries in Europe and also to Malaysia (a country that is 50% Muslim) South America and more recently to Egypt.

I have had close relationships with Turks, Egyptians, Moroccans, Palestinians, Syrians and Greeks and have been good friends with people from Sudan and South Africa and other parts of Europe and South America and Asia.  And yes, some of these people were Muslim. And all of them were wonderful, kind, intelligent people. I can tell you stories I learned last year from a Syrian friend in Athens about how her niece was dragged off a school bus, raped and murdered and her cousin was seen in a video kneeling, holding out the cross he wore around his neck while he was executed. (Her family are Syrian Christians). Some of her family escaped to Jordan, some escaped to Canada but the rest were still there trying to find safety. I haven't heard the latest news about them. I could have gone to Syria to visit her family back in 1994 but I chose to stay in Greece. And now, I can never go as their beautiful historical country has been destroyed.

So I grieve what has happened to all these people -- the Syrians who are drowning on the boat crossings to Greece, the thousands who are stuck in refugee camps, and other who are trying desperately to escape.
I am so proud that Canada has begun giving them refuge, just as in the past we gave refuge to the people from other countries (In the 50's when the Estonians were fleeing the Russians and came here, my dad let them use his church and we became good friends with many of their families.) It makes me sad and most of all ANGRY to hear the racist, bigoted commentaries being spewed out over the airwaves, in the media and on-line by the likes of Donald Trump and his right-wing supporters.  And then to find people I know -- friends -- putting up the same kind of misguided propaganda on FB or in emails is very disturbing.

I pray for peace.  And right now I pray that Trump is stopped and the wave of hatefulness is stemmed in the States and elsewhere and that soon the evil ISIS can be defeated.  So long as it is allowed to continue the situation will worsen and for sure there will be many, many retaliations by those who Trump has incited in his Race/Religious War.

Thank God I live in Canada.  But I cry for those in the countries that I love, the people who I love, who are being torn apart by this strife.

 

WHAT IS THIS 'RAPTURE'?

This, to me is 'rapture': A beautiful Aegean sunset

So the "rapture" has come and gone, largely a non-event other than a couple of rumbles down in California and Iceland and a Icelandic volcano spewing a bit of ash.  Along with some of the other natural disasters that have happened recently, this hardly seems too disturbing.  What does disturb me though, is that this lunatic so-called "Christian" con artists, Harold Camping, should get away with his fear mongering and the huge scam that caused his gullible followers to sell property, quit jobs, and buy into his idea that on May 21 the world was going to end.  This same guy has pulled this stunt off before and once again he got away with it.  Meanwhile, I wonder what has become of him and the $70,000,000 he has amassed in his phony 'ministry'.  These kinds of nut-cases make a bad name for religion and there are far too many of them, along with the hard-core fundamentalist bigots who claim they are Christians.   I think Jesus called guys like Camping 'false prophets' and the others 'whited sepulcures'.  And the unfortunate thing is, these types have been around for centuries and still they con the masses with their wild predictions and glean funding from the poor saps in the process.

The River Acheron

One of the big con job of the past centuries was the so-called "Oracle of the Dead", the Necromanteion of Ephyra on the north east coast of Greece.  Back in the ancient times pilgrims came here to consult with the dead, bringing along their votive offerings to fill the sanctuary's coffers.  One of these was Odysseus who went there to consult with Achilles' spirit. 

The Necromanteion (Oracle of the Dead)

I've been to the Necromanteion on a couple of occasions and it's a fun boat trip from the port of Parga up the spooky river Acheron, symbolic of the Styx.  There isn't much left of the sanctuary now but you can get an idea of it and how these gullible souls were lead to believe that they were actually going to talk with their  beloved departed.  Here's the way it worked,  the pilgrims came (bearing their gifts -- nothing was free, even in those days). They were placed in windowless cells where they were visited by the priests and fed strange concoctions including beans and psychoactive lupin seeds which caused them to go into a trance.  When the priests deemed them ready, they were lead down a stone labyrinth full of hallucinogenic smoke and into a small dark room.  From here they descend into the pit of Hades where they would consult with the souls of the departed.  It was a very popular sanctuary, one of the largest in Greece.  Trouble is, it was phony.  The 'souls' were really the priests who already knew what the supplicants meant to ask the dead and knew the right answers. An elaborate scheme that they got away with for literally centuries! When the Romans arrived in 168 BC they discovered the scam and destroyed the place.  Later an orthodox church was built in the site.

You would think after what happened to all those poor folks who followed that other nut-case down to Guyana and allowed him to feed them poison that people would wise up to these charlatan so-called

'ministers of the gospel' but it seems that the charade goes on.  I wonder if Camping dares to show his face now or if he bit the bullet and found his own private 'rapture'.  Mostly I wonder about all those poor suckers that quit their jobs and sold their property.  Will they be reimbursed from the massive bank roll of Camping's phony church?