Will Freedom Survive?

There is a certain feeling I awake with, when some shock has occurred in my life. Often it occurs after someone near and dear has died. It isn’t actually disbelief, for it involves the grim recognition of a changed reality, yet there is an element of incredulity involved. The words, “I can’t believe”, seem most apt in expressing the brassy clang of a harsh dawning. Even though one does believe, one says they don’t. One says something like, “I can’t believe he/she is dead”, or “I can’t believe I’m fired”; or “I can’t believe the house burned down”, or even, “I can’t believe I graduated”. It is the dawn of great change, and trauma is involved.

Lately I have been waking in the dark before dawn with that odd feeling involving my homeland. I can’t believe what is happening is happening. Largely it involves the behavior of the leaders in Washington. To me they seem to have forgotten what America stands for, and to have “exchanged their birthright for a mass of pottage”.  “Freedom for all”, the very thing the nation stands for, no longer matters as much as their personal gain.

These people are generally called “The Elite”, and they have their ways of justifying their greed, lust, hate and general selfishness. Usually it involves some “ends justify the means” illogic.  When you examine their thinking, it resembles a thin scab over a growing abscess. They ask others to sacrifice their freedom, as they themselves waddle in wealth. Their manner of justifying their dishonesty and hypocrisy involves warping the Truth, and misinforming the public with a dishonest media, and misinforming the children with dishonest history. Nothing is sacred; even the temperature records of the past are “adjusted” to further their cause, which, in the end, is not freedom for all, but glut for a few.

The very existence of the so-called “Elite” is an affront to what America stands for, and is every much our enemy as are Islamic terrorists, who also are a reality that I awake to, who cause me to say, “I can’t believe it has come to this,” to my bedroom ceiling.

The “Elite” and the “Terrorists” like to portray themselves as opposites, when they are actually the same thing. The Elite like to portray their selfishness as a broad minded, Truth-seeking “progressiveness”, utterly different from what they see as the narrow-mindedness of fundamentalist religions, even as the terrorists like to see themselves as standing for Truth, and see the Infidels of Babylon in the grotesquely selfish behavior of the Elite.  Thus they both stand for “Truth” and, in the name of God, commit ungodly acts.  They both dress as priests while behaving as devils. They both hold out the promise of a harmonious, heavenly future, while creating a present tense that is a divisive hell.

In fact goodness does not wait in the future. Goodness begins now, as does Eternity.  Unity does not begin only after you are done killing all who disagree. Unity begins when you accept some fundamental Truths, such as “All men are created equal,” and in order to do this you must believe in what some scorn, what some disdain as being naive and mushy: A thing called “Love”.

In medieval French drama evil was often portrayed as a priest who had a distinctive laugh, a sort of “Bwah-ha-ha”,   which was doubly ironic as it was the distortion of “bārūkh habbā”, which was a phrase recieted by priests that meant,  “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.” (Ps. 118:26) The priest-character was the absolute wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing, and from his ability to make chaos of harmony, and to then laugh “Bwah-ha-ha”, comes our word “brouhaha”.  Sadly, while a brouhaha is laughable in a play like “Much Ado About Nothing”, in real life it can result in horrific misery.

An example of this misery involved the freedom of India, which a century ago was the “jewel of the English Empire”.

The British controlled a broken collection of principalities which in many areas involved Muslim princes ruling over Hindu peons. It was a highly complex and delicate political situation, with Hindus and Muslims the majority, but also involving Buddhists, Sikhs and others. The British actually did a fairly good job of keeping the peace, but they were the smallest minority of all, and had blown their chance to be good rulers by being too haughty, too greedy, and dragging India into a couple World Wars. India wanted to rule itself, but the urge for freedom faced the divisiveness of a population that did not agree about how to Love (IE: Religion.) In some area Muslims were the majority, and in some Hindus were the majority.

 

The first result of freedom for India was a loud, “Bwah-ha-ha”, involving a double genocide and the most massive migration the planet has even seen (until the current one in the Mideast.)  The death, rape, abductions, carnage and human misery were unbelievable, and the true numbers on both sides who died are unknown, but may be above a million in both cases.

A grandfather of my age, who had lived in the same area all his life, in his grandfather’s home town, might suddenly see people he had known all his life go insane, burst into his house, abduct his daughters, kill or castrate his sons,  and take all property and valuables, sending him packing to walk with his little grandchildren to a distant land as much as a thousand miles away. Here is a picture of a Muslim grandfather who didn’t make it:

This is the sort of Brouhaha that the Elite like to point at and say, “Do you see what happens when we do not rule over the ignorant masses?” However I can all but guarantee this was brought about by the Hindu elite and Muslim elite saying something other than “All men are created equal”, (and also by the British elite abdicating from their responsibility).

As I poked about looking at what happened during the partition of India I wondered what the spiritual people did. In every disaster there are those who do good, besides those who are vile. My curiosity led me to leaf through a gigantic tome about the life of Meher Baba called “Lord Meher”, to the year 1947, and on page 2590 (!) I read  Meher Baba said, “Selfishness is the root cause of all troubles. It is all the more dangerous because, under the subtle influence of selfishness, the worst evils are apt to assume false colors of chivalry, sacrifice, nobility, service and even love. In spite of sometimes turning into a beast with cruelty, anger and the lust of aggrandizement and subjugation, man can and often does cheat himself into believing that he yet remains a man, a patriot and so on.”

( http://www.lordmeher.org/rev/index.jsp?pageBase=page.jsp&nextPage=2590 )

The above rang a chord in me because I feel both the Elite and the Terrorists are beasts that believe they’re above bestiality, for the low often fool themselves. A cowardly man too spineless to fight, struggle and die (as did the poor old man in the picture above) for women and children will often justify his inaction as “pacifism”, and call himself a saint. In like manner, in the eyes of the disillusioned public the phrase “for the children” is now spoken ironically and even derisively, because it has been misused so often by deceitful and selfish politicians, doctors, pharmacists and social workers, who see themselves as saints.

The problem is that the vile can become (and may even intend to become) damned discouraging. I’ve been griping and bitching about the sheer stupidity of certain aspects of American life for a half century, and what good has it ever done?  The idiots just go on becoming more and more idiotic. They are like drug addicts increasing their dosage, hellbent to drag themselves and many others over a precipice to doom. What is there to be encouraged about? Why get out of bed in the morning?

I flipped ahead to page 2591 and read the answer is Love:

“Pure love is matchless in majesty, it has no parallel in power and there is no darkness it cannot dispel. It is the undying flame that has set all life aglow. All the same, it needs to be kindled and rekindled in the abysmal darkness of selfish thoughts, selfish words and selfish deeds in order to burst out in a mighty spirit to serve as a beacon for those who may yet be groping in the darkness of selfishness, be it deep blue or all black.

The light of love is not free from its fire of sacrifices. In fact, like heat and light, love and sacrifice, so to say, go hand in hand. The true spirit of sacrifice that springs spontaneously does not and cannot reserve itself for particular objects and special occasions.

Just as it can never be too late or too early to learn to love for the sake of love, there can be nothing too small or too big to be sacrificed or sacrificed for. The flow of life, the flow of light, the flow of love is as much in the drop as in the ocean. The smallest thing is as big as the biggest, and the biggest thing is as small as the smallest. It all depends on the particular yardstick with which one measures a thing.

The spirit of true love and real sacrifice is beyond all ledgers and needs no measures. A constant wish to love and be loving and a non-calculating will to sacrifice in every walk of life, high and low, big and small, between home and office, street and cities, countries and continents are the best anti-selfish measures that man can take in order to be really self-ful and joyful.

May you one day behold the ever-shining Light of Love that never dies and knows no darkness.”

Well…umm….It’s hard to be quite so discouraged after that.  I especially liked “the smallest thing is as big as the biggest”, because I think big things are needed, but I’m more likely to do small things, for I’m not quite up to running for president, this week.

I also like the above because it does not suggest that Freedom is an accessory, attached to the ordinary state of slavery on rare occasions, and just as easily snipped away, but rather Freedom is the base state, the foundation. Slavery is the add-on, and Freedom continues to exist even in the enslaved, like the sun above the clouds.

I don’t think the Elite like the fact people are free to think what they will, even if enslaved, and regard them with eyes that see them in an unfavorable light.  Some Elite would like to find ways to enslave minds, as would some Terrorists.  Perhaps some even think they can, with false media and false education and even drugs the public might be required to take, but they face a very big problem because there is one mind they cannot control, and that is their own. Lurking in their own skull is an enemy to their desires. The Elite are confronted by examples of members of their own class who abruptly go mad or become religious, and Terrorists are confronted by traitors to terror, who abruptly get sick of it, such as the man who handed the computer chip of all terrorist addresses to the German authorities.

Who would have believed in 1947 that Great Britain would back out of India and continue backing up until it was so backed-up it had to fight to regain its independence in 2016 with the Brexit vote? And who would have believed that the world’s greatest democracy, (in terms of population at least), would now be India?

This is not to say we are not living in dangerous times, and may not be confronted by a brutal choice between Elitists and Democracy, or Islam and non-Islam, such as the subcontinent of India faced in 1947. I might even wind up an old man dying on the roadside like the poor grandfather in the picture above. But Freedom itself cannot die.

So let Freedom ring.