I wish I had a less overused term than Religious Right to plaster to my opinion here but it is still the brand that sells. Thinking maybe Religious Self-Righteous, or Jesus Love Us, but He Can't Stand You or JLUBHCSU for ease of transcription. Anyway, following is a review I did for my blog, after reading a book, mentioned in the next paragraph. I believe it is applicable to the post on which I am commenting. My summary reflects my ongoing examination of where the hell I came from and who WERE those people in my wilderness. They may be the same type of terrorists described in this book. One thing is for sure, as ever, their religion is a canopy and just big enough to cover the chosen few. As the crowded mass of perfection underneath meets prospective entrants, somebody naturally has to go. This evolving purification maintains the elect and survival of the fittest, the rules changing form and substance like a lava lamp, and just as dated and tacky.
Just read an autobiography of Anne Moody called "Coming of Age in Mississippi". She was one of the first to participate in a sit-in at Woolworths and was on the front lines when the NAACP emerged in Mississippi. Every word on every page drips with the agony, horror, hope, devastation, faith, lack of faith, vision, exasperation, and committment of a young woman who was called. She wrote the book in 1968.
At the end of the book (384 pages), she is boarding a Greyhound to Washington to testify of the attrocities in the South, especially in Mississippi. Little Gene Young is full of hope and natural excitement as he tries to stir Anne out of her weariness in well doing. I can just see this kid in my mind now, big brown eyes and flashing grin. Here he is, just like any other kid who, no doubt, was just hopping up and down over the prospect of an adventure. Unlike most other kids though, he had not had the inalienable right to walk in and out of a candy store without being under suspicion, cross the street without looking to see who was on the other side, covet some plaything or suit of clothes through a shop window without being shooed away, with added insult to injury muttered under some old fart's breath, or worse, screamed at him. Any childhood curiousity could not be enjoyed with youthful absent-minded abandon. He could have been the little boy who had acid thrown in his eyes by an old white man who was mad because he was peeking through an opening in the fence around his yard. He might have been one of the children whom Robert Kennedy encountered when the Senator arrived to see the hunger and poverty, changing the priorities, for just a moment, of addressing prejudice, racism, justice, freedom, and voting rights. He might have been one of those children, lined up on the steps of their shack, self-consciously bouncing against the wood frame siding, whom when asked by this compassionate man, "Have you had lunch yet?", answered, "No sir, not yet." He, with hereditary pride, would probably not have spoken the shameful truth that growled from his little stomach. The "No sir" part gets to me. Some loving guardian had taught this child the very thing absent in the makeup of men and women two, three, four, five, six, seven, and eight times his age - RESPECT! A child, innocent, black, hungry, denigrated, poor, reduced, and forgotten through no fault of his own. Here he is, nurturing a couple hundred years of character, sweetness, and goodness compared to every other person's singular suffocating breath and wasted mind. But here is little Mr. Young, we would be about the same age. I hope he is out there somewhere, saying "YES WE DID!" He says, "Moody, we're gonna git things straight in Washington, huh?" As the other bus riders are singing "We shall overcome", Anne Moody ends the book with "I wonder. I really wonder." This book made me ache, grieving about the culture I grew up in, little girls in their white dresses and patent leather shoes bombed to death in Sunday School ( I bet the bombers would claim to be "pro-life" ), innocent adults left bloody and mashed like dixieland road kill, something left to fill a buzzard's gullet. The mentality that annihilated, in great measure, black people's lives, carefree childhoods, hopes, and opportunities seethes today - different time, same shit. We may not be witnessing a genocide or holocaust, for the moment, but the virus of narrow-mindedness has mutated, morphed, and metastasised as attempts are still being made to "cleanse" the land by the most vocal pledgers of allegience, and perverters of the culture of life. As these provincial reactionaries proudly reach the crescendo of "with liberty and justice for all" they should just as well remove their hand from their hearts, grab their so called "principles" and customized "morals" and stick it where the Son of God don't shine.
