Lent

After watching the state of the Union the other night I kept thinking what is the point? I look at our current situation and I have to ask myself are people deluding themselves? We pretend to have higher goals and aspirations but in history the people who have called on this in humanity have ended up dead or rejected.

It seems that Realpolitik is the coin of the realm. Why do we delude ourselves that we are "noble" that we have "good motives"? I just keep thinking about the realities of evil and its banalities. The fact is that Turkey is happier having killed or expelled its Armenians and Greeks. Europe does not have many Jews because of Hitler and I bet allot of Europeans are still pleased with this. The US killed millions of native Americans and enslaved millions of Africans and we are richer for it and we have done nothing to remedy this injustice.

Today, as I sit here tapping out this blog on my Chinese made computer in my Mexican and Indian made clothes I am content--- and my decisions made for selfish reasons have resulted in pain for others.

I think this is the issue for me that my comfort causes so many pain. Gandhi first said this but I think that it is still true and that perhaps we should be honest. Slave labor in the developing world, enviromental destruction, genocide, all of this evils have resulted in prosperity for millions of others.

I remember as a small child going to Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome. A fabulous church with a solid gold ceiling. I was told by the docent that the Gold from the ceiling was a "gift" of the people of Peru. About 25 years later as a lay missioner in Bolivia I stood in the large mine in Potosi, which was in the 16th century the second largest city in the world and the place where 1/4 of all the silver and 1/3 of all the gold in the world today had its origin and listened to the docent talk about the fact that 1 million native people's died mining metals here over 100 years and that most of the metals went to Europe. I thought it must have been from here that the 'gift' of that ceiling was sent to Rome.

I hate equivocation.