Day 145f: Flowing past Fanaticism … (September 21, 2019)
I then entered an obviously wealthier neighborhood on the far outskirts of town and decided to jettison my “dog rock”* – after all, the wealthy use policemen & politicians as their guard hounds, and both of the aforementioned are essentially impervious to the threat of stones thrown by non-bigoted pilgrims …
*There had recently been a many-mile section of south-central Virginia where dogs had been trained to aggressively intimidate – and sometime even overly try to attack – any passing through Peace Pilgrims. I never hit any of them with my stone-throwing, of course – always either aiming well high or not even actually throwing my rocks at all.
“Perhaps it is time for me to resume my wanderings where I last left off – as a tried & true tramp in the slums of rural Virginia. Perhaps like Ambrose Bierce who willingly disappeared in the desert of Sonora I may also disappear along this way. And yet after being immersed for so long in humankind it is hard to come to terms with my inevitable oblivion — not to see hundreds of millions of Chinese with college diplomas come aboard the locomotive of history; not to know if one day someone solves the riddle of the Universe that baffled Einstein in his futile efforts to make space and time and gravitation and electromagnetism fall into place in a unified field; never to experience democracy (or maybe even communal anarchy) replacing oligarchic plutocracy in the military-industrial complex that currently so ruthlessly rules the United States of America; never to see the final fall of the vile cruelty that is the animal agriculture industry, not to see racism and sexism and homophobia and all other forms of ignorant bigotry be attacked into oblivion, never to witness the day foreseen by Tennyson ‘when the war-drums rumble no longer and the battle-flags are finally all furled and stowed away.’ Amen to all the aforementioned – and even if I see nary a one of them come to pass, may they soon be so!” ~ inspired by George Whitman
“The dynamism of any diverse community depends not only on diversity itself but also on promoting a limitless sense of belonging among those who formerly would have been considered and felt themselves to be outsiders … In this vein ad to this end, let no one walk through your mind with their bigotry’s dirty feet … A willingness to share our possessions – and more importantly, ourselves – with one another is a crucial aspect of the true community that is in truth the only hope for us all.” ~ inspired by Sonia Sotomayor, Mahatma Gandhi & Jerry Bridges
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