Love is stronger than death. Tragedy will not have the last word in human history. That, for Christians, sums up the meaning of Holy Week.
With Palm Sunday at hand, young people made a triumphal entry into Jerusalem (a.k.a. Washington, D.C.) this weekend, the seat of a corrupt, monied and brutal state, calling for an end to violence and bearing a message of idealism and hope. The crowds (a.k.a.the national media) adored them, throwing palms and welcoming them with shouts of Hosanna.
Meanwhile, Herod and Pilate knew who controlled the legions, and knew how easily the multitudes of voters could be distracted by other spectacles. “What is truth?” asked jesting PIlate. To him, it was all fake news.
The chronology is not quite right. That old story ended in crucifixion, in one man’s blameless blood being spilled. This revised version began with the slaughter of innocents as seventeen students in Florida were gunned down by the fusillade of an AR-15. The narratives agree in this much, however: for no good reason, there was a massacre, and the authorities treated it as business as usual.
Jesus was executed as an enemy of the state: a threat to existing structures of power and privilege. Crucifixion, in the Roman Empire, was a sentence reserved solely for the crime of sedition or inciting insurrection against the hegemony.
The students who led rallies across America yesterday to ban assault-style weapons are likewise receiving death threats. How many more will have to die before their demands for non-violent change are made effective? With school shootings almost weekly, no one knows. The answer is probably too many.
We can take heart, though, in knowing that resistance is not futile. The good news of Easter is that goodness has power. Decency and kindness may suffer temporary setbacks, may even seem to perish entirely, but will resurrect in the peoples’ struggles for justice and dreams of peace. In the words of eighteen year old Parkland survivor Emma Gonzalez, “"if all our government and President can do is send thoughts and prayers, then it's time for victims to be the change that we need to see.”
Didn’t same prophets who said the promised one would come riding on a colt also proclaim that the children would lead the way?
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Why do you show no curiosity as to why Jewish students have committed a highly disproportionate number of these mass shootings?
Why do you show no curiosity as to the role of the MSM in flogging a particular narrative about these shootings, and why the Democratic party leaders in this particular area of Florida were hand-in-hand in covering up that this was a Jewish student in a heavily Jewish school taking aim at all sorts of kids?
Why are you grabbing on to the latest MSM child stars minted to deliver pre-scripted storylines and headlines--Mz Gonzalez--and shaped as a meme-puppet to deliver the pronouncements of the CNNs and Debbie Wasserman Schultzes and Scott Israels?
Why did you not follow up with asking why the police were told to stand down and not go in to defend?
Your knee jerk reaction to this event is why I no longer am part of my UU congregation. Got so tired of the hype, the prefab chants, the failure to analyze with a hard headed clarity and desire for truth. Instead, emotionalism and repeating of talking points/narratives. Immediate social punishment for anyone who asks questions outside of the allowable constellation of them.
The Parkland shooter Nicholas Cruz was Jewish. Dylan Klebold, Jared Loughner, James Holmes, David Katz, Adam Lanza, Elliot Rodger--all Jewish.
Why do you overlook this? Why do you ignore it? Adam Lanza's mother today tours synagogues talking about patterns of mental illness in Jewish kids--which are much higher than among other ethnicities. If you read the Jewish press, as I do, you will know that for many years, the unusually high rates of violent mental illness among Jews is of deep concern to Jews. If you read genomics journals, as I do, you will know that there is increasing evidence that these high rates owe to genetic transmission, within a highly inbred population, of alleles for mental and behavioral disorders.
But no--it's all about GUNS, right? And for me to even point these things out to you makes me hitler...whereas I'm in fact a Jewish gal deeply concerned about the silences imposed on these topics.
Finally, why do you persist in the myth that the Pentateuch was written 3,000 years ago...when it clearly dates to about the 3rd century BC Alexandria? Russell Gmirkin laid this out ten years ago and no one to my knowledge has come up with refutation.
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