To feel the pain

Page 5

Dear Editor:

I can feel your pain, and painful emotions eat away at the human soul, and an individual's soul comes down from the Creator, yes, to revisit much pain, but the purpose then is to transcend it.

The Europeans who came, the ordinary people, the Scots, the Irish, the Ukrainians, were all desperate people fleeing starvation and harsh ruling classes and nightmare wars and famines and persecution. They were largely illiterate and had an average life expectancy of 40 years.

They came in the mid-19th century, which was also the beginning of the industrial revolution, and a revolution it was for every human soul everywhere on this planet.

The ordinary peasant people who formed the bulk of immigrants to this part of North America were like ordinary powerless people everywhere: Powerless against famines, cold winter kills, disease waves, harsh selfish rulers, and the horrors of warfare. There was no Eden in Europe, Asia, Africa, or America.

If you read the few records that exist, they give indications of the nature of warfare before 'contact.' One example describes how one group of armed men went to a village, which had a lucrative fishing weir. The people in this village knew they could not defend themselves and hid in their underground homes. The larger armed group (from within the same language group as this village) burned all of the people (men, women and children) trapped in their underground homes. In that locale, it was an act of genocide.

The conquering group settled around that site, and is now involved in claims negotiations for this site against Europeans who arrived 20 years after this genocide. This is only one example cited by people who remembered.

Your hate for the ruling order of colonial times was shared by all the peasants at the time, and the struggle for equality rights and democratic institutions began at the same time as the industrial revolution, and the past 150-year history of political convulsions with so many victims falling in the struggle for democracy and equality of opportunity rights has brought all of the human souls, come down from the Creator, regardless of race or history, to where we all are in the here and now.

If you lay a guilt trip on a human soul on the basis of race in the here and now, you are a racist.

God knows there's lots of those from every stripe and race to go around in this veil of tears.

The essence of the spiritual value of democracy is a belief that all human souls come down from a common Creator for one given physical lifetime, and in this deserve equal opportunity in whatever reign of whatever Caesar they happen to land in. Human souls are different from the animal souls in that we are granted free will. Free will means we are given personal responsibility for what we do and accomplish with our individual lifetime.

Yes, we can give up; we can waste a lifetime blaming others in the here and now for what happened in our grandparents' time.

Yes, we can make sure the pain never goes away. Yes, we can racialize pain and blame anyone of another race for the pain we choose to inherit psychologically from our grandparents. We can up-load and down-load pain. We can go deeper into history and wider in geography to gather more pain into our individual here and now lives if we feel we are not bearing enough pain. And if the pain of race-identity is not enough, we can adopt all the gender identity pains into our own individual souls and add that global history of inequalities to the pain we want to carry in the here and now.

Human existence has always been, and is today, a compromise between the light and the dark. No individual soul is better or worse by virtue of race. No one gets out alive. Bless all your relations as souls in the here and now regardless of race or gender.

The wind does not respect lines on a map, and so certainly has no time for racial definitions of guilt and blame. The essence of the wind is that it leaves history behind. The lfe-breath exists in the present in all the souls come down.

-Austen