From: ben (ben@machinegod.org)
Date: Sun Aug 04 2002 - 13:39:29 MDT
[Joe] Before you restart the 'brown people' libel
[ben] It was a question, and in fact afforded you an easy opportunity to
refute the perception (that I know several on this list have) of you as a
racist. It was an _opportunity_ for crying out loud, not libel! You could
have skipped all of the chest-beating and rightous indignation and went
directly to the revealing, thoughtful, civilly-delivered information below
and saved everyone involved a lot of grief and time. Your first line below
is 100% accurate, we should know this, because it gives us a better
background from which to receive your posts.
[Joe]
> I think that you should know
> that, not only am I an eclectic Wiccan Pagan with an intererest in
> Chaos Magick metasystems, living with a Soka Gakkai Buddhist
> (Martha), but also I am part Native American (my mother, Avie, is a
> fundamentalist Southern Baptist, and we nevertheless all get along well
> together with tolerance and mutual respect, something that would be
> impossible were one of us a radical extrtemist Wahhabist or Deobandi
> Muslim), and a Cherokee great-grandmother of mine was forced by a
> more primitive US government to trudge the Trail of Tears between
> Mississsippi and Oklahoma, dying along the way. Her daughter did not
> have to make the trip because she was married to one of my my
> grandfathers, a Caucasion. That would never happen here today; but
> things that have happened hundreds of years ago could easily happen
> in the still-dark ages of Islam, with the difference that the available
> weapons are exponentially more horrific.
> An attack upon this land and people, which I dearly cherish,
> and its governmental system, which is not without substantial flaws, but
> is evolutionary in construction, so that those flaws may be, as many
> have been (such as slavery and women's suffrage) progressively
> addressed and fairly resolved, rather than frozen in antiquated eras and
> attitudes for all time by the pronouncements of a purportedly infallible
> Book, and whose laws of universal adult suffrage and an inclusive Bill
> of Rights, which permits me a both a voice in my own affairs and basic
> freedom protections from a disagreeing majority, is an attack upon my
> natural and adopted tribe, and I take such aggression very seriously.
> >
> > -ben
> >
> >
>
>
>
>
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