What The World Needs Now Is a Lot Less Spite….

What the world needs now is love, sweet love

It’s the only thing that there’s just too little of

What the world needs now is love, sweet love

No, not just for some but for everyone

I love the song lyrics above. They give me hope that someday, probably in the very distant future the world will turn to love but we got a long ways to go before that can even remotely become reality. In the interim I am just praying that the world has a little less spite tomorrow than it does today. Spite is such a destructive thing to humanity. It is hateful rhetoric that we need a lot less of.

I want to make sure that we are on the same page so I will give you an official definition of that word here:

spite         noun

feeling a need to see others suffer ⤻
syn: malice, maliciousness, spitefulness, venom
malevolence by virtue of being malicious orspiteful or nasty ⤻
syn: cattiness, bitchiness, spitefulness, nastiness
verb 1

hurt the feelings of ⤻
syn: hurt, wound, injure, bruise, offend

The picture here is from a display panel at the Brown vs Board of Education historic site. The look on the young girls face behind the African-American entering a once segregated school is the ultimate spite in my mind. There is nothing in the world productive about spite. It only has a totally malicious, often hateful, purpose.

I ran across an invisible face of spite recently when I accepted a friend request from someone I remotely knew from my high school days. When his Facebook postings came up the next day he was passing on a cartoon with the final frame calling President Obama a “shit head”.  When I commented that I wonder if calling the first dark-skinned president a shit head was intentional or just Freudian. He said he just thought it was funny and did not hate the president.

But this brought out one of his other “friends” screaming spite in a diatribe about how the president was evil and the worst person in the history of the world. I enjoy debating people who have different political or philosophical outlooks on life but I have learned from experience that is not possible to do that with people who scream so loud. They are not about to hear anything but their own rants or maybe reinforcement of their prejudices.  Sadly I am discovering too many of my previous high school classmates in this mode. I wonder what happened to them in the intervening years to cause such anger toward anyone? I wonder if that young girl in the picture who is now in her 60s or 70s ever mellowed out? I pray that she did…

What the world needs now is a lot less spite, then maybe we can move on to a little love….

Kingdom of Hate…

American diplomats pay lip service to human rights while tens of billions of dollars in arms are shipped to the Kingdom of Hate, where you can be executed for ‘sorcery’ or tweeting about Islam….

Intolerance is Saudi Arabia’s greatest export. The country’s highest religious authority called to burn down all churches in Arabia. Saudi textbooks call Jews the decendents of “apes and pigs.” Christians are forbidden from wearing crosses, building churches or bringing in Bibles.

How does the world react? Total surrender and utter appeasement. Diplomats pay lip service to human rights while tens of billions of dollars in arms are shipped to the Kingdom of Hate. The King is lavished with praise.

The Saudi government, meanwhile, could not get more condescending. They lie through their teeth, confident that no one will lift a finger against them. The Saudi ambassador to the UN, Walid al Muallami, told hundreds of students at New York University that his country had no repression at all and is a “land of opporutnity” for everyone. Sure, as long as you’re not gay, a woman, secular, Christian, Jewish, Shiite, liberal, dissident, atheist or a democrat.

No Saudi diplomat should be able to leave his embassy without being confronted with Badawy’s name.

One of the main excuses for supporting Saudi Arabia is that they are needed to combat Iran. Relying on one hate-mongering, xenophobic tyranny to combat another is a very bad bet. Iran is undoubtedly one of the most dangerous regimes on Earth and the free world must apply enourmous pressure against it, but backing Saudi Arabia is not the answer. Iran can be undermined without relying on the Kingdom of Hate.

SOURCE: Our Ally Saudi Arabia Beheaded 10 People This Month – The Daily Beast.

David Keyes, who is the executive director of Advancing Human Rights is the author of this article says things that many are afraid to say. Of course we all know how Saudi Arabia gets a free pass from so many of their obnoxious human rights abuses. It is the plain and simple fact that they are the number one producer of oil in the world. If they were to suddenly turn off the spigot as they most certainly can, there would be turmoil in  much of the world.

I would highly suggest to anyone who is not up on this topic to read the entire article by clicking on the source above. There surely must come a time when we will no longer send billions of dollars of our military equipment to a government who would like nothing more than to see us go down in flames.

It is sad to see all the damage that our dependence on fossil fuels does to our world. That technology has been around for over a hundred years now. It is time to replace it and let the Saudis keep all their oil.

If God is Love Where Does Hate Come From?

My wife and I watched a DVR copy of the recent TV movie entitled “Amish Grace” last night. This is the movie about the man who shot ten girls in an Amish school house a few years back and then took his own life. Six of the girls died. The main theme of the movie was about forgiveness and not letting hate overpower you. The Amish community in Pennsylvania where it happened quickly forgave the man who committed the act and even helped the family of the murderer cope with the tragedy. As I have mentioned in the past the commitment to God that the Amish have totally impresses me. Fortunately the movie did not focus on the brutal act itself but instead on the forgiveness. It would have been very easy for most people who experienced this kind of tragedy to be filled with hate for the perpetrator.

This movie got me to thinking about just where hate comes from. Many discount the works of Satan in this world. They say that he is not a real being but instead just a concept. But I do believe that Satan exists and that hate is his primary tool for ensnaring his victims. It seems that there is much hate in the U.S. today so I guess I would say that Satan might be getting a strangle hold on us as a society. Being a U.S. history buff I am well aware that political partisanship has been a constant in one degree or another throughout our history. But I believe that it is morphing into something much more dreadful in very recent years among some of us. This is evidenced by the recent decision of several well respected people in congress who have decided to not run for re-election this year. Most often one of the primary reasons for not running is the tainted atmosphere in Washington today.

On a recent trip to Kansas I visited the high school that has been turned into a memorial to the Brown vs. the Board of Education lawsuit that started racial integration in the 1960’s. One picture on a wall is of a young girl, probably in the late teens, that is screaming at one of the black kids entering the segregated high school in Little Rock. I had seen this picture several times before but for some reason this time the pure hatred on the face of the girl totally struck me. I included a photo of it at the top of this post and as you can see it was a very scary thing. I often wonder about that young girl and how her life might be today. I have even said prayers for her even though I don’t know her. But that was not the last time I have seen that same look. It was also evident on several faces in the recent Tea Party rally in Washington that was protesting the healthcare reform law that recently passed. Their very antagonistic placards were also evidence of that hatred. Now I am not saying that all people in that rally were hateful but the ones shown in those pictures definitely were filled with hate. It was obvious from their faces and their signs. It was again a scary reminder of Satan’s presence in the world today.

“Filled with hate” is a very appropriate term. Hate starts out grabbing a small corner of our minds but if we don’t let it go it then, much like an aggressive cancer, it quickly overtakes much of the person’s total being. That is why there are numerous places in the bible where God tells us to fill ourselves with love, even for our enemies. He wants us to never allow hate even start within us. If we allow hate into our minds we are giving Satan a grip into our very souls. I know, given some circumstance such as the Amish incident I started the post out with, it is very difficult to not hate someone or something. But we, especially us Christians, must be very aware of the deadly effects of hate and fight it back when it crops up in our minds. We can disagree with someone but still love them. Hate simply does not have any place in a Christian’s life.

<<<Originally Posted on April 22, 2010 by at RedLetterLiving.net>>>

‘I cannot even stand to look at you’

The No. 2 Democrat in the Senate, Sen. Dick Durbin, says that a House Republican leader told off President Barack Obama during a negotiation meeting, and that they are so disrespectful it’s practically impossible to have a conversation with them.

“In a ‘negotiation’ meeting with the president, one GOP House Leader told the president: ‘I cannot even stand to look at you,’” Durbin wrote in a post on his Facebook page over the weekend.

Calling a government shutdown strategy from Republicans “disastrous,” Durbin did not specify which leader made the comment, what the context was or how the president responded.

“What are the chances of an honest conversation with someone who has just said something so disrespectful?” Durbin wrote.

SOURCE:  Dick Durbin: GOP leader told President Obama ‘I cannot even stand to look at you’ – Tal Kopan – POLITICO.com.

It looks like our country has now devolved into gutter politics. That is where an opponent is treated with utter hate and anger. It used to be that when other politicians were addressing the president they did so with respect for the office.  That is the reason that presidents are usually address as “Mr. President” instead of their name.  We might not particularly like the person in the office but we treated him with respect.  To hear this sort of thing happening is a direct insult to our very institution of democracy.

When someone says that they can’t even stand to look at you, how would you respond? As for me my first inclination would be to shout a profanity back at them. But I hope I would be controlled enough simply to walk away from the vitriolity.  I don’t know which GOP leader said the words but I can imagine who it was.  How can anything approaching a respectable conversation occur when it start with those words?

President Obama always seems to be pretty cool under fire so I’m sure he didn’t respond like-for-like as I probably would have. When he came into office in 2009 he seemed to almost bend over backwards to get a conversation going with the Republicans but after so many failed attempts he finally wised up and quit compromising when nothing was returned. Since as a result of gerrymandering it is unlikely that Democrats will get control of the House so I expect this sort of ugly politics will continue throughout this second term.

I just wonder how much could actually been accomplished in improving ACA and reducing our deficits if both sides learned to treat each other with R-E-S-P-E-C-T   as an old song used to say.

Never in my life has one of our political parties devolved into such a sorry state…..

What is the saddest thing in this world???

Occasionally I like to revisit some of my previous posts that I think contains valuable messages. This is one of them.

<<<<<<<<<<<<<>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Originally posted January 15, 2011

That is a question that has been on my mind the last few days.  I have lived for more than six decades on this earth so I have been exposed to probably millions of different situations but what is the saddest?
The list initially was quite large but the more I have thought about it the more it shrinks. I think I am finally down the one thing and that is lazy minds. I know, on first thought, that seems a strange answer.  After all there are things like world hunger, hatred, prejudice, homelessness, constant wars, and many other things that seem more serious.  But the more I have thought about it the more I am convinced that all of the above mentioned things are a result of lazy minds.

Why U.S. politics devolves into good vs. evil

Source: Why U.S. politics devolves into good vs. evil – USATODAY.com.

It is so much easier to hate someone when you are able to put the “evil” label on them.  It makes everything they do wrong and everything you do somehow righteous. That seems to be what is happening so much around us today in so many categories. The most obvious of which is politics. The fringes of both political parties who seem to now control everything have come to  believe that their opponents are indeed evil and have only the country’s destruction as its goal! For those of us who still have some remaining sense of humanity we know that people for the most part are not evil but simply have different world views than we do.

It is sad to say but there are definitely many in the country who see things in totally black and white. To them anyone who does not buy into their views are the enemy and are evil.  Unfortunately the Conservative Evangelical community  as a whole has been dubbed with this stance. The group as a whole are labeled to see  President Obama as being in cohorts with the devil himself. To them the president’s purpose is to destroy the moral fiber of the country! They see him as simply evil and must be defeated at absolutely any cost.

How can people come to such a radical stand against someone else? This totally perplexes me.  It looks like Mr. Romney will be the president’s opponent this fall. To me that is a much better outcome than many of the other possibilities. At least we will have a rational choice in the presidential elections. I wonder how much of the “radical conservative” blanket Mr. Romney will now shed in order to get elected. Many independents, including myself, would never vote for him if he continues to maintain the views he was pushed into by his primary opponents. It will be interesting to see if he sheds himself of the black/white view of the radical base of his party.

Treating something as evil makes it easier to demonize it but that is not rational thought. I’m sure the super pacs will continue to put huge sums of money into a campaign to get people to fear the president. Fear and hate seem to go hand-in-hand during these times.  I will close with a saying of one of the sages of the time.

“Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering. I sense much fear in you.” ~Yoda

But what do I know…