Sunday Morning

I got up one Sunday morning when I was eight or nine and turned on the TV.  Growing up in Windsor, a border city, we picked up Detroit stations, even in the pre-cable days of the early 1970s.  So, that meant that I found religious programming rather than the cartoons I was probably hoping for.

What I saw left a lasting impression on me.  A row of beautiful, wholesome looking young women in pastel coloured chiffon dresses stood in a beautiful, natural setting as they sang, “Onward Christian soldiers, marching off to war…”  Besides wondering how they managed to flash their perfect smiles for every syllable, I was immediately appalled.

Even at that tender age, I was offended.  Despite my lack of sophistication, I could see the hypocrisy.  Kill for god?  Doesn’t one of the commandments read, “Thou shalt not kill”?  Now I’m supposed to believe god wants us to kill when it suits him?  And I could see it was a sales job, too.  I may have been pre-pubescent, but I knew a pretty girl when I saw one and, somehow, that sex sells.  Somebody wanted people to buy the ideas of war and god.

At that time, the US was embroiled in the Vietnam war, fighting against the communist North.  Being godless, they were presented as a threat to American ‘values’.  It wasn’t about money, markets, or business opportunities, of course.  It’s amazing how history keeps repeating itself.

If I, a child, could see through this ruse, why couldn’t the adults across the border?  Are people really so blinded by religion?  Apparently, they are.  Give them eyes, that they might see.

‘Onward Christian Soldiers’, a song I suspect has its origins in the Crusades, was the most offensive song I’d ever heard, and it remains so.

I’m So Excited… By Statistics

Have you seen the chart?  It’s a hell of a start!  This could be made into a monster if we all pull together as a team!

Apologies to Pink Floyd for borrowing their lyrics but they happen to fit.  Just three days and three posts into this project and I’ve already had eight readers.  Actual readers!  Registered eyeballs.  I’M AN AUTHOR!  And the graph!  A beautiful upward curve.  If I was an investment advisor I’d rate me a solid ‘Buy’.  I may not be riding the gravy train yet, folks, but get your shares in this now while you can.  This is a ground floor opportunity not to be missed.  At no point will the growth curve be longer.

I haven’t even tried to link to any other sites or resources, yet.  I’ll have to look into that to see if I can really get things going.  But people are finding me, anyway.  If the ‘spam’-marked comment can be believed, someone has even bookmarked me.  That means they intend to come back and read me again.  A fan!  A devoted follower!  A repeat customer!  Someone likes what I have to say and how I say it.  I matter.

One of the great things about blogs is the insight they offer into the minds of others.  From a safe distance we can offer up and observe views and opinions that would otherwise be difficult to share in most face to face situations.  You can’t tell people what you really think at work because it wouldn’t contribute to a constructive and efficient environment.  You can’t do it while socialising without running the risk of offending someone or being asked to lighten up.  And, if your family is anything like mine, you can’t even talk openly with them without an argument erupting.  How five siblings could all be so different is a mystery to me.  It’s like we all grew up in different houses.  If your family isn’t like mine, consider yourself lucky and know that at least one person envies you.

 In order to function, we have to live in a neutral world.  Bland.  Beige.  But a functional life is not enough.  There is ‘I am’.  Then there is ‘I am someone’.  By spewing words onto the screen and a file stored on some server somewhere, some unseen, insignificant nobody becomes somebody again.

A Blast From the Past, Indeed

I was listening to Talking Heads for a blast from the past.  The track ‘Listening Wind’ was playing.  It’s one of those songs that makes my skin tingle because it seems so true – it cuts through all the bullshit and tells you what’s what and tells it like it is.  It’s also very unique and, hence, ‘cool’.

But, it also got to me for another reason.  It got to me because it’s STILL true, about twenty-five years after its release.  It’s just as relevant and, in fact, could have been written yesterday.  Aside from the fact that I used to have hair down to my ass when I listened in the past and, well, now I don’t, nothing has changed.  Not a thing.  A quarter of a century.  More than a generation.  The middle east is still a mess with American foreign policy still fuelling resentment and making things worse rather than better.  And the news stories still invade my home.

 This may seem a bit callous, but I actually feel a certain resentment.  For my entire life, the middle east has dominated the foreign news.  Ever since I was old enough to notice the news the middle east has been the big story, with wars, bombs, civil wars, terrorists, religious nuts, revolutions, hardliners, and the rest getting in my face every day.  I feel imposed upon.   How dare they come into my home and dump their stupid hatred and arguments on me.  And all because they insist on a religious based state of one kind or another.

When will these idiots realise that religion and government are a terrible combination?  Religion is fuel for fires started by heated political debates or situations.  So, two peoples need water in an arid region?  A skirmish over control of the source of the only two rivers in the region grows into an extended, decades long religious conflict encompassing ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ wars.

Do you think people would want or support half the wars if they were presented with the facts – that they are about water, oil, resources, or land and, ultimately, money rather than religion or “To protect/defend our values/way of life”, as they’re told?  I doubt it.  There are lies, damned lies, and then there’s politics or business masquerading as religion.

“The wind in my heart

The dust in my head”