Tag Archives: unity

The Gathering Stone

stone

© Sue Vincent

Malcolm Potter was desperate enough to finally make the pilgrimage. He once thought it was all silly nonsense, but things had gone too far. The monster in the White House had made an incredible mess over the past two years, rolling back environmental protections so that his rich buddies could clear cut and strip mine, even in national parks, chipping away at abortion rights, healthcare, protections for all marginalized populations across the board, and having a religious fanatic as his Vice President. The nation was spinning out of control.

He had been a staunch atheist for most of his five decades of life, and couldn’t understand why religions were still tolerated since they were one of the major causes of war, oppression, persecution, and colonialism. Yet, even though his last hope was firmly grounded in superstition and belief in the occult, it was still a hope. Only the stone could restore the correct orientation of the world, and return it to a course that ultimately would lead to utopia.

“Who are you?” Malcolm thought he’d be the only one here, but a woman was standing on the other side of the stone.

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Symbol of Hope

justin - flag

Justin Schroeder, 36, in front of his home in Bozeman, Montana – Image found at Blue Lives Matter website.

When the kid walked up his driveway, Johnny recognized him as Randall Berry, who had moved to Boise with his family from Seattle last month. That didn’t surprise him one bit. Johnny got up from where he was sitting on his front porch as Randall approached. “Evening.”

“I see you still have that symbol of hate flying,” pointing at the American flag mounted to the right of Johnny’s front door.

“I see you had the nerve to back up that threat you made in the anonymous note you had the audacity to tape to my front door.”

“You should have done what I told you to do and gotten rid of the flag. I promised you a fight where you would lose.”

“Take your best shot you motherf-cker.”

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Living in the Dystopia: A Nation Divided

dallas shootings

AP Photo/Tony Gutierrez

Supposedly in response to police shootings of African-American men Philando Castile and Alton Sterling, Micah Xavier Johnson, age 25 allegedly gunned down multiple police officers in the city of Dallas, murdering five of them. Johnson later was supposedly barricaded in a parking garage and, although the details are subtly different depending on which news agency report you read, Dallas P.D. sent in a bomb defusing robot armed with a bomb to kill Johnson. Other reports say that Johnson had the area wired with bombs and police used the robot to detonate one of them.

All of this goes back to “Black Lives Matter” vs. “All Lives Matter”. It’s easy to see why the concept of black lives matter makes a lot of sense, but at the same time, the actual enactment of the movement spawned by the sentiment is so dangerous, to police, to African-Americans, and to the rest of us.

This isn’t the first time populations have been separated within a nation and deliberately put at odds with one another. This isn’t the first time such conflicts have been used as an excuse to disarm citizens who legally own firearms.

I’m currently reading Elie Wiesel’s Night, his landmark chronicle of his personal experience as a survivor of Hitler’s Holocaust. The Jews were vilified in Nazi Germany and made the scapegoat of everything bad happening in that nation.

It was subtle at first. The Nazi’s first step wasn’t rounding up the Jews and shipping them off to the camps. That was the last step. The first step was marginalizing one or more populations from one another. If diverse populations in a nation are united, they cannot be overcome by the government. If the non-Jewish German citizens had stood by their Jewish counterparts, could the Nazi government have perpetrated the Holocaust?

What about us?

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