Category: Tolerance

Happy Birthday

Published on by Sharron BurnettLeave a comment

4760252204_d1ab50cd7f_oToday marks the birthday of the United States of America, at least in terms of being the day that the Founding Fathers published the Declaration of Independence from Britain on July 4, 1776. That makes our country 241 years old which means that we are still really just youngsters in relation to other countries around the world.

Our government has made it through almost two and a half decades but not without a few ups and downs. Somehow our democratic republic has managed to stay intact thanks to the wisdom of the men who designed our Constitution. For better or worse their ideas appear to continue to work, but all of us sense that we have yet to achieve the perfection that we desire. In the long history of the world there has yet to be a flawless union of diverse people and ideas, so perhaps we are sometimes a bit too hard on ourselves. Still we long for a land in which people of varying cultures, backgrounds and beliefs will be able to live together in harmony. Perhaps ours is a pipe dream but it is built on what was perhaps the most audacious and daring experiment in freedom that history has ever witnessed. It seems to be in our DNA to want a nation in which everyone enjoys a full measure of justice and opportunity.

All of us can recite the problems that our country has sometimes ignored and other times attempted to unravel. We might spend hours outlining the injustices that were part of our past and some which continue into our present, but what’s done is done and our only goal should be to continue to move to an ever more just system. It does little good for any of us to stand in judgement of our nation’s architects given that we did not walk in their shoes.

I suspect that those men who developed the idea of becoming a free and independent country understood that getting everyone to agree on one document would be almost impossible, and so they were willing to make compromises along the way in the hopes that one day as the nation evolved the citizenry would be willing to accept new ideas and make changes to help our country grow ever stronger. To a large extent we have accomplished just that, but at the same time the world itself has become more and more complex. It is very difficult to read into our future because we are members of a massive global community in which there is a very delicate balance. As the saying goes, if a butterfly flaps its wings in Africa we all feel the effects of the flutter.

The world as we know it today is chaotic. People everywhere are searching for answers to very difficult questions. Just as with the ultimate design of our Constitution, there are no simple resolutions. Sometimes we have to compromise to keep the steady heartbeat of democracy alive. We find ourselves more and more often wondering just how much change is good and how much is too much. These were the same eternal questions that kept the signers of the Declaration of Independence awake at night.

Some of my ancestors stayed to fight the battles and some of my husband’s left for Nova Scotia to remain loyal to Britain. Who could have known back then where all of the furor would lead? Who would have dreamed that one day the entire world would be looking to our nation as a power?

In spite of my reservations about the ways in which our government runs on this day I still believe that I live in the best land on earth. I have traveled to other countries and viscerally felt the difference between our nation and theirs. On a recent trip to Mexico I was treated kindly and felt very welcome. The experience was quite lovely in all regards, but in the background were the heavily armed guards at the airport whose presence in military uniform was difficult to ignore. I enjoyed visiting the ruins of the Mayan civilization but could not help but note that the rest stop where we lingered just long enough to take care of our needs was surrounded by men in body armor who bore big guns at the ready in case of trouble. Our tour guide joked about such things and then reminded us that we should not try our adventure alone. I felt safe but had a strange sense of foreboding that I do not encounter in the place where I live.

We have a president who is struggling with his role and a Congress that seems to be incapable of working together as our Founding Fathers once did. We insist on all or nothing in our governing which has led to a great divide that far too closely resembles the state of affairs when our nation was not quite one hundred years old. We toss aside politicians who appear to want to compromise for the betterment of everyone and instead cast our lots with rabble rousers who refuse to acknowledge the things that we have in common. We forget that the our beginnings were imperfect but managed to give us a starting point. Today’s atmosphere would have kept us under the rule of Britain and we’d all be singing “God Save the Queen” if men like Madison and Hamilton, Adams and Jefferson had not been able to come to an agreement that began the process of establishing our republic.

I love my country and continue to have great hope for it. We will soon enough settle down and find ways to move forward together. It is something that we always seem to eventually do. I long for politicians who will unite us rather than divide. I believe that incremental progress is inevitable. So Happy Birthday, United States of America. Long may your banners wave. Let’s hope we can guide you through your adolescent years and into a future that will unite us as never before. I have faith in you. God bless.

Real Life

Published on by Sharron BurnettLeave a comment

Yoda-peace_670I read the following words on Facebook the other day, “No matter how you feel–get up, dress up, show up and never give up.”

I actually like the idea behind that statement, and it’s a philosophy that I have followed for most of my life. I suspect that most people do the same. We muddle through even when times get really hard. We paste those faux smiles on our faces, gulp down enough caffeine to keep us awake and slog through whatever mess is doing its best to hold us back. Somehow though I suspect that there are unfortunate souls among us who simply can’t push on no matter how much they wish to do so. For reasons of physical or mental illnesses they reach a point at which keeping calm and carrying on is absolutely impossible. They are trapped inside circumstances that they did not ever wish to endure, and I wonder how platitudes such as the one above that actually inspires me must sound to them.

It’s rather easy for most of us to adjust our attitudes, but when someone’s brain is chemically imbalanced it can be akin to climbing Mt. Everest without oxygen tanks. Depression, bipolar disorder and anxieties cripple those afflicted with such diseases just as strokes, heart disease and other serious physical ailments all too often sideline individuals who might once have been warriors of activity and optimism. In our eagerness to keep everyone feeling as happy and productive as possible we sometimes forget to note that courage isn’t always measured by getting up, dressing up and showing up.

Some of the bravest people that I have known are those who deal with chronic illnesses, either physical or mental. They often become homebound from time to time when their symptoms overwhelm their bodies or their minds. They certainly never want to just give up but they are often stymied by the realities that they must face. It’s rather natural for them to want to rage at the unfairness of their situations, but as a society we tend to prefer for them to make the rest of us feel good by pretending that everything is just fine. We generally don’t like hearing bad news or the honest voices of those who are suffering. We discourage discourse that accurately describes the truth. Instead we elevate those who appear to overcome adversity without ever uttering a single angry or negative thought, never considering that they may need to vent the feelings that are in reality bearing down on them.

I wonder how many people break apart simply because they are afraid that admitting their fears and their anger will alienate everyone else. Our culture rewards stoics and those who manage to maintain the course. We deem Yoda to be a font of wisdom because he tells us that fear leads to hate and hate leads to suffering. He makes it sound easy to have better lives simply by eliminating our fears, but how many times have we been shocked to learn of someone who was crushed under the weight of pretending that everything was fine? How often do we avoid an individual who attempts to tell us about the hurt and pain? Why do we recoil so whenever someone brings up delicate truths?

I thank God every single day that I awake and realize that my body and my mind are sound enough that I have the capacity to face whatever challenges come my way. I have learned not to be smug about my ability to be strong in the face of hardships because I have realized that at least for now I am enjoying a great gift. I have seen what it was like for friends and family members who did not have the luxury of being able to push themselves as their bodies or their minds shut down leaving them struggling to face the day. I remember the rage of a friend who was dying at a young age. She did not want to pretend that she was content to accept her lot. She unburdened her heart to me and only smiled as though she was at peace when strangers came looking for strength from her. She resented that she so often had to hide her tears and be the adult in the room. She needed to be honest so that she might ultimately endure her fate, but so often she was the one who was comforting everybody else. They thought that she was such a beautiful soul and in fact she was, but she so wanted to be able to speak of the pain that filled her thoughts.

My mother in turn grew weary of always wearing a mask when her mind seemed almost to take control over her free will. She spoke of the terror of hearing herself say things that she did not want to say that seemed to be coming from voices inside of her brain that had taken control of who she would be. When her mental illness became the most unbearable she hid behind drawn drapes fearing that someone might come to her door and see her in her weakened state. She too was furiously enraged over her illness which she fought with her very being. Over and over again she rose from the ashes of defeat but always with fewer and fewer friends willing to walk with her when she was the most ill. Before long my once vivacious and stalwart mother who had been the life of so many parties found herself alone save for family because the symptoms of her illness were too difficult for people to observe.

We all need to learn how to stand by the people that we know who are suffering and unable for whatever reason to pretend that all is well. We should be ready to offer understanding and a willingness to accept them even when they feel as though they just want to surrender to the negativity that is stalking them. We should all learn how to just listen and not be so quick to force platitudes on them. Our role should be to assure them that we will not abandon them and that our love for them will never waver. They need to know that it is safe to be exactly the person that they need to be. Real life is not always pretty and that is okay.

Churches

Published on by Sharron BurnettLeave a comment

19510606_1819990221352292_3124586995295021826_nI write my blogs in the early morning hours when the world is a fairly quiet place. I look out on the little world of my backyard as I gather my thoughts and seek inspiration for a topic. Sometimes the ideas seem to pop out of nowhere like a distant call inside my head. It is as though I am being gently compelled to speak of a certain idea, event or individual. This day lead me to a rather strange place.

It began as I pondered my recent trip to Mexico and a visit to San Sebastian Church in an old colonial town dating back to the fifteen hundreds. Our tour bus stopped just long enough for a quick peek inside the old structure where daily mass was being celebrated in spite of all of the gawking tourists. The sounds of the ritual prayers were so soothing to me, and their familiarity in spite of being uttered in a somewhat foreign language helped me to fully understand just how the word “catholic” means universal. I remembered my religion teachers telling us back when I was still a child that we might go anywhere on earth and find the same mass with the same prayers. Here I was thousands of miles away from home and I knew exactly what was going on inside that historical church just as I suspect its earliest parishioners would have also known. It was a joyful moment for me as the people raised their voices in song and praise because I felt a deep connection to them that came from being part of a Church that transcends local geography.

Of course I also thought about the tragedy of missionary work in Mexico that had so ignorantly trampled the culture and traditions of the Mayan people who were indigenous to the area. In the misguided belief that the natives and their own religious ideas were somehow less advanced, the Franciscans built San Sebastian and other churches throughout Mexico hoping to save them. We now see the practice as questionable, but back then it was viewed as a matter of doing God’s work. Thus it often is with religious fervor. There is a very thin line between actually helping people by spreading the love of Christ and being presumptuously and wrongly judgmental. Sadly the history of missionary work in the colonies of the European nations intent on founding new worlds were sometimes far too dismissive of the local morays.

Such backward thinking is present in radical and fundamental religious sects even in today’s more enlightened world. In particular the members of Westboro Baptist Church are an example of demonstrating the most obnoxious and invasive forms of overreach. In a blind belief that they somehow have all of the eternal answers they time and again force their presence and their tainted ideas about God on people who would rather not have to deal with them. This past weekend was no exception as noted by a longtime and dear friend of mine whose children were shocked when they encountered a demonstration being held by the group in front of a Lutheran church in Pasadena, Texas. The zealots were holding signs that read, “God Hates Gays!” a particularly repulsive statement to my friend because she is in fact a lesbian woman.

I firmly believe as my friend does that God doesn’t hate anyone. To say so is to contradict all of the preachings of Jesus whose one and only commandment was that we love one another. I often wonder how we manage to take His clear and powerful message and distort it to conform to twisted interpretations. I have little doubt that if Jesus were to walk among us once again He would emphatically reiterate that His is a religion of peace and kindness devoid of judging and other such nonsense. I can almost envision Him tearing up signs that indicate that any form of hate is a product of God. To me such pronouncements are nothing short of blasphemy, a perversion of His words.

Ironically as I was experiencing the sting of anger over the hurt that I knew my friend was feeling because of the rabid Westboro folk, I encountered a grainy old black and white photo of Our Lady of Mount Carmel Catholic Church being built back in the early nineteen fifties. The church opened its doors for the first mass in the same month in which I turned four years old. Two years later I was a parishioner there along with my parents. I would spend the remainder of my school years learning about my Catholic faith in that parish built near Hobby Airport back when southeast Houston was little more than empty fields waiting to be developed in the post World War II boom. It was a wonderful experience in every sense mostly because it was where I was taught about a God who is all about love.

In the same spirit as Pope Francis today the nuns and priests and laypeople who were my teachers and mentors unveiled a love filled religion to me and my classmates. They taught us to honor our fellow humans and to see ourselves as citizens of a beautiful world in which we are all cherished by God. Ours were lessons in understanding and inclusion. We were told to empathize rather than indict, and so I struggle to understand how some fanatical Christians or those of other over zealous sects can be so self righteous as to presume that they are speaking and acting for God.

Of course religion or lack of it is a very personal thing. I would be loathe to foist my own faith on someone else. Still I would be remiss to simply leave my friend and others who are abused and misjudged to endure the taunts of groups like Westboro Baptist Church without defense from those of us who disagree with hateful preaching. Sometimes we have to speak up when the actions of others are so egregious.

Yes, it is a free country. Yes, the folks from Westboro Baptist Church have a right to their freedoms of religion and speech. I will not ever deny them those things. What I will do is shout from the rooftops that God is not about any form of hate and never will be. I will embrace my friend who is in fact a good and godly woman. I am certain that she is loved by our Lord, and I want her to know that those of us who have been lucky enough to join her in our collective journey through this life will always be by her side.

Shame Shame

Published on by Sharron BurnettLeave a comment

ShameGirlThere was an episode while I was still a school girl when the members of my class grew a bit rowdy. As anyone who knew me back then will attest I generally did my best to be a good girl, and so I was not involved in the mischief even though I secretly would have liked to have been. My teacher was having a very bad time and she ended up reading the riot act to all of us. She told us that we were perhaps one of the worst groups of students that she had ever taught and then proceeded to keep us all after school to complete a grueling punishment.

I was filled with anger because I knew that I had done nothing, and yet I was subjected to a group trial so to speak. On top of everything else it took me longer than most of my classmates to finish the task that she assigned. By the time that I was turning it in to her all but one other student had already gone home. The teacher smiled at me and whispered that she was sorry that I had been part of her humiliating lecture and subsequent sentence because she knew that I had been totally innocent of all of the bad behaviors that had resulted in the group shaming.

I was quietly stunned by her admission and simply left the classroom without saying a word. My sense of fairness had been badly wounded and I lost respect for the harried educator after that. In fact, I’ve spent most of my life believing that indicting entire groups of people because of the wrongdoings of a few is quite horrible. Unfortunately it appears to almost be a national past time of late.

Our society is playing a demeaning and dangerous game of laying guilt trips on whole groups without real thought. Instead emotions are at an all time high rather than rationality. We have created so many “isms” that it is difficult to keep up with all of them. It sometimes feels as though we are being shamed just for existing.

We have those who are criticized for their bodies. They are too overweight or too thin. They eat the wrong things or wear the wrong clothes. They don’t exercise enough or have become too obsessed with attempts to make themselves more perfect. No matter which way individuals choose to go there will be someone just waiting to inform them of the error of their lifestyles. Sadly we now have young children who are constantly weighing themselves and pushing food away because of concerns that they not measure up to some nebulous definition of how we should be.

Some are being told how horrible they are because they vote a particular way or live in a certain kind of neighborhood or house. It often feels that just being born makes one guilty of some egregious crime. Sadly it’s difficult to know what that may be until the accusations start flying. Even just quietly minding one’s own business is often viewed as demonstrating a lack of compassion or justice.

I read an editorial recently in which the author criticized Katy Perry for being too nice. This person felt that Ms. Perry’s attempts at being diplomatic and bridging compromises between people was a sure sign that she was not as “woke” as she pretended to be. In fact the writer asserted that Ms. Perry needed to choose sides quickly or be viewed as a total fraud.

I was stunned to actually read words indicating that anyone who attempts to stride along a middle ground or tries to be kind to everyone is actually worse than those who are honest enough to rant and rave. I found myself wondering what we have come to when common decency is judged to be our biggest problem. I suppose that I sound very old and out of it when I suggest that we might all cease with the judging and name calling, especially when we don’t even know the people that we are attacking.

One truism that I learned as an educator is that if one carries on with continuous nagging and negativity people will eventually quit listening at all. I suspect that we are quite close to that situation. I find that few people want to discuss anything in a meaningful way anymore. They simply want to be left alone to lead their respective lives as they wish. They have grown weary of being misunderstood by people who won’t even take the time to learn the facts. They are eschewing the laziness of judgements like my teacher of long ago made. Such opinions are mattering less and less.

I fear that many innocents are being hurt because they feel overcome by the stereotyping and ignorance of our current ways. I know we have gone too far when we even have a local television station sending out an email headline filled with inuendo that advertises a story about “the confederacy era hero, Sam Houston.” The fact is that Sam Houston had many character flaws but being a confederacy era hero was not one of them. He was the governor of Texas at the time when most of the southern states were seceding from the union and he unequivocally pronounced his opposition to having Texas become a member of the Confederacy. He was ousted from office as a result.

At the same time that we are being so critical of so many aspects of our humanity, our history and our philosophies, we are also becoming less and less willing to listen to opposing points of view. We shut certain people down immediately simply because we believe that we already know what they are going to say and we find their comments to be so offensive that we are willing to deny them their first amendment rights. Journalists whose job it is to bring even horror into the light of day are being ostracized if they allow certain individuals to speak.

We are shouting constantly at one another and putting our heads into the sand at one and the same time. Nobody is exempt these days and we find ourselves wondering what if anything that we hear is true. We have lost our way and it’s time that we found our way back to a sense of fairness and decency and honesty. Not that Katy Perry is a paragon of thought, but we have to ask ourselves what is wrong with her idea of seeking to be nice.

I dislike much of mankind’s actions of the past, but I do not in any way feel responsible for things that I did not do. I refuse to feel shamed or to accept punishment for ideas that have never been mine. I don’t prescribe to wearing a hair shirt and beating up myself or anyone else for that matter. Our history is what it is and the best we can do is learn from it, not continue to divide ourselves over it. Even if we to were remove every last hint of wrong doing from our memories and paste scarlet letters or six pointed stars on those that we fear or despise we will only end up repeating the sins of the past. Shaming has never been an effective means of correcting behaviors, but it often leads to egregious crimes of inhumanity. We’ve used a bit too much of it of late and I suggest that we take ourselves off of this path before we find ourselves in places that we would rather not be.

  

A Facebook Story

Published on by Sharron BurnettLeave a comment

h0fvargheeyaybm4oyytI’ve been a member of Facebook for some time now, so I’ve watched it change. In the beginning it was a great way for me to keep up with friends and even to find people that I had lost along the way. Over time I accumulated a rather large following and I suppose that it was the same for most of the people who had signed up for the service. I understand that it would be rather chaotic if the posts from my hundreds of friends were to show up on my wall each day. It somewhat made sense that the folks at Facebook had to find a way to tame the beast so to speak. The result was the creation of various algorithms designed to ferret out the main people whose posts they thought I would most like to see. Unfortunately the rendering of a mathematical analysis resulted in my losing touch with a number of individuals with whom I had happily reunited. Facebook appears to think that I mostly want to hear from relatives and people who are my own age. While I have definitely enjoyed hearing from those individuals I have to admit that I am angry that I no longer see the posts from so many of my younger friends. The Facebook methodology is a rather presumptuous way of determining whose photos and comments I will see from day to day and who will see mine.

Since I write a blog each weekday I eventually created a special page on which to share the information. The idea was to find a larger audience for my stories. Admittedly it has been a bit of a bust in the last year or so, and I suspect that it is because Facebook is doing the same kind of things with that account that it does with my main one. In other words over half of the people who I number as my friends never see the post. Adding insult to injury is the fact that Facebook is perfectly willing to boost my reach if I pay them a certain amount each month. Since I am unwilling to give them any money we appear to be at an impasse.

I suppose that I should be happy enough that Facebook provides me with an advertising platform, albeit quite small, but a few years ago I was managing to inform around four to five hundred people a day in the same venue. Now I am lucky to gain the notice of a hundred. Perhaps it is the result of my writing having grown dull, or maybe it is because of another one of those strange Facebook algorithms, which leads me to another bone that I wish to pick.

Since setting up a page for my blog I have written over four hundred fifty entries, each with a special image attached. I tend to believe that a photo has a certain ability to entice people to read my thoughts, so I never simply use words. Awhile back I composed a piece about Heinrich Himmler. I had seen a documentary about him that prompted me to consider how often we have monsters in our midst whose physical appearance and background seems so harmless. The theme of my essay revolved around the horrors that this seemingly innocuous individual managed to perpetrate. My composition was in reality a verbal takedown of Himmler and his henchmen, and as usual I included a picture to illustrate my points.

For some reason out of the four hundred fifty odd other images that I had posted Facebook chose to single out the Himmler photo and display it prominently on my page as an example of what I have to offer. Seeing that horrible face again and again quickly began to irritate me, but I hoped that it would eventually be replaced by a newer offering. Day after day after day I had to look at that mugshot and wonder what someone who did not know me might think about that image being so prominently displayed on my wall. I began to worry that Facebook had some kind of algorithm designed to find right wing extremists and that perhaps they had pegged me as someone to watch because I had used that picture.

I’m a bit hard headed so I decided just to wait and see what might eventually happen, but the image never went away. They did not replace it with the lovely photos of my students or Mother Theresa or the heavens. Somehow the people who decide such things thought that it should stay. Finally in sheer desperation, and my own aversion to constantly viewing that mug, I simply deleted the entire post. He is gone forever from my wall but I truly wonder what kind of indelible and erroneous impression I may have made on someone who has never met me or read my ideas.

The world of social media can be a very scary place in which we take risks each time that we reveal a bit of ourselves. We never really know who is seeing our posts nor how they are interpreting them. I suspect that from time to time we all draw hasty conclusions about things that we see without ever bothering to read more about them or even to ask questions about why they are there. We fall for stories that are dubious without following up to determine their veracity or lack of it. We make instantaneous judgements and read between the lines overlaying our own thoughts on others. We question the intelligence of someone because of grammatically confusing posts and poor word choices when sometimes those errors are the result of autocorrect. What we think we see can be a real slippery slope of incorrect judgement, and in today’s world lots of people are being tried and found guilty in the court of public opinion without virtue of valid evidence.

I have so few visitors to my blog Facebook page that I’m probably okay, especially now that Himmler”s ugly mug is gone, but my own story made me think about how we all too often indict people without ever seeking explanations for the things that we think we see them doing. Mine is a good lesson in both being circumspect in how we present things and taking care not to draw swift conclusions. I have long held that our first recourse should be to give people the benefit of doubt. In most cases they are innocent of bad intentions. Only after we have assembled facts and evidence should we make judgements that might prove them guilty.

We are all too often manipulated by a steady barrage of opinions and innuendo from questionable sources. A good way to combat the propaganda is to always start by assuming the best and then put in the time and work to uncover the truth.