A Walk on A Rainy Sunday Afternoon

Hmmm, a Krystal drink with a Bud Lite chaser. Interesting lunch.

NOW I believe that roadside trash is an effective way to gauge the health of humanity. So today, I took my camera with me on my Sunday afternoon walk. Basically, the roadways around my neighborhood are buried in trash. Check out my survey.

As I continued on my walk I came across a man working in his front yard on a busy road. His yard was full of trash. I said, "It's unbelievable that people would throw trash right in your front yard."

"That's just typical of the world today," he said, in what sounded like an African or Caribbean accent.

"But it's depressing me," I said.

"You just have to pick it up and go on with your life.," he said. As I walked away, I turned back one more time as he was picking up bottles, cups, and cigarette boxes.

I have been hit with a powerful new idea!

Last Thursday, I attended a meeting of the Atlanta Leavers, who are dedicated to introducing people to the work of Daniel Quinn. This famous author is known for the books Ishmael and Story of B. I read Story of B soon after I became an activist in 1997.

During the meeting, I was hit with a new thought that just blew me away. All my life I operated on the assumption that the attributes that helped early humans survive — like greed and selfishness — would ultimately lead to the undoing of humankind. I always operated on the precept that humans were inherently and fatally flawed.

But at the meeting Thursday night, the idea was thrown out that maybe humans are NOT FLAWED. Look around. Are dogs flawed, are cats flawed, are birds flawed? Nope. So, as I ran my errands on Friday afternoon I observed people and came to the conclusion that WE ARE NOT FLAWED!

For hundreds of years we've been hiding behind the excuse that we are flawed, and we use that as an excuse to justify our bad actions. We are born sinners, according to Christianity. So, God created us but we are born flawed? No. I am told that God gave us a Free Will, and long ago we chose sin over righteousness. Yes, I believe that.

But it's not in our genome to be rotten, bad people — we make that decision on our own. I believe, as of Thursday, that humans are GOOD — we just have an odd way of showing it. But the vast majority of people really ARE good, and a lot of the "bad" we see in others is actually how they are perceived or a result of how they are treated.

So, to those of you who are chunking your beer bottles, cigarette cartons, and fast food wrappers into the woods and in people's yards, come on, man. You just can't say, "Well I'm a sinner anyway, what the hell" and throw your McNasty wrapper out the window. And you can't say, "We humans are fatally flawed. We are SUPPOSE to litter God's creation — THAT'S OUR FLAW." Sorry, that is unacceptable.











Yum, yum. Someone had Krystal Sunrisers and coffee for
breakfast. I hope they enjoyed it. I hope they didn't spill crumbs
inside their Mercedes.

Anyway, getting back to my litter and health-of-humanity correlation, I must say that humans are not doing well. In regards to the cigarette cartons I found everywhere today, of course I don't expect people to take care of the Planet when they don't even take care of their own health. And in regards to the tons of fast food wrappings I found, well, I guess you are suppose to eat it fast and then get rid of the trash fast. I guess people's yards and greenspace are the personal trash cans for those in a hurry.

So, like I say, humans are not doing well at all. Whether we will have the wherewithal to save ourselves from our own self destruction and from the abuse we give to Mother Nature remains uncertain. In the meantime, the next time I take a walk I think I will bring a trash bag.

Conform or Die

Freaky looking riot police in Miami who have
been turned into Teenage Mutant Ninja
Turtles with your tax money.

Believe, obey, do not question!

Let's milk terrorism so we can have an excuse to turn our nation into a Police State. Let's humble those little demonstrators with our clubs, tear gas, dogs, fire hoses, rubber bullets, armored tanks, and any other weapon we can find to humiliate those who question us. Let's throw them in jail; maybe even kill them. For we are the Think Police, and we know the One Right Way, and if you open your mouth in protest, you'd better find a good dentist.

So, allow me to digress...

I would like to take a break from my usual idealism to give a more personal example of why I'm so screwed up and why this world is so screwed up.

Today, my mom insinuated that I'm a bad parent, and that really hurt. I spent this morning cleaning the house and eating a bowel of rice, I really can't figure out where this is coming from. I can't really understand why my own mother has to continually remind me what a rotten scum bag I am.

Yesterday, I spent the afternoon getting my oldest daughter's car worked on and washed, and I spent 45-minutes at her college getting her financial aid paperwork completed. I stopped by the state patrol and picked up a driver's handbook for my youngest daughter and later took her to dinner. I love and idolize my daughters more than anything in the world — they are everything to me.

But I am a bad parent? Why? Because my youngest daughter left a video at my mother's house that contained "really horrible stuff." My mom is a religious fundamentalist, and she says it's MY FAULT for my irregular church attendance, and for not "making" my 14-year-old daughter attend church. My mom says if she doesn't "attend church" she will get in trouble, and fall into the ways of the world.

Okay, let's talk about the video. I'm not sure what the hell my mother is talking about. She says my daughter downloaded stuff from the Internet. Now, I have NO IDEA how to download a video from the Internet onto a VCR tape, and I don't think my daughter does either.

Secondly, I am suspecting the incriminating video contains some Good Charlotte videos. Now, these kids are covered with body piercings, body art, they wear black leather, one of them has colored hair, they are really freaky looking, and I love them. This is a band that has clean songs, who sing about the pain of growing up. They talk about when their dad left them, or what it's like to be a geek in school. They are helping my daughter and her friends get through growing up. But since they do not look like Eddie Haskell, then they are immediately deemed as evil and satanic. Okay, let's take a look at wonderful Eddie Haskell.

This is taken from a Leave it to Beaver fan website:


Eddie’s two trademarks are his unctuous politeness to adults and his weasly, sharp-tongued meanness to everybody else. He is a model white-collar delinquent, a creep who goads people into trouble rather than perpetrating the crime himself. He was a born shirker, not worker, and a strain on any parent, especially his own long-suffering mother and father, Agnes and George.

Now, let's talk about those freaky looking people. This comes from today's Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Letters Section:

To the guy with the rainbow-colored mohawk, tattoos, and earring who picked up the lunch tab for Lt. Col. Steven Butler, Capt. Ed Ray and me at Harold's last Tuesday, and then slipped out before we could acknowledge your generosity: Thanks.

—Lt. Col. Kelly S. Jennings

So, in conclusion...

To my mother and others, I ask that you please not judge people by their appearance. Only judge another human by what's in their heart.

As for Christian fundamentalists having a monopoly on morality, I fully expect everyone on this Planet to be moral. While I support gay marriage, I expect these couples to live a moral life. It is the moral duty of a gay couple to have a divorce that's just as ugly and drawn out as a heterosexual divorce. After all, 53 percent of marriages end in divorce, and then I hear people mumbling something about the "sanctity of marriage." I'm tired of hearing about the Conservative Right's definition of morality: Hate, self-righteousness, prejudice, and intolerance all ring hollow with me.

Yes, I am...

...a rotten person. I am rotten because I cannot support big religious institutions who tell me that God will judge me, and then their members judge my every move. There is no need to send my daughter to church every Sunday — I'm sure there are plenty of other places where she can learn to be a hypocrite.

"He's a bad one, that Yellow Canary, he is a truly lowly, sorry, no good, loser."

"Yes, you're right Ms. Whipple. He is pond scum. Now get back to knitting those socks."

The Slaughter of Mother Earth

Another forest in the Atlanta area has been clearcut. Hurray! Now we can grow our economy, make rich people richer, and create more traffic when the development goes up.

Somewhere in one of those dark skyscrapers in Atlanta, a red-nosed economist is pulling a whiskey bottle out of his bottom desk drawer and taking another swig. He's staring at a computer screen as he writes his latest economic forecast. "We've got to have growth," he says in a slurred voice. "We have to keep the economy growing. The world is infinite, it is the size of the sun, and the United States can hold millions and billions more people! Who cares about the forests we desecrate, the species we drive to extinction, and the impact our development has on weather." So he continues writing his rosey economic report.

The next day his report is all over the news, and the Republicans are screaming, "See, the economy is growing because we cut taxes," and the Democrats are screaming, "The data is flawed, that economist was DRUNK last night."

But John and Jane Doe really don't care either way. They have always lived with growth, they have learned to accept and adapt. Perpetual growth is JUST THE WAY IT IS and there is nothing that can stop it.

A big corporate head is at the end of the boardroom table in a darkened room. Every once in a while the rising smoke from his cigar glimmers in the one lit light. "Dwiggins, BRING ME THAT ECONOMIC REPORT, and give me a milkshake from Steak-n-Shake while you're at it." A lone, tall, skinny man with horn-rimmed glasses scurries about at the far end of the room, and there's a sound of ruffling papers.

"Well, ladies and gentlemen. We CAN BUILD this mall, and we can hire cheap foreign labor to build it and staff it. That will allow maximum profits for us, so that I can expand my house in Boca Raton."

It is not all their fault because eternal growth is all they know. The lake, the old fishing hole, is all gone. A little boy looks at the acres of scorched earth and asks his father, "Where will the animals go?"

The father looks down and says, "The animals will find another place to live, and Saddam is stockpiling weapons of mass destruction."

"Oh," says the little boy. But the father is lying. The little greenspace left west of Atlanta is crisscrossed and fragmented—not much of an ecosystem can survive around here.

From today's Atlanta-Journal Constitution:

"Metro Atlanta's population boom keeps booming along—adding about 320 people a day since 2000—with the fastest growth among Hispanics and Asians. The 20-county metro area's population increased by 9 percent between 2000 and 2003 and now is about 4.4 million, according to estimates released Thursday by the Census Bureau."

Globally, the Planet's population is 6.3 billion and rising rapidly and we are losing an estimated 200 species a day*. A lot of these species play essential roles in our ecosystem. We really have no idea what we're screwing up. It's just that all we know is growth, so we keep on doing it, at the expense of everything else. Read a book on Easter Island, and you'll learn that we REALLY CAN destroy our world.

We humans are running out of time. We have to reinvent from the ground up our morals and ethical systems. We need to redefine just how much "stuff" a person needs to be happy. We need to weigh in the future and environment every time we make a decision. We need to stop making cars our false idols. We spend trillions providing them with black nature trails and massive seas of asphalt. They are the real God of our sick society, and this is wrong.

If we don't change our ways, one day humans will be on the list of "Species Lost Today" and Mother Nature won't care one bit.

My inspiration for today: Friends of Ishmael Society .



*This is just an estimate. Since many species are being destroyed before they are even discovered, this is a tough guess. However, the famous Harvard scientist Edwin O. Wilson puts it another way by saying, "Current species loss due to human intervention is probably 1,000 to 10,000 times greater than what would occur naturally."

We Are All Monkey People

So, our entire essence, everything who we are, floats around in this 5-pound organ in our skull. If our organ becomes damaged or diseased, then everything about who we are changes. We cannot escape it—we our stuck with our organic brain and these frail bodies, and these are the tools we have to accomplish our mission in life.

Some of us are pretty, others are ugly, and some must go through life disabled in a wheel chair. It is so UNFAIR. Some of us are smart, while others are born rich. As for me, I have none of the above. I am just a lowly bottom feeder trying to raise a family, hold a job, and make it through life. I am human 3,043,732. I just showed up here one day and I've had to spend my entire life trying to figure it out.

How did I suddenly get in my mid 40s? Where did my 30s go? Was I doing what I was SUPPOSE to be doing?

What happened to my dad? Why did he die of cancer? That would have never happened on the Leave It To Beaver Show. Why do we have to get old, wrinkled, and sickly?

Is the HUMAN SPECIES making any progress? I think so. In World War I millions of men went off to suicidal battles because their country told them to. They rarely questioned it. Now, when a country sends young people to battle, more of them are questioning.

From the Iranian Ministry of Defense:

"We will not sit to wait for what others will do to us. Some military commanders in Iran are convinced that preventative operations which the Americans talk about are not their monopoly. Any nation, if it feels threatened, can resort to that."

THAT'S WHY THE IRAQ WAR WAS WRONG!

Oh my God, do you know what this means? They are saying that because the United States invaded Iraq because they felt threatened, Iran has the right to attack Israel if Iran feels threatened.

Now I heard Condoleezza Rice on the radio this week parroting the Bush party line about the war: "They had the capability, history, and will to make weapons of mass destruction." is what Dr. Rice said in a nutshell. Does this justify an invasion? NO. This whole thing has been spun and repackaged so much that the typical American is going around saying, "Yeah, Saddam tortured and gassed his own people. We are great liberators."

Just a reminder: It is NOT moral, ethical, or nice to wage war on another country except in self defense. Or, a nation may aid another, but only in conjunction with the world community, and only for the task of protecting world peace, and only as a last resort.

While the Yellow Canary believes in peacemaking and nonviolence, he is not a pacifist and he realizes that war is sometimes necessary.

Yes, a preemptive attack may be acceptable as a form of self defense. But this opens a real can of worms, as we've seen from the statements by the Iranians above.

So, getting back to my opening statement, yes, we all are Monkey People. We think we are better and smarter than monkeys, but maybe we are not all that different. We are all animals, and we need to remember that. Humans are just another animal. By recognizing and accepting this fact, maybe it will help us understand and live in greater harmony with other species, and, hey, maybe even other humans. Right now, so many of us live the dream that we are somehow better than other animals and other groups of people. Yet, all of us, including monkeys, are all confined by our cranials.

Let's not forget that. Let us be good Monkeys and not start another Middle East war.

The Sad Canary

Supersizing Atlanta

Painting by Lucy Brady, used with permission.


Well, the news is out...a report by the Atlanta Regional Commission states that metro Atlanta is adding 2 million more people in the next 25 years. The worse news is that even if proposed transportation improvements are made, the traffic is STILL going to get worse. Now, the roads are already packed around here, so face it, the American dream is going to become a nightmare. We will just waste our lives away sitting in our cars, as emissions spew from our tailpipe. And as we sit in a sea of cars, we'll scream, "What a great nation we live in!"

Of course, most people don't even read the newspaper, so they don't even know about all these growth projections, nor do they think about it. After all, we humans are designed to adapt, right? And besides, it's God's will anyway — it's just another sign of the end times. While some just accept the problem, others blame it on immigration or the "damn yankees" that are "invading" north Georgia.

At a sprawl presentation I attended a week ago, the speaker said that OVER 60 acres a day in metro Atlanta are cleared for development. That means more strip shopping centers with nail shops, more roads, more "Big Box" stores that are surrounded by massive parking lots. If we scalp the land and develop the entire U.S., won't that effect weather patterns? Is it really right to smash every forest and pave every pasture in Chatlanta (the new name of our area when Chattanooga and Atlanta run into one another)? Is this moral? Is it righteous?

Now immigration is a complicated issue that I won't address tonight, but I will say that our country's own policies are exacerbating the endemic poverty in Latin America, which is forcing people to move here. But overall, immigration is only a side effect of a far greater problem.

The PROBLEM?

The problem is that every time a couple has more than two children, they are growing the population. Right now, world population is skyrocketing and will soon hit 6.5 billion (it was only 3 billion in 1960).

The typical response to traffic is "build more roads" and the typical response to overpopulation is "there's plenty of room."

Okay, let me address these:

Roads - Build them, and people only move farther out. Roads are only a cheap subsidy for developers. They open up more land for the bulldozers. As long as the growth remains out of control, the roads will just fill up again.

Plenty of Room - Shouldn't there be a balance between nature and humans? Is it our destiny to pave over every last inch of the Earth to build another convenience store or gas station? And while there may be enough space for everyone to have a plot of land, there is certainly not enough resources for unlimited people. Already, steel and gas prices are up, partly because of China's booming economy. The price of seafood is already increasing as the world's fisheries continue to become more depleted.

I remember giving a presentation once on how all the world's oceans are already below replacement level, except the Indian Ocean. Well, now I read that giant fishing ships, often from Taiwan, are now fishing out the Indian Ocean — the last great area that has not been over-exploited by humans.

While family size is a sensitive issue, all I ask is that everyone in the world should consider "stopping at two." In that way, at least we'd have a fighting chance at protecting our natural world and ourselves. Do we really need another 6 billion people on the Planet? What goal does that accomplish?

From the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

"Rush-hour drive times will continue to lengthen, as will gridlock regionwide. For example, an afternoon trip from Marietta to Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport is projected to grow from a 48-minute ride to a 70-minute odyssey."

@#%$&@#

Gosh, I envy this girl! She was a
cheerleader in high school and
put bubble gum in my hair for fun.

She's Beautiful, with her hair glowing in the light. But she's plastic — just like so many people in our world. I watch them flick their cigarette butts out the window. Yes, God made the Earth as your own personal wastebasket. I see the people in their cars talking away, totally oblivious to the fouled air, the scalped Earth, and the longer waits in traffic. Millions of cars are idling as the fumes rise to the heavens.

And then we have Barbie and Ken, who drive their Hummer and live in their trophy house far out in the trophy suburbs, which used to be farmland. Their mammoth vehicle, filled with Saudi fuel, belches fumes out the back, and they think God is punishing them because their kids have asthma. Ken has a 40 minute ride to work, and most of the time he goes from one traffic jam to the next.

On Sunday they pull their Hummer, the one with the fish on the back, into the church parking lot. The sermon is on tithing, and the preacher screams at them for 40 minutes about the need to GIVE MORE and DO MORE for the Lord. But Ken and Barbie already have their credit cards at the max, so they don't give the sermon much thought.









Nuclear winter? Nope, just the rape of Paulding
County, Georgia.

During the week, they have to drive the kids to soccer, dance, church, school, and the asthma doctor. There are few sidewalks and nothing is close together, so Barbie just drives everywhere. She drives past all the subdivisions going up, all the land being cleared, all the forests being bulldozed, and she has no idea that what she sees will soon mean more traffic. Nosiree, Barbie is perfectly happy because she is living the American dream. She is too busy thinking about Christmas and all the junk she'll be buying for her kids and relatives. On the day of Jesus's birth, she'll participate in the carnal ritual of giving a lot of Made in China junk to her relatives, and then they'll load her up with junk. Sure, she'll get 17 candles and three Ziggy calendars, and she'll even get an electric toothbrush from Uncle Fester, but, hey, it's Christmas, so Barbie will be happy. Ken will be wearing his fluffy sweater and singing Silent Night by the fireplace. Yum, yum, there will even be eggnog.

Do I sound jealous? Shoot yeah. They have the perfect American life. It is the life of excess, driving, polluting, and basically stealing from the rest of the world. The United States is 5 percent of the world's population, yet consumes over 20 percent of the world's energy. Maybe Barbie and Ken will realize this and begin to cry. But then again, maybe they won't. Barbie was a cheerleader in high school and Ken was a football star. As for me, I was a lowly photographer and writer. I was the grime on the bottom of their shoes. And now look at them, they have achieved the dream.

Wow.

"Every day is a good day to die if you're fighting your enemies"
—Klingon warrior

Listen to the Prophets

Jimmy Carter lights the Christmas tree in Plains,
GA, Nov. 2003. I was only a few feet away from one of my
great heros.

I have no idea WHY I want to help make the world better. I mean, who cares if we multiply by the trillions and colonize the Universe or if we merely become extinct in 100 years. Why do I want humans to succeed? I have no freaking idea. I look around and I see tons of good, but I also see lots of bad. Like, WHY do people have to throw their gum in the parking lot? My flip flops are bubble-gum magnets and as soon as I step in a warm mound of gum, well, my foot keeps going but that flip flop just stays there — it's like flubber.

So, it's necessary for me to put existence into a spiritual perspective. Why did God create us? Well, some have told me that "God was lonely" while others say we are here to "glorify God." So what does "glorify" mean? To make God happy.

But how do we know what makes God happy? Since God doesn't make public address announcements or give us sermons from mountains, we have to depend on prophets. For thousands of years, we have relied on prophets to let us know what God likes and dislikes, and to provide behavior parameters. More often than not, we humans don't like to hear what prophets say, so in the old days we sometimes executed them or just ignored them. In fact, so many prophets were either being killed or ignored, that God finally sent his own son Jesus to serve as a prophet. But, basically, people just killed him and ignored his words, just like the others. Of course, a few people DIDN'T ignore him, and they went on to start Christianity. Other religions, of course, have prophets too.

Through the centuries, more prophets have popped up. There is always a debate as to whether a prophet is "true" or "false." Often, a prophet is considered "true" if he or she does not conflict with what the older prophets said in the Holy Scriptures. Church leaders often fulfill the role of prophets because they are defining improved models of behavior that fit within scripture. Of course, people can pull scripture out of context to justify nearly anything they want to, but when scripture is used to provide backing for a new moral standard, then that provides authority and credibility for the masses. One example of this is slavery. In the old days, scripture was once used to justify this abhorrent practice, and then during the Civil Rights Movement, scripture was used to condemn it. The same is now going on in the Gay Rights struggle. One side lists scripture that says that homosexuality is bad, while another group pulls out different versus about tolerance, or tries to redefine the context of the scripture used by the opposition.

It is all so confusing. But the beautiful thing is that as we humans evolve socially, we are learning more about justice, equality, and tolerance for others. The prophets of today are the preachers who promote these values. The greatest prophets of our modern times have been Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Mohandas K. Gandhi, and President Jimmy Carter, and these are my greatest heros. Dr. King was incredibly astute when he said:

"Gandhi was inevitable. If humanity is to progress,
Gandhi is inescapable.
He lived, thought and acted,
inspired by the vision of humanity evolving toward
a world of peace and harmony.
We may ignore Gandhi at our own risk."

- Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Of course, as is the standard fate for prophets, Dr. King and Gandhi were promptly killed by individuals who didn't like what they had to say.

How do you glorify God and fulfill your mission on Earth? I think we follow God best when we override our natural instincts of greed and selfishness and practice higher ideals like compassion, empathy, and unconditional love. Back in the early days the Vikings and Saxons didn't have a problem with invading villages, taking all the plunder, and murdering all the inhabitants. Hey, the stuff was there for the taking and the villages were lightly defended, so it must have been okay. So, did this glorify God? Sure, they could be excused because it was the early days of civilization and they probably didn't know better, but it probably DIDN'T make God happy.

I think it is now time that we START LISTENING to the prophets and STOP KILLING them. I assure you that you won't like what they have to say, but listen anyway.

Are We Going Forward or Backwards?

As always, I try to collect pieces of things I see and hear and put it together. To me, life is like assembling a giant puzzle, and that is what makes it fun!

Snapshot 1: A report on NPR (National Petroleum Radio) was talking about the movement of liberal Muslims in Indonesia. Now this densely population nation is a fledgling democracy, but they are doing okay. True democracy in an Islamic nation is wonderful. My hope is that the liberal Christians of our country and the liberal Muslims will begin an ongoing dialogue and foster better understanding and love. They need to do so quickly before the fundamentalist elements in both religion get us all killed.

What is liberal Christianity and liberal Islam? I see it as viewing your faith through the context of what is just, peaceful, and constructive in today's world, as opposed to the mentality of "that's the way we've always believed." Viewing religion in a context that persecutes, marginalizes, and harms fellow humans cannot be right, and certainly cannot bring honor to any Supreme Being. After all, God created ALL of us.

Snapshot 2: A documentary on the National Geographic Channel that same night focused on the efforts of terrorists to obtain nuclear weapons. Some believe that terrorists, if they haven't already, could easily smuggle enriched Uranium out of the former Soviet states and into Afghanistan or Pakistan. The thought of terrorists detonating a nuke in the U.S. is horrifying. I believe time is short and we must engage the moderate elements in the Arab world, and build friendships and alliances before evil has its way. We need more libraries, university student exchanges, traveling cultural exhibits, symposiums, investment, and development in Arab nations. And we need to do it fast. Had all the money wasted in the Iraq war been diverted to sustainable development programs, and peace and friendship initiatives, the world would be MUCH safer today.

Snapshot 3: Where are the Christians? Many are in full retreat. At a family reunion I saw my cousin's son, who is home schooled. I grieved. Then I heard a report on NPR where they were interviewing a staff member in the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), and it sounded like he was supporting the idea of home schooling. And then I had been hearing about the proposed resolution encouraging parents to pull their kids out of school. So, I went to the SBC website and did searches, and sure enough I found all these Baptist Press articles that seemed to condone the pullout of Christian kids from America's schools.

Tuck tale between legs, run, hide, the retreat is on! At a time when we desperately need kids of strong moral character to set an example at schools, at a time when we urgently need Christian parents to get involved in schools, where are they? The Southern Baptist Christians are taking their kids into their homes and hiding from the world. To all of you who home school your children, and use a variety of reasons to justify it, I wish to thank you for sealing our fate. Actually, it is probably a great service to cleanse our schools of children who are raised by parents who practice a double standard. Yes, go out and fulfill the Great Commission, but just not at school. There are druggies, freaks, and people of color there. We have to keep you away from them and protect you in your sheltered world.

Putting it all together: The more you engage and interact with different people, the more your eyes are opened. Sure, it's not all good, but at least you learn from it. What do you fear by letting your child into the world? Haven't you instilled in them strong values? Are you afraid the faith that you have imparted to them is not strong enough to withstand scrutiny?

At this critical stage of our world history, we need to let our children engage MORE with people who are different than them. If they can't even interact with the long-haired kid who sits in the back of the classroom, how will they EVER be able to interact with a Hindu, Muslim, or Buddhist from a faraway land? What, you don't won't them too? Maybe that's why we are in the situation that we are currently in. Besides, maybe the long-haired kid at school needs a friend. Maybe your child could be that friend. And maybe your child could be the world's friend.

Tricia Goyer, a home-schooling mom and member of Easthaven Baptist Church, Kalispell, Mont., said her children are actually getting a more realistic view of what society is like by learning at home.

— Baptist Press, October 25, 2001

Learning About My 1 Billion Friends

It was a great joy to visit the Muslim Festival today. Metro Atlanta has a thriving Muslim community that includes people from many nations. This is a vast religion that has made major accomplishments in the arts, math, science, music, architecture, and many other areas. There are over 1 billion Muslims on the Earth, which is 1/6th of the global population. The festival had several educational exhibits, and there were many nice people who educated me and answered my questions. I was surprised to learn about the millions of Muslims in China, or about the many Muslim Africans who were forcibly transported here during the slave trade.

The festival featured about 70 booths containing crafts, art, and good. There was also a stage, and a prayer area. Several booths were staffed by members of the Council of American-Islamic Relations. From them, I learned about cases of harassment, profiling, and legal injustice committed against Muslim citizens. I met a girl who was making beautiful paintings while waiting to return to college and another woman who made beautiful gourmet cookies.













I even met a visionary politician today who wants to work for ALL people.

Of all the interesting people I met, it was the biggest thrill to meet Akhtar Sadiq, who is running for the Georgia state senate. After spending only 15 minutes chatting with him, it was clear that he and I view the world the same way. Strongly patriotic, this is a man who wants to make his country better. He told me that if elected, he would not only represent the Muslim community, but all communities, and he told me about his plans to speak at a Jewish synagogue. It is people like Mr. Sadiq who will save humanity from its own craziness.

It was neat how everyone called each other "brother" and "sister." I think all of us humans should do that — after all, we are related. I also enjoyed seeing the little kids play, hearing the cultural music on the public address system, and smelling the good food. I did donate money to some various causes, including a new school, a legal fund to help an imprisoned local leader, and a capital campaign for building a new mosque.

At several places, I was thrilled to see Muslims signing a "not in our name" petition that took a strong stand against terrorism. One of the most common complaints I hear against the Muslim community is that they are not taking a strong enough stand on terrorism. I doubt this is true.

All my life I have seen and heard the stereotyping and misinformation about Islam. Some people, even Christian religious leaders, have inferred that Muslims are the enemy. This is a lie. I've also read and heard that Allah is actually a demon and that Muslims can't get into heaven. I am not sure what the motives are of the people who propagate these lies, but I suppose it is either ignorance or a desire to keep the fear level up in conservative churches.

I have actually heard Christians tell me that all Muslims are going to hell, and they say it just as casually as saying, "Hey, do you want to go out and get an ice cream?" If this were REALLY TRUE, and a Christian REALLY HAD compassion, then he or she would be crying and grieving night and day for the rest of their lives. After all, 1 billion is a lot of souls.

As for me, I side with the beautiful and wonderful followers of Islam. If they are to be condemned by the "enlightened ones" who scream behind pulpits, then condemn me too. I stand on their side. They are not my enemy — they are my friends.

A book that was recommend to me today. I have several books ahead in line, but do plan to read this:


Towards Understanding Islam
By A. A. Maududi
Paperback / Kazi Publications / March 1992 / ISBN 0933511795

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