2005 Sucketh

The way my luck has been lately, I feel like Pharaoh going through the Twelve Plagues. My fundamentalist Baptist upbringing is too deeply drilled in, and when anything bad happens I can't help but think it's test. I have these crazy thoughts that God is trying to break me; to get me to conform. The lightening bolts are being thrown at me, and I am being warned to crawl back into some little country church and spend the rest of my life with my MOUTH SHUT.

It takes courage when your little world begins to splinter apart, and you have to continue the struggle regardless. My problem is that my dream of long-term sustainability runs directly head-on to the teachings of the Sunday morning talking heads, who scream about sin, destruction, and damnation until they hyperventilate. To not subdue to this authority is an act of rebellion that must be quashed. The fear of eternal damnation, the fear that a Higher Power can punish you, and the fear of just trying to hold a life together is enough to force one into conformity. Yet, fear is a poor motivator — it makes people have just enough faith until they think they earned a ticket to heaven.

As for me, I do not question or challenge the grand Creator, but I do challenge the flimsy manmade institutions that are made hollow by their own hypocrisy. How much longer I can hold out, I do not know. At what point I will drop this rebellion and reach for my religious security blanket, I do not know.

But today, I am not ready to give up. I'm not ready to quit being the Yellow Canary. The God of the fundamentalist Christian is far different than the God I believe in. My God needs no money and he does not need to manipulate people by fear, intimidation, or the bribe of a mansion and gold street. The Jesus I believe in is the rebel of the religious institutions, not the carpenter of new ones. We didn't just trade Judaism for Catholicism and Protestantism so that we can endure more petty legalism and self righteousness. We were suppose to embrace a higher ideal — something about unconditional love, not just earning brownie points to receive a bigger mansion.

I am the Yellow Canary, a lowly bird who, by his own convictions, feels it an obligation to warn others that unless we re-engineer our culture and values, then we will surely destroy ourselves. Our president is now cutting federal programs for the poor, so that he can better finance his war machine, yet we are the Christian nation that is "under God." These are sins that I cannot justify nor reconcile in my heart, and, once again, I remain mystified by the madness of my country and society.

Yellow Canary