No Excuses. No Compromises. No Fear. No Forgiveness.
There are crimes and abominations for which forgiveness is not possible.
"Father, forgive them for they know not what they do."
Spoken by a fellow in a time when tolerance and trust, faith in the essential goodness of human beings, belief in turn-the-other-cheek stoicism, all were still possible. It was innovative even back then, but an option which could be considered.
These are different times. No longer does innocence bloom. Hope is a four-letter word, gutted by abuse, now a contemptuous metaphor for hypocrisy and cunning. Faith, charity and love have been quantified, digitized, commodified, sexualized, turned into more weapons of mass deception and poisoning of the human spirit, just box cutters in the toolbox of a tiny elite, self-anointed as the class of absolute privilege and ultimate prerogative, self-appointed as Masters of the Universe. The sociopaths have won the class war and sit at the top of the sh*tpile they're fabricating.
No, good people, forgiveness is no longer recommended, no longer possible, such graciousness is not the appropriate noble response anymore.
We simply cannot forgive those who are doing to our world what we see happening right now.
It's unconscionable. It's repulsive. It's malevolent. It's nihilistic. It's . . . unforgivable.
Jesus Christ surely would not approve of what I'm about to say. Then again, these days He's basically irrelevant, just another marketing brand, an advertising gimmick for knee-jerk religiosity.
Please listen, friends. Take heed. It's getting late. We have no choice. Urgency drives our mission. Common decency and timeless morality dictate our agenda.
Forgive them not . . . for endless war, carnage for conquest, slaughter for power and control, the creation of enemies to drive weapons sales, the demonization of other countries and their leaders to prepare the public for war and more war.
Forgive them not . . . for destroying the environment, killing untold numbers of species, filling the waterways with toxins, polluting the air, pumping greenhouse gases at an accelerating rate into the atmosphere.
Forgive them not . . . for poisoning our bodies with man-made chemicals and for-profit pharmaceuticals, for poisoning our food with herbicides, pesticides, hormones, antibiotics, for boosting the bottom line with no regard for human health or dignity.
Forgive them not . . . for filling the oceans with millions of tons of the debris of "civilization" and turning the vast expanses of life-giving, life-sustaining water into graveyards for the creatures of the sea.
Forgive them not . . . for fostering suspicion and hatred, promoting racism and intolerance, for setting humans against one another to make us all easier to control, manipulate and exploit.
Forgive them not . . . for persecuting Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning and other truth-tellers, while promoting to positions of power serial liars, prevaricating warmongers, self-enriching enemies of truth.
Forgive them not . . . for destroying science as an objective methodology for obtaining knowledge and achieving understanding, for buying and bribing scientists to front for their deceptive, money-driven agendas.
Forgive them not . . . for rigging the economy via influence peddling and grotesque warping of the democratic process with enormous infusions of money, in order to accelerate the transfer of wealth to a handful of beneficiaries at the top, then use that wealth to leverage even more money to further enrich the already incomprehensibly rich.
Forgive them not . . . for desertification, deforestation, the destruction of enormous swaths of arable land, the destruction of rainforests, the ruin of ecologically-sensitive marshlands, the oil spills, chemical spills, all the direct result of blind avarice and predation.
Forgive them not . . . for hoarding epic, inconceivable piles of money, while so many millions on the planet struggle to survive, live meal-to-meal, starve to death, die of easily curable diseases.
Forgive them not . . . for flooding the planet with weapons, seeding crisis after crisis, being witness and perpetrators of killing, slaughter, unconscionable terror, death and destruction, all in the name of defense industry profits and stock portfolios.
Forgive them not . . . for using the media, movies, TV and internet, entertainers and celebrities, to spread lies, propaganda, disinformation, fake news to slander and marginalize bearers of truth, and to confuse, distract, and disempower everyday people.
Forgive them not . . . for destroying democracy and the promise of our bold and once-affirming experiment in self-government.
Forgive them not . . . for exploiting our innate fear of death and universal desire for well-being, for turning medical care and maintenance of health into yet another revenue stream for predatory capitalism.
Forgive them not . . . for violating the innocence of children, exploiting their thirst for knowledge and natural curiosity, destroying their inherent creativity, and turning our educational system into a factory for consumer robots.
Forgive them not . . . for taking the beautiful, majestic heavens, the pure, wholesome expanse of outer space and turning it into yet another battlefield, bristling with weapons of terror and killing.
Forgive them not . . . for mangling and mutilating timeless messages for spiritual growth and healing; for inverting the lessons teaching the virtues of compassion, caring and sharing; for turning institutionalized religion into cults of self-worship and warring tribes of exclusion and vilification.
Forgive them not . . . for Monsanto, Raytheon, Pfizer, Chase, the Fed, Amazon, Google, the NYT, Facebook, Microsoft, the entire web of corporate tyranny.
Forgive them not . . . for the Patriot Acts, for the 17 intelligence agencies, the CIA, NSA, FBI, DHS, the NDAA, the duopoly, Citizens United, for election rigging, voter machine fraud, gerrymandering, the scam of government by the people.
Forgive them not . . . for massive intrusive unconstitutional citizen surveillance, both by security agencies and private corporations, and for the oppressive censorship which has destroyed the most fundamental rights of free expression and open exchange of ideas and information.
Forgive them not . . . for simply being so self-centered, so selfish, so arrogant, so self-righteous and delusional, they are undermining everyone else on the planet, and creating a world which will eventually be uninhabitable for any of us, including them -- the stupid self-sabotaging bastards!
FORGIVE THEM NOT . . . FOR THEY KNOW EXACTLY WHAT THEY DO.
And what they do is sick and evil . . . pure and simple.
We have to get it together, folks! Tolerate none of this. Do not forgive the "people of privilege". Capture them. Bring them to trial. Imprison them. They know exactly what they're doing. They do it callously, maliciously, mercilessly, intentionally, with plan and pre-meditation. We know who they are. They cannot be trusted. They cannot be excused — now or ever — if there is to be a world which is functional and supports life and positive human interaction.
No forgiveness. No excuses. No compromises. No fear.
FORGIVE THEM NOT . . .
"Turn the other cheek" is a serious misunderstanding of what Jesus intended. The cultural context is covered thoroughly at
https://thetyee.ca/Citizentoolkit/2004/11/22/JesusTrickster/, but here's the most relevant bit:
When Jesus said "Turn the other cheek" he was not recommending total surrender, but rather some radical mischief. I'll attach the whole article on this, but here's the relevant bit:
"If anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also." Why the right cheek? How does
one strike another on the right cheek anyway? Try it. A blow by the right
fist in that right-handed world would land on the left cheek of the opponent.
To strike the right cheek with the fist would require using the left hand,
but in that society the left hand was used only for unclean tasks. As the
Dead Sea Scrolls specify, even to gesture with the left hand at Qumran
carried the penalty of ten days penance. The only way one could strike the
right cheek with the right hand would be with the back of the hand.
What we are dealing with here is unmistakably an insult, not a fistfight.
The intention is not to injure but to humiliate, to put someone in his or her
place. One normally did not strike a peer in this way, and if one did the
fine was exorbitant (four zuz was the fine for a blow to a peer with a fist,
400 zuz for backhanding him; but to an underling, no penalty whatever). A
backhand slap was the normal way of admonishing inferiors. Masters backhanded
slaves; husbands, wives; parents, children; men, women; Romans, Jews.
We have here a set of unequal relations, in each of which retaliation would
be suicidal. The only normal response would be cowering submission. It is
important to ask who Jesus' audience is. In every case, Jesus' listeners are
not those who strike, initiate lawsuits, or impose forced labor. Rather,
Jesus is speaking to their victims, people who have been subjected to these
very indignities. They have been forced to stifle their inner outrage at the
dehumanizing treatment meted out to them by the hierarchical system of caste
and class, race and gender, age and status, and by the guardians of imperial
occupation.
Why then does Jesus counsel these already humiliated people to turn the other
cheek? Because this action robs the oppressor of power to humiliate them. The
person who turns the other cheek is saying, in effect, "Try again. Your first
blow failed to achieve its intended effect. I deny you the power to humiliate
me. I am a human being just like you. Your status (gender, race, age, wealth)
does not alter that. You cannot demean me."
Such a response would create enormous difficulties for the striker. Purely
logistically, how can he now hit the other cheek? He cannot backhand it with
his right hand. If he hits with a fist, he makes himself an equal,
acknowledging the other as a peer. But the whole point of the back of the
hand is to reinforce the caste system and its institutionalized inequality.