Thank You, Tom Tomorrow

Tragedy at Virginia Tech

In my opinion, David Walsh's commentary on the social roots of Monday's tragic events at Virginia Tech is absolutely brilliant. I would only add that one should not shy from naming Cho's act "terrorism." The prevailing narrative in the United States today reserves that term for acts of violence perpetrated by Muslims. We need to resist the monopoly over the use of this term by the State sponsors of global terror in the White House, Defense Department (now the Offense Department), State Department, Homeland Security, and Pentagon. Terrorism is as terrorism does. But that is all that I would or could hope to add to Walsh's courageous display of human intelligence in the face of the darkness of this time.

peace,

Mazeppa

What Is A Mazeppist?

Go here and begin with the Sunday, April 15, 2007 entry.

Hope Is Our Only Hope

I recently received a letter from a friend of mine expressing his concerns about the (admittedly not great) state of the world today. This presented me with the opportunity to reflect, again, on what I view as the point of prophetic religion.

Prophecy is a discursive genre. Its purpose, from Zarathustra to the present day, is to help one to heighten moral awareness; to assert that one's actions have consequences. Little apocalypses occur in this world on a daily basis. A literal reading of certain prophetic texts, however, can leave the best of us holed up in a bunker with a lot of canned goods, ammo, and bottled water waiting for the sky to fall. That's not a good place to be.

Our prophecy-based religious traditions are 90 percent internalized ancestral anxieties and 10 percent prophetic hope and expectation--precisely the inverse of what they ought to be in my view. Every person on this planet has the choice to order her or his life in accordance with her or his best hopes or worst fears. There is a prophetic tradition in which Muhammad is remembered as saying, "If you find yourself on the Last Day of the world holding a sapling in your hand, plant it."

Hope is our only hope.