In my religious tradition, today begins what we call "The Three Days". These are days when we engage in self examination and repentance in order to prepare ourselves for Easter, our most holy religious holiday. One of the ways in which I prepare for Easter is to read passages in the Gospels that are attributed to Jesus’ messages to the people of his day during the week before he died. In one of the most moving passages, Jesus used the word translated as "Woe" when he spoke about the hypocrisy of the religious and political leaders of his day. No matter what one believes about who Jesus was, his words have a particular resonance and warning for this day and time. For those who care to read them, they are in the 23rd Chapter of the Gospel of Matthew. His words are in the best prophetic tradition of Old Testament prophets like Jeremiah, Isaiah, Zechariah, and others who decried oppression of the poor and weak, violence, and greed and chastised those who considered that their legalistic religious rituals would resolve them for that guilt.
Other great religions follow similar traditions of self-examination, repentance and contain similar calls to reconciliation. I use mine here because it is what I know best. Those who follow no particular religion also respect the need for self-examination, repentance, and reconciliation so please forgive me if my use of my own religious tradition offends. It is not intended to offend.
I am going to use the word that has been translated as "woe" in this diary to express what I see about the state of the election and the state of our nation today.
Woe to US when we trash and honest and able man of character because we are angered by the comments of someone close to him (even when those comments express the anger, frustration and hurt felt by a large part of our own population and a large part of the global population and are in the tradition of the Old Testament prophets in the Bible);
Woe to US when we fail to follow this honest and able man of character into his transcendent vision of hope and racial reconciliation because we just have to make that one last point against the other side (regardless of who we support in this election);
Woe to US when we refuse to recognize that our actions toward others who don’t look, sound or act like ourselves demean, dehumanize, deprive, degrade, and discriminate against them to enrich ourselves at their expense;
Woe to US when we follow our leaders into a war that is causing death, grievous injury, starvation and disease to others who have done us no harm because we willfully believed the lies of those leaders;
Woe to US when we follow leaders who seek to gain office for their own political and personal aggrandizement and are willing to use any means to obtain that office;
Woe to US when we compliment and praise a candidate who promises 100 years of war and even greater Woe to US if he is elected;
Woe to us if we don’t demand that our leaders take the necessary steps NOW to stop the pollution that is destroying our planet;
Woe to US when we permit so-called "news outlets" to become forums for the hidden agendas and personality cults of egotistic bigots by which large and powerful corporations add advertising dollars to their own coffers because we fail to write and boycott those same advertisers;
Woe to US when we permit divisive campaign strategies to over-shadow our resolve to work for affordable health-care for everybody, affordable and quality education for all our citizens, an end to an unnecessary and unjust war, an end to a foreign policy that makes us a target for war-mongers and destroys our economy, opposition to corporate welfare, use of taxpayer dollars to underwrite and bailout unscrupulous financial institutions who are incapable of policing themselves; tax breaks for the wealthy and greedy few while 12 million of our citizens go to bed hungry every night and millions around the world die of hunger and hunger related diseases every day;
Woe to US when we do not act to end genocide in Darfur or excuse our failure to intervene to end past episodes of genocide because it "wasn’t in our national interest";
Woe to US when we do not vigorously condemn, attack, and denounce comments clearly aimed at setting up an invasion of Iran and excuse those comments as momentary slips of the tongue;
Woe to US when we excuse our own conduct by pointing to the conduct of others;
Woe to US if we don’t stop this division and bickering soon because then we will have four more years of unrelenting war, hatred, greed, and dishonesty with incalculable consequences for ourselves, our children and our children’s children.
I say mea culpa, mea culpa; I am guilty, I am guilty. If people wish to translate "woe" as "damn" so be it.