Let's say that the meek shall "rule" the world. According to many accounts the statement originated with Jesus, however earlier philosophers, like Plato and Aristotle, elaborated on it as well. I am not going to become philosophical on it as I may lose some of my readers on this topic. But is there not a lot of truth to this statement?
In the case of Canada we will not discuss this yet as instead of a meek a freak has run the country for the last few years. But the situation is quite different in the US. Barack Obama winning the presidency is quite a feat. Given the nature of black history in North America they will meet the criteria of being meek. Only 50 years ago blacks were still not able to vote and slavery existed in some form or another in the Southern US. Some of the things I observed in the South of the US made me think that equality for blacks has still not arrived in many cases.
Even in Canada we have a very unfortunate history of slavery. As a student I did some work for a certain community, it shall remain unnamed, and I saw an interesting building in that community. I was helping the community to provide some guidelines as to how they should restore their historical buildings but the manager would not show me a particular building which was located somewhat isolated from the rest of the community and quite dilapidated. That raised my curiosity so I spoke to the Mayor if he would help me examine the building. He obliged and then explained the hesitance of the manager to show the building. The mayor said that the community was not proud of the building and that aspect of its history as that particular building was used to house the slaves many decades ago. It was quite an eye-opener for me.
Strangely enough people like Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Michele Bachmann, Sarah Palin and many of their ilk still cannot reconcile with the fact that a black man occupies the Whitehouse. Especially when all these characters consider themselves religious and despite that they are intellectually very mediocre compared to Barack Obama. Keep in mind that Obama is by far more qualified than any of his Republican opponents and compared to George W. Bush, Obama is a genius. I will be talking about Bush in a subsequent post but suffice to say that that man was not qualified to run the country. Intellectually he is impeded. The last two years' events in the US did make me think of the above words of great wisdom "Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit (rule) the earth." I think there is lot of truth to those words.
Don't get me wrong because as a president Obama has his own shortcomings and I have criticized him for that in my previous posts and most probably will do so again. But his election as president is an extraordinary accomplishment and in the long run we will move, I hope, towards a more egalitarian society because of that.
It doesn't take much to parse the right's reaction to Obama and the people who elected him. There is a vein of such pure hatred in their appraisals of the man - even before he was elected and had not yet acted as President - that there can be little doubt that many Americans (and some Canadians) wish slavery was still a part of their country. So it is no surprise the right is bending over backwards to make slaves of Obama and his supporters, if not in reality at least in their words and deeds.
ReplyDeleteJymn, so true my friend, so true.
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