Jerry Falwell is dead! Hooray!
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Jerry Falwell is dead! Hooray!
Maybe its a cathartic experience to express these sentiments but I have to shake my head... I've been noticing a loss of civility at times on certain subjects and not a lot of discussion except from those who share the extreme view.
Holding on to hate or feeling helpless isn't a good thing either but the object of hatred is a fallible human after all. Show them a little pity or even understanding. Don't know if anybody's going to dance in the streets when my time comes... OK if I were around when Hitler died I'd join in the shout. But its a very short list.
I'm liking the compassionate and loving approach towards others instead. :heart: out to NT.
Damn! Hell is rapidly filling with hypocrites - pretty soon there won't be any space left for us honest sinners.
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Posted in reply to the post by roble:
Fellow Waccoites:
I'm a yoga teacher in Bodega and I have a blog with my essays about yoga practices in daily life: www.yogalikesalt.com ... this WACCO thread inspired me to write about Jerry Falwell. Here's the essay:
Suzi
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Thank you, Jerry Falwell!
This week, I’ve found myself considering the recent deaths of two men. One of them — Joseph Rattigan — a former senator and justice from Northern California, a liberal, educated, and erudite jurist who championed the causes of many disenfranchised groups, including minorities, the elderly, and the disabled. An old friend to our family, we were, with many people, saddened by his death and will miss his grand presence in our lives.
The death that has stood in contrast, for me, is that of Jerry Falwell, the conservative minister and televangelist who founded The Moral Majority and used his public persona to wage campaigns against homosexuals, women, and the sanctions that helped to end apartheid, among other things.
These were two men of the same generation, miles apart politically and ideologically. Yet both of them are important icons for me.
One of the things I’ve noticed in the past few days is how the internet forums I frequent (which are unabashedly liberal in nature), have lit up with messages like “Woo-hoo, Falwell is dead!” And, I have to say, this is making me really uncomfortable. For while Falwell and I may have been so different that we would have had a hard time making even the most strained, polite chit-chat at a dinner party, I recognize the fact that he, too, had family and friends who cared about him, as well as people who supported his beliefs and actions.
I think it’s fine to disagree with someone. It’s a personal choice to believe that their actions and policies are wrong-headed, bad, or even evil. But it’s wrong to wish them dead, and to celebrate their death.
After all, even though by Falwell’s standards, I might be destined for eternal damnation, I believe that he carried in him a piece of the same Divine Light that resides in me.
When my son was three and four years old, he attended a great preschool. The couple who ran it were kind and genuine people. They were Baha’i in faith, and embraced the cultures and celebrations of all the children who attended their school, throwing a few more celebrations into the mix, as well.
I remember that at Christmas, my mother had taken my son to see a local production of the Charles Dickens’ classic, A Christmas Carol. His teachers asked about it, and decided they would also take their six-year-old daughter to see the play. They had never seen it before.
Several days later, I asked how they had liked the show.
“We left,” his teacher replied. “The way that Scrooge talked to the orphans was inappropriate and cruel. We couldn’t sit through that, or have our daughter hear it.”
I sort of murmured a little acknowledgment and scurried away, holding my son’s hand. I found myself wondering if I had been wrong to let him see the play. All of my new-mother anxieties surfaced, and I wondered if I had scarred my kid for life.
But as I thought about it on the long car ride home, I realized that in all of their kind-hearted earnestness, they may have missed the point of the play altogether.
The contrast of good and evil is the basis of so many stories, for both adults and children. In fairy tales, there is a witch, or a wolf, or a wicked stepmother. These are the morality tales that help us define what is Good and what is Bad. After all, there is no goodness without evil. Evil helps to define goodness. There is no light without darkness, there is no sukha without dukkha, there is no yin without yang. We define ourselves as much by what we aren’t, as by what we are.
So while Joe Rattigan represented my idea of what the “never-ending battle for truth, justice, and the American Way”* might look like in one incarnation, Falwell provided the contrast. And for that, I have to thank Jerry Falwell. He stood in opposition to the things I believe in and represented a set of tenets I would like to see change in the world. While his Moral Majority, as the bumpersticker says, was neither, he did serve to remind us how many people in this country still think as he did, something we tend to forget in my sweet, liberal, Northern California community.
I’m not happy that he died. I have compassion for those around him feeling their loss. I am, however, harboring the hope that he was visited by the ghost of Jacob Marley before he died.
Namasté.
*with a nod to Superman
The Sad, Quotable Jerry Falwell
It's bad form to speak ill of the dead. Good thing this man's own vile words speak for themselves
By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Friday, May 18, 2007
(article removed)
I'm a little surprised that in my absence, this thread was allowed to be posted.
HURRAY??? Because Jerry died???????
this is not bad form, but this is something that could come straight from Jerry's mouth! This means that Roble has absorbed Jerry's teachings very well.
Jerry's was a man with blind passion, and as MadMiles pointed out very qoutable!
But are we preaching hatred now because Jerry is in the box???
love
LuLu
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Posted in reply to the post by Mad Miles: