Question for You

Blog readers, here is an ethics question for you. Is there anything wrong with continuing to meet with the Jehovah's Witnesses, going to their house for dinner, accept rides etc. when we have not one inclination to be converted, we are just curious and enjoy hanging out with them? I mean I am pretty sure they have come to like us somewhat but what primarily motivates them is the drive to convert us and I know Jehovah's Witnesses are not encouraged to hang out with unbeleavers other than to convert them and if they have to for work and stuff. We practically got job offers after going to dinner with them, well they asked if we had driver's licences and would have offered if we had.

The Problem With Blackface

Last Halloween I saw in Prisma (Finland’s Wall-Mart) a young man in blackface. He was wearing a brown 1970’s leisure suit with its typical wide collars and bellbottomed pants. He also had a black afro wig on. This does not happen in America. A Caucasian would be lynched for doing that. It is considered incredibly racist because of context. Finland does not have this same context making it not racist but ignorant. Just like the rockabilly girl with a confederate flag sown on her jacket she is probably more ignorant more than she is racist. This post is not for Americans but for other people around the world who don’t get the context.

Most of us know the context of the Nazi flag in Finland and it is only used by racists. This was not the case a few decades ago. I read a passage in a book called Häräntappoase by Anna-Leena Härkönen about this. Not having the text in front of me I will summarize from memory. The main character mentions a problem his school had with punks wearing the Swastika, in his school you weren’t really a punk unless you had one. The school had to ban them and educate the students on the holocaust. Did this dampen the enthusiasm of said punks to wear it? Not particularly. When you are proud of your identity and one of your symbols is tied up to ignorance you stick with your guns. I kind of think that a lot of rockabillies would still wear the confederate flag even if you told them what they meant; the compassionate intelligent ones would stop.

Let me explain the context of blackface as well as I can. I am no expert on it but I think I can explain a few things. It goes back to the Jim Crow era in the US, and to an even earlier time. Jim Crow laws were enacted in the South after the North won the civil war. They essentially kept Black people in the place they were in before the war. It allowed for the same discrimination. Essentially Blacks and Whites were separated in all public arenas and it made it possible for White healthcare workers to refuse lifesaving treatment to Blacks and even to refuse to perform their jobs in their presence. They prohibited intermarriage between Blacks and Whites and you were considered black no matter how little black blood you had, unless you could “pass” for white, which meant living as one and presenting yourself as 100% Caucasian [link].

This affected the casts of plays and movies, because Blacks and Whites did not perform together. For this reason White actors donned black paint on their faces to play Black people. They were always portrayed as dumb, lazy buffoons or as evil, violent and oversexed. These roles reinforced the role of blacks as less than, as animals. This helped to fuel a perversion of justice known as lynchings. Lynchings were a grotesque pass time for Southern Whites. If a Black man so much as looked at a white woman in a way that was interpreted as sexual interest by on lookers he would be hunted down and hung up on a tree and people would picnic with their children as his body bloated in the hot sun.

Lynchings were the furthest and cruelest extreme of Jim Crow. It also fostered poverty, ignorance and hopelessness. Blackface is a symbol of degrading blacks and portraying them with negative stereotypes and fueling violence and injustice. Blackface is the symbol of death and injustice the same way the swastika is or the confederation of the southern United States is. Let’s just stop blackface in Finland before it becomes a thing.

I love Muslims

I am serious, I really do love Muslims. Do I love them more than say Atheists, Buddhist, Satanists, Christians or Secular Humanists. No, not really but lately there has been a lot of talk about Muslims in my neck of the woods.

It has been a while since there was a major terrorist attack and we have had plenty of time to connect with our fellow humans and get to know those affiliating with the Muslim faith. Still people are unduly afraid of Muslims. Why is that? I have known plenty of Muslims in my life and really cannot say that any of them were anything other than harmless regular people, some I would even categorize as really great loveable people. You know, same as with any random sampling of humanity.

I see Muslims everyday on the bus. Well, I see Muslim women. I am sure I see men too but they are not as noticeable because they dress just like everyone else. I feel no fear, or nervousness with these women. I have classes with them. They are quiet, some not so quiet, but they seem like regular people. They stick to their own kind, just like the representatives of most minority groups because they are probably a little scared.

I remember 9/11. I was in the University of Oklahoma at the time. People started saying crazy things like, don't go in the Towers (12 story residential buildings) someone will fly a plane in them. I remember laughing and thinking they were crazy, I lived on the 12th floor of one. What was going to happen? Someone was going to fly a crop duster in one? I also remember being scared for my brown friends. Not only my Muslim friends but all my brown friends. Any one perpetrating a racially motivated attack is not going to wait to find out that they guy is actually Sikh, or Mexican.

I take all the words of Jesus literally. I may leave some room for interpretation in some parts of the Bible, but I must say that the words of Jesus I listen to with out interpretation. I have never felt the need to expand up on them. I try to expand the sphere of my love as far as it will humanly go. I try to love people no matter how exotic their culture is or how strange their ideas are because they are people just like me. I also believe in loving my enemy and as a result I am supposed to have no enemies. I can honestly say I love all Muslims from the nice Afgani family that runs the pizzeria down the block to even the villainous late Osama bin Laden. My literal neighbours in this case may deserve my love and it is easy to love them, the latter is universally hated for the things he has done and deserves no love but he is still a human being and the words of Jesus apply to him too. So, if you start from the stand point that we must love our enemies, if we are to be good Christians, and the late Mr. Laden is our enemy, how much easier is it to love that person down the street who is merely different.

Älä alistu!/Don't submit!

So, I found this video because it has caused quite a bit of controversy in Finland and caused 500 resignations from the Lutheran Church the day it was released. It was not put together by the Evangelical Lutheran Church but it was done with their money.



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfPjTvTx5-U

Campaign official pages: http://www.nuotta.com/kampanja

If you do not speak Finnish here is the over long and tedious video in a nutshell. "Anni's Story" is the title it is from the "Don't Submit" video campaign. Anni was a bisexual girl. She realized in high school and became quite involved with gay rights and dated a girl in the ninth grade and then they broke up. During this time she was having some problems and met a girl who wanted to just help her with them. One day this girl asked to pray with her and Anni saw the holy spirit. She went to a religious youth camp and became saved. She prayed hard to leave her unholy desires behind and God heard her and she stopped dating girls nor did she really want to. She has been engaged to a man for a year now, she is twenty. She said that being with a woman never really made her feel like a woman, because one had to take the man's role etc.

What really stood out to me is that it is so simple to be rid of lustful impulses. Just admit what you are and give it to God, he will heal you. I would like to say, I do believe that God can heal everything from gout to cancer and it is very much in his power to change a person's sexual orientation or to curb lustful impulses. That being said, lets talk about the practical implications for a young person who hears this. I bet any God believing young person who has this or similar problems has prayed for them. Asking God to change a perceived flaw in you is nothing new. I cannot count the hours I prayed as a teenager begging God to change me, to cure me from this or that affliction. Lustful thoughts were very much featured in those prayers, as was my laziness and other assorted general "badness". God did not cure me, at least not then, of one single one of my flaws. I felt like crap. I felt like a failure. I felt like a bad Christian. I prayed everyday for God to take me to heaven so I could stop constantly failing and sinning. I was tired, I was desperate. What would have Anni's message of easy, reachable fixing have meant to me? It would have meant an ever compounding sense of guilt. It would have isolated my lust for women as an even more heinous crime than my lust for men. Here I had been beating myself up for both indiscriminately.

I call this a suicide inducing flick. Say, it is wrong! It is Sinful! Älä alistu! Don't submit! It can all be made better. God is waiting for you to give your burden to Him and heal you! All that can hold you back now, sinner, is your own lack of faith! Only one you have to blame is yourself. Maybe Anni has more willpower, maybe she has more faith, maybe her prayers are special. Maybe I am failing at this like I fail at everything else because I am too damn lazy to change. Way to rip old wounds open and make me feel like that girl again.

As an end note, God did heal me, but not in the way I expected. He healed me by giving me perspective, understanding and self acceptance, flaws and all. I was good enough for him to die on Calvary for my sins when I was at my worst. Not because I was special or good but because he was and he loved me. He cleansed me when I accepted his cleansing. It does not matter that I am lustful. It does not matter that I am lazy. I am exactly as he created me. This does not mean I need to whore around and not do any work because that is not how he intended me to behave. He intends me to strive for a healthy balanced life. My flaws are really the other side of my virtues. I am lazy because I am laid back. I am content to contemplate and not worry too much about having a spotless house there are more important things in life. I am lusty, but I love my husband and it can be a very positive quality in a marriage when channeled properly and understood for what it is. Now that God has healed me from my low self esteem and depression I can no longer really care about my flaws and can really give them to God, and you know what, stopping the demonization of that part of me has allowed me to not be trapped by lustful thought. When they are no longer forbidden or wrong they take a backseat to more important and interesting thoughts. I am no longer paralyzed by fear and anxiety due to my laziness and am actually able to break the inertia and do what really matters and needs to get done.

Self-acceptance is a wonderful thing. Do not submit to thoughts of self loathing and accept that if you do seek help from God for your problems, which I do recommend, he may not give you the quick fix you want but will allow you to walk down a longer, harder path that will make you a better person and accept yourself, and in the long run that beats a quick fix.

I have The Internet

So, I have been away. Not a good sentence to start a blog with, it tells you this is going to be boring and I will make excuses and such. Also I might tell you what is going on in my life, which is not what I started this blog for. I started this to talk about my thoughts on various things and that is very different from what I am actually doing. The topic of racism is still at the surface so I think I will write on that.

I thought I had blogged on racism before in my old MySpace blog but after tracing the blog back several years I found that I had not. The main thought of that imaginary blog post was that we evolved for racism. Back in the day when we still lived in caves, huts made of animal skin or what ever. We knew everyone around us and we all looked pretty much alike and there was not a lot of mixing with those other people across the river with the strange customs and odd clothes and those unnatural brownish eyes and what not. Those weird people may even have been enemies so it was safe for primitive ignorant man to stay with his own inbred group and breed a myriad or special genetic diseases only present in Finns (or insert there what ever small group of people). It was a survival trait to be suspicious of anyone who seemed different because they were probably out to get you.

With that sort of a legacy, no wonder we still get uncomfortable when we have to share an elevator or a bus bench with a person that is a different color or nationality. This is a completely inappropriate reaction today. Now we are hampered by our genetics. We have come a long way from those club carrying grunting simpletons that acquired this trait that helped them survive and turn into us. Still we have a long way to go and this trait is in our way.

I don't think there is a simple quick fix. We cannot go and have the racist gene eradicated from our kids to give them an edge in the global community. We cannot just tell ourselves that our feelings are wrong and stop it is not that easy. Still I think we must strive to be better than animals. The difference between animals and humans is that they are at the complete mercy of their genetics and do not even realize it. Humans can realize that they have a problem and struggle against their natural tendencies and better ourselves. Man is where the falling angel meets the rising ape.

I have many friends of different colors, nationalities, cultures and native languages but I still struggle against my tendency to feel uncomfortable with a person who does not look like me. I accept this is a condition that I will never be rid of but I have been struggling against this since my teens, since I was old enough to realize I had a problem. I will keep struggling until I die and am freed from the burden of my outdated genetic tendencies. Best we can do is realize we have a problem and forgive ourselves, but never give into it or believe the lie that natural=good. The second we start equating natural with good we may as well start condoning murder because someone pisses us off, because wanting to kill someone who angers you is perfectly natural.

How I became Infected

When I was little I did not really know what racism was. It was around, it always is but you don't really get it until you see it yourself. As a child I heard all the jokes about the Gypsies being lazy thieves but yet really good singers and dancers. The Saami were claimed to be drunks. It was not really real to me because I had never knowingly met a member of either Finnish minority. That is because in reality no one looks like the exaggerated caricatures shown on TV.

Then I moved out of my sheltered life and into the United States. I moved from a country practically oblivious of the implications and evils of their racist attitudes to one very conscious of them. I was taught about the civil rights movement and became not only an admirer of Martin Luther King and of Rosa Parks but of the underground rail road and all the people who had stood up for that was right even at the cost of their own lives. I became emotionally involved with history of the civil rights movement and became emotional when confronted by injustices of any kind. I felt that to stand by and let something like that happen was wrong. I bristled when ever my parents or anyone said anything negative about someone based on looks, race or nation of origin.

I also became friends with people of varied back grounds. I was in ESL so I became closer and could identify better with other immigrant children than the people at large regardless of actual ethnic origin. The thought of hate groups like the KKK wanting to hurt my friends was horrifying to me.

I was happy when I went after my first year of school to ESL summer school. It was like school with all the bad boring parts removed. I expected everyone to be nice. There was only one other white person in my class besides me but he was a boy and so I wanted nothing to do with him. The definite majority was the Vietnamese girls. There was about four of them but they seemed like more because they spoke Vietnamese together separating themselves, loud, boisterous and confident in their numbers. They played a game I did not understand and was not invited to join, not that it occurred to me, they seemed so insulated. There seemed to be a leader and her second, little kid gangs always have leaders and a hierarchy, like chickens. The leader had long hair and her second had very short hair. They seemed very tall and pretty to me, but I do not know if that was reality or an image borne from their confidence, self assurance and popularity.

I got along with other girls in the class and other classes just fine. The Somalese girls I took the bus with were nice and so was the Korean girl who was both in my class and on my bus, she was quiet but nice.

Then one day in class I changed my seat. Our seats were not assigned. I just wanted a change. One seat was differently made than mine and I wanted to sit in it so I moved. Unfortunately that seat was in the second to back seat of the Vietnamese row. I sat down behind the short haired girl and right in front of another girl from a different country. After a while of enjoying this novel seat the short haired girl turned around.
"You can't sit here you are not Asian." she said. I felt shocked and confused.
"But she is not Vietnamese." I said indicating the girl behind me.
"But she is Asian." she replied. I felt confused I did not understand. I mean I did, I had been bullied all my life. I could not deny I was not Asian. I felt heat on my face and my brain was not working so I moved back to my old seat. I was upset, humiliated and did not understand for a long time that I had been a victim of racism. I did not know it could happen to me. I did not really get it until years later that it did not matter who was really the majority what mattered was who was the majority at the moment. Being discriminated does not make someone a more understanding person and less likely to repeat it, it makes you more likely to repeat it.

Racism is an infection that is passed from person to person. Not only from discriminating father to discriminating son by example but from racist to victim. Making the victim scared and hateful. It was years after this my heart rate stopped going up when I was alone in a room with Asian girls and if I found out a girl was Vietnamese it got even worse. I became nervous and panicky and wanted to escape before I was attacked. I felt awful about this but could not control my feelings.

All over that minor little childhood incident. I am pretty thin skinned I guess. Not like anything truly bad happened but it is the principle of it. I admired Rosa Parks so much and I was not able to emulate her. If you cannot live by your convictions what are you? I have been wondering that myself. What am I if I cannot do the right thing when it matters so much to me.

The Neighbourhood Snitch

It seems as if I have become the neighborhood snitch. I keep relaying information to the leasing office about things that I feel like are of interest to them and would improve life for us and just feel like it is the right thing to do. Not to even mention the times I have called the police for fear someone might get hurt.

This comes from an innate desire to do the right thing no matter what others think. I never regret doing something just how I did it. This leads me to call the police when a neighbor is having a loud argument I fear might turn physical. I failed to do it on two occasions in the past and regretted it. I pick up worms out of puddles so they don't drown. I report to the leasing office when someone is tossing bottles in to our little forested area, I worry about them breaking and the kids and animals getting hurt. I told them I saw a prostitute being picked up in the complex. I lived next door to a brothel before and will not put up with it.

Sometimes I wonder if I am just being a busy body. I told the office a few weeks ago that a little boy had broken a small window with a rock. His mother did not care so she was not going to tell them. Was that busy bodying? I guess it was. Still, I did nothing I would not do for myself. Had my son broken the window, I would have told them and made arrangements to pay for it. It is only fair. I think I have not crossed the like but I am getting very close to being that little kid who tattles on other kids about stuff they were not even involved in, or perhaps I have crossed the line.

I am thinking more carefully about how I go about doing what I perceive to be the right thing. I have hurt people and caused things to happen that should not have. I have let other people bully me into doing things I should not have.

When I was in college some evil fire and brimstone street preachers came to OU. They called every passing student a whore or a whore monger and said all homosexuals were evil and an abomination in the site of God. I thought they were terribly hateful and offensive. Someone stole a briefcase and a sign just out of spite. Not that they did not deserve it. They were horrible. I still did not think that was right. Vigilante justice and giving other people punishments we think they deserve just is not right. I saw that some of my dorm mates had stolen the sign, not the briefcase but the sign. I went and told the preachers I knew where their sign was and would get it back for them. I was going to go and talk to the boy who had stolen it and ask him to give it to me so I could return it. That was the plan but unfortunately I was still a little girl and much more manipulatable and intimidatable by authority figures. He bullied me into telling him where the sign was. I did not tell him who had it. I sent this horrible mean person to bully and yell at my neighbours. I was filled with guilt and shame. I had allowed him to intimidate me into doing a wrong in my quest to do what I perceived was the right thing. I was too ashamed to look at my dorm mate (he was coincidentally gay) who had taken the poster in the eye again. I avoided him and probably made everything worse. I was just so ashamed of myself.

I am always afraid of doing this but I do not let that stop me. I try to do the right thing no matter what but I am always conscious of how I should do it. What would be the right way. For example, when my neighbours smoke weed in their bathroom it is as if they smoke it in ours, there is an insulation problem between the two bathrooms. If they do it again I will not go to the police or the office or anything that tately, I will tape a sealed envelope on their door respectfully explaining that I really do not care if they smoke weed in their bathroom but I do care when it smells like they are smoking it in our bathroom. I will ask them respectfully to refrain from this and if they can I can refrain from telling anyone about it.

I guess all this ultimately stems from my poor social skills and belief in rules. Sure some rules are wrong and need to be changed but unless a rule is outright immoral, not just flawed, it should be followed until it is changed through the proper channels. Otherwise society would slide into chaos and we would screw each other over so much that we would lose our humanity. I do not believe in anarchy.