Thread by @jeffblack945

#RevThread # 126
Big Gift

1/ In Robert Burns’ “To a Louse”, the poet is in church when a grand lady sweeps into the pew in front. She’s wearing a very fine hat with various things piled on it. ...

2/...And as he looks at the back of her head, a small critter emerges from the stuff on her hat and looks at him.

“Ha! Whare ye gaun, ye crowlin ferlie?”

3/ I can imagine the folks getting those awful church giggles, where the harder you try not to laugh the funnier it all seems. Burns then writes his immortal line:

“O wad some Power the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!”

4/ Reminds me of another church scene in a story by Jesus, where two guys go into the temple to pray and one carries on about all his pious accomplishments while the other just prays, “Have mercy on me!”

5/ Jesus says the guy bragging away should have saved his breath, for he bores God and humanity to tears (Ok, I’m adding stuff.). He could not see himself as others saw him.

6/ The other day we were watching Morning Joe as someone else began piling on Joe Biden, while some R’s were shocked, shocked, by his depravity, and others were talking about how the wild liberals were becoming impossibly puritanical, blah blah blah...

7/ I got all mad and asked my wife to hit mute and so she did and I stood up to thunder about what foolishness was going on. She listened and then quietly said, “Honey, your fly’s unzipped.”

“O wad some Power the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!”

8/ My dear fellow crawlin furries -- let’s be careful with the righteousness. Just sayin’...

9/ Here’s a great question to ponder: What is America revealing right now? How do others see us?

10/ It is time to disenthrall ourselves. Most of our myths about our history are self-congratulatory:

11/ We are not exceptional. We have the same humanity as everyone else.

12/ Our idolatry of greed is now on full view.

13/ We do apartheid and call it Gerrymandering.

14/ We are the most recklessly violent population on earth, slaughtering scores of thousands of each other with our guns as we continue to bow to the stupidly written 2nd amendment.

15/ We continue to traipse the world with soldiers on every continent as our financial system veers towards collapse.

16/ We imprison more people than any country in history, and then privatize the prisons so that greedy creeps can profit from our gulags.

17/ We have lifted into the most powerful office on earth a person as reckless as Nero, as vain as Louis XIV, and as debauched and cruel as Herod.

18/ It’s time, past time, for what the great Rev. Dr. William Barber calls a moral revival. And that doesn’t have to do with how consenting adults express their love for one another, nor yet with decisions people make about what happens inside their own skin.

19/ It has to do with three things:

20/ (1) accepting a more honest accounting of our history, especially the injustices inflicted on the population by white patriarchy;

21/ (2) facing and repenting of our reckless ecocide, which threatens the future of every child on the planet;

22/ (3) addressing the appalling, God-denying injustice of our greed-based economy - how can it be that the richest one tenth of one percent control more wealth than 40% of the population?

23/ Right now, under the leadership of the Republican party, we have become a decadent spectacle. Time for change.

“O wad some Power the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!”