A meandering rant because the world is on fire but my babies were born
CW: violence, lynching, apathy toward death
It’s just that my babies had birthdays while the world is on fire.
We watched the hubris of wealth sink to the depths of the ocean and I fear God too much to mock the deaths of other humans but I fear God enough to know about the tiny nature of the eye of a needle, and it seemed that the depths were like that eye - attainable to the very few.
Unlike salvation. A Savior who came not to condemn the world but to save it through himself. The riches and power of heaven left for the womb of a poor woman. A selfless life offered for the benefit of the universe. But he had to go through scourging, mockery, and death itself — and I wonder how much of that was divine plan and how much was the nature of being here, with us. (It’s freeing to know that there are Christians with millennia of tradition behind them, who do not take stock in penal substitutionary atonement. It’s really a comfort that I wish to nestle in. Penal substitutionary atonement has been turned out to serve bloodthirsty men.) Jesus could not survive us without scars.
Jesus could not survive us without scars.
We barely watched a boat full of God’s image slowly sink into oblivion because the news and the countries responsible told us to look the other way. It’s weird, I know, but it reminds me of Thanos and little girl Gamora. He gently turns her head away to look at the pretty balancing knife rather than the destruction of her own mother and half of her people. He raises her to kill obediently, for his empire and the “greater good.” He programmed her to believe that utopia was just around the corner for us, as long as there are less of those people.
“Those people” — the ones who are actually here and not a Marvel analogy — come from countries whose borders magically disappeared, and were stripped and spread wide for the pleasure of empire, were slowly drowned by empire. Countries that “those people” fled are referred to as shitholes by presidents unironically calling people rapists even as they are found by a court of civil law to be the very same. “Those people” come from countries who power our phones, clothe our bodies, and cultivate our food; countries whose diamonds adorn symbols of empire. In the case of the sinking boat, “those people” come from cultures so ancient, the Bible speaks of them. Those countries have long been used in political games for empire profit. Imperial civility turns away from its half-siblings fleeing the desolation of imperial forefathers and foremothers.
What would become of Gamora if she had not looked away? And what became of her anyway?1
Self-preservation is such a strong opiate. I have watched white friends stick a toe in the water of defiance of white supremacy just once, and then limp back into the fold at the first retaliatory remark. White people are terrified about what other white folks will do to them. Terrified.
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