QBlog: Q-BLOG #26 Man or Machine?

It continues to amaze me how thoughts enter ones head and certainly, how events can trigger an emotion, a thought you did not realize you had. Maybe you just forgot it. Maybe it was there, implanted before you were born. Maybe.

A thought that has continued to enter my consciousness this week has been the verse to a song we sang in church when I was a child. Maybe some of you recognize it.

“What so ever you do to the least of my brothers, that you do unto me.”

The context is not purely religious. It can certainly be cosmic, universal, pagan or whatever you decide or choose it to be. The thought, the meaning behind the words is in essence, ‘treat others as you would have them treat you.’ As easy as this would seem, it is much more obvious that the application is much more difficult. Why? My theory is fear. I find so much fear, certainly in my own decisions, but also in decisions we make as a collective. I also find myself laughing because of the hypocrisy in those decisions.

Please don’t get me wrong (fear talking here!). I understand the context, the reasoning, the fear behind the thoughts. I have them too. Yet when I have time to think about it, calmly, without the distractions of materialism and the constant messages of fear and greed, I can only hear one thing in my soul of souls. “Love. Love others as you would Love…”.

As a nation, many claim that we are a nation built on the principles of the bible and God. That may be, but being built on those principles obviously does not translate into acting on them.

In Iraq, we have many workers from other countries. Many of these workers are well educated in many different fields. Here they are working as laborers, custodians, cashiers, supervisors, drivers, trash collectors. They have left their families, spent thousands of dollars to get a job here for less than half of what a Westerner makes, to provide a better life for their families. They deal with many hardships to achieve this better life. Many Westerners, especially American’s look at these fellow human beings as being less than human. They are sometimes treated as being stupid or less equal. We, I, shouldn’t be surprised. We treat each other similarly. We create class divides, income divides, social and racial divides. We forget that we are all humans. I’ve seen and heard managers, supervisors and colleagues talk about how badly they may be treated by their supervisors, only to see them treat people the same way.

Laws don’t change people’s minds or actions. Laws only reflect minds and actions of the people. It feels more and more like we are a rope that is being slowly untwined.

I wrote several pieces of poetry for a series of Art work titled “Humanity” that my friend Jim Frederick created. I share some of them with you here. Think about humanity. Not as something separate, but something collective that each of us is connected to and how what one part of this collective does, affects all the other parts.

Shroud of the Trinity