kindness

Color an Ocean of Peace

/ Darlene Franklin-Campbell / 1 Comment

“Art Teacher,” Bobby calls out, “Jimmy just hit me and said my picture is ugly.”

“Jimmy, why did you hit Bobby?” I ask.

“Because” Jimmy says, “he’s not coloring the ocean blue. The ocean is supposed to be blue. I told him to color his water blue and he won’t listen.”

“So, you got mad?” I say.

“Yes.”

“And you hit him to make him do what you wanted him to do?”

“No, it wasn’t like that. He’s not doing it RIGHT. The ocean is supposed to be blue.”

“So, Bobby is coloring his picture of his world differently than you think the world is supposed to look?” I say, “And you don’t like the way he sees the world because it doesn’t match the way you see it, so, you got mad at him and tried to make him do it the way you think it needs to be done. You hurt Bobby because you wanted him to make his world your way? Is that what happened?”

“Ugh,” Jimmy says, “Yes, I got mad because he ain’t doing right. And he won’t listen to me when I try to tell him the right way to do it.”

“And how is that hurting you?” the teacher asks.

“But it’s supposed to be blue!” Jimmy is clearly upset that anyone could see the ocean as green, black, and purple instead of blue.

“And how is that hurting you?” I ask again.

“But…oceans are blue.”

“Your ocean is blue,” I say. “Bobby’s ocean is multicolored. What if you color your world and Bobby colors his world and you don’t try to force Bobby’s world to look just like yours? Then you will both have a better day.”

“I want you to make him do it right,” Jimmy says sullenly.

“Do you want to be right or happy?” I ask.

Jimmy and Bobby both look at me, confusion etched across their little faces.

I explain. “I’m not going to force Bobby to color his ocean the way you want it to be. However, if you insist on being right, and hitting Bobby because he made a choice that’s different than yours, then you are going to find yourself in a very unhappy position,  or you can accept that Bobby is different than you and that it’s okay for other people to see the world differently, mind your own business, color your own ocean and have a peaceful, happy day. The choice is yours. So, do you want to be right or be happy?”

Jimmy thinks hard for a moment. Letting go of the need to be right is tough. Then he says, “I’d rather be happy.”

Bobby pipes up, “Me, too. I like to be happy.” He proceeds to draw a purple sun in the sky.

Jimmy visibly cringes, but he chooses to be happy, at least for now. He hasn’t seen Sophia’s spotted, flying unicorn fish yet.

………………………………………………………………………………………

The Secret of Peace

Jimmy’s teacher is trying to let him in on a secret. It’s the secret of peace. If we want peace in our lives, then we must stop trying to control the actions of others.

No wonder Jesus said, “Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called the children of God.” That doesn’t mean we go around settling arguments but that we facilitate inner peace. Outer peace without inner peace is impossible.

The secret to having outer peace in the world is more people with inner peace!

As adults, we are not so different than Jimmy, concerned about what someone else is doing. Perhaps, it would be good if we could learn the lesson Jimmy’s teacher is trying to teach him. We don’t need to control others and the only actions we are ultimately responsible for are our own.

Ironically, we can see the tiniest faults in the behaviors of others yet neglect to see similar things in ourselves. Jesus once responded to some critics by saying they had the ability to see a speck of dust in someone else’s eyes but couldn’t see the giant beam sticking out of their own.

If I had a quarter for every time a child has come up to me and reported on the affairs of others in hopes that I would “punish” the other child, I think (maybe playfully) I would be as rich as Elon Musk! It seems to start early, this need to control others, even when those actions have nothing to do with us. Kids will often say things like, “Make them let me play with their toy.” Or, “Make them play with me.” Translation: “Do what I want YOU to do and MAKE THEM behave the way I want them to behave.”

Sadly, this desire to control and punish others often doesn’t end when childhood ends. It just graduates and grows bigger and instead of making someone give up their toy or play with them, the controllers want to dictate how others should live their lives. They want to invade neighboring countries, take over their resources and control their populations.

How much pain and suffering in the world would be alleviated if world leaders didn’t try to make other countries conform to their wishes?  If they didn’t invade and seek control? What if everyone in the world were truly empathic? What if we realized our Connectedness?

Peace on Earth

When Jesus was born, the angels spoke to shepherds proclaiming peace on earth, but of course, the world hasn’t been at “peace” since that time, but in the biblical sense, peace doesn’t mean the absence of war. It means inner tranquility, staying calm regardless of what others are doing or saying. In other words, inner peace is only found when we let go of the need to control others.

Just as Jimmy isn’t justified in dictating how Bobby colors or one child isn’t justified in forcing others to play, we are never justified in wanting to control the feelings and thoughts of others.

It’s far too common and too easy to focus on the negative aspects of others, to talk bad about them and try to make them behave the way we want them to, but it’s a losing battle and in the end, we accomplish nothing but destroying our own peace of mind and happiness. I once heard a very young minister named Randy (who knows? Maybe he is reading this post right now!) say, “You can’t legislate morality.” He was right. Kindness, goodness, empathy, joy, love….those things must come from the inside out and be voluntary. If you force people into, it’s not real and sooner or later the sleeping demons of self-righteousness, greed and power will awaken.

LET IT GO!

Peter, an early follower of Jesus, wrote, “Do not repay injury for or insult with insult. On the contrary, repay injury with kindness, because to this you were invited so that you may obtain adulation. For whoever would take pleasure in, long for, and enjoy life (both physical and spiritual, present and future) and experience good days must restrain his language from injurious and their lips from treacherous (deceitful and harmful) speech. They must cease from doing injury and do good; they must seek peace and pursue it.”

Likewise, Paul, also a student of Jesus once told a group of Thessalonians who were in The Way to aspire to live quiet and peaceful lives, to mind their own business and work with their own hands.

A passage from Psalms keeps going through my head:

46:10 He says, “Be still, and know that I am God;
I will be exalted among the nations,
I will be exalted in the earth.”

The words “be still” there denote a “letting go” or “falling into.” In other words, as Elsa says in Frozen, “Let it Go!” The word “know” means to recognize, get it, or understand.

So, we could put it in the modern vernacular, “Let it go! Relax, and recognize…” What are we recognizing? We are recognizing that I Am God. Which God? The I AM. And what are we recognizing? The fact that I Am is God! And what ever you need I Am is. Nothing is impossible with I Am God. Nothing.

Peace comes when we let go and relax in the knowledge that the Almighty Source of all that is or has been or ever will be is in control. Peace comes when we realize that a person’s life-worth doesn’t consist of our possessions, or what color we paint our oceans.

Stillness and tranquility set things in order in the universe.

Dyer, Wayne W.. Living the Wisdom of the Tao (p. 93). Hay House. Kindle Edition.

 

But the muddiest water clears

                           as it is stilled.

And out of that stillness

life arises.

Dyer, Wayne W.. Living the Wisdom of the Tao (p. 33). Hay House. Kindle Edition.

 

 

No More Expendables

/ Darlene Franklin-Campbell / 2 Comments
Pexels

ARTICLE BY DARLENE FRANKLIN-CAMPBELL

TRUTH IS CONTROVERSIAL AT TIMES

This post is a little different than my usual stuff.

It may be controversial, but these are historical happenings, all prior to the events of the last two years.

I believe that to truly be spiritual we must see the divinity in others. If we fail to see others as divine sparks from the Glory Realm, we are spiritually asleep.

When we are spiritually asleep, we can do horrible acts, all the while believing we are doing good. I think of the fictitious character, Captain Nemo, from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. He believed he was doing “good.” Hitler didn’t see himself as the bad guy. The most hideous acts are often committed by people who see themselves as “good.”

EXPENDABLES FROM LONG AGO

At one time, the Irish were the expendables and Irish daughters were sold to slave traders to breed with African males who were also considered expendable.

In the 1700s, “Gypsies” were so expendable in Scotland that you could be executed just for being Romani.

Chinese were “expendables” when the American railroads were being built and the list goes on and on and on. It even extends into modern America.

AND NOW?

Ask yourself, “Would individual men and women in powerful positions ever endanger the lives and livelihoods of those they are supposed to represent and care for to achieve personal gain, power, or status?” And ask yourself, “Could and would scientists and doctors ever falsify experimental results in exchange for large amounts of funding and personal gain to such an extent that people may lose their lives or suffer irreparable harm?” Now, ask yourself, “Could I ever become the target?”

Let’s look at a few historical events to answer those questions.

SMALLPOX AND NATIVE AMERICANS

*According to Elizabeth Ann Finn’s article in the Journal of American History, volume 86, the United States military and government officials knowingly spread Smallpox to Native Americans on several occasions.

MUSTARD GAS EXPERIMENTS

*On June 22, 2015, NPR published an article highlighting how the American military experimented on its own soldiers, via mustard gas. The experiment targeted men by race, testing them to see what effects mustard gas would have on Black skin.

STERILIZING THE POOR

*In the 1960s the United States Government declared war on poverty. As a result, the number of people on welfare increased substantially during the 1960s and 1970s. A part of that war was deliberate genocide against “low-income minorities” in the form of forced sterilizations. The powers that be were handing out money with one hand, while secretly cutting down the population of those most likely to receive it with on the other.

Anyone who thinks that the scientific and medical communities are immune to the plague of greed is unaware that there are humans at the top of these communities and humans are the only species susceptible to being infected with greed.

INMATES

*Between 1907 and 1939 over 30,000 people in 29 states (U.S.A.) were sterilized against their will while incarcerated or in mental institutions, especially if they were foreigners or if they were non-Caucasian. About half of these incidents took place in California.

STERILIZING BLACKS, ASIANS AND MEXICANS

*Fast forward, between 2006 & 2010 California prisons approved the sterilizations of around 150 female inmates. This time Asians and Mexicans were targeted.

At one point in the study, medical students at some hospitals were allowed to perform “appendectomies” as a part of their training. During these appendectomies, they performed complete hysterectomies on Black women, with a significant portion of the patients being under 18.

EXPERIMENTS ON AMERICAN MINORITIES

*In the1960s and 1970s physicians could increase their income by performing hysterectomies and tubal ligations. After birth control pills came out, they continued these procedures because they made more money doing them than they did prescribing “the pill.” Some of them reasoned Indigenous American women, Black women, Hispanic women, and Asian women did not have the capacity to use birth control pills effectively, so “forced sterilization” was for their own good and their own protection and the protection of the American way of life.

POLITICAL AGENDAS

*In the 1970s, the Black Panthers movement and the American Indian Movement came to the forefront of events and news coverage. These groups were perceived as threats by people with the power to hand out forced sterilizations, so certain health services performed supposed appendectomies which became hysterectomies. Still, others wanted to get experience in obstetrics and gynecology, and they needed human lab rats. The U.S. government covered the expenses. And some medical professionals believed they were helping these families become more financially secure with fewer children. So, for “their own good,” they were sterilized without consent and sometimes without knowledge until after the fact.

NATIVE AMERICANS WERE MAIN TARGETS

Although Latin American women, African American women and some Asian-American women were targeted and did suffer from this wrong, it was the Indigenous American women who bore the biggest brunt, because their low visibility in society at the time, smaller numbers and lax laws regarding the treatment of Native Americans allowed bureaucratic policies that made them easy targets.

Dr. Connie Pinkerton-Uri, Choctaw & Cherokee, discovered, in 1974, that one in four Native American women between the ages of 15-44 had been sterilized without consent, leaving her to believe that full-blooded Natives were being singled-out for sterilization in an effort to diminish their numbers. Genocide. And indeed, between 1973 and 1976, The U.S. Indian Health Service forced the sterilization of at least 3,406 Native American women.

EXPERIMENTS DONE ON CHILDREN

In the 1950s children at the Willowbrook State School in New York became the guinea pigs for the development of a hepatitis vaccine.

Unethical experiments in THIS country have been done on the elderly, on the poor, on Blacks, on Asians, on Mexicans, on women, on men, on children, on the mentally disabled, and on perfectly healthy people of every race and religion to make them sick. They were done in the distant past as well as in the recent past.

IT STILL GOES ON

And the incidents go on—and on. I haven’t even touched on the things U.S. funded laboratories have done in other countries or the things that other countries have done to their own people as well.

Some might argue that these experiments led to breakthrough discoveries, but do the ends justify the means if it’s YOUR beloved brother being bombarded with mustard gas? If it’s YOUR teenage, incarcerated daughter being forced into sterilization? If it’s YOUR little niece who goes in for an appendectomy and comes out unable to bear children? When does the line become too blurred? What about the “Do no harm” thing? What about the sworn to “uphold, truth and justice” thing?

FOLLOW THE MONEY

If you want to get to the heart of any corruption, any genocide. Follow the money, because greed (the unbridled lust for power and influence) is an equal-opportunity offender. It can corrupt any gender or any race, at any level, but when it corrupts at the highest levels, it can do the most damage to the most people, sometimes while pushing an agenda of, “This is for your own good. This is for the betterment of society. This is for your protection.”

SOURCE LINKS:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/leahrosenbaum/2020/06/12/willowbrook-scandal-hepatitis-experiments-hideous-truths-of-testing-vaccines-on-humans/?sh=636e4f11279c

Biological Warfare in Eighteenth-Century North America: Beyond Jeffery Amherst

Hunger: both a cause and a consequence of genocide

https://www.amazon.com/Bury-My-Heart-Wounded-Knee/dp/0805086846