For those of you who are disheartened and depressed by the arrogance, criminality and wanton greed, cruelty and destructiveness of the powers that be in the world today, especially our own corrupt and degenerate federal government, epitomized by the hubris-intoxicated Neocons, let us recall that, as Archbishop Desmond Tutu so often points out, we still live in a moral universe where actions have consequences.
The Divine does not forever abandon the oppressed and the righteous, nor does Divinity forever withhold judgment against those who routinely violate others. Consider what the planet is collectively going through now as a test of Faith, and take note of the famous words of Krishna, the Hindu incarnation of the Godhead, to his protégé, the warrior Arjuna, in the great Hindu classic,
The Bhagavad Gita, in describing those power-addicted elitists who only worship their own egos and lusts:
From Chapter 16 (Sir Edwin Arnold translation),
The Divine and Demonic Natures Defined:
12) Ensnared in nooses of a hundred idle hopes, slaves to their passion and their wrath, they buy wealth with base deeds, to glut hot appetites.
13) "Thus much, today," they say, "we gained! thereby such and such wish of heart shall have its fill; and this is ours! and th' other shall be ours!
14) To-day we slew a foe, and we will slay our other enemy tomorrow! Look! Are we not lords? Make we not goodly cheer? Is not our fortune famous, brave, and great?
15) Rich are we, proudly born! What other men live like to us? Kill, then, for sacrifice! Cast largesse, and be merry!"
16) So they speak, darkened by ignorance; and so they fall, tossed to and fro with projects, tricked, and bound in net of black delusion, lost in lusts down to foul Naraka.
17) Stubborn and proud, dead-drunken with the wine of wealth, and reckless, all their offerings have but a show of reverence, being not made in piety of ancient faith.
18) Thus avowed to self-hood, force, insolence, feasting, wrath, these my blasphemers, in the forms they wear and in the forms they breed my foemen are, hateful and hating.
19) Cruel, evil, vile, lowest and least of men, whom I (Krishna) cast down again, and yet again, at end of lives, into some devilish womb, whence - birth by birth - the devilish wombs re-spawn them, all beguiled.
20) And, till they find and worship Me, sweet Prince, tread they that Nether Road."
*****The scriptures of other Faiths also address the perennial folly of the rich and powerful as they lord it over humanity. Perhaps some of our readers would like to share other passages with us.
John Warner exemplifies the extremes that better late than never can take. I'm still upset that he never fulfilled his promise to hold hearings on the torture policy.
