Song of the Week: Ilene Kristen's "Flesh and Blood"

In the 1950s the good sisters ran air raid drills with their shrill voices emanating from their coifed, wimpled and squashed features commanding the young ones in their charge to get under their desks. As the children got older the drill took the form of going into the deepest recesses of the school as a makeshift bomb shelter. Fifty years thence all are very aware that a school desk is little protection against the ravages of a nuclear blast or anything else for that matter unless one is strong enough to toss it at the sister who was attacking with a wooden ruler. Even in the ignorance of those years there was little to reinforce the sense of being safe. The good sisters also did their part with many – almost daily – warnings against godless communists who would surely come to persecute the godly. (Little did they know that years later on these shores more danger would come in the form of godless Russian capitalists.)

If concrete dangers did not frighten the little ones then fear of repercussions in the afterlife could serve up fear and anxiety. If communists were not crawling through the bedroom window, certainly Satan was well prepared to snatch the bold and brazen sinful child who was incapable of a perfect act of contrition. The fear and anxiety of the nuclear years reached its zenith during the Cuban Missile Crisis when it was very clear that cities could disappear in the blink of an atomic or hydrogen eye.

High school brought some much needed sophistication into the minds of hitherto frightened school children but the fear and anxiety was persistent. This time it expanded its boundaries to include the godly capitalists who waged needless undeclared wars well into the university years where the godly and capitalistic shot at demonstrators and sometimes killed them.

The people of America at large already a rather conservative bunch became ever increasingly so and the boundary between the secular and religious blurred. When the Soviet Union was declared an Evil Empire it was already in its death throes, and most people knew that it was more dangerous to the people who lived within its realm of influence than those outside of it. The saber rattling served to help the general population feel safe or so it was thought. What was discounted was the continuous stirring in the area where once stood the Ancient Persian and Babylonian Empires. It’s almost as if the dissolution of Soviet Communism in Eastern Europe was there almost as a distraction.

Muslim yet secular Iraq battled Iran with much needed supplies from the United States. American businessmen did their best to increase their wealth by selling arms and food to both nations outside the U.S. Western Europe was already battling domestic terrorism for years. The UK had its IRA and Italy had overcome in a way its Brigata Rossa. The United States had its own form of terrorism at the time. It was called violent crime. Most people who have lived their lives in terror stricken areas, like Northern Ireland, will tell you quickly that most terrorists are not politically driven. They are criminals pure and simple. Much like Ann Coulter their principles are a smoke screen for money and/or power. Are the criminals of now non-communist Russia who have access to nuclear weapons any less dangerous than religious extremists who want to capture hostages? If only life were as simple as hiding under a little desk until the strange noise stopped.

In a perverted sense of reality allegedly religious conservatives tend to feel safer when the poor and the diverse are utterly disenfranchised, i.e. very quiet and powerless or at least very close to that. Most of the good sisters have discarded their wimples and coifs except in extreme cases, not unlike Moslem women covering themselves by the way. Most Clergy and Politicians have discarded their strident anti-communism, of course. Now their targets are Moslem extremists.

Perhaps it should be brought to mind that it is r-e-l-i-g-i-o-u-s extremism that is dangerous in all its forms. The suicide bombers that brought down New York’s twin towers were exploited by criminally minded leaders with the prospect of a celestial afterlife in the arms of lovely virgins, because the extremity of their perverted religious beliefs kept them from physical pleasures here on earth. Here in the heartland of America let us remember our own Pat Robertson who exhorts others to assassinate and rejoices in the death of Supreme Court justices. Who is the real criminal? The so-called New Orleans looter of whatever stripe or the man who encourages death and murder while exploiting his viewing public for their money?

While many hope and believe there is no guarantee of an afterlife, an eternal paradise. Both heaven and hell are readily available here which seems to end soon enough.

What we do know is that those who sought power by guaranteeing safety have not done so. An American city has recently disappeared under their watch. And the blame game will not cease no matter how much the idiots in charge repeat that mantra. This is the time to blame. This is the time to politicize the situation: anything to keep people alive and safe. Lest we forget the Twin Towers went down under their watch. The exploitation of the tragedy of September 11, 2001 not only kept the incapable in power, but it also was perversely used to attain the long standing non-isolationist conservative goal of controlling the Middle East. Do not permit extremists to demonize the poor and the diverse. The enemy is not out there. It is not communists or devils that mean to harm good people these days. It is those here and now who would have us quiet and weak.