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The media glorification of gansta values, videos, music
cllothing and macho violence is a kind of self-inflicted penance which the
Americans embrace silently with their digital dollars, knowing in their hearts
that their guilt over 150 years of slavery can never be cleansed, no matter how
much we glorify the gansta(ghetto)-entertainment-complex.
All the right-wing carping that "we aren't
responsible for our ancestors sins" can't change the fact that
subconsciously we know as Americans that the fruits of our prosperity were
nourished by the blood and sweat of slavery and by the conscious manufacture of
generations of American slaves (either by white sexual assault from employers like Thomas Jefferson or by standing-slaves-stud to produce new products to sell)
for 150 years.
As Harriet Beecher Stowe made clear in Uncle Tom's Cabin,
Christianity was complicit in American slavery, pulpit-preachers citing
proof-texts from the Bible as justification for the selling of human beings.
Over and over again Stowe sings out from her pages : 'Listen Christian . . .'
I recall Quakers speaking out as abolitionists. Correct me
if I am mistaken, but I do not recall rabbis doing so from their pulpits,
unless there has been historical suppression of Judeo leadership in abolitionism,
NOTE: :August Bondi, however, did participate in John Brown's early raids.
Thus I contend that Americans --especially young Americans
---realize that the so-called "Judeo-Christian" religious
values" cited by Howard Sachs as being "washed over by nihilism",
are, and have been, a sham.
Judeo-Christian values are not the remedy to consumer
nihilism; they have been its sometimes vocal, sometimes silent, accomplice.
Paul D. Keane
M. Div. '80
M. Div. '80
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