InterFaith to the Rescue

The talk was on "Interrogating the Text". It was meant to alert us to the mind molders in the varied media we read, watch, listen to...The day before the talk I providentially received in the mail a sample of the town paper of my small sea coast town. It seems that HATE has been epidemic. So much so that the Inter-Faith Community had come together in order to arouse AWARENESS (don't you just love that word) over the racism, oppression, antisemitism, Islamophobia, that has been ongoing. "Ongoing" evidently meant an act of antisemitism in 1980. Another in 1989. We are now in 2017. (Perhaps "tidal wave of Nazism" might be overstating just a bit.) Be that as it may another example of HATE: a Muslim woman experienced an "instance of oppression". It was not further elaborated on what the said "instance of oppression" was. (Was it a beating, a murder, or might it have been a raised voice, an arched eyebrow?) Regardless of what it was it occurred to me that my town is relatively free, actually absolutely free of concentration camps and detention centers. For crying out loud, I don't even think we have a jail! Why, even the sleepy town of Mayberry had a jail.). So I set out to be on the look out for all the HATE I needed to make myself AWARE about. I was unable to find any. Was I so blind to bigotry? Yet all these compassionate religious leaders couldn't be confused, could they? Of course not. I do appreciate their all consuming compassionate open- minded enlightenment Robesperian zeal to nip this noxious weed in the bud before it pollinates us all with bigotry, intolerance, privilege, all the promiscuous phobias. I should perhaps visit one of their churches to find out where I can put the pesticide. (Nota bene: Absent were the Catholic church and the Evangelical. It seems that these two churches wish to make their congregations aware of other things.)