[Oe List ...] YES

[Herman Greene]

The Lumumba Cross is also my symbol.

 

Herman

 

  _____  

From: oe-bounces at wedgeblade.net [mailto:oe-bounces at wedgeblade.net] On Behalf
Of svesjaime
Sent: Friday, April 24, 2009 11:41 PM
To: Order Ecumenical Community; Order Ecumenical Community
Subject: Re: [Oe List ...] YES

 

 

On Apr 24, 2009, at 10:40:06 PM, "Margaret Helen Aiseayew"
<aiseayew at netins.net> wrote:

 



From:

"Margaret Helen Aiseayew" <aiseayew at netins.net>


Subject:

[Oe List ...] YES


Date:

April 24, 2009 10:40:06 PM EDT


To:

"Order Ecumenical Community" <OE at wedgeblade.net>

As far as I am concerned the ring has always been the symbol.  Private,
personal, with a story that could be told if we so chose. A silent,
circular, global, powerful sign of the ordering dynamic in history no matter
where we show up--beholden to no one or no thing (i.e. no structure),
committed to being no body.  Creating images of possibility in every
reality.

_______________________________________________
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OE at wedgeblade.net
http://wedgeblade.net/mailman/listinfo/oe_wedgeblade.net

 

The iron Lumumba Cross hangs on my wall.

 

Here's how this Order guy will show up on the OpEd page of the Saipan
Tribune this Monday:

 

PULSING AMERICA'S HEARTBEAT ON GROUND ZERO

I logged a picture of the NYC skyline with the twin towers that served as a
décor piece in my SVES 6th grade class to the home of NYC friends in this
week's “mission of mercy” I am undertaking to the Big Apple. Traversing the
Battery tunnel to my client in Brooklyn from the south end of Manhattan, my
host drove us through the gaping big hole of the scar of 9/11 that has
become during the reign of GWB as the ground zero of the heartbeat of
America.

What has since become a controversial memorial edifice to the shock-filled
awakenment of the American psyche, with the thousand submissions of design
entries to CNN and 300 to the Spark Award Design group, for the
rehabilitation of the tragic grounds that snuffed the lives of more than
3,000 Americans, has city plans sadly mired in the ugly morass of political
wrangling and posturing.

Tripping down this April to salvage a four-year old marriage of a current
Chinese Saipan resident to an ailing Yankee who woed her in China but is now
confined to a Care home on Coney Island, reality intruded to dictate that
the hour is long past the moment of rekindling the covenant of yesterday's
matrimony, particularly as Uncle Sam refused recognition of the coupling,
rendering the situation now to be best left as a relic of the past with the
concerned parties better off leaving previous decisions behind and moving
on.

The gentleman's health deteriorated to incompetence and incapacity, and the
lady's hopes and dreams for herself and her son will now have to be lived
without the promise of the legal membership to the American dream.

This personal heart-rending tragedy soon to grace a divorce court is the
couple's ground zero waiting to be separately reborn, and the face of this
stark reality to this writer, a sociological voyeur of the nation's social
affairs, looms as a footnote to the larger question of the state of
America's ground zero.

Until 9/11, ground zero to me, and I suspect, to many, was formally the US
Congress grounds in Washington, DC, the designated km 1 in the nation's
Interstate Highway system, and the symbol of the nation's commitment to
representative democracy and guided deliberations.  

Attempts were made earlier during Jimmy Carter's term in the White House
when tradition of the Town Meeting was highlighted in the nation's
bicentennial celebration, but the republican forces prevailed over the
democratic impetus, and town meetings deteriorated as a political format for
campaigners to meet their constituency without making the audience feel they
were being preached at.

The imperial and often rapacious military-industrial complex that Ike
Eisenhower warned us about, in its attempt to secure the fossil fuel supply
to undergird the bloated but profitable consumerism of the American Empire,
latched on to 9/11 as an occasion to foist a culture of belligerence and a
climate of fear against the 'infidel' of its choosing.  Bush's foreign
policy shadowed by biblical Armageddon, and bolstered by the rhetoric of
preemptive defense v. the Axis of Evil, has made ground zero of the 9/11
tragedy the symbol of national anxiety, societal dysfunction, and neurotic
suspicion over the foreign, the alien, the unfamiliar and the unknown.  

Thus, in the current ascendancy of the audacity of hope and the tectonic
shifting occurring in the glocal psyche from Empire to Eco-Democracy,
incidence of hate crimes have doubled and the emergence of hate groups has
become more prominent.  An alarming increase in death threats to the Obama
family has now become a national security concern.  Conversely, community
building and informal sunrise/sunset conversations in small scales and at
low decibels, is emerging across the glocal landscape.

Moving from Manhattan's Battery to the Bowery district, skewing the picture
of America's ground zero as the gaping hole of previously mangled steel and
collapsed concrete and cement, the vitality of Times Square nudged my
curiosity.

In 1968, I heard the double tragic news of Robert Kennedy's assassination at
a hotel on 44th St., and the trouncing of Eugene McCarthy who I was rooting
for in the California Democratic primary.  Notorious 42nd St. then was a
place where one did not casually venture out alone even before sunset unless
one was anonymously in search of sleazy adventure and chemically-induced
high.

Today, the breadth and length of 42nd St., from the United Nations on the
east end to the Chinese Consulate at the corner on 12th Ave., a few blocks
north of the architecturally I.M. Pei-famed Jacob Javits Convention Center,
is a long stretch of American glocalization.  Applebees sits across where
Kenichi's udon is offered, and Villa's tacos are only a few doors down where
Nikos' gyros are sumptuously served.  Kemala's masalas compete with
Francois' croissants around the Rockefeller Center.

The Port Authority's bus terminal at the corner of 8th Ave. and 42nd St.
offers DFS Galleria type of ride-and-shop convenience, not to mention ground
connection to the three international airports.  Grand Central Station on
5th Ave. is, of course, the grand Dame of all railroad stations in the
world.   The crossroads along 42nd St. are a more authentic and accurate
symbol of ground zero urban America.  

A possible involvement in a China program of the Global Ministries of the
United Methodist Church headquartered at Riverside Dr., made me apply for
Chinese visa at their office on the west end of 42nd, and proceeded to
traverse the west-east continuum to the National Episcopal Office Center on
2nd Ave. where Fr. Fred Vergara (no relation) conducts the noon Mass for the
episcopoi.  On to the environs of the heavily guarded UN Mission facilities
by the East River and a day's jaunt across this street shows the vibrancy of
the American soul more than the despair and fear-laden ambience of the
former Twin Towers of NYC.

As dusk descends on this midtown area of live theatres, the promise of the
secular city heralded half a century earlier in the cutting edge of the
nation's social thinking might not be too far off the mark, and for those
seeking for a ground zero of the American promise, it is not in the memory
of the Twin Towers but in the revised version of Midtown Manhattan, USA.  

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