Engaging the Family Laundry

Perhaps infertile incomplete unwashed memories of elder v younger, Goliath v David, crusades v communion critical, yet part of chronic, events speak extended family disengagement truth to powerful dirty laundry engagement failures. That disclaimer said, I have two incomplete conversations in mind and heart and what I hope I will eventually learn from mistakes in anemic compassion too thin for nobler listening opportunities. When I was sixteen, I courageously confronted my dad about his white supremacist beliefs, which would not endorse slavery but were oppressively too comfortable with White nationalism and patriarchal white-washed privileged capitalism Win/Lose meritocracy theology, teleology, evolutionary ethology, God's chosen evidence of Black and Brown unfortunate lack of pure enough LeftBrain intelligence to successfully care for their own intellectual and physical property/properties God given but in a more niggardly way. After all, if they were as full of divine grace as we are then they never would have become forced migrant fieldhands and robotic domestic servants, before we had robotic domestic servants, properly satisfied with a basic shack, self-grown food, cotton-picking and sugar-caning uniforms, Rented and unrented servants capable of learning yet not relentlessly driven by passion for deeper democratic health interdependent webs of life empowered each day by dense empowering understanding, robust economic awareness of who has power to sell and who has insufficient power to redeem what could never be naturally-spiritually commodified without severely wounded ego-disintegrity, social madness, political fury. When I asked my dad, Why are you so sure people of color, especially women, are so intellectually and emotionally and mentally inferior to you, the WhiteMan living in an all white rural community and all white nationalist church fully invested in a white plutocratic military-industriously colonizing authoritarian mess? And an all white school system and all white county government all your life? He could not point to any experience of his own white superiority But he could pull out a Reader's Digest article regarding research on standardized LeftBrain tests with unstated lexicon and linguistic norms of dialectally empowered WhiteEnglish DominantSpeak. My WiseElder dad told me to read it and get back to his more senior self if I had any further naive questions. That was the end of that conversation. Question asked and self-declared orthodox textual reference answered. A year ago I asked my White nationalist evangelical older brother if he would vote DeTrumpian again, and, if so, why? Given his Christian God of love and his GoodNews evangelistic vocation to bring universal peace and uniting divine justice to all people everywhere, now and in rapturous kingdom at near ill-defined hand of future Heaven for all eternity, red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in His sight. My brother responded, While troubled by Trumpian narcissism, and maybe over-wrought cynicism, Trump's anti-immigrant anti-Islam sectarianism are a good faith fit for a god scripturally written to be pissed off about pagan idolatrous hedonists and uppity women and lying stealing greedy children and people too stupid to get it that God has been strategically designed in a RightWing dominant WhiteMan's ancient fascist apartheid image of spiritualized denatured seclusion. Well, OK, he explicitly said just the first part, about keeping out the threatening anti-Christian, pro-liberal ecofeminist choice, anti-family values foreigners, All for building an impermeable moat around a White privileged patriarchal "Christian" nation on an awesome well-lit hill, originally intended to be democratically enfranchised only for WhiteChristian male property-owners, possibly including Black and Native American slaves within their enfranchising propertied status, But only White property-owners have historically correct autonomous rights to carry automatic military rifles and drive gas and oil-hog Hummers to an all-White church in substantially Black and Brown Flint, Michigan. When I asked him why keeping Muslims, and perhaps other Black and suspiciously Spanish-speaking Brown people out, was more important to his Christian beliefs than keeping democratic family health care in and USA climate therapeutic care at the top of our global investment budget, even higher than our ballistic automated threat budget designed to blow up people and plants and planet, He said he had no interest in that conversation. The only important conversation for us, from his fundamental dogma-centered power position, was how much of the King James Holy Bible I have properly memorized and adopted, not adapted, and invited into my personal everyday relationship with Jesus. The political Jesus, unmarried Messiah and Teacher of following GoodNews Truth into universal interdependent compassion, most accessible to a child, wounded and poor in spirit, when Win/Win Truth invites GoldenRule conflict between elders and siblings about signs of extended family integrity and wonders of divinely humane non-walled communion, non-apartheid community, non-violent communication... Again, I digress from explicit historical conversations about experiential evidence for White nationalist privilege on into internal implications for WinWin empowering communion where I can sometimes Left with Right childlike balance, still finding and grasping onto universally inviting unitarian co-operative laundry cleaning compassion.