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: Never In Our Names

Dirt

By blueness

Early last Monday morning, KGO-San Francisco's Ray Taliaferro, dean of the Left Coast lefty AM-radio talk-show hosts, signed on with an impassioned sermon both poxing, and pleading with, all parties in Israel's current assault on Gaza. A brief account of that jeremiad can be found here.

This Monday morning, the violence in Gaza having not at all abated, Taliaferro returned to sermonizing, this time taking as his text the primacy in this Mideast conflict, of dirt.

What is liberating to me about Taliaferro's lamentations is that they transcend all the tired old themes that are so incessantly and obsessively worked and reworked whenever people feel the need to on this issue opine, ruminate, bloviate, screech. This night, Taliaferro graphically exposed and addressed the bald fact that in this Mideast conflict combatants on all sides, through their actions, demonstrate that to them dirt is more important than their own children.

Some excerpts from my transcript of this broadcast are found below the fold. Reverend Ray's sermon may be heard in full here, for the next seven days, after which it will be scrubbed from the KGO website.

In 2009, if we really think that things are going to be fine, people over in the Middle East are going to have to wake up. They've got to wake up, and quit killing each other.

I don't know what the sickness is in the Middle East. I really don't. Because both those groups that are over there, Jews over in Israel, and Muslims over in Palestine, they are both human beings, and they are both intelligent people--some of them are extremely intelligent people--except when it comes to this nonsense: then you have to wonder if there's anybody who really graduated from the cave era.

The prime element of your religion is to appreciate the life that you feel that God gave people, alright? I do. I do. I honor life. There's no question about it. And I do not want to see people stirred up, going at each other's throats, because of something that has to do with a religious identification a thousand years ago, two thousand years ago, three thousand years ago. Who gives a flying fig how many thousands of years ago, if in fact now, in the year 2009, you're going to take a look at a piece of dirt, and say, "that dirt is worth more than my son"? "That dirt is worth more than my daughter. That dirt is worth more than my brother, my sister, my mama, my daddy." My god. Dirt is dirt.

"Well now, no-no, uh, Mr. Taliaferro, now please don't, don't say that, um, as you know, there is sacred land." Where? Where is there sacred land? Sacred land is in somebody's mind: it sure as hell ain't here on planet earth.

I don't want to see another Palestinian killed. I don't want to see the arms blown off a Muslim child. I don't want to see half a face blown away from a Jewish kid. To me, the most precious thing we've got--this is me, this is Reverend Ray talking now, this is Dr. Taliaferro--there is nothing more important than life! Life. Not land. Not dirt. Life. Life!

Now, some of you disagree with me. Some of you say: "No, no, no it isn't. The life of a human being is not the most important element here on planet earth. It's our belief that so-and-so walked on this side of the border some thousand years ago, so therefore, that's what's important: the dirt on which this gentleman walked."

Man, I tell you: to equate a child to a piece of dirt--"Now this is our land, you know, and so we're going to go over there, and boy, we're just gonna blow these little children to death; we're gonna take an arm off of this one, we're gonna take a leg off of that one, we're gonna shoot the head off of that one, we're going to crush a family over here, we're going to crush a family over there." Why? "Well, it's all over dirt, you know. Two thousand years ago this dirt was walked on: they had a picnic here."

Folks! You gotta wake up!

All this sacred stuff--and I call it stuff, because it's not reality, it is just something that you simply believe. And somebody else comes along, and they have another belief. And so then you have this war of faiths. My God, it seems to me that in the 21st Century that what we really have to do in the world is to develop a little faith, in the reality of our existence today. Today, ladies and gentlemen, my fellow wonderful world citizens living over there in the Middle East. Today--that's what you have to pay attention to.

2009 has got to be different, don't ya think? Don't you think, finally, it has to be different? We've got to stop the killing--just gotta do it. I think that if we spend the rest of our lives, trying to spare other lives, I think it'd be well worth it.

I know that I've pissed some of you off. Oh, I've read some of the email you folks have sent in: "oh, boy, you sure turned coat on this." Folks: what I support, is life. Life. Life! Life! Life. Not death. Not suffering. I support life over it all.

Full post as published by Never In Our Names on January 05, 2009 (boomark / email).