by Colin Hyde

In regard mainly to those persons with white skin who were born before, say 1980, you can’t have ruled the world since 1492, you can’t have controlled information since 1492, have decided what is truth and what isn’t, and not feel innately that your people are God’s most important gift to the world. It isn’t possible, innately, that you see people who are not white as your equal. With knowledge, openness to the truth, consciously a white person can come to the reality that dehn noh betta than nobody. But subconsciously, the dye, I believe, it is as permanent as the color of our skin. 

Last week I saw a little post on social media from my past, where I wrote sometime during Donald Trump’s first presidency that we should thank him for telling us the truth about how his country rolls—that America is about America. In respect to Trump the person, anyone who doesn’t understand that he is white first is not of this planet. White people putting the interests of white people first only surprises people who have no knowledge of history.

That said, you have to be, ehm, dense to not see the race part of Trump’s South Africa move for what it is: naked whiteness. I won’t complain about his regime telling white South Africans to come on over to the US, aha, where they are making America white again, like it was in “its” heyday after they had defeated Native Americans and had Black Africans in chains. Hopefully, the plan isn’t to get them out so that they can bomb the hell out of Black South Africans with no collateral damage to people who have white skin. 

There’s a BRICS story here, and that involves ALL Americans, because first and foremost, people who live between the Rio Grande and Canada are extremely “material girl”. Many things in this world intertwine; that’s why as night follows day, at some time in your, ehm, little life you will find yourself in bed with someone strange. Black, brown, red, and yellow, if the increasing paycheck is what matters most to you, you might overlook the white part of the South Africa story due to the concern over the dollar threat from the BRICS.

We know there was a horrible Apartheid in South Africa. It is so that since 1492 the Whites have had the most powerful weaponry, and they have had no conscience in their pursuit of their god, material goods. About this land story in South Africa, Tim Cocks, a “conscious” White, in a Reuter’s story titled, “The stark divide that South Africa’s land act seeks to bridge”, says the government’s decision seeks to address “the gaping land inequalities that persist more than three decades after the end of white minority rule …” He said the law “allows the government to expropriate land — in rare cases without compensation”, and since it was introduced it “has reignited racial tensions that have dogged Africa’s southernmost tip ever since European settlers began arriving nearly four centuries ago.” Ah, the Trump government’s response has been a threat to cut aid to South Africa, and to “offer white farmers resettlement in the United States” and “humanitarian relief.”

Cocks says, “For many Black people, disputes like these reflect a legacy of inequality left by the colonial and apartheid eras, when they were dispossessed of their lands and denied property rights. In 1913, a Native Land Act gave most farmland to whites, mostly Afrikaners of Dutch descent, leaving just 13% to Blacks. Then in 1950 the Afrikaner National Party passed a law removing 3.5 million Black people from their ancestral lands.”

Apartheid ended in 1994, and South African governments since, beginning with Nelson Mandela, have dodged addressing a number of the serious injustices of the past. The Bible teaches us that there must be atonement for sin. It’s a tochiz subject here, of course, but doing nothing in the face of injustice is blessing it. If you are white and don’t see that there’s justice in the South African government’s objective, I have to believe that both innately and consciously you have serious race bias. If you’re a non-white and you think the South African government has no justice, at best you are a bleedin’ ignorant. 

Muslim heaven

For “literal” Christians who aren’t rich, the belief is that if we make the grade we will have the new experience of walking on streets made out of gold when our time comes in the great yonder. It’s actually in the Bible. The Digital Bible says that Revelation 21:21 says, “And the twelve gates were twelve pearls: every several gate was of one pearl: and the street of the city was pure gold, as it were transparent glass.”

For the ambitious “literal” Muslims, their reward is 7 beautiful virgins. I expect that is for the man, and for the pious woman the reward must be to be one of the ehm, 7. You know that virgins thing is actually in the Quran; the only thing I have wrong there is the number; they are actually a whopping 72. Mark Anderson, in the piece, “Muslim View on Heaven”, says, “While the Qur’an does emphasize heaven’s sensual pleasures, those are not the sum total of its pleasures. Because the Qur’an also points to heaven’s spiritual and religious delights.”

So, in both our religions there are these prizes up yonder that come straight from here. I bet our Bible doesn’t mention any sexual prizes because we are not to talk about it; wait, not even think about it; and you know, maybe that’s why we call those Arab bohgaz, heathens. They, the children of Abraham through Ishmael, dreaming of wild sex up yonder, when poor we were separated from God in the Garden because we got seduced by an aapl. Hmm, it must have been very sweet.

Old Testament writers were more “civilized” about the hereafter than New Testament and Quran writers. WELS, at the page wels.net, in the story, “Heaven and hell in the Old Testament”, said: “Old Testament writers spoke of people enjoying God’s eternal blessings through faith in Him. The writers described heaven in different ways: being at God’s right hand (Psalm 16:11), dwelling in the house of the Lord (Psalm 23:6), being with God in glory (Psalm 73:24), a place of joy (Isaiah 26:19) and the enjoyment of everlasting life (Daniel 12:1-3), for example.”

But the Old Testament writers lose all their points with their celebration of despicable horrors on earth. I haven’t read the Quran, and I’ll rely here on Ambreen Fatimah from Quora, and live with that until/if someone comes along with a better score. Speaking on the violent stories, Fatimah says, “There isn’t just one but many … I don’t know if any battle has anything called ‘Gentleness’, be it a battle of Muslims or Hindus or Christians … one good thing about Muslim or Islamic battles or Jihad is, one isn’t permitted to kill children, women, age old people or destroy any crops, and one is supposed to forgive his enemy once he surrenders, and this has been followed in all battles.”

Whoa there, Fatimah, we know that true followers of the Christ don’t take up physical weapons to destroy others. We are to turn the other cheek. In Gethsemane Jesus instructed His disciple to put down his sword, after he struck the soldier who had come to arrest Him. How people justify murder in Jesus’s name is a stretch as long as from here to Mars; no, from here to where these new telescopes can see.

You know when you’re writing, or talking to a friend, if you’re open, the truth comes, or you remember things. I recall when I was getting closer to Baháʼu’lláh. Da brother is a man of peace, like da Christ! Thanks to the influence of my aunt, Grace Ernestine Grant, I was exploring Bahá’í teachings; but that inspiration got the brake when my paternal grampa asked, “Is your present religion failing you?” And when I thought about it, I said to myself, no, I am failing them, and I will compound my sin if I go and join another faith, it being my nature to fail.

Hmm, my EOB report remains on pause.