[Julie Steiner]

Sorry, Charlie and others, but I need to point out my first big mistake as moderator. I tried to quote a snippet of Charlie's rather long post #80 and respond to it, but I ended up clicking "Edit Post" rather than "Quote", and thus ended up deleting most of Charlie's original post, except for the snippet I quoted in my response (to quibble with it). I thus made my quibbling response (now deleted) look as if Charlie wrote it. My apologies to everyone, especially to Charlie.

[Andrew Mandelbaum]

Originally Posted by Andrew Frisardi

The poem below is longish, but I felt it was more than worthwhile to type it up. It was published in Muir’s The Narrow Place, during WWII, in 1943. He was there, one of the great witnesses to that time.

The Refugees
by Edwin Muir

A crack ran through our hearthstone long ago,
And from the fissure we watched gently grow
The tame domesticated danger,
Yet lived in comfort in our haunted rooms.
Till came the Stranger
And the great and the little dooms.

We saw the homeless waiting in the street
Year after year,
The always homeless,
Nationless and nameless,
To whose bare roof-trees never come
Peace and the house martin to make a home.
We did not fear
A wrong so dull and old,
So patiently told and patiently retold,
While we sat by the fire or in the window-seat.
Oh what these suffered in dumb animal patience,
That we now suffer,
While the world’s brow grows darker and the world’s hand rougher.
We hear the lot of nations,
Of times and races,
Because we watched the wrong
Last too long
With non-committal faces.
Until from Europe’s sunset hill
We saw our houses falling
Wall after wall behind us.
What could blind us
To such self-evident ill
And all the sorrows from their caverns calling?

This is our punishment. We came
Here without blame, yet with blame,
Dark blame of others, but our blame also.
This stroke was bound to fall,
Though not to fall so.
A few years did not waste
The heaped up world. The central pillar fell
Moved by no living hand. The good fields sickened
By long infection. Oh this is the taste
Of evil done long since and always, quickened
No one knows how
While the red fruit hung ripe upon the bough
And fell at last and rotted where it fell.

For such things homelessness is ours
And shall be others’. Tenement roofs and towers
Will fall upon the kind and the unkind
Without election,
For deaf and blind
Is rejection bred by rejection
Breeding rejection,
And where no counsel is what will be will be.
We must shape here a new philosophy.

I missed this in the smoke. Thanks Andrew.

[Jim Moonan]

Julie, Perfectly honest mistake.

It's a war of words and where there's war there's fog... and casualties (is this helping things at all?)

Welcome to the Age of Hack, Rig & Trump. Let the arguments come forth. We shall overcome…

[Nigel Mace]

Duly noted, Max, however, back in the heady early days of the '60s 'satire boom', the young turks of Beyond The Fringe took this off rather neatly. It's here from 1.53.00 onwards - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUd1OxPbKk4
(On the other hand, the show's opening is a startling - even shocking - reminder of how very, very long ago in every sense the early '60s were!)

I think your pessimism about Dawkins, Andrew, might be revised if you had a look at his blog. He's no enemy to the arts or to imagination - quite the reverse. He's also touchingly fond of logic.

[Julie Steiner]

Charlie, your reference (now deleted, due to my bonehead mistake above) to Jesus coming again in his glory made me think of Jesus's own description of that scene, at Matthew 25:31-45.

I wonder what you make of it, in the context of turning refugees away.

My take is the same as our own Matt's, in his poem "The View from Samaria".

[Charlie Southerland]

Julie, if everyone is so truly worried about the children of Syria, why don't they go there and gather them up and remove them? It is so much easier to bemoan the fact that kids and women are suffering than to remedy the situation. It is a war zone without a boundary. Helping little kids and women is not the issue here. The issue is grown men of age to fight, jihad that Trump is talking about. There is a process for insuring the safety of our own people so that we can help others. One has to consider that process, don't you think? We might be able to help, but make our own land a safe place to do it from.

In Revelation, Jesus comes and slays the wicked, whoever they might be. Some of those who are wicked now are related to those John the Revelator is talking about. There is a long list that is defined. If the shoe fits...

I see no reason to brag on me and what I do or have done for others in my life. God knows, and he knows my heart. The judgement here of me by some who know absolutely nothing about me smacks of opportunism without knowledge. Common sense should prevail but it doesn't because the left is furious and want their pound of flesh that they can't ever get out of Trump. So, they say really ignorant things and disparage anyone who disagrees with them. It isn't anything new around here. I expect it. I don't live my life in a defensive position, although I get defensive when people don't think things through and make silly statements that they can never back up with truth. Blind leads blind and stumbles off cliff. Buzzards pick their bones clean.

I'm used to it.

[Brian Allgar]

Charlie, I note that in all your latest self-centred blather, you don't reply to my question higher up.

As for your remark: "Julie, if everyone is so truly worried about the children of Syria, why don't they go there and gather them up and remove them?", words fail me. It is so cynical, so contemptuously unrealistic, and so uncompassionate, that I all I can do is feel disgust, and thank my non-existent God that I don't call myself a Christian.

[Andrew Mandelbaum]

When voter suppression is met with cynicism because "how could you know who to unregister", just think about this new info below.


http://motherboard.vice.com/read/big...a-brexit-trump

[Charlie Southerland]

Honestly Brian, I didn't think your silly question merited comment. I didn't want to irritate you with that fact. Proving my point, once again, you pick and choose what I say, ignore the relevance of it and try to twist it into something else altogether. I'm used to that tact as well. You should try something different, a different approach would be most welcome.

[Julie Steiner]

Charlie, you can characterize my social justice blatherings as leftist hogwash if you wish, but when your own God is saying something in your own Bible--over and over and over again--you might do well not to harden your heart to that, at least.

I don't think it's necessary for me to trot out specific verses to convince you that the Bible is emphatically in favor of people doing things to take care of widows and orphans. And the poor and oppressed. And foreigners.

Furthermore, the Bible frequently defines evildoers as those who fail to respond with mercy and compassion to those in need.

So when you're talking of the smiting of evildoers...are you 100% sure that your definition of evildoers agrees with the definition that the one actually doing the smiting goes by?

[Then again, maybe a specific verse will help. Take another look at Matthew 25:31-45.]