by Minister Ma
sada
"We were so close...
there was no room...
we bled inside each other's wounds...
we all had caught the same disease and we all sang the songs of peace."
as Melanie (accompanied by the Edwin Hawkins singers)
a Daughter of The Voice for the past, or was her 1970's song "Candles
In The Rain" a prophecy for "looking back into the future?"
Imagine: it is now the year 2015 and the stores
have all run out of their stock of fresh air cannisters. The battle of the
sexes has ended. The Motherhood Of Man Movement (M.O.M.) taught all men
this fact: there is nothing a man can do to equal the birth of his coming
upon this Earth through his mother. Therefore, the mothers of all men put
all men in the service of all mothers, including the mother of nature.
The battle against racism has ended. The devastating
ecological disasters battered the bounty of the rich and famous until they
were humbled and homeless and living in little huts. The evolution of planetary
consciousness went back to Africa. Classism, spiritual and religious imperialism
and every other "ism" which label one people inferior to another
people also dissolved in the dust. All the people working for the preservation
of the planet wore white (for a time) to show their devotion to truth, justice,
and the prevention of planetary pollution.
We learned that it was the nature of fallen
man to feed upon the destruction of another human being (or any living creation).
We then taught all people that the noblest and most sacred of vocations
was to work for the public good by protecting their water, air and food.
The world is our temple. Everything God has
created is sacred. In the cathedral of the forest, the birds are the choir.
The trees they sing in are the lungs of the earth. But did the people of
earth see the divine ecotheology of nature in time to prevent "developers"
from causing her asphyxiation?
Did we prevent the destruction of the rain
forests?
According to the Worldwatch Papers, as much
as 80 percent of disease is spread by pathogens and germs in polluted water.
Anne Platt, research associate and author of Infecting Ourselves: How
Environmental and Social Disruptions Trigger Disease, says that "all
ecological disruptions tip the balance between people and microbes in favor
of microbes. As we destroy nature, microbes take revenge and destroy us."
Mrs. Platt called for intelligent, sustainable development, in farms, agriculture,
logging, migration, and urbanization.
In addition, Rodney Barker, in his new non-fiction
book And The Waters Turned to Blood, tells the terrifying story of
a deadly micro-organism inhabiting our rivers and coastal waters. Could
the mother of all infectious epidemics be lurking on the horizon to alter
the very ecology of communicable disease? Is it possible that a mysterious
microbe deadlier than Yersinia pestis (plague) and Pasteurella
pestis (black death) has evolved and will be resistant to any of man's
treatments?
In the video Diet For A New America,
John Robbins, son of ice cream magnate Baskin Robbins, shows the livestock
industry's depletion of natural resources, degradation of animal-kind, and
the use of 5,000 gallons of water to make one pound of beef. This is obscene.
I'm calling on all African Americans to boycott all of McDonald's hamburger
products since we are their largest customers.
It was no accident that this eye-opening video
was shown to me by Ms. Alli Reeder, hostess and clerk at Comfort Inns and
Suites, and her assistant, Clemente Arroyo. I was there to quietly read
the Celestine Prophecy; they had already read it and we discussed
it. This was truly a trinity of multiracial intuition.
It's clear to me that there must be a revolution
of intuition. And that leads me back to the beginning of the story where
we are in the year 2015, where the store has run out of cannisters of fresh
air to breathe. Improbable? Possibly. But just think: 50 years ago everyone
drank water from the faucet.
And what happened to the environmentalists
all clothed in white? Well, they became:
They embodied the non-violent principles of
their deceased Earth First leader Judi Bari. They also honored Martin Luther
King: changing the refrain from "We Shall Overcome," to "We
will Overcome. We will defend our mother at all costs."
After the Miramar helicopter decision, in which
military authoritarianism clearly triumphed over representative democracy,
we knew the rain was going to fall. Soon, fighting for the environment came
to be seen as hostility towards a global, iron-fisted government which would
not let nature stand in its way. The intergalactic fascists and terrorists
cloned themselves and consolidated their forces with the Machiavellian barbarians
of the military industrial complex.
However, we sang a new song; we lit the fire
to our souls. When the night came, we let our light shine. We sang the songs
of peace. And the words of Melanie's song gave us binding courage: "We
were so close, there was no room... we bled inside each other's wounds...
so raise candles high, 'cause if you don't we could stay black against the
night... Oh, raise them higher again and if you do we could stay dry against
the rain. So lay down, lay down, lay it on down, let your white bird smile
up at the ones who stand and frown..."
Judi Bari lives again. Candles in the Rain.
Minister Masada, ecotheologist and ecofeminist,
has been a regular weekly columnist for numerous local and out-of-state
publications and has lectured at UCSD and SDSU. She has been an organizer
of support groups for abused mothers and is Chairwoman of the Sisterhood
of the Daughters of Zion, a mother's advocacy group
