Love vs. the Ku Klux Klan

Thanks Barafundle,

I really appreciated the Reverand's prayer, "Lord forgive him for he can't help being stupid!!" :confused:

I don't know if you remember this moving story that someone posted on HP years ago and which I found a bit more about:

In her book, Not By the Sword, Kathryn Watterson tells the story of Michael Weisser, a Jewish cantor, and his wife Julie. They had just moved to their new home in Lincoln, Nebraska in June 1991, when their unpacking was interrupted by a threatening phone call.

Shortly after, they received a package of racist flyers with a card announcing, "The KKK is watching you, scum." The Weissers called the police, who told them it looked like the work of one Larry Trapp, a self-described Nazi and Grand Dragon of the local Ku Klux Klan. Trapp, in fact, had been linked to fire bombings of African-American homes in the area and a center for Vietnamese refugees.

Trapp was wheelchair bound and suffering from diabetes, yet was a leader of the white supremacist movement in the area. At the time, he was making plans to bomb B'nai Jeshuran, the synagogue where Weisser was cantor.

Julie Weisser was frightened and infuriated by the hate mail, but also felt a spark of compassion for the man in the wheel chair who lived by himself in a one-room apartment. She decided to send Trapp a letter every day with passages from the Proverbs. When Michael saw that Trapp had launched a TV series spewing hatred on the local cable network, he called the Klan hotline and kept leaving messages: "Larry, why do you hate me? You don't even know me."

At one point, Trapp actually answered the phone and Michael, after identifying himself asked him if he needed a hand in doing his shopping. Trapp refused politely but a process of rethinking began to stir in him. For a while he was two people -one still spewing hateful invective on TV, the other talking with Michael Weisser on the phone saying, "I can't help it. I've been talking like that all my life."

One night, Michael Weisser asked his congregation to pray for someone who is "sick from the illness of bigotry and hatred." That night, Trapp did something he'd never done before. The swastika rings he wore o began to itch, so he took them off. The next day he called the Weissers and said, "I want to get out, but I don't know how." Michael suggested that he and Julie drive to Trapp's apartment so they could "break bread together." Trapp hesitated, then agreed.

At the apartment, Trapp broke into tears and handed the Weissers his swastika rings. In November, 1991 he resigned from the Klan, and later wrote apologies to those groups he had wronged. On New Year's Eve, Larry Trapp found out he had less than a year to live and that night, the Weissers invited him to move in with them. Their living room became his bedroom and he told them, "You are doing for me what my parents should have done for me."

Bedridden, Trapp began to read about Gandhi and Martin Luther King, and learn about Judaism. On June 5, 1992 he converted to Judaism -- at the very synagogue he had once planned to blow up. Julie quit her job to care for him in his last days, and when Larry Trapp died on September 6th of that year, it was with Michael and Julie holding his hands.

There are further details here:

That is real forgivness for you!

Love and peace,

Judy

I do remember that story, Judy. It's very moving, and when I received the video I looked it up again and passed it on to friends who hadn't read it.

The video ties in with some thoughts I've had in the lead up to the recent elections, but I have to explain a theory I worked out for myself years ago first...

During my teens I started to become interested in the important questions, I wanted to know why were are here and what the world was all about. I did a lot of reading, and a lot of thinking, and I tried to work out a few things for myself. One idea I had then I haven't really been able to improve on since...

I was quite shy and withdrawn at the time and my big idea was that there are basically two ways in which we can get by in the world; we can interact with each other through an 'expanded awareness' which is characterised by love, selflessness, tolerance and empathy, or we can interact through a 'contracted awareness', characterised by selfishness, anxiety, intolerance and isolation.

All of us are somewhere on the spectrum between complete contraction or complete expansion, and where we are is largely decided by our individual temperaments and the circumstances in which we find ourselves. Our open or closed awareness is the prism through which we perceive the world, and if we're lucky we discover ways in which to expand our awareness.

That was it.

Forgive me if the conclusions seem obvious, but it took a bit of working out at the time.

Anyway, my point...

The Ku KLux Klan connection is relevant here as over the past few weeks I've been hearing (and have read even here on HP, a forum dedicated to health and wellbeing!) people say that they were going to vote for the BNP. The BNP are, in my opinion, with their message of fear and intolerance, the very embodiment of the contracted awareness. BNP members don't even seem to like each other very much.

We can do better than look for differences between ourselves and others, and focus instead on what we all have in common. A life lived in fear is a life half lived and that's not healthy.

Anyway, my point...

The Ku KLux Klan connection is relevant here as over the past few weeks I've been hearing (and have read even here on HP, a forum dedicated to health and wellbeing!) people say that they were going to vote for the BNP. The BNP are, in my opinion, with their message of fear and intolerance, the very embodiment of the contracted awareness. BNP members don't even seem to like each other very much.

New members in the main, Barafundle. Some are still members of HP, who have no doubt followed the election results with interest and perhaps some disappointment, just like the rest of us 🙂

Holistic

That's wonderful Barafundle that you were thinking so deeply as a teenager! And you have just gone forward from what you discovered then.

Love and peace,

Judy