Sunday, August 9, 2020

conventional wisdom, like the herd, disagrees with just about everything else


The day before yesterday's post gained attention from two Alabama Trump supporters, who had sent me Facebook friend requests a while back:
Comments
  • Robert E. Morrow Sloan, you do keep things stirred up.
  • Sloan Bashinsky Looks to me pretty much everything already is stirred up and I just seem to not blend well with "conventional wisdom".
  • Paula Sevier Can’t we just vote like on American Idol...Text TRUMP 2020?
    • Sloan Bashinsky Paula, I will not be able to live with myself, if I vote for Trump. I don't like Biden, either. Have not voted for a Democrat or Republican candidate is years. But that's not the topic of this discussion. The topic is mail-in voting.
    • Paula Sevier I gotcha. I am an independent. I vote each time for whomever. I plan to vote for Trump unless somebody else comes out of the woodwork....from God’s Hand. I thought I WAS discussing voting. Voting in American Idol seemed to work fine. I was using the “text Trump 2020” as an example...... Like text your vote in. Either Trump 2020 or Biden O. Is there a libertarian candidate? Anything could happen between now and November. Messiah could return. Everything is supposedly “ready.” I’m not big into eschatology.
    • Sloan Bashinsky Looks to me you are proselytizing Trump as chosen by God. You have lots of company, which does not include me.
    • Paula Sevier Absolutely, Trump was chosen by God.
      As was Obama.
    • Sloan Bashinsky Are you willing to bet your life and your soul that statement?
    • Paula Sevier I don’t understand your sometimes seemingly odd questions. I do not bet my soul and my life. I am not my own.
      Yes, of course God puts leaders into positions. All of of them. Haman, Herod, Hitler......to serve God’s Own Purposes.
    • Sloan Bashinsky God told you that?
    • Paula Sevier Do you read scripture? Do you think pharaoh was an independent agent working against God? Pharaoh was an Instrument in Gods Hands. As were the ones who crucified Jesus. It is God Who is working out God’s Vast Eternal Plan. I pray I am an agent for good/ righteousness. Whatever pleases my Creator. Whatever is my destiny. Same as you, I would suppose.....
    • Sloan Bashinsky So, Adolph Hitler and his top aides and the Gestapo and Nazi Germany were working for God when the incarcerated and killed Jews and Gypsies. Same Joe Stalin worked for God doing same in Russia. Same, Africans being enslaved and brought to Americas by white men. Same, KKK. All bringing about God's plan on earth.
    • Paula Sevier Yes. None of that...as horrible as it was.... was outside of God’s Vast Eternal Plan. Neither was the crucifixion.
    • Paula Sevier I was once going to order a bumper sticker that said : “What about Hitler?”
      That is always the question asked in discussions on Divine Providence/ God’s Ultimate Sovereignty.
    • Paula Sevier I certainly am not a defense attorney/ apologist for God. God doesn’t need that. God is God.
    • Paula Sevier Have you ever read the book MAY I HATE GOD by Pierre Wolff? It’s a good one.
    • Sloan Bashinsky No, have not read that book and don't want to read it, I hated God after my son died. But if he had not died, I might have lived out my life trying to be like my father and his father and living in Mt. Brook. My son's death set me free, but it took a long time for me to get there. You read about that in the Southern Lawyer Who Became a Mystic trilogy. But what does that have to do with what seems to me you keep saying on Facebook that you know God's mind? Yet when I question you about it, you do not give direct answers. I think you are on dangerous ground, Paula. Dangerous for you, dangerous for people you presume to tell what God is and thinks.
    • Paula Sevier Ok, thanks Sloan. What do you have against living in Mountain Brook? Isn’t it your home town?
    • Paula Sevier It’s a short book.
    • Sloan Bashinsky It's my home town. It's not called The Tiny Kingdom by its residents for nothing. I had nothing to do with it acquiring that name.
    • Sloan Bashinsky As for the book, I don't hate God, but I think many people do but are unaware of it.
    • Paula Sevier I didnt mean to imply you hate God. It’s just a good book. As I said: very short. I was thinking you were born in Mt. Brook. A great place to live. Safe. The people are law -abiding and neighborly, for the most part. I am certainly grateful I was placed here. For as long as meant to be. I don’t understand your bashing it.... but that IS your name. 😂👊🏻☝️
    • Sloan Bashinsky Mt. Brook people named it The Tiny Kingdom. I had nothing to do with that. As my life unfolded I lost interest in living there, I lost interest in belonging to the Birmingham County Club, which is in Mt. Brook. I moved on from all of that. I feel no attraction to nor kinship with Mt. Brook. It's safe because it's nearly all-white, there are a lot of very rich people there, it is secluded. The world I came to know is far different from Mt. Brook.
    • Paula Sevier Wow. Saying it is safe because it is all white might sound racist to some ears.
      I guess it became known as The Tiny Kingdom because it was such a peaceful place to live.
      The best place to live is determined by many factors.
      We do not choose where we are born.
      I assume people “move on” when/ if they are “sent.”
      If one is “sent” (by God) to Bangladesh or Key West,
      then that is the best place to live/be.
      I knew a family of non- whites who moved to Mountain Brook as missionaries-of-sorts.
      Where do you live now?
    • Sloan Bashinsky A nearly all white city in the Birmingham, Alabama metro area might be viewed as a racist city just about anywhere on this planet. Until I read your comment, I had never heard "The Tiny Kingdom" spoken in a complimentary way by someone from Mt. Brook or elsewhere. What do you suppose would happen to Mt. Brook if black maids, nannies,yard men and garbage collectors from Birmingham stopped coming "over the mountain" each day to work in Mt. Brook? I went many places. Sometimes I was running away, sometimes I was sent. I was sent back to Alabama in the fall of 2017. After a few back and forths from Key West, I understood I was supposed to live in Alabama for a while. That facilitated reconnecting with my first wife and our children and their families, which was very healing, and with a few people I had known from the past, and with my meeting lots of new people who played duplicate bridge and chess or hung out where I hung out before the world turned upside down. I was not directed to get much involved in local politics, which had been the assignment in Key West and the Florida Keys. By the time I left Key West for good in the fall of 2018, I was being directed more and more to write about U.S. politics. The angels running me do not share your view of President Trump. They don't share Democrats' view of Joe Biden. They didn't seem to highly regard Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama or G.W. Bush. I think very few people would be able to cope with the regimen the angels have me and a friend of mine on, who is about half my age. The regimen kinda reminds me of what happened to some people in the Bible, but it has nothing to do with religion, other than we have to interact sometimes with religious people. I think people are going to find out after they leave this life that they had very little understanding of most things they thought they knew a great deal about when before they crossed over. Me, included. If the angels had not taken me on in early 1987 and started remaking me, slowly, in steps, increasing the load as time passed, I suppose the guy you grew up next door to in Mt. Brook would be dead today. Certainly, he would still be a lot like the guy you grew up next door to. The irony for me is I am blocked from making money, which perhaps is rooted in my relationship with my capitalistic father and his capitalistic father, and I live off an inheritance from my father. For many years, the angels would not allow me to view that as payment for the work they had me doing. But in the summer of 2017, the angels switched lanes and since that time I have viewed the inheritance as payment the work I do, which my father and his father never would have viewed as work when they wore alive. Not picking on them. Maybe a dozen people I have known since the angels grabbed me in early 1987 viewed what I did as work.
    • Paula Sevier Wow. Interesting stuff. You are obviously angry. I understand anger. I, too, seem like an angry person. But I have been unable to figure out why. I don’t really care/ have a problem with it ( the problem, if there is one, is my family’s) . I am aware of it: it is an intensity. Actually, I like it. I am energized by it. Maybe it is a spirit? A possibly “hindering” spirit? Or, more a supposed “trumpet” call ( have you ever sounded a shofar?). And Bash: YOU are “being racist” by saying Mountain Brook is safe because it’s all white. The implication seems to be that it won’t be safe anymore when our black citizenry increases. No way. The non-white people who live in Mountain Brook are just like the white folk: civilized. Not making demands and burning yo businesses down. And screaming “YOU OWE ME YOU PRIVILEGED WHITE PEOPLE!” Some white people worked/ work really really hard and some of the leave inheritances to their children. Some black people, also, though not as many .....but black people and all people have their own inheritances. Inheritance is not just money......It’s a nobility, a kind of aristocracy of spirit. But so many people seem to be seeing the superficial rather than the common core/ essence. We are one. We are all the same. We choose whether to be grateful and humble. Or we choose to demand/force/ flaunt. Sometimes it can be tricky. We ARE inheritors, after all. I can and do expect MY FATHER to provide for me. However My Father sees fit. I already have way more than I want/ need. And our Older Brother and Constant Companion Jesus Christ has promised us in no uncertain terms He will NEVER leave us nor forsake us. He accompanies us everywhere even if we are unaware. And The Holy Spirit ( Shekinah) directs us. (You may not be familiar with that term used by rabbis of old). And, yes, OF COURSE thebterm “Tiny Kingdom” refers to God’s Perfect Kingdom which awaits us all.💕. Oh.... and even though the houses we lived in were next door to each other, I never knew you. I may have seen you coming and going a few times. Never have we had a conversation that I recall. It was your brother “Major” whom I knew more because he and my brother were friends. And cute little Sissy!!!! It always assumed Sissy was Cha’s special one... until I read your memories and saw that you and Cha also had a deep bond. I shake my head in amazement thinking back on the depth of the wisdom in almost all the black “maids” I knew back in the day. We did not have a regular housekeeper, but so many people had housekeepers who were ( I know this is politically incorrect) family. And I know many a white person/ family who paid for college educations for the children of their employees. A black acquaintance who at one time dated a daughter of mine, said to me recently: “the issue is: would you have wanted your daughter to marry me?!” I answered “I would have been fine with it. I always thought you were a cool guy. “ He is a drummer in a band. Victim mindsets are so unattractive to me. It makes me want to be that bratty little girl that says “Waay Waay.” As I have now said directly to most of my whiny black friends: “You got a problem with your skin color: take it up with God.” The other black friends are just like me. They know Who has been and IS “in charge.” Wow. This is really a “stream of consciousness” conversation.
    • Sloan Bashinsky Actually, Paula, this seems to be a conversation between a white woman who never left her rich white city and a white guy who did leave the same rich white city. Having grown up there, I know it well. Not having been where all  I have been, you know that not at all. I wonder how you would view things if you had been born to a black family in west Birmingham? I bet you would see things much differently than you see things today.

Here's a link to Part One of A Southern Lawyer Who Became a Mystic. After introductory material, it begins with the portrait of the federal judge for whom I clerked after graduating from law school. Then comes a portrait of the daughter of American slaves who loved and raised me as one of her own in my rich white parents' Mountain Brook home.


sloanbashinksy@yahoo.com
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