My poor parents are on all kinds of religious mailing lists. While I was fighting the publicly funded NBA stadium swindle, in their mailbox was this bizarre piece of mail:
This horses ass Kirk Humphries is a former Oklahoma City mayor and is now in the private sector providing added value solutions or some crap like that, I forget exactly what and please forgive me for that. Anyway, they saw this for what it was. A complete bunch of garbage. That made me feel great, as did the fact that they saw the light and were totally against the taxing of the citizens of our town so that Billionaires could get wealthier.
However, most of the radical right in this town were against it so it’s not that huge of a deal. A few months before they’d received a letter from some televangelist nut-jub, the outside of the letter read "THE END OF CHRISTIAN TELEVISION AS WE KNOW IT!!!" and of course there was this long rant about the Fairness Doctrine coming back and it would be all over for everyone and we’d be watching voodo ladies dancing around on the tv instead of the good honest Christian viewing we now appreciate thanks to good men like Mark Fowler and Ronald Reagan!
People are always bothering them for money. Twenty-somethings pursuing a life of cowardly careerism in the church or in some "Youth Ministry!" program, huxster televangelists, you name it they get it. But about a month ago something really stood out to me. It wasn’t another mailer or something I saw laying around the house, rather, my Mom for some reason came up to me when I was over there for dinner and told me about some new ministry they were thinking of supporting in Africa. She looked at me kind of wide-eyed and said "..this ministry, it is in a country in Africa where there are two things, just two things! Christianity, and Satanism. That is that!!" Essentially she was presenting it as had these people trying to get their money (I think it was only thirty bucks a month!!!) for something really worthwhile, so worthwile that they LITERALLY had Satan there and he was running around trying to convert people while the good white Christian folk were battling him to the death to get the poor dumb Africans to be good Christians like all of us.
It kind of stood out to me. I mean, look at it this way. What if my Mom was some poor African woman rather than a fairly well-off, attractive, loved by everyone white woman in suburban USA? And what if someone approached her and described the past, I don’t know, eight, 16 or 28, take your pick, years in America. Lets for the sake of the moment go with the past 8. What if someone told her, pretend shes a poor woman in this village in Africa, that the leaders of America have started a pointless war in Iraq based on lies, slaughtered at least 100k people. And then what if they went on to describe the economic system over the past 8 years. How the rich have become so much richer, how the poor and middle class haven’t done so well. Imagine them vividly telling the stories of the wealthy K street lobbyists and their parties, the ripping apart of media outlets for the purpose of telling lies and making immense profits, or about the sub-prime loan scandals. There could be so many things a person could tell my Mom as a poor African woman, and tell her so as to conclude the story with "…and these people running this nation are Satanists, and they are causing much harm to the good Christian people of America, and may other people!"
I don’t think my Mom would be able for a second to doubt the person telling her these things. However, I think she wasn’t too swayed by the people beggin her for money so as to go off for a safari adventure, avoiding having to work in a shop making crappy wages here in the States and having to deal with people who just don’t appreciate your work.
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