I just saw Blood Diamond for the first time. Leonardo de Caprio is brilliant. and I don't even enjoy him on an ordinary day..
I watch histories like Blood Diamond, breaking my heart over a part of history I had known nothing of. It makes me think of other blood diamonds..other parts of our history. It reminded me of a kind of slavery I know first hand. Of blood diamonds I have seen. You too have seen these glittering gems, perhaps only from afar, as diamonds of this sort are sheltered, sequestered lest they be tarnished or snatched away. It isn't a disposable earthly bauble I'm speaking of, but friends in churches, parts of a subculture we all have seen and known. Religious control at its most deadly.
These sparkling ones souls have been castrated to lay down the impulses for life and creativity they were born to express. Their minds brainwashed to a system. You know who I'm speaking of, that family you've met that sequesters its children behind outmoded, concealing clothes, and shelters them from 'evil influences' by home-schooling them and moving them out to parts of town where they won't be defiled by the influences of the world. These are just a few, more typical examples. There are myriads more..
These religious belief systems believe their children are the great satisfaction and jewels for their parent's pleasure and honor. A system where a 'house in order,' be that full of internal pain, is worth any amount of emotional bloodshed in order to have children under 'authority,' looking good for all their friends to see. It being irrelevant if the child be two or forty. Allegorically locked in the safe, as the unsellable blood diamonds; these human hearts have broken, the spirits within them relentlessly beaten down until the will to fight is extinguished forever. The great tragedy is each generation is equally broken.
Their spirits cut down as they are forced to relinquish dream and vision in order to bend to the molds of accepted fear. These ones are no longer living full of heart and life, but spiritual automatons, full of obescience. The heartbreaking reality of religion in this form is that it takes only the smallest amount of love and relentless passion to sound the siren call to freedom, pulling these diamonds from seclusion. One by one.
Every time we choose love, laughter, and a perspective insistent upon producing life in the world around us, we still the religious conservatist machine that generates a steady stream of misinformation and control. Inside that machine, slowly, they are raising a generation of young people that have sold their wills to the god of performance to fear-based religious standards; sold to fitting in to the culture's standards of life and success.
Love them, and woo them to freedom. Together we can show them there is a world without fear. A way of living, loving God, that is bred from life and produces goodness. It is no longer Christianity if it is based in fear. They have produced another god entirely.
Rescue these shining ones sold to a system of control and manipulation. Wonder at their women's silence, question their sons' filial allegiance to earthly parental gods; and love them all, these ones kept by religious control. For if we love, and continue to question the status of their hearts, we've ceased to buy the lie of their false glitter, and instead insisted upon understanding what has produced this system.
I know. Because I was one of those diamonds.
A tiny flickering flame. Before it was too late, before my spirit too, was extinguished, I was given the chance to choose Life.
