POTUS Didn't Have To Go Back 800 Years: He Needed To

When President Obama recalled The Crusades at this year's National Prayer Breakfast, I began to
remember the fiasco as it was taught by the nuns at my school in eighth grade.
The sisters thought it was so disgusting, they taught the geography of the ancient landscapes, and they taught the routes. When it came to the rational of the 'Christians", they seemed embarrassed, and at a loss. This was in 1960. They refused to delve into any of the practices the Christians thought
righteous in order to spread their beliefs. Our nuns had the attitude about that expressed in the Jim
Carey movie about an African adventure: "Leave that part out."
Later, I learned in higher education classes, and from my dad, that those practices were barbaric.
But POTUS could have held up the practices and beliefs and votes of the religious right in this country, and the deeds they still think righteous.
If Jordan's pilot had been subjected to what Mike Brown Jr. was subjected to but about thirty weeks ago, and the entire thing was filmed, including the hours the young person's body lay in the street, and the manner in which the young man's body was finally removed, could Jordan have been less
outraged?
I doubt it.
As the Palestinian people showed solidarity with Ferguson and all of us who hurt for Mike Brown Jr. and his family, they themselves were being bombed daily!
Does anyone think that escaped ISIL?
And do we know the horrors inflicted on people during American slavery, much nearer than 800 years ago, are all unknown to ISIL?
Records of the atrocities are preserved, in the handwriting of the perpetrators. Has no one in ISIL seen what is written in the Maryland archives? Have they heard of slaves forced to wear metal bits in their mouths while picking crops in the hot sun so they won't be able to eat anything?
Have they read the account of the proud owner who forced one slave to defecate in the mouth of another who actually had eaten without permission? No, in his writings, he didn't use the word 'defecate'. He wanted a more colorful description, much cruder.
Can we be certain ISIL hasn't read the article in a Smithsonian magazine about a New York slave roasted alive on a pit for trying to escape?
Have none of the doctors, lawyers, and statesmen in their ranks heard of the breeding farms Rhode
Island ran to supply slaves to Virginia planters? Many young girls lost their lives thrown in with men
who'd been corralled in isolation together for long periods of time. I guess the farmers had to undergo
a learning curve on how to render a girl alive and pregnant.
Can we be certain ISIL never heard of Ruby Ridge, or of Jonestown? Now how Christian were those
groups laying claim to being? Wasn't that all in the last half of the twentieth century?
Does ISIL know about the Missouri militias running around their mountains with necklaces of the
facial parts of Native Americans around their necks in the 19th century...lips, teeth, noses, etc.?
When has America been free of committing atrocities against people? What did Bush and Cheney do
to the Iraqi people?
President Obama cannot say these things, because though they are factual, they are too indelicate for the sensibilities of his countrymen. But I can say them because for people to have suffered them is a
much more indelicate thing than for us to have read them or acknowledged them and I do not represent all of America.
If ISIL did not come up with the atrocities they commit on their own, then they may have learned them from us. Or maybe they read the Nebelungenleid. Either way, Western culture heaps
nightmares on human beings.
What ISIL should think about is that when they do the repulsive things they do, they are in very bad
company. Very bad company indeed.