Posted by panch from host-148-244-221-7.block.alestra.net.mx (148.244.221.7) on Tuesday, April 09, 2002 at 7:48PM :
In Reply to: Whoa posted by Jeff from bgp01107368bgs.wbrmfd01.mi.comcast.net (68.42.59.180) on Tuesday, April 09, 2002 at 3:45PM :
In the first place I know you aren`t mindless any more than I could ever think you are noseless. Both are original and both cry out to be heard. I have had the same reaction you are having now...thinking that I was a clone of someone else. These ideas are no more mine than they are yours. They are out there for anyone who is at all curious about what it really means to be a Human Being.
We can not have been put here after so many eons of trouble to breed, eat and shit...while dressing nicely. There is more, so much more to it and it has something to do with building a community...that`s why them guys back then did it in the first place. We Assyrians, Chaldeans, and all us cousins, are really and truly lost in the world. We can blend in, but at a terrible price...that`s because there just isn´t any mechanism for expressing who we are in these cultures we live among...not yet.
There is one in San Francisco, a beacon, a Kuduru, to use our ancient word for it... a marker placed at the outer extremities of our King`s travels, indicating how far we had gone.
We are on another kind of journey altogether...one that has taken us to those four corners of the world Raman and YIKES were talking about. The monument of Ashurbanibal is a Kuduru we have placed in the Modern Era showing how far we have travelled not only in miles, but in personal and community growth, in faith in ourselves, in our ability to measure up to the very best, to invest our hearts and cold cash and dreams and wishes for our children as well as this dear Heritage. It is a record of an inner journey, one we have to make if our long ride through history is to continue.
I never believed that our glory days were over way back when and it`s been a steady decline since then...aggravated by these leaders from hell who ride us to earth so they can make some personal miles. When Humanity needed Empires and empire builders to act the part of a gardener nourishing, nurturing and most important of all, protecting the fragile Arts of civilization, the budding social institutions Humankind would need one day...the science, music language and all the mechanical and other inventions which have spread everywhere on earth since we helped discover and refine them, when the next stage in human evolution required it, we did more than our fair share...no matter what another lout of a Kraut, inordinantly proud that his personal heritage encompasses the valuation of used cars...thinks of our ancestors...or any of us who would excuse those "barbarians" who gave the world so much, because we had the "good sense" to atone by turning Christian, to be kicked from pillar to post since then... but done so uncomplainingly well that we would win a paradise at the expense of our own childrens` throats....our story is not over...not by a long shot.
That was then, and we did as well as Empire has ever been done. This is now, and the people closest to us in history, the Jews, are well on their way to doing more harm to themselves than any Christian entity ever did. Their way can`t be ours...or let me just say it will never be mine. The world is my domain, why should I sell my soul and my children´s lives to harm another child and be used by one great power after another. No thank you...I will not go down that road.
And THAT is precisely both our destiny and our opportunity, our duty, even a "task" reserved primarily for us to undertake for no one else on this planet has the unique past history we do. We will NOT revert to primitive barbarism in order to gain a country and lose our souls in the process. Neither do we necessarily have to accept total assimilation until an Australian Assyrian can`t relate to an American Chaldean.
We have the unique opportunity to teach Mankind another sort of a lesson, one that has at its core the respect for your own culture, without having to destroy your neighbor`s. It sounds so simple to say it like that...so lacking in drama, in guns and explosions and parliaments and declarations and PROTESTS!
Sooner or later the entire planet will have to adopt this other "invention" of ours, if we will accept the challenge...the glorification of what is best in us, without pandering to what is worst in us as if the two HAVE to go together.
Nimrod and Jackie, in their emails, of what amount to old fishwive´s gossip about me (and others), my insanity, my destructiveness, my greed, my troublemaking tendencies...Atour and Janey in their assertion that I worked 20 years just to ruin it all in the end ("can we send you some money"?)...these things they have done and said...they will repeat now and in greater force because nothing could give them the lie more than our coming together to raise a monument from the ashes of the last two.
If you look at our Winged Bull in one way, this great Lamasu looks indeed like the Phoenix of old which flew out of Arabia, close enough, every 500 years to build its nest, ignite and burn to ashes only to rise again in glorious rebirth. It is a fitting symbol I think...I know I feel like I crashed and burned.
There was no good reason in the world for John Nimrod and Homer Simpson to whisper in Helen`s ear to have her lose confidence in me, especially as they so dismally blew it with the matter of the Viking helmet...no reason but the greed John would later accuse me of...there was no reason for John to wait for his sister to die without allowing Chicago to install the Shumirum, and no good reason for the lies he has spread since then as the honored guest of one set of idiotic organizations after another...there was no good reason for Jackie Bejan to use her personal frustrations as an excuse to punish me and deny all of us the chance to see OUR sculpture and there was absolutely no excuse for that poor excuse of a man, that Jesus of Janey`s, to back her up and contrive lie after lie to finally force me out because I wouldn`t bend to his lying ways...no reason for him to stop me from selling models of the Hammurabi so that I might continue the work...the only reason they all have, whether they ever admit it, or even know it, is that Assyria is supposed to be defined by them...all of them, in their spare time when not at their REAL jobs, or at soccer practise or on vacation, time they then "devote" to our Heritage...and it has to be done their way, even in areas they know nothing of...so fearful are they of being shut out when and if we ever rise up and demand to guide this Heritage for ourselves.
We can`t do very much except the most important work of all...we have to give our children reason to be proud...give a reason CHILDREN can feel in their hearts...something you can see shining in their eyes and not the surly hostility and boredom you see in them at the conventions.
I looked into the eyes of two young Assyrian girls and I KNOW what lies there dormant waiting on US, their elders and parents and teachers to nurture. WE are as the kings of old, each of us with a trust to fulfill...it isn`t enough to teach them to make small talk in their native tongue, they have to have IDEAS and DREAMS and PLANS to articulate.
Let them see a monument in a city, in several cities if we can do it. make it a "tax" we impose on ourselves because we have no one with a billy club to come and make us do it...no tax man forcing us to give anything. It is voluntary, it HAS to be voluntary.
If we once wake up...you`ll find us instantly rid of the Jackies and Atours and Nimrods...there will simply be nothing "in it" for them any longer.
We are the only ones standing in our own way. NO white official, NO rule or law barred us from placing all the monuments we could have made...only our own leaders and "friends". It doesn`t end with monuments either...those are just the most permanent "bang" for our bucks...we have no way of knowing what those two little girls would grow up to contribute...if they could have seen the Shumirum in all her glory, reserved now for those who wander to a far corner in a foundry in Monterey, California.
Those girls, and hundreds of other children have it in them to grow into artists and writers who will tell our story so compellingly as to increase the world`s awareness of just who we REALLY descended from...not these cartoon thugs of their own invention.
Those two girls, my own children, Rabel Shmoel and so many more deserve a great big apology from Nimrod and Bejan and Golani et al. and they will never get it. That monument could have been installed years ago, in plenty of time for that light in their eyes to continue to shine and grow. We have to show them, as I have to convince my children, that what happened will from now on be an aberration...that no Assyrian in his right mind, or Chaldean in his proper clothing, will EVER dare do such a thing again...we have to remove this blot on our good name...on the name of THEIR heritage.
It isn´t too late...we have waited centuries already...but there is no good reason to delay either. Making monuments is hard work, even for this old coot...and if what these thugs have done is allowed to stand, if we don`t repudiate them and this act of theirs, it will be a long long time before you will find another fool this willing...and that is JUST what Jackie and John and Atour are hoping for...so they`ll be left to catch all of whatever glory they think there is in being leaders of a two bit congeries of as pettifogging a batch of backstabbers as there ever was.
When I set out 20 years ago I knew it would be rough, but all I had in mind was the difficulty of getting people to put up the money...and then the doubts about whether or not white America would give us the respect I wanted for us by giving us worthy locales for the monuments. I was pleasantly satisfied on both counts...but I never EVER dreamed that from our own midst would come the people to lie about me, to cheat ME, to spread false stories to undermine people´s confidence in me JUST because they saw me more able to inspire people in every way, but especially in that all important way, with their MONEY, than they ever could. I never thought that those who´d been convincing us all along that they were working for dear little poor little old us would ever react the way they did when I frustrated their attempts to seize these projects and put them to the same old dead end and dreary task of bolstering their own egos...the hell with the rest of us.
Now that we know this tendency exists...now that every kid with those stars in his or her eyes has seen what can be done to someone who has literally staked his whole life on this one toss...do you really think anyone else will try something even remotely similar again? If our community doesn`t rise up almost as one and declare their disgust but more importantly their hope for a better future...do you see how dismal a triumph it will be for all the Jacksters who have ever jacked us off?
-- panch
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