Strange Fruit

Yesterday while standing in line at the post office to pick up a package I overheard a customer loudly refer to his employees as wetbacks.  The postal worker he was talking to looked at me wide mouthed, to which I responded by shaking my head.  The elderly white haired man looked at me and said, "Would you prefer that I use the word illegal immigrant?"  My only response was "the word you used is very derogatory."  "Tough shit," he said, "that's just the way it is."  I left.  Then I got mad.  I called the Postmaster.  He had heard all about the incident--in fact, all this occurred while he was retrieving my package--and had every intention of taking some kind of action.  "I cannot believe in 2013 we still have that kind of bigotry, I don't want to hear it, my customers don't want to hear it, and I don't want my sons to hear it, and I'm sorry you had to hear it." 


After seeing a photograph of a lynching and haunted by the image for days, Abel Meeropol--husband, father, poet, social activist--wrote the following poem which he also set to music and which was later made famous by Billie Holiday:

     Strange Fruit

     Southern trees bear a strange fruit,
     Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,
     Black body swinging in the Southern breeze,
     Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.

     Pastoral scene of the gallant south,
     The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,
     Scent of magnolia sweet and fresh,
     And the sudden smell of burning flesh!

     Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck,
     For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck,
     For the sun to rot, for a tree to drop.
     Here is a strange and bitter crop.

This same man later adopted the two sons of the Rosenbergs who were found guilty of treason and executed for conspiracy of passing information to the Russians.  At that time, the 40's and 50's, many Americans who joined the Communist Party were pioneers in the civil rights movement. 

Why is it so very difficult to do unto others as you would have them do unto you?

Who hangs from yonder passion tree?
Your son, dear Mother
Do you not know me?

"The Latin root of religion--relegere--means to be aware, and absolute awareness will never perceive difference or conflict." 

"...dharma is rather about the search for enduring ethical principles, about the cultivation of right behavior in physical, moral, mental, psychological, and spiritual dimensions.  This behavior must always relate to the growth of the individual with the goal of realizing the Soul.  If it does not, if it is culturally limited or warped, then it falls short of the definition of dharma.  Sadhana, the practitioner's inward journey, admits of no barriers between individual, cultures, races, or creeds."  B.K.S. Iyengar

And so.