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Rootsie's Roots |
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When I was a young girl and reached my age of reason, I looked up from my childish concerns and saw the world around me. What I saw filled me with grief, and anger, and after that, a hunger for justice. I realized that I had been born into the 'oppressor's camp' by virtue of the fact that I was a white-skinned American, and notwithstanding my Castillian Spanish peasant roots. Both my parents' fathers were anarchists in Spain, and my family suffered many losses in the Spanish Civil War. My parents always taught me to look with a sceptical eye at what a government does as opposed to what it says. So I started reading with an aim to find the answer to the suffering of the world, to the evils of racism, of imperialism, of capitalism. I began with spiritual texts, and saw that all religions reflect the same truth. And then I moved onto history. This was horribly painful. As I read of the 'Conquest' of America, the Native American genocide, slavery, I would often fling the books away from me in angry tears. How could this be my heritage, and how could I help to redeem this ghastly history, which was of course playing itself out in terrible ways everyday before my eyes? When I first heard the music of Bob Marley at the age of 18 I was hit to the core of my being. For here in Rastafari, was a philosophy that did not shrink from pointing out the injustices of the world, and suggested that there was a spiritual answer, and that the Divine Essence was moving and working in the world to awaken people to their own power and the focus and vision to heal the world. And here was this music, coming out of a third-world ghetto, from among the wretched of the earth. I knew that I must align myself to this, and so I have. And now I am ready to begin to move beyond my anger to reconciliation. And the answer lies in history, as the problem between Europe and the rest of the world lies in a forgetting of history, the true history that tells us we are one people on this planet, with not only a common roots in far antiquity but with branches of philosophy and culture that bind us together, always have, and always will. If the Europeans had known that the Africans were their brothers and sisters in the actual physical, would it have been so simple a matter to enslave them and murder them by the millions? Well that is the territory we wish to traverse with European Roots. To present simply and clearly the history that binds us together in order that New Heaven and New Earth may be made manifest to all, here and now. This is a life and death matter, both for individuals' spiritual development, and for the future of the planet. Please post any threads you may have to add to this tapestry of redemption, any articles you wish to submit or anything you think European Roots needs to address. Like all good efforts this is a collective one. I only have pieces, and I do not present myself as an academic or an expert, really still that young child who wants to see reflected before her eyes the world she knows we all deserve, and which is our birthright.   Copyright © 2003 rootsie.com |
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