Christian Hegemony

I read history and it makes me wonder with the connection is to the situation we find ourselves in today. The wealthy hates a group of people and does things in order to undermine their power and then eradicate them.

Some things I learned from reading The Empire of Necessity by Greg Grandin:

Hernan Cortes, the Spaniard who invaded Mexico, called Aztecs "Moors." One priest thought the nomadic peoples who roamed northern Mexico reminded him of Arabs. Spaniards used the word mosque to describe Aztec and Incan temples and believed some of the rituals to be similar to Islamic rites. When Spanish royals arrived to survey Castile's new possessions, they were welcomed with reenactments not of the American conquest but of the reconquest of the Iberian peninsula. The saint they picked to be the patron of America was St. James the Moor Slayer. And this eye opener: Columbus himself described his voyage as the next step in the struggle against the "sect of Mohamet and of all idolatries and heresies," even though one of the reasons he sailed west was to avoid Islam, to find a way to bypass Muslim control of trade routes to Asia.

Remembering Dorothy

This came up in my Facebook memories for today, March 19, 2011, the day of Dorothy Ackerman's memorial. She's been in my thoughts lately. Yesterday, we used a bowl we got from her for a potluck and I told this story. On the way home from that party, Liz told me that the sculpture that Dorothy did of people in Quaker worship is at TCFM. One the people in the sculpture is me. Then I remembered that today was the anniversary of her memorial. That's three times in two days.

So here's the story I told at her Meeting for Worship for Memorial in 2011.

After the bone marrow transplant in 1994, I had to go to the clinic every day for several weeks and Dorothy drove all the way from Minnetonka to take me to the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. One fine late August day, she decided to stay in the car to finish listening to Garrison Keillor on the radio at the state fair and she told me she'd meet me up in the clinic.

We always played scrabble as I sat in my chair getting blood or IGG or fluids or whatever they were giving me that day. And she always beat me. Bad.

That day, I was getting red blood cells and nodding off when I heard her and the nurses' laughter as they walked into the treatment room. Then she told me this story.

Garrison Keillor was at the state fair and a man holding a baby in one of those kangaroo-like pouches walked by, and Garrison asked him if the baby was his. He said, nah, it's a rental.

When the show ended she walked up to the clinic, and my nurse asked if she was looking for her granddaughter. Then she said, "Nah, I'm just a rental."

I never really knew any of my grandparents, and rental or not, she was a great substitute grandma. Someday, I hope to finally square up with her for the rental fees. Maybe one day I'll get to be a rental grandma too.