THE KARMA OF SCORN

 
Jeering, mocking, threatening and terrorizing the objects of their self-righteous resistance, the Democrat’s sour grapes groupies parody the mirrored equivalent face: the Republican party’s Grand Master’s Tea Party attack. Serving as cockleburs to prick and stick to any vagrant bestial impulse that passes by, not only does the liberal brand’s “resistant movement” begin to slobber over the free speech amendment, adding spittle to the acidic mix, when heated to a fever’s pitch, this seething brew causes the pot to boil over into a looter’s haven of violence. This rightful civil protest, we’re expected to believe, was originally designed for the peaceful end they had in mind.
 
They lost, they lost, they lost—losers one and all! All for one, and lonely still!  Losers, losers—all are one! Deep the hurt, the defeat, monumental and grand in scale, the surprise too great to contemplate—oh, the shame! Ambushed—it happened! Hillary, Hillary, how do you do now? Oh, of course: a book to dictate and sell, bestseller sure enough, millions more than Trump voted for you! Tell the world why the unthinkable happened! Pick up your tail, spearhead the resistance; glower in the history of your comeback. That’s the spirit!
 
So, what’s Karma’s role in all this mayhem?? Where’s Karma’s rulebook? And, from the Christian’s perspective?  Which offenses need addressing?
 
Ironically, especially to his detractors, the mystery behind the phenomena of a Trump election had something to do with a sense of justice. People have a desire to live under a different rule, create an alternative society. They knew the cost, but didn’t care. All they knew was that a radical transformation needed to happen. The forces that aligned to elect Trump carried aspects of a true rebellion (even one with spiritual significance). This same kind of desire, a will to be free of oppressive rule, some hundred-fifty years earlier, fueled the Christian inspired, mid-1800s, Taiping Rebellion in China (roughly coinciding with America’s Civil War). In that country, people accepted the notion that rulers were chosen by Heaven under a “Mandate of Heaven” . . . until Heaven withdrew it. The Taiping Christians fought for radical change, nearly topping the corrupt, ruling Manchus. Inspired by their leader and his interpretation of a vision that he, as the younger brother of Jesus Christ, was destined to bring about the belated, “Kingdom of God on Earth.”
 
It’s a common wish. A couple millennia earlier, the Jesus movement, desiring to live under a different rule than Roman, countered the norm, not with violence, but by celebrating women, embracing outcasts, and venerating the poor. Jesus railed against the “whitewashed” tombs and “dead bones” representing the religious elite. The ragtag beginnings of an alternative society rose out of the same pool of desire that elected Trump. Trump called for draining the swamp. Trump identified in part, some sources of corruption, and Jesus, by explicitly critiquing the powers and religious regimes that kept people living miserable lives, he exposed the connection between power and corruption. Power. Corruption. Eerie—how often they fit together. Birds of the same feather, perhaps.
 
At the location where Jesus delivered the Sermon on the Mount, in the crowd were Zealots, members of the Jewish resistance movement. This angry sect strained and likely cringed to hear, “Blessed are the Peacemakers, for they shall be called the Children of God.” The words struck a discordant chord within the militant mind. The early church, persistently pacifist, had separated from the roaming rebel bandit bands, and consciously, of course, Jesus, always condemning violence himself, by testifying to all who had ears to hear that day, that peacemakers would be called the children of God, was purposely distancing himself from that particular breed of disruptive “resistance.” He knew how hatred engenders more hatred; violence begets more violence. For all its bravura, the modern anti-Trump resistance movement, seeded in a swamp itself, might ultimately bear the cowardly kind of fruit that eventually promotes “suicide by cop.”
 
Antagonize, revile, provoke—see if it engenders the brand of Karma that doesn’t hesitate to pay a visit.  
 
“Life is like an echo. What you send out usually comes back to you.” – Chinese Proverb
 
Only a change in consciousness will change the world. The Buddha developed a method to purify his mind. Jesus, in the center of a maelstrom, practiced radical nonviolence—love for enemies. Only an awakened heart would understand this realism. “And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind . . .”
--  Romans 12: 2