With the rise of the Internet, I am a citizen of the world, but I was born and raised in Memphis, Tennessee, on the muddy Mississippi River; the infamous town that brought the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., but is also home to Arun Ghandi, a grandson of M. K. Ghandi and now the proud site of the M. K. Ghandi Institute for Non Violence in Memphis. But I have come the long way home in more ways than one, because when I was a little girl I was told to ‘spit on a black man’ if he even approached me... though I never was inclined to feel this way or do such a thing. I am glad to have seen the black race embrace their roots....but at the same time, I have had to let mine go. It is a strange dichotomy. I think so! But each must progress on their own merit and every one should have something to excel in, but THAT in a perfect world….which I do not expect to see in my life time…but maybe some future time. I have a deep southern U.S. ancestral history that dates back to the Daughters of the Revolution and the Sons of the Confederacy, having both a 5x’s over great-grandmother that hung 3 Torries (British supporters) in her backyard and a great uncle that died serving the Confederate States of America. One day it might be common knowledge that the U.S. Civil War was a war of Northern Aggression, and our Declaration of Independence was transgressed even way back then in that the North did not want us Southern States to individually sell our bountiful cotton to England. Anyone who has lived in this part of the world as long as I have will tell you that, individually, many of us embrace our black brothers and sisters. Honestly...ANYTIME I HAVE BEEN IN TROUBLE ON THE ROAD, THRU CAR TROUBLE, ETC., IT HAS BEEN A BLACK MAN THAT HAS COME TO MY AID ! But all the aid our government has given out in the form of subsidies to the poor underclass has only made a dependent class that will not know how to survive when the checks quit coming…and surely they will as we head into a world depression. It is such a dangerous city, Memphis. We are at the top of the statistics for rape, car theft, murder and God knows what else. And the gangs are running rampant and the drugs flow thru the brains and veins of our youth. We need a major intervention…but where will it come from? The church is broken. It is in turmoil from pedophilia, infidelity and just plain theft …and this is in the conservative Bible Belt where the songs we sang as children were “Rock of Ages“, “In Them Ole Cotton Fields Back Home” and “Way Down Upon the Sewanee River”. ..and even into the 70's we still we sang 'Dixie' and actually had a deep love of the Confederate flag, a flag that is on it's way to be banned because now it is used as a symbol of hate…though in the early 90's I flirted with the idea of joining both the Ancestral groups-- but I got into politics and began to realize that there is an element of hate that spiraling out of control. So much so that I watched as the Oklahoma City Federal Building was blown up by so called ‘militia’ types, supposedly Constitution loving, PATRIOTS….right then I began to even think that for the world to change that I would need to have a new understanding and started searching for something to believe in that is True and Real and Pure. I was at my wit’s end one day after Hurricane Katrina, the hurricane which devastated the coast of the state that I live in. I won’t go into it here, but there was some talk of weather modification and even weather wars. Oh, My God…it’s one thing to think of natural disasters, but something covert and manmade…and not the hand of God…how could this be? I could not bear to think of the future of my children and grandchildren or the world. I became obsessed with researching electromagnetic pulse online for about 5 months…then one day something came up that was just posted to a blog…that life changing day of February 10th , 2006. It is posted here under my favorite blogs “Fusion of Science and Spirituality”…but this interesting title was the page that turned my life’s story from one of disillusion and hopelessness to that of maybe…one day…a better world. It is a very confusing world, but with the Internet, the world is shrinking and the people are coming together without their country’s assumptions, just person to person, and there is no way to keep propagating the lies by our countries to their citizens. And what we are finding is that different cultures are interesting and invigorating and educational and that many times we find answers to life’s questions that we would have not found if our mind had been closed. There is truly something that can link us together and that is seeing the Other as the Self and to feel where it comes from. And if we want to see what the future holds, all we have to do is look at the past and the present and it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that the vision is grim. We all know we are the same flesh, though different color… the same blood, though different types.. With the same needs of home and hearth, and health and safety for the little ones coming up…we all search the same search for a stable happiness…this is my journey..<<