Winter Carnival: Justice is Possible

So word is getting out about this and I wanted to talk about my ideas.

This is no anemic little interfaith thing I am planning where people make points and don't really listen to each other and nothing is accomplished.  This is big.  Go big or go home.  In the words of Keith Richards: "[I]f you don't make bold moves, you don't get fucking anywhere."  So let's meet at our Cathedrals and spend the long cold winter engaging with each other to create a plan to make a better world.  And since we will be working together to bring more joy to our lives and health to our souls, let us first start with a celebration.

Imagine that the people of Britain came together in the cold dark winter and planned for a new Spring.  Imagine your streets flooded with the people of your part of England or Scotland or Wales.  Imagine children, elders, soldiers, Anonymous, Occupiers, The Greens and all people of faith or no faith rising to their feet as one and venturing out into the cold to hold a candle, to walk and hold a candle and be willing to bring more light into the world.  There is much work to be done, but the work has begun.  Surely that is a reason for celebrating!  People are out in the streets clamoring for justice.  It's not all the people, and a lot of people are looking on from the sidelines unimpressed, but still, I think everyone is into the idea of a more just world where secured our children's health by securing the health of the planet, remaking corporations in our image, making our lives more about what they should be about and less about the endless chase of getting and spending that exhausts us and lines the pockets of others.  Let's debate whether we should outlaw interest rates.  Let us engage.  Truly this could be the Church Universal's finest hour. 

Or it need not be the Church.  We could leave the campers.  The Bank of Ideas and those fruitful camps are likely to get somewhere.  But they are cold and pre-occupied with camping, they are set upon with legal proceedings, they must govern their own community.  Let us help them and take them into our communities and let each person decide whether they will stand up and be counted among those who believe justice is possible.  If everyone stands up for that and goes to their Winter Carnival, we will be the visionary populace who embraced change and made it smooth and fair.  Let us move swiftly.  The ghetto stands with its gates ominously open. 

For surely, as a start, as the simplest thing we can all agree on, and as a big wonderful reason for a party is that justice is possible. 

Justice is possible.  We can agree that some of the old ways are no good anymore, can't we?  That we need a better way of caring for each other and the planet than the constraints of corporations?  Surely when the government and the universities must eternally be supplicants to corporations, we must transform them.  We could start at the Carnival with a bonfire of Corporate Charters.  And not just corporations, we can burn in effigy the instruments of war, the instruments of destruction of our planet . . . I am also thinking that it would be brilliant to burn Tony Blair in effigy at the Winter Carnival, not a move endorsed by the Church, to be sure, but one that Anonymous could do somewhere nearby.  I mean, of all the elite who have hurt this nation, surely he is the symbol of all that is wrong with the old order, with his ten houses and his unjust war and his twenty-seven million dollars to run a bullshit interfaith foundation that says whatever Rupert Murdoch and Goldman Sachs want it to.  That picture of him dressed in white on the banks of the River Jordan as godparent to Rupert's child made me ill.  Didn't it make you ill?  Because this wonderful spirit of God that he co-opted is actually so much bigger and more wonderful than this greedy money worshiper Blair could ever conceive.  Church, if that is true come out and show us.  Open your doors and call all the people.

And if you do not feel called by the Church, if you do not have, in the words of one planner of this event, "one religious bone in your body", then come to engage and partake and tell your views of a better world.  Come for your children.  If you don't come, the world will not be beautiful enough for them.