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RE: What Does It Mean to "Be The Change"?
"I hope that dialogue will open to discuss these matters of great importance..."
OK, I'll bite. My offering is to play devils's advocate by quoting a friend of mine who grew up in an Israeli kibbutz (before going on to academia to search for more complete answers:
"That's all fine and dandy.... until you see tanks coming over yon hill."
When the SWAT team raided the Garden of Eden on an early morning in August 2013 with their fully armed soldiers and helicopters, @everlove offered to cook the officers breakfast. She asked them why they were harassing the innocent, peaceful people at the GOE, and they replied that they needed to feed their families. She told them to lay down their guns, bring back their families, and she would feed them.
She walks the talk.
That's great. I think that I walk the talk too. But I have had some differing experiences.
My very first year in the Himalayas, I was at an annual religious and cultural festival in the district capital with the people from the village where I was living. We began our procession, but were ordered by the authorities to take a different route than the long established customary one (because it would be "better for tourism"). Well, of course the villagers kept on along the same route they had used for the last thousand or more years.
The state police opened fire and killed two of the villagers beside me.
Oh wow that is really intense. It must have been weird that feeling of you still being alive while those beside you are dead. I am sorry to hear that experience happened to you. Hopefully you grew from in a way to were it expanded you more than it scarred you.
Wow, that's incredible and disturbing. Did anything happen to the police officers? Were they reprimanded in any way?
As you can perhaps imagine, the entire valley was in an uproar for weeks. The rest of the festival was canceled (and it was a very important festival in which the goddess of the upper end of the valley was brought down to greet the god of the lower end of the valley once a year and all the gods and goddesses of all the 365 villages of the valley came together each year to be in attendance.
The government officials from Simla, the state capital, arranged to come to the Hadimba Devi temple in Dhoongri where the goddess resided to make supplication. This was the very first time that I ever saw a chanelling, and it made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. My alter-ego @twiceuponatime may write about it in future in one of his Reports from the Bleeding Edge :-)
Write about the whole story in a linear fashion and how each moment affected you. I would like to hear more about it, thanks ^_^
P.S. why post it on your alter ego? Why not just post it on this account?
Wow! What an incredible journey you have had. I can't even imagine being left standing between two others shot down. This definitely sounds like an experience to share in more detail and depth. I'll bet you have a lifetime of stories beyond the imagination. I imagine that is why you are on the cutting-edge of things. Thank you so much for giving us a taste and for your comments here @onceuponatime. Your input is greatly appreciated.
I'm certain that was like no other raid they had ever done before! We definitely were not who they thought we were. Took them all by great surprise!! Having met several City of Arlington officers since, they expressed their concern for us and told us that even their officer friends in attendance on SWAT day were shaking their heads in disbelief of their own actions. What a day to share the love!!!