Ep16 In The Shadow Of The Mountain C.L.Knox stories

The speaker discusses their upbringing in Birmingham, Alabama during the Civil Rights Movement and the forced integration of schools. They reflect on their own experiences and the prejudices they witnessed, both within their family and society. They also touch on the political climate in Canada and the US, highlighting the difference between true liberalism and leftist ideologies. The speaker then explores the dichotomy between truth and emotions, emphasizing the importance of speaking truth even if it is seen as narrow. Okay, what are we now? Episode 16, I think? Um, don't know what I'm going to do for music yet. I don't think I'm going to be able to sing. I've tried a few times and I just start coughing. So, probably play something old or something I've already played or maybe something new that I haven't played yet, but I already have recorded. I wanted to talk a bit about some of my upbringing previous to the drug experience. My mom, I've said it before, I was born and raised in Birmingham, Alabama until I was 11 years old. So, understanding that the political and social environment and cultural environment of the day was pretty, it was filled with unrest. Martin Luther King was pushing hard to gain rights which are provided through the Constitution of the United States, trying to win those rights for black people. And my mom got involved in the Civil Rights Movement, I mentioned that before as well, when I talked about the camp and stuff like that. I probably mentioned it other than that, too. I wanted to talk about my experience as a child, a white child, of the forced integration of the public schools. So, I went to a public elementary school in Birmingham, outside of Birmingham, Cahaba Heights it was called, which is now, I mean, at that time it was pretty rural, just a little tiny community. Now it's kind of a big community. Apparently there's money out there now, I think. It's been a few years since I've been there, but it seemed like there was money around there. Anyway, so I went to this school, and I think it was Kennedy that pushed to have the forced integration of the schools, and I think it started in 1963 or something like that, just for my quick overview of the facts about that history. And if you don't know anything about that history, again, it's quite interesting. I mean, I talk to people all the time that don't know history, and they think it's boring. And the reality of history is that it is who we are. We are born out of the history of our families and our communities and our cities and our counties and our states, our provinces, wherever you live. It's back to that subsidiary ideal where the smaller government being the most, I'm going to say being the most effective type of government, so family government, and then moving out from there. But all of those things, they all relate to our psyche, our personal psyche, our social psyche, our psyche as a people, our psyche as a city. So where you live, it adopts a certain kind of a psyche, attitude or personality. A lot of people might think that's bunk, but I mean, even biblically, it's displayed throughout, like passing judgment on cities, on towns, on countries. You know, those are, that's a side note, which, anyway, when I was in grade three, that's when, so that would have been about 1967. I was between eight and nine in grade three, turned nine in grade three, 66, 67. That's when they began to bus black children into the school that I was in. And I had already said my mom, like I was raised in the Unitarian Church, where quite a few black people, they were, you know, they were successful black people. There wasn't a lot of slum types in that church. It's kind of, you know, it was a home for the intellectuals and, you know, people that were progressive and on the front edge of the progressive thought of that time, progressive beliefs of that time. So anyway, so I didn't have an inherent prejudice towards black people, because I was raised in a different type of home. Even though my dad, he believed in the rights of black people. He had his own types of prejudice that, you know, I became aware of as I got older. A lot of times prejudice is born out of something that's an observed fact, or observed whatever reality. I mean, today we can say like the black people's hatred of white people, which is a form of prejudice. It's, you know, it's racism, and some people call it reverse. It's not reverse, it's just racism. But it's born out of a true fact, and that is that historically white people mistreated black people in the United States. That's a historic fact. They treated them as lesser thans. So the same thing, my dad growing up a white man in the Deep South, he had those same kinds of prejudices, where even though he believed that the black man was equal, he also believed that they were stuck in a culture of, that was going to hold, a culture that they would intrinsically use to hold themselves down, and make excuses and not excel to the rate that, or to the level that they could. Now that's one way of putting it. As he got older, it became more and more obvious that he had disrespect for the majority of the black people, the black population in Birmingham. He had deep respect for some black people that he knew, and again, they were successful. They weren't poor. They weren't, you know, speaking in black slang, and you can understand them. They could talk to you, and you can understand them. I'm not, I'm just trying to talk back, people. I'm not trying to honeycoat anything. I mean, this is the world we live in. Anyway, when this, the busing of the children into our school happened, I, there was some black children that were put into my grade three class. Now, I had a couple of friends in grade three. One of them, I think he was a year or two older than me, and he actually lived right near the school, and he initially was my brother's friend. His name was Gary, and, but he became like a family friend. You know, his children, he'd come and play with all of them. He was just somebody that we all were friends with. Or me and my older brother, anyway. And I had another friend who's, I don't remember it was his name. It was Harvey, or Harold, or something like that. And he was a, he was actually a Jewish boy. He was from a Jewish family, and they were fairly well off. And he was peculiar in, like, his look was peculiar, and, you know, it kind of reminds me of that 60s show, what was it called? It wasn't called the 60s show, it was called Wonder Years. And there was a character in there of a tall, skinny guy that wore glasses, and he was like that. Very similar. I don't remember him wearing glasses, but he was tall and skinny, had an elongated kind of a face, a little bit darker complexion. And he could, he could suck in his chest, like he could pull in like, hold it, suck in his breath, and it would be like a hole the size of a fist in his chest. And it was just so peculiar. It was like he would do it, and people would laugh. And I can remember one day, we were learning math or something, and he looked over at me in class, and he pulled open his shirt, like, pulled it open like that, and sucked in his chest, and I started laughing. And this is Cook, that was our third grade teacher. She was pissed. She dragged both him and me into the cloakroom off to the side and pulled out the yardstick or the ruler and proceeded to smack us on the palm of her hand. It was a different day and time, believe me. So, for me, for laughing at him and him from doing that, making me laugh at him. So, anyway, by this time, I was already hippie-ish. I had fairly long hair for the day. Whatever, that's sort of a side note. One day, this boy's mother saw me talking to two black boys. And we were, like, playing around, you know, not just talking, sort of hanging around and playing around. We were waiting for the school bus. And she picked him up. My friend, she picked him up. And the next day, he was like, my mom told me I can't play with you anymore. I can't be your friend anymore. And I was like, well, why not? It was like because she had seen me being cordial, being friendly to the black boys. So, just an observation at this hatred, I mean, even to think of it coming from a Jewish family, I mean, none of us are immune to it. We all have this capacity to be filled with hatred. And there's other things that happened in that year, but in the school, mostly from that year on, it says you become more cognizant of what's going on around you. I found that whole experience extremely difficult. And that was the beginning of me losing interest in the public schools. At a young age, I was losing interest in being in school. I was losing interest in all of that. It was painful. It's a painful thing to happen. As it turned out, we would still hang out at school and play, but never again was I invited to his house and never again was he allowed to come to my house. So, that is the way of humanity. It evolves around here in North America and Canada and the U.S. The U.S. is even worse than Canada in a lot of ways. But here in Canada, it's liberal and conservative. In the States, it's Democrat and Republican, but it's the same. It's liberal and conservative. It's not true liberalism now. Most of it is. There is true liberalism, as in classical liberalism. But a lot of the liberals that you would have something to do with today, a lot of those liberals are more leftist. They have bought into an ideology. So, they are actually leftist ideologues. So, you could say this is my opinion, except an examination of history and what classic liberalism is, as opposed to what socialism and communism and those leftist belief systems are. You can see for yourself that it's not. It's not opinion. It's fact. Regardless, it's politics. I don't really want to go into politics. I kind of wanted to talk a bit about the dichotomy. The dichotomy of truth versus tears. That's the way Tim Keller put it in a book I'm reading by him. Truth versus tears. The truth is often seen as angry and judgmental. And people talk about when you speak truth, they say you're being narrow. And the truth is that truth can be narrow. Truth is narrow. Truth is truth. If it's not true, then it's outside of that. That makes it narrow. And the tears part is the emotion, the love part, the caring part. And I'm talking left and right in politics, and there's left and right in worldview and ideologies and things that people believe. And truth is that there must be a balance of those things for the earth to live in and have peace. And man, humanity hasn't been able to achieve that. And that's one of the things that Jesus did when he came and walked the earth. He wasn't a conservative. He pushed against the conservative ideas of the leaders of his church and government. And he wasn't a liberal. He was both and. Because he reached out and he cared for the poor and the sickly and the widow and the prisoner. And he cared for them and he reached out and he touched them. And yet he spoke the truth of the law, which is conservatism in its purest form, the truth of God's law. And as I spoke before, God's law is actually God's personality. It's God's characteristics. That's what makes them law is everything's built on these characteristics. All of creation is built on these characteristics. And Jesus, when he walked the planet, he exemplified both and or perfectly. He was righteous in his judgment. He was righteous in his love and his caring. And yet, like even like an example is when the Jewish men brought the woman caught in adultery and threw her down in front of him. This is a story in the New Testament that you can read. That's really interesting. If you've never read the New Testament, this is an interesting story. The Jewish leaders, the Jewish men dragged a woman into his presence and said, this woman was caught in the act of adultery. First of all, it's apparent that the woman was there alone. Where was the man that she was caught with? Why wasn't he being judged in the same capacity? And so like right off the top, Jesus is the first human to actually stand up for the rights of women. And it goes throughout Scripture. Women were the first to see him resurrected. Women whose testimony meant nothing were the ones that testified that he was alive and risen from the grave. I mean, I could go into that. That's irrelevant. That's liberal. That's liberal thought. Anyway, he sees this woman and he stoops down onto the ground and he starts writing. And you can speculate what he was writing. And there's all kinds of cool kind of introspection or ideas that people believe. He started writing maybe the names of the women that the men that were there had cheated on their own wives with or something. Who knows? Their own sins. Writing sins that these men had been caught in themselves or done secretly themselves. Whatever. It doesn't matter what he wrote. And then he stood up and he said, let him who's without sin cast the first stone. Because the judgment, the penalty for adultery was death. Stoning. Stoning by death. Death by stoning. And these men, starting with the oldest, they laid their stones down and walked away. And the woman who's there, obviously dirty, crying, probably, you know, half naked, if not totally naked. And he turns to her and says, woman, where are your accusers? And she's repentant. She's like, they're gone. And Jesus says, neither do I condemn you. Go and sin no more. This is an act of love. He still wants her to not sin. That's conservative. That's conservative. Stop doing what's wrong and start doing what's right that will preserve and nurture humanity. And yet, the mercy part again. Truth and tears. Anyway, so this is the end of number 16. And we'll see what song I come up with. Still can't sing much myself because I'm sick. So see you on 17. Thanks a lot. I've been fooling myself. So long, so long now. I think that everything's alright now. We'll get through this somehow, don't you know? It's no good lying to yourself. It's no good lying. A cauldron of your dreams. Everything's good, it seems. No more stirring around it, trying to make it neat. Just as I work somehow. Don't keep lying to yourself. Don't buy the deception that's beating so. The morning of our next trip. You feel it running through your veins again. You seem to get a grip on his pain. It's all making you cry inside. Don't keep lying to yourself. Won't do you any good. Don't keep lying to yourself. Live in the shadows of reality. Nothing's what it seems to be. It's all reflections of something much more real. Don't keep lying to yourself. Don't keep lying to yourself. Don't keep saying all those things you think you wanna hear. There's a god in hell and I know that there's a god in hell. There's no way this earth made itself. I know that something's looking out for me and I'll say it's the creator himself and I am. Don't lie. I'm not making this shit up. I'm not lying. It's really real. So you close your eyes. You don't wanna see. You don't want to hear. You don't want it to be and you can't. Keep lying to yourself you can. Keep lying to yourself you can. Keep on lying to yourself you can.