One of my favorite stories is about an old Mormon guy who pulled me aside one day to let me know he liked me. He said he'd been thinking, and thought I was smart - didn't strike him "as the kind of black who could be made a slave." But then came the best part, which was when he put his hand on my shoulder and said - when that does happen to me - I must let him know, first chance I get, because he'll get "really pissed."
This, my friends, is when you know life is an adventure.
I looked at his wife and she was beaming. I then looked at him so curiously I think the tilt of my head cracked a vertebrae. As Ann Althouse would say, “I can't tell when/whether he's lying, but I can tell when he's pleased with himself.”
And that's the Mormons.
The Mormons are a cult and a hot tub time machine all rolled into one.
Amram Musungu joined the LDS church in 1992 as a 14-year-old living in Nairobi, Kenya, and within three years served a full-time mission in his homeland.
Now living in Utah, Musungu is married with two children, works as an accountant, sings in the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and helps lead a burgeoning, 300-member Swahili ward in Salt Lake City.
He doesn’t care about the former priesthood ban.
“Everyone asks why, why, why it didn’t happen sooner,” Musungu said. “We don’t know. We are just rejoicing at our opportunity to hold the priesthood and bless the lives of our families.”
Even Musungu, though, has experienced the sting of racist comments. Once, when he was introduced as being a Mormon from Africa who sings in the choir, another church member asked: “What are you doing in our world?”
It's theirs, all theirs.
In a country that's ours, all ours.
Located on a planet that's mine, all mine.
Muuuwwaaaaahhha-ha-ha-ha-HA!,...
Having had the acquaintance of some Mormons, yep, they live in a freaking bubble.
ReplyDeleteOf course, a lot of other people do too -- so there's that.
Which leads me to an article I read about Eddie Sweat, and goes back to that magic Negro thing. As a supposedly intelligent, educated person, the writer should have steered away from mentioning anything about a "magical way with horses" and "herb lore handed down" -- because it's hogwash, and because it takes away from the actual person. There was nothing magical, or spiritual, going on there: just a person who worked hard at their job and worked hard to be good at it. The "magical way" was nothing more than long years of experience at trying for better outcomes; the "herb lore" was nothing but the practical knowledge of a poor, rural person who grew up tending livestock in a time before the "magic" of modern medicine. My gramps, who was lily white, "was" Eddie Sweat.
And that's the real accomplishment; the real extraordinariness of the situation. A person, just a person, working hard and working hard to be good at what they do, and succeeding -- if not in other parts of their life (Sweat died penniless) at least in their work which they piled their lives into (one could say he may have been able to have his money taken away from him, but not his skill; that was always undeniably his).
Granted, it isn't as romantic and sensational as mystical properties, but at least it gives a person access, a place, in the scheme of general humanity rather than some dark, mystical realm -- which, granted again, some people would rather inhabit, even if it isn't real...which of course brings me back to Mormons...
PW
Now ask me about the time a German foreign exchange student, on learning that my mom was part Indian (feather, not dot) started asking her if "her people" still lived or had she herself lived in tipis (and I think he was being straight up with that)...
ReplyDeleteThe response was classic and sadly not videotaped, although it should have been.
PW