Doing Unto Others

To start with, what a place to be born!—Salt Lake City, Utah. 

But two of my father’s brothers
became Mormons, oddly enough.

Not my father—he was a decided atheist,
in spite of which he had me baptized Catholic,
and I started school in a Catholic first grade in Pueblo, Colorado.

I cherished my little blue
Catechism book,
but the wind blew it in the lake.

OK, it gets happier. In those days of the 1950’s,
kids would come to school for Halloween with blacked faces,
wearing hobo bandanas.

Every third science-fair entry
was an articulated cat
skeleton.

A peevish, resentful
self-righteousness hung over the land,
everyone dispossessed of something and pissed off,

blaming the Mexicans or Communists
(the natives had already been extirminated,
the ex-slaves mostly in inner-city slums like the 1930’s Polish Jews);

choosing assured righteousness to escape being cast into the fire.
Why this compulsion to punish ouselves?—
as in a Jack Chick comic: Soul in Hell:

Won’t Jesus love me here?  Satan:
NO! You've made your choice.
Now you’re forever separated from LOVE.

Ultimately, it must be fear of abandonment—
compulsion to repeat: we force ourselves to experience
what we most fear.

Then we protect ourselves by projecting—no problem
doing unto others
what we viciously do unto ourselves!