Thoughts From Cascadia

Who Leads Us Now I am attending the Pacific Northwest Annual Conference as an ambassador from the Oregon-Idaho Annual Conference. What I am blogging about really has nothing to do with being here except that while here I heard about two more companies in the good old USA taking a lead in doing what is just and right. Amazon's employees have demanded their company stop doing business with the US's Immigration and Custom Enforcement branch of the Department of Homeland Security. Netflix has fired their Chief Communications Officer, Jonathan Friedland, for using racist language in a meeting. These are just two more examples of how corporate America is doing things that witness to a better world and making sure that justice is spoken and lived out in our society. Normally I don't have many good things to say about the Fortune 500 but lately, in the face of so much hate, insensitive, racism, sexism, etc. it seems that corporate America is leading us in ways that it has ...

Struggling with My Whiteness I was scrolling through Facebook this morning and ran across a post about the Tulsa Race Massacre in May of 1921 (often referred to as the Tulsa Race Riot but turned into a massacre by white vigilantes). https://timeline.com/history-tulsa-race-massacre-a92bb2356a69  I have no memory of ever hearing about this event before today.  I know that my white privilege has made it easy for me to ignore, overlook, and even consciously and unconsciously suppress these types of events from our history. I can't help but feel pained that any human being would think that killing others, burning their property, and bombing them from the sky is an acceptable way to handle a situation (Even war is evil, sometimes maybe necessary but evil and ultimately it never seems to solve the problem it is suppose to address). Add in the race element and I really don't understand how one group can feel so righteous and superior to another that they can justify such abho...