Scapegoats and magic

I just got an email forwarded and it scared the pants off me! It began: “This belongs in the "Email Hall of Fame." How's this for apocalyptic literature. This was written by a pastor's wife in biblical prose as a commentary of current events. It is brilliant.” And then it proceeds to vilify Barak Obama, casting him as a blaspheming maniac who thinks he is God. It blames him for the shit this country is in while the very people who elected him to fix the mess he inherited are doing everything they can to prevent him from getting it done. “This is broken; fix it! Oh wait, we’re going to have to buy glue? Oh, I don’t know.” We are a two-faced nation. We will smile at you while fingering the knife pointed at your throat. We elect our officials to move us forward and they spend every ounce of energy they have to prevent any progress from being made. But a pastor’s wife can cleverly spew her venom and we applaud her backward glance at the last ten years because we are scared. I am offended by the hysterical literature that continually casts Obama as some sort of Godless spawn of Satan. I am sick of insidious, paranoid suggestions about his birth certificate. I am even sicker of being told what is right or wrong by people who believe the world was created in six consecutive twenty-four hour days!
If I have been more an “historic” Jew than a religious one it is because I have always identified with that survivor part of being Jewish more than the part that believes, word for word, in laws and documents that are man-made, have evolved or not evolved willy-nilly over the centuries, have spawned factions and hatred and mass murder and terrorism and fanaticism and the horrible situation the world finds itself in today. Time and again throughout history, people and ideas have risen up to move past these antiquated and superstitious notions. The Greeks, the Communists, Socialists… The problem is that they found such violent, self-serving, horrible ways to deliver their progressive messages; that they were conceived by brilliant minds and executed by less than brilliant PEOPLE! Greedy, arrogant, ignorant PEOPLE! So we fought back. Self- defense I understand. But clinging to a mythology that has two people magically created in a garden somewhere and never explains where their sons mysteriously found wives… did they procreate with the sheep; that turns wine into blood and matzoh into flesh; that pits one man against another in the name of “the One True God”. If there is only one, then what are we all fighting about? His name?
I don’t even know if this is making sense anymore. I’m just so angry at how easily people are distracted from what is really wrong with the world by the creation of a new scapegoat, in this case Barak Obama, the man who dared to step forward at this point in the world’s evolution. This needs to stop!