Burning Down The Mission with Jimmy

Way to go Jimmy!

I heartily and fully concur with what you have written recently regarding the institutionalized discrimination against women and girls and its basis and ubiquity. I applaud you.

You tell me there's an angel in your tree
Did he say he'd come to call on me
For things are getting desperate in our home
Living in the parish of the restless folks I know

You have really opened a can of worms though. By calling out the patriarchs on this one little character defect they share, you are agitating for far more than just the welfare of half the human race. You are seeding the thought that discrimination of any sort, and, by implication, it's cousin, entitlement AND the horse they both rode in on, are on notice that morally and evolutionarily they are to be terminated, with prejudice.

Everybody now bring your family down to the riverside
Look to the east to see where the fat stock hide
Behind four walls of stone the rich man sleeps
It's time we put the flame torch to their keep

You have just fired a massive volley in what may prove to be a thousand year headlong war with structures that have been refined over a period ten times that long, which have been inculcated and beaten into successive generations, incorporated into our languages and hence our brain structure, and most probably bred into our genome. These structures have been antigened into our bloodstream inoculating us against and protecting us from questions, from independent, critical thought, from disobedience, from our self.

Burn down the mission
If we're gonna stay alive
Watch the black smoke fly to heaven
See the red flame light the sky

I realize there have been skirmishes in this war since at least Lysistrata's time 2400 years ago, but the goals that were sought in those skirmishes were discrete and local things like stopping a war or voting rights acquisition and on a much smaller scale than what you and the other Elders have set forth here:

"The justification of discrimination against women and girls
on grounds of religion or tradition,
as if it were prescribed by a Higher Authority,
is unacceptable."

You have just let fly a challenge that has the potential to and a requirement of a complete restructuring and transformation of what has, sadly, come to pass for civilization on this planet. If the conditions you enumerate are to be resolved they will need to be, as they already are being, taught as wrong to our children and the children of our children unto the seventh generation, verily. The overturning of these conditions will demand the same but more of the fearless and fervent dedication and singlemindedness that established them, over millennia, in the first place.

Burn down the mission
It's our only chance to stay alive
It's our only chance of living
Take all you need to live inside

You are calling on the human race to consciously choose to evolve and the evolutionary direction you have enunciated just happens to point away from Abraham (Ibrahim) and ALL his quarreling, vindictive and dishonest progeny. You have laid another piece of wood on a fire that, hopefully, will soon flare up and consume the destructive and antagonistically backwards understanding of life incorporated into those three religions at the root and cause of the inbuilt and core component that results in this discriminatory treatment of women, children and the "other". I have the beam I've removed from my own eye ready to add to the conflagration. I've been looking forward to this for a long, long time. Maybe we can roast some peanuts.

Deep in the woods the squirrels are out today
My wife cried when they came to take me away
But what more could I do just to keep her warm
Than burn, burn, burn, burn down the mission walls

This declaration you have made also carries within it notice of termination for most economic and financial structures that, now imminently threatening to collapse taking huge swaths of dreams and lives with them, are predicated on disparate valuations of individuals and peoples. These institutions and structures have engendered and encouraged as much if not more strife and discrimination and death than the religions they have financed. This shouldn't be surprising as the largest, most corrupt and power hungry of the three oldest professions and the one which joins its twin, cassocked brother in abusing, raping and pimping their younger sisters out as prostitute, is that of moneychanger.

Now everybody now bring your family down to the riverside
Look to the east to see where the fat stock hide
Behind four walls of stone the rich man sleeps
It's time we put the flame torch to their keep.

You are a good man Jimmy Carter. Thank you for your courage. Thank You, Elton, for your words and music.