Contrariness

Teaching a Man to Fish

2010-09-05T23:10:00.005-07:00

"Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish and you have fed him for a lifetime." - Anonymous

In order to teach a man to fish, you must first arrange for him to forget how.

Start early. Burn his great-grandparents' village. Cut off his great-grandfather's hand. Rape his great-grandmother in front of her children before taking her to work in your estate house and them in your fields.

The man's great-grandfather will not teach him to fish. His great-grandfather died on the rubber plantation that replaced the family's hometown before the man was born. (Our great-grandfathers put new tires on their cars and went fishing with their sons.) Nor will the man be taught to fish by his grandfather, who, fatherless, mined diamonds at gunpoint and did not live see his own daughter marry. (Our grandmothers and their daughters wear diamond engagement rings.) The man's father will not teach him to fish. The man was only a toddler when he lost both parents to a war ridding mineral territory of its occupation by inefficient and unproductive humans. (Coltan, cassiterite, and tungsten are spontaneously generated, infinitely abundant miracles to which we owe the wonders of technology and the foundations of our way of life--digital communcation, laptop computers, military fleets and arsenals, and the 'vibrate' function on our mobile phones.)

The man will be raised by strangers. He will beg for food and flee for his life. Or he will steal for food and fight for his life. Or he will work to feed others and beg for his life. (We will think it his fault that he kills and inevitable that he die.)

Perhaps it is just as well that he has forgotten how to fish. The plants and animals that his great-grandfather used to make fishing tackle can no longer be found. The lakes and streams where his great-grandfather fished have been drained to feed factories and poisoned by runoff from plantations and mines. The fish his great-grandfather caught have been decimated to keep first-world plates and bank accounts full. Were he to eat any fish that remain, he may develop cancer from the petroleum-based pesticides concentrated in its flesh. Were he to bring fish home to his wife (were he to have a home and a wife), their children might suffer cognitive impairment and birth defects from the heavy metals in the water from the runoff from the mines in which his father and grandfather died. And perhaps it is just as well--at least this man's children will not suffer knowledge as well as hunger and pain.

The man whom we intend to teach to fish was never a boy who carried a fishing pole. He never went to the lake with his father. This man was born to carry a gun. Our poor fathers manufacture guns, our middle-class fathers design them, and our rich fathers sell them for profit. Cheap lives for costly dust and ether as long as trade is free.

Ah, but we, we with our lines and our hooks, we with our miles of factory-wound lines and our buckets of machine-stamped identical hooks--we are feeding the world.

Unobtainium

2010-04-30T23:22:00.004-07:00

go

make units of labor of all nations
every child a refugee
all God's creatures great and small
extinct, endangered--or soon will be

clear the forest--leave a desert
wear the soil out to sea
mountains leveled, oceans burning
this is Progress, can't you see?

red and yellow, black and white
killed, exploited, put to flight
load the trains and feed the furnace
remember--WORK SHALL MAKE YOU FREE

it's yours if you can take and sell it
if it's shiny, they will pay
more Unfood to stuff us empty
more Ungoods to throw away

Standard American Christian Response to the Ecological Crisis

2010-01-04T09:23:00.000-08:00

1) What ecological crisis?

2) Nothing that bad will ever happen to us.

3) We are the world's benefactors, remember? We ARE the good guys. Period. The Bible tells me so. If anyone has a story in which we are not the good guys, the story must not be true.

4) We have everything under control. We will be more than happy and prepared to respond to any crises that might arise . . . once WE have decided that the crisis is actually happening. If anyone has a story in which we do not have everything under control, the story must not be true.

5) See #2.

6) See #1.

Revelation 12/26

2009-12-26T04:46:00.006-08:00

Everything is made by elves
and delivered by reindeer.

Everything comes from the North Pole.
Every day.
Of course.

As long as we behave and do as we're told
the stuff will keep coming.
Our stockings are full,
so we must have been good.
We deserve it. (Santa knows.)

(Santa knows.) We still believe.

Bumper Stickers

2009-09-28T21:52:00.006-07:00

DON'T BELIEVE EVERYTHING

YOU THINK

What if the Hokey Pokey

IS what it's all about?

Do not meddle in the affairs of Dragons . . .

for you are Crunchy and good with Ketchup.

Where are we going and

why are we in this handbasket?

I WAS AN

HONOR STUDENT

-----------------------

I DON'T KNOW WHAT HAPPENED

Free

2009-09-26T10:50:00.006-07:00

To experience the full brilliance of this comic, visit the 'xkcd' website here, drag the mouse over the picture, and rest it there for a second.

: ) !

Gleaning

2009-07-26T14:07:00.004-07:00

Too many Rainier cherries
the woman said
Come on over--
my neighbor's orchard--
the perfect crop--
unbought
untouched
priceless.

Too many?
Eyefuls
handfuls
mouthfuls--
Heaven
is an orchard.
Enough.
And more.

(Muchas gracias, Rosalio Morales. El "producto de Dios" es bueno.)

Poem: Bitter-sweet

2009-07-26T14:03:00.002-07:00

by George Herbert, 17th century poet and priest:

Ah my deare angrie Lord,
Since thou dost love, yet strike;
Cast down, yet help afford;
Sure I will do the like.

I will complain, yet praise;
I will bewail, approve:
and all my sowre sweet dayes
I will lament, and love.

Found in this lovely article here.

Song: Handlebars

2009-05-29T13:40:00.004-07:00

by Flobots

Quotable: Look About You

2009-05-13T19:04:00.005-07:00

"And if you would know God, be not therefore a solver of riddles. Rather look about you and you shall see Him playing with your children."

- Khalil Gibran

(Thanks, Kelz!)

Waste Not, . . .

2009-04-28T09:38:00.002-07:00

From Forecast Earth, an illuminating overview of the fate of some common items that typically pass through your hands in a matter of days or only minutes and may not pass through your thoughts at all. Read "In a landfill, how long does trash really last?" Then REDUCE (don't buy in the first place if you can help it, especially if it isn't fully recyclable or non-toxic and biodegradable), REUSE (borrow, trade, buy used, salvage, re-purpose, and opt for quality durable goods (and take care of them!) over purchasing disposable, single-use, highly packaged and processed, poorly made things), and finally RECYCLE (which includes composting, the original recycling system).

What this otherwise excellent article doesn't tell you is the upstream story. Less than 2% of the solid waste stream is post-consumer.* All that stuff that ends up in a landfill was quarried, mined, logged, drilled, grown and harvested, or bred and fattenend, shipped somewhere, refined or slaughtered or siloed, shipped, manufactured, shipped, packaged, shipped, warehoused, and shipped again on its way to your local retailer and, sooner or later, a landfill. Figure that for everything you throw away, 50-75 times--not percent, times--as much solid waste (read: land, soil nutrients, and raw materials rendered more or less permanently useless) is committed before you see something on the shelf. And that's not counting air and water pollution caused, water used, or fuel burned in the extraction, refinement, and transportation process.

Another important factor in recycling: materials returned for recycling don't actually get recycled unless it is cost-effective for the industry to do so, i.e. cheaper (in $) than extracting new materials and marketable as new products. Recycling almost always saves significant amounts primary resources and energy (especially in the case of glass and metal) but does not always save the manufacturer money. Newly extracted energy and raw materials are cheap in $ because ecological and social costs (arable land lost, habitat destroyed, air and water polluted, illness caused, communities displaced) are not figured in to the sticker price of extraction. Neither is disposal.

Even recycling, though much preferable to not recycling, takes up some amount of land, water, fuel, and raw materials for the bins, vehicles, machines, and factories. So think before you buy that container. Especially if it's plastic. The recycling record on glass, metal, paper, and cardboard is much better than that of plastic.

Would we think differently about garbage if everything we wasted had to remain in our home state? Our city limits? Our backyard? What if we had to pay by the pound for our permanent trash? Since money is a temporary and relative social construct while the health of the ecosphere is a concrete condition upon which all life and health depends, is it even possible to put a meaningful $ value on how our current consuming-and-wasting system affects what we leave, or don't leave, to the generations who will have to live with our mess?

The good news is that society finally seems to be catching on and starting to facilitate certain environmentally responsible habits. But we have a long way to go. We would do well to realize that the transition to a sustainable society is not going to be easy or convenient, and that 'going green' is less about fancy engineering and buying things with the right sticker, and more about not buying stuff, not using energy, disciplining ourselves to do without, and gaining the skills and tools to provide for ourselves close to home.

*Similar figures in both For the Beauty of the Earth by Steven Bouma-Prediger and "The Story of Stuff" online short film, see link at right.

Poem: The Future

2009-04-22T22:08:00.003-07:00

by Wendell Berry in Given: Poems (2005):

For God's sake, be done
with this jabber of "a better world."
What blasphemy! No "futuristic"
twit or child thereof ever
in embodied light will see
a better world than this, though they
foretell inevitably a worse.
Do something! Go cut the weeds
beside the oblivious road. Pick up
the cans and bottles, old tires,
and dead predictions. No future
can be stuffed into this presence
except by being dead. The day is
clear and bright, and overhead
the sun not yet half finished
with his daily praise.

Quotable: Time and Eternity

2009-03-22T21:24:00.005-07:00

I haven't read this book, but I think I might need to get around to it someday soon. My dear friend Abby hand-copied this for me onto a piece of green stationery and gave it to me one day when I was needing some encouragement and perspective. I still have the piece of paper about 5 years and 10 relocations later. I keep it posted or tucked somewhere in my room where I will run across it occasionally. It never fails to cheer me up, both because of what it says and because it reminds me of Abby's kindness and humor and our good days together in Decorah, IA.

" . . . and I really believe that the Irish are the least anxious people in the world. There is no secret either to this absence of anxiety on their part. It lies in the realization that man lives in eternity, and time therefore is an illusion which is not to be taken seriously. Time and eternity are, of course, the opposites of each other, so if you believe in one you cannot take the other seriously. Not taking time seriously dissolves the greater portion of frets and worries in this world. I recommend the attitude if you are harassed in your daily life."

- Leonard Wibberly in The Shannon Sailors

Related lovely thoughts from Story People artwork, another good thing from Decorah:

"Everything changed the day she realized there was just enough time for the important things in her life."

"Most people don't realize there are angels whose only job is to make sure you don't get too comfortable & fall asleep & miss your life."

I Might Be Irish

2009-03-17T13:12:00.017-07:00

Lately I have been musing and sometimes angsting about the absurdity of human history and its corollary, the astounding propensity of human stupidity to trump human intelligence. Most of what happens you would not believe if someone made it up. "Truth is stranger than fiction," indeed. And I'm not sure what is worse--what happens by accident, or what people do on purpose fully convinced that it is a good idea. Considering our collective record and the staggering variety of what could go wrong, it's really a wonder that things 'work' as well and as often as they do. This is a large part of why I believe in Providence. Left to our own devices without benevolent nudges from the Spirit, we myopic, haphazard, and flighty humans would really make a mess of things. Often, the main difference between full-grown people and toddlers is that we have more practice being obstinate and making up (and believing) our explanations for our behavior.

It is absurd but also interesting that 3rd- or 4th- generation Americans still say "I'm (insert nationality here)" when we were born in the U.S., don't speak the language in question, more often than not have never visited (much less lived in) the place(s) of our ancestry, and may not know or even know of any relatives still living there. Fewer and fewer Americans can claim a hometown or home state, but we can tell you precisely what % of our gene pool came from which nation-state 100-200 years ago. I wonder if this is partly due to the fact that what it means to be 'American' carries such different connotations for different people, amongst ourselves Stateside but especially in relation to those who are actually from other places and still live there.

For some, U.S. citizenship is a hard-won privilege, for some it is grounds for unqualified entitlement, arrogance, and bigotry, for some it inspires sincere and humble if provincial filial pride, and for others it causes considerable conflictedness, embarrassment, guilt, and shame. The main thing we have in common here is displacement, and that doesn't make for much of an identity. So we tend to identify with an idealised, neutral, nostalgically tidy version of our pre-American heritage. Unless we are recently displaced from a heritage that we would rather forget or that divides us from our neighbors against our will. Then we do everything we can to erase the native identity and assimilate to whatever flavor of American-ness we think will serve us best.

We humans have a need to belong to something and come from somewhere. We want both something that makes us different from others and something that makes us the same. And so often we settle for the idea of connections or distinctions rather than going to the trouble of actually establishing and maintaining them. Strange creatures.

It's St. Patrick's Day. For some reason, this is a national holiday in a country that used to cruelly discriminate against Irish immigrants and before that was colonized by and then declared itself independent from an empire whose abuses arguably drove many of the Irish immigrants here where "all men are created equal" unless of course you happen to have been displaced due to imperial machinations (or agricultural fiascoes or a combination of the two) more recently than your neighbors. Forgetfulness does have some advantages, I suppose, as so many of us can cheerfully assert our ancestry percentages without a thought for how we and the people with whom we choose to identify have been the causes or the victims of displacement, or both. Besides being entirely or selectively oblivious to history, most of us 21st century Americans don't pay any homage to saints or the Catholic church or have any sort of association with Ireland. An embarrassing percentage of us couldn't even find the country on the map. But it's St. Patrick's Day. So we will wear green shirts and shamrock pins to work or school, and decorate with rainbows and leprechauns and maybe (if we know how to cook) prepare some corned beef and cabbage for the occasion. If nothing else, who doesn't like an excuse to drink beer?

Yesterday I was subbing as an aide in a classroom for developmentally delayed 3rd-and-4th graders. Some of the children were mostly or totally non-verbal so I could only conjecture what they were thinking and feeling as I sat and helped them glue bits of green and yellow construction paper to prefab paper shamrocks that were going to be hung around their classroom the next day. This is just the way things are. This is just what people do. I wonder a lot about that--how we come by our notions of 'the way things are' and 'what people do'. Everything we take for granted about the universe, every perception, every skill, every story, every habit, was new to us at some point.

I love to hear how kids explain what they or adults are doing, and I love it when they do or ask things that make me see the world in a way I hadn't before, or at least not in a while. Sometimes, among the little ones, I think that as a sub I am seen more as the new kid than as a teacher, maybe because I tend to be taking rather than giving instructions and I have to ask them questions about how things are done. Never mind that I am twice their height. The other day, a friendly child making conversation during coloring time asked me, "Do you know how to count?" "Yes," said I. Then he drew some circles, gently instructed me to count them, and when I had done so correctly he approved of the effort in a brilliant caricature of a benevolent-authority-figure voice. So funny. I suppose that if as a child you think of yourself as a complete person (why wouldn't you, unless you had been treated otherwise?) and spend most of your days being made aware of things you didn't know before, you would suppose that this is also true for other people, regardless of how tall they are. I wasn't there when he learned how to count. So the question was perfectly fair.

Most children are more interesting, more alive, than so-called adults whose ideas of "how things are" have ossified to the point that they no longer ask questions or entertain new experiences with wonder and surprise. It makes me sad when I meet kids who are already 'old' in this regard. Bored and suspicious and dogmatic, no curiosity, not wanting to see, or to know, or to befriend, or to try. What makes us conclude that we have nothing to learn that is worth learning, or that we are worth any more or less than anyone else? What makes us take so seriously our version of the story about our piddly fragment of space and time while regarding the glorious improbability of life and the world and other beings so carelessly?

I claim and engage my Swedish heritage almost exclusively, though I have only one 2nd-generation Swedish grandparent on each side. But I might be Irish. I have green eyes, auburn hair, and some freckles. I sunburn quickly and tan slowly. To the best of my knowledge my ancestry is 3/4 Nordic and 1/4 British. Considering the, er, 'cultural exchange' that took place as a result of Viking exploits ca. 1,000 years ago, and what with the raids, occupations, and border wars that went on across Scandinavia and various islands to the west all the way into the 20th century, there is a good chance that I come by Irish blood from several directions.

Potatoes came to Ireland, and to Sweden, from Peru and Chile, where they and the Inca civilization that developed them were 'discovered' in the 16th century by Spaniards hungry for gold. U.S. residents now eat more processed potato than any other vegetable, though only a tiny fraction of the thousands of varieties cultivated in Patagonia are produced here on a commercial scale. At 46% fried potatoes account for almost as much of our diet as all other vegetables combined. (Corn counts as a grain, not as a vegetable.) Processed tomato and iceberg lettuce are the runners-up. Read some fascinating potato-related history, legend, superstition, and literary quotations here.

If disaster were to befall the United States tonight and freeze this moment for posterity, or an alien species invade, would outside observers conclude that we worshipped clover, rainbows, and leprechauns based on the ubiquitous presence of shamrocks and related paraphernalia in our public school classrooms? And what will archaeologists two thousand years hence say about what they find in our cupboards, refrigerators, and grocery stores? Strange creatures.

Are you Irish?

Quotable: The Backdrop

2009-03-07T11:56:00.003-08:00

By Annie Dillard in The Maytrees, a novel. Her Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is one of my all-time favorites. It's an unusual memoir in that it is not 'about' her but concerned almost entirely with her passionate observer's encounter with the mystery and significance of life's intricacies that most humans tend to overlook. (And are therefore, in my opinion, missing out.) I didn't realize she wrote fiction as well. Good stuff.

From the first few pages:
"The Maytrees' lives, like the Nausets',* played out before the backdrop of fixed stars. The way of the world could be slight, then and now, but rarely, among individuals, vicious. The slow heavens marked hours. They lived often outside. They drew every breath from a wad of air just then crossing from saltwater to saltwater. Their sandspit was a naked strand between two immensities, both given to special effects. Twice a day behind their house the tide boarded the sand. Four times a year the seasons flopped over. Clams live like this, but without so much reading."

* The Nausets are a Native American people who used to live on Cape Cod where the story takes place.

From the last few pages:
"In her last years Lou puzzled over beauty, over the tide slacked holding its breath at the flood. She never knew what to make of it. Certainly nothing in Darwin, in chemical evolution, in optics or psychology or even cognitive anthropology gave it a shot. Having limited philosophy's objects to certainties, Wittgenstein later realized he broke, in however true a cause, his favorite toy, metaphysics, by forbidding it to enter anywhere interesting. For the balance of Wittgenstein's life he studied, of all things, religions. Philosophy, Lou thought and so did Cornelius, had trivialized itself right out of the ballpark."

Poem: Blueberry Girl

2009-03-01T16:53:00.002-08:00

Quotable: The Play World

2009-02-25T16:34:00.004-08:00

From The Silver Chair by C.S. Lewis. Puddleglum speaking to the Queen of Underland:
"One word, Ma'am," he said, coming back from the fire; limping, because of the pain. "One word. All you've been saying is quite right, I shouldn't wonder. I'm a chap who always liked to know the worst and then put the best face I can on it. So I won't deny any of what you said. But there's one thing more to be said, even so. Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things--trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one. And that's a funny thing, when you come to think of it. We're just babies making up a game, if you're right. But four babies playing a game can make a play-world which licks your real world hollow. That's why I'm going to stand by the play world. I'm on Aslan's side even if there isn't any Aslan to lead it. I'm going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn't any Narnia. So, thanking you kindly for our supper, if these two gentlemen and the young lady are ready, we're leaving your court at once and setting out in the dark to spend our lives looking for Overland. Not that our lives will be very long, I should think; but that's small loss if the world's as dull a place as you say."

Quotable: Why We Are Here

2009-02-17T20:38:00.002-08:00

"There are things you do because they feel right & they may make no sense & they may make no money & it may be the reason why we are here: to love each other & to eat each other's cooking & say it was good."

- Brian Andreas of Story People

Bah, humbug!

2009-02-14T09:31:00.002-08:00

Quotable: Give or Take

2009-02-13T16:33:00.008-08:00

"Foreign Aid is the process by which poor people in rich countries give money to rich people in poor countries."

- Peter Bauer

Found on Blessed Economist, a blog to which my mom alerted me this afternoon. Worth reading.

However, regarding today's post on said blog: I'm not sure I entirely agree with his theology of work and vocation, as Kingdom is a matter of citizenship and we are never off-duty for that. We don't punch out of our identity as children of God when we go on the clock for our paying gigs. Christians would do well to remember that. Too often we allow The Economy to be the primary gauge of the worth of our work and the worth of our personhood. We evaluate ourselves and our neighbors by its idolatrous standards of success and failure. We denigrate and underpay the most wholesome and necessary of labor - growing and preparing food, child-raising, keeping a home, caring for the sick, making clothes - while glorifying activities of questionable usefulness and integrity.

I would argue that how one conducts one's paid employment always has Kingdom implications. Seldom do profitability and competitiveness coexist peaceably with truth, wisdom, and compassion. As long as we live in a broken world, compromise is inevitable and there is always need for grace. Grace, however, is not license to carelessness. With due acknowledgement of systemic evil and the pervasiveness of moral ambiguity involved in 'just doing my job' and 'just getting by,' "The Invisible Hand Made Me Do It" does not make for a very good ethic. What we sell (our time and talent, the 'information' we propagate, the upstream and downstream physical effects of our 'products') and what we buy (where it came from, who made it, what was done to them, what was done to the earth that is ours on loan from our children) are matters of love and justice.

"Eternal significance" is a meaningless abstraction if spiritual work has no impact on our conduct in 'temporary' things. Incarnation happened for a reason. Word made Flesh is what Christianity is all about. Eternal life starts now. Creation is the medium through which God chose (and still chooses) to manifest God's love. Feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, giving the thirsty something to drink, visiting the sick and the prisoners, and caring for orphans and widows are all work of the highest "eternal significance." Kingdom ethics is not a matter of "permanent difference." It's a matter of compassion, integrity, and embodied witness. The Resurrection is the permanent difference. The world is already saved. The vocation of every Christian is to live the reconciliation and restoration for which we wait in hope. Our treatment of the Creation reflects our attitude towards the Creator. Our treatment of 'the least of these' reflects our knowledge of Christ.

If our economic activity results in wasting food (and worse, wasting land--setting our neighbors and children up to be hungry), polluting or hoarding water, making ourselves and other people sick (through malnutrition, poisoning, and stress), orphaning children and widowing women, reducing the fullness of the earth to disposable 'raw materials' (thereby making refugees of all nations and depriving millions of the opportunity for dignified wholesome work to provide for themselves and their families), how can we say that what we are doing is just a job that pays the bills and has little to no "eternal significance"?

I do second Blessed Economist's observations that vocation need not equal employment and that parish ministry is not the only 'calling'. The church is called to be the Body of Christ and to minister to the world as such. Pastors should be there to instruct and encourage us in our collective and particular vocations. Churchgoers abuse pastors when they outsource all of the church's (Body's!) functions to the paid clergy and demand that a handful of appointed leaders minister to them. Religion as such is just one more lifeless consumer commodity. Church, properly understood, is not merely a set of programs we attend and (sometimes) financially underwrite. It is who we are.

Song: ABC . . . Cookie Monster!

2009-02-10T08:21:00.002-08:00

This'll cure whatever ails you. Pretty much.

Citizenship, Part II

2009-01-24T15:10:00.004-08:00

The point of the previous entry is not that I think there is no hope for my country. The point is that Obama, as wise and good as I believe him to be (especially as politicians go), is not the Messiah. The point is also that along with this changing of the guard We the People need to do some serious soul-searching and changing of our own attitudes and patterns of behavior.

Looking to any human elected official to revolutionize the world, keep us free from all dangers, provide for all our needs, and eradicate all evil is naively Utopian. It is also idolatry. Similarly, blaming our political leaders for all tragedies and chronic social ills is lazy and childish, no matter how incompetent and corrupt those leaders turned out to be. Who elected them? Who looked the other way during the weeks, years, or decades leading up to the crisis of the hour? Who swallowed their lines whole and bought what they were selling and joined their crusade because it felt shiny and happy and warm and fuzzy and safe and easy and righteous and glorious at the time?

Who abdicated responsibility for the world to Uncle Sam? More than a handful of us have been mentally and physically atrophying in front of the TV, sitting holed up in the academic ivory tower knowing too much and doing too little, partying the night away in pursuit of ersatz happiness (stimulation or numbness), maxing out credit cards with fashion and gadget addictions, obsessing over image and spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each year trying to 'look healthy' when we're not, succeeding in business while failing at human decency, and confusing the idyllic white picket fence and weed-free lawn with goodness.

We the People have somehow degenerated into a kind of collective Emo brat. We smugly or sulkily assert our deservingness, demonize or ostracize anyone who won't coddle us while we lick our wounds, and resent the suggestion that we take any responsibility for our own character or lack thereof. Instead of reveling in chronic adolescence, whining about how rough we've got it, and running to the pharmacy whenever something isn't working right, Americans need to be growing up and showing up in their own lives by putting their money where their mouth is, reading news that might (gasp!) make them think or tell them something they don't want to hear, writing letters to their senators, getting their hands dirty cleaning up their own mess or someone else's, and otherwise doing real work (not just pushing paper and buttons) to make the world a better place for their neighbors and children.

Yeah, we were all born into a broken system and we've all been lied to, but we've also gone along with it when we've know better and chosen comfort and ignorance over conscience and effort time and time again. Nobody's clean.

One can't say with any integrity that one 'values' something unless it is reflected in the way one lives and the possibilities that one extends to others. Politics is, or should be, so much more than cheering or sneering the pre-formulated soundbytes of one's ideological camp. Politics means everything about the ordering and governance of human society. Citizenship is so much more than voting. It is the way one occupies the world to which one belongs and carries out one's responsibilities in that world.

A good way to start is to take a hard look at our place in human history and proceed with more humility--and, where appropriate, repentance--when we speak about where we come from, what we are doing, and where we are headed. U.S. citizenship is not proof of superior humanity, license to indulge oneself at others' expense, or grounds for preferential entitlement to peace, prosperity, and security. It is quite possible, the best efforts of Obama and friends notwithstanding, that in a few years U.S. citizenship will not be an asset at all.

Someday the sun will set on the Almighty Dollar, which for anyone currently on the winning side of the stars and stripes is an inconvenient truth to say the least. Get used to it, darlin'. Empires fall. And lots of people are out of luck. And there is considerable misery and chaos for awhile. And lots of other people are better off. And life goes on.

So choose this day whom you will serve. Choose this day where you will place your hope.

Forgive us, Father, for we know not what we do. God bless everyone. God have mercy on America.

Quotable: Citizenship

2009-01-22T15:59:00.011-08:00

By Jay Phelan, President of North Park Theological Seminary in Chicago, in his weekly letter to the community:

"Christians live between Romans 13 and Revelation 13—between the powers that be, ordained of God, and the beast rising out of the sea—between the state punishing evildoers and the state persecuting the saints. Christians neither wholly affirm nor wholly condemn the state. We can and should love our countries and cultures for the good they can offer the world. But we are also called to prophetic witness when the state is oppressive and destructive and when it claims loyalties that it is not due. And we are always called to a loyalty to the community composed of every nation, tribe, and tongue—the Church of Jesus Christ. We live as outposts of God’s kingdom, sacraments of that coming new heavens and new earth. As much as we can we live out that kingdom life, that Kingdom of God, in the midst of a brittle human community. In all of this we seek the good of all God’s people, all God’s creation and every nation of the world."

Tuesday's inauguration ceremony was beautiful, marking a triumph of love, courage, solidarity, and justice over not just 8 years but centuries of hatred, fear, alienation, and oppression. A redemption, indeed, but not the Resurrection and not the Restoration in which we as citizens of God's kingdom place our hope.

We are the Empire, my friends. The United States of America was founded not purely on ideals of human equality (at the time 'men created equal' applied only to white European males who could afford/invade and defend land) but on the genocide of Native Americans and the slavery of millions of Africans. Obama moves into a mansion built by the hands of slaves, children of God kidnapped from their homes, reduced to property in the eyes of their 'owners', and forced to sweat and bleed so that others could live in luxury and idleness. No Northern smugness, please; Yankee factory owners got rich on cheap cotton from the South and many of our ancestors dressed much better than they could have if the shirts on their backs had not been subsidized by stolen human lives.

Let's not forget that it took the stubborn, blind, anemic hearts of this nation's privileged class a whole century to get from abolishing the legal 'right' to buy and sell people to establishing some basic laws asserting that all people ought to be treated as such. And fifty years later we have quite a long way to go. A few years ago at camp, I was giving a little girl a piggyback ride and she said, "You don't act like white folks. I like you." After only 8 or 9 years of life in this world (specifically the unofficial apartheid of inner city Gary, Indiana) she understood already that she is less welcome here due to the color of her skin. What kind of a childhood is that? 'Created equal' remains a noble but hollow sentiment as long as pigmentation and birthplace (neighborhood or nation) stack the deck against most of the residents of this planet. For every disadvantaged child who beats the odds and makes it big, there are millions who barely get by (no matter how hard they work) and thousands who don't make it at all.

Let's also not forget that 2,000 years ago the cross was an instrument of torture and the ultimate symbol of imperial oppression. Rome has the final say on life and death, y'all. Don't mess with Texas. Caesar is Lord, it doesn't get better than the Pax Romana, and anybody who begs to differ has an ugly, slow, painful death waiting for them, right in public view.

But the tomb was empty, Life had the last word, and the cross became a symbol of hope instead!

However, human history stayed messy and somewhere between Constantine and Christopher Columbus the cross started being used in ugly ways again. Christendom's global expansion agenda has hardly been an unqualified good. Gold and glory for us; grief and poverty for you. Jesus loves you, but our guns are bigger and we have our nation's treasury and our own wallets to think about. Business is business. And besides, who needs neighbors when they're taking up space on perfectly good land that could be put to much better use dismembered as raw materials for factories and paved with sugarcane, bananas, coffee, cattle, and tobacco for the good, more deserving Christian white folks to buy? It doesn't get better than the Pax Americana.

(This story, too, is far from over. Open an atlas sometime and look at all the cute, tidy little symbols depicting what each country 'exports'. Then wonder to yourself what that land looks like now, who used to live there, what happened to them, and whether they were entirely willing and eager to part with what the Invisible Hand in its infinite wisdom has taken away. Next, wonder how many pieces of someone else's broken world are sitting in your refrigerator and closets or buried in a landfill somewhere, never to move through the Circle of Life again.)

Homeless? Hungry? Overworked? Underpaid? What are you complaining about? You should be grateful that we tried to 'save' you at all. God helps those who help themselves, so we help ourselves to as much as we can get our hands on. The sun never sets on the Almighty Dollar. The truth will probably get you in trouble; the Marketplace will set you free.

Quotable: History Lesson

2009-01-17T10:57:00.002-08:00

“When the missionaries came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said, 'Let us pray.' We closed our eyes. When we opened them we had the Bible and they had the land.”

- Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa

Song: Empire

2009-01-08T19:24:00.003-08:00

By Dar Williams on My Better Self (2005):
Who's afraid of the sun
Who would question the goodness of the mighty
We who banish the threat
When your little ones all go nighty nighty

Well there's no time for doubt right now
And less time to explain
So get back on your horses
Kiss my ring and join our next campaign

And the Empire grows
With the news that we're winning
With more fear to conquer
And more gold thread for spinning
Till it's bright as the sun
Shining on every one

Some would say we've forced our words
And we find that ingeniously churlish
Words are just words
Don't be so pessimistic, weak and girlish

We like strong, happy people
Who don't think there's something wrong with pride
Work makes them free
And we spread that freedom far and wide

And the Empire grows the seeds of its glory
For every five tanks
Plant a sentimental story
Till they worship the sun
Even Christ-loving ones

And we'll kill the terrorizers
And a million of their races
But when our people torture you
That's a few random cases
Don't question the sun
It doesn't help anyone

But the journalists cried out
When it was too late to stop us
Everyone had awakened
To the dream they could enter our colossus
And now I'm right, yeah, you said I'm right
There's nothing that can harm me
Cause the sun never sets on my dungeons or my army

And the Empire fell on its own splintered axis
And the Emperor wanes as the silver moon waxes
And the farmers will find old coins
In their strawberry fields
While somebody somewhere twists his ring
And someone kneels

Oh, where is the sun shining for everyone?
Where is the sun shining for everyone?

Quotable: Technical Obsession

2009-01-05T17:12:00.005-08:00

From The Brothers K (1992) by David James Duncan, a description of the inner condition of the “One-Pointed Specialist,” one who attains excellence in one discipline at great cost to one’s humanity and perhaps that of others as well. The following is Duncan’s brilliant poetization of a phenomenon also identified by Wendell Berry. In Berry’s thought, the category ‘specialist’ is a pejorative term for someone who knows (and therefore effectively cares) way too much about one thing and not nearly enough about anything else, thereby wielding immense power without reference to context, and thereby performing work that is inherently meaningless and potentially disastrous.
“That an all-consuming focus on a single object of desire could achieve a quantitatively spectacular result was no surprise to any thinking person in the early Sixties: the mushroom cloud that accompanied J. Robert Oppenheimer’s dissection of the atom was an unforgettable* demonstration of the general principle. But that the same intensity of focus which made any great quantitative achievement possible might also render it qualitatively bankrupt—that a Golden Glove MVP could accomplish a fabulous feat and end up looking, feeling, and playing, the following year, like a battle-jagged vet just back from some interior front line—this was the ‘un-American’ surprise and bitter public lesson of Roger Maris’ life.

Technical obsession is like an unlit, ever-narrowing mine shaft leading straight down through the human mind. The deeper down one plunges, the more fabulous, and often the more remunerative, the gems or ore. But the deeper down one plunges, the more confined and conditioned one’s thoughts and movements become, and the greater the danger of permanently losing one’s way back to the surface of the planet. There also seems to be an overpowering, malignant magic that reigns deep down in these shafts. And those who journey too far down or stay too long become its minions without knowing it—become not so much human beings as human tools** wielded by whatever ideology, industry, force or idea happens to rule that particular mine. Another danger: because these mines are primarily mental, not physical, they do not necessarily mar or even mark the faces of those who have become utterly lost in them. A man or woman miles down, thrall to the magic, far beyond caring about anything still occurring on the planet’s surface, can sit down beside you on a park bench or bleacher seat, greet you in the street, shake your hand, look you in the eye, smile genially, say ‘How are you?’ or ‘Merry Christmas!’ or ‘How about those Yankees?’ And you will never suspect that you are in the presence not of a kindred spirit, but of a subterranean force.”

Editorial commentary:
*One might question whether it was sufficiently unforgettable. We don’t seem to have learned our lesson yet.
**’Human resources,’ perhaps? Or, as the new industry lingo would have it—I kid you not, I took a graduate course in HR—‘human capital’?

Quotable: Coauthorship and Affirmation of this Life

2009-01-01T14:03:00.003-08:00

From Norman Wirzba's introduction to The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry (2002):
"Though more of us than ever before live a life of luxury and ease, fewer of us can claim that our lives are permeated with peace and joy. The frantic, stressful striving going on all around us indicates that we are profoundly lost. We seem unable to ask with any seriousness or depth the question of what all our striving is ultimately for.

Where can we turn for help and direction? In the same essay ["A Native Hill" (1969)] Berry concluded that the source of help cannot come from within ourselves for 'it is not from ourselves that we will learn to be better than we are.' The path towards wholeness depends on our discovery and acknowledgement of, and then response to, a greater goodness that contextualizes us. Our fundamental mistake is that we have presumed to be the authors of ourselves and our destinies, and thus have forgotten or denied that we are part of 'a great coauthorship in which we are all collaborating with God and with nature in the making of ourselves and one another.' We can only become what we truly are by acknowledging that we do not exist by, from, and for ourselves. Our lives are always rooted in a natural and cultural community, so that to cut ourselves off from these roots, whether that be in the name of progress or human liberation, is to ensure the eventual withering and then death of life. Once we have forgotten or denied our biological kinship with the earth and its inhabitants, it is hardly an accident that so much of human spiritual life is premised on an escape from rather than an affirmation of this life."

P.S. Watch WALL-E. Like any good prophecy, it is a distressingly incisive but still hopeful portrayal of the threshold on which we stand, and a striking wake-up call to the choices and consequences we face--not 100 or 1,000 years in the future, but NOW. Much worse off and no better prepared than we were 40 years ago when "A Native Hill" was written, will we have the wisdom to look to the sources (esp. the Source) that can help us "learn to be better than we are" and the courage to respond in time to avert (or at least mitigate) the (un)natural logical outcomes of industrial globalization and 21st-century consumer culture?

Quotable: Trust

2008-12-27T10:51:00.004-08:00

From the novel Remembering by Wendell Berry:
"And it required trust. He sees it now. What he and Flora have made of the Hartford place has depended all on trust. They have not made it what it might be - how many lives will it require for that? - but they have made it far more than what it was when they came to it. In twelve years they have given it a use and a life; a beauty has come to it that is its answer to their love for it and their work; and it has given them a life that belonged to them even before they knew they wanted it. And all has depended on trust. How could he have forgotten?

His life has never rested on anything he has known beforehand - none of it. He chose it before he knew it, and again afterwards. And then he failed his trust and his choice, and now has chosen again, again on trust. He has made again the choice he has made before, as blindly as before. How could he have thought that it would be different? How could he have imagined that he might ever know enough to choose? As Flora has seemed to have known and never doubted, as he sees, one
cannot know enough to trust. To trust is simply to give oneself; the giving is for the future, for which there is no evidence. And once given, the self cannot be taken back, whatever the evidence."

Winter Waking

2008-12-21T14:23:00.009-08:00

Oh
If one will only watch the world
While it is sleeping
One will never run out of poetry

And oh
If one will only listen well
To snowflakes and starlight
One will never run out of music

The Wonder of Creation

2008-12-18T18:59:00.003-08:00

The Wonder of Creation is a great new resource covering theology, philosophy, poetry, history, narrative, education, and devotional material related to delight in and stewardship of nature. Blog author Dean Ohlman is, among other things, a retired English teacher, professional writer, and avid outdoorsman. He offers quotations from and reflections on the work of various excellent thinkers (recent posts include classics John Muir, Robert Frost, and Jacques Ellul) and reviews of new books and films.

Highlight: Ohlman has developed a teaching tool on The Biblical Worldview, including general vs. special revelation, with a Peaceable Kingdom ethics focus. You can see the Power Point slideshow online, or contact Ohlman to request a copy of it and a Word document explaining his rationale.

Song: One Woman and a Shovel

2008-12-14T20:51:00.003-08:00

Love it! Carrie Newcomer is my favorite music artist lately.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HwdPVWpQmDk

CSI: The Planet

2008-12-13T20:35:00.009-08:00

Exhibit A:
Wars tend to temporarily or permanently displace communities and to disrupt agriculture, resulting in crop failure and loss of livestock. Violent conflict leads to famine, disease, depopulation of arable land, migration to cities (where people survive by menial service jobs, sweatshop factory labor, prostitution, crime, dump-diving, or begging), indefinite containment in refugee camps, and mass flight across national borders in search of a livable life. Abject poverty, desperation, and displacement lead to more violent conflict. Even wars divided along ethic lines arguably come down to political and economic disputes over control of dwindling resources.

Exhibit B:
Some weapons of war, e.g. cluster bombs and land mines, remain live in the forests and fields for decades after a conflict, so returning to work the land means to risk losing life, limb, and eyesight. Thousands of acres of arable land in Third World countries have been lost to munitions manufactured and supplied, if not directly deployed, by First World countries. Additionally, depleted uranium (a ‘dirty’ byproduct of nuclear energy) is used by the U.S. and U.K. militaries to harden metal in both vehicles and ammunition, gets embedded in the ground, buildings, and sometimes people when used as directed, and remains active for decades if not millennia, causing radiation poisoning in any living thing exposed to it. Unpleasant side effects include higher rates of cancer, leukemia, birth defects, mental illness, and the development of ‘biological deserts’ (areas that cannot support life for reasons other than inadequate rainfall). Iraq, among other places, is now littered with literally tons of this stuff.

Incidentally, the United States refuses to sign an international treaty that would make cluster bombs, land mines, and depleted uranium illegal even though most other countries have chosen to ban them. It also refuses to acknowledge the International Criminal Court (ICC) established to allow for the persecution of human rights violations committed by citizens of member countries while on the soil of other member countries.

Exhibit C:
Effectively all of the weapons in Africa (I believe South Africa is the only exception, manufacturing some of its own) and most of the weapons in South America are supplied by First World countries—sometimes sold officially, sometimes on the black market, sometimes donated as foreign aid. The overwhelming majority of weapons exports (not counting weapons manufactured for use by each nation’s own military— just exports) come from the 5 nations that hold permanent seats and veto power on the UN Security Council: the United States (1st in world at 38%), Russia (2nd at 19% ), France (3rd at 10%), United Kingdom (4th at 8% ), China (5th at 4%). More than half of these weapons are imported by ‘developing’ countries. (Figures from globalissues.org for total exports 2000-2007 measured in U.S. dollars and reflecting only official trade agreements; actual volume of weapons adjusted for taxpayer-subsidized discount rates, donations, and black market sales not reflected here. By some counts, the U.S. is responsible for closer to 50% of the weapons sold abroad in the past decade. Relative shares of the weapons market are constantly changing. Russia’s exports have doubled since 2000, bringing it closer to even with the U.S., and Israel may now be outpacing China.)

Incidentally, the U.S. spends over 20% of its federal budget on its own military and homeland security, and less than 1% on foreign aid (much of which is still military in nature, i.e. personnel deployed and weapons donated or subsidized rather than sold at defense contractor sticker price). U.S. humanitarian (non-military) foreign aid is the least of any industrialized nation. This reality is at a bit of a variance from public perception. Multiple surveys show that U.S. citizens guess on average that foreign aid accounts for more than 20% of the budget. What’s not to love?

Exhibit D:
Almost all of the wealth—minerals (decorative or instrumental), fossil fuel, lumber, coffee, and chocolate—extracted from Africa goes into products that will never be bought by Africans. Though many industries do ‘create jobs’ for Africans (usually in deplorable working conditions at sub-living wages), the extraction process profits primarily the multinational corporations that do the extracting. Much of the food grown in South America comes from vast ranches and plantations controlled by the aristocracy (made possible by the underpaid labor of the people who used to live on the land growing food for themselves), and goes to feed people who do not live in South America, mainly profiting multinational corporations and commodities traders. Much of the factory or cottage industry labor in Asia goes to assembling (and disassembling) electronics, sewing or otherwise fabricating clothing and shoes, molding and packaging plastic items of variable quality and usefulness, harvesting tea and spices, processing and wrapping chocolate and other candies, and handcrafting fireworks; only a small fraction of any of these products will be purchased and used in Asia.

Exhibit E:
In Africa, South America, and Asia as elsewhere, the ‘development’ of land and ‘progress’ of industrialization displaces whole communities and poisons or depletes the commonwealth—water, soil fertility, and forests (needed for meat, fruit, nuts, greens, medicinal plants, shelter, and fuel). Native skills for hunting, gathering, and farming are lost, families are torn apart, and people are homeless and hungry. The First World can then generously step in to offer food (surplus yields from subsidized commodity crops) and other forms of foreign aid (incl. weapons and military training) with which either the ruling party or rebel militias (depending on political alignments of the moment) can discourage poor citizens from establishing stable communities that might prosper independently, thereby reinforcing Third World dependence on First World approval. The supply of humanitarian and military foreign aid is of course conditional on enterprises from the benefactor nation being allowed unconditional access to conduct ‘free trade’ with what is left of the beneficiary nation’s resources.

Does this sound fishy to anybody else? Can anyone spot the potential conflict of interest in the world police-and-welfare state of 21st century globalization? Why do they hate us?

Quotable: Live Without Explanation

2008-11-26T18:07:00.014-08:00

Found in a blog post entitled "Grief, Faith, and Friendship" from The Other Journal. From Christianity, Democracy, and The Radical Ordinary by Romand Coles and Stanley Hauerwas:

"Crucial for me is the presumption that the gospel is a story meant to train us to live without explanation. Explanation presumes that if I can just account for why what happened did happen, then I will be able to live with what has happened… I think Christianity is the training for learning how to live without being in control: you learn to live in the silences, and you learn what the politics* of living in the silences might look like… But to learn patiently in a world where you have no answers, it seems to me, gives you political alternatives that otherwise would not exist—through hope… I assume that God will show up in all different kinds of ways. That’s how I try to conceive of what it means to live hopefully without explanation. You don’t try to explain the death of a child. That will kill you. That will kill you."

I exert so much energy asking "Why?" and trying to fix things or heal things. I am a compulsive systems thinker and an omnivoracious reader, so accounting for 'why' is not usually the problem, at least not on a practical level. The problem is that the answers I find are often harder to live with than the initial questions. There's no good reason for famine, for AIDS, for slavery, for poisoned water and air, for food and medicine that sicken rather than nourishing and healing, for a financial system that gives bailouts to bankers while honest people who have worked all their lives lose their homes and land, for expensive machines engineered specifically to kill people who can't fight back. There's just no good reason. Though I could run my mouth for hours about any of the above, the practical explanation demands an existential explanation that eludes human understanding. Take a shot at the existential explanations and you've got two destinations that I can see: mystery (which is another word for faith) or despair.

I am getting better at letting go and at living with unknowns and ambiguity, though if you know me or read this blog very often you know that my morbid curiosity is alive and kicking and I'm still plenty fond of trying to explain. When I forget for even a few minutes that I'm just one small creature, not God, and therefore have no business trying to get my head around the universe, the want of explanation starts tearing me apart. Coles and Hauerwas are right. It will kill you.

Striving is not all bad—I believe that as creatures we are all here to serve a purpose and to do good work with the time, energy, and capacities that are given to us. Fixing and healing is part of that, as is being lovingly present with others in their explanationless grief and unanswerable 'whys,' not turning our back or averting our eyes having concluded ahead of time that God will not show up. Grieving is not all bad, either. If you are alive and paying any amount of attention, you are aware that there are good reasons to grieve. Absence of grief is probably an indication of denial, apathy, or hate, and I'm pretty sure those things are all bad. Faith and love require grieving for the things that grieve God and grieving alongside those God loves, which is everybody.

Hope is not naive optimism or happiness that depends on earplugs and blinders to shut out our neighbors' cries. Hope means standing up in the dark, broken world and proclaiming, "There is something more!" Hope means looking at the world's casualties and certified lost causes, imagining what could happen with a little grace, and rolling up our sleeves to pitch in. Hope means telling resignation to shut up because some of us are trying to make life worth living here. Hope means deciding that even though you can't feed all the children or save all the trees or stop all the wars, you can make a difference for that one, or those two, or three. "Hope," as I wrote in an essay awhile ago, "means living like the Resurrection is true." (I’m not sure I know what that means, either. But I believe it with all of my heart. Most days.)

Since tomorrow is Thanksgiving, gratitude also deserves a mention. On the positive side of 'why', "Why anything?" Why life? Why love? Why friends? Why babies? Why light? Why color? Why flavor? Why beauty? Why music? Why flowers? Why sunsets? Why fire? Why stars? (I could also give you a technical explanation for most of those, which would be missing the point of them entirely.) If there's no reason for anything, and no Reason behind everything that is, why is there so much good? And why does it hurt so much when the good things of this world get damaged or taken away from us? Just as there are always good reasons to grieve, there are always good reasons to celebrate. What are you grateful for? Do you take time to delight in those things often enough? Who are you grateful for? Do you tell them so? Often enough?

Tomorrow as you gather around the table, take** a few moments to grieve with those whose tables are empty or who have empty places at the table. Take the rest of the day to celebrate the abundant goodness that is given to us not by any nation-state or because we deserve it, but by the mystery of provision through the goodness of God's creation. Celebrate and hope.

Endnotes:
*'Politics' as Hauerwas and others use the term means a lot more than American presidential elections and red-state/blue-state ideological categories. Politics in this sense includes anything having to do with the ordering and governance of human society, from friendships and households to local churches to the nation-state to the whole planet.

**With all due gratitude for the rich vocabulary of my native language, I am becoming increasingly dissatisfied with the selection of verbs relating to time. 'Taking', 'making', 'spending', 'managing', and 'saving' none feel right.

Thanksgiving Prayer

2008-11-17T12:22:00.002-08:00

God our Provider,

The abundance we are born to is both a great gift and a sobering responsibility. In your mercy, grant us the ability to be grateful but not complacent. May our consciences be troubled by the ways in which our actions and inactions contribute to the suffering of others. May we have reverent compassion for all of humanity regardless of nationality or station in life, as we are all made from the same dust and even 'the least of these' bears the image of God. May we learn how to better hold our possessions lightly, give generously of our time, humbly understand our place in the unfolding story of the Kingdom, and steward God's good creation on behalf of all life. May we use our privilege and opportunities as means of blessing others rather than to serve ourselves.

Amen.

The Emperor is Naked: An Exposé

2008-11-08T15:01:00.005-08:00

If you have taken an economics class, you may remember that there are forces called supply and demand, that one of these drives the other (economists disagree as to which—hence classical supply-side economics and Keynesian demand-side),* that the collective free will of rational people acting in self-interest is sufficient (even ideal) regulation of market forces, that left mostly to its own devices the economy will keep growing indefinitely, and that the distribution of resources resulting from this arrangement (a.k.a. The Invisible Hand of the Marketplace) is the best possible scenario for the well-being of the human race. This is how capitalism works.

But does capitalism work? Really? If by ‘working’ one means serving the purposes it claims to serve and functioning without significant glitches, supporting evidence is questionable at best. Use your own eyes and brains, people. This fancy outfit may not be quite what the tailors promised.

EARTH-SIDE ECONOMICS

Principle #1: Demand does not cause supply. You can’t buy it if it isn’t there. This is obvious.

Principle #2: Supply does not cause demand. The advertising industry, mimetic desire (formation by imitation), and bodily appetites (healthy and otherwise) do that. ‘Growing’ demand requires cultivating consumer insecurity and dissatisfaction or encouraging helpless dependence on manufactured conveniences or counterfeits for the meeting of legitimate needs. This is deplorable.

Principle #3: Demand is not the same thing as need (or even want). Both need and want become ‘demand’ only when they have buying power (money or credit) to back them up. If you don't have buying power, you don't get to demand anything. And most consumers demand (read: buy) things they don’t need (and really, let’s be honest, often don’t want—how big is your storage space? when is the last time you used that?). Then they neglect to demand what they do need and want (‘demand’ requires putting your money where your mouth is—remember, in this system what you buy counts infinitely more than what you say). This is absurd.

Principle #4: Capitalism’s accounting theory is bullshit.** Economic ‘growth’ measures how fast money is changing hands. Nobody is adding what of any goodness or lasting value gets created or subtracting anything, however priceless and irreplaceable, that gets destroyed. This is insane.

Principle #5: The global financial system is a pyramid scheme.*** When the source (buy-in plus buying power) dries up, the siphon fails and whoever got sucked in during the final stages comes up empty. The people at the top get away with a fortune and the people at the bottom get screwed. This is a crime.

Principle #6: Everything comes from somewhere. Wealth is not so much ‘made’ as it is taken away from someplace, rearranged, and deposited someplace else. The trade of commodities allows for a small percentage of the world’s population to control and profit from distribution of the substances on which all current and future residents of the planet depend for sustenance. (The handful of corporations dominating the food system are not so much feeding the world as they are owning the world’s food supply. And now people are working on owning the water.) Whether there will be enough tomorrow is beside the point.**** What counts, as far as the ‘owners’ are concerned, is how much something can be sold for, now. Scarcity is good for business. The less there is to go around, the better to get away with price-gouging, my dear. This is: a) waste, b) theft, and c) murder.

Principle #7: Private ownership and ‘development’ of land (or private enterprise conducted on public land) is a temporary cause of a permanent problem. Our culture deems this a legal and even sacred ‘right.’ People are financially rewarded for drastically reducing the capacity of land to offer anything of value (monetary or otherwise) to future residents. Killing individual plants and animals is not the problem here; this is natural and necessary. The real violence is breaking the circle and making it a line, killing the systems that allow for the renewal of life. (Example: 100 years ago, Africa had plenty of topsoil, forests, and clean drinking water—wells, springs, lakes, and rivers. War, famine, and disease were sporadic smash-and-grab intruders, not a tyrannical occupying force, until European colonists and post-colonial ‘globalization’ got involved and raped the continent within an inch of its life.)***** This is genocide.

Principle #8: People are not rational. Or perhaps more accurately, human reason, being limited and corrupt, allows people to rationalize all sort of things that don’t make sense. What capitalism calls ‘self-interest’ may turn out to be merely greed. If self-interest includes such things as contentment and health, not to mention survival, greed-based economics are actually counterproductive to self-interest. This is irony.

Principle #9: Progress is a myth. In the name of ‘progress’ we have built a machine that is too complicated and powerful for humans to control, and now it is running away with us. Our collective presumptuous effort to beat nature and overcome mortality has succeeded only in setting us up to succumb violently to the inexorable requirements of both. Our strength is our weakness. Our greatness is our downfall. This is tragedy.

THE MORAL OF THE STORY

Economic ‘growth’ as traditionally understood is incompatible with the health and stability of the ecosphere (i.e., the planet-wide physiology in which all biological, chemical, geological, and atmospheric systems are connected). Pursuit of the former at the expense of the latter is the ultimate example of what behavioral psychologists call ‘the error of escalating commitment’: redoubling one’s efforts at any endeavor to prove that it was never a bad idea in the first place. Humans do not have the luxury of naming the terms or the schedule on which we respond to the ecological crisis. We will learn to cooperate with the conditions for the health and survival of the systems on which we depend, or we will not survive.

The ‘health’ of the present financial system is a function of how fast the military-industrial-agribusiness-pharmaceutical-insurance-real/estate complex is running; ‘growth’ (read: running faster than it was running the previous quarter) inevitably worsens the illness and hastens the death of the planet. The Economy as we know it will stop one way or another. It remains for us to determine what sort of communities (people, relationships, and economic arrangements) will be in place when it does. The sooner we move to make substantive changes towards sustainable infrastructure, the more slowly non-renewable resources will dwindle and the more time we have to further adjust.

It would be delusionally optimistic to pretend that we can put Humpty-Dumpty back together again as if none of this had ever happened; there are deep scars that will fade only after millennia of geological activity, and some consequences (e.g. water pollution and species extinction) will remain as long as the Earth and Time endure. It is too late even to talk of turning the ship around. A good number of watch-women and -men saw the iceberg clearly in the 70’s. Some detected it sooner. They sounded the alarm. Our captains responded by not only staying the course but accelerating. Now there are a few billion steerage-class passengers locked in the hold with icewater up to their nostrils, and there may not be enough lifeboats even for the more privileged folks on board.

It’s NOT easy being ‘green.’ “Anyone who says differently is selling something.”****** I’ve been paying attention to and gradually realizing and coming to terms with this ecological crisis stuff for over half of my thirty years. I’ve known what ‘sustainable development’ was and why it mattered since the mid-90’s when I was in high school. Still, living it, putting my money where my mouth is, will require skills I don’t have and sacrifices I am not prepared to make on my own. I need help—mentors, companions, followers, friends. Any successful ecosphere triage efforts will require widespread commitment to humility, wisdom, courage, imagination, hard work, good work, goodwill, interdependence, and radical departure from comfortable conventions, maybe more than our society is prepared to muster. We don’t know for sure how or whether it will work but we must try. We are beginning to see what will happen if we don’t.

Endnotes:
* As with any good false dichotomy, the notions of supply-side and demand-side are presented as opposites and the only two alternatives, ruling out the possibility of other paradigms compared to which the asserted either/or options look like different flavors of the same thing.

** Apologies to sensitive readers. According to theological ethicist Stanley Hauerwas, in some cases ‘bullshit’ is a technical term. In this case I believe I am actually putting the matter politely.

*** Remember the Enron scandal? Putting ‘hypothetical future value’ on the books as an asset and keeping such complicated ledgers that to the untrained (or mis-trained) eye everything adds up? Lay, Skilling, and friends can’t even pride themselves on originality in fraud. Their corporation just internalized what the whole rest of The Economy already does. (Remember the Enron scandal? Haven’t we learned anything?)

**** Sure people sometimes do horrible things for cruelty’s sake alone, but in general if you want to stay on the trail of blood, just follow the money. Some guy named Jesus said that, “The love of money is the root of all kinds of evil.” Maybe he actually meant it.

***** Nowhere is it written that God loves North America more than (s)he loves any other continent. Anything that can happen anywhere can happen here.

****** The Princess Bride has an insightful if sometimes obnoxious remark for just about any occasion.

Quotable: Given Broken Blessed and Shared

2008-11-02T01:02:00.010-07:00

Highlights from my personal best-of-Wendell-Berry collection--the literary version of a deserted island mix CD. Be challenged and and moved. Peace.

__________

I think

an economy should be based

on thrift, on taking care of things, not on theft,

usury, seduction, waste, and ruin.

My purpose is a language that can make us whole,

Though mortal, ignorant, and small.

. . . We

Who do not own ourselves, being free,

own by theft what belongs to God,

to the living world, and equally

to us all.

– WB, from “Some Further Words,” Given: Poems

__________

It is not necessary to have recourse to statistics to see that the human estate is declining with the estate of nature, and that the corruption of the body is the corruption of the soul . . . And it is clear to anyone who looks carefully at any crowd that we are wasting our bodies exactly as we are wasting our land. Our bodies are fat, weak, joyless, sickly, ugly, the virtual prey of the manufacturers of medicine and cosmetics. Our bodies have become marginal; they are growing useless like our “marginal” land because we have less and less use for them. After the games and idle flourishes of modern youth, we use them only as shipping cartons to transport our brains and our few employable muscles back and forth to work.

– WB, “The Body and the Earth,” The Art of the Commonplace

__________

Out of this contempt for work arose the idea of a nigger: at first some person, and later some thing, to be used to relieve us of the burden of work. If we began by making niggers of people, we have ended by making a nigger of the world. We have taken the irreplaceable materials and energies of the world and turned them into jimcrack “labor-saving devices.” We have made of the rivers and oceans and winds niggers to carry away our refuse, which we think we are too good to dispose of decently ourselves. And in doing this to the world that is our common heritage and bond, we have returned to making niggers of people: we have become each other’s niggers.

– WB, “The Unsettling of America,” The Art of the Commonplace

__________

Having witnessed and abetted the dismemberment of the households, both human and natural, by which we have our being as creatures of God, as living souls, and having made light of the great feast and festival of Creation to which we were bidden as living souls, the modern church presumes to be able to save the soul as an eternal piece of private property. It presumes moreover to save the souls of people in other countries and religious traditions, who are often saner and more religious than we are.

– WB, “Christianity and the Survival of Creation,” The Art of the Commonplace

__________

To live, we must daily break the body and shed the blood of Creation. When we do this knowingly, lovingly, skillfully, reverently, it is a sacrament. When we do it ignorantly, greedily, clumsily, destructively, it is a desecration. In such desecration we condemn ourselves to spiritual and moral loneliness, and others to want.

– WB, “The Gift of Good Land,” The Art of the Commonplace

__________

But won’t you be ashamed

To count the passing year

At its mere cost, your debt

Inevitably paid?

For every year is costly,

As you know well. Nothing

Is given that is not

Taken, and nothing taken

That was not first a gift.

– WB, from “Sabbaths 1998:VI,” Given: Poems

Quotable: Reformation Economics

2008-10-28T19:06:00.002-07:00

Martin Luther, renowned father of Protestantism, in An Open Letter to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation (1520), quoted in George W. Forell, Faith Active in Love (1954):
"We must put a bit in the mouth of the Fuggers* and similar corporations. How is it possible that in the lifetime of a single man** such great possessions, worthy of a king, can be piled up, and yet everything be done legally and according to God's will? I am not a mathematician, but I do not understand how a man with a hundred gulden can make a profit of twenty gulden in one year, nay, how with one gulden he can make another; and that, too, by another way than agriculture or cattle-raising, in which increase of wealth depends not on human wits, but on God's blessing."

"This I know well, that it would be much more pleasing to God if we increased agriculture and diminished commerce."

Who knew Luther was an Agrarian? I like him better the more I learn. Too bad this stuff doesn't make it into Sunday School curriculum more often. The American church*** couldn't possibly be more interested in civic indoctrination than in historical veracity, could it?

And who knew that corrupt popes and medieval mob families spawned capitalism centuries before Adam Smith came along? Funny how that never came up in high school Social Studies, college History, or graduate school Economics classes. So much for modern Western society having objective, accurate, and rational explanations for the causes and origins of everything. Mythology is not dead after all.

*16th century Italian banking establishment employed by the Vatican to facilitate the sale of indulgences. During this era, the papacy "sometimes used the threat of excommunication to compel men to pay the usurious interests demanded by Italian moneylenders." - Forell
**Please excuse Luther's gender-exclusive language.
***Double entendre intended.

Always look on the bright si-ide of life . . .

2008-10-24T11:37:00.005-07:00

"When you're chewing on life's gristle
Don't grumble, give a whistle
And this'll help things turn out for the best..." *

The good news** is that if/when the Economy stops, that'll do more to slow down global warming than any policy measures undertaken thus far. So the sooner this thing tanks, the more habitable the planet will be in the long run.

I desperately wish I were making things up, but I'm pretty sure 'unsustainable' means 'can't keep going' means 'is going to stop,' and I can't help being a little surprised at how surprised most of the experts seem to be that the economy is imploding. Even the esteemed robber-baron/philanthropist Andrew Carnegie in his 1889 essay The Gospel of Wealth admitted that if capitalism ever slowed down it would fall apart, though in his colossal hubris he insisted that such a thing would never happen because in 'Progress!' through aquisition of wealth lay the destiny and salvation of the human race, and failure was unthinkable. Ever since Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations (1776), the classic apologetic for growth-based economics, capitalist fundamentalists have steadfastly held to the dogma that The Economy is Making Life Better for Everybody and Will Make Life Better-er FOR-EV-ER, despite centuries of evidence to the contrary.

"The Economy Works, d'you hear? It does not cause Problems. If it isn't working for you you're the Problem and you don't really count. If fact you deserve to be poor and you should be thankful that we deign to use your labor at all. Living wage? Hah! Do you want our shareholders to complain? What would become of our profit margins? And if you could afford Land, or, heaven forbid, acquire Capital, you wouldn't be Labor anymore and that would never do. So we have to keep you convinced that The Economy is your unqualified benefactor and you would not survive without it. Because really it (and we its Masters) could not survive without you."

Welcome to the Matrix. This is the greatest commandment: Feed all your heart, all your soul, all your mind, and all your strength to the Marketplace. It will give you in return an excess of food and trinkets, plenty of cheap entertainment and sensual pleasures, and a cleverly fabricated, comfortable illusion from which you (if you know what’s good for you) will never wake up. The second is like it: Serve yourself, use your neighbor, and once your own appetites are glutted, buy your way into Heaven with your ill-gotten wealth and garner as much self-congratulatory recognition for your ‘generosity’ as possible.

Everybody now!
"It's the end of the world as we know it
it's the end of the world as we know it
it's the end of the world as we know it
and I feel fine . . ."*
*Thanks to Monty Python and REM, respectively, for their lyrical gallows humor.
**The other, and more important, Good News is that the world is already saved.

Poetry: Re-Membering

2008-10-21T12:02:00.004-07:00

by Wendell Berry in the introduction to his novel Remembering

". . . to him that is joined to all the living there is hope . . ." -
Ecc. 9:4

"Let the fragments of love be reassembled in you.
Only then will you have true courage." - Hayden Carruth

Heavenly Muse, Spirit who brooded on
The world and raised it shapely out of nothing,
Touch my lips with fire and burn away
All dross of speech, so that I keep in mind
The truth and end to which my words now move
In hope. Keep my mind within that Mind
Of which it is a part, whose wholeness is
The hope of sense in what I tell. And though
I go among the scatterings of that sense,
The members of its worldly body broken,
Rule my sight by vision of the parts
Rejoined. And in my exile's journey far
From home, be with me, so I may return.
I'm not allowed to start reading the story until my thesis is done--11 days!--but something moved me to open the cover this morning and the impulse proved fruitful. Quite the fitting invocation and benediction for the work of writing a theology paper and a great deal else in this season of my life.

Earth to Icarus

2008-10-08T11:56:00.002-07:00

Originally printed April 2006 in "The Humble Deacon", a North Park Theological Seminary student publication.

theme - 'sankofa: looking back to move forward'

- - - -

A tragic figure in Greek mythology, Icarus escapes prison on cleverly invented wings of feather and wax, only to plummet to his demise after failing to heed his father’s warning about flying too near the heat of the sun. This is the story of Western civilization and its relationship to its environment.

The dream of colonialism was ever-expanding boundaries and fresh sources of cheap (exploited) labor and resources. The dream of capitalism was that the greater good of society would be served by individuals working in self-interest and that unregulated competition by private enterprise would result in ever-increasing material prosperity for all people. Francis Bacon, a key figure of the scientific revolution, declared that “knowledge is power.” He viewed technology and mastery of natural science through God-given intellect and creativity as the means to transcending the difficulties and suffering of humanity exiled from Eden.

Whether or not we are aware of them, these three philosophies shape most aspects of our daily lives. We are the conqueror, merchant, and inventor chasing the Utopian rainbow, often careless of what we step on and who we break in the process. We prefer to live with our heads in the clouds. This is our inheritance.

We’ve had our time in the sun, a century or two of flight from the natural limitations of human creaturehood. We must return to earth, and we will do so violently if we do not choose to do so carefully and soon. There is no easy way out of our present predicament. We all depend on and participate in an economy that is on a trajectory toward self-destruction. We are all implicated to some degree in the problem, and none of us can ethically exempt ourselves from responsibility to our neighbors and to our descendants.

Movement toward a sustainable future will require drastic paradigm shift and commitment to wise, disciplined, and well-informed choices. We must learn from our mistakes and change our ways. We must humble ourselves before our Maker whose good creation we have desecrated and whose provision we have taken for granted, commodified, and squandered.

Who will bring about the necessary changes? We can no longer abdicate responsibility for the consequences of our lives to our elected officials. Though warned by President Carter’s administration about pressing concerns relating to fossil fuel consumption and the environment, our nation’s lawmakers have for the last several decades consistently chosen short-range expediency and popularity over wisdom in these matters, even repealing conservation laws that were put in place mid-20th century. Advocating responsible policies might help to move our culture in the right direction, but hierarchy and concentrated power will never build a sustainable world because it is contrary to the very nature of these institutional forces.

Sustainability means meeting the needs (not wants) of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. This can only grow from the ground up, one attitude and community at a time. The following are examples of paradigm and priority changes that will move our lives in the right direction:

competition => cooperation
ignorance => awareness
apathy => compassion
isolation => community
disposable => durable
quantity => quality
convenient => worthwhile
linear => cyclical
consuming => sharing
profit => value
exploitation =>servanthood
waste => conservation
fragmentation => integrity
entitlement => gratitude
more => enough

Ecology is the relationship of living things to their living and non-living environment, and the study of these connections. Context determines the meaning and consequences of our actions. We do not live in a vacuum, and whether or not we understand or acknowledge our place in the system, our decisions have complex ramifications for many (and maybe all) other lives. As Wendell Berry writes, “The context of everything is everything else.”* Improving our personal ecology requires the attentiveness and humility to see the systemic relationships for what they really are, and the courage to change our behaviors for the sake of our fellow creatures (human and otherwise) even when it means inconvenience, discomfort, or sacrifice.

The myth of eternal affluence is a fairy tale we tell ourselves so we can sleep at night. The age of cheap energy and unlimited resource extraction is over. Time to wake up. Our short-sighted consumptive practices already have serious negative consequences for our less prosperous neighbors all around the world, and they are beginning to catch up with us. Several generations have chosen to ignore the warning signs. We are no longer free to pretend that the material economy can keep up its ascent indefinitely. It is time to pledge allegiance. Do we follow Christopher Columbus, Adam Smith, and Francis Bacon, or do we follow the risen Christ? Will we choose responsibly to walk and steward the earth as God intended, or will we persist in our illusions until we fall?

* Berry, Wendell. “The Purpose of a Coherent Community.” The Way of Ignorance. Washington, D.C.: Shoemaker and Hoard, 2005.

Cartoon: Playing War

2008-10-08T10:30:00.002-07:00

Quotable: A Bailout by Any Other Name

2008-09-30T11:28:00.007-07:00

from a Yahoo! article entitled "Lawmakers scramble to revise bailout bill":

"Bush noted that the maximum $700 billion in the proposed bailout was huge, but was dwarfed by the $1 trillion in lost wealth that resulted from Monday's stock-market plunge."
"'The first thing I would do is say, "Let's not call it a bailout. Let's call it a rescue,'" McCain told CNN. He said 'Americans are frightened right now' and political leaders must give them an immediate solution and a longer-term approach to the problem."

That's some quality presidential leadership for you. On both counts.

"Let's not call it a 'panic'. Let's call it a 'depression'." (True story and still it went down in history with a capital D.)

"Let's not call it a 'recession'. Let's call it a 'slowdown'."

"Let's not call it a 'bailout'. Let's call it a 'rescue'."

I suppose the important difference between bailing and rescuing is the latter implies that you have a watertight ship somewhere. But even the term 'rescue' is an admission of immanent danger. If you're resorting to euphemisms in order to lull people back into a false sense of security, you might as well come up with something inspiring. Performance-enhancing dope regimen? Triple-shot espresso federal injection?

The problem with the 'bailout' idea is the assumption that you have something on which to be floating once you have fixed the leak--water as well as a ship. Bailing an airplane or a hot air balloon wouldn't be terribly effective. Unless we take 'bailout' a different way: bailing out as in ejector seat. "Damn, we're a mile high and we've run out of fuel. There aren't enough parachutes even for the crew. Let's make sure ours are golden and whisper sweet nothings into the intercom just long enough to save our own skins and make our exit. Leave this thing running at 500 mph and put her on autopilot to keep the horizon level as long as possible. They won't even know what hit them."

The problem with the 'rescue' idea is the aforementioned watertight ship. The economy does not work like a ship. It's a bit more like a projectile, or maybe a vortex. Economic activity is not a matter of 'growth' so much as momentum. To stop (or even to slow down too much) is to fall apart completely.

Why?

Because money isn't there. It exists only in people's imaginations. The second greatest trick the devil ever pulled, after convincing the world he didn't exist, is convincing people that money does.

Back to the first quotation: "lost wealth." What was it made of? Where was it? Where did it go? People get nervous and try to hang on to it and 'Poof!' it disappears. Money appears only when it is moving, and if you are going to 'grow' it you have to keep it moving faster than it was moving before so that the vacuum it leaves behind does not catch up with it. Maybe it would make more sense (or at least less nonsense) to say that money is a negative phenomenon; it exists in the appearance of its absence.

Illustration: "See that fancy widget? It came into being of its own accord. The only thing between you and the widget is a little void in the shape of $99.99. If you run a piece of plastic through this machine the $99.99 will seem to exist, you can go home with the widget, and the balance of the universe will be restored."

This is how capitalism works. 1) You create a money-absence on one end by putting a price tag on an object. (Objects for sale are 'products' and are made of things called 'raw materials' that someone took from somewhere before it had a price tag, so you can take them without leaving a void, at least not one that you have to count.) 2) You create an existential or physical void on the other end by developing an imagined deficiency in the consumer's psyche or by arranging reality so that the consumer (for lack of skill or material access, or due to pride, laziness, or socially conditioned presumption of entitlement) cannot or will not meet his or her own natural physical needs and wants. 3) You then bless this arrangment as an immutable law of science and come up with equations to prove that as long as you don't include anything inconvenient in your calculations everything adds up right, and call it "Economics."

(The third greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing most of Earth's human population, who are theoretically intelligent enough to know better, that they could demonstrate their superiority and achieve 'progress' by resolutely building a civilization on such ridiculous premises as the immaculate conception of machines, the infinitude of extractable fuel, and the spontaneous generation of inanimate objects. This problem isn't exactly new. It just got more dangerous with the acceleration of technological power and more jumpy and volatile with the invention of credit and detatchment of money from its already fairly dubious and arbitrary foundation in (practically useless) shiny minerals.)

"Ladies and gentlemen, here in my hand I've got 1 trillion dollars. Now you see it, now you don't." (The American public is gullible; they will believe we really had that $1 trillion when Wall Street opened on Monday. If we say that we just need $700 billion to make that trillion reappear, maybe they will give it to us. They always have before.)

Where is the $700 billion going to come from? Our unborn great-grandchildren? The increasing population of theoretically employable college graduates who can't even earn enough to pay rent, let alone buy a home or save for the future? The corporations whose positive balance sheets and stock values are based on the assumption that money (and fuel and metal and rock and fiber and food and water) will keep moving faster forever? The taxpayers whose hope of retirement is based on the sticker price of stocks which is based on the ability of corporations to maintain the perception that money will start moving faster again sometime soon if the government gives the banks the privilege of pretending they have $700 billion of future taxpayer money?

The Economy is running out of fuel metaphorically as well as in obvious terms (the liquid and vaporous fossil stuff) and even the most skillfully spun political rhetoric can't keep it running on fumes for long. We have already squandered the real wealth - clean air, clean water, healthy forests, fertile soil, native cultural wisdom. All our current 'leaders' can give us is smoke and mirrors, flamboyant gestures, and empty words. We have nothing left to lose but our illusions.

Everything I Need to Know . . .

2008-09-26T09:52:00.002-07:00

If I believed in standardized testing and were the benevolent dictator, these would be the requirements for graduating from kindergarten and having access to any amount of money and power:

1) Clean up after yourself.
2) Share.
3) Before you take something that's not yours, ask (and say 'please' and 'thank you').
4) Don't break things (especially if it's not yours).
5) No name-calling.
6) Keep your hands to yourself (unless someone wants a hug).
7) Say 'sorry' (even if it's less than half your fault).

If everyone lived this way, we would have a much lower incidence of problems like pollution, landfills, poverty, crime, divorce, and war. Imagine that!

Quotable: Consider the Lilies

2008-09-22T12:24:00.003-07:00

by Soren Kierkegaard in Judge for Yourself!:
“But the Savior of the world says, as if it were a Sunday afternoon or a holiday, when there is nothing else to do, 'Look at the lilies of the field; consider the birds of the air.' How childlike! How sound and wholesome!”

“. . . Make use of the moment. Be quick to learn—as far as the lily and the bird are concerned, do not worry: they show no signs that soon it is all over. . . . What beneficent peace out there! It is just that for which a person has such a great need, especially that it would be within himself—the peace that is out there with you and is in you, you lily of the field, you bird of the air—the peace that so many real or imagined sorrows and anxieties and afflictions want to upset, the peace that is rest or resting in God.

Pay attention, then, to the bird! It sings and chirps, and chirps—oh, please hear!—in between what it is saying—pay attention to it!—to sorrow, what an old hymn says, 'Yes, yes, tomorrow.' And thus the bird is happy 'today.' Then sorrow thinks, 'Just wait—I will be on the lookout; tomorrow, before dawn and before you have left your nest and before the devil puts on his shoes (for I am up and about even earlier than he; I am one of his servants and heralds who arrive first in order to try to arrange entry for him), then I will come.' And tomorrow—the bird is no longer there. What! It is no longer there? No, it has left; it has gone. 'How could it go? After all, its passport was confiscated, and I’m damned sure it has not departed without a passport.' 'Well, someone must not have kept watch well enough, because it has gone. It left a greeting for you. The last thing it said was, "Say to sorrow: Yes, yes, tomorrow!"' You are indeed clever, you winged traveler, an unrivaled professor in the art of living! . . .”

“And the lily! It is pensive; it inclines its head a little, it shakes its head; it is for sorrow: Yes, yes, tomorrow. And tomorrow the lily has a legitimate excuse for absence; it is not at home, it has gone. The emperor has lost his rights, if he had any, and sorrow may just as well tear the demand to pieces at once—it is not valid. And this makes sorrow so furious that it says: That is not allowed! Ah, to be able to say to sorrow: Yes, yes, tomorrow; and then to be able to remain in that place so calm, lovely in its carefree joy, happier, if possible, over having its jest with sorrow: Tomorrow! To fool it not for a few days, a week—no, to keep on saying to sorrow every time it announces itself: It is too early; you are coming too early; to keep on saying it so long that when it does come it is—too late! What mastery in living! . . .”

“So pay attention to the lily and the bird! Surely there is spirit in nature—especially when the Gospel inspires it, because then nature is pure symbol and pure instruction for man; it, too, is inspired by God and is 'profitable for instruction, for reproof, for correction.'”

Fill In the Blank

2008-09-11T17:46:00.001-07:00

Status symbols are timeless across cultures and species; contemporary consumerism has just taken the phenomenon to an unprecedented extreme. Our beloved Economy feeds on the religion of self-justification by one-upmanship. Pathological competition gnaws at the core of our identity. We will never have enough or be enough because we don’t know what ‘enough’ is, but we can always find people who make us feel less-than by comparison and others over whom we can lord a little ‘less less-than than thou.’ We make tremendous sacrifices to the god of More.

Steadily devouring anything it can turn to profit (or anything that gets in the way) and writing off its bad debt to the children, the Marketplace justifies itself based on the quack science of ‘economic growth’ in which all instances of money changing hands for ‘new’ objects (newly rearranged raw materials) and payrolled people-hours (which is not the same thing as ‘work’) are added as ‘product’ and presumed positive, and no consequences of the acquisition and consumption process are subtracted. The Marketplace counts every sale as gain regardless of the goodness or usefulness of what was created or destroyed in each transaction and whether something was worth more before it was measured in money.

Fill in the blank in the previous post with status symbols including but not limited to material objects (e.g. American citizenship, a penis, white skin, a six-figure salary, a paycheck, a spouse, a big car, bling, blond hair and blue eyes, a size D bust, a tan, a college degree, an Ivy League alma mater, a weed-free lawn, a snub nose (if you’re Caucasian), a Roman nose (if you’re Asian), above-average height, below-average weight, the latest gadget, this season’s brand name clothes). No matter how many trump cards you hold, chances are you still come up empty.

“But, in accordance with his promise, we wait for a new heavens and a new earth where righteousness is at home.” - 2 Peter 3:13

Welcome to the Kingdom Coming where nothing is earned, only given and received. The good news in the economy of grace is you have nothing to prove; you couldn’t if you tried. The first shall be last and the last shall be first but everyone is invited to the party. Lay down your treasure and come to the table, for all is ready and there is enough to go around!

Coming of Age

2008-09-08T11:42:00.002-07:00

The Age of Enlightenment: "I think, therefore I am."

This is not exactly good Christian anthropology (notion of what it means to be human). 17th century philosopher Rene Descartes' statement is based on a false sense of individual autonomy and an improperly elevated view of Reason. However, it is at least dignified and implies some capacity for and interest in wisdom.

Fast forward a few hundred years . . .

The Age of Entitlement: "I deserve whatever I want," "I have _____, therefore I am better than you," and "I do because I can."

Is this 'progress'? It actually sounds a bit like the developmental inclinations of the average 2-3 year old, except that most toddlers are also given to spontaneous, uncalculating displays of affection and gratuitous acts of sharing. I suppose that the glorification or valorization of certain puerile tendencies is an eternal liability of the human condition. Even so, I cringe when I think about how this era in my so-called civilization's history will be remembered by those who come after.

What will it take for 21st century petit bourgeois society to grow up?

I am afraid I will live to find out.

Quotable: What Keeps you Going

2008-08-14T08:56:00.003-07:00

Quoting blogger-friend Gretzky quoting Barbara Kingsolver's book Animal Dreams (which I guess I need to read now):

"I'm thinking about Falstaff today, about Hal, and Shakespeare's vision of death and what it means. And how our culture views death, its finality. I'm thinking a lot about how to live in light of our imminent departures, and I'm again reminded of Barbara Kingsolver's words from Animal Dreams, about what she wants - well, about what Hallie wants, in her letters to Codi:

'I don't expect to see perfection before I die. Lord, if I did, I would have stuck my head in the oven back in Tucson, after hearing the stories of some of those refugees...What keeps you going isn't some fine destination but just the road you're on, and the fact that you know how to drive...You keep your eyes open, you see this damned to hell world you got born into, and you ask yourself, "What life can I live that will let me breath in and out and love somebody or something and not run off screaming into the woods?"'(224)

'...You ask why I'm not afraid of loving and losing, and that's my answer. Wars and elections are both too big and too small to matter in the long run. The daily work - that goes on, it adds up. It goes into the ground, into crops, into children's bellies and their bright eyes. Good things don't get lost. Codi, here's what I decided: the very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live right under its roof. What I want is so simple I almost can't say it: elementary kindness. Enough to eat, enough to go around. The possibility that kids might grow up to be neither the destroyers nor the destroyed. That's about it...Right now I'm living in that hope, running down its hallway and touching the walls on both sides. I can't tell you how good it feels. I wish you knew. ' (299)"

Keep the faith, hope, and, love, y'all. Carry on.

Song: Somethin' More

2008-08-13T07:39:00.002-07:00

by Andi & I on the album Days Like This:

you can keep your parking tickets
hey, keep your letters and your law
well, wipe your tight little bureaucracy
and flush your paperwork and all, flush it all

hold on to your diamonds
and your hard earned cash
you can still fill the tip jar if you like, but hey,
don’t dig up your buried stash
‘cause there’s something more . . .

hang onto your fabulous prizes, Ed
keep your home out in the ‘burbs
i might even give up this guitar
for the mystery that i’m finding in these words

somewhere deep inside this cynic’s heart
miracles and wonders abound
and all desires and irritations lose focus
they fade into the background – they fade
‘cause i know there’s something more . . .

there’s nothing like it in the finest stores
or behind any of Monty Hall’s doors
for winners, losers, beggars, choosers,
lovers, sinners and whores
i know, i know there’s something more . . .

i’ve been looking down dark alleys
i’ve been hanging out in bars
i’ve been uptown and downtown and all around,
all around, following the sound of
slow beating, crap eating, poor treated tired hearts
and I’ve moved with the masses on Michigan
marking miles in melancholy stares straight ahead or
sternly at the sidewalk concrete
careful can’t cause contact ‘cause there’s too many too many
too many damn people, people
wanting, begging, needing, dying for something, for something
and there’s nothing to give
as we feel the weight of our monuments of consumption,
our Towers of Babel
boxes built on the bones of the bodies we’ve buried
trying to reach the top,
to leave this planet, but there’s nowhere, there’s nowhere,
nowhere, no there’s nothing there
but the hearts we’ve emptied trying to make room
for the garbage we’ve picked up along the way

but somewhere deep inside this cynic’s heart
miracles and wonders abound and
how can I be expected to sit by quietly and
watch them drown, watch them
when I know there’s something more . . .

there’s something more

Blood Cell Phone

2008-08-11T09:11:00.002-07:00

Sierra Leone is hardly the only place where lead and steel in the bodies of the poor are 'traded' for minerals in the shiny accessories of the rich. Ever wondered how many people in the Congo were killed or driven from their homes and deprived of food and shelter to make way for the mining of the coltan* in your pocket? Don't you just get a warm fuzzy feeling from being connected to the rest of the world through the wonders of modern technology?

*Coltan is short for columbite-tantalite, eerily fitting names for particles so implicated in violent hegemony and covetousness.

Little Mysteries of Life

2008-08-06T07:31:00.002-07:00

Why is the sky blue?

Who insures the FDIC? (And what happens when they go bankrupt?)

If the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil, and power corrupts, and the road to hell is paved with good intentions, why are many of us so eager to trust people with money and power who claim to be well-intentioned?

If playing the stock market involves guesswork, risk, and putting down money in hope of a payout sooner or later (if you play enough rounds, something is likely to work for you), and you collect money for which you did nothing but have money already while many of the people who actually worked to make your investment profitable were not compensated fairly for their labor, how is that different from stealing and gambling?

If through the use of military or economic force you cause someone to lose their land so they cannot provide for themselves and must work for you (on your terms) and buy things from you (also on your terms) in order to survive, how is that different from slavery?

Quotable: By the Stars

2008-08-06T07:17:00.004-07:00

by Soren Kierkegaard in Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses, "The Expectancy of Faith" (1843):
"How, then, should we face the future? When the sailor is out on the ocean, when everything is changing all around him, when the waves are born and die, he does not stare down into the waves, because they are changing. He looks up at the stars. Why? Because they are faithful; they have the same location now that they had for our ancestors and will have for generations to come. By what means does he conquer the changeable? By the eternal. By the eternal, one can conquer the future, because the eternal is the ground of the future, and therefore through it the future can be fathomed.
. . . The believer, therefore, is finished with the future before he begins with the present, because what has been conquered can no longer disturb, and this victory can only make someone stronger for the present work."

'Homo sapiens'

2008-08-04T08:08:00.003-07:00

'Survival of the fittest'* is often touted as justifying proof of the naturalness and inevitability of capitalism's machinations. But are no-holds-barred competition and 'enlightened self-interest' really as compatible as we would like to believe? Is either morally sound or even sane? Where is the better world we were promised would arrive if we would just follow our primordial instincts and accumulate for ourselves?

Lest we forget that Someone Else is the author of creation and its rules (and there is only so far we can bend things before something breaks . . .), I beg us to remember other laws of the jungle less economically stimulating but equally applicable:

1. Don't foul your watering hole.
2. Never expect your dinner to come to you.
3. Live within your means; you can't live without them.
4. There is no independence; everyone is contingent (and the higher up on the food chain you are the more true this is).
5. What constitutes competitive advantage is liable to change on occasion, sometimes gradually and sometimes abruptly.
6. If your habitat changes faster than you can and there's nowhere to migrate, guess what?

*The vital if fairly haphazard process of natural selection by which adaptive genes are passed on in greater proportion to the next generation within the population of a given species while maladaptive genes are edited out. Interpreted by some to mean that competition is the fundamental organizing principle of life.

Deep Thoughts

2008-07-27T20:25:00.003-07:00

Moving somewhere new and far away is kinda like a cross between ripping off a bandaid and cliff-jumping. The anticipation is often worse than the actual experience. Parts of the process are just not going to be fun but once you get it over with you're fine. Sure it stings and it might be a little raw and pale there for a few days, but you'll recover. Other parts are exciting and scary both at once and the only thing that's guaranteed is a sudden and dramatic change of scenery. You half wonder the whole time what you were thinking but you know that if you don't go for it you'll regret it. And really, what are the chances of anything happening that would be worse than having to explain to everyone why you chickened out--not least of all yourself? Run, jump, take a deep breath, and shut your eyes . . .

Spinning Gold into Straw

2008-07-11T09:11:00.002-07:00

Unless alchemy has improved since last I read about it, no one has yet figured out how to turn digital currency into food and water. Just sayin' . . .

Part of the Solution

2008-07-11T09:00:00.005-07:00

Truly sustainable development will require more drastic measures but the more we do now the more time we have to do anything. Here's how to get started:

CONSERVATION PRINCIPLES

10 WAYS YOU CAN REDUCE your personal contribution to GLOBAL WARMING and improve your Earth stewardship ethics in general:

1. Conserve fossil fuels and reduce carbon emissions by keeping your car well-maintained, buying more fuel-efficient vehicles, carpooling, taking public transportation, and (better yet!) biking or walking. Drive less! Reducing weekly mileage is as important as increasing miles per gallon.

2. Plant trees and replace high-maintenance (Kentucky Blue Grass) monoculture lawns with native grasses and flowers. This will reduce pollution, absorb CO2, and conserve water.

3. Learn more about where your food comes from and buy local (farmers’ markets and CSA’s-Community Supported Agriculture) as often as possible. Most American meals travel 1,500-2,000 miles to the table—that’s a lot of petroleum spent and CO2 released in transit. Eat less meat, as the resource and energy cost of meat production is much higher than plant sources for the same number of calories. Seasonal fresh produce and minimally processed grains, legumes, nuts, and seeds are best for both conservation and nutrition. Game is good if the species is well populated in the region. Look for ‘free range’ or ‘grass fed’ on meat, dairy, and eggs. Fish? It’s complicated. For more info, read Real Food: What to Eat and Why by Nina Planck.

4. Grow your own food and compost your kitchen scraps, grass clippings, leaves, etc. There’s nothing like day-fresh produce, and your garbage output (and therefore disposal transportation and landfill impact) will be significantly less.

5. Get a home energy audit to improve the efficiency of your insulation and heating systems. Set your heating thermostat lower in the winter (62-65) and your A/C higher in the summer (80-82). Your body will adjust to the seasonal temperatures if given the chance and you might even be better able to enjoy the out-of-doors once you are acclimated.

6. Turn off lights and other appliances when not in use, including setting your computer to automatic low-power standby after 15-30 min. Leave occasional-use appliances unplugged, as most draw a current even when not turned on. Cut back on plugs and batteries altogether.

7. Clean with warm water and plant-based detergents or other non-toxic substances (vinegar or baking soda will clean just about anything). Plant-based dish, laundry, toilet, and all-purpose cleaners can be found at natural food stores. Most commercial cleaners are toxic and usually made out of petroleum. In addition to wasting energy, these can be dangerous to people exposed to them (vapor inhalation or absorption through the skin contribute to cancer, birth defects, endocrine system disruption (thyroid, etc.) and autoimmune disorders) and persist in the water supply after they have washed down the drain. Use, rinse, and re-use rags made from old T-shirts or towels instead of cleaning with paper towels and other disposable products.

8. Reduce the quantity of things you buy – manufacturing, transportation, and packaging all contribute immensely to carbon emissions and landfill expansion. Borrow, trade, share, salvage, or buy used items whenever possible. Buy in bulk rather than relying on (convenient but inefficient) individually packaged items. Invest in a refillable water bottle, travel mug, and a few canvas or nylon shopping bags to avoid wasting thousands of one-use containers annually.

9. Reuse materials both for their intended use and in creative ways. Buying well-made durable goods rather than disposable ones greatly reduces waste and often saves you money in the long run. Donate things you don’t use anymore to someone who will.

10. Recycle. This spares the earth the greenhouse emissions and habitat destruction caused by extraction and refinement of raw materials. Recycling saves energy, helps prevent land and resources from being permanently lost to landfills, and cuts down on health problems and community displacement caused by logging, mining, drilling, and garbage disposal.

The Usual Suspects

2008-07-07T17:05:00.001-07:00

Who killed the economy?

Pointing fingers seems to be the new national pastime and I’m appointing myself referee of the blame game for a minute. I’m not an economist, I’m an ecologist, but since most people don’t pay attention to ecologists and they do pay at least some attention (and often a lot of money) to economists, lawyers, and doctors, I’ll pretend just for fun.

No doubt many of the recently alleged instances of mismanagement did contribute to the economy’s downfall. However, I would like to suggest that everyone is looking in the wrong place, or, more precisely, on the wrong scale, for the culprit. The problem is a great deal bigger and older than any of our current so-called leaders, and the absurdities and atrocities committed in the past decade have been more or less in keeping with the fundamental logic of the economy.

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I humbly suggest a different solution to our case. The prosecutors have not given adequate consideration to the possibility of suicide as cause of death. I am prepared to offer evidence.

The opposite of ‘sustainable’ is ‘unsustainable.’ ‘Unsustainable’ means ‘can’t keep going.’ Think back to 11th grade American history. What happens when widespread buying on credit and speculation on real estate and the stock market combine with natural disasters, drought, and crop failure? Has anyone read the headlines lately? What is to prevent it from happening again?

Only through deceitful externalization of (real) human and ecological costs and elaborate manipulation of (imaginary) money has the economy survived this long. October of ’29 was not a fluke, it was a warning. We ain’t seen nuthin yet.

The economy is killing itself.

Our patient is in critical condition. Despite (or rather due to) recent periods of robust activity, the deferred maintenance on its infrastructure is reaching unmanageable levels and damage to vital organs may be irreversible. The military-industrial respirator that has kept the system chugging for so long now seems to be on the fritz and refills for the petroleum IV keep getting harder to come by. I’m so sorry to have to tell you this, folks, but the prognosis is touch-and-go. We’ll do our best to maintain homeostasis by every means at our disposal. Meanwhile, perhaps you’d want to go and call the family?

Sustainable?

2008-07-07T17:01:00.000-07:00

People keep using that word. I do not think it means what they think it means.

Poetry: Diamonds and Gold

2008-07-04T13:11:00.003-07:00

Here's to freedom--EVERYWHERE.

* * *

by Alice Walker

What can I give you for a day when the inequality of the world strikes you as so blatant that you are at a loss for words? When you weep instead of speak? . . . I can give you this poem:

THE DIAMONDS ON LIZ’s BOSOM

The diamonds on Liz’s bosom
are not as bright
as his eyes
the morning they took him
to work in the mines.
The rubies in Nancy’s
jewel box (Oh, how Ronald loves red!)
not as vivid
as the despair
in his children’s
frowns.
Oh, those Africans!

Everywhere you look
they’re bleeding
and crying
Crying and bleeding
on some of the whitest necks
in your town.

WE ALONE

We alone can devalue gold
by not caring
if it falls or rises
in the marketplace.
Wherever there is gold
there is a chain, you know,
and if your chain
is gold
so much the worse
for you.
Feathers, shells,
and sea-shaped stones
are all as rare.

This could be our revolution:
To love what is plentiful
as much as
what is scarce.

Just Lagom

2008-07-02T16:45:00.003-07:00

('Lagom' is a Swedish concept that has no adequate direct translation in English. It has connotations of 'just right,' 'enough,' 'average,' 'in moderation,' 'so-so,' and maybe even 'lukewarm.')

How much justice is enough?

For fear of overdoing it, I have decided to stop trying to have a passion for justice and just take a polite interest in justice instead.

First of all, the highest virtue to which a good Christian girl can attain is 'niceness.' (Besides of course chastity, which in the case of females is synonymous with 'virtue'.) Justice and niceness are not always compatible, and I have been criticized on more than one occasion for my failure at the latter when attempting to pursue the former. (One could argue that having a passion for justice is an aid to chastity in Christian circles. As is, I am thoroughly unmarriageable and probably a heretic.)

Second, everybody knows that only men really understand anything serious, important, or complicated about the world like money or power or politics or God or evil. For centuries, men have been running the world just fine with very little assistance from women (at least when it comes to calling the shots and writing the story afterward) and if anything really needs to be thought, said, or done the men will see to it like they always have. I would just be in the way. It's cute that I like vegetables and care about the malnourished children, but the sooner I grow up and realize that the problems are too big and you can't really change anything (especially not if you are a girl) the more comfortable everyone will be. (Aside: Unlike when pursuing justice, failure at niceness when attempting to pursue comfortableness is perfectly acceptable.)

The end.

Is the Economy Stupid?

2008-06-28T10:47:00.001-07:00

Check out this website and decide for yourself . . .

Center for Popular Economics

Poetry: Expect Nothing

2008-06-17T08:03:00.001-07:00

by Alice Walker in Anything We Love Can be Saved: A Writer’s Activism.
And I ask myself: What can I give you for comfort on those bleak days to come—and they will—when you are wondering if “this” (whatever the limit is that you have reached) is all there is. I can give you this poem:

EXPECT NOTHING

Expect nothing. Live frugally
on surprise.
Become a stranger
To need of pity
Or, if compassion be freely
Given out
Take only enough
Stop short of urge to plead
Then purge away the need.

Wish for nothing larger
Than your own small heart
Or greater than a star;
Tame wild disappointment
With caress
Unmoved and cold
Make of it a parka
For your soul.

Discover the reason why
So tiny human giant
Exists at all.
So scared unwise
But expect nothing. Live frugally
on surprise.

Catechism III: Q & A

2008-06-04T16:05:00.003-07:00

“As you do not know the path of the wind,
or how the body is formed in a mother's womb,
so you cannot understand the work of God,
the Maker of all things.” – Ecc. 11:5, NIV

“As you do not know the way the spirit comes to the bones in the womb of a woman with child, so you do not know the work of God who makes everything.” – Ecc. 11:5, ESV

I have a hard time with many philosophical yes-or-no questions, especially when in one party’s opinion the state of one’s soul or fitness for ministry are at stake. ‘I don’t know’ and ‘that depends’ are generally the wrong answers, even if that is true. The following is part of my ongoing process of recovery from Sunday-school ‘answers’ and how I was taught to think (or not think) about what I believe. (Put your orthodox reflexes on mute momentarily and hear me out on this one . . .)

* * *

Hypothetical Inquisitor: Do you believe that the holy scripture, the Old and New Testament, is the Word of God and the only perfect rule for faith, doctrine, and conduct?

Me: That depends on what you mean by ‘word,’ ‘perfect,’ ‘rule,’ ‘faith,’ ‘doctrine,’ and ‘conduct.’ I believe that ‘Word’ is not limited to verbal revelation, that the Creation and the Incarnate person of Christ also proceed from (or are) the Word. Also, I suspect that the scriptures were not dictated verbatim by God into your favorite contemporary language translation. They might actually be at least partially the result of a human process involving cultural context and literary sophistication unfamiliar to modern readers and therefore need not (and cannot) be taken as face-value literal statements in order to be rightly valued and appropriated as Truth. As there are different translations, they cannot all be equally perfect, and there are no perfect interpreters. Even the decision to take something literally (or not), or to translate a word one way rather than another, are acts of interpretation. Also, I’m not sure that the Bible was ever trying to be a ‘rule,’ and I do not understand ‘faith, doctrine, and conduct’ as separate categories.

I am committed to interacting with the Bible as a paradigmatic story for adoption into the family of Christ and participation in the Realm of God. There is a great deal of mystery involved that might not be best served by verbal definition phrased in absolutes. Faith-doctrine-conduct is a matter of identity and belonging, who you are and (most importantly) whose you are, not a regimented series of formulae to be navigated, propositions requiring assent, and a codified list of behaviors to avoid, appearances to maintain, and errors according to which we not only may but ought to look down on other people.

* * *

Does answering ‘yes’ to the above catechism question really lead to a situation in which the whole canon of scripture is forming and guiding the church? (“Something that serves to form character and guide discernment and action” would be a definition of ‘rule’ I can live with.)

One example: “See poverty? See evil? Look up, and you’ll see corruption and love of money.” Despite centuries of orthodox propagation (and enforcement) of the Faith, this recurrent theme of the Bible has hardly become paradigmatic for the way institutions and individuals going by Christ’s name approach interpretation of and engagement with reality.

In much of church tradition, the Bible is perfect, and relevant to conduct, only insofar as it is convenient for those whose social location bestows upon them, in their sovereign opinion, the exclusive and inalienable right to (and capacity for) accurate, normative interpretation of scripture. When not convenient, whole passages can be ignored, trivialized, banished to the archives, hidden under a bushel, rendered merely figurative or metaphoric, spiritualized, or otherwise explained away in deference to the highest task of much self-described ‘orthodox’ faith: the formulation and defense of Doctrine.

Historically, individuals or movements that question this arrangement are given the official seal of disapproval, assigned an epithet by which they can be summarily condemned without a hearing, and sometimes violently dispatched. The official records tend to erase public consciousness of such troublemakers when possible. If said troublemakers are not sufficiently forgettable, those whose version of history has the most political, financial, and ecclesial backing either co-opt renegade characters and ideologies to neutralize their subversive power, or they anathematize them as heretics. Naturally, histories, scripture translations, and venerable institutions endorsed by socially ensconced persons are a simple fact of the created order, divinely revealed, ordained, and appointed, and therefore free from all interests, agendas, biases, ideologies, and contextual perspectives. Any ‘alternative’ and ‘marginal’ voices that might beg to differ are obviously illegitimate.

* * *

Answer ‘no,’ and may God have mercy on your soul. Because knowing all the right answers about God and how He works is why He put us humans here in the first place. That and keeping score, making sure that prior to eternal judgment at least a degree of mercy is withheld from everyone who falls short of God’s purposes.

(Really? Where is that written?)

Quotable: Living Will

2008-05-31T10:32:00.003-07:00

In Anything We Love Can be Saved: A Writer's Activism by Alice Walker. From a speech given in 1990 at a festival honoring author Zora Neale Hurston, on why it no longer upsets Alice that her heroine lies in an unknown, unmarked grave:
"But what is a dead body, what are bones, even of a loved one? If you mix Zora's bones with those of Governor Bilbo, for many years an especially racist oppressor of black people in Mississippi and, psychologically, of the whole country, the untrained eye would not be able to tell them apart. And nature, in its wisdom, has made sure that the one thing required of all dead things is unfailingly accomplished. That requirement is that they return to the earth, which in fact, even as living bodies, they have never left. It matters little, therefore, where our bodies finally lie, and how or whether their resting places are marked--I speak now of the dead, not of the living, who have their own needs and project those onto the dead--for our ultimate end, blending with the matter of the earth, is inevitable and universal. I hope, myself, to become ash that is mixed with the decomposing richness of my compost heap, that I may become flowers, trees, and vegetables. It would please me to present the perfect mystery of myself, prior to being consumed by whomever, or whatever, as rutabaga or carrot. Sunflower or pecan tree. Eggplant."

Quotable: Why Bother?

2008-05-22T12:47:00.003-07:00

From the article "Why Bother?" by Michael Pollan in the New York Times Magazine, April 20, 2008:
"But there are sweeter reasons to plant that garden, to bother. At least in this one corner of your yard and life, you will have begun to heal the split between what you think and what you do, to commingle your identities as consumer and producer and citizen. Chances are, your garden will re-engage you with your neighbors, for you will have produce to give away and the need to borrow their tools. You will have reduced the power of the cheap-energy mind by personally overcoming its most debilitating weakness: its helplessness and the fact that it can’t do much of anything that doesn’t involve division or subtraction. The garden’s season-long transit from seed to ripe fruit — will you get a load of that zucchini?! — suggests that the operations of addition and multiplication still obtain, that the abundance of nature is not exhausted. The single greatest lesson the garden teaches is that our relationship to the planet need not be zero-sum, and that as long as the sun still shines and people still can plan and plant, think and do, we can, if we bother to try, find ways to provide for ourselves without diminishing the world."

Quotable: What Answer . . . ?

2008-05-19T12:00:00.004-07:00

from Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry:
"What answer can human intelligence make to God's love for the world? What answer, for that matter, can it make to our own love for the world? If a person loved the world--really loved it and forgave its wrongs and so might have his or her own wrongs forgiven--what would be next?"

Fasten Your Seatbelts

2008-05-09T15:29:00.001-07:00

April 14, 1912 – We’re unsinkable. And besides, we don’t believe in icebergs. Full speed ahead!!

October 29, 1929 – What goes up must come down.

February 14, 1945 – Dresden is burning.

December 12, 2005 – On the authority of the U.S. Energy Department, we are sorry to inform you that last year’s figures were mistaken and oil prices will not be going down to $33 after all. But please believe that they will remain steady at a non-inflation-adjusted sticker price of $50 a barrel for the next 25 years. Scout’s honor.

May 9, 2008 – $124+ a barrel. Nearly double the record-setting prices from two years ago. Slated to go up another 50% in the next 6 months or so.

This is not going to be pretty.

Silly, silly Venezuela. We’re just minding our own business, taking our oil out from under their country, and they expect us to pay for it. The nerve.

Love is hate. We are at war with Eastasia. We have always been at war with Eastasia.

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall.
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men
Couldn’t put Humpty together again.

Today I am wondering, and not for the first time—why did God create petroleum in the first place?

And who will guard the guardians?

Quotable: How Good is Your Glue?

2008-05-07T16:14:00.003-07:00

(I’m procrastinating . . .)

When gardening, I am often struck by how wondersome the whole process is and how little of the work I actually do. Transplanting lettuce seedlings yesterday called to mind this passage, which I keep bookmarked in my copy of Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Enjoy.
“Intricacy, then, is the subject, the intricacy of the created world.

You are God. You want to make a forest, something to hold the soil, lock up solar energy, and give off oxygen. Wouldn’t it be simpler just to rough in a slab of chemicals, a green acre of goo?

You are a man, a retired railroad worker who makes replicas as a hobby. You decide to make a replica of one tree, the longleaf pine your great-grandfather planted—just a replica—it doesn’t have to work. How are you going to do it? How long do you think you might live, how good is your glue? For one thing, you are going to have to dig a hole and stick your replica trunk in the ground halfway to China if you want the thing to stand up. Because you will have to work fairly big; if your replica is too small, you’ll be unable to handle the slender, three-sided needles, affix them of clusters of three in fascicles, and attach those laden fascicles to flexible twigs. The twigs themselves must be covered by “many silvery-white, fringed, long-spreading scales.” Are your pine cones’ scales “thin, flat, rounded at the apex, the exposed portions (closed cone) reddish brown, often wrinkled, armed on the back with a small reflexed prickle, which curves towards the base of the scale”? When you loose the lashed copper wire trussing the replica limbs to the trunk, the whole tree collapses like an umbrella.

You are a starling. I’ve seen you fly through a longleaf pine without missing a beat.”

Catechism II: Isms

2008-05-06T12:32:00.000-07:00

(I know that I am thoroughly and vocally opinionated and fond of being right so I put myself at risk of some hypocrisy here. Please bear with me.)

Being finite and human, which most of us are, it is easy to insulate and forget that we play a role in many cause-effect relationships, and we are fond of assuming that our version of the world is the only one. This universal human tendency gets worse when one is a member of an elite class of any flavor, because of course your position gives you a sufficiently privileged perspective from which to call the shots. If you don’t know something, it must not be important. You have the luxury of avoiding knowledge of certain things in order to prevent them from becoming important to you. You are entitled to not being made uncomfortable. You have a natural right to evaluate, influence, and control other people but they have no business reciprocating. (Who do they think they are, anyway?)

This is true not just of politicians and business magnates, but academics and church leaders as well. Quandaries of interpretation, abstract theological musings, responses and (over)reactions to contextual circumstances, or interpersonal and factional grudge matches tend to land somewhere in the untidy realm of reality, playing out powerfully in human lives whether or not those in the ivory tower pay attention to the fallout. Paradigms trickle down haphazardly piecemeal to the masses, losing any sense of nuance, process, and ambiguity in their origins. Or, worse, an erroneous or oversimplified approach to an issue gets deliberately packaged and delivered as The Truth.

Inherited ideologies are dangerous. If one does not know where one’s ideas come from, chances are one believes that it ‘just is so,’ and one is not capable of defending what one believes except by shutting out evidence and arguments for all other options. To open things up for discussion would be to betray The Truth, and changing positions, budging even a little would require shaking the very foundations of reality. (Forget embracing new paradigms or, heaven forbid, repenting.)

We are conditioned from the cradle to perceive the world in certain ways, and all education is to some degree re-education. No one comes to a situation un-formed, and many of the formative influences bombarding us in are daily lives are fallen, causing our perceptions of ourselves and our surroundings to be de-formed. We can learn to identify these to forces in order to counteract them—discernment and re-formation. But we will never be able to do this completely even for ourselves, let alone when we are teaching or learning from people whose stories we do not know. So we need to pay attention and ask ourselves why anyone believes or acts the way they do.

What ‘isms’ “colonize your imagination?” (Phrase coined by Stanley Hauerwas or Sam Wells, I think). Who paid for the version of reality you are being fed? Who profits from ideological enforcement of the status quo? What would you stand to lose by letting new ideas change you? Ignorance may be bliss, but is it innocence? At what point are we morally responsible for what we choose or pretend not to know?

Catechism: How do we ‘know’?

2008-05-04T17:19:00.002-07:00

11 days left in 19th grade. More than enough to do, less than enough inclination to be diligent about it. Unfortunately, being interested in what I am reading does not necessarily translate into being efficient. More often the reverse. It is against both my religion and my personal nature to compartmentalize anything, and the more I am affected by whatever I am reading, remembering, hearing, or seeing, the more likely I am to spin off on tangents and mull over them for eons. I am focusing, really, just on several things other than page 93. (What follows is highly relevant to Christian Ethics, I promise. And the New Testament, Global Economics, and Strategic Management of Non-Profit Organizations, at least indirectly.)

Seminary has given me many ideas and opinions, some answers (or at least articulate statements about my ‘working theology’), and lots of new questions. It has been a process of un-learning and reconsidering as much as anything. Enduring, becoming, being refined. The more I study, the more I become aware of how much responsibility one has as a minister and scholar. We’re not just dealing in ideas here. Many different people contributed to the traditions that formed me (for better or worse). How I think, speak, write, and live will in turn influence the people in my life in ways that I cannot foresee or control. It’s daunting and makes me more than a little uncomfortable.

Where do our notions about ‘how things are’ come from, and how (by what influences) do they change? How does one distinguish between learning and indoctrination? What is the purpose of knowing, and how does knowing relate to being and doing?

How can one know one’s mind and speak one’s mind without being afraid to change one’s mind? How to maintain a healthy degree of humility about convictions of faith and worldview without falling off into relativism? How to be confident without being inflexible? How to be principled without being judgmental? How to be uncertain, conflicted, or in process without using ambiguity as an excuse for thoughtlessness or inaction? How does one honorably represent one’s thoughts while being hospitable to someone else’s?

How can I get better at asking the right sorts of questions in conversation so that I both make space for someone to speak on their own terms and help them think about things in a way they haven’t before? Am I too quick to interject with ‘answers’ rather than listening and responding thoughtfully? When to just listen and acknowledge what has been said? How can I learn to see people for who they are and appreciate them as-is, accepting frustrations and disappointments, expecting that people will surprise me, giving people freedom to change? How well do I allow people to know me?

Whatever I don’t know, about knowing or anything else, I do know that the learning process is fundamental to being, becoming, and remaining fully human. And the fully human life is not a spectator sport. Whether or not we have a clear sense of direction at any given time, we are all actors and every role is important. Knowledge of God, of people, of information, ideas, and skills are all interrelated and should infuse and transform how we play.

Poverty

2008-04-25T13:38:00.003-07:00

To enjoy
only
power

to possess
to control
to destroy

is to be
nothing
and have less.

Quotable: Beware of Author

2008-04-21T04:29:00.004-07:00

Among the front pages of the novel Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry:
NOTICE
Persons attempting to find a "text" in this book will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a "subtext" in it will be banished; persons attempting to explain, interpret, explicate, analyze, deconstruct, or otherwise "understand" it will be exiled to a desert island in the company only of other explainers.

BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR

Poetry: When Serpents Bargain

2008-04-16T09:05:00.006-07:00

by e.e. cummings
when serpents bargain for the right to squirm
and the sun strikes to gain a living wage--
when thorns regard their roses with alarm
and rainbows are insured against old age

when every thrush may sing no new moon in
if all screech-owls have not okayed his voice
--and any wave signs on the dotted line
or else an ocean is compelled to close

when the oak begs permission of the birch
to make an acorn--valleys accuse their
mountains of having altitude--and march
denounces april as a saboteur

then we’ll believe in that incredible
unanimal mankind (and not until)

That Incredible Unanimal Mankind

2008-04-14T20:14:00.003-07:00

A few interesting* headlines from the BBC:

*Disclaimer: Headlines have been paraphrased by the author. Opinions expressed here are not necessarily the view of the BBC, the UK government, or any of their corporate sponsors.

"I secrete, therefore I am." - Or, "The Invisible Endocrine System of the Marketplace?"

Finally, scientific proof that men are not purely rational beings!

"Let them eat cash!"

Quotation from the article in light blue italics, editorial commentary in plain text: "The U.S. (after: 1) perpetually consuming nearly 7x its per-capita share of world resources, 2) undermining local agriculture in 'developing' countries by flooding international markets with subsidized products, thereby contributing to malnutrition by substituting stale/processed/chemically contaminated/artificial foods for fresh/whole/natural foods, 3) contributing to the ruin of arable land via construction, extraction, erosion, deforestation, land mines, radioactive ordnance (DU) pollution, etc., and 4) selling weapons that help warring factions, corrupt governments, and rebel groups kill or displace civilians who would otherwise be growing their own food) provided more than 2.1 billion (the cost of one B-2 bomber, or less than 2% of the amount spent on the Iraq war in the same fiscal year) in food aid (to the entire less-fortunate 95.5% of the world's population) in 2007."

Don't hate us for our freedom . . . we've only got the world's best interests at heart.

Poetry: Whatever Happens

2008-04-06T20:45:00.002-07:00

excerpts from "Sabbaths 1998" in Given: Poems by Wendell Berry
I.
Whatever happens,
those who have learned
to love one another
have made their way
to the lasting world
and will not leave,
whatever happens.

VI.
By expenditure of hope,
Intelligence, and work,
You think you have it fixed.
It is unfixed by rule.
Within the darkness, all
Is being changed, and you
Also will be changed.
. . .

But won't you be ashamed
To count the passing year
At its mere cost, your debt
Inevitably paid?

For every year is costly,
As you know well. Nothing
Is given that is not
Taken, and nothing taken
That was not first a gift.

IX.
What I fear most is despair
for the world and us: forever less
of beauty, silence, open air,
gratitude, unbidden happiness,
affection, unegotistical desire.

The Greatest of These

2008-03-25T09:56:00.002-07:00

"And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love." - 1 Cor 13:13

Faith means saying “Thy will be done!” and meaning it.

Hope means living like the resurrection is true.

Love means dying to yourself that others might have life.

Quotable: Practical Atheism

2008-03-14T12:27:00.005-07:00

from Living the Sabbath: Discovering the Rhythms of Rest and Delight by Norman Wirzba
"Especially in a time of widely professed belief in God, we need to acknowledge that the patterns of our dominant culture pronounce and encourage practical atheism. In a time of practical atheism people are cut off from deep relationships with others, which means that we are cut off from God's life-giving and life-sustaining ways at work in those relationships. Having lost our contact with God, we turn to religious beliefs or pious sentiments that are forced, hollow, or merely ornamental. Though we desperately search form moments of peace and joy, we do not find them, for the structures of our living keep us trapped within a graceless world of our own or someone else's devising."

Poetry: The Glory of the Garden

2008-03-01T14:06:00.003-08:00

by Rudyard Kipling, 1911

There's not a pair of legs so thin,
there's not a head so thick,
There's not a hand so weak and white,
nor yet a heart so sick,
But it can find some needful job,
that's crying to be done,
For the Glory of the Garden
glorifieth everyone.

Chasing Denali

2008-02-21T17:02:00.001-08:00

Written for a Covenant Point Bible Camp staff devotional, Oct. 2004. I was reminded of it today.

“The Mountain is Not Out.” So say Alaskans of Mt. McKinley (Denali is the native name) when the snow-covered titan lies hidden in the clouds of its own personal weather system, to which it has every right considering its status as the tallest thing on the continent. Such was the case when I was in Denali National Park this September during a visit to my dear friend Katherine. We drove 150 miles to the park through a heavily overcast morning. The tundra slopes lining the highway were rich in fall colors, and I was enjoying the immediate terrain too much to mind the low visibility ahead. Once we were in the park, the clouds started to lift, and by the time we had summited Mt. Healy, a nice little 3,400-footer, we could see mountain ranges all around us, but still no Denali. I became considerably exasperated with the elusive giant for refusing to reveal itself even as the sky cleared everywhere else.

Word has it that Denali is visible only one in four days, and even locals get really excited when the Mountain deigns to permit onlookers. The Mountain will not be taken for granted. This is for me a great deal like faith. Most of my experience of God comes from stories, reflections, and echoes. Only on rare occasions do I meet God in any way more solid than a subliminal nudge. I think that’s a large part of why we create idols. We want something that is tangible, predictable, and safe. God is not subject to our whims, and seldom appears how and when we expect.

This excursion to Denali was only for the day. We were spending the night at a cabin in Talkeetna, a little backwoods town that serves as an outpost for wilderness recreation. We peered between trees and into the sunset the entire drive home, straining for a glimpse. Even from designated viewpoints along the highway there was no sign of the Mountain. One starts to question, if not its existence, at least its magnitude. (What presumptuous creatures we humans are.)

At dusk as we arrived in Talkeetna, the veil dissolved, and there it was in the fading light, towering even from 100 miles away. Wow. The following morning was perfectly clear and we stared awestruck at the Mountain for awhile on our way out of town. It was plainly visible all the way back to Anchorage. Wow again. Breathtaking.

God hears us, calls us, seeks us. And we are to seek him, not merely in order to confirm his existence or to check it off the list of things to do, but because the rumor of his glory compels us through the journey that is life.

God’s unseen presence does not become more or less real with the changes in our lives. We can put distance between ourselves and God, have our senses cluttered with mundane details that obscure His majesty, or get our perspective distorted by mindset and circumstance. Yet He is there. He reveals Himself according to his perfect timing. We can no more discover God at will than roll back the clouds.

“Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation? Tell me, if you understand. . . . Have you ever given orders to the morning, or shown the dawn its place, that it might take the earth by the edges and shake the wicked out of it? . . . Have you comprehended the vast expanses of the earth? Tell me, if you know all this.” – Job 38:4,12-13,18

“Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see. This is what the ancients were commended for.” – Hebrews 11:1-2

Author of the Universe,
Help us to trust and find comfort in your greatness. Heal our fear and confusion, and teach us peace. Give us the strength to be still and know that you are God when our questions have no answers we can understand. Help us open our hearts to wonder and joy. Amen.

Kingdom Prayer

2008-02-18T10:05:00.004-08:00

Written by Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero, martyred in 1980 for taking the side of the poor in a U.S.-funded war that killed thousands of peasant civilians in his country.

It helps, now and then, to step back and take the long view.
The kingdom is not only beyond our efforts,
it is beyond our vision.

We accomplish in our lifetime only a tiny fraction of
the magnificent enterprise that is God's work.
Nothing we do is complete,
which is another way of saying
that the kingdom always lies beyond us.

No statement says all that could be said.
No prayer fully expresses our faith.
No confession brings perfection...
No set of goals and objectives includes everything.

This is what we are about:
We plant seeds that one day will grow.
We water seeds already planted,
knowing that they hold future promise.
We lay foundations that will need further development.
We provide yeast that produces effects
beyond our capabilities.

We cannot do everything
and there is a sense of liberation in realizing that.
This enables us to do something and to do it very well.
It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning,
a step along the way,
an opportunity for God's grace to enter and do the rest.

We may never see the end results, but that is the difference
between the master builder and the worker.
We are workers, not master builders,
ministers, not messiahs.
We are prophets of a future not our own.

Made of Petroleum

2008-02-04T12:05:00.003-08:00

Question: Which of the following consist of oil and natural gas derivatives?

gasoline
diesel
jet fuel
rocket fuel
heating/cooking fuel (oil and gas)
plastic
styrofoam
paint
solvents
soaps and detergents
dye
synthetic fabrics (acrylic, nylon, polyester . . .)
adhesives (including resins used to make paper)
insulation
ink
toiletries and cosmetics
artificial sweeteners, flavorings, and food coloring
preservatives
synthetic vitamins
tires
asphalt
electronic components
paraffin
pharmaceuticals
herbicides
pesticides
ammonium nitrate (fertilizer, explosives)

Answer: All of the above.

Addictive substances work by mimicking or overriding certain biochemical processes, suppressing and sometimes permanently disrupting normal physiological function until the addict requires for sustenance the very thing causing the degenerative disease. This is exactly what has happened with our society and petroleum. We have forgotten how to live without it, and what we don’t know might kill us. The withdrawal on this one is going to make kicking heroin look easy.

Peak oil will soon be as much of a household term as global warming. The petroleum supply is effectively half gone; projections for the halfway point range from 2005-2030, with general consensus falling closer to 2010. Roughly half of what has been extracted thus far we’ve consumed in the past 20 years. To put that in perspective, petroleum entered the industrial scene in noteworthy quantities around 1900. Demand is increasing exponentially, the supply has just about hit a plateau, and since naturally the oil industry has gone after the good stuff first, what is left will only get harder (more expensive, less energy-efficient, and more ecologically disruptive) to extract and refine. Higher gas mileage and biofuels ain’t gonna cut it, honey. If we distilled and burned the whole world’s food supply it wouldn’t cover even current U.S. demand for the first two things on this list.

That, and the manufacture, use, and disintegration of petroleum products continually release toxins and greenhouse gasses (some of them more potent heat insulators than CO2 by several hundred times per molecule) into the ecosphere. Many of those toxins end up in our bodies by ingestion, inhalation, or absorption, causing a myriad of physical and psychological malfunctions.

Your mission:

Start working on rehab strategies, posthaste. Collect the tools and learn the skills it takes to sustain human life without fossil fuels, giving up petroleum-based products and relying on renewable, non-toxic sources of water, food, clothing, shelter, and fuel. That (and nothing less) is the meaning of sustainable development.

For ideas on how to get started, look up ‘permaculture’. It’s the discipline of designing human habitat according to ecological principles to cut down on unsustainable energy use and waste.

Peace and courage to you, however you may find it. We are in for an interesting ride, to say the least. Carry on!

P.S. Yes, I recognize the irony of posting this on a computer, but I figure from a cost-benefit standpoint I might as well take advantage of the free media outlet while it lasts.

Song: God of Grace and God of Glory

2008-02-01T14:27:00.000-08:00

by Harry Emerson Fosdick, from the Covenant Hymnal, #608

God of grace and God of glory,
on your people pour your pow'r;
crown your ancient church's story,
bring her bud to glorious flower.
Grant us wisdom, grant us courage,
for the facing of this hour, for
the facing of this hour.

Lo! the hosts of evil round us
scorn your Christ, assail his ways!
From the fears tha long have bound us,
free our hearts to thanks and praise.
Grant us wisdom, grant us courage,
for the living of these days,
for the living of these days.

Cure your children's warring madness;
bend our pride to your control;
shame our wanton, selfish gladness,
rich in things and poor in soul.
Grant us wisdom, grant us courage,
lest we miss your kingdom's goal,
lest we miss your kingdom's goal.

Save us from weak resignation
to the evils we deplore;
let the search for your salvation
be our glory evermore.
Grant us wisdom, grant us courage,
serving you whom we adore,
serving you whom we adore.

Quotable: State of the Union

2008-01-24T12:23:00.000-08:00

“Keeping America competitive requires affordable energy. And here we have a serious problem: America is addicted to oil, which is often imported from unstable parts of the world.”

– George W. Bush, State of the Union address, Jan 31, 2006

* * *

“Not only is the world addicted to cheap oil, but the largest liquor store is in a very dangerous neighborhood.”

“Scientists have concluded that stabilizing the climate will ultimately require reducing global carbon dioxide emissions by 60 to 80 percent [from 1990 levels].”

– Christopher Flavin and Nicholas Lenssen, “Beyond the Petroleum Age: Designing a Solar Economy,” Worldwatch Paper 100, December 1990

* * *

More GWB . . .

Oct 11, 2000, 2nd Gore/Bush presidential debate – Your take on global warming?

“It is an issue that we need to take very seriously.”

2001 – Bush pulls the U.S. out of Kyoto Protocol, a 1997 worldwide agreement to address climate change. (Since 1988, scientists and national leaders across the globe have been seriously discussing energy policy focused on reducing carbon emissions, and the Kyoto treaty set forth concrete guidelines for doing so. Australia was the only other 1st-world nation to reject the treaty.)

“I felt the Kyoto protocol was not realistic. It was not based upon science. The stated mandates in the Kyoto treaty would affect our economy in a negative way.”

(2001 results of Bush’s requested independent investigation into climate change: Does global warming exist? Are humans to blame? Yes! The [American] National Academy of Sciences: “Greenhouse gasses are accumulating in Earth’s atmosphere as a result of human activities.”)

GWB quotations from an NPR audio clip Feb 1, 2007.

Quotable: Tellin' it Like it Is

2008-01-23T17:55:00.000-08:00

“The train came apart. We have to put it back together.”

– the conductor, 3:30 am

True story. 2 am, somewhere west of Buffalo, NY . . .

Several loud clanks. Grinding and hissing noises from what one presumes to be the emergency brake. The Amtrak Lake Shore Limited 49 jerks quickly to a halt. Lights out (except for a few small ones in the ceiling, enough to see the walkway, shapes, and almost colors). Fans (meaning heat) go off. Less than five seconds from full speed ahead to dead stop and dead silence.

People sit up sleepily and begin to look around. No one speaks for a minute or two. Unlike all other scheduled and unscheduled stops, there is no announcement. Murmurs of speculation start. “A red light? Maybe it’s a single track. Maybe we’re waiting for another train.” “The engine’s broke. That’s why we lost power. It’ll be hours before they can bring a new engine.”

A baby is crying. A few people stand up and move slowly towards the exits. Somebody declares, “Don’t go out that door. It’s gonna get cold. Don’t you open that door.” One man doesn’t listen, and stalks off nervously towards the neighboring car. A minute or two later, another does the same in the opposite direction. Grumbling gets louder. People start to shift anxiously. A pleasant, level-headed, middle aged gentleman walks down the aisle gently telling people to pull the curtains shut to keep the heat in, sometimes leaning over sleeping people to close the curtains himself. Agitation increases. Several tempers are lost at whomever happens to be in the vicinity.

It gets cold. 3 am, still no lights, no heat, no announcements, and no sign of the crew anywhere in the coach cars despite several passengers’ forays in search of them. All we can see through the windows is snow and faint outlines of scrubby woodland lining the tracks. I’m curled up in fetal position across my two seats and huddling under my coat, thermal headband covering my ears and eyes, very glad that I thought to wear leggings under my jeans. Audible protests get harsher but less frequent. Twilight Zone eeriness has long since set in.

Shortly after 3 I call my mom in Chicago to see if she would contact Amtrak to see if they knew we were stranded and why, figuring that some news would be better than none and I could help calm several of the people near me who were pacing or muttering unhappily. Just then the lights and heat came on. “Never mind, sorry to wake you up.” But the hopeful sign lasts maybe a minute. Just kidding. Darkness and silence again. A man in the next car has apparently called Amtrak and is shouting his displeasure for the whole county to hear. He irately echoes everything the operator says. It takes about five minutes for the customer service person to determine that the 49 is delayed, stalled west of Buffalo. We had determined that ourselves, thank you very much.

At 3:30 am, the door opens and the conductor bustles breathlessly down the aisle, not acknowledging anyone. A passenger confronts him, “What’s going on?” “The train came apart. We have to put it back together.” “!? How long are we going to be here?” No response. The conductor disappears. A few minutes later there are clanks, the train shifts a few times, and the lights flicker, then stay on. By 4 am we are underway. We learn later that the joint (or whatever it’s called) between the two sleeping cars had come undone while we were rolling.

True story.

Afterthoughts (Not Dessert)

2008-01-07T22:12:00.000-08:00

In response to a friend's good questions about the preceding poem:

"The Main Course is probably one of my least favorite postings... why is she comparing herself to food? Why are good real women waiting and being waited for? Why aren't they living like you do so that one day someone (presumably a man if I'm following you) who is also living like you do may be noticed or notice one who is living and ask to live alongside her? I'm probably reading too far into this post... but those are my thoughts."

I understand the objection. It does leave itself open to narrow interpretation. I really like how you expressed noticing how one another live and asking to live alongside. That is of course what I am waiting for, but you can't ignore the fact that bodies figure in a great deal to the marriage thing.

"Why are good real women waiting and being waited for?" Ain't that the million dollar question. This is a source of exasperation for more women than just me, as you well know. I imagine there are all sorts of cultural and circumstantial factors, some better than others. I'm convinced that it is partly due to a shortage of worthwhile gentlemen who know a good thing when they see one and have the courage and self-confidence to do something about it rather than aiming low and settling for someone who is easy on their ego. However, I don't like the bitter feminist rationale that there is just something wrong with men. Implied in my comment is the hope that there are some good men who are actually waiting for a good woman, and taking their time for reasons of their own.

By waiting I do not mean languishing in an ivory tower taking naps and primping oneself until the knight in shining armor arrives. I mean waiting as in just plain "not yet" and in the right-person-right-time sense, having the dignity and discernment not to throw yourself at the first guy who will have you. I also do not mean that women should never take initiative; if you're going to be a true egalitarian that means equal opportunity for putting yourself out there and risking awkwardness and rejection.

Further thoughts (and by the way, thank you for making me think through this; I just posted it because I liked it and it resonated with the mood I was in at the time): I read it in context with the rest of the book. It doesn't specify which year she wrote this particular poem, but at the time of publication she's actually a grandmother. She is profound and multifaceted. This is one of her sassier pieces. From her other poetry and narratives, it is clear that she does not think of herself as an object. (I hope that from the rest of my blog it is clear that the same is true of me. If most of my posts were about my dating life or lack thereof, that would be a whole different story.)

What I like about it is a Christian woman taking pride in her sexuality rather than acting like she needs to repent of it, confident in being someone who is precious rather than cheaply 'for sale' or for grabs just because she's there. She's also not wallowing in insecurity and self-deprecation because she's not taken and wondering what she needs to do differently to be lovable. I don't know about you, but I so often get the 'fix yourself' message from well-meaning friends, relatives, and a certain Midwest Ministry Exam counselor--the message that singleness is a disease and the way I do womanhood is defective. Since I got thin a few years back, the implication has become that "there's nothing wrong with how you look, so it must be your personality . . . just be sweet and more . . . normal? . . . and don't think so much. And you might want to doll yourself up a little too, just in case." As though I will be lucky to have someone find me desirable, rather than him being lucky to get me.

I also took this poem to be a jab at the inane, wasteful 'choice' culture that forms people to want everything, appreciate (let alone deeply love) nothing, and abuse their own bodies and others. Wendell Berry draws many parallels between cheapening of food and farming and cheapening of physicality and sexuality. In his thinking, food of the nourishing sort is a mystery and one of humanity's deepest connections to creation and thereby to God, and he denounces our culture for our desecration of eating. I think there is some of that implied here. If that's the case, 'the main course' could be an honorific rather than meaning only food.

Finally, Song of Solomon is full of food imagery for sexuality, so it's not that off. Come to think of it, Jesus compares himself to food as well. Hmm . . .

Poetry: The Main Course

2007-12-31T23:57:00.000-08:00

by Julia K. Dinsmore in My Name is CHILD of GOD . . . Not "Those People": A First-Person Look at Poverty

(Amen, sister. My resolution for 2008 is to have more attitude like Julia. On behalf of all good real women out there, still waiting and worth waiting for . . . )
I ain't no appetizer you can nibble here and there.
I'm not a side dish either, believe me if you care.
I'm sweeter than dessert and more delicious than a treat.
My fuzzy-navel nectar gonna knock you off your feet.
I ain't a bag of chips you can munch on now and then.
And that's real good for you,
'cuz salty oil is not your friend.
I'm not a Mountain Dew, or a Kool-Aid, or some tea.
A drink of me refreshes and brings serenity.
I'm not sloppy seconds upon a dirty plate.
My portion is enough your hunger to abate.
If you haven't figured out by now, I ain't no
Midnight munchie,
Or the crunchy in the nut mix,
Or the funky fast-food lunchy.
I'm the main course, daddy, Number 1, and one and only,
A feast of finest splendor that would never
Leave you lonely.
I'm the main course, daddy, my plate is all you need.
My taste is that of succulence, nowhere else
You'll want to feed.
I'm not leftover hot dish warmed up in a pan.
My meat is fresh and sizzlin' hot, and kept up for a man.
A man who can appreciate dining at its best,
Saving up his appetite for rib, and thigh, and breast.
You see . . . I'm the main course, daddy, and that's
All I'll ever be. Go ahead and eat your junk food,
'Cuz you won't be tastin' me!

Trial and Error

2007-12-31T10:56:00.000-08:00

My sister is in grad school for sociology. For some research projects she has to get approval of her methods due to considerations of propriety when doing experiments with human subjects.

It occurs to me that any relationship or interaction is an experiment with a human subject. Parenting especially. We could all stand to be more mindful of that as we go about our lives.

In The Magician’s Nephew by C.S. Lewis, the creation story of Narnia, Aslan says to the human boy Digory, “Grief is great. Only you and I in this land know that yet. Let us be good to one another.”

Grief is indeed great. Let us be good to one another.

Poetry: If Still Your Orchards Bear

2007-12-20T09:15:00.000-08:00

by Edna St. Vincent Millay
Brother, that breathe the August air
. . . Ten thousand years from now,
And smell--if still your orchards bear
. . . Tart apples on the bough--

The early windfall under the tree,
. . . And see the red fruit shine,
I cannot think your thoughts will be
. . . Much different from mine.

Should at that moment the full moon
. . . Step forth upon the hill,
And memories hard to bear at noon,
. . . By moonlight harder still,

Form in the shadows of the trees,--
. . . Things that you could not spare
And live, or so you thought, yet these
. . . All gone, and you still there,

A man no longer what he was,
. . . Nor yet the thing he'd planned,
The chilly apple from the grass
. . . Warmed by your living hand--

I think you will have need of tears;
. . . I think they will not flow;
Supposing in ten thousand years
. . . Men ache, as they do now.

Grace by Pomegranate

2007-12-09T15:27:00.000-08:00

Pomegranates are the quintessential procrastination food—an excellent source of cheap therapy and probably some vitamins too. They’re downright enthralling and they taste as lovely as they look. I treat myself to several of them each winter and I never get bored with them. I suppose this proves that I am easily entertained by strange things and suffering from a mild case of OCD, but I find it quite soothing to carefully pry open each section, revealing another collection of cheerful deep-red juicy bits to be gently detached and popped into my mouth one by one. Pomegranates are yet another example of the gratuitous intricacy of creation. It baffles me that anyone could experience one and still believe that the world happened by accident.

We're Spending our Children's Inheritance

2007-11-27T09:05:00.000-08:00

That bumper sticker is truer than anybody understands. It makes me rather ill.

Forgive us, Father, for we know not what we do.

Quotable: A Grateful Heart

2007-11-20T20:25:00.000-08:00

Excerpts from “About Thankfulness,” an unpublished essay by the late Paul L. Holmer, professor at Yale University and former Covenanter:

“Indeed thankfulness is commanded, but it does not dangle there as an unsupported attitude. It is not a vagrant move of the personality, an immediate gift that some have by sheer force of their wish or disposition. Rather it is both appropriate to what we are as persons and also correct in respect to the reality of things. Christian teachings tear the veil of illusion away and they confute the erstwhile wisdom of experience. What may look like a scandal and an offense to the statistically normal apprehension is no longer a scandal at all – it makes sense. The token of that sense is the new capacity for thankfulness that makes every day worth living and every moment of opposition an occasion for spiritual strengthening.”

“The radical contingency of all things must be acknowledged, for nothing has to be the way it is. We can regret it and spend our time scheming how to beat reality, or we can acknowledge the Lord and Giver of all. With the first, we thwart ourselves and see so little; with the second, we share a perspective that lets us see goodness in suffering and providence in pain. Gratitude is not an escape from reality, it is an access to it. The Christian life is thus a life-long improvisation in the attitude of thankfulness.”

“There is such a thing surely as a state of being thankful, and that state would suggest a demeanor of peace, tranquility of mind, and a quality of present life. A reduction of anxiety, a kind of contentment, and a willingness to be what one is – these are part of that state.”

“Grumbling, envy, malice, and rivalry can only prosper where other people are no longer thought about with any gladness of heart. But if one is genuinely thankful for a wife or husband, for a friend or neighbor, granted their idiosyncrasies and difference, then we can also rejoice in them. Pettiness disappears, and affection gets a little room in one’s life.”

“We are spiritual beings, not just pawns of a material world. Because we are also spiritual, we bring capacities and dispositions to bear upon everything that is. That means dependency upon events is broken, and we can now have health of the spirit even while creation groans for the day of deliverance.”

“Thankfulness is, indeed, commanded. That makes it look almost like a bit of personality manipulation, but it is not. Being thankful for all things also is one of the deepest ways to approach God. To thank Him is to appreciate what He is. This, in turn, is to be fully alert and alive to the way the real world is. Not to be thankful is to have lost touch with reality itself. Besides it means missing one of the most refined and lovely human experiences that we can have. God not only demands thankfulness, but finally He communicates His presence to grateful hearts. This is why a virtue like that is both rewarding for what it is, but more, that in that thankfulness God is able to give Himself to tranquil spirits.”

Song: The Summons

2007-11-07T19:48:00.000-08:00

Add hearty, lilting Scottish melody. Sing well.
Will you come and follow me
If I but call your name?
Will you go where you don't know
And never be the same?
Will you let my love be shown,
Will you let my name be known,
Will you let my life be grown
In you and you in me?

Will you leave yourself behind
If I but call your name?
Will you care for cruel and kind
And never be the same?
Will you risk the hostile stare
Should your life attract or scare?
Will you let me answer prayer
In you and you in me?

Will you let the blinded see
If I but call your name?
Will you set the prisoners free
And never be the same?
Will you kiss the leper clean,
And do such as this unseen,
And admit to what I mean
In you and you in me?

Will you love the 'you' you hide
If I but call your name?
Will you quell the fear inside
And never be the same?
Will you use the faith you've found
To reshape the world around,
Through my sight and touch and sound
In you and you in me?

Lord, your summons echoes true
When you but call my name.
Let me turn and follow you
And never be the same.
In your company I'll go
Where your love and footsteps show.
Thus I'll move and live and grow
In you and you in me.

Words © 1987 The Iona Community
Tune: KELVINGROVE (Scottish Trad.)

Ain't that the Truth

2007-11-04T17:59:00.000-08:00

The Cynicism and Hope conference this weekend was powerful and beautiful, a much needed respite from the incessant 'doing' of grad school to worship, pray, grieve, be still, eat, learn, converse, and celebrate Kingdom promises in the company of 200 or so faithful people weary of exile and empire.

Among the many worthwhile things I gained is knowledge of the existence of this website:

Make Affluence History.

Amen.

What will it take?

Damned If You Do . . .

2007-10-18T23:01:00.000-07:00

I have been reading the Old Testament a lot lately, both out of humble repentance from the Marcionism of my Evangelical upbringing and because I’m in a class on it right now, OT II, in which we are covering the fascinating, disturbing, and sorely neglected territory of wisdom literature and the prophets.

Theological ethicist Stanley Hauerwas, who like me fancies himself a comedian sometimes, writes something to the effect that having an original thought means forgetting where you read it. He’s right. I’m sure the thoughts that follow here are not original. I believe they originated most directly from the prophets themselves and from a talk entitled “Why Mercy Looks Easy, Why Justice is Hard” given by Martin Marty a few weeks ago at my school.

Wendell Berry, who also fancies himself a comedian and in my opinion succeeds at it more often than Hauerwas or I do, said at a conference last week, “This is what the intellectual life is all about: some stupid person says something and another stupid person corrects him.” According to two of my favorite thinkers, by presuming to be an intellectual and sharing my thoughts I run the risk of being both unoriginal and stupid. Fortunately I have no power to speak of and a very limited readership, so at least I am not unoriginal, stupid, and dangerous.

The first problem with being a prophet is that you are called to do things just because God said so and not because it is likely to help much of anything from a temporal standpoint.

The second problem is the human tendency to shoot the messenger; the better you are doing at your job the more likely you are to be killed in nasty ways at the height of your career.

The third problem is a secret—though if I told you I wouldn’t have to kill you since you wouldn’t understand anyway.

Just kidding. Seminary nerd humor. Sorry. Let’s move on.

The third problem with being a prophet is that if one is still buying cheap cotton from the South one doesn’t really have much business talking abolition.

Note to Self:

2007-10-15T22:15:00.000-07:00

Next time you are feeling even remotely unloved* or neglected, especially if you are also procrastinating schoolwork at the time, it doesn’t hurt to go through several months of e-mail clutter, skimming the messages for personal notes. Delete most of the e-mails and you will get some satisfaction from freeing up so much space in your inbox. While you’re at it, make a new folder and hang on to some of those thoughtful, encouraging words that various someones bothered to send you. You are a silly person and sometimes you forget. Peek in that folder when you need reminders. Also try to remember not to be the reason that someone else feels unloved or neglected today.

*Actually I am not feeling unloved right now. Closer to the opposite. What with a visit from some dear Swedish friends, a wedding where I enjoyed seeing people from camp and college days, many marathon congratulations, and a couple of spontaneous moments of hospitality from neighbors, it has been a great week. Tonight I’m just procrastinating, as usual. But I certainly have those days when the phone is not ringing and the existential inbox feels much more than half empty. I want to get better at remembering (and trusting) what I have been given, to be grateful and joyful without so much help. In the meantime, I’m stuck being human and I’ve got some digital love tucked away for those moments when I’m finding it hard to believe that it matters to God and maybe a few other people that I’m here.

On second thought, maybe not-needing-help is the wrong goal. Maybe I need to learn that it’s OK to need help. That limitations are in a strange way a blessing, because emptiness and shortcomings are just space for God (often through other people) to enter my life. Over-independence is just as unhealthy as over-dependence. Maybe I need to be more hospitable to my own humanity and the finitude it entails.

Wow. Didn’t see that revelation coming when I sat down at my computer a little while ago. I had only the first paragraph in mind. Hurrah for fall break and the schedule space in which to let life be more important than school for a few days. I didn’t catch up on any reading tonight, and that’s OK. Now if I can just remember to follow my own advice . . .

Hurrah for blogs being harder to misplace than the pieces of scrap paper I usually rely on to supplement (/replace) the overtaxed and cluttered short- and long-term memory functions of my poor tired brain.

Cynicism and Hope

2007-10-01T11:30:00.000-07:00

Upcoming Chicago-area conference. Open invitation. Check it out and spread the word!

Cynicism and Hope:

Reclaiming Discipleship in a Post-Democratic Society
11/2-3 (Friday evening and all day Saturday)

WE ARE: Frustrated activists. Academics. Ordinary people.

WE ARE ASKING: What would it look like if we were honest about our disillusionment? How can we live out God's call to prophetic witness in an apathetic and disempowered society? How can we nourish our hope for the kingdom of God?

JOIN US for workshops, worship, honest conversation, and hope-against-hope for a better world.

http://www.cynicismandhope.org/

Pop Quiz

2007-09-17T19:20:00.000-07:00

Paul Revere and Davy Crockett were:
a. guys with funny hats.
b. heroes.
c. rebel guerillas.
d. both a and c.

Hugo Chavez should be:
a. a busboy.
b. a migrant worker.
c. assassinated.
d. nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize.

Extra credit for anyone who can pick out the propaganda in this article (click here).

No Child Left Behind is in no way, shape, or form a coercive government tactic invented by the Bush regime to impose neo-con ideology in the classroom by threatening punitive funding cuts on those unwilling or unable to comply with nationalization of curriculum and Washington oversight of the classroom. Standardized testing is not a vehicle for capitalist indoctrination. That is what televisions and Yahoo! news articles are for. Blackmail enforcement of teaching to multiple choice performance is merely a way to prevent rogue educators from having time to encourage the development of "critical thinking" skills, which are a threat to our way of life. Socialists hate freedom and progress and therefore want their children to think of themselves as citizens rather than consumers. If values of "cooperation and solidarity" and promotion of dialogue were to infiltrate American society, this would undermine the sacred principles of individualism, hierarchy, and competition on which civilization is founded.

Good Morning Babylon: 1984 Part II

2007-08-17T00:47:00.000-07:00

Reader be warned: This post will not brighten your day. In fact, I hope it shakes you up. If your heart has escaped becoming altogether calloused, it might even bring you to tears. I am weeping a little on and off as I type.

What follows might convince you that I am crazy if you hadn’t come to that conclusion already. I’m comfortable with that. It’s a little lonely but I’m fairly certain that I’d rather be crazy my way than most people’s definition of sane. (As my mother says, “You wouldn’t worry so much about what people thought of you if you realized how seldom they did.” That’s one way to stay humble, for sure.) This isn’t about me, except that I really need to get it out of my system in a way that I pray will be constructive for somebody.

All week (more than usual) I have been raw with knowledge of the precarious state of the world and sick with grief over my feeling of helpless complicity in an ugly, violent, senseless system that seems to be spiraling out of control. Broken. And breaking more every day. There is healing also, in big and small ways (both are significant and should be remembered and celebrated, for therein lies hope), but I am deeply afraid that the momentum is in the wrong direction. Without the victorious words ‘It is finished!’ and the promise of a new heavens and a new earth, I’m not sure how I would make it through the day. We know how the story ends. (Or continues?) Still, God help us all.

Agrarian ethicist poet prophet Wendell Berry in his book Standing By Words coined the term ‘tyrranese’ to identify the empty or twisted language by which those in power disguise reality to promote their interests and enlist the blindly trusting support of average people. Civic indoctrination. The first thing they teach us is that there is free speech and no propaganda here. Pretty much everything else after that is propaganda.

'Where I come from, we believe all sorts of things that aren’t true. We call it history.’ . . . There are precious few-at-ease with moral ambigu-it-ies . . . so . . . we . . . act . . . as . . . though . . . they . . .don’t . . .ex . . . ist.
– Wicked, the musical

Elsewhere in the aforementioned book, Berry calls language “the opportunity and limit of thought.” We can think (and therefore do and be) only as much as that for which we have words. Our ideas shape our words shape our actions shape our worldviews shape our very selves. If we hold a thought for very long and want to do anything about it, we must build a way to express it out of existing idea-symbols or invent a new term. (If we don’t, we lose it, or it becomes confused with categories we already have.)

And then, because we are relational creatures whether we like it our not, we must somehow introduce the word or phrase to others so that it can be used. Meaning is of little efficacy when not shared. This gets tricky when certain words contain multiple meanings, or different shades of meaning for different people, or come to mean contradictory things (or nothing at all). Labels are a convenient way of replacing thought with soundbyte, of blurring perception with misguided preconceived notions and lies. Naming is an act of power, and it can be creative and healing or cause distortion and even annihilation. (What if God had kept the Word to Godself? What if God had never spoken at all? But here we are – God spoke, and it WAS. God said it was good and that we are to love. Those are the marching orders. Who are we, silly creatures, to think we need to understand why?)

Since writing an essay on the power of language for a class on the thought of Wendell Berry, I have been coming up with interpretations of ‘tyrranese’ terms used by politicians, economists, advertisers, and other manufacturers and peddlers of what passes for ‘the real world’, which is not someplace I want to live. I am doing my level (if hesitant, struggling, conflicted, confused, and frequently discouraged and sidetracked) best to relocate to the Kingdom of God. Who’s with me?

Ladies and gentlemen, here you have it. The Matrix decoded. Some of these definitions are new for this blog, but most are compiled from earlier essays, journals entries, and e-mails. The wording is mine; the ideas are assimilated from all manner of sources. I don’t expect you to enjoy, but please read on. Emerge disturbed and disillusioned, stouter and softer of heart, and angry enough about the right things to love fiercely, live boldy, and wage extravagant peace on the mess we backward human creatures have made of creation.

“resource” – Something that can be used up and thrown away because there will always be more where that came from.
“away” – Anywhere but my own backyard; a place where things can be ‘thrown’.
“human resource” – Unit of labor; sentient component of The Economy. For connotations of ‘resource’, see above. Often synonymous with ‘consumer’ and ‘taxpayer’.
“health industry” – Purveyor of goods and services that keep sick people alive and comfortable; healthy people are a threat to health industry job security and profit margins.
FDA – Falsehood and Disinformation Authority (If a substance needs the FDA’s approval, chances are it’s not good for you.)
USDA – Unjust Subsidy Distribution Agency
“economic growth” – Wealthy people (yes, middle class, this includes us) buying more things they don’t need with more money that doesn’t exist (a.k.a. credit). Causes ‘development’.
“development” – Installing structures that enable people with money to take land and other resources away from the local population; economic and environmental rape of already impoverished regions; conversion of other people’s means of sustenance into money and garbage by those who already have too much of both.
“trickle-down economics” – What happens from Wall Street to the middle class after the Invisible Hand has sucked up stolen time and resources from the less fortunate (and cleverly hidden) majority at the bottom.
“globalization” – Hegemony privatized; colonial exploitation without the messy business of directly running local governments.
“free market” – A system in which no one gets in the way of the people with the most money doing whatever they want.
“democracy” – Government that cooperates with the free market economy, defending corporate interests against those of their own people. (Venezuela, naturally, does not qualify).
“collateral damage” – State-sponsored genocide; elimination of people who are not significant to or get in the way of ‘peace’, ‘democracy’, and ‘economic growth’.
“war on terror” – State-sanctioned violence against people suspected of non-state-sanctioned violence and thousands of those people’s neighbors. When we have killed all of the desperate angry people who hate us, we will have peace. (And besides, the weapons industry creates jobs and grows the economy no matter who does the killing and dying.)
“peace” – Enough political stability to allow the industrial economy to proceed undisturbed.

Parting exhortations from some wise Nordic folk, the first courtesy a 1,000 year old runestone and the second a favorite saying of my hockey-obsessed buddy Henrik.

Remember to forget trivialities.
Remember to learn what counts.
Remember to love when you should.
Remember to live while you can.

Come on, now. Let go of the sideboards and get in the game!

Quotable: Pretty Much

2007-06-28T06:06:00.000-07:00

I'm not a complete idiot. Some parts are missing.

This is printed in colored ink on a slip of paper and taped to the ceiling above the bed where I am staying this week while dogsitting. It just makes me really happy. Thought I'd share.

Quotable: Celebrating Independence (and other random thoughts)

2007-06-07T20:01:00.000-07:00

Printed on the back of the menus at "My Sister's Place", a family restaurant in Grand Marais, MN:

In this home of the brave
and this land of the free
they've burned women for being
a little like me.

- Sharon Seivert

Love it. Grand Marais as well as the quotation. Funny how I've spent 24 years in the Chicago area (15 of that in Chicago proper) and a lifetime grand total of about a month in northern MN, yet a week after my most recent trip up there I'm more homesick for the Northwoods than I ever am for the city. Sigh.

A friend once told me that had I lived a few hundred years ago, I would have been burned as a witch. He's probably right. Whatever I'm not happy about in my day, it could be a whole lot worse. Something to be grateful for when I am (like this evening) restless, dwelling on those aspects of my immediate circumstances with which I am impatient or discontent ('cause on the whole I've got it pretty darn good and I know it), and distressed by the state of the world at large . . .

I hate shopping. Even when it's a matter of (relative) necessity, let alone an activity for its own sake. Today I went for a proper grocery run for the first time since the beginning of May (due to finals, moving, and being out of town), and then to Target for a handful of things that are useful to have in a new apartment, like sponges, a broom and mop, and salt and pepper shakers. It was the first time in several months that I'd been in a big box store. It gave me a headache and made my skin crawl. I just wanted to get out of there. Even Wild Oats (a franchise natural foods store, less yuppie than Whole Foods but same idea) was a little overwhelming. Other than farmers' markets and little neighborhood co-ops (which I love), thrift stores (which I have fun with for a few hours a season, seeing how well I can update my wardrobe for $20 or less and coming home with bragging rights on e.g. a good-as-new pair of J. Crew wool pants for $3), and bookstores and camping gear outfitters (guilty pleasures even when I'm just window-shopping), I really would not mind never going shopping again.

At least I live in an era and a region where as a twentysomething single woman I can have an education, legal rights to my own apartment, employment opportunities other than prostitution, freedom to be out in public alone, and the privilege of getting to be my own self and say exactly what I'm thinking without fear of execution.

Poetry: Outcast

2007-05-10T10:30:00.000-07:00

I would far rather be an outcast
upon the bosom of the great world
than be an accomplice to
a moral nothingness

- from N126,
a poem by Edvard Munch

Me too.