A Little Music for Sunday

This is my favorite flash mob of all time:  Ode to Joy.  I love the music, the choreography, the background, the children, and the expressions on peoples faces.  I think it is sponsored by a bank.

Guns, More than a Correlation

Countries with stricter gun laws than those of the United States have fewer gun deaths.  Cause or correlation?  Adam Gopnik says, “it’s hard to find a more robust correlation in the social sciences than the one between gun laws and gun violence.”  Then he goes on to discuss all the reasons we should take this correlation seriously.  His article is so thorough, so well-written, I don’t want to say more.  I want you to read it; then take at least one small action.

 

Possible small actions—

 

Write or call legislator.  The group Moms Demand Action has instructions here.

 

Write a letter to the newspaper.  I have heard these letters get good attention from your legislators. 

 

Join a lobbying group such as Moms Demand Action above or Gabby Gifford and Mark Kelly’s group Americans for Responsible Solutions.

 

What else?

Unexpected Encounters of Urban Life

I am walking on the river walk along Riverside Drive, just a bit north of Angela Boulevard.  I see a man coming toward me on a bicycle, and I watch him because he seems a bit wobbly.  When he gets even with me, he stops and says, “Could you do something for me?”

I give him a questioning look.  “Will you pray for me?” he asks.

“Sure,” I say.

He holds out his hand, so I take it.  He looks at me expectantly.  I conclude he is waiting for me to pray, right here, right now.  “May you be blessed,” I say.  “May your needs be met.  May you find peace in your heart.”

He says, “Thank you.” We withdraw our hands.  He rides south and I go on walking north.  But I continue to ponder the touch of his hand and the sound of my words.

 

Moon from My Window

Ahhh...
7:30 A.M.,3/28/13, South Bend, Indiana

Needed--Universal Background Checks

In this video link, Gabby Gifford’s husband Mark Kelly goes to an Arizona gun story, buys a gun (video camera in pocket), and fills out the form for a background check.  The purpose of the video is to support “universal background checks” and show that it’s an easy process.  Kelly answers a lot of questions and then comes home with a new gun (to add to the other guns he owns).  I assume those answers went into a computer and no red flags were found.  The check is better than nothing, but I don’t think we yet have a system that flags all the things that need to be checked.  I think the mental health community needs to do a lot of talking.

Little Solutions

Last week I posted some quotations from Parker Palmer ("Politics and the Brokenhearted") and I ended with this one:  "Big problems are solved by a million little solutions."  I want to think about this statement everyday.  What are the little solutions I can partake of?  It's funny how satisfying it can be to read an apt description of a problem, how hopeless it seems to make the problem better.

Hanging On

Ta-Nehisi Coates, my favorite blogger went into anaphylactic shock last week while riding a train.  He remembers hearing a doctor and fellow passenger leaning over him and saying, “I can’t get a pulse.”  But he lived to write about the story.  He says, “…I have seen the elephant now. It would not have been the worst way to go--kinda quiet, as Biggie would say--but it would have been going all the same. And I am most happy to still be here, to be with my family, and my friends, to be in the world with you.” 

 

Sy Safransky writes, “And I marvel…that I’m now sixty-seven years old, which is inconceivable to some of my closest confidants…Then I notice the calendar: the first decade of the twenty-first century is already behind us, which means I’m that much closer to the day it all ends, my appeals exhausted, my friends in high places insisting their hands are tied, except to wave goodbye.”

Reading the obituaries today, I see that two of the deceased were born the same year that I was.  What can I say?

(This is the first time I’ve encountered the expression “seen the elephant.”   Here’s one definition:  “Experience more than one wants to, learn a hard lesson; also, see combat, especially for the first time.” )

 

Imagine, a song for Sunday

John and Yoko

A surprising twist from the Anti-Defamation League (Scroll down slightly.)--

Blame and Peace

The Sun magazine has a section on the last page called "Sunbeams."  Here are two sunbeams from the November 2012 edition.

We habitually erect a barrier called blame that keeps us from communicating genuinely with others, and we fortify it with our concepts of who's right and who's wrong.  We do that with the people who are closest to us, and we do it with political systems....It is a very common, ancient, well-perfected device for trying to feel better....Blaming is a way to protect our hearts, to try to protect what is soft and open and tender in ourselves.  Rather than own that pain, we scramble to find some comfortable ground.  (Pema Chödrön)
We have thought of peace as the passive and war as the active way of living.  The opposite is true.  War is not the most strenuous life.  It is a kind of rest-cure compared to the task of reconciling our differences.  (Mary Parker Follett)

People are so good at describing the problems.

Got Milk?

I grew up on a farm in southern Indiana where my family had a small heard of cattle with ten or so cows.  Some of our neighbors had larger operations, maybe twice to three times as many cows as we had.  These cows spend their days pretty much like the cows in the picture at the left.  Our cows had to be milked daily, a schedule that greatly restricted the lives of my dad and granddad.

Recently, on a road trip in New Mexico, I got a close-up view of the new factory farm method of milk production.  In 2009 NPR did a story on this area and called it Dairy Row.  “Located “along Interstate 10 between Las Cruces, N.M., and El Paso, Texas, more than 30,000 cows live in 11 farms located one after the other.”  As we drove, I smelled Dairy Row before I saw it.  The picture on the right (from the NPR site) is a typical view of these operations.  I don’t want to romanticize the past, but this is a far cry from the contented looking cows above. 

Odor and flies are a problem on these new farms, but even more serious are problems with water pollution.  The NPR article says, “The trend in the dairy industry, like the rest of commodity agriculture, is toward fewer and larger farms, which concentrates more manure in smaller geographic areas. Citizens are reporting dairies contaminating ground and surface water across the nation — in the Yakima Valley in Washington; Brown County in Wisconsin; Hudson, Mich.; and now Dexter, N.M.”  Our milk may be more expensive than we think.  The article also says, “Everyday, an average cow produces six to seven gallons of milk and 18 gallons of manure.”  That’s a lot of production for one animal.

Back in the day, when I had to help milk our tiny collection of cows, we milked them twice a day.  Cows now get milked three times daily and research is being done with four to six milkings for cows who have just calved.  I don’t want to anthropomorphize these beasts; I’m not against animals serving humans, but this sounds too much like animal slavery cruelty for comfort.

The View from My Window

Copied from the Dish

Why We Write

I found this explanation by Andrea Barrett at "The Dish":

I’ve never known a writer who didn’t feel ill at ease in the world. Have you? We all feel unhoused in some sense. That’s part of why we write. We feel we don’t fit in, that this world is not our world, that though we may move in it, we’re not of it. Different experiences in our lives may enforce or ameliorate that, but I think if they ameliorate it totally, we stop writing. You don’t need to write a novel if you feel at home in the world. We write about the world because it doesn’t make sense to us. Through writing, maybe we can penetrate it, elucidate it, somehow make it comprehensible. If I had ever found the place where I was perfectly at home, who knows what I would have done? Maybe I would have been a biologist after all.

Politics and the Broken Heart, continued

After yesterday’s post, a friend wrote this:

 “I can see that many idealists in this country are brokenhearted, and consequently become very negative and angry.  But that doesn't necessarily mean that they are right, any more that the KKK was brokenhearted and subsequently very angry with the passage of civil rights legislation.  Muslims may be brokenhearted that the West wants to give women equal rights, and thus become very angry.  But being brokenhearted doesn't necessarily mean that your solution is the right one.”

This perspective worried me—I was afraid that I had chosen Parker Palmer’s quotations without enough context.  I never thought he was saying being heartbroken made your behavior correct.  I assumed he meant that if you want to communicate with people who have very different political views that you do, you need to understand where they’re coming from, and it may be from a broken heart.  Many of the ways we discuss (or argue) issues don’t work because we ignore the broken hearts, our own and others.

I was taken by Palmer’s choice of the word brokenhearted.  It sounds old-fashioned, and I seldom hear it used.  I wouldn't use that word to describe much of my own experience, but maybe I should consider it.  It has a poignancy that could be useful.  Am I brokenhearted by certain political perspectives?  Maybe.

Politics and the Broken Heart, continued

Here, Andrew Sullivan looks back at his support for invading Iraq ten years ago.

I was an integral part of the problem. I drank deeply of the neocon Kool-Aid. I was also, clearly countering the trauma of 9/11 by embracing a policy that somewhere in my psyche seemed the only appropriate response to the magnitude of the offense. Prudence, skepticism left me. I’d backed Bush in 2000. I knew Rummy as a friend. And my critical faculties were swamped by fear. These are not excuses. These are simply part of my attempt to understand how wrong I was – and why.

Politics and the Broken Heart

“I propose that what we call the ‘politics of rage’ is, in fact, the ‘politics of the brokenhearted,’" says Parker Palmerin an interview in the November 2012 issue of The Sun.  I was introduced to Palmer during my teaching years and have read his books on education and vocation.  I was surprised to see that his latest book is about politics:  Healing the Heart of Democracy: The Courage to Create a Politics Worthy of the Human Spirit.

The ideas presented in The Sun interview are a different take on our current dysfunctional system, and I’m not sure what to think.  I am going to look for the book.  Below are a few more quotations from his interview:

If Americans don’t understand that radical Islamic terrorists are heartbroken about what’s happening to their people, we’re missing the point.

Violence is what happens when we don’t know what else to do with our suffering…When individuals don’t know what to do with their suffering, they do violence to others or themselves—through substance abuse and extreme overwork for example.  When nations don’t know what to do with their suffering, as with the U. S. after 9/11, they go to war.

 [S]uffering is an aquifer on which we all draw. 

 When I’m talking with people whose views I regard as wrong but not evil, I need to ask myself: Am I here to win this argument, or am I here to create a relationship? 

 Big problems are solved by a million little solutions.
 

A Song for Sunday

It's sunny today and the birds are singing:  "Let the Mystery Be."

Got Empathy?

The South Bend Tribune reports this morning, "Sen. Rob Portman of Ohio has become one of the most prominent elected Republicans to announce his support for same-sex marriage, a 'change of heart' that he said began when his son told him that he was gay."  I read this news with mixed feelings--good for the cause--but why wait until it benefits his family?

Matthew Yglesias says in Slate, "...if Portman can turn around on one issue once he realizes how it touches his family personally, shouldn't he take some time to think about how he might feel about other issues that don't happen to touch him personally?"

Senators tend to be fortunately limited in what they experience personally.  Yglesias concludes his article with this:

The great challenge for a Senator isn't to go to Washington and represent the problems of his own family. It's to try to obtain the intellectual and moral perspective necessary to represent the problems of the people who don't have direct access to the corridors of power.  Senators basically never have poor kids. That's something members of congress should think about. Especially members of congress who know personally that realizing an issue affects their own children changes their thinking.

I like to think I can do this, but as I write this, I sense that I too could and should improve.

Borders

We’re standing in a parking lot at the edge of a small town in New Mexico, near both El Paso, Texas and Juarez, Mexico.  A short distance away, there’s a very long, very tall fence.  In a way, it appears random.  But it’s not; it’s the border—the border separating the United States from Mexico.  At home, when I cross the border that ends my state, it’s more of an imaginary line.  Here, it’s a ten foot fence.  Neighbors are separated from neighbors. 

I’m here to listen to a Border Patrol agent talk about the purpose of the fence and the work of his agency.  He’s charming.  He talks about his background.  His parents immigrated here from Mexico “the right way.”  They followed the rules.  Coming into the United States without going through an authorized entry point is a crime.  He is sworn to uphold the laws of the land.

I am attending this presentation because my niece Grace is a volunteer for the Border Servant Corps.  She attended a similar presentation when she began her work and was introduced to the many sides and the many agencies involved with border issues.  She suggested we (her parents, her sister, and her two aunts) attend this presentation scheduled for a group of students from Lone Star College who were spending their spring break studying life on the border.  Our Border Patrol presenter is here so we can understand what they do.  He’s not here “to change anybody’s mind.”  But he doesn’t fully answer all of our questions.  I respect him, but I’m not convinced of the rightness of everything his agency does.  I’m just not sure how it should be changed.

I tend to be politically opinionated, but when it comes to immigration policy, my opinions are vague:  Be compassionate.  Make it easier.  But long term, the issue is too complicated.  I have no answer to promote.

When the agent finishes his presentation, we walk closer to the border.  Some of the college students walk down the fence to where a small group of kids are playing ball on the other side.  The two sides talk a bit; then they toss the ball back and forth, over the fence and back.  For a moment the wall is merely part of the game.

Tenative Confessions

I don’t think much about sin.  It may be hubris, but the definitions I've grown up with seem irrelevant.  However, a friend recently sent me an article with a meaningful definition of sin.  Paul Tillich defines it as separation:  “separation among individual lives, separations of a man from himself, and separation of all men from the Ground of Being….Before sin is an act, it is a state.” 

I love this.  It is relevant and describes so well my struggles.  Tillich says sin is a condition we’re born with—original sin with a difference.  It’s similar to the Buddhist idea that suffering happens when we reject what is.  Hearing this from a Christian and Buddhist perspective is helpful.  Since reading this article, I’ve been noticing when I separate myself and when I don’t.

Tillich then goes on to define grace:  “the reunion of life with life, the reconciliation of the self with itself.  Graces is the acceptance of that which is rejected.”  I assume there are different levels of this.  I’ve been hiking in the desert around Tucson and feel so connected to the beauty of nature.  Then, a human being annoys me, and I feel myself falling into that state of sin.  As with the sin of my childhood, there’s an urge to feel guilty.  I’m trying not to be separate from any of this.  Surely, if I can connect to a prickly pear growing in the desert, I can connect to a prickly person or a prickly self.  I’m not there yet, but nature is one teacher.

Music for Sunday Evening

"Everything is Holy Now" by Peter Mayer.

"This Is My Song," music by Sibelius, sung by Emiko Soltis.