Presidential Prerequisites

 

If I were running things, before a person could become president, he or she would need at least a minor in history. I believe the president—legislators too—should know and understand the past. However, I can't imagine this really becoming a law. I just wish voters would demand that their politicians be well-informed. The presidential primary debates could be part history test. How can we understand the present if we don't understand how we got here?

I written about the importance of studying history before, here and here.

The Problem?

From James Baldwin: “White people in this country will have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other. And when they have achieved this, which will not be tomorrow and may very well be never, the Negro problem will no longer exist or will no longer be needed.”

Understanding Anger

Recently two friends recommended the book The Heart of the Soul by Gary Zukav. I've just been jumping around the book, and the passages below remind me of interesting ideas I've read before. They ring true. And during this time when the daily news is filled with stories of anger, these reflections on anger seem relevant. (The bold print is by Zukav.)

Anger is an iceberg phenomenon. It is the apex of a larger structure, all of which is invisible except the very top....There is no such thing as anger without an immense emotional substructure. Anger is the peak protruding above the clouds. Beneath every experience of anger is a huge body of emotional experience.....

Anger lashes out at a target. That target is another person, group of people, or the Universe. Anger is righteous and self-important. Anger does not listen to, respect, or care about others....Anger wants what it wants, when it wants it...

Angry outbursts are painful experiences, but they are not emotional explorations. Each outburst of anger is a barrier to the exploration of emotions. It is a fortress from which an individual who has no power does his or her best to face a frightening world.

All hostility originates in fear. Fear is the birthplace of every impulse that is not loving. A loving individual is fearless. An angry, jealous, vengeful, depressed, or avaricious person is filled with fear....Love is fearless.

Between terror and anger lies another experience—pain. In other words, beneath anger lies pain, and beneath that pain lies fear. It is not possible to experience the fear without first experiencing the pain. The pain may appear to be caused by the loss of a job, the death of a child, or a diagnosis of a terminal illness. The pain of these things is intense, and the experience of it is very much like feeling a white-hot piece of metal. That is why it is easier to become angry than to touch the pain. This is what most people do, but the pain does not go away when you become angry. It gets buried. (129-133)

I have looked at some of my own emotions through these lenses of anger-pain-fear. It's amazing how nearly impenetrable unpleasant and painful emotions can be. But these ideas from Zukav help one travel through the fog.

Words Matter

In 2016, Krista Tippet gave a talk a to the Unitarian Universalist Association's General Assembly. I

read it at the time and liked it. I reread it recently and liked it again. It is frustrating that these ideas can so easily become forgotten. This passage makes me want to use better words, but I'm not sure I know how.

Words Matter:...The words we use shape how we understand ourselves, how we interpret the world, how we treat others. And the world right now needs the most vivid, transformative universe of words that you and I can draw on and give voice to.

We chose too small a word in the decade of my birth, the 1960s, to grapple with the onset of genuine diversity in this country. And it does bear remembering that it was only in the 1960s that America truly began to integrate racial, religious, ethnic, and social differences into its national sense of self. We did so by pursuing the reasonable order that would be achieved by a civic mandate of tolerance.

Tolerance has value as a civic tool. But as I say, it's not big enough in human, ethical, or spiritual terms. Tolerance connotes allowing   

Tolerance, the word itself, connotes allowing, enduring, and indulging. And in the medical context, it is about the limits of thriving an unfavorable environment. Tolerance is not a lived virtue. It is kind of a cerebral assent and too cerebral for animate guts and behavior when the going gets rough. Tolerance has not taught or asked us to engage, much less to care about the stranger. Tolerance doesn't even invite us to understand, to be curious, to be open, to be moved or surprised by each other.

"Tolerance is not a lived virtue." Very good Krista. You can listen to or read her talk here. If you listen, the talk starts around 34 minutes.

Taking the Knee

I haven't figured out why this is so offensive to some.

My background teaches me it is a respectful and humble posture.

It seems commendable in so many places.

To Write or not to Write?

For many years, on and off, I have written this blog. I have been ignoring it for some time now. Last night I came back to look and discovered I had not written at all this year and only eight entries in the last half of 2017. Yet, when I read the entries, I saw that I was writing about things that concerned and moved me, things that still move me. And surely I was not the only one interested in these issues. Yet, for some reason, I have not felt moved to share in these last months. Have I not been moved? Has the strange climate in this country left me mute? I think, for awhile, I would like to try sharing again. I'll see how it goes.

You Own This

Here's something to remember in times like these.

Maybe you weren't born with a silver spoon in your mouth, but like every American, you carry a deed to 635 million acres of public lands. That's right. Even if you don't own a house or the latest computer on the market, you own Yosemite, Yellowstone, the Grand Canyon, Golden Gate National Recreation Area, and many other natural treasures. (John Garamendi)

Moo

I don't eat meat. There are a number of reasons for this. One is it just seems cruel to slaughter animals and eat them. I still eat eggs and dairy, but I know that is not free from cruelty either. Those animals, when they stop producing, will also be slaughtered. Then, I read the numbers below, and I have begun to think more seriously about cutting back on dairy.

In 1950 the average cow yielded 5,300 pounds of milk. Last year the average cow yielded 23,000 pounds of milk. A Wisconsin Holstein recently yielded nearly 75,000 pounds of milk in a year, which amounts to roughly 24 gallons a day. 

I grew up on a farm, and I did occasionally milk a cow. I hated it, but never considered the ethics of it. The cows did, most of the time, seem content. I moved away from the farm, and for the most part, had no contact with cows. Then, a few years ago, I visited a farm and noticed the cows were different from the cows of my milking days. Their udders were much larger. It looked burdensome. I suspected they were being bred for that, but until I read the above statistics, I had no idea how much. I found it rather horrifying. The cows were being treated like machines. I need to move away from this cruelty.

(These statistics come from a Vanity Fair article about the Department of Agriculture. Find it here. Also, here is an earlier article I wrote about cows here before. When I went back and read it, I realized how long I've been concerned about this.)

I don't know when I first heard “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” also known as the black national anthem. It's a lovely song, and reading a recent article by Brandon Patterson at the Mother Jones site, it brought to mind the recent protests during the standard anthem that are getting so much attention at football games.

I like this anthem better and it's making me consider, what is my definition of patriotism?

Not my problem?

Last week Krista Tippet interviewed Ta-Nehisi Coates on her radio show "On Being." As a long time follower of Coates and Tippet, I found it a fascinating conversation. Sometimes in his writing Coates can sound rather hopeless about racial equality in this country and hopeless that white American will understand racial oppression. I suspected that Tippet was slightly intimidated by Coates, but she pressed Coates in ways that helped us all better understand this country's problems.

Coates made many interesting remarks, but below is one I particularly liked. He was explaining why the argument that one has nothing to do with racial inequality and so on just doesn't work.

...what people will tell you is, “Well, I didn’t have any slaves. I wasn’t alive when this happened. My ancestors just got here.” And what became clear to me, reading that, is: OK, but you cook out on the Fourth of July. Your ancestors weren’t here. They played no role in that. They had nothing to do with it. You take off for President’s Day, but you had no part in that. Your ancestors weren’t here. There are a number of patriotic rituals that folks have no problem participating in, as long as they can get credit for it.

But they don’t want the debits, see: “I want the paycheck; I don’t want to have to write a check, though.” And that is a kind of — in the piece, I think I talk about it as à la carte patriotism. It’s like sometimes-friendship: I’m there when I can get some, but when it gets tough, man, I’m out. “I wasn’t there. I had nothing to do with that.”

But it’s like, either you’re in or you’re out. Either you’re part of it, or you’re not. I was not alive during the Korean War. I had nothing to do with it. But my taxes go to pay pensions for folks, to this day. It would not have been my choice to invade Iraq, but my tax dollars went to it. That’s the way a state works. And so I think what people want is, they want to be a part of the state as long as it gives them something that they like.

Listen to the entire interview here.

Being Supported

Bryon Katie offers these reassurances for when you feel alone and unsupported:

...[S]uppose you've eaten your breakfast, sat down in your favorite chair, and picked up this book. Your neck and shoulders support your head. The bones and muscles of your chest support your breathing. Your chair supports your body. The floor supports your chair. The earth supports the building you live in. Various stars and planets hold the earth in its orbit. Outside your window a man walks down the street with his dog. Can you be sure that he isn't playing a part in your support? He may work every day in a cubicle, filing papers for the power company that makes your lights come on.

Among the people you see on the street, and the countless hands and eyes working behind the scenes, can you be sure that there is anyone who isn't supporting your existence? The same question applies to the generations of ancestors who preceded you and to the various plants and animals that had something to do with your breakfast. How many unlikely coincidences allow you to be here!

 From I Need Your Love--Is That True?

From Andrew Sullivan...
Believing that human beings are somehow inferior or superior because of their innate characteristics is not only to believe a lie; it is to live in a prison. It is putting you and others into a false category from which none of us can escape. To see nothing in one’s own body and soul but whiteness or blackness dehumanizes the self and others.

Are We There Yet?

From a Independence Day speech delivered in 1852 by Frederick Douglass to the Ladies of Rochester Anti-Slavery Sewing Society:

What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.

It's a reminder that, although slavery is mostly gone, we have not yet grown into our noble words and hypocrisy is still with us.

Cognitive Dissonance Anyone?

Here's an interesting idea from Yuval Noah Harari  that that could explain a lot about politics today.

Yet the two values [equality and individual freedom] contradict each other. Equality can be ensured only by curtailing the freedoms of those who are better of. Guaranteeing that every individual will be free to do as he wishes inevitably short-changes equality. The entire political history of the world since 1789 can be seen as a series of attempts to reconcile this contradiction....

If tensions, conflicts and irresolvable dilemmas are the spice of every culture, a human being who belongs to an particular culture must hold contradictory beliefs and be riven by incompatible values. It's such an essential feature of any culture that it even has a name: cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is often considered a failure of the human psyche. It fact, it is a vital asset. Had people been unable to hold contradictory beliefs and values, it would probably been impossible to establish and maintain any human culture. (164-165)

What constitutes a crisis?

Ted and David Gup

Ted Gup writes movingly about the opioid epidemic in the June 23 issue of the Washington Post. He writes that there were approximately 4,000 deaths from drug overdoses in his home state of Ohio. But what makes this all the more painful for Gup is that one of the deaths was his son David. He writes about proposed cuts in federal programs that would reduced the money for dealing with this problem.

Then he says,

As a nation, we seem fixated on the foreign and the sudden, incapable of focusing on what is near and constant. If the drug fatalities were all suffered in a single 9/11-like attack, we would be consumed; the steady seepage of lives scarcely moves us. The failure to address the drug epidemic is not an anomaly but a case study in the shortcomings of human attention and political accounting. From global warming to deteriorating infrastructure, from declining schools to the hollowing out of the middle class, the incremental gets short shrift. It seems beyond our political grasp and communal will.

 Read the entire article here.

Why Study History? Part 2

David McCullough offers some enthusiastic answers to this question. Still he doesn't mention the excellent reason from Adam Gopnik that history warns us of all the possible terrible unintended consequences of sincere action.

Who Were These People?

A few weeks ago I was reading history about the early first ladies of the United States. Now I'm reading the "history of humankind." It's slow reading.  I just finished reading about foragers or humans from the hunter-gather time period. I'll share a little information about these long ago people. Most anthropologists and historians think they had bigger brains than we do. Harari says," the average forager had wider, deeper and more varied knowledge of her immediate surroundings than most of her modern descendants." We don't need to find all of our own food, make all of our own tools, and have a detailed understanding of nature and our surroundings.... (48-49)

However, these foragers were hard on their environment. This "first wave of Sapiens colonisation was one of the biggest and swiftest ecological disaster to befall the animal kingdom....Homo Sapiens drove to extinction about half of the planet's big beasts long before humans invented the wheel, writing, or iron tools."   One of the reasons the Galapagos Islands retained their unusual animals is because humans did not arrive there until the 19th century. (72-74)

Above is a picture of the Cave of Hands found in Argentina and painted about 9,000 years ago. Harari says, "It looks as if these long-dead hands are reaching towards us from within the rock. This is one of the most moving relics of the ancient forager world--but nobody knows what it means" (57). I found more pictures of the cave here.

Now on to Part Two: The Agricultural Revolution." 

Different Strokes

 

Philando Castile

In his most recent column, Leonard Pitts writes chillingly about the visceral impact of actually watching the video of Philando Castile's execution instead of just talking about it. He also points out a couple of interesting issues that I hadn't considered:

I thought of the NRA, which supposedly exists to protect law-abiding gun owners from government overreach. Obviously, that extends only to law-abiding white gun owners, because it’s been nearly a year since Castile’s death and, at this writing, the group has uttered barely a peep about a black man who was martyred for that cause.

I thought of all those people who assure me, with a smugness found only in the profoundly ignorant, that if black people would just treat police with respect and obey their commands, they wouldn’t get hurt. I would ask them to tell me which of those things Castile failed to do.

I thought of that time Sean Hannity explained how, when he is stopped, he informs the

officer that he has a legal firearm and it all goes smoothly after that: “ ‘Yes, sir,’ ‘No, sir,’ writes me a ticket, ‘Thank you, sir,’ and that’s it.” I thought of the frequent inability of white men to recognize privilege even when it’s shooting a black man in the chest.

                                                                                                     

Rich People and Taxes

I love what John Scalzi has to say about his taxes. He's rich and he doesn't need a tax cut. You should just read his whole article. However, I can't resist copying some of it here. 

... So these days, whenever I see how much I pay in taxes annually, my first thought is always something like HOLY CRAP that’s a lot of money. I could totally use that! As someone who grew up poor and has worked his way steadily up the income ladder, it’s a freakin’ huge amount in terms of the raw dollars.

And then I pay my taxes and I discover that anything I would have used that ridiculous wad of tax money for, I still have enough in my net income for. I literally cannot think of a thing I want — or need — that my post-tax income can’t handle. Because as it happens, even with federal, state and local taxes, my tax burden is reasonable. I don’t pay taxes in 1980, when the highest marginal federal income tax rate was 70%; I pay taxes in 2017, where top federal tax bracket maxes out at just under 40%....

So even with literally the full (pre-deduction) tax burden someone in Ohio can pay — we max out all the marginal rates — there is more than enough left over for pretty much anything that we want to do, individually, as a couple or as a family. We save a lot, invest a bunch, and thus take that money out of the short-term income pool we use for bills, household spending and, uh, “consumer activity,” and we’re still just fine, thanks. I suppose it’s possible that we could spend so much of our post-tax income that we’re left with little or nothing and thus would wish we had some of the money that we paid in taxes back into our hands, but speaking from experience, this takes effort, and some willful stupidity about your money....But if you’re not the sort of person who spends $30,000 a month on wine, you’re probably going to be fine.

We do just fine. The other people I know who have similar or better incomes than we have also do just fine. The ones I know with substantially better incomes than we have are also doing just fine. No one at my income level or better actively misses the money they spend on taxes, because they’re still rich after they pay taxes.
Would I like to pay less in taxes? When I look at the raw number of dollars I send to the IRS, sure. When I think about the actual impact on my day-to-day life having that money would make, versus the actual and positive impact on the day-to-day life of millions of other people, when people like me pay our taxes? Nope. I have certain (in more than one sense of that word) opinions about how those taxes I pay in should be used, and whether they are being used effectively, and whether I’m getting value for what I pay, to be sure. Those are different issues, however...

Rich people don’t need any more tax cuts. They’re doing just fine. They will continue to do just fine. And no, their tax burden isn’t onerous. Trust me, I know. I live that tax burden daily. It doesn’t hurt. What does hurt is knowing that people I know and care for will likely die sooner and sicker than they should just so someone like me gets back a few more dollars they won’t notice. Don’t come at me with “but the rich earned those dollars.” Dude, I earned my dollars, too. I earned them in a country that helped me get where I am in part through taxes. I earned them understanding that getting rich came with an obligation to the society I live in and benefit from, an obligation discharged, in part, by paying a perfectly reasonable amount of taxes.

How often do you get pulled over by police?

Trevor Noah, who has lived in the United States only six years, says he has been pulled over by police officers eight times. He offers an interesting theory about institutional versus individual racism here. And here, he talks about the shooting of Philando Castile.