The End is Not in Sight Yet

Tags

editorial, Jr., March on Washington, Martin Luther King

It has been a momentous week in Washington. That’s saying something, given the gridlock that is the norm there.

If you are not old enough to remember the March on Washington in 1963, well, there was plenty of history to learn from last weekend onward. I was thirteen at the time, so I was aware, though surely not the way I am now.

PBS did a great job, giving us the “music of the March” followed by a great little history lesson of the organization and the organizers, followed by an informative look at Whitney Young, one of the major players who was neglected by the later power players as a “tom”, although nothing could be further from the truth.

Wednesday of course offered us the original speech and those of many others, along with the President’s.

One should not avoid the other “issues” of the March. Women, many of whom had significant jobs in the March organization, were shoved to the back, kept off podiums, and marginalized. (There is probably a whole psychology that could be explored here.) Bayard Ruskin was a major organizer of the march, yet he was completely marginalized given his avowed Communist beliefs and his open homosexuality.

Yet, given that, it was a monumental undertaking and a phenomenal success. It turned the tide of public opinion, and put politicians in a box from which they could not escape. They tried to, to be sure, but after the Kennedy assassination, it was like a deck of cards had collapsed, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 65, followed quickly.

I wonder how our Republican brothers and sisters viewed the events of the past week. It is unquestioned that they have done all they can to co-opt Martin Luther King, Jr. as their own, calling him a Republican, and announcing or rather pontificating that he would be opposed to much “liberal” legislation.

If I hear, “I believe like MLK did, that you shouldn’t judge a person by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character,” one more time,  I shall vomit. This is always in connection to some anti-African-American statement. Whether it be to vilify another Black actor for “playing the race card” (speaking up for justice for Blacks in whatever venue it is absent), or vilifying anyone who dares defend the “unfair” practice of affirmative action, a quick reference to MLK seems sufficient to establish one’s bona fides as a “non-racist.”

Of course their take on Dr. King is anything but correct. There is no evidence that King was a Republican, and his words suggest that he was a member of neither party. He considered the 1964 Republican platform to be racist, and actively campaigned against Goldwater. He thought little of Ronald Reagan.

What the uber Right refuses to remember is that King was murdered while in Memphis supporting striking sanitation workers. These workers were union men. King spoke out again and again against the economic inequalities that existed and favored redistribution of wealth. He was no fan of capitalism as it existed denying workers reasonable compensation for their work.

At least two of his closest aides had ties to the Communist party. One was an avowed gay man. These are not the signs of a TEA Party wannabe surely. People like Alan Keyes, Allen West, Herman Cain and Clarence Thomas would not have been in his camp, now would he have remained silent to their kowtowing to the white conservative element.

The usual lies about this week were rolled out by the usual players. Billo the Clown O’Reilly blatantly said that Republicans were denied a part in the festivities. This was not even remotely true. Both Bushes were invited, as were Boehner and Cantor. All declined for various reasons.

Such is to be expected of Fox of course, which routinely spouts lies, knowing that a minority of Americans watch them to the exclusion of all else, and will continue in their neighborhoods and blogs, and Facebook walls, to convey the lie to even more unknowing, unthinking individuals. With that Fox’s job is done–the lie will become “truth” to a minority of ignorant-loving TeaBirchers.

Meanwhile, nothing much changes. Fox and other crazy sites will continue to pretend that the Australian athlete who was gunned down, was killed by a couple of “black kids” when in fact there were three, and one was white. They will continue to bellow “why has the President not expressed his outrage?” when of course the two situations (this and the Trayvon Martin case) are in no way linked. Police in Oklahoma have stated again and again that race played no part in the shooting.

But something has indeed changed. John Lewis reminds us that voting rights continue to be a challenge, given that Republican-held state legislatures across the land pass law after law that limits the right to vote–of only those who typically vote Democratic. They are quite blatant in their explanations. There is no racial motivation they proclaim, but only political motives! They thumb their noses at us, claiming that they “have every right to make it hard for their opponents to vote”. Nothing illegal in that.

If voting is our most precious right, then people of color, seniors, students, and all those who threaten to power base of the modern Republican party, will rally to the cause. We will not stand still for this. And the modern NAACP and other battle-savvy warriors in the equality battle will lead us. They are rejuvenated by the behavior of the white power players. As Colin Powell said, this plan will surely backfire on the party. We mean to see that it does.

Dr. King would be proud of not where we are today, for we have much yet to do, but he would be proud of our determination to “let freedom ring”. We will get to the mountain top Dr. King, we will.

Oh No She Di’nt. Oh Yes She Did

Tags

children, Entertainment, Individual Rights, Media, sex, violence

One thing you cannot call me is a prude. I grew up in the 60’s where it was sex, drugs and rock and roll for goodness sakes. We reveled in turning on and tuning out. We dabbled on the edges, at least most of us, and a few sadly jumped off the mountain and died young.

So, don’t say, oh go back to your knitting old woman, this is the new generation. We were all the new generation at one time, and the roaring twenties had nothing kiddies to do with lions.

But even I have to come up short once in a while, and ask. . . . “Really? Haven’t you gone just a bit too far here?”

And I’m not even talking about the occasional “over the top” display of boobs, vaginas, or exploding heads with sprays of blood in every direction. I can even buy that some of this is “necessary” to convey the true horror of the event, time, or business as usual attitude.

I’m talking about the constant one-up-man-ship that seems increasingly necessary in order to capture and keep the attention of the average person.

The danger is never that one single act of viewing will so warp the mind that it will forever impact the life of the viewer. It is so much more than that. It is numbing if the mind to the point that we are becoming more and more desensitized. What used to shock no longer does.

And it happens rapidly.

Just last evening I was bemoaning once again that we have started to watch Breaking Bad when it first started and then for some reason, bailed after a couple of episodes. The Contrarian gently reminded me that the reason was “the violence”. Wow. We had stopped watching Breaking Bad for the same reason we ceased watching the Sopranos?

Yet here we were watching Hell on Wheels and Copper, and The Following. We had avoided Dexter, but were watching  The Bridge which treated us to bodies sawed in half and side nudity and some good simulated sex to say nothing of the same in Copper.

We had, in a word, become desensitized.

And we are technically now “old people”. We have some ability, one would assume, to separate real from simulated, and reality from fantasy. How does one attribute such abilities to tweens?

When three young fellows decide to kill a person because “they are bored”, we have probably reached the point where reality is no longer recognized as much different from the latest edition of Grand Theft Auto.

I will be the first to admit that the jury seems still out on how much all this has to do with changing the minds of our youth. Reasonable psychologists do disagree, but it cannot be a good thing that we treat violence and the ugliness of exploding bodies a good thing. It cannot make us a kinder, gentler people. Certainly we can agree on that.

It seems to me one thing to blow up star ships even though we ignore that they are filled with hundreds of living beings, and quite another to blow off two-thirds of the face of a man as they recently did in an episode of The Bridge. The fact that it’s not “real” is hardly comforting to young minds. Hell it’s not comforting to me.

It’s now the norm in my household to avert one’s eyes, yelp in shock, and yell out, “they could have warned me!” at the gore that is de rigueur for most cable shows these days. Have you learned to turn away as the crazy person raises the gun to their own head yet? We sure have.

Now, you can argue that we are just watching lousy crap, and that may be true enough. Still, some of these shows are compelling in showing us a bad side of our own history. Hell on Wheels may be often too too graphic in its portrayal of blood and gore, but we do learn that how freed slaves were treated in the real world in the Old West, and how women used their bodies to make a living, and how everybody used and abused the Native people as needed. The were alternatively “saved” and massacred as time allowed.

Which all brings us to Miley Cyrus and her “act” at the MTV Awards the other night. First I did not watch it, but I have seen the video. Anybody who breathes has heard of it no doubt and the jury is split into “what a slut” and “who the hell cares?”

Women seem to care more than men, since it’s still true that women bear the major burden of raising children, and this shit scares them. Little girls, sadly, love these pop stars, want to dress like them and act like them.  Anybody who has seen Toddlers and Tiaras, knows only too well of what I speak.

One can speculate about Ms. Cyrus’s upbringing, her mental state,  and a host of other psychologically related issues regarding her and her idea of what is appropriate to do in front of cameras, but most of us would rather not have our children witness this behavior as something to emulate. Much as Ms. Cyrus may disagree, this is not the way you “prove you’ve grown up”. Rather it proves that you have a very very long way to go to reach that destination.

I’m the first to admit here that I have no answers to any of this. As you know by now, I don’t specialize in answers so much. I prefer to rant about what is wrong. You find the answer. I’m busy rooting out the problems. And this is a growing one it seems to me.

The business of simulated sex is just not necessary it seem to me. I find it impossible to almost ever conclude that it is “necessary” to a faithful honest portrayal of the character of incident. We can all figure it out without all the grunts and groans and the “yeah baby, now” crap.

The violence? That has a better argument in some cases. I do think it’s important to see the ugliness of our history. Saying that people owned slaves didn’t have much effect until Roots showed us (graphically for its time) what it was to be a slave. The same for things like Amistad. As I have said, Hell on Wheels insofar as it shows the misery of life in the West while building a railroad, gives us a new appreciation for those that built this country. Not the Rockefellers and Carnegies, but the average people who lived out short mean lives doing the business of building.

But where to draw the line? Oh gosh, I don’t know where to begin to set the standards. And perhaps that is the reason we have so little in the way of standards. Where is free speech, art, and individual freedom in all this? All I know is that we have gone too far it seems to me.

Related articles

• Not Just a Whorehouse: Female Representation in Hell On Wheels (rookerville.com)
• Miley Cyrus: White Trash Never Looked This Bad (thoughtcatalog.com)
• Breaking Bad is brilliant (catherinecrilly.wordpress.com)
• Breaking Bad Contest: The First Three to Die? (thomaspluck.com)
• Top 10 most bad ass TV characters (angelomedici.com)

 

Preachin’ and Teachin’ and Face Palming to the Point It Hurts

Tags

Americans, body politic, climate change, evolution, ideology, ignorance, science

I am singularly aware that I bang a drum slowly, preach to the choir, and will change not one mind. Those minds that need to change, I fear are so atrophied by lack of use at this point as to be irredeemable.

However, why should that stop me?

I preach because in the great unwashed population, I sense a great number of hanger-ons, barely listening, hardly conscious of that which is beyond their own field of vision. They are the “average” person in American, and perhaps in the world. People so busy making ends meet, schedules kept, children raised to do more than gnaw raw bones on the front lawn, that they have little time for other “stuff”.

In other words, what polls show is perhaps hiding the truth rather than exposing it. I speak of yesterdays revelation from the PPP poll, to the question of whom is to blame for Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath? Nearly a third, 29% thought that Obama was to blame, while ONLY 28% thought George Bush was. A full 44% had no clue.

Now, this means but one thing. Twenty-nine percent of the people in Louisiana are dumber than the dirt they stand upon. Or are they? Granted, those that truly believe this, well they are lost to us. They should be kept in locked houses, taken for walks on leashes, and fed a low-fat diet and given a few chew toys for amusement. A car ride once in a while will suffice to keep them happy.

But I reckon those are just a few. I would hope that they are no more than 10% of the fine people of Louisiana (I reserve judgement on say, Alabama, where the number might be much higher however *wink*.) Most, I would argue, are that group from above, that are barely aware of what day of the week it is. Syria is “some place over there” and “the war to end all wars” was that movie with Tom Cruise. Asking them a serious policy question is akin to asking the average three-year-old what they think of Keynesian economics versus those espoused by Friedman and the Chicago school.

See, it really doesn’t matter what “they” think, since thinking is an experience they have had precious little experience with.

Do we stop there and just go on about grown-up business therefore? Do we just ignore the vast array of childlike innocence portrayed by much of the hard right?

Unfortunately not. I say unfortunately, because gosh darn, lots of people flourish in relative happiness in their ignorance. Some say (Thomas Gray to be specific–go look it up) ignorance is bliss. They might well be right. It’s all fine if everyone has an opinion on everything under the sun and above it for that matter, with one tiny proviso:

THOSE WITH AN ELFIN MIND HAVE NO BUSINESS IN THE PUBLIC’S BUSINESS, I.E., THEY SHOULD NOT BE VOTING ON ANYTHING BEYOND WHAT COLOR TO PAINT THE NEW SWING SET AT THE TOWN PARK!

That said, the rub is, who decides, and what are the standards. I leave it there, for I admittedly have no answers. Feel free to mingle and talk among yourselves.

That the issue is however reaching critical proportions is evident by a few of the following statistics:

1. Forty-six percent of Americans would agree that God made humans pretty much as they are today.
2. Only 58% of Americans see climate change as a problem, DOWN from 63% in 1989.
3. Eighteen percent believe that the sun revolves around the earth.
4. Twenty-five percent believe that vaccines cause autism.
5. Seventeen percent believe Obama is a secret Muslim.

I could go on with a list that would run to several pages of idiotic things that Americans believe. One can find lists of urban legends that denote the belief that Obama is gay, lost his license to practice law in Illinois from some mysterious illegal thing. There are plenty of folks who don’t believe we ever landed on the moon, plenty believe that aliens walk among us, and so on and on.

Most of it doesn’t matter.

But it matters a great deal when it has to do with evolution and our need for continued funding in medicine, geology, and many other disciplines that help us understand disease and how we can stop it. It matters a great deal when it has to do with our response to the increasing danger of man-made climate change, something that 95% of all scientists engaged in this study now believe. (Ninety-seven percent believe in that we are in a time of global warming man-made or otherwise.) It matters because in North Carolina, scientists and their predictions about increased sea levels are PREVENTED from being used by state planners in determining the future allocation of funds to protect the shore lines. DID YOU READ THAT? They are prevented from considering SCIENCE in making decisions about the future of their coastline!

As to evolution and climate change, millions upon millions have been spent in order to convince people that these things are untrue. The evolution deniers write books, create museums, and prepare homeschooling material for profit. They have a great desire to increase the number of people who “don’t believe in science”. The same is true of fossil fuel producers. They are almost the sole funders of the “science” that passes for anti-climate change. They have everything to lose by a weaning of American off of fossil fuels and a turn toward green energies.

We, on the other hand, present the evidence, but we don’t spend a lot of money to spread the word. We have been content mostly to giggle at the “stupid” people and pay no further attention. But they are voting, and they are electing people who are prepared, through either their own dumbness or because it’s lucrative to them, to speak for them, and against truth.

We can no longer remain quiet. We must beat the drum, loudly, rapidly, and continuously, until we break through the thick shell of “I don’t have time for that” mentality that affects probably 80% of our people.

I learned a new term today. Lysenkoism. It happened in Russia, or more properly the Soviet Union, when it attempted to veer off the evolution track into their own sort of biology that gave the results they wanted rather than where the science drove them.

It means:

the manipulation or distortion of the scientific process as a way to reach a predetermined conclusion as dictated by an ideological bias, often related to social or political objectives.

This is what we face in America. And we cannot assume or wait for our ignorant friends to “learn from history”, they won’t because they won’t expend the time to learn anything. Fox with its few seconds of sound bites is the most they can absorb, and only that when it is repeated continuously all day and all week long.

We, who can and do think. We, who do read, and do so critically,  and across the board of left to right, must be the voice that repeats the message again and again until we drown out those voices of personal gain who would lead our society to ruin for their own benefit, who would teach our children ideologies rather than science and truth.

This is why we beat the dead horse.

 

Related articles

• New Poll Shows Louisiana Republicans Blame Obama For How Bush Handled Hurricane Katrina (addictinginfo.org)
• And You Know That Whole Pearl Harbor Thing? Obama’s Fault. (juanitajean.com)

Should You Ever Find Yourself Stopped By the Fuzz

Tags

crime, criminal law, police, race

Well, see, most of you won’t. Won’t find yourself stopped and “frisked” by the PO-lice. I am pretty sure of that. But some of you will.

And you will wonder why.

And you will know.

You were “walking or driving while black”, or brown. Pretty much stop and frisk laws don’t apply to driving. But the principle is still pretty much the same. Pretty much they don’t apply to white people. Pretty much they are really “stop and frisk that black/brown kid” laws.

And I should know.

I worked with this stuff for twenty years, “back in the day”. Yes, it goes back that far, in fact it goes back way far. To the early 60’s.

When crime was “rampant” and large cities were losing white folks due to “white flight”, and that was due to “crime” or so they thought. And so they thought they would get tough on crime.

Detroit, of which I am intimately familiar, did it with a unit called S.T.R.E.S.S. (Stop the Robberies, Enjoy Safe Streets). It was supposed to reduce crime. All it did was make the black community fear and hate the cops, and after a whole lot of black kids were shot to death, it was disbanded by newly elected black mayor Coleman Young.

S.T.R.E.S.S. had been brought to an end before I arrived, freshly washed behind the ears, full of the desire to stick it to the “pigs” and protect “the people” from militarist style policing.

But then there was stop and frisk. Stop and Frisk arose from a case called Terry v. Ohio. Now we can ignore the facts, and just state the rule: “if an officer comes upon a person who he reasonably believes is, has or is about to commit a crime, he may, IF he can point to specific and articulable facts from which it can reasonably be deduced that the person so confronted is armed and dangerous,  he may pat down the outer clothing of said person for the SOLE purpose of determining whether said person is carrying a weapon.” Whew. Got all that?

If he feels a weapon, he may retrieve it. Otherwise he may ask the person questions which may or may not allay his fears and concerns. The point of the frisk is solely for the officer or “bystanders” safety in the moment. The law was extended to an “area” around the individual to which he might “lunge” in an attempt to secure a weapon. (read glove box or sofa or other hiding spot).

Now that’s what the law says is legal.

And being a normal person, you assume that that is how it works.

If you believe that then you believe that doctors and nurses have no dirty little secrets about what goes on in hospitals, labs and operating rooms, and you trust the military to always follow the rules of war.

Some of you may be familiar with the Rules of Justice as enunciated by Alan Dershowitz, well-known professor of law and attorney:

I. ALMOST ALL CRIMINAL DEFENDANTS ARE , IN FACT, GUILTY.

II. ALL CRIMINAL DEFENSE LAWYERS, PROSECUTORS AND JUDGES UNDERSTAND AND BELIEVE RULE I.

III. IT IS EASIER TO CONVICT GUILTY DEFENDANTS BY VIOLATING THE CONSTITUTION THAN BY COMPLYING WITH IT, AND IN SOME CASES IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO CONVICT GUILTY DEFENDANTS WITHOUT VIOLATING THE CONSTITUTION.

IV. ALMOST ALL POLICE LIE ABOUT WHETHER THEY VIOLATED THE CONSTITUTION IN ORDER TO CONVICT GUILTY DEFENDANTS.

V. ALL PROSECUTORS, JUDGES AND DEFENSE ATTORNEYS ARE AWARE OF RULE IV.

VI. MANY PROSECUTORS IMPLICITLY ENCOURAGE POLICE TO LIE ABOUT WHETHER THEY VIOLATED THE CONSTITUTION IN ORDER TO CONVICT GUILTY DEFENDANTS.

VII. ALL JUDGES ARE AWARE OF RULE VI.

VIII. MOST TRIAL JUDGES PRETEND TO BELIEVE POLICE OFFICERS WHO THEY KNOW ARE LYING

IX. ALL APPELLATE JUDGES ARE AWARE OF RULE VIII, YET MANY PRETEND TO BELIEVE THE TRIAL JUDGES WHO PRETEND TO BELIEVE THE POLICE OFFICERS.

X. MOST JUDGES DISBELIEVE DEFENDANTS ABOUT WHETHER THEIR CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS HAVE BEEN VIOLATED, EVEN IF THEY ARE TELLING THE TRUTH.

XI. MOST JUDGES AND PROSECUTORS WOULD NOT KNOWINGLY CONVICT A DEFENDANT WHO THEY BELIEVE TO BE INNOCENT OF THE CRIME CHARGED (OR A CLOSELY RELATED CRIME).

XII. RULE XI DOES NOT APPLY TO MEMBERS OF ORGANIZED CRIME, DRUG DEALERS, CAREER CRIMINALS, OR POTENTIAL INFORMANTS.

XIII. NOBODY REALLY WANTS JUSTICE.

And that my friends is pretty close to being the utter truth. In big city courts, it’s mostly about moving the mountain of cases through the system in a reasonable order, such that the state supreme court doesn’t start getting on your back for “backlogs”. The entire plea-bargaining system is predicated on it–too many cases, not enough cells. Plead to something you did not do, get out of jail, OR insist on a trial, wait until next year and wait IN jail for it, and God help you if you lose, cuz them I’m gonna throw the damned book and the library it’s attached to at ya, and say hi to not getting out of prison before you’re a very old man.

That’s the system.

So, how is this stop and frisk actually done in practice you ask?

Well, it goes something like this:

1. Drive to area which is designated as “high crime” usually involving drugs.
2. Swoop in. Multiple police cars coming from all for directions works best.
3. Jump out and start chasing all the young black men you see.
4. Scream a lot, using the “f” word liberally.
5. Spread-eagle on any wall of any building all those corralled.
6. Search them all.
7. Go around the sidewalks picking up any dope you find lying around.
8. Arrest anyone who was “holding”. Give the “found” dope to anyone who is a big mouth.
9. At station, write a report that says something like:

“My partner and I, while on routine patrol in the vicinity of John R and Erskine, observed the defendant walking down the sidewalk. As we approached, he looked in our direction, then turned and walked briskly away. As he was walking, I saw a white folded up paper, which through previous experience, I suspected was cocaine, fall from his hand onto the sidewalk. We stopped the scout car, and my partner went toward the paper while I continued to follow the defendant on foot. My partner alerted me that it was suspected cocaine, and I detained the defendant and placed him under arrest.”

And that is what he will testify to in court, or as we now call it, testalie.

And the defendant will most often plead, though he was one of the loudmouths who didn’t have any dope, but was visiting his uncle’s house down the street, and was actually sitting on the porch when the police came in and ordered him off the porch. He told them they were harassing him for no reason and that he would sue. So he got to be “it” –the recipient of any contraband they could not obviously tie to any individual.

He will plead because the judge said he would entertain a motion to release him on personal bond if he copped, but alas if he wanted a trial (which he really does, being innocent and all), he won’t get one for five months and being a drug user presumably, poses such a risk to all, that he will have to remain in the county jail all that time. Oh, and due to the fact that he has no record,he will surely get probation most probably (I’m sure your lawyer already told you that) for a plea,  but if a jury convicts you, well then we will just have to see (the book is headed for your head).

And that is how justice is pretty much meted out in the mean streets of big city USA, and yeah, it’s all racial profiling, and worse, and nobody thinks it can be fixed, because nobody really cares.

All that crap Bloomberg has been spouting about “stop, question, frisk? Pure bull.

Are we clear?

Related articles

• Stop & Frisk (skyestats.wordpress.com)
• Judge Rules NYC Stop-and-Frisk Policy Unconstitutional (newsy.com)
• Stop And Frisk Is Criminal (dish.andrewsullivan.com)

Are You Too Good to Be True?

Tags

Christians, giving, religion, right-wing fundamentalists

I find a lot of hubris among Christians. I have a right to speak on it, since I consider myself one.

I find a lot of so-called Christians who claim to know a lot about God. They tell me what God wants all the time. They tell me that the bible is “his word”, not quite in his own handwriting, but near enough.

All the while, I find that they don’t seem to have read it very carefully, although they are certainly masters of the quote. You know what I mean. You say something, and they say: “The bible says. . . . ” a quote that appears to prove their point.

So maybe if you are a real Christian, one of those born-again types, maybe on the way out of your born again experience, they give you the code book, you know, the one entitled “1001 Sayings of God: All you need to get by in a Secular world.”

I came to that conclusion because as they say, when you have eliminated all the impossibilities, what remains, no matter how improbable, must be true. And I have eliminated all the other possibilities. It is the only way you can claim to “know the bible” yet be so ignorant of so much in it. At least the Jesus parts.

That’s what I find so bizarre. It’s true you know. Among the great mass of basically unchurched or poorly churched, “I can read for myself, thank you”, you find an inordinate reliance on what Paul said, and very little about what Jesus said. Even when what Jesus said is attested sometimes by three Gospel writers, while Paul never met the living man.

It’s very true that the Gospels are not history and aren’t meant to be so. They were evangelizing documents, meant to state the case of the believing community of which they were from. They were “this is what we believe and why”. Paul is an entirely different genre. First, many of his letters were not written by him, but the writer wishes to claim Paul’s authority. So read agenda into that. Second, Paul is often writing to address problems within a local church, problems we are mostly unaware of, so therefore it’s very hard to judge the breadth of his statements.

The point is not to discuss Paul, but rather to remind folks of something Jesus talked about as regards “doing good”.

Take heed that ye do not your alms before men, to be seen of them: otherwise ye have no reward of your Father which is in heaven. Therefore when thou doest thine alms, do not sound a trumpet before thee, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may have glory of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward. But when thou doest alms, let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth: That thine alms may be in secret: and thy Father which seeth in secret himself shall reward thee openly. (Matthew 6:1-4)

See I gave it to you in the KJV version!

If you read Jesus, you find that a good deal of his anger is directed at Pharisees, those who would be similar to the born-agains in our time. They talked God and rules of Torah all day and night. They made sure everyone saw how pious they were. They demanded strict adherence to the rules of Judaism, so much so in fact that they regularly turned their back on God’s people as being sinful and untouchable. Certainly the undesirables were denied much as being “unclean”.

Our born-agains are similar. They are always talking God, always praising God, always talking about what God hates and that if you aren’t like them you are condemned. They hate the sin, but “love the sinner” which amounts to shunning the sinner and making the sinner’s life miserable all the while lovin’ him to death in their hearts. Which feeds exactly no one, nor shelters them, nor cures  them.

But the Pharisaic failing that I find worse, and maybe Jesus did too, was the degree to which they strutted about showing off how pious they were by comparison. They would have called it “setting a good example” no doubt, but Jesus just seemed to find it prideful.

I know that atheists and agnostics are as committed to good causes as the believer. I know they give of their money and their time. They care about the earth and the poor. The see it as a human thing to do–help their neighbor. Unfortunately the right-wing evangelical often does it for less honorable reasons–it’s the way to salvation. So it gets personal with them. They do it not because they are human but because they are told that there ain’t no heaven without it.

And that’s not terrible. It still serves the cause. The rich, often from a sense of guilt, throw money around philanthropically speaking. They build wings on hospitals and show up at “events” to lend their celebrity. That too still serves the cause.

But what about that Matthew thing?

About not letting the left hand know what the right hand is doing? See that’s the part about NOT TALKING ABOUT WHAT A GENEROUS PERSON YOU ARE. Who needs to know that? God already does, I’m sure you would agree. And making me feel small by comparison is certainly no way to encourage me.

See Jesus said that that makes you no different from a Pharisee, or a criminal among other criminals. And your reward is the pats on the back you receive from each other, not what you are ostensibly working toward: salvation.

And you want to know what? If I think of the instances when somebody has told me “chapter and verse” about all the things they have done for the unfortunate, you know what? EVERY time, it was a “born again” type, a “the bible is the WORD of God” type, a “holy roller” who tells me that they read the bible every single day and praise God all day and night. And it was always in response to their saying something racist, or at least selfish in that they didn’t want to pay taxes to help some “other” group. It was their “defense”.

And how un-Christ like is that? I guess they missed Matthew 6: 1-4.

You tell me.

As Gandhi said,

“I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.”

I have to agree.

By the by, there is a book about losing sight of the purpose of giving called, The Spiritual Danger of Doing Good, by Peter Greer. Some may like to take a look.

Sins of the Fathers

Tags

History, racism, teabaggers

Many years ago I was sitting in a college cafeteria at a table with an older woman who I shared a class with. She was German, and a good twenty years my senior. She had come to this country some years after the end of the war.

I asked her what it had been like living in Germany during the war years under Hitler. She responded, “we knew nothing of any of that political stuff. We were merely trying to survive, spending our days looking for food.” She changed the subject.

Little did I know in my naiveté that this was the “answer” all Germans who lived in Germany during the war years would automatically reply with. It was the mantra of “I didn’t know about all that awful stuff done to the Jews. Don’t blame me.”

Why do I bring up this story in a post about racism? Because we are still in our own mantras regarding race in America, at least some of us are.

If you talk to people on the far right,  what was once denoted as the “moral majority”, and today is surely the Tea Party, more or less, you almost invariably get this: “There is no racism in America today. Everyone has equal rights under the law. I have never personally done anything to a black person. That’s behind us. I don’t have any share of what was done ‘back then’. The only reason black people keep bringing it up is because they want to get something for free. I judge a person by the content of their character like King said we should. He was a REPUBLICAN too, or did you forget that? And it was Republicans who freed the slaves. It was the DEMOCRATS who didn’t want civil rights.”

My, such a collection of truths, half-truths and outright lies.

Racism is just not the province of those who did the actual acts that we judge as evil. And that brings us to Germany and what we can learn from a country that has intimately struggled with the evils of Nazism and all that that entailed. Germany has had to come to grips with those that bear the burden of actual guilt–Nazi and Nazi sympathizers–plus the millions who chose to look the other way, and pretend that they “didn’t know.”

Germany has had to work through the difference between actual guilt and responsibility. And it continues, no doubt to struggle. It has passed through the stages of children who must face and confront their parents and elders direct guilt, and how that impacts them as the next generation. The next generation must then confront how well that was attended to, what more and how to structure the country going forward.

Certain elements (the far right) wish to avoid all that. To be sure, it is in large part not motivated by an intellectual determination that “that was not my fault”. It is, I would argue, more motivated by the desire to eliminate all sorts of programs that they imagine costs them tax monies. It certainly motivates their desire to eliminate affirmative action which they see as impinging upon their ability to get the plum jobs that would otherwise come their way were it not for the “less qualified black” that steps in front of them, demanding the job to “atone for the past”.

That is as they see it, or choose to see it. Affirmative action is quite something else, but that’s another story.

There is a certain irony in their argument that guilt dies with the operative generation. Given that most of them are card-carrying members of the fundamentalist religious right as well, it is ironic indeed. If indeed the bible is the ACTUAL word of God, then of course, they seem to have neglected those times when “God” told them that the sins of the fathers would be visited upon up to the third or fourth generation. (If you propose that that all ended with Jesus, who fulfilled the “old testament”, then perchance you can quit citing Leviticus for the proposition that God hates gays!)

There is in fact a thing called “collective responsibility” and it is something not so easily swept away with cries of “not my problem.”

If we are Americans and that means something, then surely our responsibility for wrongs done in the past that have proven to have a lasting impact on a great number of others, does not end and did not end with those who wielded the whips, raped the house servants, denied the vote, and threw the hangman’s noose over the tree.

And we, or they (the hard right) do think that being American means something. They dare not deny that as they scream about how exceptional we are, and how God is specially favored toward us as that beacon on the hill. No you can’t have it both ways here. In for a penny, in for a pound.

To say that everyone has equal rights, is a nice legalistic phrase, holding almost no truth of course. Not when a Rand Paul, championing his white, right-wing version of libertarianism says he’s not quite sure that the individual business owner doesn’t have the right to serve whom he pleases, meaning that all those diner sit-ins would have been illegal in his world.

What exactly constitutes discharging one’s responsibilities for the past is of course the rub. We can and should argue about that. Germany certainly has. But Germany, lo these many years later, erected the Holocaust memorial, smack dab in the center of the city, reminding every one of what responsibility means.

More inspiring may be the “Stumbling stones” placed in towns and cities throughout Germany by the artist Gunter Demning. These paving stones, with the names and dates of deportation of Jews, placed in the pavement in front of the places they lived, are stark, and gut-wrenching.

Do we have anything comparable to this in the US to remind us of our past? Toward the slaves? Toward the Native Americans, victimized by white genocide? Toward the Japanese?

Our list might indeed by very long.

Does a watching of the TV-movie mini-series Roots, amount to a proper “confrontation” with our past?

It seems accurate to conclude that we avoid really confronting our past in the ways that might lead to deep reflection, and thus result in actions that might be aimed at insuring that such never happens again.

Philosopher Stanley Clavell tells us:

if we are to acknowledge, and not merely know, the extent of our nation’s crimes, some degree of traumatisation must take place. Facts are insufficient, and numbers often make them worse.

We wish to “move on”. We wish to bury our heads in “it wasn’t me” mentality, because it conflicts with our current agenda. It’s not “productive” we are told. Ironically, the mere mention of race by our very own president, elicits cries of “I hate him because he has divided us by race”.  How acutely warped a remark, let alone the idea that someone actually believes it. It is testimony to the fact that deeply imbedded within the psyche of so many remains such seeded “other” hatred, that a African-American man cannot mention the word race without screams  of “cease and desist” and worse, “he’s only half-black”. What that means is almost too frightening to imagine, and not a single person who has said it that I have confronted has been willing to tell me what they mean by that.

We are and remain a deeply racist society. That discomfort for many, and outright hatred by some extends to all the “not white” among us, whether they be Native American, Hispanic, Black, Asian. It extends to gays, and yes, still women who have the temerity to stand up and demand the right to determine their own physical future. To deny it is merely to announce something ugly within yourself.

Do read History and Guilt in Aeon. This site is simply amazing. Some of the best articles I’ve seen in a long while. If you read it you will see how much I drew from this for this post. Read it!

Adventures in Coyotes

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Diego, life in the foothills, New Mexico

Here in the high desert of New Mexico, it’s not uncommon to see coyotes. They come down from the mountains in search of water and food.

Since they will eat almost anything, if you come upon places with small holes dug, just a few inches by a few inches, you can be pretty sure it was a coyote digging up some large bug, scorpions perhaps.

I don’t know how they fare with jack rabbits who to my mind are rather quick fellows, so much so that Diego pretty much gives them a passing glance and plods on, oblivious to their enticing “eyes” as they bound away.

In any event, we’ve seen a few, coyotes that is,  in our travels through the Chihuahuan desert on our morning jaunts. Usually one vision of Diego, and they skedaddle. Coyotes are fairly small, tall but quite thin, no match for the hulk that has become Diego the Dog.

We were on leg two of our trip (there are six in all), heading due south along a dirt “road” fenced to our left. The mountains loom east along that line north to south and a scattered housing area peppers the area. All manner of houses, from manufactured, to double wides, and everything between dot the landscape at intervals about two to three times the size of the average urban lot.

One can see a horse, a goat, and certainly hear a lot of roosters along that southerly walk, as well as plenty of dogs barking. As Diego and I moved along our trail, I heard an unusual sound, a woman yelling quite aggressively: “Get out of here!” I smiled and looked up the winding dirt expecting to see a coyote pop forth momentarily.

Such never happened, though the woman repeated her order a good six more times. This led me to believe it was probably a dog searching a garbage can, since coyotes fairly move on when they see a human. I’ve had the creepy experience of finding a “body” bag (read rolled up tarp) along our western edge walk some months ago. Inside were the rather odoriferous remains of a coyote. Such animals are not appreciated around the rabbit and hen coops that litter those makeshift neighborhoods. Coyotes are wary of humans as a result.

Diego and I completed leg three and then four of our sojourn, turning on the “diagonal road” that takes us north and west back, back to our own subdivision. We were still a good three-quarters of a mile from home, and I was, as is my usual bent, engrossed in the magnificence of my own mind. Read, thinking about something or other.

Periodically, I look up to find Diego, who likes to wander off-road, following his nose. It’s enjoyable to watch as he gets further and further west, and sometimes goes back south, only to stop suddenly, and in a panic search the horizon for me. Sometimes a good block away and with the sun just breaking over the Organs, he cannot see me even though I wave my arms in the universal sign of “here I am” all the while saying those very words.  He follows his ears, in a slow meandering sort of way, and by the time we complete leg five, he usually has popped out on the service road a bit in front of me.

Well, this time was a bit different. I looked up to find the boy and saw him straight away, but I saw something else! Not a hundred feet to the west of him was a coyote, stopped and watching him. I’m not sure if Diego saw it at that moment, but when I yelled, it saw me, let out a low growl, and Diego saw it.

Diego trotted forth toward it, it trotted away. Diego trotted more, and I yelled more. No amount of “Diego, COME” seemed to register, and finally I was left with an authoritative “NO!” which did seem to get his attention. The coyote stopped as well. Diego barked several times, and the coyote uncharacteristically did not high-tail it for Arizona. Instead it held it’s ground.

The boy returned to me and I clipped on a lead, while the coyote eyed us both. “tough morning old man?” I queried. Oddly, he did not answer, but continued to stare. I stood there, some perhaps 50 yards or so away, and chatted on. “It’s really not a good idea to mess with people and their pets. A friend of yours paid the price, a bit yonder over there, you know.” He turned, and walked a few paces.

He seemed somewhat curious, not particularly fearful, and fairly subdued. I thought perhaps he was just tired of avoiding that woman with her broom. We walked on, and eventually I saw him sauntering west. As soon as I couldn’t see him any longer among the mesquite, I let the boy off his lead and he continued his interesting game of “follow my nose”.

A few weeks earlier, a neighbor was out walking her dog, her dog being a good friend of Diego’s but a very small dog, more like a Jack Terrier. She asked if I had seen any coyotes and I replied that I had seen several. She mentioned that one had “followed her and Poquito quite a ways the day before.

I didn’t point out that it was eyeing Poquito as a potential lunch undoubtedly and hoping for the degree of separation between her and the dog to get a good running shot. It’s a very good reason to keep a small dog leashed in the desert.

Such a thought never crosses my mind with the boy. He more resembles a small black bear than a dog. No coyote would be dumb enough to try.

It’s funny though. Diego was respectfully interested in the coyote. Not afraid, just cautious. He seemed downright silly scared of the turtle we encountered earlier this week.

Go figure.

Tales from the desert, signing off.

PS: if you were expecting some sage wisdom from all this, none was intended. Just a story.