Beyond this Present Devastation

Anyone who doubts our utter dependence upon nature’s graces or our frightening vulnerability in the face of nature’s power is not paying attention. We can design and build the very best we know how, and still be wiped out. A storm, a fire, an earthquake, a hurtling asteroid; a microbe, a parasite, a cell gone awry.

I am not suggesting at all that we must not do our best to defend ourselves against such threats, or to work to overcome them. To do otherwise would be to deny our nature as living organisms.

But we also must realize that everything we do is related to everything else, and that what promises security from one kind of threat may heighten the dangers posed by other threats. Then we must not let our fear of negative consequences, known or unknown, keep us from doing anything at all.

So we move forward, step by step, thoughtfully and fearlessly casting what light we do have into the shadows around us as we try to find the best path into the future. It does us no good to deny either the light we carry or the darkness around us, to ignore what helps us see something and what keeps us from seeing anything.

As I write this I am thinking about what I know about science and technology. They are neither our saviors nor our servants, but tools that will be only as good as the use we make of them. Hammers can build and they can destroy. It depends on what we decide to do with them.

In the aftermath of the current spate of terrible natural disasters, many of them focused on our home continent, we will not move forward without sound science and reliable technology. We must not allow preconceived notions, even those born of religious faith or political convictions, to blind us to what we can perceive, measure, understand, share, and do using our best intellects.

To do any otherwise is to deny the intellects that, I believe, God has given us. Trusting this gift, I am both humbled and empowered.

Fiddlin' Around

President Donald Trump has given new meaning to the old notion of “fiddling while Rome burns.” His administration’s announcement yesterday about rescinding DACA (a message delivered by his beloved Attorney General) was a cynical and calculating pandering to the worst in American society.

I understand why it would be better for DACA to be legislated. But it hasn’t been, and who’d bet on it ever becoming law? The victims are some 800,000 young adults living within our borders who probably have cleaner criminal records and are contributing more to our economy and society than any random sampling of 800,000 native-born Americans. They’ve all been checked out in ways I’ve never been. Now their future is in the hands of a dysfunctional Congress. How is that just?

Ohio’s Republican Senator, Rob Portman, likes to present himself as a compassionate human being. After all, he is against human trafficking and the opioid epidemic, and backs legislative efforts to combat both. But what kind of opposition does he face on those issues? I haven’t heard of any demonstrations in favor of human trafficking and drug addiction. But when it comes to DACA, he hides behind “the law” and “the constitution.” I take neither lightly, but there are situations when the right thing to do does not neatly fit into legalistic categories. This is one of those situations.

I do not know if DACA would stand up in court. Maybe President Trump should have let the Attorneys General who threatened to take him to court if he didn’t rescind it have at it. His own Justice Department, of course, would have sided with them, so they’d probably win. But he’d have shown himself as a man of compassion. Instead we see, again, the “realDonaldTrump.”

On the day of the President/Attorney General’s announcement, the other news was of hurricane-caused destruction and suffering in Texas and Louisiana; of an even larger storm bearing down on small islands and no doubt the U.S. mainland; of N. Korea and the U.S. brandishing nuclear weapons at each other; of tens of thousands of acres of the North American continent being incinerated; and of a hundred other tragedies. Nevertheless, they found time to appeal to his “base” and put the future of 800,000 human beings in doubt.

Good performance, Mr. Trump . . . your fiddling while the republic burns.

Birds At Home

Standing on a short ladder, I reached up to the top of the downspout–where it bends just under the gutter–and unceremoniously pushed the now-empty robin’s nest off its perch. It sailed to the ground, and landed with a soft thud.

I reached down to pick it up, intending to carry it back into our woods so it could return to the earth, and noticed how solid it felt it my hand. I examined it carefully, turning it over and over. It had suffered no discernible damage from its fall. And it was beautiful.

Through the years I have been caught up short by many of the wonders of nature’s works. But two days ago that perfect home for hatching and raising a new generation of robins struck me as one of the most magnificent of those wonders. It is perfect. It is strong and solid, but light-weight; woven tight, but soft.

How do robins know how to do that?

Season after season robins construct who-knows-how-many nests, most of them never seen by any human being. And now I held one of them in my hand, and it was, it is own way, as magnificent as the Alaskan mountains and glaciers we saw just a couple of weeks ago. And I, being human, almost swept it away without a thought.

Around the corner of our house, not far from the robin’s nest, we hang a wren house. At least a dozen–maybe more–generations of wrens have been hatched there, and we take special joy in watching for them each year. One (a male, I’ve read) claims the house first, builds a nest, and then sings for a mate. When he finally attracts the perfect partner, they work together to produce and nurture the new chicks. When they are feeding them the parents fly all day for days to and from the evergreens behind our house, feeding the hungry children until they fledge. One day they are all there; the next they are all gone. We rarely see the leave-taking.

This year’s wren nesting seemed as if it would never get off the ground. No one showed up until late June, and he (as I understand it) sang for weeks with no apparent success. Finally, just before we left on July 30 to be away for more than two weeks, a second wren did show up. We figured we’d miss whatever was to happen next.

The same day that I removed the robin’s nest I peered into the wren house through its entrance. Yes, there was a nest in there. But there had been no activity since we’d come home, and I figured the nesting was done. I took the house down and opened it to clean it out. The jumble of twigs and grass that wrens use to make their nest cradled two tiny, dead birds, just beginning to show their feathers. Some tragedy had befallen our wren family. It had been a difficult season for them from beginning to end.

It may be time for a new wren house. I want to offer these little birds we so enjoy watching and hearing the best home that I can. I could never build a nest the way birds do, but I do like to help them when possible. Their success and mine are interwoven as intricately as the grasses in that robin’s nest. Their intelligence and skill are different than any I possess. Sometimes I think it is equal to mine.

Nature’s results are never 100% what we think they ought to be, or even what they need to be for success. In this, as in perhaps every way, human beings are just like everything else. It’s pretty humbling. Awesome, even.

ABOUT THOSE STATUES...

ABOUT THOSE STATUES…

I have been reading and thinking quite a bit about the “Confederate Statues” controversy, and offer the following thoughts:

(Be advised, I am a “northerner,” so my views may reflect some geocentric bias.)

1. The conversation is helpful to me personally. For as long as I can remember I have felt ambivalent about these memorials; now I recognize why.

2. One possible solution: contextualize the statues historically by placing a similar-sized statue of a slave in chains next to each one of them. Doing this will preserve the history that many today claim they do not want to lose. Slavery is, after all, what they were fighting to preserve. An explanatory plaque would be a cheaper, but less effective, alternative.

(I know that some argue that the Civil War was not about slavery, but slavery was the intractable problem that led to everything else associated with the war.)

3. Another solution: move all the statues to museums that teach the history not only of the war itself, but of the century that followed it. Or maybe move them to battlefields or Civil War cemeteries, such as Gettysburg and Johnson’s Island, where they really can serve a historic purpose. My understanding is that many of them were put up decades after the war, as much to bolster the legalized racism practiced in most of the south in the early 20th century as to honor particular soldiers. These statues do not need to be displayed in places of honor in order to be useful, though I am not sure how much instructional value most of them actually have.

(I am wary of destroying history’s artifacts when they make us uncomfortable. Second only to the crimes against people perpetrated by Isis has been its destruction of historically significant works of art in the ancient world. Isis’s fundamental contempt for human culture and history is a crime against us all.)

(I am also wary of angry crowds taking it upon themselves to pull down and destroy statues. Mob action is a highly risky last resort, maybe.)

4. The Governor of Maine compared the destruction of Confederate statues to the possible destruction of 9/11 memorials? Really? That’s bizarre.

5. Speaking of history: weren’t these Confederate Generals traitors? Didn’t they participate in an armed rebellion against the country of their birth and to which many of them must have sworn allegiance when they signed on as soldiers and officers in the US Army? (Robert E. Lee, chief among them.) To have allowed them to go back home to take up their lives again after the war was one thing. To honor and celebrate them is quite another. What Americans would want to do that 150+ years after the last shots were fired?

6, in which I answer the question I posed in the final sentence of #5: Americans who long for another rebellion against the United States of America, that’s who would want to honor and celebrate those rebels; Americans armed to the teeth because they think the only way to save their country and their way of life is by violence; Americans who wear Nazi symbols and who wave Confederate flags because they want their convictions to become our fears.

7. Where else on earth would any government tolerate for a moment, much less for a century and a half, the near veneration of those who had taken up arms against it, leading to uncountable loss of lives and properties, for a cause–chattel slavery–that history has judged to be absolutely evil? We are such a complex amalgam of competing passions!

Donald Trump and the Threatened Triumph of Ideology over Democracy

It is increasingly apparent that ideology is threatening to overcome our democracy. The right is currently in the driver’s seat, but the left could just as well be there, and may well be in the future.

As we have become more and more fragmented and compartmentalized socially and politically, a vacuum has been left in our national fabric. It’s a vacuum that ideologies are eager to fill. We know and encounter one another on increasingly impersonal and functional terms, and are less able than in the past to match faces to the names of people with whom we interact. One sign of this is the unacceptable and offensive habit of talking on a cell phone will paying for purchases. There is apparently no need to acknowledge the human being who is serving you when you’ve got your own little circle of friends and family to attend to. Online shopping regularizes our indifference to people who are different than us, and makes such indifference acceptable.

Ideology categorizes people, problems, and solutions according to impersonal standards. Its success depends upon blindness to the rich variety of humanity and of human experience. The more we know about and understand one another, the harder it is for us to speak and think in discrete categories about one another. Ideology subverts democracy, which functions because we are individuals who participate with one another in public, civic activities (such as voting), by shaping us into compliant cogs in someone else’s ordered machine. That machine depends upon adherence to particular laws and rules which cannot be broken without threatening the entire machine. Democracy, by definition, is messy…the way life itself is messy.

Earlier this week our all-powerful immigration folks deported a man to Mexico who had been living illegally in the United States since 2001 but who has been, by all accounts, a contributing and responsible member of our society. You can say (as some of you will) that they were only enforcing the law, and you would be right to a point. But not to the point of justice, which should be the goal of all law and its enforcement. When Jesus was criticized for breaking Sabbath regulations, he told his accusers that the Sabbath was made for humanity, not humanity for the Sabbath. Laws and rules should serve people and human flourishing, not stifle or exclude them.

What does President Donald Trump have to do with all of the above? As a narcissist, he is the perfect leader in an era of ideology over democracy because is actually interested in neither. His primary and consuming interest is in himself and (perhaps) in a very, very tight circle of immediate family members. People who are driven by ideology (think Steve Bannon) can run roughshod over him because he cannot see how their plans affect anyone other than himself because he cannot see anyone other than himself. I believe he is, in fact, being used by extreme right-wing/alt-right forces to place America under lock and key. Then, they’ll throw away the key.

Yesterday I read that Trump’s Chief of Staff came very close to suggesting they are “looking at” the First Amendment, perhaps to find ways to “protect” the President and other political leaders from criticism. Today’s headline is that Trump is wondering if he might be able to pardon himself. This is narcissism run amok with political power, and one can only wonder how long and far it will have to go before the whole nation figures it out.

Not Enough America to Go Around?

How do those of us who are appalled by the dangerous and disheartening directions our country seems to be heading celebrate the Fourth of July…Independence Day?

Someone who shares my political apprehensions said to me last night, “It’s hard to celebrate the Fourth with what’s going on.” I think I have been feeling the same way recently, but her speaking those words jolted me into analyzing my feelings.

I realized that since last November I have been thinking a great deal about what it means to me to be an American, about what patriotism means to me, and have been expressing my patriotism in statements of resistance to current political trends and follies. In a way, it is easier to celebrate the Fourth of July when what today means to me as an American is under attack.

What does being an American mean to me? Start with freedom and liberty . . . the freedom and liberty afforded each individual as Americans together. It’s not just MY freedom and liberty that matter to me, but the freedom and liberty we all are promised. So, to be an American is to be one who is as passionate about the freedom others enjoy as about his or her own.

Justice…justice for me, justice for you, justice for each one. “Equal justice under law,” expresses the American ideal of justice. I deserve justice no more than does anyone else.

Opportunity and responsibility go hand-in-hand with freedom and justice. (That’s a lot of hands!) I have had many opportunities in my life, and I’ve carried out at least some of my responsibilities. Every American is deserving of opportunities no less than those afforded to me, and every American should be free to assume all the responsibility she or he can for living in our society.

The point I am trying to make is that being an American is not just about me, nor is it just about people like me. It is about all of us together. There are basics we all should be able to enjoy even as we fuss and fume with one another about how as many of us as possible might achieve them.

Unfortunately, complex and intertwined economic, cultural, religious, and political forces are converging in our time to isolate us from one another. They are stoking fear that each of us can only get what we think we want if we deny others what they need, as if there is not enough America to go around. We harden our hearts and minds to let no outsiders into our circle, and America–first the ideal and then the reality–fragments.

Last week we were able to visit Independence Hall, the Statue of Liberty, and Ellis Island. Not a one of those has any meaning to me as an individual unless it speaks to and of the experiences and aspirations of us all. They speak of big hopes and of bold dreams for today and far into the future.

We also visited the 9/11 Museum and Memorial. It, too, is about us all. It tells a horrible story, but also points to how we face and overcome adversity and terror.  We face and overcome them together, by birth or adoption sons and daughters together of what Independence Hall, Lady Liberty, and Ellis Island represent.

The American patriot never stops believing there is more than enough America to go around. Happy Fourth of July, all 325,000,000+ of us!

A Text for Yesterday and More

Yesterday evening – toward the end of the day of shootings in Alexandria and San Francisco – I happened across the following by Argentine-Chilean-American writer Ariel Dorfman:

You want to free the world, free humanity, from oppression? Look inside, look sideways, look at the hidden violence of language. Never forget that language is where the other, parallel violence, the cruelty exercised on the body, originates.

It seemed an appropriate text for another day of horrendous violence in our violence-saturated world. I sat quietly, stunned, for a full five minutes after I read it.

Watch out, Dean, for what you say. You do not own a gun, but what if your words help accelerate our spiral into anarchy?