A generation of Christmases

This is the last Christmas during which our Myers family tree will shine its colorful lights upon the quiet wooded scene in the background. Shortly after the first of the year, Maxine and I are due to move to a retirement community a few miles north of here. No window in our new home will look out on a scene quite like this one.

We’ve celebrated thirty Christmases here. That’s about a generation. Our children grew up in this place, and are now in their own places, completely immersed in pursuing careers and nurturing their own families and friendships. We grew old here, and are now making the kind of move old people make on the way to the final good-bye. We are sad to leave this house, but eager to be settled in our new one. We look forward to making new friends and to exploring new experiences.

So, the generations come and go. The Jewish and the Christian scriptures are absolutely clear about that. No particular generation or time or era or epoch is the final—the forever—one. By God’s design, each is a way-station to the next, charged only with leaving this temporal world in better shape than it had been.

Maybe that’s why, at Jesus’s birth, the angels sang a song that embraces both the uncreated and the created, and that touches each human being. Glory to God in the highest, peace on earth, good will to all is a hymn that celebrates all universes and universalities, yet at the same time it is a tune as close to us as our next encounter with worldly reality.

Praise God, live in peace, and be good to all. That’s about it.

Okay, I can expand on it: Trust love, grace, and peace; live day-by-day truthfully and justly; and forgive yourself and one another when anyone screws up so you and they can get back to the high calling of trusting love, grace, and peace.

Our family will gather around this tree one last time in the days after Christmas. We have different ideas about glorifying God, but we are almost always very good to one another, and to the many other people we meet upon our various journeys. Because none of us claims perfection, we know a thing or two about forgiveness. The generation succeeding us contributes enormously to the common good as educators and musicians and neighbors and citizens. Something good started flourishing under this roof, whether we knew it or not at the time. We are grateful.

If you are used to looking for a Christmas card/letter from us, it’s not in the mail. You will hear from us when we are in our new home. Meantime, there’s this house to sell, and a move to negotiate.

So, one more time, from this home to yours, Merry Christmas to you…and to all.

From my perspective...

The current impeachment inquiry of Our Current President (“OCP”) is important, necessary, and the right thing to do.

But it will not result in his removal from office. OCP has a long, long history of worming his way out of, or making people forget, every charge and accusation ever brought against him. His loyal base and trembling hangers-on will stay with him no matter what, even should he “stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody.” What makes anyone think they will abandon him over a quid pro quo regarding Ukraine and the Bidens?

Meanwhile, Australia burns, Venice drowns, deserts expand, storms get increasingly destructive, etc. Our United States of America willingly gives up its leadership role in the world, turning the planet over to narcissistic dictators and despots. Earth mourns.

If in 2119 humanity is still around to remember history, this impeachment process will be but a blip on its radar, no matter how it comes out. But Earth’s forever-altered climate, which our elected leaders have decided is not worth protecting, will be the main story from the 21st century— unless we have fought ourselves to death first because those same leaders valued conflict over cooperation.

Who won?

I promised I would let my loyal readers know how the Orange School Board race I wrote about last week turned out.

The Hunting Valley-resident candidate received a little more than 15% of the vote, and the two incumbents almost equally split the remaining nearly 85%. So they easily retained their seats.

Late last week we (and I assume everyone else in the district) received a letter from the Hunting Valley resident reiterating her concerns and denying she had anything to do with the vetoed attempt to tax Hunting Valley at a different rate.

Unfortunately, the incumbents never directly answered her concerns in a widely-distributed way. I think that is too bad. I don't know if that was a calculated plan or just the feeling they didn't need to. I think one good thing about this election campaign is that it did put some issues before us all, issues that might come back to trouble future requests from the school to increase our property taxes. I do not think it will be wise just to pretend none of it happened. I also think there will need to be some healing between the several communities that share the same school district.

I am happy the election turned out as it did. I hope the Orange Schools will not take the results as a sign they can rest on their laurels or do not need to take questions and critiques seriously.

Money and Politics, Up Close and Personal

Our local school district is a good place the witness the power money is having and is trying to have on the American political and social compact.

It’s a bit complicated to explain, but I will try. The Orange School District serves the residents of five communities and of small sections of some neighboring communities. We are located on Cuyahoga County's far southwest side, and comprise one of the more affluent areas of the county. There is relatively little poverty in our district, though there is some. I’d guess many of us are at least upper middle class, and the class category goes from there up to and including very, very wealthy. Why Maxine and I live here is another story, involving the church I was called to serve in 1989. It was not easy to live at or near the lower end of the income scale for the area, especially with two children going through the school system. Nevertheless, we have loved living where we live.

By far the wealthiest community in the Orange School District is Hunting Valley. Its 700 residents live mostly in homes you cannot see from the roads that make their way though the wooded landscape. Imposing gates keep unwanted visitors away. The homes you can see are large and beautiful, and just the landscaping around those closed gates is often spectacular.

Our current president has glad-handed folks in at least one of Hunting Valley’s estates. Donors have, in general, been very generous to Republican candidates, through I read that at least a few Democrats call Hunting Valley home.

As the most recent Ohio state budget was being considered by our legislature, the senator representing Hunting Valley (and other nearby communities) slipped into it an amendment to lower the property tax rate for Hunting Valley residents. This idea has been reported to have been under consideration by some Hunting Valley political leaders for some time. Apparently the fact that Hunting Valley sends very few children to the Orange Schools (in part because many of the relatively few school-aged kids who live there go to private schools) was deemed sufficient justification for the proposal. Some say now that many of the residents did not know anything about this plan; I have not heard anyone own up to being in the dark about it.

Had that amendment become law, it would have cost our district some $3 million per year in tax revenue, and it would have paved the way for other communities in other school districts to try to do the same thing. It would have meant either that our highly-regarded school system would have had to make significant cuts in what it offers, or to ask the rest of us to make up the difference via an increase in our tax rate.

Fortunately, Republican Governor Mike DeWine noticed the last-minute amendment, and vetoed it. I don’t agree with lots of things he is doing, but he seems at least to be a decent human being, with a sense of fair play. The offending state senator has admitted the way he did what he did was not the best.

You might think that would have ended it, but you’d be wrong. It’s school board election time. Two incumbent candidates with long histories of involvement in the Orange Schools were on the ballot for the two vacant positions. Then, a third candidate, this one a resident of Hunting Valley, threw her hat in the ring. She is on the faculty of Cleveland State University, where according to her publicity, she does outstanding work, including developing programs to help students who have come from poorer school districts succeed. She has also been successful in “doing more with less.” I have no reason to doubt her accomplishments in higher education.

But she offers no claim of experience with the Orange School District, or with any other public school system. She has no children, so she’s never even been a parent of a school student. She has not denied the charge that she’s never stepped foot in an Orange school, nor attended any meetings of the School Board or any of its committees or working groups.

What she has done is focus on statistics that show that Orange students do not do as well on standardized tests as do students in other top-ranked school districts, and the fact that the per pupil cost in Orange is one of the highest in Ohio. There are solid responses to her charges. I will not review them here, but I can share them with you if you are interested.

I will say this: our two daughters received outstanding educations at Orange, educations that served them well when they went to college, and into their lives and careers. They enjoyed many opportunities for enrichment in school, and their teachers and guidance counselors were almost always excellent and willing to work with them personally when they needed it.

Back to the money: I first became aware of the Hunting Valley candidate when news came out that she’d held a fund-raiser at a local Country Club, attended by many of Hunting Valley’s powers-that-be. Contributions of $500 and up rolled in. Her first financial report reveals that she has raised some $29,000 for her campaign, while her two opponents have raised $3,600 and $2,400. When asked about the disparity, the Hunting Valley resident candidate pointed out with pride that “no one has ever raised as much as me.” Among other expenditures she reported $11,600 as going to a public relations firm for “outreach.”

The election is next week, and our school district race has been the topic of many neighborhood discussions and several articles and opinion pieces in our local paper and even in the Cleveland Plain Dealer. I think there is significant support for the two incumbents, for whom I have already voted. In a public forum, I heard their responses to their challenger’s concerns, but they haven’t done much to counter her criticisms more widely. I worry that voters who simply see the stats she cites will vote for her. We’ll see what happens.

No matter how this very local election turns out, it is a great object lesson in the place of money in our political process, here for all of us to see. How much greater it is on the state-wide and national scale! And how desperate “the 1%” must be to separate themselves from the merely well-off, as have Hunting Valley’s leaders. What are they afraid of losing, behind their closed gates? Why do they feel they should be excused from full proportional participation in the education of our community’s children?

Thinking and writing about this has, however, made me face where I stand in the hierarchy of privilege and wealth in our nation and world. It’s satisfying to take self-righteous pot-shots at those who have more than you do. It’s not so satisfying to realize how much more you have than the largest portion of the human race, and to seriously wonder how they view you and the way you use money to take advantage of them. After all, you are just protecting what’s yours. Who can argue with that?

Or is it mine only, really?

I will let you know how our school board election turns out.

Strange behavior

So strange the behavior of us church folk, and I suspect of most religious folk…

We willingly and, out of what feels for all the world like our own free will, gather regularly in response to the One whom we acknowledge to be greater than any one of us and than all of us together, the One who created all things and who desires the reconciliation and well-being of all things.

We gather to sing together, to pray together, to listen together, to eat together, blending our variety of voices and hopes and hungers and needs into one unholy mix that we believe is, in fact, made holy by our coming together the name of the One.

We gather to hear that our hurts are felt, our worries are known, our anxieties are understood, our isolation is overcome because we dare speak out loud about them in the presence of the One.

We gather to hear scripture and hymns and prayers and liturgies and sermons and the dreaded “announcements” urge us to welcome the stranger, share with the poor, embrace the outsider, seek justice for the oppressed, include the excluded, empty ourselves for the sake of others, and take risks for the One who made and loves us and in whom we trust.

We confess our sins and our mistakes and our errors before the One and everyone else, and know the forgiveness we have received gives us courage to try again, and to do better the next time. And what we are too afraid to share with everyone else, is quietly put before the One who loves us anyway/nonetheless/in-spite-of-it-all, and we are free.

We scatter to try to live our lives as best we can in response to the One, a few of us doing great things, most of us doing little things, some of us still trying to figure it all out, knowing we will find welcome that next time we gather.

So strange…so counter-cultural…so important…so misunderstood…so humbling…it’s a wonder we keep on doing it.

Wrapping up Climate Action Week with "what-ifs?"

Last week was a week designated for taking action regarding the Climate Crisis our planet faces. Of course, only one week out of the year is 51-weeks-short of what we could be doing, and I believe, should be doing.

I started the week by writing to two Orange Village officials about the environmental impact of a supposedly “green” housing development going up not far from our home. One wrote back, the other promises a phone call this week.

In the middle of the week I wrote to our Ohio U.S. Senators regarding climate. Senator Portman hasn’t responded (he probably will), and Senator Brown sent me a very comprehensive email stating his position.

Our main project this week was to eat locally-grown and produced vegetable-based meals. Perhaps you saw the post about that. As the week ended, I think we fulfilled that commitment quite well, and I don’t feel any worse off for it. I confess that it’s a bit of a challenge to think about where we go now food-wise, given our attention to planet-healthier eating options for a whole week. As I indicated in my original post, these are not entirely foreign practices for us, but maybe we’ve at least moved the marker a little closer to a truly sustainable diet.

Posting bogs about these acts is also part of my action. I realize my readership is extremely small, so I don’t expect to have much impact. I am not generally comfortable with participation in mass demonstrations, even though I know they can be very important. So if I write something that perhaps increases the awareness of one or two persons, that’s a least a small contribution.

I end this Climate Action week with a cluster of “what-if” questions that keep rattling around in my mind. I will try to state them as clearly as I can:

“What if we as a human race began to do all the things the scientists tell us we must do to counter the more drastic effects of climate change, and then discovered that the climate would have stabilized even if we had not done them? Are not climate-positive actions good for and beneficial to us without regard to their impact on our planet? Is doing the right thing for the sake of our planet’s future also doing the right thing for us as individuals and as societies?”

Do those questions make sense? Are they worth considering? I plan to keep working on them.

Thanks for reading.

How we eat

During this Climate Action Week, Maxine and I are doing a little something new. We've been inspired to do this by the report a couple of weeks ago regarding food and the climate/environment.

We are making an effort to eat locally-grown and produced food, and we are not eating meat.

When you live in Ohio, eating locally-grown food is much easier in September than it is in February. We belong to a food-buying club/co-op that provides us a bag full of fresh fruits and vegetables each week from May through October. I think being more intentional than we usually are about eating local during this week is helping us see how challenging it can be even when it is relative easy to do it.

At this point, we do not think we will give up all meat permanently. Maybe we should. There are many good reasons to do so. But to the extent that we do eat meat, we want to eat meat that is from animals raised as humanely and sustainably as possible. (I tried to write "slaughtered/harvested humanely," but that's a tough stretch.)

The environmental/climate implications of changing how we eat are profound. The major way we do agriculture, which could indeed "feed the world" if it were done justly, is extremely destructive to the natural environment, and contributes to the increasing rate of global climate change. Clearly, the billions of people now on planet Earth are not about to feed themselves year-round the way our agrarian ancestors did, so becoming more efficient and sustainable in the mass production and distribution of food should be a high priority for us and for the agricultural industry.

Maxine and I do not think these changes in our diet will prove to be permanent changes, although we have, in fact, been moving in these directions for many years. We think these are good moves for us and for the environment.

Nor do not believe what we are doing this week deserves any particular praise. It is more for our own awareness than for anything else. But I share it because it might get someone else to think about their own food habits. Perhaps you'd like to comment with your thoughts on the matter. I'd be grateful.