A Family Affair?

I am equally put off by Republicans and Democrats alike these days. The well-orchestrated conventions of both parties were hyped and packaged to the slickest extremes so that everyone came away feeling good about their party and their candidate. Nobody seems to care about the crescendoing vitriol that is being spewed back and forth. Each side gets a rush when their guy takes a shot at the other guy, whether the shot is based on truth or not. And that’s the point, isn’t it? These days, when most folks get their information from neatly packaged sound bites on TV rather than take the time to actually read something, the message is more about presentation, not content. You can lie through your teeth, but if the setting is right, the background perfect, and the shills in the crowd fired up, anybody will buy it these days. And most of the time, those in opposition will just go "Whaaa?" without being really sure of the truth anyway. This has become an election of emotions, not facts.

Of course, I’m disinclined to buy into the conservative babble, but I’m getting fed up with what I am perceiving to be a clear lack of substance on Kerry’s side as well. I’m still in the "Anybody but Bush," category, but I am more deeply depressed than ever at the prospect of our country being led by anyone who is more into hype and politics than in making a difference in the lives of people.

There is a real difference in how liberals and conservatives function, at least in theory. George Lakoff, in his book Moral Politics, parses it out very nicely. Simply put, both sides see the nation as a family, with government as parent. Conservatives take a Strict Father stance and liberals take the Nurturant Parent stance. The Strict Father mind set posits a traditional nuclear family, the father having the primary responsibility for protecting and supporting it as well as overall policy authority. He assumes the power to set strict rules for the behavior of children and to enforce those rules. Mother has the responsibility for day-to-day care of the household, raising the children, and upholding the father’s authority. The children must respect and obey the parents and by doing so they learn self-discipline and self-reliance. Love and nurturance never outweigh parental authority, which to the conservative mind, translates to tough love. Self-discipline, self-reliance, and respect for authority are the things children must learn. Once children are mature, they are on their own and must depend on their acquired self-discipline to survive. Their self-reliance gives them authority over their own destinies and parents are not to meddle in their lives.

The liberal, Nurturant Parent model makes love, empathy, and nurturance primary, and children become responsible, self-disciplined, and self-reliant, through being cared for, respected, and caring for others within and without the family. The obedience of children comes out of their love and respect for their parents and their community, not out of fear of punishment. Questioning by children is seen as positive, even though ultimately, parents will have to make the decisions. When children are nurtured, respected, and communicated with from birth, they gradually enter into a lifetime relationship of mutual respect, communication, and caring with their parents.

The Strict Father morality assigns highest priorities to such things as moral strength (to stand up to external and internal evils), respect for and obedience to authority, the setting and following of strict guidelines and behavioral norms, and so on.

Nurturant Parent morality requires empathy for others and the helping of those who need help. To help others, one must take care of oneself and nurture social ties.

Looking at the Bush camp and the Kerry camp, you can see the fundamental moral political nature of each. But here is where the theory stops working, in my opinion, at least in this electronic day and age. I have to ask the question of both parties (and I am asking the question in different context for each, though it is the same question, because I hate the portrayed Republican mind set, and I want the Democrats to live up to theirs): While you each theoretically stand within one of these two moral models, and each serves to define your respective platforms, are you really thinking about the people you say you serve or are you posturing simply because you’re trying to get your own way? In other words, do you even care about the people you wish to govern? With Bush, I’m certain that there is little if any real knowledge of how the lives of people making less than several million a year are affected by his policies. With Kerry, intellectually, I believe he thinks about the little guy, but I wonder if he has a clue either. Time was, in the days of the Rockefellers, the Morgans, the Kennedys, and others, wealthy families were raised with a sense of responsibility for the world around them. Their privilege brought responsibilities to try to make life better for those less fortunate. That mind set, I fear has been lost on Kerry. I don’t think it ever existed with Bush.

You can understand my depression, then, when I tell you, I truly believe that neither party is in touch with the needs of real people and that both parties are spouting off sound bites to appeal to the lowest common denominator voters who don’t care about anything but what they can get for themselves, too. This election has, in my opinion, little to do with the needs of humanity and the making of a better world, and more to do with each party getting what it wants: defeat of the other, and power. Unfortunately, power gotten by these means only begets greater violence on the part of the losing players to get it back. I fear we are in for a long siege of ideological mud-slinging and dirty tricks with only one goal in mind - to win at all costs for the sake of winning, and that’s all.

If I ever hear someone get up and say, "I’m running for President. Here’s what I stand for. If you don’t like it, don’t vote for me," I’ll drop everything and join the campaign in a heartbeat.

6:59:26 PM   Lay some on me [] 

Phoenix

I have been trying to kill this blog.

Kill it?

You bet. Posting to this site has been a revelatory experience for me. I was having a hard time understanding the pressure I felt to post, the angst I was feeling by the lack of significant response, and my growing addiction and anger at watching the rankings list to see where I was showing up, being surpassed by sudden bursts of speed from blogs I’d never heard of that seemed to materialize high on the list from nowhere. This finally got to be too much. One of the demons which besets a person in my line of work is the concern that nobody’s paying attention, or, at best, that you’re preaching to the choir, the converted, whatever. We long to make a dent in the status quo and at the same time find ourselves concerned that the status quo will not give up or at the very worst, they will rebel at hearing stuff that shakes them up. I’ve done both. I’ve been cuffed from both sides. I have worried about someone not being in church on a particular Sunday and wondered whether it was something I said the previous Sunday. Over time, I have opted for the shake up side in the churches. But these and a multitude of other demons still haunt me from time time and they were beginning to take over my writing here as well. I didn’t like what I was feeling. I started writing here simply to write whatever I wanted. I also wanted to shake some things up. But I have discovered that most of my readers think like me, and the odd dissenting voice that comes through here usually sallies forth with a vitriole that typifies the polarized atmosphere in which we now live, response to which is an impossibility, except in kind which gets us nowhere.

There was only one thing to do. Like the horror movies where the protagonist realizes that the only way to kill the demons possessing him or her was to kill the body, knowing that the spirit would live on, I walked away from this thing, intent on letting it die on the vine. No warning, no long post saying I had bigger and better things to do. I didn’t. I just hated the blog, what it had become, what I was becoming. It had become something I had never intended and it was consuming me, even in the increasingly infrequent postings of the present day. I decided I was going to let the thing drop off the Top 100 list (after two months, it’s getting very close and the momentum may be enough to carry it through the floor) so there’d be no reason to look there. Going cold turkey made the demons scream for a time, but they have gone now and, having had brief discussions with Art Jacobson and Melanie Matson, and having had a wanted poster stuck up on Dr. Omed’s Lost Boys site, I think I’m ready to come back to posting occasionally. But it’s going to be now and then, and it’s going to be what I feel like, the responses be damned. I’ve learned at my churches (some time ago) that I have to preach what the Spirit preaches within me and that works well. Somehow, I didn’t translate that to here. Perhaps the anonymity of it all was the first seduction, I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. I am, I hope, returning to posting to a resurrected blog, raised to a new life of saying what I want, what I think, and perhaps pissing off a few more than I have in the past. My hope is that a reasonable dialogue can emerge from that, but I won’t count on it. More importantly, this time, I don’t care.

Thanks to Art, Mel, and Doc for their counsel and for reminding me that when we get lost, there are still some folks out there who care about where you are.

8:34:00 PM   Lay some on me [] 

Friday Morning Nightmare

It's relatively early Friday morning and I am performing my morning ritual of walking the dogs, checking up on the blogs, and reading the NY Times.  This morning there was a picture of Dick and Tom, all serious and important, telling us that Osama bin Laden was plotting another massive attack against the U.S. sometime this year.  "The intelligence is cryptic," said one officical, but they're gearing us up for an attack just the same.

Also, yesterday, we were informed that the House refused to pass legislation limiting the power of the Patriot Act.  Actually, they came close to nixing it, but after extending the time limit for the vote, the Republican leadership was able to coerce 10 of their renegade own who had voted for the limitations to change their votes.  The limitations they were voting on included provisions for checking up on what kind of books you and I were taking out of the library.

Looks like today I'm going to take my Saran Wrap and duct tape down to the library and check out a copy of Mein Kampf.  I need to prepare for the outcome of the upcoming elections.  And I'm sure the administration will not feel threatened by my choice of reading material when they check up on my library card.

7:28:21 AM   Lay some on me [] 

O Say, Won't You See?

We just got back from seeing Fahrenheit 9/11.  We were surprised that it even showed up here, this place being the bastion of Republicanism that it is.  But there it was, at our local theater, so we decided to go tonite with some friends of ours.  Surprisingly, there was a good crowd there for a Monday night at the end of a holiday weekend.  And a number of people I knew were there, even though they were staunch conservative Republicans.  One of them told me that he was there so he could say that he had seen the movie and make up his own mind rather than be swayed by second hand opinions.  Good for him.  Another couple, from out of town, but members of my congregation when they're here, told me, simply, that they were boycotting the movie.  They, too, are staunch conservatives, but not folks I would normally think would just stick their heads in the sand.  It takes all kinds.

The movie was great.  Those who are saying to stay away from the movie because it is filled with lies, obviously haven't seen it.  Just about everything Moore uses to make his point comes right out of Bush's or Cheney's mouth.  It amazes me how well duped this nation has become.  I just don't get the continued support this administration gets.

Watching the movie made me angry and embarassed and steeled me to some kind of action.  I preached yesterday about love of country and the ideals we held dear - Enlightenment ideals of equality and personal freedom and the responsibility we had, as Paul tells us in Galatians, to "check our work" regularly.  The essence of the readings yesterday was humility.  The only thing we can or should boast about is that we are all children of God, loved and forgiven.  To act like the biggest, baddest, dog on the block is both arrogant and dangerous.  The ideals this nation holds dear are still within us.  They have been clouded over by the agenda of those in power.  We must, as individuals, pursue those ideals, and work to get this country back on track.  Everyone has different ideas as to how that can be accomplished.  The signatories of the Declaration of Independence were at odds as to how to go about it and they fought long and hard for their ideas.  But they discussed their differences in the open, without secrecy, and ultimately made a decision that set this country on its course.  Checking our work, testing the Spirit regularly is the answer to finding the right way.  We must continually ask our selves why we are about something or other.  Is it because we have something to gain, or something to give?  Moore's movie gave a pretty believeable answer to that question as far as Bush is concerned.  Two thumbs up and a rocket's red glare for this one.

11:06:25 PM   Lay some on me [] 

Suicide Pact

Barbara Ehrenreich offers an Op-Ed piece in the NY Times today comparing George III and George II in a careful reading of the Declaration of Independence:

Their George and Ours

By BARBARA EHRENREICH

hen they first heard the Declaration of Independence in July of 1776, New Yorkers were so electrified that they toppled a statue of King George III and had it melted down to make 42,000 bullets for the war. Two hundred twenty-eight years later, you can still get a rush from those opening paragraphs. "We hold these truths to be self-evident." The audacity!

Read a little further to those parts of the declaration we seldom venture into after ninth-grade civics class, and you may feel something other than admiration: an icy chill of recognition. The bulk of the declaration is devoted to a list of charges against George III, several of which bear an eerie relevance to our own time.

George III is accused, for example, of "depriving us in many cases of the benefits of Trial by Jury." Our own George II has imprisoned two U.S. citizens — Jose Padilla and Yaser Esam Hamdi — since 2002, without benefit of trials, legal counsel or any opportunity to challenge the evidence against them. Even die-hard Tories Scalia and Rehnquist recently judged such executive hauteur intolerable.

It would be silly, of course, to overstate the parallels between 1776 and 2004. The signers of the declaration were colonial subjects of a man they had come to see as a foreign king. One of their major grievances had to do with the tax burden imposed on them to support the king's wars. In contrast, our taxes have been reduced — especially for those who need the money least — and the huge costs of war sloughed off to our children and grandchildren. Nor would it be tactful to press the analogy between our George II and their George III, of whom the British historian John Richard Green wrote: "He had a smaller mind than any English king before him save James II."

But the parallels are there, and undeniable. "He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power," the declaration said of George III, and today the military is indulgently allowed to investigate its own crimes in Iraq. George III "obstructed the Administration of Justice." Our George II has sought to evade judicial review by hiding detainees away in Guantánamo, and has steadfastly resisted the use of the Alien Tort Claims Act, which allows non-U.S. citizens to bring charges of human rights violations to U.S. courts.

The signers further indicted their erstwhile monarch for "taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments." The administration has been trying its best to establish a modern equivalent to the divine right of kings, with legal memorandums asserting that George II's "inherent" powers allow him to ignore federal laws prohibiting torture and war crimes.

Then there is the declaration's boldest and most sweeping indictment of all, condemning George III for "transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty and perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation." Translate "mercenaries" into contract workers and proxy armies (remember the bloodthirsty, misogynist Northern Alliance?), and translate that last long phrase into Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib.

But it is the final sentence of the declaration that deserves the closest study: "And for the support of this Declaration . . . we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor." Today, those who believe that the war on terror requires the sacrifice of our liberties like to argue that "the Constitution is not a suicide pact." In a sense, however, the Declaration of Independence was precisely that.

By signing Jefferson's text, the signers of the declaration were putting their lives on the line. England was then the world's greatest military power, against which a bunch of provincial farmers had little chance of prevailing. Benjamin Franklin wasn't kidding around with his quip about hanging together or hanging separately. If the rebel American militias were beaten on the battlefield, their ringleaders could expect to be hanged as traitors.

They signed anyway, thereby stating to the world that there is something worth more than life, and that is liberty. Thanks to their courage, we do not have to risk death to preserve the liberties they bequeathed us. All we have to do is vote.   

12:37:07 PM   Lay some on me [] 

Got The Fourth of July

Comes on Sunday

Patriotic Preachin'Blues

The Fourth of July comes on a Sunday this year.  I've had a couple of opportunities to deal with this holiday coming on Sunday over the past fifteen years, but it always presents a problem.  I am the last one to advocate acts of national pride and patriotism in the church.  I removed the flags years ago.  I believe strongly that the church should not be the chaplain to the state, even though with the legalisation of Christianity by Constantine nearly 1700 years ago, the state has so successfully absorbed the Christian church into its own ethos, that it's hard to distinguish the two.  I have been in churches where the colors were paraded into the church during the processional and the national anthem was sung at the offertory.  I experience these additions to the liturgy as anathema.  The church, as it is called to be, should stand as other, a community apart from the state, not walled off from the state or as an exclusive enclave of anti-government activists, but as the living, breathing, Gospel in the community, standing for peace and justice, against repaying violence for violence.  Instead of joining the state by condoning vengeance upon Afghanistan (sort of) and Iraq, the church should have been stressing exhausting all other avenues of resolution before visiting violence on others.  But that's all water under the bridge.  My problem is the Fourth of July this Sunday.

I love this country.  It is my home.  I love what it used to stand for and the ideals it once held, and may still, save for the ravings of a strident and grossly misguided few and a majority of manipulated folk who can't or won't think for themselves.  I am a bleeding-heart, lily-livered, cheese-eating, wine-tasting liberal in a community of red-neck, gun totin' conservatives, and my congregations are a microcosm of that mindset.  They will expect me to say something patriotic which I refuse to do and I want to get across to them that they are part of a community which does not believe in violence, without getting into an us/them dichotomy.  Perhaps God sensed my dilemma, because yesterday, on West Virginia Public Radio's Mountain Stage, I heard Joan Baez sing a beautiful, a capella version of Sibelius' Finlandia with lyrics by the Indigo Girls.  I may sing it, or at least read it, on Sunday.  It's a complete Fourth of July sermon for the Real America:

this is my song
oh god of all the nations
a song of peace
for lands afar and mine

this is my home
the country where my heart is
here are my hopes
my dreams my holy shrine

but other hearts
in other lands are beating
with hopes and dreams
as true and high as mine

my countries skies
are bluer than the ocean
and sunlight beams
on clover leaf and pine

but other lands
have sunlight too and clover
and skies are everywhere
as blue as mine

oh hear my song
oh god of all the nations
a song of peace
for their land and for mine

Amen.

10:43:34 AM   Lay some on me [] 

Up to us

So anyway, I’m out at one of the churches last night and some of the guys and I are spreading gravel on the ground under the new pavilion the Women’s Group built for picnics and such. One of the guys brought his big orange Kubota front loader to help out, and it was great to have it there. I couldn’t help but think, though, as I was shoveling gravel out of the bucket of this monster, and spreading it on the ground, that over 40 years ago my father kept harping at me about "This is what you’ll be doing for the rest of your life if you don’t get a high school education." It dawned on me that I now have a doctorate and I’m doing it anyway. Go figure.

So anyway, the other day the Supreme Court decided on a technicality not to rule on whether the pledge should have "under God" in it or not. I was around (third grade) when it was put in, and now things have come full circle. We put it in to separate us from the "Godless Communists" and now we want it out because "we don’t want our kids raised thinking there’s a God," or some such. My how things come around.

So anyway, the Institute for Religion and Democracy apparently is funding the AAC and its plan to infiltrate and destroy the Episcopal Church because the AAC, after all, is the one, true, Church and they know best. The fundamentalists in the world are wreaking havoc just so they can get their way. The Middle East is blowing up and all these folks can do is worry about who’s sleeping with whom.

So anyway, Bush and Co. are up to their usual stuff.

So anyway, I’m having a hard time getting worked up over all this political intrigue, questing for power, etc. On our cruise through the Panama Canal last month, I was intrigued by the fact that after the engineering miracle that went in to building the canal in the first place, and all the high-tech equipment and coordination it takes to move a 965 foot ship through the locks, the success of the whole operation comes down to two guys in a rowboat. That’s right, kids. Two guys in a rowboat have to row out to the ship as it approaches the locks, gather up the lines dropped from the ship, and row them back to the lock so they can be tethered to the mule which keeps the ship moving and centered in the lock. With all the engineering, high tech stuff, and having tried all sorts of ways to get the lines over to the mules, the whole thing falls to two guys in a row boat. It’s the only way it works. Even if the world were to blow up and we had to move our carriers through the canal to go rescue yet another third world country from itself, it wouldn’t happen unless two guys in a row boat came out to get the lines. Two guys in a rowboat have the power to control the flow of commerce from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Two guys in a rowboat have the power to control the movement of insane, nuclear might. The whole world might not come to a stop if they didn't do their work. But it sure would be mightily inconvenienced. And when inconvenience strikes, there’s an opportunity to think and consider another way.

So perhaps, with all the posturing and ego bruising that’s going on today, with people thinking they’re more important than they really are, instead of getting all worked up about it, letting blood pressures boil over at the stupidity we see every day, we should remember that in the face of it all, no matter how big, or how powerful, if we look hard enough, the success or failure of some monumental movement usually comes down to a couple of guys in a row boat, or something, doing something to make the connections so that the movement can take place.

We need to think about that.

The guys in the rowboats are us!! We don’t have worry about whether we have the power to change the course of the ship because we're not at the helm. All we have to do is decide whether or not to connect the lines to the mule. That means, for the most of us, that we just keep working throughout the day, pondering what will do the most good to bring peace and an end to suffering. Bring hope and inclusivity. Bring love and healing to a broken world. Grandiose programs, political posturing, bullying, self-righteous preaching, won’t do it. A couple of guys in a row boat under the shadow of some great imposing vessel will. Perhaps it’s time we ask ourselves if we’re pulling on our oar hard enough. It is, after all, up to us, partnered with one or two others in a little boat, to keep the world on an even keel.

8:22:00 AM   Lay some on me []