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Writing about what I have been reading and encountering in the media. |
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WELCOME TO MY BLOG! I comment on things I am reading, thinking about, encountering in media, and spiritual issues. I hope you will find something interesting. PS. I love feedback... |
| Have you noticed: we’ve lost some wonderful words along the way? Think about it: “cellophane.” When did you last use “cellophane” in a sentence? And, what about calling an attractive guy “tough?” We didn’t mean he looked like a “bruiser.” We used that for guys with neat haircuts and button-down collar oxford cloth shirts. I can’t remember the name of that haircut. Oh, and the entire recording industry. No one buys records anymore, even though ”vinyl” is back in fashion. Recently a friend and I explained “half-court basketball for women” to a forty-something and she couldn’t believe that such a thing ever existed. That is one thing I’m glad to leave behind. With the invention of antiperspirants, women can now sweat and no one seems to care. Sometimes, I notice people in my generation bringing words up that have fallen out of use merely to hear those sounds again. Just last night, we were talking about “Woolworth’s,” “Grants” and “Ben Franklin” stores. Occasionally, someone will have a party where everyone must dress as they did in a particular decade. That is always good fun. I still have a few things from the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s, but people now are nostalgic for the 80’s! Did anything actually happen in the 1980’s? Who would have thought it possible to be nostalgic for the 1990’s? They aren’t really over yet, are they? Well, it seems that some people think so. I remember my older brother saying, “that’s none of your beeswax!” Now we worry if bees will still be around for next growing season. I guess it is happening: I am part of the “older generation” who know a lot of cool unused words, but a lot of new words leave me puzzled. It’s okay, really. We are all “hunky dory.” |
| Thursday, I was in our county seat with a friend. We stepped outside to leave and were enveloped in a cloud of odd smelling smoke. “Crematorium,” she said and pointed to the tall smokestack behind the funeral home from which the smoke was pouring. “That is a dead body you smell.” As I had my car door open, the smoke quickly filled it. Driving away, I kept smelling it. I looked around. The entire downtown was full of that smoke. I thought about the Nazi crematoriums and how they must have smelled. As I gained distance, I opened my windows to blow out the smell and drove on to buy ingredients for Christmas dinner. This morning the incident returned to me. My stomach got tight, thinking about all those “imperfect” people gone up in smoke, while people nearby claimed they had no idea what was happening. I guess, if no one told you that smell was human flesh, you could chalk it up to manufacturing. Having grown up in the 1950’s in Pittsburgh, PA, I know all too well how bad that can smell. I remember a visit I had with my Uncle Paul when he was about 80. He told me as an Army officer, he had been assigned to clean up one of the death camps at the end of the second world war. He arrived the day after it was liberated. I asked him what he remembered most about the experience. His response: “The smell.” As a nation, we do both good and evil. Sometimes, as in the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we are confused by the fact that the act was meant to do good, to end killing. Why not blow up entire cities of our enemies? They don’t matter as much as we do. Who does matter? When I was twenty-nine, I had a hysterectomy. I was very sad that I would never have children. One of my sisters-in-law said, “when you don’t have children, all the world’s children are yours.” What about the world’s children when you do have children of your own? What about the world’s children grown into their dotage? To whom do they belong? My childhood was spent with 4 brothers. I didn’t want 4 brothers. I had nothing to say about that. My parents taught us to share. “Why should I share with them? I don’t want 4 brothers.” Dad would say “they are part of you and you are part of them.” I am glad I learned to share. It feels good to share. It clears away loneliness. It gives me a sense of connectedness. Did you know that trees connect at the roots and when one tree is injured, the others feed it? Even after it is dead, they feed it. I just learned that. It rests in my mind right next to the question: “Why should I pay for someone else to retire?” |
| March 15, 2017 Reading about the healthcare reform effort in Congress this morning, I encountered an article that mentions that Republicans have the majority, but did not have a reform plan in place when they achieved that majority, even though that is their top priority. I find this odd. They have been taking this stand for 7 years. Why were they unready when they got elected? So, now, Speaker Ryan and his committee have a replacement under consideration. While the replacement says, it will cut taxes to the wealthy, but still fully fund Medicaid expansion and reduce the cost to the consumer purchasing insurance on the open market, they explain that this will happen as the result of the magic of the market. The change in the market will be the ability to purchase insurance across state lines. They say this will lead to increased competition that will lower prices. The Management and Budget Office, a non-partisan organization has evaluated the bill and say that 24 million citizens would lose their insurance under this new plan. They would have to purchase their insurance using a tax credit as financial assistance. The states would have to manage their Medicaid costs with a gradually shrinking assistance from the federal government through block grants. The Obama administration initiated and Congress passed the Affordable Healthcare Act because market forces were magically helping the wealthy owners of insurance companies become more wealthy while denying healthcare to the working class. The Republicans argue that this was because the working class did not want healthcare. They think this because they were not accessing healthcare. They were not accessing healthcare because they could not pay for it. Republicans say they did have access by just going to the Emergency Room. What they fail to consider is the elevated cost of that care due to waiting until it is an emergency. They also fail to consider the harassment of people who can’t pay by hospitals that require payment to function. When patients can’t pay, it is other patients with money who take up the slack by paying more for their services. This functions as a tax on the sick to pay for services to the ill. Republicans also fail to consider that working people are responsible people who don’t want to stiff the hospital or the doctor for costs they can’t pay. They also fail to consider that people who have been unable to afford health care for generations are socialized to not use it, and do not have consumer skills related to accessing health care. One representative, Marshall, (R) from Kansas, is an OBGYN, who appears to be angry with Medicaid patients who did not use pre-natal care to his liking. It appears that he never asked them why. Well, as a social worker, I have asked thousands of people over my 44 years about their use of health care services. The biggest barrier is shame. Rich people and people with moderate means shame them in person and in the press. Health care providers shame them. They get shamed for not having enough of their own money to live comfortably in this wealthy country. They get blamed and put down in grocery lines and at the state offices where they apply for needed assistance. Even without direct shaming, they know by looking around that they are different. Health care providers such as doctors who earn hundreds of thousands of dollars per year have a hard time identifying with people who have low incomes. All too often, they fail to recognize and address the shame as a health issue. The Republican Party reminds me of the kids on the playground who laughed when someone fell rather than helping them get back up again. |
| Government by the people, for the people... The news is full of chaos and “much ado about nothing” while we are headed at breakneck speed into a desert of our own making and the rich are worried about things, objects, shiny baubles and possessions. I recall a time, in the late 1970’s or early 1980’s there was talk of building a neutron bomb. Its main feature was that it would destroy all life but leave buildings intact. I don’t know if it was developed, but the idea remains endemic to so much governmental thinking that our elected representatives have lost awareness of their own vulnerability as living organisms that survive by working in colonies rather than individually. My mother taught me that adolescence is about “learning that your parents have clay feet.” I think this time in America is about discovering that the things we use in our democracy have imperfections and we need to rectify them if our nation is to survive. Those folks that think a neutron bomb is a good idea need a virtual tour of such a situation. They need to somehow see the world they are creating with life gone from buildings, and no one to live or work in them, no one to clean or maintain them, products with no consumers, and services with no one to serve. I learned today that 26 states have the capacity within their constitutions to bypass the legislature and use ballot initiatives to address concerns. This year, in all 26 states, 10 ballot initiatives to improve the electoral system will be put forth for us to consider. They will each require 200,000 signatures to be gathered in one year before they can be placed on ballots for citizen votes. Each of them addresses a single aspect of government. One would change the Constitution so the legislature cannot change what the voters passed. Those things can only be changed by putting them once again before the voters. Another would change us to proportional representation. This is used with great success in 90 countries now. It would eliminate legislative districts so that all representatives would be elected state wide. If 40% of voters endorsed a party, then 40% of the representatives would be from that party. There are steps in the process that are included in the plan to make that workable. This would eliminate Gerrymandering, and bring more minorities into the conversation. I cannot at this minute recall the other 8 initiatives. You can find them at: www.governmentbythepeople.org. I hope all voters will explore these carefully considered ideas and begin thinking about these things, as they are intended to strengthen the voice of each voter in our representational democracy. {image # 1445398} {image # 1445398} |
As a former member of the “eastern establishment,” where people don’t know the difference between a turkey vulture and an eagle and don’t realize not knowing matters. (This is a reference to a very famous news broadcaster who did a segment in which he called a vulture an eagle. It was taped, but no one edited it out. We noticed it right off and that is what we remembered; not the point of the broadcast.) It happens that most of our media originates on one coast or the other, and frequently, someone refers to us as “flyover country.” That attitude got Trump elected. In a previous meditation about this, I used the word meritocracy to describe how things are organized in relation to training and education of the persons doing them. I see absolutely no way to change the fact that those of us with a higher IQ and/or more fruitful learning experiences will tend to be more powerful in society than those with less. Those wealthy people who started with “nothing” had something that we prize above everything in our meritocracy: intelligence and a rich history of learning. A core issue is how do we manage differences in “gifts” in a way that is healthy for everyone? Isn’t that what we mean when we say everyone is entitled to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness?” Meritocracy leads to hierarchy. For example, in local community groups, someone gets an idea of how things should be that is different from the majority. They have confidence in their idea, so, they try to win people over. If this doesn’t work, they face a choice: bide their time and keep trying; shut up and sit down; or find another venue where their idea will be empowered. Few people just sit down and shut up. Those that figure out how to get their idea empowered and enacted become more powerful. This done, they set up structures to support them in their leadership role. And, they seek positions in the structure of the society that will also protect their power because they believe in the rightness of their ideas, technologies, etc. This leads to the biggest dysfunction of hierarchy: the structure becomes the focus of attention rather than the goal it was built to accomplish. (I think I was first introduced to this idea in sociology 101.) Effective people can pull themselves back from simply protecting the order of things and re-orient to the goal and draw the attention of others back to the goal. They are not necessarily the top of the hierarchy, and in my experience, are rarely the top of the hierarchy. They are people like Martin Luther King, Jr. who kept people focused on the goal and who did not create much of a hierarchy. Instead, he worked within social structures that already existed – churches, community organizations, neighborhood etc. He didn’t sit down and shut up. He didn’t leave the group. He just kept trying and building his effectiveness. He rooted his work in widely accepted community values. He just emphasized the goal and empowered people who agreed with the goal. Whether one agrees or disagrees with his goal, one cannot realistically say he was ineffective. The medical institution is hierarchically based on demonstrated skills. The structures that support this are law, professional organizational goals, and the needs of the patients, without whom there would be no medical institution. Money is a huge issue in the medical institution. A former CEO of the local hospital said to me once that “medicine” is the largest industry in the world. Well, for certain, this is so here in South Central Missouri, and in the USA. In our society, money equals power. Consequently, looking at the medical institution, where do you find the money? Is it the patient? Well, they may have had money, before they got sick. The way we in the US have structured this institution, it is the sick who are taxed to pay the cost of care of the poor. If I am sick, I contribute more to the running of the institution than if I am well, but this exchange is rarely direct. There is the intermediary of the third party payer. The person who can’t pay gets served, not as well as the one with money, but served nonetheless. Who pays for that? - Why the sick people with access to money. There was a time, in our grandparent’s day, when this was not quite so true because things were more personal; fewer people, smaller communities, less technology. Well, those days are gone and we have had to change. However, we have applied structures to the medical institution that were developed in industry. Like my CEO friend said, medicine is an industry in the minds of most Americans. I doubt this is the best way to think of it. In a family, we have instrumental activities and nurturing activities. I define instrumental activities as wage earning, and meeting survival needs of shelter, clothing etc. I define nurturing activities as things that help the organisms that make up the family thrive as individuals and as a family. I think we manage these somewhat differently. We try to maintain a schedule of eating, sleeping, social time and time alone. Within the schedule, we are always learning, but we deliberately include teaching and learning activities for everyone. We tend to our bodies and each other’s bodies. This structure must remain flexible to incorporate unusual events such as illness, developmental needs, and adaptation to the environment. The family is the core institution of society. It is able to be flexible because it is small. The bigger it gets, the less flexible, so, we break it down into smaller units, usually defined by reproduction and/or housing. Large organizations may be effective in producing clearly defined, specific outcomes, but they are inflexible. It is much harder to turn a train around than an airplane. It is harder to turn an army around than a basketball team. Large organizations have a sort of inertia that families don’t have. They are, therefore, not good places for nurturing. But healthcare is a nurturing activity that we relegate to large organizations. The building gets better care than the persons within; the administrators and staff get better care than the patients. These two ideas: nurturing requires flexibility and medicine should be delivered in the same way as manufacture of washing machines are incompatible. This is a major problem in decision making that few people in the national dialogue acknowledge or attempt to resolve. Just as the institution of medicine is at a crossroads, so, too, is the institution of community/government. We must respond in some way to the needs of people who cannot fully care for themselves whether it be young children, the injured and infirm, or the elderly. Our government made a pact with the people 70 years ago that we would even out the provision of this care and eliminate people dying in the streets when we enacted the Social Security Act of 1934. This is a social contract our country made. In addition, our industries made social contracts with employees about health care and retirement benefits. This contract gave the industries labor they needed in a reliable way in exchange for some guarantee of long-term well-being of the laborers. This worked well in an industrial economy as far as anyone in power could see. In the end, however, those social contracts (that never were as effective as we thought they were,) are breaking down for many reasons. Key to this breakdown is the change from an industrial economy to what some of us refer to as the post-industrial age. The economic institutions that once required labor, now require highly skilled people. In both situations, industrial and post-industrial, there are un-needed people. They are not un-needed because of their intrinsic worth, guaranteed in the Constitution. They are un-needed because they have no role in the economy. The Social Security Act gave them a role: consumer. There is no one who does not consume but in order to do so, they must have money. In economic institutions, the consumer matters because without consumption, production has no purpose and there is no economic exchange. We could have an economy where people who produce receive resources in return for their production and then consume. This goes really well, until someone is no longer able to produce, or someone who is born needs care. The assumption I see in the libertarian way of thinking is that there will be someone who cares about the helpless ready, willing and able to take care of every helpless human being. Another assumption seems to be that the helpless will become able-bodied at some point, and, a corollary, that the able-bodied are equally able, and always fairly reimbursed for their economic contribution. Both of these assumptions are spurious. The closer to the nurturing role one gets, the less s/he gets paid. The owner of the food service earns much more than the server of the food. The surgeon gets paid dramatically more than the person tending to the patient before and after the surgery, etc. We pay child care workers tending to the youngest, most vulnerable people who are at the peak of their learning ability the least. The older the person gets, the closer to being productive members of the economy, the more we pay their teachers, and the more we spend on their care. There is a point at which this reverses; we call these the “golden years” to cover up the poverty of social/economic worth of these individuals. These economic decisions are not based on what works best for society; they are based on what works best for the economy. So here is the question we as a nation need to answer: what do we do about our social contracts of the past to make them meet the needs of us today? As libertarians so accurately point out, the assumptions of social security thinking are no longer true. The distribution of people has changed dramatically. Families are smaller leading to a static consumer population. The economic institutions need fewer people. Overpopulation is heating up the planet. If we continue with small families, and it looks as if this will happen despite conservative efforts to interfere with access to birth control, then we have a very different distribution of productive and “extra” people. There is one area where I strongly disagree with libertarians who say the food supply is the safest it has ever been. This is not true. We don’t even fully understand the problems we are facing that are beginning to impact the food supply. Chemicals being used to make production efficient seem to have some brain toxicity, and are killing off organisms essential to food production. These include microorganisms in the soil and pollinators. You can see the loss of pollinators in your own yard if you have not already observed it. Plant some flowers. Check daily to see how many insects are there to tend them. Try, perhaps, butterfly milkweed. In my yard, they rarely produce seed and I rarely see butterflies on them. Or, count butterflies and or bees in your yard. My experience with plants is they are not getting pollinated and not producing fruit or seed as they used to. It happens in our vegetable garden that some plants have lost their local pollinators entirely. They simply do not grow fruit in our yard. We have gardened this yard organically for 18 years. The earthworms that hardly existed when we moved here are now plentiful, thank goodness. But pollinators are not. In 1980, during the migration of the Monarch butterflies, If I drove 10 miles, I would see close to 150 at the peak of migration. During the 1000-year flood in the northern midwest about 10 years ago, the population dropped to almost nothing. Now, I am lucky to see 5 monarchs in ten miles due to the population hit from the flooding, and the disappearance of their winter habitat in Mexico caused by human activity. I could go on and on. Our food supply is in great danger. This is the result of “efficient” farming, of thinking man can outwit nature, and of thinking that arises from urban life that “flyover country doesn’t matter.” This said I haven’t even mentioned the impending water crisis. We are currently in the “oil wars.” When that is resolved, we will be fighting over water. No water is being created, but lots of water is being made unusable with mistreatment and pollution. As the population grows, so will human distress. We cannot assume this will all take care of itself. We must act as communities, as states and nation states in ways that will work, or we will find ourselves in a situation as a species that is desperate at the least. My question is, how will the libertarian thinkers propose that we manage this? I am not interested in some ideal about how it “should be.” I am interested in real ideas that work. I don’t see needed plans in the platform of the Libertarian Party. I see that platform as an abandonment of social contract altogether. I see it as overlooking these very real, serious issues we face. Where can I find someone who is libertarian who is using sound reasoning about these issues? Who is writing that addresses these things? Finally, I am asking because I am frustrated with the national dialogue. I am frustrated with our focus on institutions more than on problem-solving. I am frustrated with politics as an emotional exercise in winning and losing rather than governing. fWhile the Libertarian Party Platform ignores these issues entirely, I am interested in applying government to address these issues. I wonder how this divide can be resolved in a way that meets everyone's needs? {image # 1445398} |
| The event that prompted me to write today: Watching Thom Hartman on Free Speech TV, I was presented with the platform of the Libertarian Party. Renee and I then looked it up and read it again on the internet at: http://www.lp.org/platform. As you are the only libertarian I know, you have the privilege of receiving my response. I am teaching in the Missouri State University Graduate School of Social Work. This requires me to read a lot, and to think a lot about theories and ethics in human interaction. As a social worker I am bound by my personal commitment, and by law, to a clearly articulated code of ethics. You can read it in its entirety at: www.socialworkers.org. The reason I was drawn to social work in the first place is the approach to human interaction that is present in this code. The code is built on 6 principles: The mission of the social work profession is rooted in a set of core values. These core values, embraced by social workers throughout the profession’s history, are the foundation of social work’s unique purpose and perspective: • service • social justice • dignity and worth of the person • importance of human relationships • integrity • competence. As you can see, there are places where the code and the libertarian point of view intersect: right to self-determination is the central point of agreement. This summer I am teaching a course on theoretical constructs for intervening with clients who seek our services. All of the approaches begin with honoring self-determination and actively oppose hierarchical relationships in our interactions. There is inherent conflict between our code and the fact that we primarily provide our services within structures that are hierarchical. A major offender is the medical/scientific community. The traditions in these areas contend that people with more knowledge should have authority over those who have less. Instead of sharing what they know through Socratic discourse, they just want to impose their “wisdom” in the form of “prescription.” The assumption here is that, even though they can make grievous error, their errors are somehow more legitimate than the patient’s errors. For example, a doctor has the right to prescribe drugs to a person, and if the drugs have a negative impact on the patient, well, it is a mistake for which there is no legal consequence. However, if people without the medical “expertise” use a drug, they can be arrested regardless of the effect of the drug on the person who chose to take it. We social workers constantly walk a narrow path within this context, trying to counteract the many dysfunctions of the hierarchy that is essentially a meritocracy. This authoritarian structure is protected by government through law. Here is where the ethics of social work diverge from the stated values of libertarians. We don’t choose to abandon our social structures, nor do we choose to say all structures are bad. We choose to focus on the wellbeing of those fellow travelers who are also put at a disadvantage by the structures and to support them in participating in society in efficacious ways for the welfare of all. I do not hear this anywhere in the libertarian platform. Instead I hear that an individual has no responsibility to care about or support neighbors. I hear an old west sort of “one for one and none for all” attitude. In my 46 years as a professional social worker, I have often helped people injured by violence including child sexual abuse and rape. I live in one of the poorest congressional districts in America by choice. There are many sources of discomfort here. There are also many opportunities to be of service. I have seen a lot and learned a lot. The most important thing I have learned is that people organize themselves to promote survival. Many human efforts promote the survival of structures and ideas that help some and hurt others. I choose not to take a position: “Let them eat cake.” I know what it is like to be hurt and abandoned by my culture. I know what it is like to suffer prejudice. I know what it is like to be impoverished. I know that many people cannot find a place in this society that meets their needs and the needs of their families. There is no longer enough call for ditch diggers and apple pickers to support many families in a way that provides adequate housing, health care, education, transportation, communication and nutrition. The more complex the society becomes, the more heavily dependent on technology, the more people who are left behind. What would the libertarians do in response? Take away the communal supports that exist and demand the creation of new structures to cope with this? I receive Social Security retirement benifits. This is the only way I can afford to teach. I am paid as an adjunct teacher, $16.00 per hour, 20 hours per week and I am the only faculty member in my department at the small branch campus where I teach that is paid to do anything more than the 54 hours of classroom time for each course. This is significantly less per course than I was paid to teach freshman sociology in 1990. This is because of constantly shrinking financial resources within the University. When I went on Social Security at age 67, my monthly income dropped to what I previously took home in two weeks without the same quality of benefits. Now, I have to spend almost $7000.00 a year for health insurance and Medicare. Previously, my insurance, that cost me $20.00 per month, covered all prescription drugs, Now, one of the drugs I need is not on the list for reduced cost. Tell me, is this because I haven’t done my part in our economy? Is this because we should be more libertarian? Should I have chosen to abandon the people I serve in this very violent country so I could pay for all of this on my own? Often, my students have to work full time while they go to school because they cannot afford to go to school full time like I did. I was educated through an NIMH (National Institute of Mental Health) grant. This source of money is not available to them. Is this because they don’t do their share? Should they abandon the effort to advocate for the helpless, to empower the powerless and go to work making money? The reason this area is impoverished is its dependence on agriculture and tourism focused on the natural beauty of the area. It is because of newly, slowly emerging educational institutions that previously didn’t exist at all. It is because the low wages used to lure manufacturing to the area weren't low enough to keep them here. It isn’t because these folks don’t participate responsibly in the economy. It is because the things that come from nature are less valued than things that are manufactured. And yet, we cannot survive without these things. And, from reading the libertarian platform, I see that this party would destroy the supports we have and abandon the producers of food and other products that come from nature to a world that is heating up and making agriculture increasingly difficult. It would leave the food producers to a world that has been so poisoned by Monsanto and Monsanto-like products that plants are not getting pollinated due to a dramatic and obvious decrease in pollinators. I cannot imagine a solution to this that will be provided by the profit motive. How can the profit motive lead people to stop the marketing of chemicals? The profit motive also increases the cost of things we all need, but does not give the profits to the people who produce them. Clearly, I, personally am not considered in this platform. My people, my neighbors, my friends and loved ones, are not welcome in the world this document describes. This is a document that forgets that even though we have equal rights, we don’t have equal opportunity, equal resources, things to offer that are equally valued, or equal ability at any given moment. If this platform is implemented, our biggest risk is in getting older. If this platform is implemented, We will be totally abandoned by our culture when we are least able to do anything about it. {image # 1445398} {image # 1445398} |
| Does this bother you? This morning on MSNBC a woman was interviewed about the mine tailings spill that poisoned the Animas River in which the reporter pointed out the hundreds of situations all over the nation that are not being addressed by the EPA. She also talked about their decision that the river is now back to pre-spill level and safe to use. The reason they were in that mine in the first place was the seepage from the mine into the Animas River and the risk it posed. She said this is a national problem. I wanted more information and found nothing on line on MSNBC. There are articles about movie stars and sports, about the woman in Kentucky who was jailed for contempt of court, and stories about entertainment shows on TV. In fact, the interview was followed by a report about a new fall TV show. The original environmental report was no more than 3 minutes long, if that. If this is as important as the reporter said, and I agree that it is, why do the producers spend so much time on entertainment news and so little on environmental news? I would like, for instance, to hear just how a polluted western river actually impacts the east coast. What happens in the food chain? When is the media going to actually spend some time and money on looking into this in a way that lets us know what is wrong and what is needed to correct it? I saw a place called “speak out” on the “official MSNBC Website.” It had quizzes. There is a discussion place where viewers can state their perspective. I have never seen anything that suggests the producers ever take this into account, but, on the other hand, when I have participated, the discussion was often as inane as the shows. So, this bothers me. How can we fix what is wrong if we don’t know what it is? How can we choose representatives to government if we don’t know what we need them to do? How can we find out if the media talks more about media than about what is happening in our rivers, soil and air? Does this bother you? Contact information to give feedback is: contact.nbcnews@nbcuni.com |
| Where would the world be…? If you sign a peace treaty with Iran It will surely cause a war. We must go to war with Iran In order to prevent the war That will be caused by Signing a peace treaty with Iran. If you sign a peace treaty with Iran Iran will attack Israel. If you sign a peace treaty with Iran Israel will feel abandoned and attack Iran. If you intervene in Syria It will cause a war with Iran. Iran is causing a war by intervening in Syria. If you don’t go back into war in Iraq It will cause a war with Iran. How do I end this poem? How does any of this end? |
| I have just finished, for the second time, reading Hum (2013) Jamal May, Alice James Books, Boston. Preparing to review it here, I very nearly started all over again. It is obvious to me why this volume won the Beatrice Hawsley Award: “The Beatrice Hawley Award is given annually by Alice James Books, affiliated with the University of Maine, Farmington. "The award includes publication of a book-length poetry manuscript and a cash prize. The award was established by the press in 1986 to honor cooperative member author Beatrice Hawley (Making the House Fall Down, 1977) who died in 1985 at forty-one years of age from lung cancer. The Award is a nationally-offered publication prize open to poets at any stage of their careers.” Hum also won the 2014 American Library Association Notable Book Award for Adult Books; poetry. The 2013 winner was Sharon Olds. The comment describing the book in the posting reads: “Detroit cityscapes resonate with the pulse of machinery and silence.” To me, this wonderful poetry is an elegy to the end of the Industrial Revolution and a tour of its graveyard, the city of Detroit. Even when he isn’t talking about machines, the writing carries respect, grief and hope. One example is: “The Girl Who Builds Rockets from Bricks Finds no voice louder than hers in the caverns of deserted houses or overgrown lots that surround her excavation for spare parts: Shards of whiskey bottle, matches, ant hills erupting from concrete seams, the discarded husk of a beetle. The shells of vacants reflect the echoes of her little song—a song with lyrics assembled in a quiet language only she speaks—language not spoken with tongue but hands that snatch up fists of grass, crunch into dust the driest leaves— small hands that fill jelly jars with broken glass, gravel, and fire ants, each jar an engine for a rocket. Rain water spills from a gas can Down between bricks, the girl begins her countdown without thinking of destination.” The next poem in the book, “Mechanophobia; fear of machines,” begins: There is no work left for a husk. Automated welder like us, your line replacements, can’t expect sympathy after our once bright arms of cable rust over. So come collect us for scrap, grind us up in the mouth of one of us. Let your hand pry at the access panel with the edge of a knife silencing the motor and thrum….” Perhaps the appeal of this book for me is in my memory of Pittsburgh growing up and seeing it now with the mills gone. Perhaps the sounds of his words play in my head in the voices of my grandfathers, uncles, father and brothers. I do know that at times, as I read, I hear Jamal May’s voice as the voice of the refugee migrants leaving Syria after their homes and communities have been destroyed in the 5 year war between the old way and the push for change, between the spiritual and the visceral, the explosion and the exploded. This is the hum I hear in the background. The sound could just as easily be that of acid rock, or techno, but a hum is what you get when enough people are talking at once and you enter the room. Some would call it clamor, but, when Jamal May enters, the sound sort of sifts down into patterns resembling speech and those patterns are interpreted beautifully for us. How we could be so lucky, when all we seem to do is hum, I really don’t know. I am truly grateful for this timely work of art. I highly recommend that you follow this link and hear Jamal May read a couple of his poems at: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poem/245630 I read hum on Kindle, but it is available also in print and is well worth the purchase. You might also be able to borrow a virtual copy through your local library. Videos of Jamal May reciting his poetry are available on YouTube. |
| I wakened yesterday morning thinking about my problem with Christianity as I have encountered it in my adulthood in Southern Missouri. It starts with “have you accepted Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior?” The first time I heard that was in connection with the Leighton Ford Crusade in Erie, Pennsylvania. I worked for Zion Lutheran Church at the time and was assigned the task of participating in planning for the crusade by my pastor/boss. I went. I had never seen crusade planning before. Someone I didn’t know sat down next to me and asked that question. My answer was “I was baptized and it took.” The feeling I had at that moment was complex and very uncomfortable and the discomfort has never left me. First, it felt like a boundary violation. I would have felt the same way if stranger had asked me about my most recent sexual encounter, or if they asked me to tell them my most private thought. For me, my religious faith is very personal. That question is too personal. The person asking, hearing my reply, said nothing more and walked away. I have tried to understand that behavior. Superficially, the question was an invitation. However, even though my answer was affirming my identification with Christianity, it wasn’t good enough for them to continue conversation. I felt judged and very unwelcome. I never went back and I told the Pastor why. He said nothing more. I thought at the time that perhaps he was just uncomfortable with that view of Christianity as was I. I have had an internal dialogue about that question ever since, trying to understand what bothers me so much. It isn’t just that the question feels like a set up for being judged. The question represents an idea in my mind that is totally contradictory to my sense of Christianity. It represents the idea that was popular at the turn of the twentieth century expressed in the romantic sounding hymns such as “In the Garden: I come to the garden alone While the dew is still on the roses And the voice I hear falling on my ear The Son of God discloses. Refrain And He walks with me, and He talks with me, And He tells me I am His own; And the joy we share as we tarry there, None other has ever known. He speaks, and the sound of His voice, Is so sweet the birds hush their singing, And the melody that He gave to me Within my heart is ringing. Refrain I’d stay in the garden with Him Though the night around me be falling, But He bids me go; through the voice of woe His voice to me is calling. Refrain When I was a teen going through my spiritual transition to adulthood, I prayed and expected to hear God’s voice like I would hear anyone’s voice. Well, when that didn’t happen, I struggled to understand why I had been told that would happen and it didn’t. My conclusion was that God, whatever that may be, is not a human being, does not act like a human being and I needed to quit thinking of God in the same way I thought of my father. I need to think in terms of the creator of the universe. Science helped me to see God as the power behind everything described by science, the glue that holds things together and the power that pulls things apart and rearranges things. I can see the power is real. I understand that science gives me a limited description, and that even language cannot describe what this is. The word “awe” seems appropriate. The word “personal” seems way too small. Personal makes me think of my relationships with individual people. My experiences in relationship have taught me that no matter what I do, I cannot fully understand another person, and, no matter what I do, I cannot make them fully understand me. Although I love language, it is too small to describe the thing inside me we call life. Mathematics is too small to describe life. As my thinking evolved, I came to realize the question “have you accepted Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior?" is way too small and threatens to hog-tie my spirit. I don’t mean to criticize people who use the question. I criticize a culture that traps people in the small world view that everything that matters can be contained in any sentence. I am threatened by a concept that shrinks the power of the creator and sustainer-of-all-that-is into a few words that any human can bandy about like a basketball, or obtain like a tube of lipstick. It seems to me that the Christianity I have encountered in “the Bible Belt” represents the values of Capitalism, of consumerism, more than it represents the teachings of Christ. In fact, it seems to stand in opposition to what Christ taught. There are Christians who do not think this way. Mother Teresa, Deidrick Bonhoeffer, Pope Francis, Jimmy Carter and Dorothy Day all come immediately to mind. Their spirituality is expressed in living, not talking, in acting rather than recruiting, in loving and accepting rather that sorting the wheat from the chaff, the sheep from the goats. This is what I was thinking when I awakened yesterday morning. |
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