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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... |
| These folks, the nine Christians studying and praying together in the historic AME Church accepted their killer, and true to their Christian values, took on his pain in the most extreme way. Like Christ, they did not attack him. They offered all they had in love. They did this for a stranger in their midst. They had not locked the door and shut him out. How can we honor this in our lives? |
| I thought the horror of racist attacks on African American Churches was long over. It appears to have been a false sense of safety. I realize the problem is complex. What important issue is not complex? Yesterday, I was remembering Fred Rogers teaching us about inclusiveness, about loving behavior. Today, I am overwhelmed by a shooting in an AME Baptist Church in South Carolina. I am so very worried about my country. Will we even be a democratic republic in ten years, or will we have given up to chaos, or anarchy? Why are people arming themselves and their children? They seem very frightened for their personal wellbeing. But fear of people studying the Bible, unarmed, in a church? How do we make sense of this? If I look at what I learned in my study of sociology, the explanation lies in the rapid social change we currently experience as we move into a global economy. It is happening everywhere: the Middle East, Latin America, the borders of Russia, and South Carolina. Stopping change is not an option. We must learn how to surf the waves, harness the power, and retain our humanity. The lessons are very hard and painful. We mourn, reflect, learn and move on. That is all we can do. We must hold hands and look both ways, then, one step at a time, restore new balance. |
| The following quote is circulating on Facebook: "Love isn't a state of perfect caring. It is an active noun like struggle. To love someone is to strive to accept that person exactly the way he or she is right here and now." Fred Rogers I wonder what Mr. Rogers would say in response to the public discussion about immigration, and about gay marriage. He would not say it publicly, of course, as he publicly talked to children about themselves and each other. Mr. Rogers was a seminary educated protestant Christian and his show was his ministry. He taught generations of children about love. He demonstrated love. He did not say “love this person but not that one.” He loved animals and quirky characters like King Friday the Thirteenth. On his original show in Pittsburgh, “The Children’s Corner,” he talked to Lydia Lamp, who appeared quite excitable. It is, therefore, no surprise to me that we would become more inclusive as these children become adults. We teach children to share, to help each other, and to be kind to all their classmates. I think Fred Rogers represented the best of American values. We need to remember, learn, and practice what we were taught. |
| The People of the Other Village BY THOMAS LUX B. 1946 This is today’s Audio poem of the day on the Poetry Foundation website. If you go there, you can hear the author read the poem. This is a response to war, a descriptive piece with images that evoke a personal response one would easily shut down while watching the evening news. It offers a clear picture of the absurdity of war without judgment. It begins: “The people of the other village hate us and would nail our hats to our heads for refusing in their presence to remove them or staple our hands to our foreheads for refusing to salute them if we did not hurt them first: mail them packages of rats,...” Listening, at first, I expected it would be a rant about the people of the other village and I was only drawn in by the images. Then, “if we did not hurt them first” shook me like a friend proposing we do a home invasion would, until I realized it was a joke. As the poet goes on, it sounds like a series of practical jokes and my emotions subside a bit. Then, again I am shaken as the things the villagers do to each other escalate, like war escalates. There is no happy ending to war. As Americans, we look at how we helped Japan and Western Europe recover after the war and feel very good about all of that and pat ourselves on the back. We don’t look at what happened with Russia. We blame Russia. We are taught nothing in school that helps us understand what happened to the ally without whom Hitler may not have been defeated. I did not learn about the alliance with Russia until I was an adult. They sacrificed more than anyone in WWII and I wasn’t even taught that. In both high school and college, in the 1960’s, WWII was not taught where I was. Even today, when Russia does something in response to our actions, we hear on the news what they did, but our provocation is never mentioned. I think this poem makes clear just how all of that happens, succinctly and beautifully. I hope you will go to the Poetry Foundation website and read it for yourself. |
| When I said separate the sheep from the goats, I meant for milking. When I said let there be light, I meant wisdom; let there be wisdom. When I said to Abraham to sacrifice his son to me, I meant for him to let the child discover me on his own. When I helped the Israelites escape from Egypt, it was to free them from oppression, not to give them land to fight over. When I said to Adam to name the animals, I meant pay attention, manage wisely, live in harmony. I didn’t mean bring them to extinction. I gave mankind a brain for thinking, reasoning, learning and problem solving. I meant for people to learn, think, reason and solve problems. I didn’t intend for you to spend a lifetime trying to figure out what I want. I can take care of myself. I don’t need people to be treating me like some kind of dictator or tyrant. Nurture, live in community, love the earth, and develop wisdom. Take your time. Listen to each other. Work together. Where you are, I will be, always. |
| Matt Ford MSN News, The Atlantic - Saturday, June 13, 2015 "America's Largest Mental Hospital Is a Jail" This is an excellent description of the current state of mental health intervention in America. It includes a three page concise history of mental health intervention in the US showing how it got to be where it is today. It also describes innovative efforts at the Cook County Jail to improve the situation. The article includes quotes from inmates about the situation, as well as from the Cook County Sheriff. In spite of a lot of attention paid to the brain trauma and its aftermath suffered by football players, we still have trouble equating mental health with brain health, and with physical health. We have trouble understanding that we are what we eat. We have trouble seeing ourselves as interdependent in the USA due to the high value we place on individuality. We value team sports, but the media lauds individuals on the teams as heroes more than entire teams. We also have trouble making basics a priority. For example, parents buy teenagers cars and let them go with the cars when their teens are still having trouble picking up after themselves, completing homework and taking responsibility for their own choices. We go to war and support the war without increasing taxes to pay for it. You might ask “what does this have to do with mental health?” We expect people to function equally well, and blame them if they don’t. Blaming is one of the most common activities in public discourse. Congress blames the current President regardless of what the last President did. The President blames Congress. Everyone blames the coach, the governor, the police, etc. We Americans are highly skilled at scapegoating. When Jesus worked toward reform of animal sacrifice, he was trying to end literal scapegoating, that is sacrificing a goat to atone for mistakes called sins. So what did his followers do? They made him the scapegoat saying he died for our sins. And thus, the habit of letting someone else suffer the consequences of our bad choices continues. It is the teen’s fault if they wreck the car, not the parents for buying the car. It is the sick person’s fault for being sick, not the food manufacturer who loaded their foods with salt and sugar to sell more. It is the consumer’s fault for using those foods. On and on. What if the blaming is the problem? What if when someone on the street looks miserable, we smile at them and ask what they need and try and get it to them? What if we build a mental health system that can actually apply what we know about how mental health works in ways that actually ameliorate symptoms? What if we each agreed to pay a realistic amount of money to make that happen? What if we acted as members of an effective team/community/extended family rather than a cowboy alone on his horse singing to the cows? |
| The cover photo above is my beautiful mother, Winifred Peterson, in her teens. I thought it would feel good to have her with me when I write. She was unflappable, very smart, and unfailingly supportive. When we were little, she loved playing with us. When we got older, she would have as much fun as we did completing projects for school or scouting. She cooked for junior choir practice every week for years at our church, and made all the choir robes. The list of things she did for others goes on and on. Although she encouraged us to talk, she really didn’t talk much herself. I never knew if she was Republican or Democrat in her thinking. She practiced Christianity, but never talked about it unless she was helping us spiritually to cope with something. Mom kept her feelings to herself. So, here she is, supporting me in my thinking, and quietly listening, just as always. |
Watching the ads for Jurassic Park, I got to wondering, with global warming, will chickens gradually evolve back to being dinosaurs? How would we cook the eggs? Every meal would have to be eaten in a group. No more sitting alone at the table with an egg or two, a cup of coffee, a piece of toast, reading. Nope. The neighbors would gather to cook and eat one egg. There would be no way to pen evolved chickens, either. We’d just have to follow chicken dinosaurs around and find their nests. I assume all birds would evolve in much the same way. Robins would be crashing into trees. And the noise. Oh my. Pea Fowl screaming in the night, and think about the evolved whippoorwill. We would never get any sleep. Our only hope would be to live under ground. It would be cooler there. We could grow mushrooms and root plants in the walls. Pull a potato from the living room wall and fry it up with mushrooms from the bedroom. Umm good! Relish the thought. |
| Today, I am reading in preparation for the class I am teaching. The reading is interesting and my response must be well organized and articulate. Of course, I try in all my writing to be well organized and articulate. I am reading about families, social systems and Social Work intervention. The particular article I am currently reading critiques the medical model as a way of understanding mental health and moves deliberately toward a systems/ecological approach to the problem. This represents solid social work scholarship and reasoning. What can I pull out of this for you? A healthy family is supported by the environment, and returns output to the environment/community that benefit everyone else. This is true, also, of healthy individuals. It suggests that we discover what we and our neighbors need in order to be productive. What can we do, what can we put back into the community that will help meet these needs? When we answer these questions and act on them, we are healthy citizens. In evaluating my health, I ask myself how do I feel physically, emotionally, and spiritually. I need to understand my own responsibility in tending my own well being in these areas. One of the problems we all encounter is deciding when we need to turn to the community to meet our needs, and when we as a member of the community must respond to others turning to us for ongoing well being. This is what citizenship is all about: identification of what is needed and of what I can do to meet these needs. A healthy citizen focuses on their own role in making self and community healthy. The prime survival strategy of humans is to form families and communities that sustain us. On a more concrete level, institutions such as schools, the medical community, transportation, trash collection, and commerce are community supporting family. Producing the next generation, regulating personal behavior, and nurturing each other are products the family returns to the community. Individual family members operate in both community and family. If you take this perspective to heart, you will focus on sharing, nurturing, and supporting others and take responsibility for what you can do in these areas. This does not leave much time for creation of authoritarian havoc. A healthy community supports and sustains well being. An unhealthy community goes to war. {image # 1445398} |
| This TV program, THE CALL TO WISDOM, examines the nature of wisdom, how it can be both universally recognized yet expressed in different ways by different traditions, and why our survival today as a species and a planet will almost certainly depend on it. The program features Jean Shinoda Bolen MD., an author, activist and Jungian analyst who has written several books on the archetypal psyche of women and men in the development of human consciousness, meeting Roger Walsh MD.,Ph.D. a professor of psychiatry, philosophy and anthropology, who recently edited a book on how Wisdom can be understood and cultivated." Among the first things said on this show are: “The only true wisdom is recognizing how much you don’t know.” “Everything you know and believe is a gift.” “The only way to say thank you is to give back.” “Wisdom is expertise in the conduct and meaning of life.” The search for meaning is what resonates us. It is also deep insight and understanding of ourselves. Wise people seem to express their understanding in ways that benefit everyone, in a win-win way. Psyche means soul in Greek. Psychology should be the study of the soul. “The imbalance between our extraordinary technological power” and our wisdom leaves us vulnerable. “We are like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice with enormous power and little wisdom.” We are often at this crossroads between wisdom and catastrophe. Each of us has moments of truth. Our inner voice speaks and we choose. We come into the world with some innate feeling of what is right and wrong. Soldiers seem to have to override what is in us intrinsically. This is one of a series of shows about spiritual issues. All that I have seen have been consistently excellent. In this episode, problems intrinsic to male dominant culture are explored and placed in an historical context. I found the entire discussion to be validating and energizing. I hope that providing the link http://www.cemproductions.org/globalspirit/ will encourage you to explore the series yourself. As I listened, thoughts about Mars came to me. The current exploration of Mars by Rover has revealed there was once a lot of liquid, probably water on the surface of Mars. I wonder, was Mars once like Earth? What happened? Is this our future as a planet? Can we do anything about it? In our travels out west, my eyes have been opened to many things, not the least of which is the well of wisdom we have sitting there in the native population that we have tried, as a culture, so hard to silence. In this program, they discuss the need for wisdom to come from within, to be rooted in knowledge that comes from experience, and that wisdom looks at the big picture. They talk about the Iroquois Nation depending on elder women for important decisions including whether to go to war. Their decision was required to be based on thinking about how the choice will affect the next 7 generations, and to include knowledge accumulated from the previous 7 generations. I suspect that men following that discipline could make equally wise decisions. Unfortunately, Our culture does not encourage reflection, especially among people who make the most serious decisions that impact all of us. We want everything to be instantaneous. The speakers on the program talked about the relationship between awareness of mortality and wisdom. If we were actually to have everything instantaneously, that would, logically include instantaneous death. I agree with these people that we must take time to reflect, to think in terms of 7 generations and learn from previous 7 generations. I fear that if we don’t, all too soon, Earth will look like Mars. |
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