by Paul Watson
The meat industry is one of the most destructive ecological industries on the planet. The raising and slaughtering of pigs, cows, sheep, turkeys and chickens not only utilizes vast areas of land and vast quantities of water, but it is a greater contributor to greenhouse gas emissions than the automobile industry.
The seafood industry is literally plundering the ocean of life and some fifty percent of fish caught from the oceans is fed to cows, pigs, sheep, chickens etc. in the form of fish meal. It also takes about fifty fish caught from the sea to raise one farm raised salmon.
We have turned the domestic cow into the largest marine predator on the planet. The hundreds of millions of cows grazing the land and farting methane consume more tonnage of fish than all the world's sharks, dolphins and seals combined. Domestic housecats consume more fish, especially tuna, than all the world's seals.
So why is it that all the world's large environmental and conservation groups are not campaigning against the meat industry? Why did Al Gore's film Inconvenient Truth not mention the inconvenient truth that the slaughter industry creates more greenhouse gases than the automobile industry?
The Greenpeace ships serve meat and fish to their crews everyday. The World Wildlife Fund does not say a word about the threat that meat eating poses for the survival of wildlife, the habitat destroyed, the wild competitors for land eliminated, or the predators destroyed to save their precious livestock.
When I was a Sierra Club director for three years, everyone looked amused when I brought up the issue of vegetarianism. At each of our Board meeting dinners, the Directors were served meat and only after much prodding and complaining did the couple of vegetarian directors manage to get a vegetarian option. At our meeting in Montana we were served Buffalo and antelope, lobsters in Boston, crabs in Charleston, steak in Albuquerque etc. But what else can we expect from a "conservation" group that endorses trophy hunting.
As far as I know and I may be wrong, but my organization, the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, is the only conservation organization in the world that endorses and practises vegetarianism. My ships do not serve meat or fish ever, nor do we serve dairy products. We've had a strictly vegan menu for years and no one has died of scurvy or malnutrition.
The price we pay for this is to be accused by other conservation organizations of being animal rights. Like it's a bad word. They say it with the same disdain that Americans used to utter the word communist in the Fifties.
The Sea Shepherd Conservation Society is not an animal rights organization. We are exclusively involved in interventions against illegal activities that threaten and exploit marine wildlife and habitat. We are involved in ocean wildlife conservation activities.
Yet because we operate our ships as vegan vessels, other groups, and now the media dismiss us as an animal rights organization.
Now first of all I don't see being accused of as an animal rights organization to be an insult. PETA was co-founded by one of my crew-members and many of my volunteers come from the animal rights movement. But it is not accurate to refer to Sea Shepherd as animal rights when our organization pushes a strict conservation enforcement policy.
And secondly we do not promote veganism on our ships because of animal rights. We promote veganism as a means of practising what we preach, which is ocean conservation.
There is not enough fish in the world's oceans to feed 6.6 billion human beings and another 10 billion domestic animals. That is why all the world's commercial fisheries are collapsing. That is why whales, seals, dolphins and seabirds are starving. The sand eel for example, the primary source of food for the comical and beautiful puffin is being wiped out by Danish fishermen solely to provide fish meal to Danish factory farmed chickens.
This is a solid conservation connection between eating meat and the destruction of life in our oceans.
In a world fast losing resources of fresh water, it is sheer lunacy to have hundreds of millions of cows consuming over 1,000 gallons of water for every pound of beef produced.
And the pig farms in North Carolina produce so much waste that it has contaminated the entire ground water reserves of the entire state. North Carolinians drink pig shit with their water but its okay they say, they just neutralize it with chemicals like chlorine.
Most people don't want to see where their meat comes from. They also don't want to know what the impact of their meat has on the ecology. They would rather just deny the whole thing and pretend that meat is something that comes in packages from the store.
But because there is this underlying guilt always present, it manifests itself as anger and ridicule towards people who live the
most environmentally positive life styles on the planet -- the vegans and the vegetarians.
This is demonstrated through constant marginalization especially in the media. Any organization, like Sea Shepherd for example, that points out the ecological contradictions of eating meat is immediately dismissed as some wacko animal rights organization.
I did not set the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society up as an animal rights organization and we have never promoted animal rights in the organization. What we have promoted and what we do is oceanic wildlife and habitat conservation work.
And the truth is that you can't practise solid and constructive conservation work without promoting veganism and/or vegetarianism as something that promotes the conservation of resources.
A few years ago I attended a dinner meeting of the American Oceans Campaign hosted by Ted Danson. He opened the dinner by saying that the choice he had to make was between fish and chicken for the dinner, and what was the point of saving fish if you can't eat them?
Guest speaker, Oceanographer Sylvia Earle put Ted in his place by saying she did not think that he was being very funny. She said that she considered fish to be her friends and she did not believe in eating her friends. So neither Sylvia nor I ate dinner that night.
I met Sylvia again at another meeting, this time of Conservation International held at some ritzy resort in the Dominican Republic. Harrison Ford was there and the buzz was what could be done to save the oceans. I was invited as an advisor. I sat on a barstool in an open beachfront dining plaza as the conservationists approached tables literally bending from the weight of fish and exotic seafood including caviar. I looked at Sylvia Earle and she just shook her head and rolled her eyes.
The problem is that people like Carl Pope, the Executive Director of the Sierra Club, or the heads of Greenpeace, World Wildlife Fund, Conservation International and many other big groups just refuse to accept that their eating habits may be just as much a part of the problem as all those things they are trying to oppose.
I remember one Greenpeacer defending his meat eating by saying that he was a carnivore and that predators have their place and he was proud to be one.
Now the word predator in relationship to human beings has a rather scary connotation having nothing to do with eating habits, but for any human being to describe themselves as a carnivore is just plain ridiculous.
Humans are not and have never been carnivores. A lion is a carnivore as is a wolf, as is a tiger, or a shark. Carnivores eat live animals. They stalk them, they run them down, they pounce, they kill, and they eat, blood dripping, meat at body temperature. Nature, brutal red in tooth and claw.
I've never met a human that can do that. Yes we found ways to run down animals and kill them. In fact we've come to be rather efficient at the killing part. But we can't eat the prey until we cut it up and cook it and that usually involves some time between kill and eating. It could be an hour or it could be years.
You see our meat eating habits are more closely related to the vulture, the jackal or other carrion eaters. This means that we can't be described as carnivores. We are better described as necrovores or eaters of rotting flesh.
Consider that some of the beef that people eat has been dead for months and in some cases for years. Dead and hanging in freezers, full of uritic acid and bacteria. It's a corpse in a state of decomposition. Not much that can be said to be noble about eating a cadaver.
But a little dose of denial allows us to bite into that Big Mac or cut into that prime rib.
But that one 16 ounce cut of prime rib is equal to a thousand gallons of fresh water, a few acres of grass, a few fish, a quarter acre of corn etc. What's the point of taking a shorter shower to conserve water as Greenpeace is preaching if you can sit down and consume a 1000 gallons of water at a single meal?
And that single cut of meat would have cost as much in vegetable resources equivalent to what could be fed to an entire African village for a week.
The problem is that we choose to see our contradictions when it is convenient for us to see them and when it is not we simply go into a state of suspended disbelief and we eat that steak anyway because, hey, we like the taste of rotting flesh in the evening.
Have you ever thought why it is that with a person, it's an abortion, but when it comes to a chicken, it's an omelette?
Does anyone really know what's in a hot dog? We do know that the government health department allows for an acceptable percentage of bug parts, rodent droppings and other assorted filth to go into the mix.
And now tuna fish comes with a health warming saying it should not be eaten by pregnant women or small children because of high levels of mercury. Does that mean mercury is good for adults and non-pregnant women? What are they telling us here?
Eating meat and fish is not only bad for the environment it's also unhealthy. Yet even when it comes to our own health we slip into denial mode and order the Whopper.
The bottom line is that to be a conservationist and an environmentalist, you must practise and promote vegetarianism or
better yet veganism.
It is the lifestyle that leaves the shallowest ecological footprint, uses fewer resources and produces less greenhouse gas emissions, it's healthier and it means you're not a hypocrite.
In fact a vegan driving a Hummer would be contributing less greenhouse gas carbon emissions than a meat eater riding a bicycle.
Tuesday, July 24, 2007
Monday, July 16, 2007
Put Away the Flags
by Howard Zinn
On this July 4, we would do well to renounce nationalism and all its symbols: its flags, its pledges of allegiance, its anthems, its insistence in song that God must single out America to be blessed.
Is not nationalism -- that devotion to a flag, an anthem, a boundary so fierce it engenders mass murder -- one of the great evils of our time, along with racism, along with religious hatred?
These ways of thinking -- cultivated, nurtured, indoctrinated from childhood on -- have been useful to those in power, and deadly for those out of power.
National spirit can be benign in a country that is small and lacking both in military power and a hunger for expansion (Switzerland, Norway, Costa Rica and many more). But in a nation like ours -- huge, possessing thousands of weapons of mass destruction -- what might have been harmless pride becomes an arrogant nationalism dangerous to others and to ourselves.
Our citizenry has been brought up to see our nation as different from others, an exception in the world, uniquely moral, expanding into other lands in order to bring civilization, liberty, democracy.
That self-deception started early.
When the first English settlers moved into Indian land in Massachusetts Bay and were resisted, the violence escalated into war with the Pequot Indians. The killing of Indians was seen as approved by God, the taking of land as commanded by the Bible. The Puritans cited one of the Psalms, which says: "Ask of me, and I shall give thee, the heathen for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the Earth for thy possession."
When the English set fire to a Pequot village and massacred men, women and children, the Puritan theologian Cotton Mather said: "It was supposed that no less than 600 Pequot souls were brought down to hell that day."
On the eve of the Mexican War, an American journalist declared it our "Manifest Destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence." After the invasion of Mexico began, The New York Herald announced: "We believe it is a part of our destiny to civilize that beautiful country."
It was always supposedly for benign purposes that our country went to war.
We invaded Cuba in 1898 to liberate the Cubans, and went to war in the Philippines shortly after, as President McKinley put it, "to civilize and Christianize" the Filipino people.
As our armies were committing massacres in the Philippines (at least 600,000 Filipinos died in a few years of conflict), Elihu Root, our secretary of war, was saying: "The American soldier is different from all other soldiers of all other countries since the war began. He is the advance guard of liberty and justice, of law and order, and of peace and happiness."
We see in Iraq that our soldiers are not different. They have, perhaps against their better nature, killed thousands of Iraq civilians. And some soldiers have shown themselves capable of brutality, of torture.
Yet they are victims, too, of our government's lies.
How many times have we heard President Bush tell the troops that if they die, if they return without arms or legs, or blinded, it is for "liberty," for "democracy"?
One of the effects of nationalist thinking is a loss of a sense of proportion. The killing of 2,300 people at Pearl Harbor becomes the justification for killing 240,000 in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The killing of 3,000 people on Sept. 11 becomes the justification for killing tens of thousands of people in Afghanistan and Iraq.
And nationalism is given a special virulence when it is said to be blessed by Providence. Today we have a president, invading two countries in four years, who announced on the campaign trail in 2004 that God speaks through him.
We need to refute the idea that our nation is different from, morally superior to, the other imperial powers of world history.
We need to assert our allegiance to the human race, and not to any one nation.
On this July 4, we would do well to renounce nationalism and all its symbols: its flags, its pledges of allegiance, its anthems, its insistence in song that God must single out America to be blessed.
Is not nationalism -- that devotion to a flag, an anthem, a boundary so fierce it engenders mass murder -- one of the great evils of our time, along with racism, along with religious hatred?
These ways of thinking -- cultivated, nurtured, indoctrinated from childhood on -- have been useful to those in power, and deadly for those out of power.
National spirit can be benign in a country that is small and lacking both in military power and a hunger for expansion (Switzerland, Norway, Costa Rica and many more). But in a nation like ours -- huge, possessing thousands of weapons of mass destruction -- what might have been harmless pride becomes an arrogant nationalism dangerous to others and to ourselves.
Our citizenry has been brought up to see our nation as different from others, an exception in the world, uniquely moral, expanding into other lands in order to bring civilization, liberty, democracy.
That self-deception started early.
When the first English settlers moved into Indian land in Massachusetts Bay and were resisted, the violence escalated into war with the Pequot Indians. The killing of Indians was seen as approved by God, the taking of land as commanded by the Bible. The Puritans cited one of the Psalms, which says: "Ask of me, and I shall give thee, the heathen for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the Earth for thy possession."
When the English set fire to a Pequot village and massacred men, women and children, the Puritan theologian Cotton Mather said: "It was supposed that no less than 600 Pequot souls were brought down to hell that day."
On the eve of the Mexican War, an American journalist declared it our "Manifest Destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence." After the invasion of Mexico began, The New York Herald announced: "We believe it is a part of our destiny to civilize that beautiful country."
It was always supposedly for benign purposes that our country went to war.
We invaded Cuba in 1898 to liberate the Cubans, and went to war in the Philippines shortly after, as President McKinley put it, "to civilize and Christianize" the Filipino people.
As our armies were committing massacres in the Philippines (at least 600,000 Filipinos died in a few years of conflict), Elihu Root, our secretary of war, was saying: "The American soldier is different from all other soldiers of all other countries since the war began. He is the advance guard of liberty and justice, of law and order, and of peace and happiness."
We see in Iraq that our soldiers are not different. They have, perhaps against their better nature, killed thousands of Iraq civilians. And some soldiers have shown themselves capable of brutality, of torture.
Yet they are victims, too, of our government's lies.
How many times have we heard President Bush tell the troops that if they die, if they return without arms or legs, or blinded, it is for "liberty," for "democracy"?
One of the effects of nationalist thinking is a loss of a sense of proportion. The killing of 2,300 people at Pearl Harbor becomes the justification for killing 240,000 in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The killing of 3,000 people on Sept. 11 becomes the justification for killing tens of thousands of people in Afghanistan and Iraq.
And nationalism is given a special virulence when it is said to be blessed by Providence. Today we have a president, invading two countries in four years, who announced on the campaign trail in 2004 that God speaks through him.
We need to refute the idea that our nation is different from, morally superior to, the other imperial powers of world history.
We need to assert our allegiance to the human race, and not to any one nation.
Thursday, July 12, 2007
Sometimes, Our Suspicions are Unfounded
by Leonard Pitts, Jr.
My wife and I have a running joke.
Say the doctor informs me he's going to administer some test that will hurt like heck. When he leaves the room, I whisper to Marilyn, "You know why he's doing it, don't you? It's because I'm black.''
It is, of course, a joke with a point. Namely, that some black folks can read race into anything. Some of us keep indignation in our hip pockets and conspiracy on speed dial.
But we'll get back to Isaiah Washington in a moment.
First, the obvious disclaimer: I am not saying race is never the reason bad things happen. Au contraire. One often gets pulled over because one is black. One often gets substandard healthcare because one is black. One often fails to get the job because one is black.
Worse, because those in charge of pulling people over, giving healthcare or making hiring decisions are seldom clear and candid that race is their reason, it's easy to become paranoid, to believe everything is race until proven otherwise. So to be African American is often to walk a tightrope above a snake pit of suspicions, both founded and un.
Apparently, Washington has fallen and he can't get up.
He is, you will recall, the African-American actor from Grey's Anatomy who used an anti-gay slur during a fight with a castmate. Months later, backstage at the Golden Globes, he used the word again in denying he had used it the first time. In the ensuing uproar, Washington apologized, entered what he calls an ''executive counseling program'' and filmed a public service announcement promoting tolerance. Last month, after all that, he was fired.
Frankly, it was cheesy of his bosses to wait so long. Why let the man jump through so many hoops just to give him the axe at the end?
But what sympathy you might have for Washington is undercut by the fact that he has gone on a public relations offensive to talk about a firing that he believes happened, at least in part, because he is black. As he told Newsweek: 'Well, it didn't help me on the set that I was a black man who wasn't a mush-mouth Negro walking around with his head in his hands all the time. I didn't speak like I'd just left the plantation and that can be a problem for people sometime. I had a person in human resources tell me after this thing played out that `some people' were afraid of me around the studio. I asked her, 'Why, because I'm a 6-foot-1, black man with dark skin and who doesn't go around saying 'Yessah, massa sir' and 'No sir, massa' to everyone?' ''
Which brings us to two truths that may seem contradictory but aren't:
1) There is epidemic racism in this country.
2) You can find racism where it does not exist.
Forgive me, but Washington seems far more illustrative of the second axiom than the first. For what it's worth, the creator and producer of Grey's is a black woman, Shonda Rhimes. And Washington is, by his own admission, a temperamental actor who used a hurtful word toward a colleague. Yet he thinks he was fired because he is black.
He -- like many of us, black and otherwise -- seems knee jerk where race is concerned. I mean is it so hard to believe people feared him because they thought he was a volatile jerk? Or that a white actor of middling fame who disrupted his workplace would have also been fired? In his rush to make himself a martyr, Washington fails to consider these and other obvious questions.
He comes across as one of those brothers the running joke is meant to mock -- the kind for whom race is a get-out-of-jail-free card. Unfortunately, like the boy who cried wolf, such people trivialize what is serious and give others license to do the same.
He lost his job for saying an awful thing. I wish he'd stop whining and deal with that.
Step 1 is to realize that black is not an excuse.
My wife and I have a running joke.
Say the doctor informs me he's going to administer some test that will hurt like heck. When he leaves the room, I whisper to Marilyn, "You know why he's doing it, don't you? It's because I'm black.''
It is, of course, a joke with a point. Namely, that some black folks can read race into anything. Some of us keep indignation in our hip pockets and conspiracy on speed dial.
But we'll get back to Isaiah Washington in a moment.
First, the obvious disclaimer: I am not saying race is never the reason bad things happen. Au contraire. One often gets pulled over because one is black. One often gets substandard healthcare because one is black. One often fails to get the job because one is black.
Worse, because those in charge of pulling people over, giving healthcare or making hiring decisions are seldom clear and candid that race is their reason, it's easy to become paranoid, to believe everything is race until proven otherwise. So to be African American is often to walk a tightrope above a snake pit of suspicions, both founded and un.
Apparently, Washington has fallen and he can't get up.
He is, you will recall, the African-American actor from Grey's Anatomy who used an anti-gay slur during a fight with a castmate. Months later, backstage at the Golden Globes, he used the word again in denying he had used it the first time. In the ensuing uproar, Washington apologized, entered what he calls an ''executive counseling program'' and filmed a public service announcement promoting tolerance. Last month, after all that, he was fired.
Frankly, it was cheesy of his bosses to wait so long. Why let the man jump through so many hoops just to give him the axe at the end?
But what sympathy you might have for Washington is undercut by the fact that he has gone on a public relations offensive to talk about a firing that he believes happened, at least in part, because he is black. As he told Newsweek: 'Well, it didn't help me on the set that I was a black man who wasn't a mush-mouth Negro walking around with his head in his hands all the time. I didn't speak like I'd just left the plantation and that can be a problem for people sometime. I had a person in human resources tell me after this thing played out that `some people' were afraid of me around the studio. I asked her, 'Why, because I'm a 6-foot-1, black man with dark skin and who doesn't go around saying 'Yessah, massa sir' and 'No sir, massa' to everyone?' ''
Which brings us to two truths that may seem contradictory but aren't:
1) There is epidemic racism in this country.
2) You can find racism where it does not exist.
Forgive me, but Washington seems far more illustrative of the second axiom than the first. For what it's worth, the creator and producer of Grey's is a black woman, Shonda Rhimes. And Washington is, by his own admission, a temperamental actor who used a hurtful word toward a colleague. Yet he thinks he was fired because he is black.
He -- like many of us, black and otherwise -- seems knee jerk where race is concerned. I mean is it so hard to believe people feared him because they thought he was a volatile jerk? Or that a white actor of middling fame who disrupted his workplace would have also been fired? In his rush to make himself a martyr, Washington fails to consider these and other obvious questions.
He comes across as one of those brothers the running joke is meant to mock -- the kind for whom race is a get-out-of-jail-free card. Unfortunately, like the boy who cried wolf, such people trivialize what is serious and give others license to do the same.
He lost his job for saying an awful thing. I wish he'd stop whining and deal with that.
Step 1 is to realize that black is not an excuse.
Wednesday, July 04, 2007
When is Enough Enough?
by Bob Herbert
Chances are you didn’t hear it, but on Thursday night Senator Hillary Clinton said, “If H.I.V./AIDS were the leading cause of death of white women between the ages of 25 and 34, there would be an outraged outcry in this country.”
Her comment came on the same day that a malevolent majority on the U.S. Supreme Court threw a brick through the window of voluntary school integration efforts.
There comes a time when people are supposed to get angry. The rights and interests of black people in the U.S. have been under assault for the longest time, and in the absence of an effective counterforce, that assault has only grown more brutal.
Have you looked at the public schools lately? Have you looked at the prisons? Have you looked at the legions of unemployed blacks roaming the neighborhoods of big cities across the country? These jobless African-Americans, so many of them men, are so marginal in the view of the wider society, so insignificant, so invisible, they aren’t even counted in the government’s official jobless statistics.
And now this new majority on the Supreme Court seems committed to a legal trajectory that would hurl blacks back to the bad old days of the Jim Crow era.
Where’s the outcry? Where’s the line in the sand that the prejudiced portion of the population is not allowed to cross?
Mrs. Clinton’s comment was made at a forum of Democratic presidential candidates at Howard University that was put together by Tavis Smiley, the radio and television personality, and broadcast nationally by PBS. The idea was to focus on issues of particular concern to African-Americans.
It’s discouraging that some of the biggest issues confronting blacks — the spread of AIDS, chronic joblessness and racial discrimination, for example — are not considered mainstream issues.
Senator John Edwards offered a disturbingly bleak but accurate picture of the lives of many young blacks: “When you have young African-American men who are completely convinced that they’re either going to die or go to prison and see absolutely no hope in their lives; when they live in an environment where the people around them don’t earn a decent wage; when they go to schools that are second-class schools compared to the wealthy suburban areas — they don’t see anything getting better.”
The difficult lives and often tragic fates of such young men are not much on the minds of so-called mainstream Americans, or the political and corporate elites who run the country. More noise needs to be made. There’s something very wrong with a passive acceptance of the degraded state in which so many African-Americans continue to live.
Mr. Smiley is also organizing a forum of Republican candidates to be held in September. I wholeheartedly applaud his efforts. But if black people were more angry, and if they could channel that anger into political activism — first and foremost by voting as though their lives and the lives of their children depended on it — there would not be a need to have separate political forums to address their concerns.
If black people could find a way to come together in sky-high turnouts on Election Day, if they showed up at polling booths in numbers close to the maximum possible turnout, if they could set the example for all other Americans about the importance of exercising the franchise, the politicians would not dare to ignore their concerns.
For black people, especially, the current composition of the Supreme Court should be the ultimate lesson in the importance of voting in a presidential election. No branch of the government has been more crucial than the judiciary in securing the rights and improving the lives of blacks over the past five or six decades.
George W. Bush, in a little more than six years, has tilted the court so radically that it is now, like the administration itself, relentlessly hostile to the interests of black people. That never would have happened if blacks had managed significantly more muscular turnouts in the 2000 and 2004 elections. (The war in Iraq would not have happened, either.)
There are, of course, many people, black and white, who are working on a vast array of important issues. But much, much more needs to be done. And blacks, in particular, need to intervene more directly in the public policy matters that concern them.
In the 1960s, there were radicals running around screaming about black power. But the real power in this country has always been the power of the vote. Black Americans have not come close to maximizing that power.
It’s not too late.
Chances are you didn’t hear it, but on Thursday night Senator Hillary Clinton said, “If H.I.V./AIDS were the leading cause of death of white women between the ages of 25 and 34, there would be an outraged outcry in this country.”
Her comment came on the same day that a malevolent majority on the U.S. Supreme Court threw a brick through the window of voluntary school integration efforts.
There comes a time when people are supposed to get angry. The rights and interests of black people in the U.S. have been under assault for the longest time, and in the absence of an effective counterforce, that assault has only grown more brutal.
Have you looked at the public schools lately? Have you looked at the prisons? Have you looked at the legions of unemployed blacks roaming the neighborhoods of big cities across the country? These jobless African-Americans, so many of them men, are so marginal in the view of the wider society, so insignificant, so invisible, they aren’t even counted in the government’s official jobless statistics.
And now this new majority on the Supreme Court seems committed to a legal trajectory that would hurl blacks back to the bad old days of the Jim Crow era.
Where’s the outcry? Where’s the line in the sand that the prejudiced portion of the population is not allowed to cross?
Mrs. Clinton’s comment was made at a forum of Democratic presidential candidates at Howard University that was put together by Tavis Smiley, the radio and television personality, and broadcast nationally by PBS. The idea was to focus on issues of particular concern to African-Americans.
It’s discouraging that some of the biggest issues confronting blacks — the spread of AIDS, chronic joblessness and racial discrimination, for example — are not considered mainstream issues.
Senator John Edwards offered a disturbingly bleak but accurate picture of the lives of many young blacks: “When you have young African-American men who are completely convinced that they’re either going to die or go to prison and see absolutely no hope in their lives; when they live in an environment where the people around them don’t earn a decent wage; when they go to schools that are second-class schools compared to the wealthy suburban areas — they don’t see anything getting better.”
The difficult lives and often tragic fates of such young men are not much on the minds of so-called mainstream Americans, or the political and corporate elites who run the country. More noise needs to be made. There’s something very wrong with a passive acceptance of the degraded state in which so many African-Americans continue to live.
Mr. Smiley is also organizing a forum of Republican candidates to be held in September. I wholeheartedly applaud his efforts. But if black people were more angry, and if they could channel that anger into political activism — first and foremost by voting as though their lives and the lives of their children depended on it — there would not be a need to have separate political forums to address their concerns.
If black people could find a way to come together in sky-high turnouts on Election Day, if they showed up at polling booths in numbers close to the maximum possible turnout, if they could set the example for all other Americans about the importance of exercising the franchise, the politicians would not dare to ignore their concerns.
For black people, especially, the current composition of the Supreme Court should be the ultimate lesson in the importance of voting in a presidential election. No branch of the government has been more crucial than the judiciary in securing the rights and improving the lives of blacks over the past five or six decades.
George W. Bush, in a little more than six years, has tilted the court so radically that it is now, like the administration itself, relentlessly hostile to the interests of black people. That never would have happened if blacks had managed significantly more muscular turnouts in the 2000 and 2004 elections. (The war in Iraq would not have happened, either.)
There are, of course, many people, black and white, who are working on a vast array of important issues. But much, much more needs to be done. And blacks, in particular, need to intervene more directly in the public policy matters that concern them.
In the 1960s, there were radicals running around screaming about black power. But the real power in this country has always been the power of the vote. Black Americans have not come close to maximizing that power.
It’s not too late.
Saturday, June 30, 2007
Racism Takes Many Hues
by Leonard Pitts
An old adage comes to mind: "If you're white, you're all right. If you're brown, stick around. If you're black, get back.''
It was a folk saying--property of no one, property of everyone--that we African Americans used to encompass defining realities of our lives. Meaning not just the fact that some white men would think themselves better than you because they were white, but the fact that some black men would, too, because they were light. This was a legacy of slavery, when light skin often meant less brutal treatment.
So to be here in Brazil, to wander through this culture where a man the color of Bishop T.D. Jakes or Don Cheadle might, with a straight face, deny the Africa in him and people earnestly debate ''who is black,'' well . . . it feels like you've stumbled into a fun-house mirror of race in which everything is exactly the same as it is back home, except where it is completely different.
As this month's Miami Herald reports on black life in Latin America vividly attest, that sense of falling through the fun-house mirror fits much of the black experience in this hemisphere. That black woman in Guatemala who made history by winning a beauty title could be Vanessa Williams. That Argentine kid who got called Kunta because he went to a white school could be a kid bused to school in Boston 30 years ago. That black man in Cuba getting harassed by police could be my son or, indeed, any young black man in America.
In much the same way, race in Brazil has a way of seeming both hauntingly familiar and exotically strange. Some here will tell you that this nation's triumph is that it never encoded race into its laws as did the United States. While that sounds like, and in some ways is, a laudable thing, the punch line is that those same people will also tell you this did not save Brazil from the sin of racism.
Indeed, they will haul out anecdotes and statistics illustrating the fact that Brazilians the color of T.D. Jakes or Don Cheadle tend to find it harder to get work, education or healthcare, but damnably easy to get followed around the department store by security guards who equate darkness with dishonesty.
This country is engaged in a debate over how to best address those issues. They are fighting over an affirmative-action program that would offer educational and healthcare advantages to Brazilians who are black.
Which brings us back to that earnestly debated question: Who is black?
The question is more complex than an American might believe. In Brazil, a nation of indigenous peoples and descendants of African slaves, European colonists and immigrants, a dark-skinned man who might automatically be called black elsewhere has a racial vocabulary that allows him to skirt the Africa in his heritage altogether. He can call himself moreno (racially mixed), mestizo (colored) or pardo (medium brown). Anything but afrodescendente (Africa-descended) or negro (black).
In this, he's not unlike his counterparts in the United States, where black people also have an extensive vocabulary to describe variations in skin tone. In the United States, one can be ''high yellow'' (i.e., of very light skin); one can be ''red'' (i.e., with a reddish tint; one of Malcolm X's early nicknames was Detroit Red); or one can be any of a number of synonyms for dark. Like, for instance, Smokey. In fact, the famous (and ''high yellow'') Motown singer William Robinson was given that nickname in affectionate irony by one of his father's friends--sort of like calling a fat guy Tiny.
But here's the thing: In the States, no matter your skin tone, your race is never in question. Detroit Red was black. Smokey Robinson is black. T.D. Jakes is black. Don Cheadle is black.
The same is not true in Brazil. And if the United States is a country where black people with light skin used to sometimes ''pass,'' i.e., pretend to be white, well, in this country ''passing is a national institution.'' So says Elisa Nascimento with a laugh. She is white, American-born and the wife of Abdias do Nascimento, a 90-year-old black Brazilian artist and political icon. And the insistence of some Brazilian blacks on ''passing,'' she says, has political consequences in that it tends to distort statistics on black life. "The way racism works in Brazil . . . there is a hierarchy, and so people tend to identify themselves lighter than they necessarily would be.''
But Simon Schwartzman, a white social scientist, thinks that allowing Brazilians to self-identify beats the alternative. "I think it's very wrong for the government to start labeling people and saying, `You are officially black or you are officially white, or you are officially something.' You have all kinds of people in all kinds of situations, and I don't think it's the business of government to classify and label people.''
So the question of ''Who is black?'' is tricky, to say the least. If a man the color of T.D. Jakes or even Smokey Robinson says he is not black, do you take him seriously? Do you laugh in his face?
Maybe your instinct is the latter. In the U.S. of A., after all, we know what black is.
Of course, the U.S. of A. is also the country where, in 1896, an ''octoroon'' (i.e., one-eighth black) man named Homer Plessy, white to all physical intents and purposes, lost a Supreme Court case that started when he was ordered to move to a ''colored'' train car. And it's also the country where educator Gregory Howard Williams, a man who would disappear in a room of middle-age white men, saw his life change in 1954 from middle-class comfort to ostracism and racial slurs when it was revealed that his father was half-black.
As Williams, the author of the 1995 memoir Life on the Color Line: The True Story of a White Boy Who Discovered He Was Black once told me in an interview, "The issue in America has never been color. It's always been race.''
So in deriding the silliness of another nation's racial mores, an American finds himself in the unenviable position of the pot calling the kettle . . . well, black.
Indeed, it is America's history of encoding its racial biases in law--everything from the Constitution designating blacks as three-fifths of a human being in 1787 to the restrictive housing covenants and segregation statutes that persisted into the 1960s--that Yvonne Maggie points to in explaining why she objects to Brazil's flirtation with affirmative action.
''We don't need to say that race exists,'' says Maggie, an anthropologist and university professor. "We have to say that race is not important to define people in social terms, that black and white are the same kind of people.''
It is worth noting that Maggie is white, her ex-husband is black, and they lived for a while in the United States. In 1971. In Texas.
''It was a rough time,'' she says in her imperfect English. "For me, was impossible to live there. We could not be married. Why I married with a black guy, you know? So when I say to you that Brazil was different . . . even my first husband didn't think of himself as black. In Brazil, he was a Brazilian, even though he was black. He never thought of himself as someone different from me because he was another color.''
Which brings you to the heart of the matter, the reason any discussion of race and racial terminology that goes on long enough eventually comes to seem silly and overly complicated. African American? Afro-Brazilian? Negro? Colored? Moreno?Afrodescendente? Red? Pardo? Smokey?
The reason the language struggles so hard for precision is that it seeks to describe that which does not exist. As a scientific matter, there is no such thing as race. We are all of the human race, something we probably will not fully understand until it is explained to us by green people with eyes waving on stalks.
Whereas U.S. history flies in the face of that fact with its centuries of pretense to hard and fast racial boundaries, it's a point of pride for Maggie that her country never--officially--bought into that lie.
I respect the principle she argues--race does not exist and therefore should not be acknowledged in law. But that raises a question: How can you have racism without race?
Maggie insists that you can. She says that what Brazil has is a kind of ''social racism'' supported not by law, but by custom. One suspects that those who suffer under it would be hard-pressed to tell the difference--or find reason to care. Which is why, given the choice, many dark-skinned Brazilians choose to be other than ''black.'' It is a means of escape, if only linguistically.
One morning, my translator and I ride out to the favela made infamous in City of God, the Oscar-nominated 2002 film about the drug wars that suck in children and spit out bones. We wait outside a community center for the Brazilian hip-hop star I have come to interview. Inside, a funeral has just come to an end. A casket is borne out to a van, followed by a handful of young people. Some have light skin, some have dark. All have sad eyes.
After a while, the man I'm waiting for appears. His given name is Alex Pereira Barbosa, known professionally as MV Bill. The MV stands for Mensageiro da Verdade, Messenger of Truth, and he is famous for rapping about conditions in the favelas.
When I mention the funeral, he explains that the dead boy worked for one of the drug lords and met a violent end. When I mention that the boy was mourned by young people both black and white, MV Bill gives me a look. He considers all of them black.
''One of the characteristics of Brazilian racism,'' he says, "is that the person can choose to be what she wants. `Oh, I'm white, I'm not black.' Here, the darker you are, the more discrimination you suffer. And that makes it difficult for the blacks, from light to dark, to understand each other. The lighter-skinned blacks avoid the darker-skinned blacks because they don't want to suffer the same discrimination. It's hard for them to work together because of the degree of discrimination according to your color.''
The cruelest racism, says MV Bill, is actually intraracial, perpetuated by light-skinned blacks against dark-skinned blacks. Fair skin, he says, represents power, even in the favela.
After being in this country a while, I find myself doing something I'd never feel the need to do at home. I ask people I'm interviewing ''what'' they are. When dark-skinned people identify themselves as ''black,'' there is an unmistakable little thrill of victory, a notch for ''our'' side, as in someone who was brave enough and tough enough to accept the designation this society despises. Someone who understands that the problem isn't color and never was; rather, it is what some people have arbitrarily decided color means.
Lucia Maria Xavier de Castro, coordinator of Criola, an activist group representing black women, says she has known many people who were unable to accept their own blackness. "The person does everything to get rid of black traces. Straightens her hair, dresses like white people--not colorful. People do everything to eliminate traces. It's as if this person had a birth defect and was trying to correct it by taking those attitudes.''
Brazil likes to think of itself as a racial democracy, says Miriam Leitao, but that's a delusion. She has, she says, been making that argument for 10 years and has become one of the nation's most controversial journalists in the process.
When she writes about racism in Brazil, people tell her she's crazy. ''I don't know how to explain the thing that, for me, is so obvious,'' she says.
And there it is again, that sense of race as a glimpse in a fun-house mirror. Indeed, as Leitao relates the responses she receives, I find myself laughing in recognition. One reader, for example, accused her of "creating a problem because I talk about it.''
''Because of you,'' the reader wrote, "one day, we will be racist.''
I've gotten that exact same e-mail. Many times. And it's funny, Lord knows it is, but it's also maddening. You wonder how intelligent people can turn logic so thoroughly inside out. How smart people can say such stupid things.
Over the years, I have come to understand that it's not about the strength of the argument. Leitao has a computer full of statistics documenting ''a very strong and permanent gap between black and white in Brazil.'' Over the years, I must have quoted a hundred government and university studies illustrating a similar gap between black and white in the United States. Yet at the end of the day, sometimes, it's like you wrote it in sand.
You begin to realize that denial is stronger than logic. And that while it is, your country--whatever country it is--will always fall short of its self-image.
America, the land of the free? Not always, not quite.
Brazil, the land where race matters not?
''We have a carnaval song,'' says Leitao. "For 40 years, the people, every year, sang this song. And this song is terrible. [Whites] never think about what they are singing. The song is: "Because your color won't contaminate me, I would like your love.''
"It's offensive,'' says Leitao. "And the people never realize. Why we don't never realize that we have a problem here?''
Her frustration makes me chuckle in recognition.
She is a newspaper columnist who writes about race in a nation 4,100 miles away.
But she is also a reflection in a fun-house mirror.
An old adage comes to mind: "If you're white, you're all right. If you're brown, stick around. If you're black, get back.''
It was a folk saying--property of no one, property of everyone--that we African Americans used to encompass defining realities of our lives. Meaning not just the fact that some white men would think themselves better than you because they were white, but the fact that some black men would, too, because they were light. This was a legacy of slavery, when light skin often meant less brutal treatment.
So to be here in Brazil, to wander through this culture where a man the color of Bishop T.D. Jakes or Don Cheadle might, with a straight face, deny the Africa in him and people earnestly debate ''who is black,'' well . . . it feels like you've stumbled into a fun-house mirror of race in which everything is exactly the same as it is back home, except where it is completely different.
As this month's Miami Herald reports on black life in Latin America vividly attest, that sense of falling through the fun-house mirror fits much of the black experience in this hemisphere. That black woman in Guatemala who made history by winning a beauty title could be Vanessa Williams. That Argentine kid who got called Kunta because he went to a white school could be a kid bused to school in Boston 30 years ago. That black man in Cuba getting harassed by police could be my son or, indeed, any young black man in America.
In much the same way, race in Brazil has a way of seeming both hauntingly familiar and exotically strange. Some here will tell you that this nation's triumph is that it never encoded race into its laws as did the United States. While that sounds like, and in some ways is, a laudable thing, the punch line is that those same people will also tell you this did not save Brazil from the sin of racism.
Indeed, they will haul out anecdotes and statistics illustrating the fact that Brazilians the color of T.D. Jakes or Don Cheadle tend to find it harder to get work, education or healthcare, but damnably easy to get followed around the department store by security guards who equate darkness with dishonesty.
This country is engaged in a debate over how to best address those issues. They are fighting over an affirmative-action program that would offer educational and healthcare advantages to Brazilians who are black.
Which brings us back to that earnestly debated question: Who is black?
The question is more complex than an American might believe. In Brazil, a nation of indigenous peoples and descendants of African slaves, European colonists and immigrants, a dark-skinned man who might automatically be called black elsewhere has a racial vocabulary that allows him to skirt the Africa in his heritage altogether. He can call himself moreno (racially mixed), mestizo (colored) or pardo (medium brown). Anything but afrodescendente (Africa-descended) or negro (black).
In this, he's not unlike his counterparts in the United States, where black people also have an extensive vocabulary to describe variations in skin tone. In the United States, one can be ''high yellow'' (i.e., of very light skin); one can be ''red'' (i.e., with a reddish tint; one of Malcolm X's early nicknames was Detroit Red); or one can be any of a number of synonyms for dark. Like, for instance, Smokey. In fact, the famous (and ''high yellow'') Motown singer William Robinson was given that nickname in affectionate irony by one of his father's friends--sort of like calling a fat guy Tiny.
But here's the thing: In the States, no matter your skin tone, your race is never in question. Detroit Red was black. Smokey Robinson is black. T.D. Jakes is black. Don Cheadle is black.
The same is not true in Brazil. And if the United States is a country where black people with light skin used to sometimes ''pass,'' i.e., pretend to be white, well, in this country ''passing is a national institution.'' So says Elisa Nascimento with a laugh. She is white, American-born and the wife of Abdias do Nascimento, a 90-year-old black Brazilian artist and political icon. And the insistence of some Brazilian blacks on ''passing,'' she says, has political consequences in that it tends to distort statistics on black life. "The way racism works in Brazil . . . there is a hierarchy, and so people tend to identify themselves lighter than they necessarily would be.''
But Simon Schwartzman, a white social scientist, thinks that allowing Brazilians to self-identify beats the alternative. "I think it's very wrong for the government to start labeling people and saying, `You are officially black or you are officially white, or you are officially something.' You have all kinds of people in all kinds of situations, and I don't think it's the business of government to classify and label people.''
So the question of ''Who is black?'' is tricky, to say the least. If a man the color of T.D. Jakes or even Smokey Robinson says he is not black, do you take him seriously? Do you laugh in his face?
Maybe your instinct is the latter. In the U.S. of A., after all, we know what black is.
Of course, the U.S. of A. is also the country where, in 1896, an ''octoroon'' (i.e., one-eighth black) man named Homer Plessy, white to all physical intents and purposes, lost a Supreme Court case that started when he was ordered to move to a ''colored'' train car. And it's also the country where educator Gregory Howard Williams, a man who would disappear in a room of middle-age white men, saw his life change in 1954 from middle-class comfort to ostracism and racial slurs when it was revealed that his father was half-black.
As Williams, the author of the 1995 memoir Life on the Color Line: The True Story of a White Boy Who Discovered He Was Black once told me in an interview, "The issue in America has never been color. It's always been race.''
So in deriding the silliness of another nation's racial mores, an American finds himself in the unenviable position of the pot calling the kettle . . . well, black.
Indeed, it is America's history of encoding its racial biases in law--everything from the Constitution designating blacks as three-fifths of a human being in 1787 to the restrictive housing covenants and segregation statutes that persisted into the 1960s--that Yvonne Maggie points to in explaining why she objects to Brazil's flirtation with affirmative action.
''We don't need to say that race exists,'' says Maggie, an anthropologist and university professor. "We have to say that race is not important to define people in social terms, that black and white are the same kind of people.''
It is worth noting that Maggie is white, her ex-husband is black, and they lived for a while in the United States. In 1971. In Texas.
''It was a rough time,'' she says in her imperfect English. "For me, was impossible to live there. We could not be married. Why I married with a black guy, you know? So when I say to you that Brazil was different . . . even my first husband didn't think of himself as black. In Brazil, he was a Brazilian, even though he was black. He never thought of himself as someone different from me because he was another color.''
Which brings you to the heart of the matter, the reason any discussion of race and racial terminology that goes on long enough eventually comes to seem silly and overly complicated. African American? Afro-Brazilian? Negro? Colored? Moreno?Afrodescendente? Red? Pardo? Smokey?
The reason the language struggles so hard for precision is that it seeks to describe that which does not exist. As a scientific matter, there is no such thing as race. We are all of the human race, something we probably will not fully understand until it is explained to us by green people with eyes waving on stalks.
Whereas U.S. history flies in the face of that fact with its centuries of pretense to hard and fast racial boundaries, it's a point of pride for Maggie that her country never--officially--bought into that lie.
I respect the principle she argues--race does not exist and therefore should not be acknowledged in law. But that raises a question: How can you have racism without race?
Maggie insists that you can. She says that what Brazil has is a kind of ''social racism'' supported not by law, but by custom. One suspects that those who suffer under it would be hard-pressed to tell the difference--or find reason to care. Which is why, given the choice, many dark-skinned Brazilians choose to be other than ''black.'' It is a means of escape, if only linguistically.
One morning, my translator and I ride out to the favela made infamous in City of God, the Oscar-nominated 2002 film about the drug wars that suck in children and spit out bones. We wait outside a community center for the Brazilian hip-hop star I have come to interview. Inside, a funeral has just come to an end. A casket is borne out to a van, followed by a handful of young people. Some have light skin, some have dark. All have sad eyes.
After a while, the man I'm waiting for appears. His given name is Alex Pereira Barbosa, known professionally as MV Bill. The MV stands for Mensageiro da Verdade, Messenger of Truth, and he is famous for rapping about conditions in the favelas.
When I mention the funeral, he explains that the dead boy worked for one of the drug lords and met a violent end. When I mention that the boy was mourned by young people both black and white, MV Bill gives me a look. He considers all of them black.
''One of the characteristics of Brazilian racism,'' he says, "is that the person can choose to be what she wants. `Oh, I'm white, I'm not black.' Here, the darker you are, the more discrimination you suffer. And that makes it difficult for the blacks, from light to dark, to understand each other. The lighter-skinned blacks avoid the darker-skinned blacks because they don't want to suffer the same discrimination. It's hard for them to work together because of the degree of discrimination according to your color.''
The cruelest racism, says MV Bill, is actually intraracial, perpetuated by light-skinned blacks against dark-skinned blacks. Fair skin, he says, represents power, even in the favela.
After being in this country a while, I find myself doing something I'd never feel the need to do at home. I ask people I'm interviewing ''what'' they are. When dark-skinned people identify themselves as ''black,'' there is an unmistakable little thrill of victory, a notch for ''our'' side, as in someone who was brave enough and tough enough to accept the designation this society despises. Someone who understands that the problem isn't color and never was; rather, it is what some people have arbitrarily decided color means.
Lucia Maria Xavier de Castro, coordinator of Criola, an activist group representing black women, says she has known many people who were unable to accept their own blackness. "The person does everything to get rid of black traces. Straightens her hair, dresses like white people--not colorful. People do everything to eliminate traces. It's as if this person had a birth defect and was trying to correct it by taking those attitudes.''
Brazil likes to think of itself as a racial democracy, says Miriam Leitao, but that's a delusion. She has, she says, been making that argument for 10 years and has become one of the nation's most controversial journalists in the process.
When she writes about racism in Brazil, people tell her she's crazy. ''I don't know how to explain the thing that, for me, is so obvious,'' she says.
And there it is again, that sense of race as a glimpse in a fun-house mirror. Indeed, as Leitao relates the responses she receives, I find myself laughing in recognition. One reader, for example, accused her of "creating a problem because I talk about it.''
''Because of you,'' the reader wrote, "one day, we will be racist.''
I've gotten that exact same e-mail. Many times. And it's funny, Lord knows it is, but it's also maddening. You wonder how intelligent people can turn logic so thoroughly inside out. How smart people can say such stupid things.
Over the years, I have come to understand that it's not about the strength of the argument. Leitao has a computer full of statistics documenting ''a very strong and permanent gap between black and white in Brazil.'' Over the years, I must have quoted a hundred government and university studies illustrating a similar gap between black and white in the United States. Yet at the end of the day, sometimes, it's like you wrote it in sand.
You begin to realize that denial is stronger than logic. And that while it is, your country--whatever country it is--will always fall short of its self-image.
America, the land of the free? Not always, not quite.
Brazil, the land where race matters not?
''We have a carnaval song,'' says Leitao. "For 40 years, the people, every year, sang this song. And this song is terrible. [Whites] never think about what they are singing. The song is: "Because your color won't contaminate me, I would like your love.''
"It's offensive,'' says Leitao. "And the people never realize. Why we don't never realize that we have a problem here?''
Her frustration makes me chuckle in recognition.
She is a newspaper columnist who writes about race in a nation 4,100 miles away.
But she is also a reflection in a fun-house mirror.
Tuesday, June 19, 2007
Being There
One of the hardest truths of parenthood is that you never know how well you've done till it's too late to do anything about it. When that child who once clung to your shin becomes a man looking you in the eye, you realize with an abruptness that the time for molding personality and imparting life wisdom has passed.
I have fathered three kids, step-fathered two more, the youngest now 16. And there is not one of them for whom I wouldn't like to have a do-over so I could fix something I did or do something I should've.
[S]o often what a child remembers best and values most is not what you did or didn't do. I'm not saying those things don't matter. But what matters more is that you are there. Predictably, dependably, reliably there. Indeed, putting aside food and shelter, arguably the most fundamentally important thing you give a child is simply your presence. We change the equation when we are there.
--Leonard Pitts
I have fathered three kids, step-fathered two more, the youngest now 16. And there is not one of them for whom I wouldn't like to have a do-over so I could fix something I did or do something I should've.
[S]o often what a child remembers best and values most is not what you did or didn't do. I'm not saying those things don't matter. But what matters more is that you are there. Predictably, dependably, reliably there. Indeed, putting aside food and shelter, arguably the most fundamentally important thing you give a child is simply your presence. We change the equation when we are there.
--Leonard Pitts
Monday, June 18, 2007
Driving to the Funeral
by Anna Quindlen
The four years of high school grind inexorably to a close, the milestones passed. The sports contests, the SATs, the exams, the elections, the dances, the proms. And too often, the funerals. It's become a sad rite of passage in many American communities, the services held for teenagers killed in auto accidents before they've even scored a tassel to hang from the rearview mirror. The hearse moves in procession followed by the late-model compact cars of young people, boys trying to control trembling lower lips and girls sobbing into one another's shoulders. The yearbook has a picture or two with a black border. A mom and dad rise from their seats on the athletic field or in the gym to accept a diploma posthumously.
It's simple and inarguable: car crashes are the No. 1 cause of death among 15- to 20-year-olds in this country. What's so peculiar about that fact is that so few adults focus on it until they are planning an untimely funeral. Put it this way: if someone told you that there was one single behavior that would be most likely to lead to the premature death of your kid, wouldn't you try to do something about that? Yet parents seem to treat the right of a 16-year-old to drive as an inalienable one, something to be neither questioned nor abridged.
This makes no sense unless the argument is convenience, and often it is. In a nation that developed mass-transit amnesia and traded the exurb for the small town, a licensed son or daughter relieves parents of a relentless roundelay of driving. Soccer field, Mickey Ds, mall, movies. Of course, if that's the rationale, why not let 13-year-olds drive? Any reasonable person would respond that a 13-year-old is too young. But statistics suggest that that's true of 16-year-olds as well. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has found that neophyte drivers of 17 have about a third as many accidents as their counterparts only a year younger.
In 1984 a solution was devised for the problem of teenage auto accidents that lulled many parents into a false sense of security. The drinking age was raised from 18 to 21. It's become gospel that this has saved thousands of lives, although no one actually knows if that's the case; fatalities fell, but the use of seat belts and airbags may have as much to do with that as penalties for alcohol use. And there has been a pronounced negative effect on college campuses, where administrators describe a forbidden-fruit climate that encourages binge drinking. The pitchers of sangria and kegs of beer that offered legal refreshment for 18-year-olds at sanctioned campus events 30 years ago have given way to a new tradition called "pre-gaming," in which dry college activities are preceded by manic alcohol consumption at frats, dorms and bars.
Given the incidence of auto-accident deaths among teenagers despite the higher drinking age, you have to ask whether the powerful lobby Mothers Against Drunk Driving simply targeted the wrong D. In a survey of young drivers, only half said they had seen a peer drive after drinking. Nearly all, however, said they had witnessed speeding, which is the leading factor in fatal crashes by teenagers today. In Europe, governments are relaxed about the drinking age but tough on driving regulations and licensing provisions; in most countries, the driving age is 18.
In America some states have taken a tough-love position and bumped up the requirements for young drivers: longer permit periods, restrictions or bans on night driving. Since the greatest danger to a teenage driver is another teenager in the car—the chance of having an accident doubles with two teenage passengers and skyrockets with three or more—some new rules forbid novice drivers from transporting their peers.
In theory this sounds like a good idea; in fact it's toothless. New Jersey has some of the most demanding regulations for new drivers in the nation, including a provision that until they are 18 they cannot have more than one nonfamily member in the car. Yet in early January three students leaving school in Freehold Township died in a horrific accident in which the car's 17-year-old driver was violating that regulation by carrying two friends. No wonder he took the chance: between July 2004 and November 2006, only 12 provisional drivers were ticketed for carrying too many passengers. Good law, bad enforcement.
States might make it easier on themselves, on police officers and on teenagers, too, if instead of chipping away at the right to drive they merely raised the legal driving age wholesale. There are dozens of statistics to back up such a change: in Massachusetts alone, one third of 16-year-old drivers have been involved in serious accidents. Lots and lots of parents will tell you that raising the driving age is untenable, that the kids need their freedom and their mobility. Perhaps the only ones who wouldn't make a fuss are those parents who have accepted diplomas at graduation because their children were no longer alive to do so themselves, whose children traded freedom and mobility for their lives. They might think it was worth the wait.
The four years of high school grind inexorably to a close, the milestones passed. The sports contests, the SATs, the exams, the elections, the dances, the proms. And too often, the funerals. It's become a sad rite of passage in many American communities, the services held for teenagers killed in auto accidents before they've even scored a tassel to hang from the rearview mirror. The hearse moves in procession followed by the late-model compact cars of young people, boys trying to control trembling lower lips and girls sobbing into one another's shoulders. The yearbook has a picture or two with a black border. A mom and dad rise from their seats on the athletic field or in the gym to accept a diploma posthumously.
It's simple and inarguable: car crashes are the No. 1 cause of death among 15- to 20-year-olds in this country. What's so peculiar about that fact is that so few adults focus on it until they are planning an untimely funeral. Put it this way: if someone told you that there was one single behavior that would be most likely to lead to the premature death of your kid, wouldn't you try to do something about that? Yet parents seem to treat the right of a 16-year-old to drive as an inalienable one, something to be neither questioned nor abridged.
This makes no sense unless the argument is convenience, and often it is. In a nation that developed mass-transit amnesia and traded the exurb for the small town, a licensed son or daughter relieves parents of a relentless roundelay of driving. Soccer field, Mickey Ds, mall, movies. Of course, if that's the rationale, why not let 13-year-olds drive? Any reasonable person would respond that a 13-year-old is too young. But statistics suggest that that's true of 16-year-olds as well. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has found that neophyte drivers of 17 have about a third as many accidents as their counterparts only a year younger.
In 1984 a solution was devised for the problem of teenage auto accidents that lulled many parents into a false sense of security. The drinking age was raised from 18 to 21. It's become gospel that this has saved thousands of lives, although no one actually knows if that's the case; fatalities fell, but the use of seat belts and airbags may have as much to do with that as penalties for alcohol use. And there has been a pronounced negative effect on college campuses, where administrators describe a forbidden-fruit climate that encourages binge drinking. The pitchers of sangria and kegs of beer that offered legal refreshment for 18-year-olds at sanctioned campus events 30 years ago have given way to a new tradition called "pre-gaming," in which dry college activities are preceded by manic alcohol consumption at frats, dorms and bars.
Given the incidence of auto-accident deaths among teenagers despite the higher drinking age, you have to ask whether the powerful lobby Mothers Against Drunk Driving simply targeted the wrong D. In a survey of young drivers, only half said they had seen a peer drive after drinking. Nearly all, however, said they had witnessed speeding, which is the leading factor in fatal crashes by teenagers today. In Europe, governments are relaxed about the drinking age but tough on driving regulations and licensing provisions; in most countries, the driving age is 18.
In America some states have taken a tough-love position and bumped up the requirements for young drivers: longer permit periods, restrictions or bans on night driving. Since the greatest danger to a teenage driver is another teenager in the car—the chance of having an accident doubles with two teenage passengers and skyrockets with three or more—some new rules forbid novice drivers from transporting their peers.
In theory this sounds like a good idea; in fact it's toothless. New Jersey has some of the most demanding regulations for new drivers in the nation, including a provision that until they are 18 they cannot have more than one nonfamily member in the car. Yet in early January three students leaving school in Freehold Township died in a horrific accident in which the car's 17-year-old driver was violating that regulation by carrying two friends. No wonder he took the chance: between July 2004 and November 2006, only 12 provisional drivers were ticketed for carrying too many passengers. Good law, bad enforcement.
States might make it easier on themselves, on police officers and on teenagers, too, if instead of chipping away at the right to drive they merely raised the legal driving age wholesale. There are dozens of statistics to back up such a change: in Massachusetts alone, one third of 16-year-old drivers have been involved in serious accidents. Lots and lots of parents will tell you that raising the driving age is untenable, that the kids need their freedom and their mobility. Perhaps the only ones who wouldn't make a fuss are those parents who have accepted diplomas at graduation because their children were no longer alive to do so themselves, whose children traded freedom and mobility for their lives. They might think it was worth the wait.
Thursday, May 31, 2007
True Philosopher
Christ is the true philosopher because he embodies in his ministry the welcoming and caring reception of others so that they might more fully be the beings they are meant to be. Indeed, in the Christlike effort to understand, serve, heal, feed, and reconcile the earth and its communities we show forth the highest wisdom.
--Norman Wirzba
--Norman Wirzba
Tuesday, May 29, 2007
Friday, May 25, 2007
What's Acceptable? What's Possible?
by Jim Wallis
(This column is adapted from a commencement address that Jim delivered at Georgetown University on Sunday, May 20.)
Each new generation has a chance to alter two very basic definitions of reality in our world--what is acceptable and what is possible.
First, what is acceptable?
There are always great inhumanities that we inflict upon one another in this world, great injustices that cry out to God for redress, and great gaps in our moral recognition of them. When the really big offenses are finally corrected, finally changed, it is always and only because something has happened to change our perception of the moral issues at stake. The moral contradiction we have long lived with is no longer acceptable to us. What we accepted, or ignored, or denied, finally gets our attention and we decide that we just cannot, and will not, live with it any longer. But until that happens, the injustice and misery continue.
It often takes a new generation to make that decision--that something that people have long tolerated just won't be tolerated any more.
So the question to you as graduates, as ambassadors for a new generation, is this: what are you going to no longer accept in our world, what will you refuse to tolerate now that you will be making the decisions that matter?
Will it be acceptable to you that 3 billion people in our world today--half of God's children--live on less that $2 per day, that more than 1 billion live on less than $1 per day, that the gap between the life expectancy in the rich places and the poor places in the world is now 40 years, and that 30,000 children globally will die today--on the day of your graduation--from needless, senseless, and utterly preventable poverty and disease? It's what Bono calls "stupid poverty."
Many people don't really know that, or sort of do but have never really focused on the reality or given it a second thought. And that's the way it usually is. We don't know, or we have the easy explanations about why poverty or some other calamity exists and why it can't really be changed--all of which makes us feel better about ourselves--or we are just more concerned with lots of other things. We really don't have to care. So we tolerate it and keep looking the other way.
But then something changes. Something gets our attention, something goes deeper than it has before and hooks us in the places we call the heart, the soul, the spirit. And once we've crossed over into really seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, and tasting the injustice, we can never really look back again. It is now unacceptable to us.
What we see now offends us, offends our understanding of the sanctity and dignity of life, offends our notions of fairness and justice, offends our most basic values; it violates our idea of the common good, and starts to tug at our deepest places. We cross the line of unacceptability. We become intolerant of the injustice.
But just changing our notion of what is unacceptable isn't enough, however. We must also change our perception of what is possible.
In that regard, I would encourage each of you to think about your vocation more than just your career. And there is a difference. From the outside, those two tracks may look very much alike, but asking the vocational question rather than just considering the career options will take you much deeper. The key is to ask why you might take one path instead of another--the real reasons you would do something, more than just because you can. The key is to ask who you really are and what you want to become. It is to ask what you believe you are supposed to do.
You do have great potential, but that potential will be most fulfilled if you follow the leanings of conscience and the language of the heart more than just the dictates of the market, whether economic or political. They want smart people like you to just manage the systems of the world. But rather than managing or merely fitting into systems, ask how you can change them. You're both smart enough and talented enough to do that. That's your greatest potential.
Ask where your gifts intersect with the groaning needs of the world--there is your vocation.
The antidote to cynicism is not optimism but action. And action is finally born out of hope. Try to remember that. At college, you often believe you can think your way into a new way of living, but that's actually not the way it works. Out in the world, it's more likely that you will live your way into a new way of thinking.
The key is to believe that the world can be changed, because it is only that belief that ever changes the world. And if not us, who will believe? If not you, who?
(This column is adapted from a commencement address that Jim delivered at Georgetown University on Sunday, May 20.)
Each new generation has a chance to alter two very basic definitions of reality in our world--what is acceptable and what is possible.
First, what is acceptable?
There are always great inhumanities that we inflict upon one another in this world, great injustices that cry out to God for redress, and great gaps in our moral recognition of them. When the really big offenses are finally corrected, finally changed, it is always and only because something has happened to change our perception of the moral issues at stake. The moral contradiction we have long lived with is no longer acceptable to us. What we accepted, or ignored, or denied, finally gets our attention and we decide that we just cannot, and will not, live with it any longer. But until that happens, the injustice and misery continue.
It often takes a new generation to make that decision--that something that people have long tolerated just won't be tolerated any more.
So the question to you as graduates, as ambassadors for a new generation, is this: what are you going to no longer accept in our world, what will you refuse to tolerate now that you will be making the decisions that matter?
Will it be acceptable to you that 3 billion people in our world today--half of God's children--live on less that $2 per day, that more than 1 billion live on less than $1 per day, that the gap between the life expectancy in the rich places and the poor places in the world is now 40 years, and that 30,000 children globally will die today--on the day of your graduation--from needless, senseless, and utterly preventable poverty and disease? It's what Bono calls "stupid poverty."
Many people don't really know that, or sort of do but have never really focused on the reality or given it a second thought. And that's the way it usually is. We don't know, or we have the easy explanations about why poverty or some other calamity exists and why it can't really be changed--all of which makes us feel better about ourselves--or we are just more concerned with lots of other things. We really don't have to care. So we tolerate it and keep looking the other way.
But then something changes. Something gets our attention, something goes deeper than it has before and hooks us in the places we call the heart, the soul, the spirit. And once we've crossed over into really seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, and tasting the injustice, we can never really look back again. It is now unacceptable to us.
What we see now offends us, offends our understanding of the sanctity and dignity of life, offends our notions of fairness and justice, offends our most basic values; it violates our idea of the common good, and starts to tug at our deepest places. We cross the line of unacceptability. We become intolerant of the injustice.
But just changing our notion of what is unacceptable isn't enough, however. We must also change our perception of what is possible.
In that regard, I would encourage each of you to think about your vocation more than just your career. And there is a difference. From the outside, those two tracks may look very much alike, but asking the vocational question rather than just considering the career options will take you much deeper. The key is to ask why you might take one path instead of another--the real reasons you would do something, more than just because you can. The key is to ask who you really are and what you want to become. It is to ask what you believe you are supposed to do.
You do have great potential, but that potential will be most fulfilled if you follow the leanings of conscience and the language of the heart more than just the dictates of the market, whether economic or political. They want smart people like you to just manage the systems of the world. But rather than managing or merely fitting into systems, ask how you can change them. You're both smart enough and talented enough to do that. That's your greatest potential.
Ask where your gifts intersect with the groaning needs of the world--there is your vocation.
The antidote to cynicism is not optimism but action. And action is finally born out of hope. Try to remember that. At college, you often believe you can think your way into a new way of living, but that's actually not the way it works. Out in the world, it's more likely that you will live your way into a new way of thinking.
The key is to believe that the world can be changed, because it is only that belief that ever changes the world. And if not us, who will believe? If not you, who?
Wednesday, May 23, 2007
Illusion
A human being is a part of the whole that we call the universe, a part limited in time and space. And yet we experience ourselves, our thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest--a kind of optical illusion of our consciousness. This illusion is a prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for only the few people nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living beings and all of nature.
--Albert Einstein
--Albert Einstein
The End of an Era
by Ron Sider
Jerry Falwell's death marks the end of an era.
Falwell had a major impact on American public life. His Moral Majority, launched in 1979, not only helped elect Ronald Reagan in 1980, it also encouraged a whole generation of apolitical fundamentalist Christians to join the political debate. Falwell played a central role in focusing the political agenda of that new group of theologically conservative voters on the issues of abortion, marriage, and sexuality, and in aligning them almost entirely with the Republican Party.
Therein lies the tragedy of Jerry Falwell. He deserves much credit for helping millions of unengaged fundamentalists and conservative evangelicals understand that one aspect of biblical faith is faithful political engagement. Tragically, Falwell failed to develop a biblically balanced agenda for his political work. His tone was sometimes too harsh, but Falwell was largely right in what he promoted on the sanctity of human life and marriage. But he said little about economic justice, overcoming racism, and care for creation. Falwell is one of the significant reasons why evangelical political engagement was so one-sided for more than 20 years.
Jerry Falwell's death marks the end of an era.
Falwell had a major impact on American public life. His Moral Majority, launched in 1979, not only helped elect Ronald Reagan in 1980, it also encouraged a whole generation of apolitical fundamentalist Christians to join the political debate. Falwell played a central role in focusing the political agenda of that new group of theologically conservative voters on the issues of abortion, marriage, and sexuality, and in aligning them almost entirely with the Republican Party.
Therein lies the tragedy of Jerry Falwell. He deserves much credit for helping millions of unengaged fundamentalists and conservative evangelicals understand that one aspect of biblical faith is faithful political engagement. Tragically, Falwell failed to develop a biblically balanced agenda for his political work. His tone was sometimes too harsh, but Falwell was largely right in what he promoted on the sanctity of human life and marriage. But he said little about economic justice, overcoming racism, and care for creation. Falwell is one of the significant reasons why evangelical political engagement was so one-sided for more than 20 years.
Speak the Truth
To keep struggling against hate and to practice forgiveness need not mean abdicating one's rights or renouncing justice. This should be emphasized over and over again. It is part of loving one's enemy that Christians must remind the "enemy" of justice and right. It is part of loving to speak the truth.
--Naim Ateek
--Naim Ateek
Tuesday, May 22, 2007
We Cannot Merely Pray
We cannot merely pray to You, O God, to end war:
For we know You made the world in a way
That we must find our own path of peace
Within ourselves and with our neighbor.
We cannot merely pray to You, O God, to root out prejudice:
For you have already given us eyes
With which to see the good in all people
If we would only use them rightly.
--Rabbi Jack Riemer
For we know You made the world in a way
That we must find our own path of peace
Within ourselves and with our neighbor.
We cannot merely pray to You, O God, to root out prejudice:
For you have already given us eyes
With which to see the good in all people
If we would only use them rightly.
--Rabbi Jack Riemer
Sunday, May 20, 2007
Quotes from Albert Einstein
Nationalism is an infantile disease, the measles of mankind.
No one can read the Gospels without feeling the actual presence of Jesus. His personality pulsates in every word. No myth is filled with such life.
The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle. To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is something that our minds cannot grasp, whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly: this is religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, I am a devoutly religious man.
I believe in Spinoza's God, who reveals himself in the lawful harmony of all that exists, but not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and the doings of mankind.
The fanatical atheists are like slaves who are still feeling the weight of their chains which they have thrown off after hard struggle. They are creatures who--in their grudge against traditional religion as the 'opium of the masses'-- cannot hear the music of the spheres.
Science can be created only by those who are thoroughly imbued with the aspiration toward truth and understanding. This source of feeling, however, springs from the sphere of religion. The situation may be expressed by an image: science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.
No one can read the Gospels without feeling the actual presence of Jesus. His personality pulsates in every word. No myth is filled with such life.
The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle. To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is something that our minds cannot grasp, whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly: this is religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, I am a devoutly religious man.
I believe in Spinoza's God, who reveals himself in the lawful harmony of all that exists, but not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and the doings of mankind.
The fanatical atheists are like slaves who are still feeling the weight of their chains which they have thrown off after hard struggle. They are creatures who--in their grudge against traditional religion as the 'opium of the masses'-- cannot hear the music of the spheres.
Science can be created only by those who are thoroughly imbued with the aspiration toward truth and understanding. This source of feeling, however, springs from the sphere of religion. The situation may be expressed by an image: science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.
The Age of U-Turns
by Bruce Grierson
It's easy to get the sense these days that you've stumbled into a party where the punch is spiked with some powerful drug that dramatically alters identity. The faces are familiar, but the words coming out of them aren't. Something has happened to a lot of people you used to think you knew. They've changed into something like their own opposite.
There's Bill Gates, who these days is spending less time earning money than giving it away--and pulling other billionaires into the deep end of global philanthropy with him. There's historian Francis Fukuyama, leading a whole gang of disaffected fellow travelers away from neoconservatism. And in the back, humming Give Peace a Chance, the new Nicaraguan President, Daniel Ortega, former head of the Marxist Sandinistas. The comandante has come around on open economies and free trade and is courting foreign investment as the way out for his nation's poor.
From modest recants--Oprah Winfrey on James Frey, NBA commissioner David Stern on leather balls, Rupert Murdoch on global warming--to full-on ideological 180s, reappraisal is in the air. The view long held by social psychologists that people very rarely change their beliefs seems itself in need of revision.
To flip-flop is human. Oh, sure, it can still sometimes be a political liability, evidence of a flaky disposition or rank opportunism. But there are circumstances in which not to reverse course seems almost pathological. He's a model of consistency, Stephen Colbert said last year of George W. Bush: "He believes the same thing Wednesday that he believed on Monday--no matter what happened on Tuesday."
It's still too early, post 9/11, to get an accurate bead on how much that day actually affected people's lives in a concrete way. But what you can say with confidence is that those slicing jets pierced the bubble of privileged optimism that many Americans had been enjoying. It changed the perception that there was an inside detached from an outside you could voluntarily avoid.
Over the past three years, while researching a book on what I call secular epiphanies, I found people who had pulled a big U-turn in their lives. There was a slaughterhouse worker who became an animal-rights activist, a venture capitalist who quit to found a high-minded nonprofit, a death-penalty advocate who became a leading death-penalty opponent. Often the insight came in a forehead-smiting moment in the middle of the night: I've got it all wrong.
It looked at first like a random bunch of data points, a sprinkling of outliers beyond the curve of normal human experience. But when you stepped back, a pattern emerged. What these personal turns had in common was the apprehension that, well, we're all connected. Everything leans on something, is propped up by something--is both dependent and depended on.
Sure, there were folks who didn't don the love beads but buried them: ex-Greenpeacers who morphed into industry apparatchiks, utopians who left their kooky social experiments for banker's hours. But these aren't typically the kinds of journeys one makes suddenly--and in that sense they didn't count as epiphanies. There are lives that one slowly acquires, like a carapace. And sometimes these are the same lives that, in one deeply private moment of dead reckoning, get shed.
"The difference between you and me," a visiting Chinese student told University of Michigan psychologist Richard Nisbett not long ago, "is that I think the world is a circle, and you think it's a line." The remark caught the professor off guard with its size. It prompted him to write a book, The Geography of Thought, about the differences--culturally encoded over a few hundred generations--between the Western and the Asian mind.
To Western thinking, the world is linear; you can chop it up and analyze it, and we can all work on our little part of the project independently until it's solved. The classically Eastern mind, according to Nisbett, sees things differently: the world isn't a length of rope but a vast, closed chain, incomprehensibly complex and ever changing. When you look at life from this second perspective, some unlikely connections reveal themselves. You're forced to retreat from the den of libertarianism and sniff the wind, to wake up when someone in Khartoum or Mogadishu twitches in his sleep.
I realized this was what almost all the U-turns had in common: people had swung around to face East. They had stopped thinking in a line and started thinking in a circle. Morality was looking less like a set of rules and more like a story, one in which they were part of an ensemble cast, no longer the star.
It's easy to get the sense these days that you've stumbled into a party where the punch is spiked with some powerful drug that dramatically alters identity. The faces are familiar, but the words coming out of them aren't. Something has happened to a lot of people you used to think you knew. They've changed into something like their own opposite.
There's Bill Gates, who these days is spending less time earning money than giving it away--and pulling other billionaires into the deep end of global philanthropy with him. There's historian Francis Fukuyama, leading a whole gang of disaffected fellow travelers away from neoconservatism. And in the back, humming Give Peace a Chance, the new Nicaraguan President, Daniel Ortega, former head of the Marxist Sandinistas. The comandante has come around on open economies and free trade and is courting foreign investment as the way out for his nation's poor.
From modest recants--Oprah Winfrey on James Frey, NBA commissioner David Stern on leather balls, Rupert Murdoch on global warming--to full-on ideological 180s, reappraisal is in the air. The view long held by social psychologists that people very rarely change their beliefs seems itself in need of revision.
To flip-flop is human. Oh, sure, it can still sometimes be a political liability, evidence of a flaky disposition or rank opportunism. But there are circumstances in which not to reverse course seems almost pathological. He's a model of consistency, Stephen Colbert said last year of George W. Bush: "He believes the same thing Wednesday that he believed on Monday--no matter what happened on Tuesday."
It's still too early, post 9/11, to get an accurate bead on how much that day actually affected people's lives in a concrete way. But what you can say with confidence is that those slicing jets pierced the bubble of privileged optimism that many Americans had been enjoying. It changed the perception that there was an inside detached from an outside you could voluntarily avoid.
Over the past three years, while researching a book on what I call secular epiphanies, I found people who had pulled a big U-turn in their lives. There was a slaughterhouse worker who became an animal-rights activist, a venture capitalist who quit to found a high-minded nonprofit, a death-penalty advocate who became a leading death-penalty opponent. Often the insight came in a forehead-smiting moment in the middle of the night: I've got it all wrong.
It looked at first like a random bunch of data points, a sprinkling of outliers beyond the curve of normal human experience. But when you stepped back, a pattern emerged. What these personal turns had in common was the apprehension that, well, we're all connected. Everything leans on something, is propped up by something--is both dependent and depended on.
Sure, there were folks who didn't don the love beads but buried them: ex-Greenpeacers who morphed into industry apparatchiks, utopians who left their kooky social experiments for banker's hours. But these aren't typically the kinds of journeys one makes suddenly--and in that sense they didn't count as epiphanies. There are lives that one slowly acquires, like a carapace. And sometimes these are the same lives that, in one deeply private moment of dead reckoning, get shed.
"The difference between you and me," a visiting Chinese student told University of Michigan psychologist Richard Nisbett not long ago, "is that I think the world is a circle, and you think it's a line." The remark caught the professor off guard with its size. It prompted him to write a book, The Geography of Thought, about the differences--culturally encoded over a few hundred generations--between the Western and the Asian mind.
To Western thinking, the world is linear; you can chop it up and analyze it, and we can all work on our little part of the project independently until it's solved. The classically Eastern mind, according to Nisbett, sees things differently: the world isn't a length of rope but a vast, closed chain, incomprehensibly complex and ever changing. When you look at life from this second perspective, some unlikely connections reveal themselves. You're forced to retreat from the den of libertarianism and sniff the wind, to wake up when someone in Khartoum or Mogadishu twitches in his sleep.
I realized this was what almost all the U-turns had in common: people had swung around to face East. They had stopped thinking in a line and started thinking in a circle. Morality was looking less like a set of rules and more like a story, one in which they were part of an ensemble cast, no longer the star.
Thursday, May 17, 2007
The Hope of the World
by Shane Claiborne
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, “Don’t let anyone make you think that God has chosen America as [God's] divine messianic force to be reckoned with.” There are compelling voices who claim that God has chosen America (not the church) as a special embodiment of hope for the world, and then there are times (perhaps in more recent history) where it seems America embodies an antithesis of what God hopes for. U.S. flags colonize the altars and the money is branded “In God We Trust,” but the economy is an eerie reflection of the seven deadly sins listed in scripture, with a culture dangerously close to the sins of Sodom, a culture the prophet Ezekiel describes as “arrogant, overfed, and unconcerned.” Given the fact that America and God’s kingdom are not the same--and are often at odds--how do we resist the temptation of thinking that America, rather than God or God’s church, is the hope of the world?
Perhaps reflect on the following words from George W. Bush: “The ideal of America is the hope of all mankind. That hope still lights our way. And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.” And the recent words of Barack Obama on the Late Show with David Letterman, “This country is still the last best hope on earth.” As Christians, how do we reconcile where our ultimate faith lies, especially within an empire as mesmerizing as Rome or America?
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, “Don’t let anyone make you think that God has chosen America as [God's] divine messianic force to be reckoned with.” There are compelling voices who claim that God has chosen America (not the church) as a special embodiment of hope for the world, and then there are times (perhaps in more recent history) where it seems America embodies an antithesis of what God hopes for. U.S. flags colonize the altars and the money is branded “In God We Trust,” but the economy is an eerie reflection of the seven deadly sins listed in scripture, with a culture dangerously close to the sins of Sodom, a culture the prophet Ezekiel describes as “arrogant, overfed, and unconcerned.” Given the fact that America and God’s kingdom are not the same--and are often at odds--how do we resist the temptation of thinking that America, rather than God or God’s church, is the hope of the world?
Perhaps reflect on the following words from George W. Bush: “The ideal of America is the hope of all mankind. That hope still lights our way. And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.” And the recent words of Barack Obama on the Late Show with David Letterman, “This country is still the last best hope on earth.” As Christians, how do we reconcile where our ultimate faith lies, especially within an empire as mesmerizing as Rome or America?
Wednesday, May 16, 2007
Questions for the Democratic Candidates
by Brian McLaren
I'm writing from the Republic of South Africa, where I've been speaking in conferences and other gatherings with church leaders from across many denominations. With the memories of apartheid still alive here, with a poverty rate of about 40 percent, with crime rates moving higher and higher--in part due to desperate immigrants from Zimbabwe--and with
the continuing work of creating a successful multicultural democracy ongoing, several questions come to my mind for the three candidates. Here is how I would formulate them sitting in a home in downtown Johannesburg:
1. For Senator Clinton: If you are elected and serve two terms, it would mean that two families would share the presidency of the United States for 28 years. It's hard not to conclude that we are living in something more like an oligarchy or plutocracy than a democracy. Would you reflect on this problem so we can see how deeply you have thought about it, and would you propose what can be done about it?
2. For Senator Obama: I've heard critics express fear that you aren't tough enough or militaristic enough to be president in a world of terrorism and nuclear weapons. I would imagine that would prompt you to want to prove you are indeed capable of being tough and militaristic. But many of us are hoping for someone who will present another vision for the role of America in the world--something beyond the world's dominant military force, the world's police, or the world's imperial center. Not that America would be weak, but that we would be strong in new and different ways. Can you comment on your vision for the role of America in the world, and what you would do to pursue that role?
3. For John Edwards: When the subject of terrorism comes up, many Americans seem to think that terrorism can be stopped by guns and bombs. But others believe that wherever there is a large gap between rich and poor countries, terrorism (like high crime rates) will be likely, perhaps inevitable. If that is the case, creating a more equitable global economy becomes one of the most essential dimensions of reducing terrorism. Do you agree, and if so, what can America do to increase its security by helping poor nations improve their economic systems?
There are two additional questions I would want to ask all the candidates:
1. America seems to be caught in a cycle of fear. Politicians use fear to garner support and inhibit criticism. News media profit when people are afraid and watch TV news more often, raising ratings and advertising income. The arms industry profits when fears run high. Political parties compete for fear dominance over other parties. Cycles of fear are hard to break. How will your campaign and your presidency address this rise in the fear quotient?
2. The United States is not leading the world in addressing our unsustainable economy. We are the world's prime example of an unsustainable consumer society, and if our lifestyles were generalized to the whole human population, we would need many planet earths to sustain us. Should we be a leader in environmental stewardship and sustainability? How would you lead in this regard? What would your priorities be in environmental renewal and sustainable living?
I'm writing from the Republic of South Africa, where I've been speaking in conferences and other gatherings with church leaders from across many denominations. With the memories of apartheid still alive here, with a poverty rate of about 40 percent, with crime rates moving higher and higher--in part due to desperate immigrants from Zimbabwe--and with
the continuing work of creating a successful multicultural democracy ongoing, several questions come to my mind for the three candidates. Here is how I would formulate them sitting in a home in downtown Johannesburg:
1. For Senator Clinton: If you are elected and serve two terms, it would mean that two families would share the presidency of the United States for 28 years. It's hard not to conclude that we are living in something more like an oligarchy or plutocracy than a democracy. Would you reflect on this problem so we can see how deeply you have thought about it, and would you propose what can be done about it?
2. For Senator Obama: I've heard critics express fear that you aren't tough enough or militaristic enough to be president in a world of terrorism and nuclear weapons. I would imagine that would prompt you to want to prove you are indeed capable of being tough and militaristic. But many of us are hoping for someone who will present another vision for the role of America in the world--something beyond the world's dominant military force, the world's police, or the world's imperial center. Not that America would be weak, but that we would be strong in new and different ways. Can you comment on your vision for the role of America in the world, and what you would do to pursue that role?
3. For John Edwards: When the subject of terrorism comes up, many Americans seem to think that terrorism can be stopped by guns and bombs. But others believe that wherever there is a large gap between rich and poor countries, terrorism (like high crime rates) will be likely, perhaps inevitable. If that is the case, creating a more equitable global economy becomes one of the most essential dimensions of reducing terrorism. Do you agree, and if so, what can America do to increase its security by helping poor nations improve their economic systems?
There are two additional questions I would want to ask all the candidates:
1. America seems to be caught in a cycle of fear. Politicians use fear to garner support and inhibit criticism. News media profit when people are afraid and watch TV news more often, raising ratings and advertising income. The arms industry profits when fears run high. Political parties compete for fear dominance over other parties. Cycles of fear are hard to break. How will your campaign and your presidency address this rise in the fear quotient?
2. The United States is not leading the world in addressing our unsustainable economy. We are the world's prime example of an unsustainable consumer society, and if our lifestyles were generalized to the whole human population, we would need many planet earths to sustain us. Should we be a leader in environmental stewardship and sustainability? How would you lead in this regard? What would your priorities be in environmental renewal and sustainable living?
Tuesday, May 15, 2007
Baptism
I have glimpsed intimations of baptism being fulfilled in a multitude of unexpected reminders: laughing with the inner-city children I taught as we spashed in the gushing water of a fire hydrant on a sweltering afternoon. Washing dishes at the kitchen sink with my grandmother. Sharing a canteen of icy water with thirsty hikers at a trail junction in a mountain wilderness. Hand watering my dad's newly planted vegetable garden.
--Pat Peterson
--Pat Peterson
Advertising
by Adam Wells
I find it painfully interesting to muse on how advertising make us less free. Consider the following argument: The purpose of advertising is to peak our desires of products: sneakers, foods, cars, drugs and so on. According to a host of wise people, religious, spiritual, and otherwise, it is desires that take us away from a more ideal life, God, or enlightenment, for example. In sum, desires create suffering. This applies both to individuals and humanity.
When we desire, we are not satisfied. When we desire we feel we are lacking something. This could be anything from more genuine human interaction to more shoes or more beer. Ads channel this human desire to consumptive goods, goods that we buy from people making money. From a broader perspective, desires create vast amounts of suffering for people and the ecosystems that they inhabit.
As a nation, Americans consume enormous amounts of products that are not produced within sight. Indeed many of these products are produced in less than desirable conditions across oceans. Consider how often something that is consumed in this nation was produced at the cost of the happiness, health, or wellness of a human being.
It is reasonable to say that much of this consumption is driven by advertising. When we look at our consumption in this way, it becomes obvious that advertising is truly an evil force in modern times in that it is horrifically unhealthy, both physically and spiritually for both consumers and producers.
I would not hesitate to claim that advertising is one of the most awful and horrific inventions that humans have ever conceived. It makes profits for a few while fueling systems of oppression and suffering for billions of human beings. I am reminded why I avoid television at all costs.
I find it painfully interesting to muse on how advertising make us less free. Consider the following argument: The purpose of advertising is to peak our desires of products: sneakers, foods, cars, drugs and so on. According to a host of wise people, religious, spiritual, and otherwise, it is desires that take us away from a more ideal life, God, or enlightenment, for example. In sum, desires create suffering. This applies both to individuals and humanity.
When we desire, we are not satisfied. When we desire we feel we are lacking something. This could be anything from more genuine human interaction to more shoes or more beer. Ads channel this human desire to consumptive goods, goods that we buy from people making money. From a broader perspective, desires create vast amounts of suffering for people and the ecosystems that they inhabit.
As a nation, Americans consume enormous amounts of products that are not produced within sight. Indeed many of these products are produced in less than desirable conditions across oceans. Consider how often something that is consumed in this nation was produced at the cost of the happiness, health, or wellness of a human being.
It is reasonable to say that much of this consumption is driven by advertising. When we look at our consumption in this way, it becomes obvious that advertising is truly an evil force in modern times in that it is horrifically unhealthy, both physically and spiritually for both consumers and producers.
I would not hesitate to claim that advertising is one of the most awful and horrific inventions that humans have ever conceived. It makes profits for a few while fueling systems of oppression and suffering for billions of human beings. I am reminded why I avoid television at all costs.
Monday, May 14, 2007
Chatty World
In our chatty world, in which the word has lost its power to communicate, silence helps us to keep our mind and heart anchored in the future world and allows us to speak from there a creative and recreative word to the present world.
--Henri J.M. Nouwen
--Henri J.M. Nouwen
Put Peace Back in Mother's Day
by Marcia Angle and Naila Bolus
For moms, nothing is more important than making the world safe for their children. Mother's Day was originally founded in America as a holiday to unite women against war. Yet today we are bombarded with news and images of warfare and violence.
In proposing a "Mother's Day for Peace" more than a century ago, the American abolitionist and women's rights advocate Julia Ward Howe called on women to use their powerful maternal instincts to turn the world around.
Howe witnessed firsthand the horrors of the Civil War and the scourge of violence, death and disease that claimed the lives of soldiers both on and off the battlefield. She worked with widows and orphans of both Union and Confederate soldiers and later traveled to Europe, where she encountered the devastation of the Franco-Prussian War. In response to all this, she called on mothers of the world to gather to work for peace, as she proclaimed the first special day in their honor in 1870:
"Arise, then, women of this day!" she wrote, "`Disarm, Disarm! The sword of murder is not the balance of justice. Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience."
What can we do?
More than a century later, our nation is again at war. Today, more than ever, it's time for us to put peace back into Mother's Day.But how can we do this? Most of us can't just pack up our bags for Iraq or Sudan or other conflict-torn regions badly in need of peace building. Nor can we step in and broker peace negotiations among warring nations.
Still, there are many things we can do on Mother's Day, or any other day, to promote the ethics of peace that Howe envisioned.
• Make room for peacemakers. Even though the daily news focuses overwhelmingly on conflict, this is only part of the story. To kindle a sense of hope in our children and grandchildren, we can tell them about people who are working to make the world safer and more secure for us all.
Why not use Mother's Day to talk about what inspiring and courageous moms are doing around the globe? Moms like Wangari Matthai, the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize winner whose Green Belt Movement motivated thousands of ordinary citizens in Kenya to overcome fear and a sense of helplessness and to defend democratic rights. Or Susan Granada of the Nonviolent Peaceforce, who works on the ground in Sri Lanka to facilitate dialogue between opposing sides in that country's civil war. Or Susan Shaer of Women's Action for New Directions, who works to ensure that women have a seat at the table on Capitol Hill. You can find more stories about moms working for peace at www.rediscovermothersday.org.
• Break down barriers. Most wars and violent conflict can be traced to clashing ideologies that have drowned out our common humanity.
Introduce your children to different cultures by inviting people of different races, nationalities, religions and cultures into your home. Visiting their houses of worship can break down barriers that could contribute to hate and misunderstanding. Encourage your children to stand up for any child who is being bullied, even when it is unpopular to do so.
• Be a role model. There are many ways to model your values. Practice resolving everyday conflicts by asking questions rather than rushing to judgment. Mend fences whenever possible. Speak out against injustice in your community and in the world. Volunteer for and make family donations to groups that work for peace. Explain to your child on Election Day why you're voting and what you're voting for.
• Consume ethically. Talk to your children about shopping decisions you make to support products from companies that protect our environment and countries with good human and workers' rights records. And work with your family to use energy wisely, because reducing our dependence on fossil fuels makes us all more secure.
War enters our homes on a daily basis through the TV, over the Internet and in conversation at the dinner table. As parents and grandparents, we owe it to our kids to make sure peace gets an equal hearing. Mother's Day is the perfect chance to begin that conversation, to hold a space in our homes for something better.
How do we talk to our children about war? The answer is simple: Talk to them about peace.
For moms, nothing is more important than making the world safe for their children. Mother's Day was originally founded in America as a holiday to unite women against war. Yet today we are bombarded with news and images of warfare and violence.
In proposing a "Mother's Day for Peace" more than a century ago, the American abolitionist and women's rights advocate Julia Ward Howe called on women to use their powerful maternal instincts to turn the world around.
Howe witnessed firsthand the horrors of the Civil War and the scourge of violence, death and disease that claimed the lives of soldiers both on and off the battlefield. She worked with widows and orphans of both Union and Confederate soldiers and later traveled to Europe, where she encountered the devastation of the Franco-Prussian War. In response to all this, she called on mothers of the world to gather to work for peace, as she proclaimed the first special day in their honor in 1870:
"Arise, then, women of this day!" she wrote, "`Disarm, Disarm! The sword of murder is not the balance of justice. Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience."
What can we do?
More than a century later, our nation is again at war. Today, more than ever, it's time for us to put peace back into Mother's Day.But how can we do this? Most of us can't just pack up our bags for Iraq or Sudan or other conflict-torn regions badly in need of peace building. Nor can we step in and broker peace negotiations among warring nations.
Still, there are many things we can do on Mother's Day, or any other day, to promote the ethics of peace that Howe envisioned.
• Make room for peacemakers. Even though the daily news focuses overwhelmingly on conflict, this is only part of the story. To kindle a sense of hope in our children and grandchildren, we can tell them about people who are working to make the world safer and more secure for us all.
Why not use Mother's Day to talk about what inspiring and courageous moms are doing around the globe? Moms like Wangari Matthai, the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize winner whose Green Belt Movement motivated thousands of ordinary citizens in Kenya to overcome fear and a sense of helplessness and to defend democratic rights. Or Susan Granada of the Nonviolent Peaceforce, who works on the ground in Sri Lanka to facilitate dialogue between opposing sides in that country's civil war. Or Susan Shaer of Women's Action for New Directions, who works to ensure that women have a seat at the table on Capitol Hill. You can find more stories about moms working for peace at www.rediscovermothersday.org.
• Break down barriers. Most wars and violent conflict can be traced to clashing ideologies that have drowned out our common humanity.
Introduce your children to different cultures by inviting people of different races, nationalities, religions and cultures into your home. Visiting their houses of worship can break down barriers that could contribute to hate and misunderstanding. Encourage your children to stand up for any child who is being bullied, even when it is unpopular to do so.
• Be a role model. There are many ways to model your values. Practice resolving everyday conflicts by asking questions rather than rushing to judgment. Mend fences whenever possible. Speak out against injustice in your community and in the world. Volunteer for and make family donations to groups that work for peace. Explain to your child on Election Day why you're voting and what you're voting for.
• Consume ethically. Talk to your children about shopping decisions you make to support products from companies that protect our environment and countries with good human and workers' rights records. And work with your family to use energy wisely, because reducing our dependence on fossil fuels makes us all more secure.
War enters our homes on a daily basis through the TV, over the Internet and in conversation at the dinner table. As parents and grandparents, we owe it to our kids to make sure peace gets an equal hearing. Mother's Day is the perfect chance to begin that conversation, to hold a space in our homes for something better.
How do we talk to our children about war? The answer is simple: Talk to them about peace.
Saturday, May 05, 2007
Deadened to Depravity
by Rod Dreher
The Washington Post recently carried out an unusual experiment. It hired Joshua Bell, one of the world's most famous classical musicians, to dress like a common street busker and play his Stradivarius in a D.C. metro station during rush hour. The anonymous violinist played Bach, he played Schubert, he played some of the most beautiful music ever to emerge from the minds of mortals. And virtually nobody stopped to notice.
The point was not that most people are uncultured clods. The point, rather, is that we are so caught up in the routine of our lives that we fail to see extraordinary beauty right in front of us. Something's wrong with us.
As Post reporter Gene Weingarten wrote, "If we can't take the time out of our lives to stay a moment and listen to one of the best musicians on Earth play some of the best music ever written; if the surge of modern life so overpowers us that we are deaf and blind to something like that--then what else are we missing?"
If we don't see the beauty that we should, we don't see the ugliness either. For much of my career I was a film critic and saw just about every movie that came out. Every now and then, I'd take my wife to screenings with me, and I'd observe her flinching at intensely violent or explicitly erotic images onscreen. Though I shared her conservative moral sense, or so I thought, I pitied her oversensitivity.And then I changed jobs. I went from seeing 30 or so movies a month to seeing maybe three. It was as if I'd been a heavy smoker who'd gone cold turkey and was shocked to experience my sense of taste returning. Without meaning to, I began to watch movies differently.
The graphic sex and extreme violence that I'd manage to aestheticize away earlier, I no longer could deal with. I told my wife I must be turning into a prude. "No," she said, "you're becoming normal again."
Around that time, I became a father for the first time. One evening not long after my son was born, the mob picture "Goodfellas" came on cable. Three years earlier, I'd written that it was the best movie of the year. Forty minutes into the film, I turned it off. Couldn't stomach the onscreen savagery. Having a newborn gave me eyes to see things I couldn't before. Those eyes that had looked with wonder at this soft pink miracle could no longer take any pleasure in looking upon vivid images of human beings being shot, stabbed, beaten, tortured and abused.
Once we were a culture that looked to our art to educate our moral imagination, to show us what it meant to be fully human. Human in all our brokenness and passion and glory. Even artists who confronted evil did so with an eye toward illuminating the good (which is not a synonym for "nice").
Now, we are afraid to call anything good or evil and no longer have the confidence to assert that standards exist. When people ask if a movie, book, album or play was good or bad, what they're really asking is, "Was it entertaining?" In a culture with an insatiable craving for sensation, boredom becomes the root of all evil.
Thus our moral imagination declines into decadence. A decadent society is one that has lost its hold on standards and denies that they exist. A society in the early stages of decadence loses its sensitivity to beauty and to the good. As it slips further into decadence, it loses its ability to recognize how far it has fallen.
Which brings us to the case of Seung Hui Cho. We may never know to what degree he was psychopathic and what fed his insanity. But Washington Post film critic Stephen Hunter identified striking parallels between the mass-murder ritual Cho conceived as performance art, and the hyper-violent films of director John Woo. While it's impossible to say these films "made" Cho go berserk, Hunter is right to assert that all creative artists have to face the real-life consequences of their work.
What does it say about our culture that there is a hot genre of mainstream films called "torture porn," the point of which is to show human beings being eviscerated? The latest entry, "Vacancy," opened days after the Virginia Tech savagery. It's about a couple who are unwittingly set up to star in a snuff film--a movie in which people are tortured to death for the viewer's sexual pleasure. The Los Angeles Times called "Vacancy" a "ruthlessly efficient stalk-and-slash machine"--this, in a favorable review.
Something is wrong with us, all right.
We have learned to expand our understanding of the normative to include art that exalts things that ought to be repugnant to those who love life. In so doing, we teach ourselves to embrace death, or at least to remain indifferent to its putrid presence. "A human body that cannot react is a corpse," wrote literary critic Russell Kirk. And a human imagination that cannot react against that which would destroy it is nothing more than fever dreams of a zombie.
Do you want to live? Then look at the culture of death, say not this, not anymore--and turn to the good, the beautiful and the true. It's still here, hiding in plain sight.
The Washington Post recently carried out an unusual experiment. It hired Joshua Bell, one of the world's most famous classical musicians, to dress like a common street busker and play his Stradivarius in a D.C. metro station during rush hour. The anonymous violinist played Bach, he played Schubert, he played some of the most beautiful music ever to emerge from the minds of mortals. And virtually nobody stopped to notice.
The point was not that most people are uncultured clods. The point, rather, is that we are so caught up in the routine of our lives that we fail to see extraordinary beauty right in front of us. Something's wrong with us.
As Post reporter Gene Weingarten wrote, "If we can't take the time out of our lives to stay a moment and listen to one of the best musicians on Earth play some of the best music ever written; if the surge of modern life so overpowers us that we are deaf and blind to something like that--then what else are we missing?"
If we don't see the beauty that we should, we don't see the ugliness either. For much of my career I was a film critic and saw just about every movie that came out. Every now and then, I'd take my wife to screenings with me, and I'd observe her flinching at intensely violent or explicitly erotic images onscreen. Though I shared her conservative moral sense, or so I thought, I pitied her oversensitivity.And then I changed jobs. I went from seeing 30 or so movies a month to seeing maybe three. It was as if I'd been a heavy smoker who'd gone cold turkey and was shocked to experience my sense of taste returning. Without meaning to, I began to watch movies differently.
The graphic sex and extreme violence that I'd manage to aestheticize away earlier, I no longer could deal with. I told my wife I must be turning into a prude. "No," she said, "you're becoming normal again."
Around that time, I became a father for the first time. One evening not long after my son was born, the mob picture "Goodfellas" came on cable. Three years earlier, I'd written that it was the best movie of the year. Forty minutes into the film, I turned it off. Couldn't stomach the onscreen savagery. Having a newborn gave me eyes to see things I couldn't before. Those eyes that had looked with wonder at this soft pink miracle could no longer take any pleasure in looking upon vivid images of human beings being shot, stabbed, beaten, tortured and abused.
Once we were a culture that looked to our art to educate our moral imagination, to show us what it meant to be fully human. Human in all our brokenness and passion and glory. Even artists who confronted evil did so with an eye toward illuminating the good (which is not a synonym for "nice").
Now, we are afraid to call anything good or evil and no longer have the confidence to assert that standards exist. When people ask if a movie, book, album or play was good or bad, what they're really asking is, "Was it entertaining?" In a culture with an insatiable craving for sensation, boredom becomes the root of all evil.
Thus our moral imagination declines into decadence. A decadent society is one that has lost its hold on standards and denies that they exist. A society in the early stages of decadence loses its sensitivity to beauty and to the good. As it slips further into decadence, it loses its ability to recognize how far it has fallen.
Which brings us to the case of Seung Hui Cho. We may never know to what degree he was psychopathic and what fed his insanity. But Washington Post film critic Stephen Hunter identified striking parallels between the mass-murder ritual Cho conceived as performance art, and the hyper-violent films of director John Woo. While it's impossible to say these films "made" Cho go berserk, Hunter is right to assert that all creative artists have to face the real-life consequences of their work.
What does it say about our culture that there is a hot genre of mainstream films called "torture porn," the point of which is to show human beings being eviscerated? The latest entry, "Vacancy," opened days after the Virginia Tech savagery. It's about a couple who are unwittingly set up to star in a snuff film--a movie in which people are tortured to death for the viewer's sexual pleasure. The Los Angeles Times called "Vacancy" a "ruthlessly efficient stalk-and-slash machine"--this, in a favorable review.
Something is wrong with us, all right.
We have learned to expand our understanding of the normative to include art that exalts things that ought to be repugnant to those who love life. In so doing, we teach ourselves to embrace death, or at least to remain indifferent to its putrid presence. "A human body that cannot react is a corpse," wrote literary critic Russell Kirk. And a human imagination that cannot react against that which would destroy it is nothing more than fever dreams of a zombie.
Do you want to live? Then look at the culture of death, say not this, not anymore--and turn to the good, the beautiful and the true. It's still here, hiding in plain sight.
Monday, April 30, 2007
When Violence Kills Itself
by Shane Claiborne
I’ve always heard the old adage, “violence is a weapon of the weak.” But after events like the Virginia Tech massacre, it’s easy to think that violence has ultimate power. After all, we’ve learned history through the lens of war. And we read the news through acts of violence rather than the hidden acts of love that keep hope alive.
But there is a common thread in many of the most horrific perpetrators of violence that begs our attention – they kill themselves. Violence kills the image of God in us. It is a cry of desperation, a weak and cowardly cry of a person suffocated of hope. Violence goes against everything that we are created for--to love and to be loved--so it inevitably ends in misery and suicide. When people succumb to violence it ultimately infects them like a disease or a poison that leads to their own death. Judas, the disciple who betrayed Jesus with a violent kiss, ends his life by hanging himself with a noose. After his notorious persecutions, the Emperor Nero’s story ends as he stabs himself. Hitler passed out suicide pills to all his heads of staff, and ended his life as one of the most pitifully lonely people to walk the earth. We see the same in the case of Columbine, the 2007 Amish school shootings, the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, and this recent Virginia Tech massacre--each ends in suicide.
Violence is suicidal. Suicide rates of folks in the military and working the chambers of death row execution are astronomical; they kill themselves as they feel the image of God dying in them.
It is in moments like these violent times that grace looks so magnificent. It is in the shadow of such violence, as was the case after the Amish school shooting, that the victims' grace to the murderer’s family shines so brightly. Sometimes all the peacemakers need to do is practice revolutionary patience, and steadfast hope--for the universe bends toward justice, and the entire Christian story demonstrates the triumph of love. And it makes it even more scandalous to think of killing someone who kills--for they, more than anyone in the world, need to hear that they are created for something better than that.
I am reminded of a letter I got from someone currently on death row. After reading some of my writing, he wrote to me to share that he was a living testimony against the myth of redemptive violence (the idea that violence can bring redemption or peace). This fellow on death row told me that the family of his victim argued that he should not be killed for what he did, that he was not beyond redemption, and so he did not receive the death penalty for his crime. “That gave me a lot of time to think about grace,” he said. And he became a Christian in prison. Another story of scandalous love and grace.
So in these days after Easter, even as we see the horror of death, may we be reminded that in the end love wins. Mercy triumphs. Life is more powerful than death. And even those who have committed great violence can have the image of God come to life again within them as they hear the whisper of love. May the whisper of love grow louder than the thunder of violence. May we love loudly.
I’ve always heard the old adage, “violence is a weapon of the weak.” But after events like the Virginia Tech massacre, it’s easy to think that violence has ultimate power. After all, we’ve learned history through the lens of war. And we read the news through acts of violence rather than the hidden acts of love that keep hope alive.
But there is a common thread in many of the most horrific perpetrators of violence that begs our attention – they kill themselves. Violence kills the image of God in us. It is a cry of desperation, a weak and cowardly cry of a person suffocated of hope. Violence goes against everything that we are created for--to love and to be loved--so it inevitably ends in misery and suicide. When people succumb to violence it ultimately infects them like a disease or a poison that leads to their own death. Judas, the disciple who betrayed Jesus with a violent kiss, ends his life by hanging himself with a noose. After his notorious persecutions, the Emperor Nero’s story ends as he stabs himself. Hitler passed out suicide pills to all his heads of staff, and ended his life as one of the most pitifully lonely people to walk the earth. We see the same in the case of Columbine, the 2007 Amish school shootings, the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, and this recent Virginia Tech massacre--each ends in suicide.
Violence is suicidal. Suicide rates of folks in the military and working the chambers of death row execution are astronomical; they kill themselves as they feel the image of God dying in them.
It is in moments like these violent times that grace looks so magnificent. It is in the shadow of such violence, as was the case after the Amish school shooting, that the victims' grace to the murderer’s family shines so brightly. Sometimes all the peacemakers need to do is practice revolutionary patience, and steadfast hope--for the universe bends toward justice, and the entire Christian story demonstrates the triumph of love. And it makes it even more scandalous to think of killing someone who kills--for they, more than anyone in the world, need to hear that they are created for something better than that.
I am reminded of a letter I got from someone currently on death row. After reading some of my writing, he wrote to me to share that he was a living testimony against the myth of redemptive violence (the idea that violence can bring redemption or peace). This fellow on death row told me that the family of his victim argued that he should not be killed for what he did, that he was not beyond redemption, and so he did not receive the death penalty for his crime. “That gave me a lot of time to think about grace,” he said. And he became a Christian in prison. Another story of scandalous love and grace.
So in these days after Easter, even as we see the horror of death, may we be reminded that in the end love wins. Mercy triumphs. Life is more powerful than death. And even those who have committed great violence can have the image of God come to life again within them as they hear the whisper of love. May the whisper of love grow louder than the thunder of violence. May we love loudly.
35 Million Ways to Be Black
Look at these black college students today. They’re worried about somebody black jumping in their face and saying, “You’re not black enough. You’re a Harvard kid, a turncoat, a traitor, you speak standard English, you get straight A’s—those are all white things.” And they had to put up with that all their lives, probably. I give a speech to the black freshmen at Harvard each year, and I say, “You can like Mozart and ice hockey . . .”—and then I used to say “golf,” but Tiger took over golf!—“and Picasso and still be as black as the ace of spades. You know, there are 35 million black people in this country and there are 35 million ways to be black.” When I say that, I get a standing ovation.
--Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
--Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
What Patriotism Requires
Government is set up--and here's what a Declaration of Independence is about--government is set up by the people in order to fulfill certain responsibilities: equality, life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness. And according to the Declaration of Independence, when the government violates those responsibilities, then, and these are the words of the Declaration of Independence, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish the government.
In other words, the government is not holy; the government is not to be obeyed when the government is wrong. So to me patriotism in its best sense means thinking about the people in the country, the principles for which the country stands for, and it requires opposing the government when the government violates those principles.
So today, for instance, the highest act of patriotism, I suggest, would be opposing the war in Iraq and calling for a withdrawal of troops from Iraq. Simply because everything about the war violates the fundamental principles of equality, life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, not just for Americans, but for people in another part of the world. So, yes, patriotism today requires citizens to be active on many, many different fronts to oppose government policies on the war, government policies that have taken trillions of dollars from this country's treasury and used it for war and militarism. That's what patriotism would require today.
--Howard Zinn
In other words, the government is not holy; the government is not to be obeyed when the government is wrong. So to me patriotism in its best sense means thinking about the people in the country, the principles for which the country stands for, and it requires opposing the government when the government violates those principles.
So today, for instance, the highest act of patriotism, I suggest, would be opposing the war in Iraq and calling for a withdrawal of troops from Iraq. Simply because everything about the war violates the fundamental principles of equality, life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, not just for Americans, but for people in another part of the world. So, yes, patriotism today requires citizens to be active on many, many different fronts to oppose government policies on the war, government policies that have taken trillions of dollars from this country's treasury and used it for war and militarism. That's what patriotism would require today.
--Howard Zinn
Dilemma
by Max Lucado
John has a dilemma. He and the other disciples ran into someone who was doing great work. This man was casting out demons (the very act the disciples had trouble doing in Mark 9:20). He was changing lives. And, what’s more, the man was giving the credit to God. He was doing it in the name of Christ.
Everything about him was so right. Right results. Right heart. But there was one problem. He was from the wrong group.
So the disciples did what any able-bodied religious person would do with someone from the wrong group. “We told him to stop, because he does not belong to our group” (v. 38).
John wants to know if they did the right thing. John’s not cocky; he’s confused. So are many people today. What do you do about good things done in another group? What do you do when you like the fruit but not the orchard?
I’ve asked that question. I am deeply appreciative of my heritage. It was through a small, West Texas Church of Christ that I came to know the Nazarene, the cross, and the Word. The congregation wasn’t large, maybe two hundred on a good Sunday. Most of the families were like mine, blue-collar oil-field workers. But it was a loving church. When our family was sick, the members visited us. When we were absent, they called. And when this prodigal returned, they embraced me.
I deeply appreciate my heritage. But through the years, my faith has been supplemented by people of other groups.
A Brazilian Pentecostal taught me about prayer. A British Anglican by the name of C.S. Lewis put muscle in my faith. A Southern Baptist helped me understand grace.
One Presbyterian, Steve Brown, taught me about God’s sovereignty while another, Frederick Buechner, taught me about God’s passion. A Catholic, Brennan Manning, convinced me that Jesus is relentlessly tender. I’m a better husband because I read James Dobson and a better preacher because I listened to Chuck Swindoll and Bill Hybels.
And only when I get home will I learn the name of a radio preacher whose message steered me back to Christ. I was a graduate student who’d lost his bearings. Needing some money over Christmas break, I took a job driving an oil-field delivery truck. The radio only picked up one station. A preacher was preaching. On a cold December day in 1978 I heard him describe the cross. I don’t know his name. I don’t know his heritage. He could have been a Quaker or an angel or both for all I know. But something about what he said caused me to pull the pickup onto the side of the road and rededicate my life to Christ.
John has a dilemma. He and the other disciples ran into someone who was doing great work. This man was casting out demons (the very act the disciples had trouble doing in Mark 9:20). He was changing lives. And, what’s more, the man was giving the credit to God. He was doing it in the name of Christ.
Everything about him was so right. Right results. Right heart. But there was one problem. He was from the wrong group.
So the disciples did what any able-bodied religious person would do with someone from the wrong group. “We told him to stop, because he does not belong to our group” (v. 38).
John wants to know if they did the right thing. John’s not cocky; he’s confused. So are many people today. What do you do about good things done in another group? What do you do when you like the fruit but not the orchard?
I’ve asked that question. I am deeply appreciative of my heritage. It was through a small, West Texas Church of Christ that I came to know the Nazarene, the cross, and the Word. The congregation wasn’t large, maybe two hundred on a good Sunday. Most of the families were like mine, blue-collar oil-field workers. But it was a loving church. When our family was sick, the members visited us. When we were absent, they called. And when this prodigal returned, they embraced me.
I deeply appreciate my heritage. But through the years, my faith has been supplemented by people of other groups.
A Brazilian Pentecostal taught me about prayer. A British Anglican by the name of C.S. Lewis put muscle in my faith. A Southern Baptist helped me understand grace.
One Presbyterian, Steve Brown, taught me about God’s sovereignty while another, Frederick Buechner, taught me about God’s passion. A Catholic, Brennan Manning, convinced me that Jesus is relentlessly tender. I’m a better husband because I read James Dobson and a better preacher because I listened to Chuck Swindoll and Bill Hybels.
And only when I get home will I learn the name of a radio preacher whose message steered me back to Christ. I was a graduate student who’d lost his bearings. Needing some money over Christmas break, I took a job driving an oil-field delivery truck. The radio only picked up one station. A preacher was preaching. On a cold December day in 1978 I heard him describe the cross. I don’t know his name. I don’t know his heritage. He could have been a Quaker or an angel or both for all I know. But something about what he said caused me to pull the pickup onto the side of the road and rededicate my life to Christ.
Sunday, April 22, 2007
Imus Isn't the Real Bad Guy
by Jason Whitlock
Thank you, Don Imus. You’ve given us (black people) an excuse to avoid our real problem.
You’ve given Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson another opportunity to pretend that the old fight, which is now the safe and lucrative fight, is still the most important fight in our push for true economic and social equality.
You’ve given Vivian Stringer and Rutgers the chance to hold a nationally televised recruiting celebration expertly disguised as a news conference to respond to your poor attempt at humor.
Thank you, Don Imus. You extended Black History Month to April, and we can once again wallow in victimhood, protest like it’s 1965 and delude ourselves into believing that fixing your hatred is more necessary than eradicating our self-hatred.
The bigots win again.
While we’re fixated on a bad joke cracked by an irrelevant, bad shock jock, I’m sure at least one of the marvelous young women on the Rutgers basketball team is somewhere snapping her fingers to the beat of 50 Cent’s or Snoop Dogg’s or Young Jeezy’s latest ode glorifying nappy-headed pimps and hos.
I ain’t saying Jesse, Al and Vivian are gold-diggas, but they don’t have the heart to mount a legitimate campaign against the real black-folk killas.
It is us. At this time, we are our own worst enemies. We have allowed our youths to buy into a culture (hip hop) that has been perverted, corrupted and overtaken by prison culture. The music, attitude and behavior expressed in this culture is anti-black, anti-education, demeaning, self-destructive, pro-drug dealing and violent.
Rather than confront this heinous enemy from within, we sit back and wait for someone like Imus to have a slip of the tongue and make the mistake of repeating the things we say about ourselves.
It’s embarrassing. Dave Chappelle was offered $50 million to make racially insensitive jokes about black and white people on TV. He was hailed as a genius. Black comedians routinely crack jokes about white and black people, and we all laugh out loud.
I’m no Don Imus apologist. He and his tiny companion Mike Lupica blasted me after I fell out with ESPN. Imus is a hack.
But, in my view, he didn’t do anything outside the norm for shock jocks and comedians. He also offered an apology. That should’ve been the end of this whole affair. Instead, it’s only the beginning. It’s an opportunity for Stringer, Jackson and Sharpton to step on victim platforms and elevate themselves and their agenda$.
I watched the Rutgers news conference and was ashamed.
Martin Luther King Jr. spoke for eight minutes in 1963 at the March on Washington. At the time, black people could be lynched and denied fundamental rights with little thought. With the comments of a talk-show host most of her players had never heard of before last week serving as her excuse, Vivian Stringer rambled on for 30 minutes about the amazing season her team had.
Somehow, we’re supposed to believe that the comments of a man with virtually no connection to the sports world ruined Rutgers’ wonderful season. Had a broadcaster with credibility and a platform in the sports world uttered the words Imus did, I could understand a level of outrage.
But an hourlong press conference over a man who has already apologized, already been suspended and is already insignificant is just plain intellectually dishonest. This is opportunism. This is a distraction.
In the grand scheme, Don Imus is no threat to us in general and no threat to black women in particular. If his words are so powerful and so destructive and must be rebuked so forcefully, then what should we do about the idiot rappers on BET, MTV and every black-owned radio station in the country who use words much more powerful and much more destructive?
I don’t listen or watch Imus’ show regularly. Has he at any point glorified selling crack cocaine to black women? Has he celebrated black men shooting each other randomly? Has he suggested in any way that it’s cool to be a baby-daddy rather than a husband and a parent? Does he tell his listeners that they’re suckers for pursuing education and that they’re selling out their race if they do?
When Imus does any of that, call me and I’ll get upset. Until then, he is what he is--a washed-up shock jock who is very easy to ignore when you’re not looking to be made a victim.
No. We all know where the real battleground is. We know that the gangsta rappers and their followers in the athletic world have far bigger platforms to negatively define us than some old white man with a bad radio show. There’s no money and lots of danger in that battle, so Jesse and Al are going to sit it out.
Thank you, Don Imus. You’ve given us (black people) an excuse to avoid our real problem.
You’ve given Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson another opportunity to pretend that the old fight, which is now the safe and lucrative fight, is still the most important fight in our push for true economic and social equality.
You’ve given Vivian Stringer and Rutgers the chance to hold a nationally televised recruiting celebration expertly disguised as a news conference to respond to your poor attempt at humor.
Thank you, Don Imus. You extended Black History Month to April, and we can once again wallow in victimhood, protest like it’s 1965 and delude ourselves into believing that fixing your hatred is more necessary than eradicating our self-hatred.
The bigots win again.
While we’re fixated on a bad joke cracked by an irrelevant, bad shock jock, I’m sure at least one of the marvelous young women on the Rutgers basketball team is somewhere snapping her fingers to the beat of 50 Cent’s or Snoop Dogg’s or Young Jeezy’s latest ode glorifying nappy-headed pimps and hos.
I ain’t saying Jesse, Al and Vivian are gold-diggas, but they don’t have the heart to mount a legitimate campaign against the real black-folk killas.
It is us. At this time, we are our own worst enemies. We have allowed our youths to buy into a culture (hip hop) that has been perverted, corrupted and overtaken by prison culture. The music, attitude and behavior expressed in this culture is anti-black, anti-education, demeaning, self-destructive, pro-drug dealing and violent.
Rather than confront this heinous enemy from within, we sit back and wait for someone like Imus to have a slip of the tongue and make the mistake of repeating the things we say about ourselves.
It’s embarrassing. Dave Chappelle was offered $50 million to make racially insensitive jokes about black and white people on TV. He was hailed as a genius. Black comedians routinely crack jokes about white and black people, and we all laugh out loud.
I’m no Don Imus apologist. He and his tiny companion Mike Lupica blasted me after I fell out with ESPN. Imus is a hack.
But, in my view, he didn’t do anything outside the norm for shock jocks and comedians. He also offered an apology. That should’ve been the end of this whole affair. Instead, it’s only the beginning. It’s an opportunity for Stringer, Jackson and Sharpton to step on victim platforms and elevate themselves and their agenda$.
I watched the Rutgers news conference and was ashamed.
Martin Luther King Jr. spoke for eight minutes in 1963 at the March on Washington. At the time, black people could be lynched and denied fundamental rights with little thought. With the comments of a talk-show host most of her players had never heard of before last week serving as her excuse, Vivian Stringer rambled on for 30 minutes about the amazing season her team had.
Somehow, we’re supposed to believe that the comments of a man with virtually no connection to the sports world ruined Rutgers’ wonderful season. Had a broadcaster with credibility and a platform in the sports world uttered the words Imus did, I could understand a level of outrage.
But an hourlong press conference over a man who has already apologized, already been suspended and is already insignificant is just plain intellectually dishonest. This is opportunism. This is a distraction.
In the grand scheme, Don Imus is no threat to us in general and no threat to black women in particular. If his words are so powerful and so destructive and must be rebuked so forcefully, then what should we do about the idiot rappers on BET, MTV and every black-owned radio station in the country who use words much more powerful and much more destructive?
I don’t listen or watch Imus’ show regularly. Has he at any point glorified selling crack cocaine to black women? Has he celebrated black men shooting each other randomly? Has he suggested in any way that it’s cool to be a baby-daddy rather than a husband and a parent? Does he tell his listeners that they’re suckers for pursuing education and that they’re selling out their race if they do?
When Imus does any of that, call me and I’ll get upset. Until then, he is what he is--a washed-up shock jock who is very easy to ignore when you’re not looking to be made a victim.
No. We all know where the real battleground is. We know that the gangsta rappers and their followers in the athletic world have far bigger platforms to negatively define us than some old white man with a bad radio show. There’s no money and lots of danger in that battle, so Jesse and Al are going to sit it out.
Sunday, April 15, 2007
Theologian Sees Jesus the Beloved, Not a List of Beliefs
by Nancy Haught
Oregon's leading theologian walks his dog up and down the trendy streets of the Pearl District. His neighbors know Henry, the shaggy gray Glen of Imaal terrier, whose short legs set the pace. But few recognize Marcus Borg, the graying guy in the wool cap, as the spokesman for a different approach to Jesus Christ.
At 64, Borg is a public theologian and a private mystic.
He writes best-selling books on theology and reads murder mysteries. He was trained at Oxford University and teaches at Oregon State. He lives in a neighborhood overflowing with espresso but drinks Taster's Choice instant decaf.
But mostly, his is a polite and progressive voice in an often intense conversation about who Jesus was and what his life may mean to his modern followers.
Borg talks, primarily, to three decidedly different groups: his students, who are mostly undergraduates; his readers, who are mostly Christians who question long-held beliefs about Jesus; and his critics, who are mostly evangelical or orthodox Christians. They confess their beliefs in familiar terms. Jesus was, the last say, conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of a virgin, suffered for human sins, died, rose from the dead, ascended into heaven and will come again.
As a historian and a biblical scholar, Borg was a member of the Jesus Seminar, a scholarly group that spent years evaluating the historical evidence of Jesus' life and sayings. Borg emerged from the process with deeper faith in Jesus and a different understanding of Scripture.Borg interprets the Bible and its descriptions of Jesus as a mixture of memory and metaphor, better suited to preserving meaning than as a list of beliefs fashioned by Jesus' followers into a list that Christians must believe.
"For me, to believe a set of statements is impossible," Borg says. What is possible, he argues, is to "belove" Jesus and walk in his path.
"For the past 300 years," Borg says, "faith was a matter of believing a list of beliefs about Jesus. The list varied among Christians--that Jesus was the son of God, that he was born of a virgin, that the tomb was empty on Easter morning.
"But in the pre-modern world, before about 1600, the object of belief was never a statement," he says. "It was always a person. To believe meant to belove a person.
"To belove Jesus means more than simply loving Jesus. It means to love what Jesus loved. That is at the heart of Christianity."
Faith, Borg says, is a matter of living in relationship with Jesus and working politically, first for justice and then for peace.
Borg has taught religion at OSU for 28 years. He'll retire this spring and continue his writing and speaking, but says he'll miss his encounters with undergraduates.
"There is something wonderful about their openness," he says in his office, brimming with books and papers, on the Corvallis campus.
His fans, the ones who read his books and fill church halls as he travels the country talking about Jesus, express their admiration with a sense of humor. They wear T-shirts proclaiming themselves "Borg Again Christians" and, borrowing from "Star Wars," "May the 'phors (as in "metaphors") be with you."
"There is a hunger for something other than a fundamentalist, literal understanding of the Bible," says the Rev. Tom Tate of Portland's Rose City Park United Methodist Church. Tate says he doesn't always "buy" the traditional viewpoint. "Borg has given me the courage to come out and say certain things."
Borg's critics are his toughest audience, but one he is determined to engage. He says he accepts every chance he has to talk to them in public settings, preferably with an opportunity for questions and answers from an audience.
In February, Borg debated OSU history professor Gary Ferngren in front of 750 people. Their back-and-forth exchanges on the heart of Christianity sparked a few good-natured jibes and an unexpected measure of laughter.
In a characteristic quick show of hands, Borg observed that fewer than a third of the audience members were sympathetic to his position, a third were already in Ferngren's camp, and the others had come to listen.
"I'm not so interested in changing people's minds," he says, "as to let them hear and see a Christian like me instead of reading people who are critical of us."
Paul Metzger, a theology professor at Multnomah Biblical Seminary, is very clear about where he disagrees with Borg.
"I appreciate Professor Borg's emphasis on Jesus having been crucified for his identification with the poor and oppressed, a point often lost on many conservatives," Metzger says. "But there is more: Jesus' suffering was part and parcel of his dying for the sins of the world. Jesus was also raised bodily from the dead to bring new life."
That said, Metzger appreciates the serious and civil debate that Borg encourages. The alternatives are dangerous, he says.
"If people don't dialogue because they think that only their ideas matter, or if we put all the ideas to the side and just go for some neutral frame of reference, neither is meaningful."
And meaning, Borg would say, is the point of the Bible, of Jesus and of Christianity.
Jesus "is for us the decisive revelation of God--of what can be seen of God's character and passion in human life," Borg says. "But for followers of Jesus, the unending conversation about Jesus is the conversation that matters most."
Oregon's leading theologian walks his dog up and down the trendy streets of the Pearl District. His neighbors know Henry, the shaggy gray Glen of Imaal terrier, whose short legs set the pace. But few recognize Marcus Borg, the graying guy in the wool cap, as the spokesman for a different approach to Jesus Christ.
At 64, Borg is a public theologian and a private mystic.
He writes best-selling books on theology and reads murder mysteries. He was trained at Oxford University and teaches at Oregon State. He lives in a neighborhood overflowing with espresso but drinks Taster's Choice instant decaf.
But mostly, his is a polite and progressive voice in an often intense conversation about who Jesus was and what his life may mean to his modern followers.
Borg talks, primarily, to three decidedly different groups: his students, who are mostly undergraduates; his readers, who are mostly Christians who question long-held beliefs about Jesus; and his critics, who are mostly evangelical or orthodox Christians. They confess their beliefs in familiar terms. Jesus was, the last say, conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of a virgin, suffered for human sins, died, rose from the dead, ascended into heaven and will come again.
As a historian and a biblical scholar, Borg was a member of the Jesus Seminar, a scholarly group that spent years evaluating the historical evidence of Jesus' life and sayings. Borg emerged from the process with deeper faith in Jesus and a different understanding of Scripture.Borg interprets the Bible and its descriptions of Jesus as a mixture of memory and metaphor, better suited to preserving meaning than as a list of beliefs fashioned by Jesus' followers into a list that Christians must believe.
"For me, to believe a set of statements is impossible," Borg says. What is possible, he argues, is to "belove" Jesus and walk in his path.
"For the past 300 years," Borg says, "faith was a matter of believing a list of beliefs about Jesus. The list varied among Christians--that Jesus was the son of God, that he was born of a virgin, that the tomb was empty on Easter morning.
"But in the pre-modern world, before about 1600, the object of belief was never a statement," he says. "It was always a person. To believe meant to belove a person.
"To belove Jesus means more than simply loving Jesus. It means to love what Jesus loved. That is at the heart of Christianity."
Faith, Borg says, is a matter of living in relationship with Jesus and working politically, first for justice and then for peace.
Borg has taught religion at OSU for 28 years. He'll retire this spring and continue his writing and speaking, but says he'll miss his encounters with undergraduates.
"There is something wonderful about their openness," he says in his office, brimming with books and papers, on the Corvallis campus.
His fans, the ones who read his books and fill church halls as he travels the country talking about Jesus, express their admiration with a sense of humor. They wear T-shirts proclaiming themselves "Borg Again Christians" and, borrowing from "Star Wars," "May the 'phors (as in "metaphors") be with you."
"There is a hunger for something other than a fundamentalist, literal understanding of the Bible," says the Rev. Tom Tate of Portland's Rose City Park United Methodist Church. Tate says he doesn't always "buy" the traditional viewpoint. "Borg has given me the courage to come out and say certain things."
Borg's critics are his toughest audience, but one he is determined to engage. He says he accepts every chance he has to talk to them in public settings, preferably with an opportunity for questions and answers from an audience.
In February, Borg debated OSU history professor Gary Ferngren in front of 750 people. Their back-and-forth exchanges on the heart of Christianity sparked a few good-natured jibes and an unexpected measure of laughter.
In a characteristic quick show of hands, Borg observed that fewer than a third of the audience members were sympathetic to his position, a third were already in Ferngren's camp, and the others had come to listen.
"I'm not so interested in changing people's minds," he says, "as to let them hear and see a Christian like me instead of reading people who are critical of us."
Paul Metzger, a theology professor at Multnomah Biblical Seminary, is very clear about where he disagrees with Borg.
"I appreciate Professor Borg's emphasis on Jesus having been crucified for his identification with the poor and oppressed, a point often lost on many conservatives," Metzger says. "But there is more: Jesus' suffering was part and parcel of his dying for the sins of the world. Jesus was also raised bodily from the dead to bring new life."
That said, Metzger appreciates the serious and civil debate that Borg encourages. The alternatives are dangerous, he says.
"If people don't dialogue because they think that only their ideas matter, or if we put all the ideas to the side and just go for some neutral frame of reference, neither is meaningful."
And meaning, Borg would say, is the point of the Bible, of Jesus and of Christianity.
Jesus "is for us the decisive revelation of God--of what can be seen of God's character and passion in human life," Borg says. "But for followers of Jesus, the unending conversation about Jesus is the conversation that matters most."
Wednesday, April 11, 2007
What Would Jesus Really Do?
by Roland Martin
When did it come to the point that being a Christian meant caring about only two issues, abortion and homosexuality?
Ask the nonreligious what being a Christian today means, and based on what we see and read, it's a good bet they will say that followers of Jesus Christ are preoccupied with those two points.
Poverty? Whatever. Homelessness? An afterthought. A widening gap between the have and have-nots? Immaterial. Divorce? The divorce rate of Christians mirrors the national average, so that's no big deal.
The point is that being a Christian should be about more than abortion and homosexuality, and it's high time that those not considered a part of the religious right expose the hypocrisy of our brothers and sisters in Christianity and take back the faith. And those on the left who believe they have a "get out of sin free" card must not be allowed to justify their actions.
Many people believe we are engaged in a holy war. And we are. But it's not with Muslims. The real war--the silent war--is being engaged among Christians, and that's what we must set our sights on.
As we celebrate Holy Week, our focus is on the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. But aren't we also to recommit ourselves to live more like Jesus? Did Jesus spend his time focusing on all that he didn't like, or did Jesus raise the consciousness of the people to understand love, compassion and teach them about following the will of God?
As a layman studying to receive a master's in Christian communications, and the husband of an ordained minister, it's troubling to listen to "Christian radio" and hear the kind of hate spewing out of the mouths of my brothers and sisters in the faith.
In fact, I've grown tired of people who pimp God. That's right; we have a litany of individuals today who are holy, holy, holy, sing hallelujah, talk about how they love the Lord, but when it's time to walk the walk, somehow the spirit evaporates.
A couple of years ago I took exception to an e-mail blast from the Concerned Women for America. The group was angry that Democrats were blocking certain judges put up for the federal bench by President Bush. It called on Americans to fight Democrats who wanted to keep Christians off the bench.
So I called and sent an e-mail asking, "So, where were you when President Clinton appointed Christian judges to the bench? Were they truly behind Christian judges, or Republican Christian judges?
Surprise, surprise. There was never a response.
An African-American pastor I know in the Midwest was asked by a group of mostly white clergy to march in an anti-abortion rally. He was fine with that, but then asked the clergy if they would work with him to fight crack houses in predominantly black neighborhoods.
"That's really your problem," he was told.
They saw abortion as a moral imperative, but not a community ravaged by crack.
If abortion and gay marriage are part of the Christian agenda, I have no issue with that. Those are moral issues that should be of importance to people of the faith, but the agenda should be much, much broader.
I'm looking for the day when Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Joyce Meyer, James Dobson, Tony Perkins, James Kennedy, Rod Parsley, " Patriot Pastors" and Rick Warren will sit at the same table as Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Cynthia Hale, Eddie L. Long, James Meek, Fred Price, Emmanuel Cleaver and Floyd Flake to establish a call to arms on racism, AIDS, police brutality, a national health care policy, our sorry education system.
If they all say they love and worship one God, one Jesus, let's see them rally their members behind one agenda.
I stand here today not as a Republican or a liberal. And don't bother calling me a Democrat or a conservative. I am a man, an African-American man who has professed that Jesus Christ is Lord, and that's to whom I bow down.
If you concur, it's time to stop allowing a chosen few to speak for the masses. Quit letting them define the agenda.
So put on the full armor of God because we have work to do.
When did it come to the point that being a Christian meant caring about only two issues, abortion and homosexuality?
Ask the nonreligious what being a Christian today means, and based on what we see and read, it's a good bet they will say that followers of Jesus Christ are preoccupied with those two points.
Poverty? Whatever. Homelessness? An afterthought. A widening gap between the have and have-nots? Immaterial. Divorce? The divorce rate of Christians mirrors the national average, so that's no big deal.
The point is that being a Christian should be about more than abortion and homosexuality, and it's high time that those not considered a part of the religious right expose the hypocrisy of our brothers and sisters in Christianity and take back the faith. And those on the left who believe they have a "get out of sin free" card must not be allowed to justify their actions.
Many people believe we are engaged in a holy war. And we are. But it's not with Muslims. The real war--the silent war--is being engaged among Christians, and that's what we must set our sights on.
As we celebrate Holy Week, our focus is on the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. But aren't we also to recommit ourselves to live more like Jesus? Did Jesus spend his time focusing on all that he didn't like, or did Jesus raise the consciousness of the people to understand love, compassion and teach them about following the will of God?
As a layman studying to receive a master's in Christian communications, and the husband of an ordained minister, it's troubling to listen to "Christian radio" and hear the kind of hate spewing out of the mouths of my brothers and sisters in the faith.
In fact, I've grown tired of people who pimp God. That's right; we have a litany of individuals today who are holy, holy, holy, sing hallelujah, talk about how they love the Lord, but when it's time to walk the walk, somehow the spirit evaporates.
A couple of years ago I took exception to an e-mail blast from the Concerned Women for America. The group was angry that Democrats were blocking certain judges put up for the federal bench by President Bush. It called on Americans to fight Democrats who wanted to keep Christians off the bench.
So I called and sent an e-mail asking, "So, where were you when President Clinton appointed Christian judges to the bench? Were they truly behind Christian judges, or Republican Christian judges?
Surprise, surprise. There was never a response.
An African-American pastor I know in the Midwest was asked by a group of mostly white clergy to march in an anti-abortion rally. He was fine with that, but then asked the clergy if they would work with him to fight crack houses in predominantly black neighborhoods.
"That's really your problem," he was told.
They saw abortion as a moral imperative, but not a community ravaged by crack.
If abortion and gay marriage are part of the Christian agenda, I have no issue with that. Those are moral issues that should be of importance to people of the faith, but the agenda should be much, much broader.
I'm looking for the day when Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Joyce Meyer, James Dobson, Tony Perkins, James Kennedy, Rod Parsley, " Patriot Pastors" and Rick Warren will sit at the same table as Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Cynthia Hale, Eddie L. Long, James Meek, Fred Price, Emmanuel Cleaver and Floyd Flake to establish a call to arms on racism, AIDS, police brutality, a national health care policy, our sorry education system.
If they all say they love and worship one God, one Jesus, let's see them rally their members behind one agenda.
I stand here today not as a Republican or a liberal. And don't bother calling me a Democrat or a conservative. I am a man, an African-American man who has professed that Jesus Christ is Lord, and that's to whom I bow down.
If you concur, it's time to stop allowing a chosen few to speak for the masses. Quit letting them define the agenda.
So put on the full armor of God because we have work to do.
Tuesday, April 10, 2007
Fall in Love
Love is our true destiny. We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone--we find it with another. We do not discover the secret of our lives merely by study and calculation in our own isolated meditations. The meaning of our life is a secret that has to be revealed to us in love, by the one we love. And if this love is unreal, the secret will not be found, the meaning will never reveal itself, the message will never be decoded. At best, we will receive a scrambled and partial message, one that will deceive and confuse us. We will never be fully real until we let ourselves fall in love--either with another human person or with God.
--Thomas Merton
--Thomas Merton
Friday, April 06, 2007
What Are We Spreading?
I find this so unsavory; they‘re going out and killing people around the world to spread democracy, and what are we spreading? A form of government based on how much money you can raise from rich people.
--Chris Matthews
--Chris Matthews
Revolution of Values
When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism, are incapable of being conquered. A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies.
--Martin Luther King, Jr
--Martin Luther King, Jr
Disciples
If you have any knowledge at all of human nature, you know that those who only admire the truth will, when danger appears, become traitors. The admirer is infatuated with the false security of greatness; but if there is any inconvenience or trouble, he pulls back. Admiring the truth, instead of following it, is just as dubious a fire as the fire of erotic love, which at the turn of the hand can be changed into exactly the opposite, to hate, jealousy, and revenge. Christ, however, never asked for admirers, worshippers, or adherents. He consistently spoke of "followers" and "disciples."
--Soren Kierkegaard
--Soren Kierkegaard
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