Advent IV: Hiding In Plain Sight

And this is the judgement, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil. But those who do what is true come to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that their deeds have been done in God.-John 3:19-21

A great theme of our national life this past year has been the question of reality.  I realize that's hard to believe that a nation not well known for dwelling on metaphysical issues has spent quite a bit of time arguing about what is real and what is not real.  Yet, it's true.

In this election year in particular, although the discussion spread far beyond politics, we have spent almost as much time talking about what constitutes reality as we have our preference for particular policies.  In particular in the aftermath of the election, when it became clear that at least some partisans had not just bought but embraced a view of reality that was contrary to fact, we argued amongst ourselves over the whole question of fact and reality and perception and that poor, tired, overused truth.

Which is why I'm so fond of Richard Rorty.  Too often misunderstood - neo-metaphysician David Weissman once chided Rorty's claim of "anti-realism" by insisting the claim boiled down to pretending there is no snow while one is freezing to death; I have never quite known whether Weissman was being deliberately obtuse or really is that stupid - Rorty's position can be summed up in simple terms: common sense.  Why worry about the foundations of existence or the nature of how we know things or whether there's some deep connection between the way "things really are" and the way we human beings "know" them?  For Rorty, the provenance of the answers to these questions isn't philosophy, but science, a way of understanding the world that is remarkably successful in figuring out the answers to these questions in a practical way.  For Rorty, the only thing philosophy should concern itself with are questions of how we live with one another, and how to do that in a way that doesn't involve pain and suffering.

Rorty's dismissal of so much of the Western philosophical project is rooted in a kind of silly, gesturing obviousness.  Of course the things we see and hear are real.  In an age after Darwin, we have the explanation to the hoary old problem of the "correspondence" between the world around us and our perception of it.  Of course human beings are constituted in such a way that they can figure out the world; how else could we have survived as a species?

Yet we have been living through a time when claims about the world become matters of contention.  We find ourselves as a people engaged in discussions involving the constitution of the world, what reality is and in not, and whether some choose to believe it possible to live in worlds that are, to put it in shorthand, self-constructed.  And the discussion continues, sad to say.  The refusal to grasp the common sense idea that the world is, and is as it is, certainly creates fodder for hilarious and frustrating internet dialogue.

There is, however, something more sinister at work.  There are those who would deliberately create confusion about the whole question of reality.  The "debate" over global warming is a marvelous case in point.  Most global warming deniers are, I am convinced, well aware they are snake-oil salesmen, handing out patent medicines to people desperately wanting to believe it really can't be true we are in need of radical action to make the world habitable for human communities.  There are, however, millions at least here in the United States, who firmly and honestly believe the whole thing is a hoax, a sinister plot being executed for any number of reasons.  That they are being lied to is obvious; that they accept the lie is sad, to say the least.

Like the people who insist that Pres. Obama is a socialist when socialists are more critical of the President - because their criticism is rooted in fact - than any on the right, your run-of-the-mill global warming denier is the victim not just of tendentious fraud.  They are buying a lie sold to them by people who know it's a lie.  Those who lie in this way, and then lie about their lying, are like those Jesus speaks about above.  They are people who love the darkness.  They run from the light, deny the world that surrounds them, a world that proves their lie again and again.  In the darkness, they tell one another they are in control.  In the darkness, they tell one another that it is possible to create confusion about things that should be obvious; by doing so, they gain power.

These folks were dragged in to the light the night of November 6, when the silky comfort of their alternate reality came crashing around them.  Having convinced millions of Americans not only that Mitt Romney would win, but win big, when the exact opposite occurred - an event whose probability had been tracked for months in public, in ways anyone could understand - many stood around and asked, "Why?"  So, too, as we watch event after event, whether it's drought or hurricane or record heat or whole communities swallowed by a rising ocean, people are starting to wake up and demand an answer to one simple question: Why?

The Jesus of the Fourth Gospel knew the answer: For all who do evil hate the light and do not come to the light, so that their deeds may not be exposed.  The light of the world, the Incarnate Son of God, is the same light, we are told in the Revelation to St. John, that will one day beam out of the new temple, filling the new heavens and new earth.  There is no hiding from this light.  I picture it as a light so all-pervasive there are not even shadows; it is everywhere, all at once, just as the God who creates and creates anew is.

Yet, we live in a time when it is still possible to hide in shadow.  If one is clever enough, one can move around, continuing to conceal oneself from the light of love that is the Son of God.  Like Adam in the garden, however, God demands to know why we are hiding.  We cannot hide forever; even less can we hide if we are pretending the world is other than the way it is.  It isn't divine intervention that brings to light the multifarious lies that do so much damage.  It's reality that dope-smacks the creators of unreality.

As we prepare ourselves for the blessed event of the Incarnation, we should remember that the light that shines from the manger of Bethlehem will one day fill all creation.  In faith, we can follow the light and see all the ways some wish to hide, refusing to come to the light because they know the things they are doing are wrong.  Let us gather together in Bethlehem knowing we too carry darkness within us.  Let us take it to the light so that the baby lying in the feeding trough can remind us that he came to this world not to condemn us, but that all of us, the whole world, would be saved through him.

Christmas I: It's The Memories

Dim memories.  I had to be 4.  Our last Christmas in the house in Sayre.  I'm sitting next to my brother, jealous of the gift he just received, but eyeing my own substantial stack of loot and remembering there is good stuff in there.

Flash

It's early morning, our very first Christmas in our new house in Waverly.  We are frog-marched down the stairs, my father in front, my mother in back.  When Dad opens the door, he immediately strikes a post in the doorway between the dining room and living room.  We are not to peek until we've all had breakfast.  It's a tradition we carry on for two decades and more that at least one child is in the house at Christmas.

I'm in sixth grade, I think.  Christmas is still two weeks away, an eternity to a kid.  I come home from school cold, wet - there's snow, so of course there are snowball fights - and Mom takes me to the front living room and says, "It's time to put up the Nativity Set."

"Why?" I ask.

"Because that's your job," she tells me, then walks out of the room.  It sits where it has always sat, a forgotten corner of a dark room, the least used in the house.  I always think that's just perfect.

Flash

It's two days before Christmas that same year.  My youngest sister insists we gather in the living room where the largest tree we will have for several years stands in the bay window, the branches and large-bulbed lights filling the room with the smells and color of Christmas.  She wants us to read, together, some Dennis The Menace Christmas comic books.  Until I'm married and on my own, I never let a Christmas pass without reading at least one of these, thinking of the gift my sister just gave me.

It's a couple days before Christmas.  I think it's 1984.  It's snowing.  I'm in a car with my youngest sister, her then boyfriend, and I could swear there's someone else along with us.  We're in the parking lot at the old J. J. Newberry's in Sayre.  A Christmas song comes on the car radio, and my sister's boyfriend starts to change the channel.  My sister reaches out and flips the knob back.  "It's Christmas time!  You have to have music!"

Flash

It's 1993.  My first Christmas as a married person.  I've enjoyed shopping at the Montgomery County Mall, finding all sorts of neat gifts and things for Lisa.  After a crazy Christmas Eve, that included an extremely rude woman in front of us at Christmas Eve service, I wake up about 5:30 because my wife's side of the bed is hot.  That's right.  Our first Christmas together, she has a little 24 hour bug that includes a nice fever.  It's just the two of us in our little apartment, the single string of lights on our Charlie Brown Christmas tree providing enough light for us to open our gifts to one another.  We take a break so she can nap.  We had a nice Christmas dinner planned, but we manage to fake our way through the day.  We have one another.  That's more than enough.

Flash

The living room in the parsonage in Jarratt is filled to overflowing.  One man, one woman, a very large Great Dane, two cats, an enormous Christmas tree, and presents presents presents presents for a five month old little girl's very first Christmas.  Even as we tell one another we're not going to overdo it because she's still so small, she won't remember any of it, she doesn't need that much stuff, we over-indulge, smiling and laughing for her until she figures it out and smiles and laughs as each present is opened.  A few bows get stuffed in her tiny mouth, but get taken out before they're damaged.

Another living room.  It's a bit smaller, so it seems even more crowded.  The same adults, the same animals. The same people, with yet another addition, doing all the things her big sister did: smiling and laughing; grabbing paper and tearing it; a bit of paper or bow getting shoved in her mouth.  We're joined by more family and soon the room is filled to overflowing.

What does any of this have to do with the incarnation of God?  One could say not a thing.  On the other hand, it is precisely to these mundane realities that God came, emptying the Diving Life to be a servant for us all.  God has been in each of these moments, and so many more untold or forgotten, filled with laughter and joyous surprise, lots of food and the occasional argument (what a Safford family Christmas would have been without someone yelling at someone else I don't quite know).  These Christmases live on because they remind me that even in the cold and dark of winter there is fun and family and food and, best of all, something new.

Let's Pretend: The NRA News Conference Edition

Rather than stare slack-jawed at the insanity on display yesterday, we're going to act as if Wayne LaPierre is not a demonstrably crazy, conspiracy-mongering whackadoodle.  Rather, we are going to pretend, just for a moment, that a couple of the things he says have some kind of merit, to be considered thoughtfully by all Americans.

First, there's his claim that the only thing that can stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.  How does he explain one of our worst recent mass-shootings at Ft. Hood in Texas?  That was an Army base where there were, I presume, more than a few "good guys" who not only had guns but training in how to use them, in particular using them in situations where someone is shooting back?

The crickets stopped chirping.

There was an armed police officer stationed at Columbine High School.

The crickets have left the building.

The other of LaPierre's statements that I want us to give all due consideration is his call for armed guards, whether police or volunteers, in all schools.  Setting to one side that history has already demonstrated the irrelevance of armed guards in preventing a mass shooting at a school, maybe we should think a little differently.  For example, all sorts of folks were sharing the story of the Marine Sgt. who stood watch outside his son's school yesterday in Merced, CA.  Turns out, however, there was less there than meets the eye.  No offense to the school officials, but I am far more worried about the fact they didn't vet this guy well enough before giving him the nod.  Sure, it turned out OK in this instance.  What about next time some school decides to say, "Sure," to some guy who comes along claiming to be a veteran with a child in school wanting to stand watch?  What if that guy not only isn't a veteran, but is a pedophile?  Or worse?  I don't blame the young Marine who only wanted "to do something".  I blame the school district for not doing basic due diligence, acting to protect the children in their care.

Furthermore, we have "armed guards" over our schools.  They're called police officers.  Now, I'm not a huge fan of police forces for any number of reasons; that doesn't mean I dislike or lack respect for police officers, most of whom are hard working men and women in a dangerous, depressing job.  There hasn't been a single peep about the fact that preventing crime, subduing criminals, and dealing with extreme situations is the job for our municipal, county, state, and federal law enforcement agencies.  Whether we put police on station in schools, or merely have them patrol nearby at frequent intervals, or make sure school Administrators have a direct line to police departments to ensure someone arrives in a timely manner in case of a crisis, it seems to me most school districts already do this.  Anyone with a child in high school will tell you this.  The only ones I hear ignoring or dismissing or demonstrating lack of respect for the role of municipal police officers is Wayne LaPierre.

Furthermore, the call to place armed guards demonstrates the basic lawlessness of the NRA's entire position.  Rather than trust local law enforcement to do their jobs, LaPierre wants ordinary citizens to volunteer to take the law in to their own hands, placing themselves and others at risk because, at heart, LaPierre and the NRA have repeatedly stated their distrust of and dislike for police.  Rather than work to create a safer, healthier society, one in which various officials work together to mitigate violence and the potential disasters that come when people invariably slip through the cracks, LaPierre is insisting we weaken the bonds that unite our local communities, trusting not our elected officials and those who work to protect us but "volunteers" who may or may not have the understanding, training, and expertise to act correctly in a situation of extreme stress.

More to the point, LaPierre's statement ignores the fact the problem isn't school shootings, or just school schootings.  It's shootings.  Period.  How many people have died in gun violence in the past eight days?  How many children have died from gun violence in the past eight days?  It's been invisible for any number of reasons, not the least of them being we as a society no longer consider gun violence as a category of social problem with which we all must deal.  Rather, it is only the occasional extreme example, such as last week's mass shooting, that is the problem.  Gun violence has become, sad to say, the new normal, the price we pay for living in a free society.

Finally, a word or two or three about Wayne LaPierre and the National Rifle Association.  For four years, he and his organization have raised a whole lot of money by creating a paranoid conspiracy theory about Pres. Obama.  Even though Pres. Obama has actually worked to expand gun rights in the United States, the NRA has consistently claimed that, at any moment, the President and his Administration is going to swoop down upon every home in the country and take away our guns.  Like most everything else the right has said about this President and Administration, the exact opposite is the case, but that hasn't stopped the message being repeated and heard.  Gun sales have been through the roof the past four years.  Gun manufacturers - the NRAs real constituency, not the two million Americans who joined because they took a gun safety class or enjoy hunting - have seen their net sales grow each year.  I do not believe for one moment that LaPierre believes any of the drivel he sends out to members about Obama's secret plans to take away our guns.  It is worrying, however, there are far too many Americans who hear it, believe it, and act upon it, buying up more and more guns, creating more and more opportunities for accidental shootings, suicides, and the occasional huge, whomping horror as occurred last Friday in Connecticut.

Part of having a discussion about gun control - not "gun safety"; gun control, folks; we have to stop this idea that if we just rebrand an idea it will suddenly be more appealing - is dealing with the world in which we actually live.  Wayne LaPierre and the NRA have created for far too many gullible Americans an alternate reality, one in which they live in fear, one in which police departments and law enforcement officials are "jack-booted thugs" rather than part of the way we ensure our communities are safe.  Rather than work to promote responsible gun ownership, the NRA has spent the past four years promoting paranoid fantasies, ensuring more and more profit for its primary constituency - the corporations who manufacture and sell firearms.  That is reality.

Wayne LaPierre's news conference was just another exercise in his years-long promotion of fear.

You Might Be Doing It Wrong

As we begin a long-overdue examination of where gun culture in America has gone, we can't avoid the way guns have become so entwined with masculine anxiety, as so many men seek to find their identity in instruments of destruction.-Paul Waldman

Cultural critics, feminists, and just run-of-the-mill folks who point out, repeatedly, that gender identity tends to be conflicted social space get a lot of flack from folks who refuse to see what's out there in front of everyone's face.  With the national heartbreak from Newtown, CT still fresh, it's been interesting to discover how Bushmaster, the manufacturer of the weapon used to kill 27 people last week, marketed gun ownership.  From the Paul Waldman piece linked above:

[I]f you're anxious about your masculinity, if you aren't quite sure whether those around you find you sufficiently strong and potent, the Bushmaster corporation has an answer for you. If you buy one of their semi-automatic rifles -- like the kind Adam Lanza used to murder 20 children and six adults last week -- you may "Consider your Man Card reissued."

That's the message of ads the company has been running, along with a particularly ridiculous social media campaign. Until today --the page has apparently been taken down, but parts of it are visible here -- you could learn on the "Man Card" section of Bushmaster's website that "In a world of rapidly depleting testosterone, the Bushmaster Man Card declares and confirms that you are a man's man." Then you could fill out a little form to bust on your buddies for not being manly enough, to "Revoke a Man Card." Just enter a brief description of the offense and put it into one of five categories: "Cry baby," "Cupcake," "Short leash," "Coward," or "Just unmanly."

Folks, like me, who consider quite a bit of our national desire for guns to be a sign of social and cultural illness really don't need to go very far to discover all sorts of ways this illness displays itself.  While egregious, this marketing campaign is hardly atypical.  Whether it's cologne or trucks or tools; whether it's "chick flicks" versus "action flicks" at the cineplex; it might even be what kind of beer you drink; all these products become stand-ins for how gender roles are clarified.  Last night, I was watching an episode of NCIS from season 3, in which two characters discover a third uses hand and body lotion, then proceed to question both his masculinity and sexual orientation.  I have to admit, while I'm a fan of the show, I was horrified by what I was watching.  Honest to God.  Are there really people in the world who are so unsure of their own sexual and gender identity that it's important to belittle others because of the products they use?

It isn't just lefties like me who tend toward gender-specific social criticism.  National Review Online featured an article by Charlotte Allen (no links to this heap of bilge) in which she wrote that the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School happened because there weren't enough men on campus.  As Charlie Pierce wrote in his scathing dismissal:

American conservatism has been rendered a parody of a burlesque of a puppet show. And Charlotte Allen should be shunned by decent people. Hell, people who think like this should be shunned by bacteria.

Is our problem one of gender?  Are men these days just not man enough?  Has feminism rendered males weak, unable to perform their function as protectors and providers?

It seems to me that, as this forms the backbone less of serious cultural criticism and more an advertising campaign for weapons whose sole designed function is to kill human beings, the answers to these questions is probably no.

For all you men out there: If you are really worried about being "a man's man", here's what you do.  First, if you're just not sure, uneasy in your own skin as a male, take off all your clothes and look down.  See that thing dangling there about half-way down?  Some of you might have to bend forward a bit to see over the gut.  You see it?  If so, then you've confirmed you're a guy.

Step two to being a man's man is really simple.  Hug your kids.  That person you really love - it could be a woman, it could be a man - should be told every single day how special they are.  Tell him or her, in all sorts of ways, how much his or her presence makes your life better.

Go to work, and do your job thoroughly, professionally, with dignity and pride.  I don't care if you're an office worker, a mechanic, a construction worker, a lawyer, or President of the United States.  When you're on the clock, be focused on that work, because whatever it is you're doing, it's effecting the lives of hundreds if not thousands of people, most of whom you'll never know.

Be polite to everyone you meet.  Even, perhaps especially, the folks who rub you the wrong way, who can't seem to say anything nice about the rest of the world.  It doesn't cost you anything, and you have no idea the impact small things like that can have.

Laugh when other people tell jokes.  Express sympathy to those who are hurting.  Give a helping hand to folks who ask for assistance.

Volunteer somewhere.  Do some work, whether it's ringing the Salvation Army bell, or building a house with Habitat for Humanity, or serving a meal once a month at a homeless shelter.  Whatever it might be, even a little thing makes you feel better.

Finally, if after doing all this, you're still unsettled about your basic gender identity, then seek help.  Seriously. Sitting and talking with a counselor isn't a sign of weakness or illness.  Shoot, it takes a real, strong man to admit he has problems and wants to deal with them.

If you feel this urge to buy a gun because the company that makes it tells you you're just not man enough, stop for a moment, think, and spend that money to help yourself and someone else.  That's what a man's man would do.

Caveat Emptor

First of all, full disclosure is in order.  I was in my early 20's when I read The Right Stuff and James Michener's fictionalized version of the same story, Space (the only Michener I've ever been able to read, by the way).  I defy anyone who's read either, but perhaps especially Tom Wolfe's breezy account of the early years of the space program - the whole thing could have been printed in caps lock mode and would have read far better - without coming away not only with a great deal of admiration for the men who fly combat aircraft, but quite a bit of admiration for the machines, as well.  Twice in my life I've been fortunate to visit the Air Force Museum at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, OH.  There's something . . . just something about those planes, whether WWII-era fighters, Cold War work horses like the F-4 and F-111 or our new-fangled aircraft that is . . . thrilling? Is that the word? . . . and makes me more than a little proud to be an American.

Having said that, I wanted to expand a bit on some complaints Charlie Pierce wrote concerning the proposed F-35 Lightning Joint Strike Fighter (JSF).  Linked to a story in the business section of The New York Times, Pierce takes aim at two facts: both the per-unit cost for the aircraft as well as the potential cost for the entire proposed program are not only enormous, but growing; several countries that had placed orders for the plane are backing out of their commitments, not only because of the cost, but because the aircraft, as it has developed, is not offering what was originally intended.

While dubbed a Joint Strike Fighter, much like the problem-plagued F-22 Raptor, the F-35 is not an air-superiority aircraft.  An Australian defense think-tank has a run-down of its own complaints about the F-35, and ends the discussion comparing the Lightning to other aircraft, concluding that, in fact, the F-35 resembles less an F-18 than the old F-104 Thunderchief.  Not just the design of the aircraft, but the missions for which it's best suited, the F-35 would be far better providing air cover and low-level tactical raids than Top Gun-like dog fights.

So the plane's actual performance doesn't match expectations.  Yet the real complaint is the cost.  This is, I think, less a product of industrial perfidy than it is the oddities of our weapon procurement system.  It begins with the statutory demand not only that designs meet specific military needs; these designs need to be approved based upon cost.  Specifically, for example, while Lockheed Martin received the contract for the F-35, in all likelihood, several contractors probably bid on the project, offering plans for an aircraft to meet the stated needs of the  Armed Services.  By law, however, the bid is awarded to the company that offers the lowest bid.  This system creates cost overruns.  I doubt there are many large-scale weapon systems that have come in on budget and time, not because the system for weapon construction is laden with opportunities for graft.  Rather, it might seem feasible to propose $X million for a particular weapon design; once actual construction gets underway, even small flaws in the original design can create magnified cost-overruns to compensate.

Once prototypes go through initial testing, more changes usually follow.  Then there are test flights, which just increase the demand for changes that create spiraling cost increases.  This process can take many years, during which the demands from policy makers change, which create issues for designers to incorporate these new demands.  Again - costs increase.

The entire way we buy weapons guarantees no system will end up either performing, appearing, or costing what was originally proposed.  I'm not sure what the answer to this conundrum is, although I do wonder if we really want weapons that are built by corporations that are willing to spend less on them than anyone else.  Even with design specifications and detailed regulations that insure safety and reliability, doesn't it seem at least plausible that a low-bid is, after decades of experience, just a low-end estimate?

From the look of the aircraft through its mission capabilities to its cost, the F-35 might well be, as Pierce says, a lemon.  All the same, it is a product of the way we have decided to order defense systems.  So, I wonder: Who's to blame?  Is it Lockheed Martin, who is only looking for a slight return on its many-year investment in the F-35?  Or, perhaps, is it an entire way of doing this business that does nothing but suck money from the public trough?

Valuable Values

OK, it's been an entire weekend of listening to people parcel out blame among their pre-existing moral hobby-horses in regard to which of them is most to blame for the massacre in Connecticut. Guns. Video games. Bad Bruce Willis movies. I have my own opinion on all of them, except for the Bruce Willis movies because they don't pay me enough money to see enough of those to develop an opinion. Here's my feeling on all of them. You know what the real culprit is?

Profit. - Charlie Pierce

I love few things more than the constant barrage of noise about traditional values.  Really.  What, after all, does the word "value" mean?  Something is of value if and only if we can reasonably set it aside other things of greater or lesser value.  Otherwise, it is either worthless (of no value) or priceless (outside the set of those things upon which we bestow value).  All that talk about "traditional values" only shows the folks doing the talking have been nabbed and landed, and are currently drying on the stringer held up by capitalism.

Let's face it.  Not just in principle but in fact, everything is up for sale in this country.  We are one gigantic junk yard, filled with people willing to do just about anything to trade for cold hard cash whatever someone else is willing to pay.  Why else would "family" be thought a "traditional value" if it weren't something we were willing to trade, say, to a reality television producer to splatter dysfunction across the nation's screens for titillation and the marvelous frisson that comes from seeing someone's life that is far more screwed up that one's own?  The next time you hear someone talking about "traditional American values", remember they are only trying to part your money from you.

A simple test: What's of more value?  The tens of thousands of very real lives lost to gun violence or the right to own a weapon?  A 2010 study in the Southern Medical Journal, as reported by News-Medical.net reports that having a gun in the home is 12 times more likely to lead to death of a resident or visitor than an intruder.  The evidence is pretty clear, it seems.  You want to protect your home?  Keep guns out of them.

Except, of course, that isn't the story we're told over and over again, by an industry that seeks to profit from our fear of The Other.  We are told over and over and over again that our homes and our families' lives and safety are so valuable, we should invest in a firearm for protection.  Even though the available data indicates that owning a firearm actually increases the danger to those in that home.

So, again - what's really of value?  The lives of those we love or the erroneous aura of protection we get from owning a weapon that is far more likely to be used in a suicide or accidental shooting than to protect our property or family?

Remember.  When you wonder if capitalism can alter our ways of thinking, consider again this simple fact: If you own a gun, it is twelve times more likely to be used against a resident or visitor than an intruder.  We aren't told that, however, because gun manufacturers have convinced us, for their own profit, that owning a firearm will keep our families safe.  

Crazy!

As a way of avoiding talking about guns and gun control, there has been quite a bit of attention paid to yet another American scandal - our woefully underfunded mental health treatment and support systems.  The general line of argument, repeated with neither thought nor empathy, runs something like this: Only someone with something very wrong, mentally, would go on a shooting spree that purposefully targeted children.  Thus, the shooter was crazy/mentally ill.  If we were more aware/paid more attention to/properly funded mental health screening and treatment, perhaps this event could have been avoided.

As far as logic goes, there is a certain soundness to it.  Alas, like many logical sequences, however, it bears little resemblance to any reality, most especially the one in which we live.

Which is not to say that mental health is either understood or treatment fully funded.  On the contrary.

Rather, the major premise - Adam Lanza was mentally ill - is not only not a given, it shouldn't be assumed.  There are varieties of mental illness that could, I suppose lead one suffering from them to acts of violence.  The reality, however, as this post as Feministe reminds us, is the exact opposite: Persons with mental illness are far more likely to be the victims of violence than the perpetrators of violence.

People with mental illness suffer enough stigma without bearing the brunt of our society's fears.  Fully-funding mental health programs is a worthy goal in and for itself.  Running around insisting people who are diagnosed with a mental illness pose a threat to others in society does nothing to help them, and much to hurt them, as well as their families and loved ones.

All the talk about funding mental health programs that are following in the wake of the Newtown shooting are as much a red herring as anything else that distracts from the singular reality that we have far too many guns, and far too easy access to them.  Which is not to say that we should not fund mental health programs.  We should.  We should do it, however, without fearing those we are treating.  The mentally ill are not dangerous. They are hurting and in need of help.

Not Playing Fair

From Wonkette:

We’re going to talk about it because our thoughts and prayers are not enough. They were not enough after Columbine (15 dead), or the Amish schoolhouse (6 dead), or Virginia Tech (33 dead), or Tucson (6 dead), or Aurora (12 dead), or the Wisconsin Sikh temple (6 dead), and they are not enough now that another 28 once living, breathing people have been added to the tally. To offer only thoughts and prayers is to say “Well, that’s a damn shame. Sure hope it doesn’t happen again.” We have done this every time. And every time, it’s happened again. So we’re going to talk about it.

From Cynthia Nielsen:

How many more lives must be lost before we enact change? How many children must perish? How many parents must pick up the pieces of their shattered lives after having lost their children? What will it take to change our hearts and minds about the needless, rampant gun violence in our country? Will it taking losing your children or mine? Are not these children and these children and these children our children, our brothers, our sisters?

From Gary Wills:

Read again those lines, with recent images seared into our brains—“besmeared with blood” and “parents’ tears.” They give the real meaning of what happened at Sandy Hook Elementary School Friday morning. That horror cannot be blamed just on one unhinged person. It was the sacrifice we as a culture made, and continually make, to our demonic god. We guarantee that crazed man after crazed man will have a flood of killing power readily supplied him. We have to make that offering, out of devotion to our Moloch, our god. The gun is our Moloch. We sacrifice children to him daily—sometimes, as at Sandy Hook, by directly throwing them into the fire-hose of bullets from our protected private killing machines, sometimes by blighting our children’s lives by the death of a parent, a schoolmate, a teacher, a protector. Sometimes this is done by mass killings, sometimes by private offerings to the god.

Look at the names above.  Especially the ones with the "6" and "7" after them.  Then tell me we are powerless, that there's just nothing we can do, isn't it so sad and too bad.  Read those quoted above and tell the families and friends of the named dead how wrong they all are, how it isn't the gun-worshipers and phony he-men who are selfish but all those expressing sympathy and support and most of all demanding that these persons should not have died in vain, that we in fact are the selfish ones.  Go read those names and pretend that, somehow, the problem is too few guns.

Please.  Say whatever you want to say about slippery slopes and people killing people and Agenda 21 and enforcing laws on the books, but before you say any of those things - things that are meaningless, repeated each and every time an event such as this occurs, and have nothing to do with the world in which real people really live - please make sure you read that list of names up above.  Memorize it.  Those are the names of the sacrifices we have made sure were carried out.

A Counter-Question In The Face Of Evil

So yesterday, I was on my way home from my very long day.  Weekend All Things Considered was on the radio, and the host was interviewing Eugene Peterson.  The first question asked is the one that, to me, seems to come most often from people who have not been brought up within any religious tradition: How do you maintain your faith in the face of an event like this?  This particular question is really nothing more than a kissing cousin to the classic expression of theodicy: How is it possible for evil to exist in a world governed by an all powerful, loving God?

It's been forty-eight hours or so since we became aware that, as horrible as things might be in Newtown, the reality was far worse.  If your Facebook feed (I don't hang out on Twitter, but I guess it's probably as bad there) is like mine, the only real topic of conversation is what happened on Friday.  We are, all of us, grieving.  Some of us, perhaps many, feel helpless in the face of mass death that is simultaneously so close yet so far away.  Some of us, perhaps many, are enraged without finding a proper target for our anger.  Many people are taking refuge in the comforting words and images that salve their wounded hearts.  To be honest, with the exception of the terrorist attacks of 2001, I cannot remember an event that has so gripped the emotional and spiritual lives of the nation the way the Newtown mass killing has.

And always, of course, is the search for meaning.  I know I'm rare in that I long ago stopped looking for "meaning" in events, good or bad.  What happened, happened.  In this case, what would meaning look like, beyond perhaps a reminder that evil comes in many guises, including great, huge walloping blows about our souls and hearts, leaving us gasping for air.

The theodicy question is, I suppose, fair enough.  For folks, whether within the Church or not, the claims of Divine sovereignty and overflowing love can ring particularly hollow in the silence that follows horror of such enormity.  And we should be fair enough to remind ourselves it isn't just Newtown, either, lest we privilege too much our own grief in the face of loss.  At this moment, perhaps, we should remind ourselves of the terrible loss of life in Haiti due to an earthquake, an event that was followed by a terrible plague; the death toll from the earthquake alone was astronomical.  The plague continued to kill those left behind, and the people of that land are still waiting for anything resembling a normal life.  Even as I write this, a Pacific typhoon bears down on Fiji having wreaked havoc through Somoa.  The cry of those who suffer, whether that suffering is the result of a planet that seems apathetic to human life or the result of human action, is one to which we should give heed.

Giving an ear, however, does not mean to privilege that cry.  For all those who demand from God a resolution of pain, whether from heedless nature or the evil, murderous intent of our fellow human beings, I do believe the answer from God is a simple counter-question: Why do you permit it?

God isn't a magician.  God isn't a wizard, able to wave a wand and cure the evil that lurks within all of us.  God doesn't have a button to push to help people get safely out of the way of dangerous weather or other natural phenomena.  While the earthquake that struck Haiti was little different than earthquakes that hit places as varied as Turkey, Japan, the United States, and Chile.  Haiti, however, is a land ravaged by other, all too human evils, leaving the people with fewer resources to protect themselves from the ravages of nature.  It isn't too hard to figure out that the very first Republic governed by people of African descent in the Western Hemisphere would face obstacles no other country would face - not only neo-colonial exploitation that stripped much of the natural beauty and resources from a once-beautiful and rich land, but the added burden of white supremacy that, by turns, withheld help or forced alien-supported rulers who stole and pillaged while others turned deaf ears to the suffering of the people.  Why does Haiti suffer, God asks us, when we all have the power to relieve that suffering and prevent any repeat in the future?  Don't blame me, God might well say, when all of you have done far too little to help Haiti and the Haitian people mitigate the terrors from a world that runs on its on scale.

As with Haiti, so, too, with Newtown.  How could God let this happen?  Well, says God, how could you let it happen?  This event isn't some odd, random occurrence, outside any human experience.  On the contrary, while certainly the scale of the horror is far greater than our usual experience, it isn't like we have never gone through anything like this.  And we keep going through them, offering prayers to God in the names of the families of those lost, thinking we have fulfilled our spiritual duties this way.  We cry and we hug and then we shake our heads and we move on with our lives until there is yet another multiple shooting, as there was in Alabama on Saturday.  Which doesn't include the singular events of gun violence, events that push that body count higher each day.

We have the temerity to ask God how such evil occurs, when we have the power, should we so choose, perhaps not to eliminate but certainly to drastically reduce the possibility any such event can ever occur again.  What happened in Connecticut isn't some oddity, outside anyone's ability either to comprehend or explain.  On the contrary, it is all too human for all the horror it contains, or perhaps precisely because of all the horror it contains.  At the end of the day, while certainly understandable, perhaps even a necessary part of the grieving process, sitting around and getting mad at God is little more than refusing to take a share of the responsibility.  God didn't let this happen.

We did.

It Isn't About Newtown

I should be honest enough to say that title is a lie.  Because, as everyone knows, it is about Newtown.  Or, perhaps better - With the events yesterday in Newtown, I realized that silence equaled consent.  Not just in the bloody massacres at which we all stop and ask, "What have we become?" and everyone says they'll pray, and whoever is President will say a word or two, and then . . . the next one happens.  According to The Washington Post today, there have been thirteen such events just this year.  In fact, by the criteria of this report, there was yet another just today in Alabama.  Catch our breath?  Why even bother breathing?

But it isn't mass shootings.  They're the blockbuster of gun violence, big and gaudy, attracting all sorts of attention, enough to blind us to the steady drip of blood that is gun violence in America.  According to the CDC, in 2009 there were 11,493 gun-related deaths in the United States.  About 31 per day.  That's one and one-half Newtowns every single day.

Every.

Single.

Day.

Why don't we hear about it?  We do, though.  It's on the news, isn't it?  Just this summer, the city of Chicago saw a spike in homicides, with the city's four hundredth coming in late October.

If we faced a disease that killed an average of 31 Americans every day, we would be investing tens of millions if not billions of dollars searching for a cure, or at least effective treatment.  Facing the violent, gun-related deaths of 31 Americans every day we are told all sorts of things.  "Who could have known this would happen?", "This isn't the time to talk about gun control", "If a crazy person wants to kill people, that person will find a way to do it", on and on.  And on.

Why?  I think this article from The New Inquiry  gets at part of it:

I feel like sometimes it’s the bigness of the problem that scares us the most, and so a solution that feels practical becomes the only response we can imagine. But when people have guns to protect them from black people and the government, a black president is not going to have much luck trying to repeal the 2nd Amendment.  Especially when our response to a white guy shooting up a school is to tell people to be on the watch for “suspicious characters.” If there’s a solution, the law might be part of it, and the people who were demonstrating in front of the White House yesterday, good for them. I’d have joined them; I’m all for taxing the living shit out of anyone who wants to own a gun in a big city, for example. I’ll sign that petition, why the hell not. But as long as there’s a loophole, as long as some people are more animal, more killable than white kids in Connecticut, there will still be people killing people, and people who are crazy enough to want to do it are crazy enough to find a way. And we should be aghast about every single one of the dead kids, and adults, not just the white ones who were killed by automatic weapons in a school.

The frustrating thing about this is it is both right and wrong.  It is right because it makes clear the enormity of the problem.  It is wrong because if you say, "Wow, that's just too big," then no one does anything and we all cross our fingers and hope and pray the daily body count doesn't include people we love.

Taking any single event and saying, "Who could have known this would happen?" certainly makes sense. Except, of course, these aren't single, or singular, events.  Think Progress has a list of the 29 mass shootings since the Columbine High School shooting in 1999*, and states there have been 61 in the past 30 years.

But just as it isn't about Newtown, it isn't about mass shootings, either.  It's the mass shooting that happens each and every day, whether it's a street corner on the southwest side of Chicago, or the Lower East Side of Manhattan, or the destitute streets of New Orleans or Detroit.  These are American lives lost, a body count that we have allowed to get every larger because we both refuse to accept that these deaths are American deaths, and because we refuse to accept that bearing responsibility means doing something.

There are more things to say, such as pointing out other cultures are just as violent as ours - anyone even passing familiar with Japanese popular culture understands it is a sinkhole of violence and misogyny, for example - so American exceptionalism doesn't extend to our vices any more than it does our virtues.  There are more things to say, such as pointing out that the insistence on moments of silence are insulting to the memory of the dead.  It is silence that keeps the bodies piling up, makes that butcher's bill ever longer.

Only the dead are silent.  It is up to us, the living, to be the voice they have lost.  Because it isn't just Newtown.  It's about America.

*Their criteria for "mass shootings" appear to be slightly different from those that led to the article in the Washington Post, linked above.

Doing Something

Twenty six dead.  Twenty of them children.

According to the Uniform Crime Reports for 2010 (the last year complete data is available), 67.5% of homicides were committed using firearms.  Two-thirds.

Every time something like this happens, there are folks who scream, "But, they could use knives!  Cars kill people!  Law-abiding citizens!"  Except, of course, guns are the weapon of choice.  Why?  Because they're readily available, there are simply no constraints either on purchasing the weapons themselves or ammunition for them, and, frankly, all the folks shouting "Second Amendment!" in effect have the back of the killer.

That may sound harsh, but bite me.

When I heard the news, I wanted to rush to my kids' schools and take them home.  Of course, then the loon wins, right?  In a world filled with guns, I have to remember I put my kids' lives on the line just by sending them to school.

I'm saddened by the events.  I'm also enraged.  I'm tired, too.  I'm tired of hearing about how guns don't kill people, because there are 26 corpses, 20 of them quite small, that are giving mute testimony to the contrary. I'm tired of people offering prayers without doing much of anything else.  Because, what?  Is God a magician who will just magically make everything better?  The Church is called the Body of Christ for a reason.  We are the hands and feet and mouths and heart of the Living God.  We want God to do something without risking anything ourselves.

So, um, no.

I started a petition at Change.org.  It's really simple to understand.  It calls for repeal of the Second Amendment to the Constitution.  Under current Constitutional law, there is nothing any legislature can do to interfere with anyone's desire to own a firearm.  We want change?  We want the killings to stop?  Then sign the petition.  We get 100 signatures, it can be featured on Change.org.  Once that happens, we can get more people to link to it, more people to sign it.

Then, maybe - just maybe - we can start the real work of getting in touch with our elected representatives to start the long slog.  Fighting to make America a safe, sane place in which to live and work and shop and live with another person and go to school will take a long time.  It will take dealing with people who are quite willing to disagree with us in violent ways.  It will take being yelled at a whole lot by people who, for all intents and purposes, would sacrifice a few thousand lives each year so some hunter somewhere isn't afraid black helicopters will zoom in and take his shotgun away.

Oh, and yes, I am politicizing this.  You're goddamn right.  I'm going to politicize the shit out of this, because that's the only way to get people moving.

I know I'm not going to win any popularity contests by doing this.  That's OK.  Because this isn't about me, and, frankly, it isn't about you, either.  It's about all of us, every single American.  We are long past the time when we should have realized it was time to put away our childish joy in guns.

The Aristocrats

A little known part of the on-going nonsense in Washington is the fact that cuts in the Estate Tax will expire at the end of the year.  Back when they were cut, there was all sorts of carrying on, calling them "Death Taxes", acting as if they were some break on economic growth and a blight upon the entire American ethos.

Except, of course, what they are is an expression of a basic American principle - we aren't going to have a hereditary aristocracy in this Republic of ours.

I heard a report on NPR the other evening in which an estate planner was saying that people with estates that would fall within the lowered limit/higher tax rate were "worried".  I'm sorry, but I would have thought that if an individual managed to amass a million dollars and more of wealth, that person would have provided well for his or her family members; perhaps even provided an example, say, for their children to follow such as hard work, thrift, and sound investment so the children could prosper without help from dead Daddy and Mommy.

When primogeniture was eliminated from the Constitution, it was done to prevent the creation of an aristocracy, seen at the time of the founding as a parasitic class, contributing nothing but maintaining power and authority through no reason other than birth.  If you read Barbara Tuchman's The March of Folly, there's a description of the kinds of feasts the Lords and Ladies of 18th Century Britain would enjoy.  At a time when industrialization was just beginning to stir and penury and want were spreading, the aristocracy took it as a matter of course, indeed of right, to gorge themselves while the peasantry starved.  Having fought and won a revolt against this kind of thing, the Founders had no desire to start it up again.

All the hugger-mugger about small businesses and what hard working people who earn a lot of money deserve is nonsense.  With the Gilded Age and the rise of American billionaires, very often amassing their fortunes through illegality, violence, repression, and manipulation of the political process, the levying of a confiscatory Estate Tax (the original tax was 100%; it was aimed at one person, John D. Rockefeller) was seen as ensuring that the accidents of history and the purposeful greed of industrialists didn't create that most despised of British institutions: a hereditary aristocracy.  While sold to the public with this argument, it was also offered as a way of promoting charity, and it worked quite well.  After all, rather than face the state taking one's wealth, many wealthy benefactors spent a great deal of time and energy giving their money away.  Andrew Carnegie built libraries all over the country; Rockefeller invested in colleges and universities, including helping to create the University of Chicago and supporting historically black colleges and institutes in the south (one can say many things about Rockefeller, but he was no bigot, at least not by the standards of his time; he also provided massive amounts of money to eliminate ringworm across the South, in both black and white populations).

While this latter is a worthy goal, and has provided ample opportunity for the wealthy to do some good, the fact remains that defense of the Estate Tax is more than a little un-American.  The idea that family members, having done nothing more than being born in a family that was successful, "deserve" an estate runs against the very idea that we in the United States will not have the growth of a class of hereditary wealth, amassing power and public influence.  I find it more than a little funny that the most adamant defenders of the elimination of the Estate Tax are in a political party with the name "Republican".  Last time I checked, small "r" republicans weren't huge fans of aristocrats.

Except, alas, in early 21st century America.

The Unkindest Cut

Of all the ridiculous things in this season overflowing with the ridiculous, from Nick Kristof suggesting we reduce support for children with disabilities to round-about discussions over a 5% tax hike that seem to signal the end of the world, the most ridiculous has been near silence on the massive across-the-board budget cuts known as sequestration.  While we should all be a bit inured to squabbles over cuts in discretionary spending, that Congress set up the Department of Defense to be cut both deep and broad is not only amazing; that no one seems to be shouting about it is shocking.

Now, most on the Left carry on about the Pentagon budget without actually looking at the numbers.  I have actually skimmed a couple different years' budgets (it's impossible to read it thoroughly unless that's your job), and taking in to account several factors, it is actually surprising how economical the Pentagon is.  The first factor to consider before getting in to high dudgeon about defense spending is the previous question: Do we, as a nation, have either commitments or broad national goals that require a large military infrastructure?  In fact, we have both.  The second factor flows from the first: Do we wish to continue these commitments, i.e., do we wish to continue to exercise global power and influence?  It has always seemed to me that we need to talk about this question before any, Left, Right, or the Very Serious Center, start talking about how we spend money for guns and planes and things that go boom.

Despite having an election - you remember the election, right?  It was all over the news - most of our upper echelon press and far too much of the commentariat carry on as if nothing of note has occurred.  I mention this in passing not because it impacts any thoughts on defense sequestration, but because it's important to remember that we cannot have any kind of honest, robust discussion in our current climate.  All one need do is consider that much of the hoopla over Ambassador Susan Rice and Benghazi had to do with what the Ambassador said on a Sunday talk show.  Like any talk of defense sequestration, we should have a serious investigation of the events in Libya on September 11, find out what went wrong, if someone dropped the ball security-wise, they need to be held accountable, and put mechanisms in place to prevent another such event. Carrying on about what someone said on television, however, drained any serious criticism of real power; any time anyone says, "Benghazi," it sounds just the same as John McCain yelling at the clouds.

The facts are that, despite the enormity of our defense budget, both front-line and support personnel are operating at what can politely be called below optimum capacity.  That's a nice way to say that for all we have the weaponry and platforms for delivery, our force levels are far smaller than twenty years ago, even after a decade of war.  Indeed, even with the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, there was no movement to enlarge the actual numbers of troops; that's why there are service members and veterans with multiple tours, under combat conditions, in both theaters.  The mental and emotional toll this decision not to increase the size of the various branches is also in all the papers; the obscene and scandalous suicide and crime rates among both active duty and veteran service members due in no small part to PTSD and related phenomena can be laid at the feet of policy planners who insisted on doing these wars not just on credit cards, but even then, doing them on the cheap.  Because we didn't increase the size of any of the branches of the military, we were forced, as a nation, to dip again and again in the same pool both of reserve personnel and those who had already done time overseas in combat.

At the same time, support staff and others who do vital work, from security to logistics, are forced to do more with less.  Many tasks that were once part and parcel of the armed forces are being outsourced to contractors and subcontractors, whether it's janitorial services or "private security firms", a polite way of describing mercenaries.  With sequestration looming, the ability of the huge array of services the Pentagon provides will be drastically reduced; all the while, the needs for which they've been tasked will continue.  Whether that includes figuring out what threats our nation faces from yesterday's North Korean missile launch, or making sure enough food gets to our troops in Afghanistan, or getting needed medical supplies to troops doing covert ops in central Africa - these things still need to get done.  Fewer people will be available to do them, however, which means more work for those left behind.

A Pentagon spokesperson quote in a recent article at Defense.gov puts the matter quite plainly: 

“If this is triggered, even in light of this absurd mechanism that was created to avoid absurdities, our intent is to not implement sequestration in an absurd way … inside the Department of Defense,” Little said.  

While the post-Cold War defense draw down was needed, it became apparent fairly quickly that the United States continued to see itself as a superpower, with global commitments and therefore the need for a fairly large military infrastructure.  We have, I think, not faced the central question: Do we wish to continue to be a global power?  If so, then we should bite the bullet (so to speak) and be willing not only to pay for it, but to provide enough people to get the job done, and done well.  If we aren't willing to pay for it, then we shouldn't be a global power, and the assigned tasks to front line and support personnel grow fewer, and so we don't need as many people.  It seems to me, in other words, we have gone about the whole matter of defense spending half-assed; as the Pentagon spokesman said, we are now piling absurdities upon absurdities, and we have yet even to mention this in our public discussions.  It's all about a small tax hike on a very small percentage of the American public.

It would be nice if we could talk about these things without getting all hot and bothered.  It would be nice if we could actually consider these matters as they really are, rather than as we believe them to be.  It would be nice if "going over the fiscal cliff" didn't mean something horrible for our ability to defend ourselves, breaking faith with the men and women who have volunteered to protect us.

A Most Dangerous Gift

Christmas is the moment of recognition, the moment when what we have always secretly known is set out in plain and freshly terms. And at the same time, “Woe unto you who desire the day of the Lord” and “Who may abide the day of his coming? For he is like a refiner’s fire” … Christmas is a beauty that is the beginning of terror: the Burning Babe, who has come to cast fire upon the earth, Before his presence, the idols fall and shatter. - Archbishop Rowan Williams, Advent: A University Sermon, Open to Judgement: Sermons and Addresses

In a time of year our late capitalist culture transforms from from verbose longing for something new to silent nostalgia for an irretrievable past, it is sometimes a good thing to consider what, precisely, is this new thing God is doing in the Babe of Bethlehem over which we coo and weep in joy.  Far from the schmaltzy Hallmark nonsense that swamps us like a tide of stupid and ugly, in the Incarnation God is doing something that should bring about both praise and fear.  As we wait and watch, counting down the days on our Advent calendars and watching other shoppers at the nearest Big Box store with their worried looks and creased brows, we should recall to what end this baby is born.

I sometimes think we have forgotten that the broken corpse of Calvary should lie in the manger, rather than a swaddled baby.  Not to revel in blood and death.  Rather, because the New Thing that God is doing, coming to earth in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, is nothing more or less than God demonstrating that love is not a feeling, faith is not thought, and freedom is most assuredly casting our lot in with others, submitting ourselves to the strictest discipline, to the point of offering up our very lives for others.

There is nothing cute or cuddly about the life Jesus will live.  There is no peace or goodwill that follows in his wake.  He knew that.  He told his disciples that the world would hate them for his sake.  He told his disciples they needed to be prepared to surrender their families, their fortunes, all the things they thought God considered valuable, if they wanted to follow him.  When Maundy Thursday came around and they discovered he wasn't kidding, they ran off.  Peter, like Judas, betrayed his master at a point when confessing solidarity with Jesus might well have cost him his life.

This time of year, as we gather our loved ones around us in our various family rituals, I think we numb ourselves to the reality that the birth for which we wait, the Coming for which we wait and watch is not some silent blessing, the still small voice that whispered to the prophet Jeremiah.  The Gospels are clear enough that Jesus' birth brought terror and death to a world already overflowing with terror and death; consider the Slaughter of the Innocents in St. Matthew's Gospel (the first feast day after Christmas is just that; the second is the Martyrdom of St. Stephen, recounted in Acts).  Jesus was born in a world filled with violence and hatred, terrorism and war, economic and social exploitation.  He became a victim of these forces, winding up on a Roman crosstree the innocent scapegoat of a socio-political and religious establishment terrified of the promise he offered a people under Roman thumb.  Jesus' Revolution was not what anyone in a position of authority wanted, so he ended up dead on trumped up charges.

That he had the last laugh, rising on the third day, confirming that the Kingdom he offered is not one of this world, yet is visible for us and with us, does not remove the blood and horror from the story.  As we move through the weeks of Advent, we should prepare ourselves to look in the feeding trough and see not a pink cheeked baby sleeping peacefully; we should look and see the bloody, broken face of the man Jesus would become.  Only then will we be waiting for the Jesus promised us in the Hebrew Scriptures; only then will we be ready to hear what the man Jesus will say to us; only then will we begin to understand what the baby whose birth we celebrate offers a hurting and broken world.

Peace?  Only if we are willing to risk everything for it.  Justice?  Only if we are willing to suffer injustice in pursuit of it.  Life?  Only if we are willing to risk death for it.  As Archbishop Williams states, over and over again, not only Jesus but the Hebrew prophets before him insist that it is only through a refiner's fire that we who hear and answer God's call and promise in Jesus become what God wants us to be.  If we are not filled with fear this Advent that the new thing God in Christ is doing in our midst may well be what God always said it would be, then we aren't really waiting and watching for the coming of the Christ child promised by the prophets and attested in the Gospels.

Advent II, Part 2

But, in accordance with his promise, we wait for new heavens and a new earth, where righteousness is at home.-2 Peter 3:13 

‘To what then will I compare the people of this generation, and what are they like? They are like children sitting in the market-place and calling to one another,“We played the flute for you, and you did not dance;   we wailed, and you did not weep.” For John the Baptist has come eating no bread and drinking no wine, and you say, “He has a demon”; the Son of Man has come eating and drinking, and you say, “Look, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax-collectors and sinners!” Nevertheless, wisdom is vindicated by all her children.’-Luke 7:31-35

Few things in Christian teaching are as confounding, easily misunderstood, abused by those who don't understand it, and mocked by those outside the faith than the promised return of Christ and the fulfillment of the work of the Kingdom begun with Jesus' resurrection from the dead.  I am alternately amused and frustrated by the ways it is either denied or stretched to incoherence either by those who would prefer it no longer be part of Christian teaching, or those who, knowing little to nothing, make of it an enormous landscape filled with horrors for their pet hates all the while promising rescue for like-minded fellows.

I think I may well be one of the few self-professed liberal Christians who actually buys in to the whole idea.  I don't know, maybe not.  Yet, we Christians affirm that, Christ being raised from the dead inaugurates a new era, the time when the Kingdom of God both is and is not, Christ will return to make all things new, bringing the Kingdom of God to the new creation.  When we United Methodists say, in our mission statement, that we are making disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world, it is this new reality of which we speak.  We live between the times, in a well-worn phrase; between the resurrection and the final consummation when, as the reading from Peter's epistle tells us, creation will dissolve to be replaced by a new Kingdom of righteousness.

In between, however, far too many of us are like those described by Jesus.  Recognizing that you can't lose for winning, Jesus makes clear that, like John the Baptist before him, he faces nonsensical criticism from those who, apparently, are far more interested in getting these same folks they publicly despise to endorse them and their work.  Why do they say John the Baptist has a demon and Jesus is a drunkard and whore-monger?  "We played the flute and you did not dance."  In other words, the religious and political and social elites wanted some kind of endorsement for their efforts at piety.  What they received was contempt or worse, apathy.  So, they turned on John the Baptist and on Jesus.

We want some kind of endorsement, don't we?  We want the stuff in our faith to make some kind of sense, after all.  I make fun of creationists without ever once denying that all that is exists because of the Word of God.  I confess the centrality of this ridiculous idea that Jesus died on that Roman cross, yet not only came back to life - not just resuscitated but raised! - but is still, even now, alive and with us.  Most contemporary Christians repeat this, give some kind of more-than-lip-service to it, all the while refusing to confront how ridiculous a claim it really is.

The Second Coming, though?  Isn't that the stuff of The Omen movies and Hal Lindsay?  Do we really need to confess belief in such insanity?

First of all, that the doctrine of the New Creation has been hijacked by popular culture on the one hand and an idiot like Lindsay on the other only makes it all the more important we affirm the reality of Christ's promised return as part and parcel not only of our faith, but also of our hope.  Second, as the Scriptures tell us, these folks, whether movie makers wanting to make a quick buck on our fears of "Satan" or fools like Lindsay who see in human history the key to understanding what God is doing in the world, are little more than flute players and wailers, wanting some kind of attention for all their efforts.

Jesus reminds us that Wisdom - that part of God celebrated in the book of Proverbs - will vindicate her children.  Which means, quite simply, that holding fast to our hope in the promised return of the risen and living Christ we shall see that God's promises are not the promises of human beings.  Waiting and watching, as the writer of St. Peter's Epistle reminds readers, is something we are called to do in faith because it is in the new heaven and new earth that righteousness will have a home.  It is indeed, breaking forth even now around us, to be sure.  Yet here, as we know all too well, it is homeless, an orphan, outcast by those very flute-players and wailers who want some recognition for all the work they've put in, some reward for their efforts.

So, I confess with a light heart and a loud voice this Advent season, in the words of what the United Methodist liturgy for the Eucharist calls "the mystery of faith": "Christ has died.  Christ is risen.  Christ will come again."  I have neither the time nor energy to "prove" a promise that has yet to be fulfilled.  I do, however, invite anyone who would join with me to praise a God who has not left us, a God who will not abandon us, a God who offers us the promised fulfillment of God's creative love and joy.  Confessing hope in the coming again of Christ and all that offers for all creation is not a silly or odd idea.  It is nothing more or less than continuing our confession of the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.  I'll let the flute players demand attention, and wailers demand that others rend their garments in sympathy.  Me, I'll take St. Peter's advice, and wait and watch in faith and hope.

Advent II, Part 1

Praise the Lord!
Sing to the Lord a new song,
   his praise in the assembly of the faithful.-Psalm 149:1

Let me sing for my beloved   my love-song concerning his vineyard:My beloved had a vineyard on a very fertile hill -Isaiah 5:1

Without music, life would be a mistake.- Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight Of The Idols

More than language, more than reason, more than our ability to use our hands and minds to create tools to make our lives better, the greatest single thing we human beings can do is create beauty.  If there is, as we profess, still some spark of the Creator within our sinful, broken lives, it is just this.  Whether a painting - perhaps the chiaroscuro of Rembrandt, or the abstract expressionism of Pollock - or the architecture of joy one sees whether looking at the magnificent mosques of Muslim Spain, the grand Buddhist temples of ancient Khmer in Cambodia or the cathedrals of France, or perhaps the simple beauty of homespun craftsmanship in mundane pieces of workaday art like Shaker chairs, we human beings have this gift not only to make something out of nothing, but to give what's made the ability to rip us out of time, to stand and experience something majestic, profound, and eternal.  In the arts, as perhaps in no other sphere of human activity, we have the opportunity to experience transcendence without needing to understand what is happening to us.

While I enjoy the physical and visual and plastic arts, it is hearing music that lifts me out of whatever moment I might occupy and drops me before the throne of God, giving me the experience of the Divine "Yes!" that can be otherwise obscured.  The Scriptures quoted above, part of the readings for this second Sunday in Advent, celebrate the power and possibility of song.  We are called to sing songs.  Psalm 149 celebrates a "new song" that is sung not just by we human beings, but all creation in praise of God.  Isaiah 5 sings of song of a parable of a landowner who creates a magnificent vineyard that is overrun by wild grapes.  Despite the landowners tender love and care, at the end the only thing the landowner can do is tear it all down, destroy the weeds that choke the life out of any chance for good wine.  Will the landowner build anew?  The parable, alas, leaves us hanging, although we do know that the prophet Isaiah is the great prophet of the LORD's promise to renew the people.   The song of the destruction of the vineyard is not the only song to be sung.

The Psalms are filled with admonitions to "Sing a new song".  The prophets are filled with the promise that the judgment for injustice and unrighteousness will not be a death sentence, but already pregnant with the promise for new life, a new hope, and, yes, new songs.  Morton Lauritsen's setting for O Magnum Mysterium, certainly among those musical moments that ring out with God's affirmation for all creation, includes the celebration of the presence of the animals at the moment of Christ's birth.  All creation takes part in praising God for the wondrous gift of God in Christ; for that, we are called to sing a new song.  All creation is called to sing praises to God because, in the birth of the Christ Child, we encounter the new thing that God always promises.

These new things call for new songs of Praise.

The Rapeublican Party: Juris-My-Diction Edition

It kinda-sorta started with Rush Limbaugh calling "slut" on a woman testifying before a House Committee.  It kicked itself in to high gear when then-Senate candidate Todd Akin announced that women's bodies had a heretofore unknown protection against conception, which is why rape victims don't get pregnant, which is why abortions for rape victims are unnecessary.  Later, then-Senate candidate Richard Mourdock opined that, as God has created the fetus through rape, well, then that fetus is a gift.  Being a fetus (a pre-born baby, in current parlance) it should be provided every protection under the law anyway; it can't help that God wanted it's mother raped so it could come in to the world, right?

Is it any wonder radio blabber Stephanie Miller has called the Republican Party the Rapey Party?

More evidence has emerged that, when it comes to the matter of rape, the Republican Party doesn't quite know when to stop.  House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R[ape]-VA) is holding up the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) because of some additions made by the Senate.  One in particular, apparently, sticks in Cantor's craw.  When accusations of domestic violence occur on reservations, under new provisions, tribal courts would have jurisdiction even when the accused is not a member of the tribe.  Current law limits jurisdiction in such cases to state and federal courts; state and federal law enforcement, however, is usually too far away to be effective, while tribal law enforcement is present, able to react quickly.

As a writer at Huffington Post notes, this comes at a time when there is an appalling level of violence against Native women by white men.

One in three Native American women have been raped or experienced attempted rape, the New York Times reported in March, and the rate of sexual assault on Native American women is more than twice the national average. President Barack Obama has called violence on tribal lands "an affront to our shared humanity."

Of the Native American women who are raped, 86 percent of them are raped by non-Native men, according to an Amnesty International report. That statistic is precisely what the Senate's tribal provision targets.

Just to be clear, the changes proposed in the Senate version do nothing more than allow local law enforcement to act because those with jurisdiction under the current law just can't react in a timely fashion.  As Congress is granted the power to set out the structure and jurisdiction of federal courts (including the tribal courts that operate on native lands under their laws), his resistance to this change amounts to little more than a tantrum.

Over an issue, namely rape, that has become a theme tripping Republican politicians again and again this year.  Which leaves me wondering if Cantor is as smart a politician as people say he is.  I would guess Cantor would insist he is not "defending" rape of Native American women by white men, but standing on some principle or other about which legal system should have jurisdiction in certain kinds of criminal cases.  Except, alas, it is the very class of cases that keep getting Republicans in trouble.  As soon as the word "rape" appears anywhere near a story, it seems to me a Republican politician would run as fast and far as possible.

Which tells me Cantor isn't a very smart politician.

And, yes, if it appears I am giving Cantor the benefit of the doubt, trusting his word on his reasons for objecting to the language in the proposed amendments to VAWA, I am.  Against a background in which white southern men defended the rape of women of color as a right guaranteed by the institutions of slavery and Jim Crow.  So I think I'm going a long way on this one.  All the same, it certainly appears as if the Republican Party has a rape problem they just can't get rid of. 

The Non-Existent Decline

Yesterday, I saw a photograph that captures what some continue to insist is the decadence and moral failure of our country:

In case you're wondering, these are couples waiting in line to get their marriage licenses in Washington.  Please note a few things.  First, they're all white.  Second, they appear to be, at the very least, middle class.  Several of the couples are older (the two gentlemen in the foreground and the women in the front on the right could be, and probably are, someone's grandparents).  Far from crumbling edifice of our social life, this photo demonstrates how . . . All-American those folks wanting to get married really are.  I realize that this picture will make people like Rick Santorum weep, but I fail to understand why.  It's really threatening to the institution of marriage, all these folks wanting to join the club?  Really?

Similarly, a recent article in Atlantic (with thanks to Amanda Marcotte who writes about it both at Pandagon and Slate) takes a look at a popular theory from a quarter century ago that the rise in single-parent families, which tracked pretty closely to the rise in violent crime, was a principle cause of that rise.  The fact is, since the mid-1990's, while single-parent - usually single mothers - households continued their steady rise, the violent crime rate quite literally collapsed.  Philip Cohen, author of the piece, even graphs the changes:

Please note a couple things.  Even as conservatives were insisting we were facing a whole new wave, perhaps even a generation of sociopathic criminals, the homicide rate was in decline.  It has continued to decline even as the economy has continued it lackadaisical performance the past two years.  All the while, the trend in single motherhood continues.

To be clear, now, this is not to say that there is not a correlation between being the child of a single-parent household and having a criminal record.  That correlation continues; Cohen notes it and doesn't deny it.  What he is denying is any factual basis for some kind of broader social or cultural decline rooted in the rise of single-parent households.  Indeed, while it may be the case that, if one either has a criminal record or is in the corrections system it is likely also that one is the product of a single-parent family.  On the other hand, fewer people who are such are committing crimes.  So the old argument from social conservatives that the "breakdown of the family" would bring about some kind of violent, crime-ridden dystopia is false.  As Cohen writes, "I think single mothers—especially those who were raising their kids back in the 1990s—deserve an apology from the conventional-wisdom purveyors of that time."

I keep reading people on the right carrying on about how the United States is in some kind of decline.  The only thing they point out, however, is a stagnant economy which, to be fair, is a problem for folks of any ideological stripe.  They can't carry on about crime.  They can't carry on about the rise of hedonistic hordes wanting to destroy marriage by getting married.  Shoot, they can't even carry on about single mothers being the source of social pathology because, frankly, there is far less now than two decades ago.

Would it be so hard for all these people who insist America is in decline to take a look around and realize the country is in pretty good shape?  What's wrong with celebrating all sorts of really good things, like a declining crime rate and people finally being allowed to marry?