Someone Else's Words

This posted by PaulDavisTheFirst on the website for the Anchorage Daily News, in a comment in response to a rant by Paul Jenkins on January 29th:

the last time a president tried to tell it like it really is (carter), the country thought he was being a real downer. congratulations for all those who couldn't take the advice to wear an extra sweater or turn down the thermostat - you've basically made it impossible for any president or national elected leader to realistically describe the country to itself.

you want reality? we live in a country that has outsourced its manufacturing capacity, wildly redistributed wealth toward the top 5%, promoted a consumer culture that has been powered by credit, failed to enact a health care system that stands any real chance of bringing our costs into line with other industrialized countries, launched a series of massively expensive wars primarily in defense of our interests in the energy resources of the middle east, failed to significantly develop alternate domestic supplies of clean energy, failed to maintain our physical infrastructure, created a culture that is endlessly focused on our lives as consumers when most of us spend more time as employees and citizens, semi-consistently cut taxes to the wealthiest people (in marked contrast to what has been done during the most economically productive periods in US history), deregulated industry after industry out of some naive and historically absurd notion that they will police themselves in accord with our national interest, sold our political system to the highest bidder (which these days can legally be a corporation), stood by as political gerrymandering and absurd senate rules drain the vitality our government's decision making processes ... the list goes on and on and on.

What do you think you'd feel about a president who said all that?

Read more: http://www.adn.com/2011/01/29/1674405/americans-grow-weary-of-political.html#ixzz1CUZ85RCJ

I like how thorough he is in describing our country's economic policies.

A Stupid Economy

I have heard that President Obama will focus on the economy during tonight’s state of the union address, purportedly because the economy is the number one issue concerning the majority of Americans recently polled by some polling organization or another. Harking back to President Clinton’s 1992 internal campaign motto, “It’s the economy, stupid,” our president seems to be focusing his address on the economy in an effort first to address a public concern and second to bolster his political well-being. That our people care deeply about the economy, according to this brief analysis, is a persistent trend.

And I get this. Abraham Maslow famously presented a pyramid of needs, on the bottom of which are life necessities rising to a crown of spirituality concerns, and argued that before a person can address more lofty or spiritual concerns (those on the top), she or he must first satisfy everyday concerns (those on the bottom), like having enough food to eat, having clothes to wear, having a place to live. After those bottom conditions are satisfied, a person can begin to consider one’s purpose and calling, or theological and philosophical questions. So our emphasis on things economic points to a pressing need to meet these basic necessities for our citizenry before we move on to a public concern for “intangibles” such as justice, and mercy, and compassion.

When President Clinton focused his successful 1992 presidential campaign on the economy, the unemployment rate in the United States was 7.5%. Today that rate is 9.5% or thereabouts. So I can understand 9.5% of those polled listing the economy as their number one concern: they’re unemployed, looking for work in a weak economy, probably looking at their unemployment compensation ending soon. I get this, too: I’ve been unemployed since June of 2008. Even though my wife and I live in such a way that being unemployed is a choice I’ve made rather than a predicament I’m in, I still feel at times useless, frustrated, unwanted, underutilized, simply because I’m not bringing home a regular paycheck.

What I don’t understand is why so many besides those of us who are unemployed would say the economy is their number one concern. This month, the Rasmussen Reports found that 87% of those they polled listed the economy as “a very important issue,” highest of ten pressing issues. So if I subtract 9.5%, representing those unemployed whom I consider have pressing reasons to list the economy as their number one concern, that leaves 77.5% of those polled who are concerned about the economy. Presumably, those 77.5% are employed, though I cannot speculate how well employed, if they have a crushing mortgage, if they’re uninsured, etc. But being employed, why is the economy still their most pressing issue?

Perhaps poverty plays a role here. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the poverty rate rose to 14.3% in 2009 (which, interestingly, is 8.1% lower than it was in 1959, the year I was born), poverty being (a) a threshold of $22,000.00 in income and aid per year for a family of four and (b) certainly representing a much higher degree of material well-being in comparison to poverty in other nations, particularly in the two-thirds world. So, let’s add this percentage to that of the unemployed, ignoring any overlap that surely exists, and subtract 23.8% representing those who have righteous reasons to list concerns about our economy as number one from the 87% of all of us and that leaves 64% of us who are employed and not impoverished (even by Western economic scales) yet who still list the economy as their number one concern.

And I still don’t understand this. That 64% of us live in a staggering degree of comfort, unseen in all previous millennia. Almost every person in this country has a refrigerator and air conditioning, television and internet, at least three rooms per person in our houses, almost one car, and at least some form of assured retirement income (at the least, Social Security). And that 64% of us still are most concerned about economic issues.

Look, Maslow was right, but he didn’t extend his analysis far enough. He limited his analysis to necessity instead of perception. If a person does not have the necessities covered – housing, food, clothing – he will never rise to consider more spiritual matters. But as we see daily in our country, if a person does not wrench his perceptions away from having more and more food and clothing and housing, having more opulence, he, too, will never rise to consider more spiritual matters, such as truth, and beauty, and justice, and compassion, and love. And in this country, in our culture, you and I are convinced we never have enough, even when we have so much. So how can we expect our polity to step above this crass consumerism and commercialism to a higher plane where we actually advance our morals and ethics, our philosophies and theologies?

Sadly, I do not expect too much out of us: I know us for the shallow breed we’ve become, a breed that exalts value over principle, whose main sense of worth comes from purchasing, bred carefully through many generations to consider economics of prime importance. Of such creatures, one cannot expect more than ravenous consumption. But I do expect more from a leader, especially from our president. I fully appreciate that followers make leaders in their own image, but leaders, dammit, LEAD, they don’t simply follow their followers. I want our president to give us a good spanking, to tell us to stop whining about getting more and more stuff and to stand up and be adults for once instead of the spoiled children we’ve become, to show us how we can be a better commonwealth, not in terms of wealth, but in terms of common dignity and decency and compassion. I’m tired of bottom dwelling. Let’s rise. Thank you for reading.

Stiff Hands

I reached to touch you
And found my hands clumsy
As if a mannequin’s
Or artist’s model
All carven oak and metal joints

Hands remember
Grasping where one should not
Remember textures that
Make one shudder and squirm
Because they violate
So nerves grow stiff and senseless
And tendons petrify
And fingers pose slowly
And wrists and joints creak coldly

Sand my hands
With finest grit
Finish them in shellac and lacquer
Till all is sealed and sleek
Lest my splinters
Pierce and pull your tender skin

Virginia’s Damn Moth

Let us postulate
Two powers, two principalities
Engaged in endless, insensate contest
Purposeless, goalless
Simple consequences from initial conditions

On this hand, life
Boiling, roiling, seething
Bursting into new paths
When another becomes resolutely blocked
Evolving new forms
Without preference, pragmatic
Impelled in the process
Midges teeming from a drying slough
Grasses sprouting in lava flows

On that hand, death
Staunch, resolute, adamant
Impeding, depleting,
Grasping with enormous, weighty hands
Dragging, exhausting
An insensate, clinging giant
Thoughtless, slow, entropic
Inured to forms
All alike like sputtering candles
In a damp and musty tomb

In this demonic trial
Everyone I know, everyone I love is
One of Virginia’s damn moths
Feeble but defiant
Collateral damage on the windowsill

Second Amendment Economics

Whatever else we might say, our United States seems of two minds regarding people murdered by other people wielding firearms: we deeply regret the lives lost to lunatics shooting semi-automatic weapons but we reiterate that such tragedies do not override Second Amendment protections of the liberty to keep and bear arms. I say “we” because, first, we have a broad and successfully organized lobby for not only preserving but advancing Second Amendment rights, a lobby that certainly contributed to our Supreme Court’s recent decision interpreting the Second Amendment to provide an individual’s right to keep and bear arms regardless of any civic interest (the first time in our long history the Supreme Court has found such an unrestrained individual right to keep and bear arms in the Second Amendment).

I say “we” because, second, recent polling data describe the majority of those polled as favoring more government regulations on the sale of firearms and the types of firearms available for purchase. Please note: this is a temporary majority whose numbers usually spike after some seriously deranged person takes up arms and murders a bunch of people, as recently happened in Tuscon (and Tuscon brings to mind Virginia Tech and UT Austin and the Amish schoolhouse, remember that one?). But so far, this majority has not organized their convictions (and, again, their convictions waver far more than those of gun rights advocates) to a politically persuasive extent. A subset of this majority has mobilized and organized, have called for tighter regulations and have had some success – the Brady Bill comes to mind, though that bill was signed into law by President Clinton twelve years after John Hinkley shot James Brady along with President Reagan and two others, hardly a speedy success.

Finally, I say “we” because you and I – assuming neither you nor I are members of a gun rights group or have been polled – hold private convictions on the matter, convictions we’ve generally kept to ourselves or at most have posted online in the form of “what a shame” or “this is tragic” or a link to an article that does express a strong opinion, for or against. Most of us – and the unpolled and unaffiliated form a sizeable majority, a vast majority – swing emotionally from one argument to the next, feeling that our Constitution does guarantee us rights that are important, feeling horrible about such senseless killings, feeling either emboldened or repulsed by vocal advocacy groups such as the NRA, but we haven’t taken the time to think through the issues and, having thought, to contact our Representative and Senators about our opinions. We in the vast majority are buffeted to and fro by the winds of our shifting public discourse, but usually, if we have an opinion, we keep it generally private.

So we – all of us in this great country – share responsibility for our current predicament: our governments allow each of us, provided we are of sufficient age and pass a computerized background check (with all the shortcomings and strengths of computerization), to bear firearms of astonishing power, capacity and efficiency, even firearms that seem to be designed primarily for shooting other people (for instance, semi-automatic handguns or armor-piercing ammunition). And I realize it’s hard to speak about “we” in meaningful ways since “we” in this instance refers to our United States. Yet our Constitution does just that, beginning “We the people of the United States,” and even though our Constitution’s ratification did not depend on every citizen eligible to vote voting “yea” (ours is a republic, not a democracy), our Constitution represents all of us through the medium of our elected and appointed representatives. So by using “we” I don’t mean to speak about each and every person in this country, but about a public consensus of “we,” representing the media and debates and governments and laws and opinions and spokespersons that our citizenry exude like will-o-the-wisps over sloughs and swamps, that fleeting, shifting, miasmical “we” of representational public discourse.

I find it difficult to avoid the conclusion that “we” have adopted a cost/benefit approach to our stance regarding our firearm predicament: though we’re horrified, the number of people killed by other people using firearms, even the particulars about those so killed (for instance, a nine year old girl or a septuagenarian shielding his wife), have so far not risen to a level that would make us willing to curtail a constitutionally protected freedom. If this is the case, why don’t we try a little thought experiment. Let’s ask ourselves this question: how many murders through use of firearms would it take to make us willing to curtail Second Amendment freedoms?

If we answer anything other than “it doesn’t matter how many people are murdered using firearms: a right is a right,” then we demonstrate that it is possible for a certain number of murders to make us reevaluate our convictions regarding the Second Amendment, that is, “we” will preserve and protect the right to keep and bear arms lightly fettered (current regulations, the NRA’s rhetoric notwithstanding, are truly light fetters) provided not too many of us are brutally, senselessly murdered. And whether that number is fifty thousand or one hundred thousand or one million over a one-year period, or if it is just one poignant tragedy (all are poignant, but Nickel Mines comes to mind as especially so), if we’re using a cost/benefit approach our reasoning is morally suspect: we subsidize the constitutional right to bear arms on the people that have been murdered by other people using firearms, and not on thoughtful considerations or patriotic convictions regarding constitutional rights. Bottom line: there haven’t been enough murders for we the people to amend our constitutional right to bear arms.

As for me, I hope and pray that our answer will never be, “it doesn’t matter how many: a right is a right.” Such absolutism hides too many other issues – firearm culture, sports enthusiasm or last-ditch security against encroaching government militantism among them – behind a blanket assertion of constitutional rights. And I find it more frightening if such an answer is honest, if nothing else is on the table except constitutionalism. Such an answer grants way too much foresight to our well-intentioned founders - foresight they undoubtedly would not claim for themselves – and privileges their supposed foresight over all our subsequent history. If we say “a right is a right” we portray the most inhumane brutality, not just to those six murdered in Tuscon, but to every person murdered in every city and home for whatever reason, and to every survivor of attempted murder, and to every person related to or friends with a murder or attempted-murder victim, hell, we portray the most inhumane brutality to everyone, victim or not, including you and me and “We, the people”: all our lives are found wanting when weighed in the balance against Second Amendment rights.

Please, let’s you and I say it is possible for there to be so many murders by people using firearms that we’d seriously consider changing our interpretation of the Second Amendment’s right to keep and bear arms, that you and I would encourage our elected Representatives and Senators to amend the Second Amendment. Let’s pick a horrible number of murders – say, one hundred thousand in a calendar year – and say that once we reach that level, we’ll do something about regulating the purchase and use of firearms more stringently. Once we’ve set that number, then we’ll see how cheaply we hold all those lives that fall short of our arbitrary number, and rather than weighing all of us against the Second Amendment, we’ll see how we weigh even those tragic victims – real this time and not speculative, with names and histories and birthdates and deathdates – against the Second Amendment and find them, too, wanting. Perhaps then we, the people, can move from two minds to one: no right is worth this. Thank you for reading.

Getting Attention

When I was studying pastoral care at Columbia Seminary, the instructor assured all of us fledgling ministers that dying people want to be remembered more than anything else, and not in a grand, universal way but in an up-close, person-to-person way. Shortly after, while I was a chaplain at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Decatur, I told a dying person that his family and friends – and even I – would remember him always. He cried and cried, telling me I was one of the good ones (the good ones being his family and friends and their attention).

I attended to his needs, my supervisor told me, challenging me not to be proved a liar. I remember him right now – Vietnam veteran, incurable staph, no memory of combat but combat veteran – so I guess I was truthful. Though he fought on an international stage, when his dying time came the attention he needed most was local and personal - I just happened to pass through his life at its very end, and was fortunate to be invited to share it. To attend: civilly or courteously caring for another person. Respectfully sitting in an audience, “attend” recalls most polite aspects of our culture, and politeness is the eternal root of politics.

You and I share a basic need for attention, of being noticed sympathetically or memorably. I am blogging right now, partly because I crave your attention. This morning, I researched Phyllis W. Schneck – 79 year old shooting victim in Tuscon, life-long Presbyterian, mother of three, widowed for three years, knitter and volunteer – so that I could post a memorial to her and not to a federal judge or nine year old girl, though they need our memories as much as Mrs. Schneck. Though I do want us to remember those not famous as well as those who are (famous being a function of attention, and we do lavish attention on those who are judges and politicians more than we do on those who are retired widows), I also wanted your attention, your noticing that I was sharp enough to post from a different, perhaps even unique angle on yesterday’s tragic event.

To get attention among so many people, to have even a tiny fraction of the world’s eyes turned to us, has always required notability, either great beneficence or great malevolence. Both hold their own distinctions. One who accomplishes something of great benefit attends to others' needs and wants, who in turn give attention (accolades, honors) to the accomplisher. Call this reciprocity, civil reciprocity. We attend concerts, recitals, speeches, performances with respect and attention because we’re being served and so should be appreciative, polite, politic. And those we honor do well to drop the head and lower the eye and give us the “aw shucks” of humility. And I’m not arguing that benefactors serve solely for the accolades, just that the accolades are always a part of beneficence.

The other, malevolence, holds a great irony. A drive for attention seems also to be an inseparable part of great (and lesser) malevolence: a lunatic kills six people in Arizona from motives we know not what, but in public, in broad daylight, attention must be a factor. Our eyes are riveted, pulled to the scene, he gets our attention even though his act holds nothing of civility, or courtesy, or even politics (to our current knowledge). Sadly, such malevolent acts are not the sole attractors for our attention: even speaking malevolently can draw our eyes and ears more quickly than speaking benevolently. Praising someone gets little noticed, deriding someone gets instant airplay. Deep in us, all of us, lies a greater propensity to notice danger than succor, to attend to the warnings more than the assurances, to mark the enemies more easily than the friends.

And that’s one hulking challenge of our times: we have so much info, so much media, so much data that for one to get another’s attention - globally, mind you, not locally - consistently leads to an escalating criticism, an escalating disparaging of the two’s adversary. So politics – ironically, sadly ironically the practice of living together – becomes wildly divisive, media becoming fascinated with this “vitriol,” and you and I can’t tear our eyes away from such a malevolent display. And it's a slippery slope, pot to heroin, once we get used to a certain noise level the only way a voice can stand out from the cacophony is to get louder, so it’s pedal to the medal, accelerate manfully, shoot ‘em up cowboys, cat-fights galore, “liberal” and “conservative” and “traitor” and “liar” and “they should be executed” and look at me, at me!

I am just like that, sadly. I want you to notice me, to pay attention to me. Oh, I’m not so desperate that I’m going to go out and murder people, perform some atrocity. But I do know that many of my efforts, even posting this post to this blog, stem from that deep, human need for attention. You’re this way, too, we humans all are this way. And public notice is so much more efficient (we think) than private: I can do this, and these many eyes will see me. Particularly in this time, in this culture, you and I can instantly appeal for another's, for many others' attention just by posting on Facebook, on blogs, on web pages. We all know how easy this is, and given how much quicker we notice threat or danger or malevolence, any person wanting you and me to post about them on Facebook, etc., knows that the quickest way to do so is by saying or doing something fearful, or horrible. After all, that I'm writing and you're reading this blog marks you us a correspondents in our global discourse: we're the target.

Enough. I for one need to turn my eyes from the global to the local, from memorials for six people killed in Tuscon, good folks all, to helping close a grave at the local cemetery this afternoon with my dad and the other "gravehands." I need to refocus my gaze on those here up on the mountain, on those here at home. I certainly don't need to forget the international scene, to ignore it, but I do need to balance my attention between the global and the local. And given the great ease with which we notice threat or danger or malevolence, I should intentionally refocus, constantly refocus my attention on acts of kindness and goodness, of simple pleasures and dignities, of such inanities as being polite to each other, of remembering each other, of always remembering each other, since memory is the goal of attention. We, you and I and our public discourse, need this balance desperately. Thank you for reading.