Leadership When We Need It

               “There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God, the holy place where the Most High dwells. God is within her, she will not fall; God will help her at break of day.”

I didn’t want to write this article. The issues that it addresses sound a dissonant chord amongst the holiday music still echoing in my head. For many Americans, the shootings in Tucson, Arizona which occurred on January 8^th banished all memories of holiday cheer. Almost two weeks later the tragedy still dominates the headlines as the media does what it does best, which is to embrace the negative, dissect it and display it from every possible angle. On the information superhighway as well as on the Interstate, the only time we slow down and look is when an accident occurs.

               Monsters have always lived among us and for their victims it does not matter whether we find our explanations in the psychology of a diseased mind or in the spiritual realm of a lost soul. History is full of events which equal and exceed the horrors of Tucson. Events like this have occurred for as long as humans have occupied this planet and no amount of knee-jerk legislating or pulpit pounding will prevent them from happening again.

               Today we will leave the re-telling of the tragedy with its accompaniment of theories and explanations to others and focus instead on one positive development which has grown up out of the event.  It has been easy for us to criticize President Obama. His healthcare plans and his relationships with the financial industry invite criticism and for me personally, if the election were held today, the emergence of a qualified candidate from any political party would make it unlikely that Mr. Obama would get my vote. Nevertheless, credit must be given where credit is due. When disaster occurs the nation needs leadership.  In his speech for the victims of the Tucson shooting, President Obama provided that leadership. 

On the other hand, the pundits who make their living fanning the fires of hatred continued their efforts. Sarah Palin, whom some consider as the standard bearer of the Republican Party, made a pathetic attempt to inject herself into the discussion. Her comments about the tragedy in Tucson were, characteristically, all about her. If her irrational behavior and celebrity seeking have not yet served to divest any disenchanted voter of any illusions as to her qualifications for leadership, her response to the killings should do so.

We have not, in my opinion, always (or often) elected the best candidate to the office of President of the United States. Fortunately for our nation, if the man was not ready for the job, the job has many times made the man.  Witness the accelerated graying and wizening of everyone who has occupied the Oval Office. President Obama is no exception. And while his policies may prevent me from giving him my vote in 2012, it is a comfort to know that the country does, indeed, have a leader in the Whitehouse.

In closing, consider these words from President Obama’s speech in Tucson:  “So sudden loss causes us to look backward - but it also forces us to look forward, to reflect on the present and the future, on the manner in which we live our lives and nurture our relationships with those who are still with us. We may ask ourselves if we’ve shown enough kindness and generosity and compassion to the people in our lives. Perhaps we question whether we are doing right by our children, or our community, and whether our priorities are in order. We recognize our own mortality, and are reminded that in the fleeting time we have on this earth, what matters is not wealth, or status, or power, or fame - but rather, how well we have loved, and what small part we have played in bettering the lives of others.”

Let it Snow

               There is a foot of snow on the ground in our cove this morning. Reclining in front of a warm fire, I’m watching the birds through the window as they energetically carry away sunflower seeds from the feeder. Firewood stacked in the shop, propane tank full, gas in the generator and food in the pantry, I am content that the thin line of technology separating us from the forces of nature will hold for the day. I am thankful for the excellent maintenance of our electrical right of way that has enabled me to sit in a warm and lighted room watching the snow fall out of the window and the Atlanta traffic snarl on the television. I’m grateful for the crews who risk life and limb to keep the power on whatever the weather may bring. I’m mindful of the plight of our neighbors to the south who will get more ice than snow in this second major storm during a winter that was predicted to be “warm and dry.”

               In last week’s column I threatened to leave the Christmas decorations up in civil disobedience to our culture’s mandate to rush ever onward. Last night with the whole family under the same roof (and at the same time) the glittering lights reflected in the new fallen snow helped rekindle some leftover holiday magic. A good snow storm, if used properly, can offer us something we usually only get on our holidays, stretched out so few and far between, and that is an excuse, if not a demand, to simply stop and be – be at home, be with our loved ones, be content in the knowledge that there is nothing to do and nothing that can be done. A culture defined by megapixels, measured in nanoseconds and driven by relentless needs can do with a little reminder that so much of what drives us, so much of what we choose to believe is so urgent and important, is but a footprint in the snow. Life on earth moves in rhythms older and deeper than we can imagine and occasionally they remind us that our own brief moment is much like the snowfall, to be enjoyed before it melts away.

Rage Against the Machine

                    "I awake and find myself lonely in the vast world. After many an inebriating farewell cup, I come to my senses. The slanting moon on the wax is shaped like a crescent." -Hồ Xuân Hương

I have always liked the idea of the twelve days of Christmas. I am reluctant to take down the Christmas tree and all the decorations so painstakingly arranged, preferring to leave them up and glittering at least until Epiphany.  Driving around my old neighborhood in the suburbs of Gainesville last night and enjoying the decorations still visible, I was happy to find that quite a few people seem to share the same reluctance.  A perfectly green and functional Christmas tree tossed to the curb, to me is a sad sight, all the expectation and joy once surrounding the icon of our holiday season, now headed for the land fill.

Our time on this earth is so fleeting, the older I get, the more I rage against the machine we have created which seems to require that the vast majority of our waking moments be consumed by the grueling pursuit of digits to pay for widgets. Our celebrations and moments of vacation and renewal are few and far between in comparison to our hours of work and worry, not to mention the commute in between. Our moments of rest are disturbed by the constant background noise of information and drama. Ancient societies that we now consider “primitive” worked far fewer hours than their more sophisticated descendants.

What is it that drives us to press our flesh to the grindstone as it strips away the days of our lives in efforts which, now more than ever, enrich the few while barely sustaining the many? Perhaps it is the very real fear of finding ourselves adrift in a society which has replaced the cultural obligation of caring for the poor, the sick and the elderly with an institutional, governmental substitute that is more effective at making insurance and drug companies profitable than it is in providing quality care.

Perhaps it is the ascendancy of the competition paradigm. Millions of Chinese people work like insects, flogged by fears of failing to compete with the Americans. Their party bosses grow rich in the same way as our own corporate masters. Americans are told that older cultures than ours, not so intent on world domination, which work fewer hours, take more holidays, longer lunches, more breaks - and retire at a younger age – are corrupt, are decadent. Yet these “inferior” people live longer than we do and they suffer from less heart disease and cancer during their longer life spans.

All too soon my own work week will begin again. I am grateful, as I have been instructed to be, as millions of Americans who have seen their benefits diminish or disappear and who have not received a raise in years, have been instructed to be, that I still have a job in this economy. What can one person do against a planetary paradigm anyhow?

I’ll tell you what one person can do. One can choose not to participate in the seductions of a consumer culture which serve to further enslave. I can refuse to borrow money to pay for things I do not need but have been conditioned to want. I can learn to want what I already have. I can find pleasure in the myriad facets of life in a magical and remarkable world that does not depend on this thin veneer of human activity for its magic and remark-ability. I can learn to spend less than I earn and to save and invest wisely and dispassionately. I can leave my Christmas tree up until spring if I want to.   

           

 

Thanksgiving without misgivings

We approach the holiday season each year with a variety of choices between thanksgiving and misgivings. For many the holidays are a welcome relief from the drudgery of commuting to the cubicle. Fellowship with family and friends and the festivity of traditions from around the world blended together in a uniquely American way is something that sustains us from the darkening days of October well into the next year.

For some of us the holidays are less than festive when we are basted in happy images of perfect families feasting from a cornucopia of material prosperity; images which invite us to compare or own less sparkling reality to something that is, for most people, virtual and unattainable. Holiday marketing does for many of us what images of half starved, made-over models “Photoshopped” for magazine covers does for the self esteem of “average” young girls who compare themselves to pictures of glittering unreality and forget their own innate beauty.

Holidays are a much needed break in routine for most of us, but for many the busy routine is some protection from the remembrance of things past – and when that routine is broken, holidays can be a reminder of the empty seats at the table, the companions who have passed on, the children who have grown up and gone away. I will always remember visiting my favorite aunt in the nursing home during her last Christmas on this earth, the miniature decorations in her window, the way she sat quiet and alone in her room, staring out of the window and across the years…

Many Americans will enjoy the holidays with considerably less material prosperity than they did last year. A decade of grim headlines and color coded fears will end this year with the weakest dollar of our lifetimes, with high unemployment and higher prices for food and fuel. Some of us who have spent a lifetime measuring success and gauging happiness in terms of material things will have a chance to shift our awareness this year. We can choose to be thankful for the friends and family we still have while so many are alone, for the job we complain about when so many have none, for the opportunities that this great land still produces and for the freedoms we have and take for granted. We will gather and we will feast as we have done in the past, but perhaps this year our festivities will be tempered by a greater awareness of the planet we live on rather than the empire we live in - and perhaps by a little more compassion for our fellow travelers.

We know not the number of our days and as the wheel of time turns, many things diminish. My own circle has grown smaller over the years and there will be many empty seats around the table at Thanksgiving. I do not know how many more days I will be privileged to share a meal or enjoy a holiday with loved ones. When we are young we spend our days like tossing coins into a fountain. Nature tells me that for some loved ones there are fewer coins remaining than have been spent, but oh how precious is this treasure and how golden. In these moments there is real prosperity and a source of heartfelt thanksgiving.

Hope

In our efforts to walk the middle path between hope and fear we sometimes find that a lifetime of programming has made fear the easier choice, just as a car with an underinflated tire will pull in that direction. Today we make a conscious effort to pump up the flat. Hopeful signs are abundant and clear, lacking only in emphasis.

Hope is the expectation that the events we wish for will occur. In classical Greek mythology, Zeus gave to Pandora a gift which was never to be opened. When Pandora’s curiosity overwhelmed her discretion and she opened the gift, all the ills of humanity escaped with every disaster and disease which has plagued us ever since. Trapped under the lid, Hope remained; a singular quality seemingly small in comparison to the evils of the world, but one which has sustained humanity in the face of overwhelming odds.

Hope is essential for good health, both mental and physical. Much of the disease which plagues the body begins in the mind and in the spirit, where hope functions to protect and to heal. Hope for Christians is the companion of faith, “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” Hope is the lifeline that religion casts into the beyond to anchor us to something that will elevate our lives above the daily struggle for the survival of the body. Hope is the offering we make of that portion of our daily struggle for the benefit of our children and grandchildren, our family, our community, our nation.

Hope is also a tender place to be guarded against the grasping of those who would bend our will to their own desires. The clever play of fear against hope attempts to solicit our hard earned money, our vote or our compliance. To defend the sale of plasticized cardboard boxes full of high-fat, high calorie processed food to children, McDonalds portrays Happy Meals as boxes of hope, as if accountability for the health problems of thousands of could be purchased by a meager donation to some worthy cause in a kind of “cap and trade” exchange for junk food emissions. Their effort is but one example of the technique. Many marketing companies offer the fulfillment of our hopes and dreams in the purchase of their material goods.

Politicians and pundits offer us false dilemmas in a choice between our unrealized fears and their hopeful platitudes. Every two, four and six years hope is dangled in front of us like a carrot on a stick, always just out of reach. So strong is the motivation of hope that we follow the most appealing carrot trustingly, never noticing that we are traveling in circles like oxen turning a mill.

We travel in circles and so history has a tendency to repeat. Where it doesn’t repeat exactly, if often rhymes. We are similar in many ways to the generation of our grandparents and our great-grandparents at the beginning of the 20^th century. Arrogance and naiveté led to WWI, the Great Depression and act II of the Great War played out in World War II. These trials and tribulations forged the generation of our parents, the Greatest Generation, whose efforts yielded a period of the greatest peace and prosperity the world had ever seen.

The arrogance and naiveté of your author’s generation of Baby Boomers has produced challenges as great as any faced by our parents, and this is the legacy we will leave our children. Yet hope is still abundant and readily found in those children. It is being forged on the battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq. It will continue to be found in the generation of young people who are emerging from the fire with a humility born of hardship to counter the hubris of their parents and with a worldly wisdom inspired by hope to counter the bitterness of innocence betrayed.

The Sacred and the Profane

The written word, lacking the inflection, tone and body language available in a good old fashioned face to face conversation, can be a source of misunderstanding in this modern age of facebook posts and handheld texts. It was during a light-hearted posting of text on one of the popular electronic bulletin boards that I witnessed such a misunderstanding and experienced the discord that incomplete communication can conjure, especially when magnified by our national tendency towards political correctness - which is today’s feeble response to our centuries-old habit of dividing all of life into divisions between the sacred and the profane. Follow me now, if you will, down the circuitous path of understanding.

I like cats. We have three. I recently spent half a day constructing a weatherproof, heated cat palace for the wintertime comfort of our feline friends. Cats have been a part of life on the farm as long as I have lived in Towns County, so when a friend posted her frustration at some particular feline behavior towards her chickens, I could relate. As frustration often turns to humor, some lighthearted banter ensued which broached the subject of laboratory cat dissection and favorite cat recipes.

Lovers of all things feline were quick to join the discussion with admonishments. They were not amused, and private messages condemned our dark-hearted humor. My first reaction to the huff of the hall monitors was a desire to tell them all to go and lick themselves. (Patience; we’re almost done with cat humor here). Discretion, however, prevailed and led via this cat-food for thought to today’s discussion of the sacred and the profane.

As a "rule of thumb," one man’s sacred is another man’s profane, and even the use of this worn out phrase profanes the women who, under a vague reference to old English Common Law, could not be beaten by their husbands with anything wider than their thumbs, thus the expression. Here’s another example: A tattoo to an early Christian was a mark of separation from the pagani but to a modern fundamentalist Christian it can be considered a mark of the devil. A cartoon of Mohamed to a non-Muslim may be comic relief from the tensions of terror and jihad but to a devout Muslim it is a death sentence.

Politicians, pundits and preachers plant landmines of the sacred and the profane on the slippery slopes of their fallacious logic. If you want to reform healthcare, you have profaned the sacred cow of corporatism with a socialist smear. If you trust the free market to level the playing field of healthcare, then you care nothing for the huddled masses. If you are a democrat, you can be nothing but a liberal. If you are a conservative, you can be nothing but a republican. There is no “in between” between the sacred and the profane. Everything is black and white; (no offense to European Americans and African Americans intended) with no shades of gray and definitely no colors in the palette. Dark and Light; Good and Evil; divided we are conquered and conquered we are enslaved.

This is not a commentary on cat lovers versus cat cookers. It is not a judgment of millions of devout Christians or a criticism of dedicated democrats and reliable republicans. It is not a judgment of anyone’s spiritual or political path. This is a discussion of dichotomy – a splitting of the whole into two non-overlapping parts – and the biggest, baddest, scorched earth destructive march-to-war dichotomy of them all is the dichotomy of the sacred and the profane. The problem isn’t really so much the dichotomy itself, but the aggressive proselytizing of my idea of what is sacred or your idea of what is profane.

History reeks of this aggressive proselytizing: The Crusaders marched around Jerusalem with decapitated heads on pikes. Muslims burned libraries and put “non believers” to the sword. Communist party bosses liberated millions to the equality of starvation and the American hegemony burned down communist villages and then opened up the charcoal business to the free market. If we examine all of these events closely we see individual stories of faith and sacrifice, patriotism and pride, but zoom out to an objective view of history through the lens of time and we see that the death of millions has solved little or nothing as we now face off over the same issues with weapons capable of killing billions.

Some part of our humanity realizes our dilemma. In the western world, political correctness is our muted response. Understand, if you will, from whence it came. It grew out of centuries of war and destruction and social unrest. It is a step towards tolerance, but it is a humorless tolerance and therefore, in my humble opinion, not quite sincere. We will revisit this topic again because there is much to discover about it, but not right now. I have a cat baking in the oven.

Necessity, Crisis and Change

The level of dishonesty we have become conditioned to accept in political campaigns is disconcerting. Rumor, innuendo and outright deception are trumpeted across every form of media. The use of common fallacy is increasingly common. We hardly notice anymore, and if we do notice, it is always the candidate from the other party who is the culprit. The contradictory claims of the candidates are mutually exclusive. In other words, someone has to be lying. In some cases both candidates lie. We elect liars to office, expect them to represent us with integrity and become indignant when scandal is exposed.

I don’t like Democrats and I don’t like Republicans; don’t like conservatives and don’t like liberals. Author, Tom Robbins, said, ‎"Conservatives understand Halloween; liberals only understand Christmas. If you want to control a population, don't give it social services, give it a scary adversary." With our two party, one agenda system we’re forever trapped somewhere between Halloween and Christmas and Thanksgiving comes for fewer Americans every year.

Democratic candidates posture a concern for the downtrodden to hang on to their slim majority of voters. To pay for their ability to remain in power the fifty percent of us who actually pay income tax in this country are increasingly burdened by the costs of an ever growing government bent on being all things to all people. Democratic candidates appeal to people with open minded and egalitarian views, to non-judgmental people and to people with guilty consciences who want the government to force everyone else to assuage that guilt.

Republican candidates posture a concern for enemies that surround us at all times to hang on to their slim majority of voters. To pay for their ability to remain in power the fifty percent of us who actually pay income tax in this country are increasingly burdened by the costs of an ever growing government bent on projecting American corporate power into every corner of the world. Republican candidates appeal to hard working people with conservative values, to entrepreneurs and to people who are afraid of anyone who is different and want the government to force everyone to have the same values and religious beliefs.

How’s that for a political (or anti-political) ad? Oversimplified, emotive and not entirely accurate? As far as technique it isn’t too far afield from the marketing campaigns “approved by” today’s candidates. I have to wonder if we would actually elect a candidate who dared to tell us the truth, because the truth does not a guaranteed happy ending like a half hour sit-com.

The truth is deceptively simple; easy to see but hard to reach. The continued prosperity of a nation is dependent upon just a few simple things: private investment, productivity and a sustainable population growth. Private investment is dead right now because entrepreneurs and small businesses which might otherwise be hiring and building are instead saving and paying down debt. The specter of increased taxes will support that trend. Sustainable population growth is the 500 pound gorilla in the room that is increasingly hard to ignore. It is at the root of the inability of either political party to solve the immigration problem. Without immigration, legal and otherwise, we have a below-replacement fertility rate in the United States. With immigration we just about break even, which nevertheless may not give us enough of a working force to pay for the Social Security and Medicaid of the impending flood of Baby Boomer retirees. As far as productivity, it has increased dramatically over the last two decades. The problem is that the benefits of increased productivity have been appropriated by the financial sector. Real wages have stayed the same or, according to some estimates, decreased as prices have risen.

And here, dear readers, is the rest of the story. The last problem mentioned is the one that will prevent a solution for all the others. The continued appropriation of productivity by the financial sector will continue and expand the hardships felt by average citizens. Do not look for solutions from government, for as the actions of the Obama Administration - that great hope for change so quickly subdued by the corporate elite - clearly illustrates, government itself has been appropriated by the financial sector. Nothing in politics today indicates that either political party will do much to change the status quo.

As Jean Monnet said, “People only accept change when they are faced with necessity, and only recognize necessity when a crisis is upon them.” We can by all means vote our conscience and our convictions, but don’t expect anything to change. Not just yet. The quiet coup orchestrated by the financial sector will ultimately lead to crisis. There is no other outcome to the policies they have designed to enrich themselves. When that crisis comes, then we will have a chance to purge the den of thieves which currently controls the reins of power. Better to batten down our hatches. Save our money, cut our expenses and pay down our debts. Invest wisely. Pay attention. Look to our families, neighborhoods, churches and local organizations for support. Think outside the box. Develop local ties and affiliations and again, pay attention. Pay attention.