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.

Fear and Loathing in Washington

We have been uncharacteristically silent regarding politics this year and the midterm elections are approaching rapidly. In the gubernatorial race we are content with the knowledge that whichever candidate wins, Georgia will get a competent Governor. Both candidates are flawed; each has stretched the truth about the other, but they are both basically decent men and cut from nearly the same cloth: a little scratchy around the collar but wears well. No matter who wins, Georgia will manage.

We are less than content with national politics, still smarting from how quickly the “lesser of evils” presidential candidate caved in to the big banks. We think Obama is also a decent man, but arrogant, insulated and ill advised. The economic problems he inherited were at least 20 years in the making, but he surrounded himself from the beginning with the same people who helped create the problems - people as removed from mainstream American life as the average American is from an Aborigine. Reminds us a little of George W. Bush, but no, we don’t “miss him yet,” as the famous billboard asks. We do miss the political savvy of Johnson, the sense of hope engendered by Reagan and the integrity of Jimmy Carter.

We like to give people (and politicians) the benefit of the doubt when we can. It is better for the digestion that way; but apparently Obama and his advisers still believe that the survival of the entire American economy is dependent on a handful of gigantic investment banks. We strongly disagree. We think that Greed is advising the President as we watch banking behemoths gradually digesting small town banks all across the country. The majority of our media is owned by only a half dozen corporations and the financial industry seems set to follow the same course.

We are not concerned at the probability that the Republicans may gain control of the Senate and win many seats in the House. Our Democratic Congress with its clear majority has managed to accomplish very little. It took the serious problem of healthcare and turned it into a disaster. Everyone agreed that healthcare should have been overhauled, but the shiny chrome of a shared ideal, when it was exposed to the battery acid of backroom deals, lobbyists and political maneuvering, turned into something just plain ugly. If the Republicans win the Senate, it may well be worth it if they can dismantle the wreckage of Obamacare.

There is some hope, perhaps, in the growing level of anger and disgust with government which is shared by so many Americans. Unfortunately we have little hope for a movement as conflicted as the Tea Party as long as it is influenced to any degree by racism and religious intolerance or guided in ANY way by the ambitions and self promotions of a Sarah Palin. We had hoped that Palin would quietly fade away without any further fragmentation of the Republican Party. Our best hope for her now is that, like a net used to clean the floating debris from the top of the swimming pool, she will at least gather together the reactionaries and nuthatches so that they can be addressed as a group. Anger can be a positive agent for change if it is focused intelligently, but unfortunately it can also make us vulnerable to the likes of Palin. Sadly, if it wasn’t her, it would be someone else. Someone has always been willing to lead the mob and, lacking a mob to lead, to help create one.

Anger with government is widespread. We are fed up with the lack of integrity that exists in Washington, in state capitols and in county seats. Alexis de Tocqueville said that in a democracy, we get the government we deserve. When we allow the ambitions of political candidates to frame our choices in terms of so many common fallacies; when we allow candidates to paint their ideas in such broad strokes while we listen for key words which identify them as one of “us” or one of “them,” the result is permanently polarized political parties at the extremes and a disempowered majority in the middle to push the pendulum in one direction or another as our frustration with one side becomes our hope for the other.

Too many of us vote for the candidate who best pretends to sympathize with our own fears and prejudices, which are of absolutely no use when a candidate is actually elected. Whether a candidate worships god in the same way as we do, or at all; what a candidate believes about conception or capital punishment or gun control or what people choose to put in their own bodies or what they choose to do with their own bodies in the privacy of their own homes - and a host of other “issues,” has no effect on a candidate’s ability to govern. Our favorite “issues” do not predict a candidate’s ability to build a consensus, to manage an economy, to create jobs, to maintain infrastructure and to protect us from enemies. Our favorite talking point issues are utterly useless in gauging a candidate’s ability to maintain freedom, opportunity and stability. While divided, we are conquered. Gullible and easily manipulated, with each passing year we lose a little more freedom and a little more opportunity – no matter what political party is in power.

October Magic

October is the magical month. The air acquires a crystalline quality rarely seen in the haze of summer and hidden behind the gray mantle of winter. October skies are bluer; all the colors, more vibrant. October invites us to sit upon the bare ground and bask in the warming rays of the sun, the same sun which only a few short weeks ago drove us panting into the shade or trapped us indoors with the ubiquitous buzz of the air conditioner.

Each passing year increases the distance between Technological Man and the Earth which sustains him. Being “one with nature” is a quaint cliché from a bygone era; inconceivable when the temperature and the humidity are both above 90 or when the ground is hard and the breath turns to ice crystals, but in October, nature is welcoming. The hordes of stinging, biting and sucking things are in retreat and it is easier to remember why a walk in the woods is a very good thing.

October hints of mysteries obscured for most of the year by the neverending pursuit of stimulation and gratification. Leaves change colors and fall to the ground. Flowers fade, go to seed, wither and die. Hints of the winter to come are carried down the mountains on the evening breeze.

October reminds us of change and season and the irresistible march of time. In the frantic but fading calls of crickets we can hear the primordial rhythms of life on earth, older than civilization, older than religion, visceral, untamed. We feel the irrational but perfectly natural urge to build a bonfire, beat a drum, carve a pumpkin or wear a scary mask, to unconsciously join the thousands of generations stretching back into the mists of prehistory who raged against the dying of the light. The ancients claimed that the veil between this world and the next is thin this time year. The grinning pumpkin sitting in the window would agree…

Diversity and Tolerance

Mark Twain wrote that "travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts.” Twain went on to say that “broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime."

I understand the frustrated idealism in the statement, but I think perhaps that the operative word here may be “vegetating.” My grandfather, born in 1886, never traveled outside the Southeast, never owned an automobile or even a television, but never was there a more charitable or tolerant individual. He never “vegetated.” He observed human behavior; he read voraciously; he prayed constantly and he died peacefully at the age of 98. He was, perhaps, exceptional in his egalitarian views.

Americans have for generations taken pride in being a great “melting pot” of cultures, and nowhere on earth has travel been more ubiquitous than in the United States. Travel is central to our national identity, our perception of freedom and independence and in some cases our very sense of self. Yet a generation after the great civil rights struggles of the 1960’s, prejudice persists and we are a nation divided by race, ethnicity, politics and religion; this, despite the efforts of mass media to frame every situation and every comedy as a happy mixture of every race, color, creed and national origin that can fit on a screen.

As for the “melting pot,” a recent study based on census data and posted on the Radical Cartography website illustrates the extreme racial and ethnic segregation that persists in our largest cities. With the ability to live anywhere we choose, we choose to live among our “own kind,” and humankind is not enough of a distinction for many of us.

Mark Twain hoped that if Americans exposed themselves to different cultures that they would recognize the humanity which joins us all. Yet travel in and of itself does not seem to fulfill his wish. The British Empire at one point in history circled the globe and yet many of the people who lived within the “empire” were considered by the British to be subhuman – not a particularly charitable view. Africans who traveled halfway around the world to America did not consider life on the plantation to be wholesome and their owners, when they were exposed to a foreign culture, attempted to eradicate it.

Prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness display the ability to survive travel and exposure to other cultures. Decades after the desegregation of our schools they appear capable of withstanding even education. These debilitations of the human spirit seem to be hardwired into the animal side of human nature. Genetically identical animals form groups, develop identities separate from their neighbors and compete with each other for territory and resources. This is true of a hive of bees, a pack of wolves, a pride of lions or a herd of elephants.

Is this not also true of humans? Several studies have shown that the human mind is incapable of comprehending more than about 150 meaningful relationships. People outside this group have a tendency to be perceived as “the other, “no matter how similar they may be to us. Perhaps this is the determining factor in our astounding ability to create divisions among ourselves. Combine our hardwired perceptual limitations with fear of “the other,” and you have the history of the human race in a nutshell.

I’m still inspired by Mark Twain’s hope for “broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things.” As well as being capable of division, humanity has used religion, education and compassion to overcome the limitations of the human animal. For many it is not the perception of the other but the fear of the other that is the root of the problem and for many, travel provides the opportunity to overcome that fear. For others it is the spiritual journey or the travels of the educated and inquiring mind.

Perhaps there is a cautionary tale to be found in the structure of the human brain. A hundred and fifty individuals is about the size of a small tribe or a clan. Perhaps we achieved the optimum organizational unit for human beings generations ago - and while nations and empires have erased the natural boundaries of the community, we have invented divisions to replace them. While there seems to be little chance of an orderly retreat from the homogenization of cultures, it would behoove us to remember the plagues and infestations endured by the natural world that was brought on by our industrial practice of monoculture. In the final analysis, perhaps our best hope for survival is to be found in a twofold approach: by encouraging diversity and, above all, by teaching tolerance.

Time to Take Away the Keys

The wisdom is as old as history. It survives in homilies and platitudes repeated so often as to go unnoticed by many, but it is intuited if not understood by a variety of people: a student working to gain an education, an athlete training to excel, a child saving to buy a bicycle (or an iPod) or a parent saving to send that child to college. The wisdom is this; that great things are accomplished by sacrificing a measure of immediate gratification to make small, incremental changes oriented towards a future goal.

A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. “Slow and steady wins the race,” said the tortoise to the hare. Our parents’ generation understood this. They opened savings accounts when they were young. They bought bonds and annuities. If they invested in the stock market they chose companies with solid fundamentals which paid dividends. Back in the “old days” nation building was funded by a country’s savings. The WWII Generation used their savings to build the strongest nation in the world with the best schools, the best infrastructure, the best science and the most innovative businesses.

If civilization survives us, historians may argue indefinitely about where we lost our way. If you compare today’s economy, infrastructure and educational system with those of the previous generation, we begin to look like one of those before and after posters of a meth addict. Our drug, it seems, was gratification. Born into the affluence created by the previous generation, we lost the will to sacrifice anything for our own future. Some say that we allowed the moral fiber of the nation to weaken, but we might also understand it this way: Our dissipation weakened our immune system and made us vulnerable to an array of predators and parasites.

Parasites and predators have been with us since we lived in caves, but today we exist in a tapeworm economy while the vultures circle overhead. If we are lucky enough to have a dollar, an incredible array of devices exist to entice or to extort it from us. All forms of communication and commercial media are infested with tapeworms. The Internet is becoming one endless marketing campaign. Radio and television attempt to shout us into submission. Even the old fashioned telephone is not safe from the computer generated sales pitch.

Our largest and most venerable institutions have also turned parasitic. If we want to save for the future, our bank pays us almost nothing for the use of our money - but if WE want to use it, transfer it or, so it seems, even look at it – they charge us a fee. We can’t drive an automobile without paying an insurance company – and who can afford to have a tooth filled or visit a doctor without insurance? But of all the institutions great and small, the hungriest, the greediest, the most intrusive and by far the most parasitic is none other than our own government.

In such an environment sacrificing and saving for the future becomes difficult when our best efforts are barely sufficient to keep up with our obligations. We are living with the consequences of our choices and unfortunately we are only in the beginning stages of what some have called the Great Recession or, as Bill Bonner coined, “The Great Correction.” Like a drug addict beginning to detox, our society is in for some unpredictable behavior as we experience withdrawal symptoms from being denied the instant gratifications we can no longer afford. Working Americans are becoming savvy to this situation. Our savings rate has grown rapidly as we learn to spend less and save more. But in the process we are starving many of the parasites which have thrived for so long on our indiscretions.

Think of it this way – our economy is being “wormed,” and like the dog or cat unfortunate enough to have experienced this process, we will feel a little sick for a while as the parasites struggle to stay alive. Our biggest challenge will be “worming” the government, which has bored very deeply into us, feeding heavily on our vital processes.

In our growing frustration it may make us feel better for a moment to consider the similarity between government institutions and tapeworms. In the final analysis, however, we are dealing exclusively with human beings; human beings who share many of the same addictions that have plagued the general population. The difference is that the people in government are in a position to leverage their addictions. We feel the momentary rush of power when we are able to satisfy our desire for instant gratification. In government the rush of power is more long lasting. It is, perhaps, a more serious addiction. Wresting power from such an addict will not be any easier than taking the car keys from an alcoholic, but it must be done. We have allowed Washington to drive drunk for too long.