Community After the Shootings

After the horrible double shootings recently, I found comfort in the community of my church.

With all the current commentary about the decline in Christian churches, I find no other comfort as healing as this community.

We sorrow, of course, and rage, too, at the continued evil that targets innocent people. Then we find purpose in the story of a man who preached love but was himself targeted and killed. Yet, he overcame.

Indeed, two thousand years later, this man’s followers persist. They tend to refugees and feed the hungry and comfort those who mourn. Some of them are killed, too, but where their message is lived out, people regroup and stubbornly conquer by loving even one’s enemies.

Jesus in the Voting Booth

“Forty years ago in Houston, Texas, a group of conservative pastors pulled off a heist at the annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention that reshaped both America’s biggest Protestant denomination and its national politics.” (Lexington: “On the Edge,” The Economist, June 15, 2019)

The article comments on the denomination’s story since that Houston meeting. Many evangelical leaders became openly political, usually favoring candidates from the Republican party.

Forty years on, what has been the result of the politicalization of a denomination? According to the article: “The confidence that fueled the 1979 resurgence is long gone. The convention’s membership . . . is at its lowest in 30 years, and falling. Half of all Southern Baptist children leave the faith . . .”

What’s the takeaway? Perhaps a call for the support of certain directions rather than support of a particular party.

Jesus’ ministry took place in an empire ruled by an aristocratic elite, but we still might learn from his interaction with the leaders of the day. He seemed inordinately concerned for the poor, the hungry, the sick, the dying, and the grieving.

Jesus welcomed any of the wealthy who came to him. However, he told stories like the one consigning a rich man to the flames of hell because of the man’s disregard for the poor beggar in his neighborhood.

Perhaps Christians might vote with these examples in mind.

Frankenstein News

Some call Mary Shelley’s famous novel Frankenstein the first science fiction novel. Her theme is repeated in many later stories. Someone creates a powerful being or force only to see the creation become a weapon of destruction.

The printing press, popularized by Johannes Gutenberg in the 15th century, was an amazing technological advance. It made possible the creation of reading material cheap enough for ordinary people to buy. All sorts of information became available. Everything from the Bible to new scientific theories to incendiary tracts was produced and consumed.

From that time, ordinary people had access to ideas and to the pleasures of reading. Countless lives have been saved through accessible knowledge.

However, cheap printing also made possible the spread of false information like the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a hoax purporting to prove a Jewish plot to dominate the world. This type of easily accessible lying contributed to the murder of millions in World War II.

The digital age has multiplied the Gutenberg effect many times over. Warnings of hurricanes and other disasters wake us from sleep, pinged from our mobiles. Supreme Court decisions and election results are known instantly.

But anyone with an email account or a twitter handle can spread stories, verified or not, sending them off like so much tree pollen in a spring wind.

Efforts at some kind of control over hate material and outright lying are necessary but have limited success.

In truth, the only controls over this digital flood are we the consumers. We can be tempted by Frankenstein rumors or we can choose trusted sources for our information.

 

Luis Velez and Trump’s Tweets

Have You Seen Luis Velez? is a beautiful story of a seventeen-year-old boy and an elderly blind woman connecting with each other and finding a way out of their loneliness.

The story is set in New York City, with its mingling of indifference and the occasional surprise of caring strangers. The story weaves a subtle tale of tribalism but also times when tribalism is overcome. Thus it is a tale of hope.

I read the novel as hate flew back and forth in news stories about four young congresswoman of color, their liberalism riling even some members of their own party.

It wasn’t the stands they took or opposition to those stands. No one has perfect knowledge. Our political system is supposed to provide a way for differences to be lived with and for solutions to be hammered out that work.

Instead, many descended to pure hatred.

I was angry, but something worse joined my anger. For the first time, I became afraid that this country I love will be lost.

I began to fear this tribalism, this unAmerican belief that one group of people is intrinsically superior to all others. It sneaks up on us in our fear of change—the belief that a few people deserve to rule all the rest. It seems so safe, so beguiling.

Are white Europeans superior? That’s the people who, after centuries of bloodshed and fighting, finally began the two worst wars the world has ever seen.

For the first time, I’m afraid too many of us may succumb to hatred.

Yet, as in Luis Velez, it may be possible to step across that fear and hatred. Possible, perhaps, to listen and search for wise and just answers, not those born of knee-jerk hatred against the stranger.

It’s Close Enough For Government Work

“It’s close enough for government work,” the old joke goes. Actually, much “government” work these days is not done by government employees but by contractors. That’s because, over the years, the belief grew that the government employed too many people.

We could save money by contracting work to what many believed were more efficient business models, so the idea went.

However, the reduction led to backlogs for some agencies, like the Internal Revenue Service and the Social Security Administration.

In addition, as the The New York Times (January 3, 2014) pointed out: “ . . . the current practice of contracting out vast swaths of government work indefinitely . . . has created a bloated federal-contractor sector in which the public good is often subservient to profit.”

The outsourcing of work can seem unfair, for example, if a contract worker in a war zone makes a much higher salary than a soldier for Uncle Sam serving in the same area.

No one supposes government employees are all sterling characters. Oversight is required. However, they are generally hired for a particular job function. Unlike contractors, they are not there to make as much money as possible off the taxpayers.

When I worked in a U.S. embassy overseas as a career government employee, I cooperated with the information tech contractors who came to install new computer systems in the embassy. They were nice guys (all males, as I remember) and as far as I could tell did an adequate job with the new systems.

They went back to their hotel at five in the afternoon, followed by an evening out. I usually stayed another hour or so, taking advantage of the quiet to finish work.

If an American citizen called in with an overnight emergency, I came in and worked as long as necessary to find some resolution for the problem.

I had my job, and the contractors had theirs. Contracting makes sense in areas where the need for the work increases for a limited time or requires unusual expertise.

Certainly, U.S. government employees have been guilty of shoddy work, or worse, betraying their country. They take an oath, however, to obey the laws and Constitution of the United States and often develop pride in what they see as serving their country.

With the number of contractors in recent years found guilty of misusing their access to government documents, that sense of pride should not be lightly dismissed.

The Biggest Finding from the Mueller Investigation

From Stephen Kotkin (“American Hustle, What Mueller Found—and Didn’t Find—About Trump and Russia)” in Foreign Affairs, July/August 2019):

“ . . . Russians approaching the Trump campaign could not figure out whom to contact, who was in charge, or who mattered. . . . Putin, supposedly, could help Trump get elected but could not talk to him, despite the publically expressed eagerness of Trump and his people to enter into contact and make deals.”

Jared Kushner is quoted as saying, “They thought we colluded, but we couldn’t even collude with our local offices.”

Apparently, the Trump campaign was so poorly organized that the Russians couldn’t figure out who to talk to. Trump’s people didn’t collude with the Russians because, in Kotkin’s opinion, they were too inept to do so.

A Marshall Plan Approach to Immigration?

El Salvador is one of the so-called “Deadly Triangle” countries of Central America, along with Guatemala and Honduras. These are the countries from which many of the refugees flocking across the southern border of the United States are coming, fleeing violence and abuse.

For decades, these countries have been ruled by corrupt dictators. During the Cold War, the dictators beguiled the U.S. with fears of a communist takeover, leading Americans to turn a blind eye to horrible human rights abuses. Catholic Archbishop Oscar Romero was assassinated in El Salvador when he stood up for the victims.

Nayib Bukele, newly elected president of El Salvador, has called for a new approach to the violence and poverty in his country.

He wants economic and social investments, like job creation and schools. He has called for working with Mexico on immigration issues and beginning a new relationship with the United States.

President Bukele is not from either of the two parties which have ruled El Salvador for decades. Instead of our dealing with immigration only as a border problem, the United States might work with President Bukele on a new approach.

Perhaps we could base it on the Marshall Plan, used so successfully to build up war-torn Europe after World War II.

Begin with Thee and Me

We have different ideas about refugees and immigrants. Some welcome them with open arms. Some shun them as freeloaders and criminals. Some feel sympathy but worry about being overwhelmed by their numbers.

Recently I realized how I can’t get these people out of my mind.

From the little I know about my own ancestors, most came to this country before the American Revolution. I don’t know if they were refugees from wars in Ireland or England or France or if they were drawn simply by promises of a better life. Some of them appear to have been poor, a few more well off.

For all I know, my ancestral tree may include native Americans and black slaves as well as Europeans, but certainly the family benefitted from white privilege. We also benefitted from immigrating at the right time.

That’s why I can’t get those refugees, like the ones on our southern border, out of my mind. They’re my people several generations back.

Whatever choices we make in immigration reform—and we certainly need reform—perhaps we can act from the understanding that these immigrants and refugees are us. Wisdom we need, but hatred and disparagement we don’t.

The numbers may be large, but our policies, if we are not to be judged by a higher power, must come from compassion—toward them as well as the countries they come from.

If You Break It, You Own It.

Many Americans have forgotten that the United States fought, not one, but two wars against Iraq.

The first one, in 1991, may be forgotten because we chose limited aims and achieved them. As soon as the oil-rich country of Kuwait was liberated from Iraqi invaders, the United States left Kuwait and chose not to invade Iraq. We were not saddled with an endless war.

The second war against Iraq, beginning in 2003, was a war we did not need to undertake. We were already fighting in Afghanistan as a result of the 9/ll terrorist attacks.

However, some of our leaders wanted regime change in Iraq. Some possibly had economic reasons—wanting the oil from that country. Others liked the idea of getting rid of an admittedly cruel dictator.

Regardless, Iraq was accused of having nuclear weapons. On flimsy evidence, the United States invaded Iraq and deposed Saddam Hussein. As it turned out, the Iraqis had no nuclear weapons.

Too late. We had broken Iraq and now owned it. Our venture cost us lives and national treasure. We still wrestle with problems from our engineered regime change in that country.

Today, some in our current political administration want regime change in another Middle Eastern country, Iran. That Iran has a nuclear program is not in doubt. However, a diplomatic process led to a halt in programs leading to nuclear weapons. It was not perfect, but it was a start toward lessening the threat of nuclear weapons.

Then the United States unilaterally pulled out of the nuclear deal, even though international inspectors had verified Iran’s compliance with the terms of the agreement.

Now members of the administration are pushing for regime change in Iran. Again, Iran certainly has sponsored conflict in the Middle East. Before we became involved, however, it was based on a centuries old conflict between two branches of Islam. With some reason, Iran now counts us as an enemy.

Remember, if you break it, you own it. We already own the conflict in Afghanistan and Iraq. Do we want to own a third?

The Money that Isn’t There

The late Senator John McCain strongly supported legislation for reform of political campaign funding. The McCain-Feingold Act was passed in 2002.

However, the Supreme Court undid much of the reform in various rulings, including the Citizens United ruling in 2010. The decisions opened the door for unlimited contributions from corporations and allowed more channels of secret money to pour into political campaigns.

According to opensecrets.org, election spending for the 2016 presidential and congressional elections was 6.5 billion dollars.

In a political process depending more and more on money, the advantages to the wealthy are obvious.

Consider also the increasing amounts of money given to political campaigns that might previously have been given to other causes—programs for troubled youth, drug rehabilitation, spiritual growth, to name a few.

Politics has consumed us in the past few years. We seem to believe that the magic candidate will solve all of America’s problems. Even ordinary citizens of limited means, who never before gave politically, turn anger into campaign spending.

In truth, it’s probably the efforts of individuals and small groups concerned for neighbors that do more good. But money given in the past for such programs may be finding its way into political campaigns instead.

Where We Go For the Most Important News

My husband and I subscribe to digital versions of a couple of national newspapers, including our closest major metropolitan daily.

However, the one we faithfully pull out of the newspaper tube next to our mailbox is our twice weekly local newspaper. This one may be the most important.

What did our city council consider in its last meeting about the proposed zoning plans for the city?

How long will one of the ferries serving our island be removed before another replaces it?

What’s going on at the arts center?

We scan the local police report, too.

Oh, yes—there’s the picture of our local high school graduates. Also, a story on the end of the sports year at the school. Announcements of scholarships and what the two student speakers at the commencement will be talking about.

Let’s see, here’s an article about the elementary school students harvesting vegetables from their garden.

We check the events calendar—everything from a library book sale to a meeting for children of alcoholics and dysfunctional families.

Of course, we must read the letters from readers—this is where our neighbors endorse candidates, weigh in on government proposals, and make their opinions known.

All newspapers face challenges today. One of our civic duties is to keep them as strong as possible.

Support is especially vital for our local papers. Regular reporting on local governments and the issues which affect our lives, more than anything else, favors a strong democracy.

Building Up the Land to Restore the Future

When I was growing up, my father used to spread the leaves gathered each fall from our trees into a small plot at the back of our yard, rather than burn them. He used the rich humus produced by the leaves over the years to enrich soil for our plants.

This kind of activity is practiced on a larger scale by an organization called “Plant with Purpose.” This group works with farmers in Mexico, Haiti, and other countries to merge economic and environmental renewal with spiritual renewal.

Much of the land in poorer countries has been depleted through years of deforestation and over-farming. Unable to produce a good living from the land, young men emigrate to cities, sometimes returning later addicted to alcohol or drugs and drawn to criminal gangs practicing violence.

“For those living in rural villages, the answer to emigration is often simple: Restore the land to restore the future.” (“Better Than a Wall,” Sojourners, August 2017)

Such groups promote sustainable agricultural practices, including “cover crops, organic compost, and natural soil erosion barriers to revive farmland.”

Better agricultural practices on one farm in Mexico included planting to maximize this particular plot of land. Food crops were planted on parts of the hilly land, then trees above the crops. Runoff water was used for irrigation. Grass during the dry season fed animals.

The soil gradually was replenished and produced better crops, leading to more food and a higher income. As neighbors were drawn to reproduce the process, immigration lessened. Fewer young men migrated northward.

Anti-family, Finance-dominated System?

In a column in The New York Times, Ross Douthat noted a Fox News commentary in which Tucker Carlson accused Republicans of building “an anti-family, finance-dominated economic system.” (“Tucker Carlson Versus Conservatism,” January 12, 2019)

Among Douthat’s comments on Carlson’s commentary, was his mention of the “family wage” of the 1940’s and 50’s—a wage that allowed “a single breadwinner to support a family.”

Today, women have followed men into employment, often a necessity since one wage no longer supports an average family.

However, it also has to do with women finding their way back into the economic sphere, where they always played a role until the industrial revolution began separating work and family.

Today we have need of different career models for men as well as women .

Careers, more often than not, require a major investment of time while workers are in their twenties and thirties—also the years when parenting is a vital job.

Writes Douthat: “Is there really nothing conservatives can do to address the costs of child care, the unfulfilled parental desire to shift to part-time work, the problem that a slightly more reactionary iteration of Elizabeth Warren once dubbed ‘the two-income trap’?

“If marriages and intact families and birthrates declined as the family wage crumbled, perhaps we should try rebuilding that economic foundation before we declare the crisis of the family a wound that policy can’t heal.”

Robots: Great as Servants, Terrible as Masters?

Robots are a current invention of capitalism.Recently, hotel chains have experimented with robots to perform some types of hotel labor: deliver towels to customers, clean floors, and so on. Hotel workers are worried about the future of their jobs.

How will robots, if widely used, change our human interactions, however brief those interactions? Will I prefer being serviced by a robot? Will I feel slightly uneasy going to and from my hotel room passing, not house cleaners, but little R2-D2’s?

It’s true, I won’t have to tip a robot. Of course, how do I know hotel owners might not add robot service to my bill?

Also, because of fewer jobs, more homeless people may confront me and my conscience as I step from the hotel. More homeless camps? More soup kitchens? Perhaps my taxes will rise to support emergency room care because fewer Americans have health insurance.

In themselves robots are neither good nor bad. Machines, including computers, have freed us from much backbreaking labor and tedious calculations. They have increased both our physical and mental reach.

If robots bring benefits, that is all to the good—as long as the benefits are shared. If fewer human hours are needed to perform work, establish, perhaps, a 32 hour work week as opposed to a 40 hour one. Provide affordable job training for increasing tech jobs and other growing fields. Employed workers pay taxes.

Capitalism is great. Share it.

A Pilgrimage from Nashville to the Purpose Based Novel

Southern Writers Magazine has published a blog of mine in its Suite T section: “Pilgrimage with the Purpose Based Novel.”

It’s an updated rendering of a Southern gal’s journey from the home of the Grand Ole Opry to a career in lands she’d only dreamed of visiting. Inevitable, I suppose, that I did as I’d always done: tried to make sense of overwhelming changes through writing.

I’d tried telling it first in From Y’all to Assalamu Alaikum: A Southern Baptist Discovers the Middle East.

The article is a shorter version, which means maybe I’ve learned at least something along the way.

 

 

Fake News circa 1960

Lawrence Martin-Bittman created fake news for the Czech Communist Party in the 1950’s and 60’s. Sharon McConnell tells his story in “The Founding Father of Fake News (Writer’s Digest, March/April 2019).

Martin-Bittman joined the Communist Party in 1954 at age 15. After studying law and journalism in Czechoslovakia, he became an official in the Czech disinformation service. He became a press attaché in the Czech embassy in Vienna, working to distribute false news stories to journalists. His purpose was to poison the relationships between the United States and Western Europe.

In at least one instance, he used blackmail to force an Indonesian diplomat to feed false information about a U.S. “plot” to his home country of Indonesia. As a result, anger against Americans severely damaged American influence in the region.

In another instance, he captured signatures of American diplomats from Christmas cards and placed them on false documents.

The Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, however, horrified him and led him to change his mind about his communist beliefs. He fled with his wife to the United States.

After a year of debriefing in Washington, D.C., he eventually became a professor of journalism at Boston University.

McConnell writes, “Think about all the damage Martin-Bittman and his cohorts managed to cause before the internet existed. . . . As a reader, it’s important to approach headlines and text with a healthy sense of skepticism . . . considering the source . . . and looking for objective sources.”

Amen.

Livestreaming Violence: Our Choice

Jacinda Ardern, New Zealand’s prime minister, has called for a global meeting to discuss measures to stop the livestreaming of violence. It’s set for this week in Paris. Ardern is co-chairing the Paris meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron.

New Zealand recently was the scene of another horrific mass murder, this time of Muslims. This massacre was planned by the killers to be beamed to the world on social media as they carried it out.

In the world of instantaneous broadcasts, the massacre was viewed, as the killers intended, millions of times. Social media sites attempted to shut it down, but humans can act only so fast—not nearly as fast as the internet.

It’s a safe bet that virtually everybody who downloaded that video did so by choice.
Whatever the legal changes, or lack of, to the practice of livestreaming, people watch such scenes by choice.

An unwatched video loses its power. Ultimately, it’s our choice to watch or not.

Purpose Beats Escape

“People whose method of coping with life has been to escape it have to learn, almost from scratch, how to live. . . . It’s a long, hard and essentially spiritual process.” So writes Danny Duncan Collum in “Learning How to Live Life (on Life’s Terms)” (Sojourners, April 2019)

Collum, a writer based in Kentucky, comments about a film Recovery Boys, an effort to aid young men in recovering from drug addiction.

Boys attempt to kick the habit while housed at a remote farm. They take care of animals and crops and spend time in meditation. Some are apparently making it; others have a harder time.

Collum’s article suggests the need for purpose if one is to avoid, not only drug destruction, but all sorts of other ills. We can be drug free yet addicted to wealth or power or pleasure. Somehow, to overcome, or to prevent such “addiction” in the first place, we must be protected by some purpose bigger than ourselves.

It is, as Collum says, a spiritual battle.

Equal Opportunity Slaughter

In the past few months, we’ve seen massacres of Muslims in New Zealand, Christians in Sri Lanka, and Jews in the United States.

We appear unable to allow men and women to practice chosen spiritual disciplines to guide them through complicated and difficult times.

Ours is an age shot through with the worship of wealth and power. Ordinary people struggle against oppression and war and famine. You would think we would welcome a little spiritual comfort and insight for them.

A spiritual pilgrimage is an acknowledgment of our weakness. If we seek help beyond the human, we are going against the dictates of the age. We are saying people matter more than things. We are saying justice matters more than wealth. We are saying humility matters more than power.

Unless we have some spiritual answers, death ends it all—everything we seek vanishes. Against this reality, you would think we would encourage spiritual seeking, not try to kill its practitioners.

Big Brother Has You in His Sights

Reading the Mueller Report side-by-side with a U.S. diplomat’s recent memoir, The Back Channel, makes frightening reading.

William Burns, author of The Back Channel, spent most of his adult life, from 1982 until his retirement in 2014, serving the United States as a diplomat. He held several top jobs, including ambassador to Russia from 2005 until 2008.

In his book, Burns goes out of his way to compliment almost all the people he has worked with in a long diplomatic life, both American and foreign. One exception is Russian leader Vladimir Putin.

Putin, according to Burns, harbors something close to paranoia about the United States. Among other views, Putin doesn’t see the movement in Ukraine to topple a Russia-friendly autocrat as a people’s movement, but an effort by the United States to keep Russia down.

Burns writes: “Putin gradually shifted from testing the West in places where Russia had a greater stake . . . like Ukraine . . . to places where the West had a far greater stake, like the integrity of its democracies.”

Then read even the outlines of the Mueller Report, beginning with the section titled “Russian ‘Active Measures’ Social Media Campaign.” (The term “IRA” is the Internet Research Agency, a Russian agency used to spread disinformation on the internet.)

“The IRA Targets U.S. Elections. The IRA Ramps Up U.S. Operations As Early As 2014. U.S. Operations Through IRA-Controlled Social Media Accounts. U.S. Operations Through Facebook. U.S. Operations Through Twitter.” And so on.

The unquestionable conclusion of the Mueller Report is that the Russian government actively interfered in U.S. elections in an attempt to manipulate voters its way.

And next time?

“Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.”