Actually Leaving Facebook?

A news columnist, Froma Harrop, announced her intention to leave Facebook. She’s leaving because she believes Facebook has become a platform for fake news.

At the same time, Mark Zuckerberg, head of Facebook, has posted (on Facebook) an announcement that his company is acting to curb false news stories. It is, he said, developing new tools to detect and classify “misinformation.” Further, he has said, the company won’t accept adds that are “illegal, misleading or deceptive.”

Possibly the problem is with the “friends” concept. Facebook may fit comfortably among a group of actual friends, brought together by some kind of kinship. It runs aground when it becomes an advertising center for businesses or political parties. Calling customers or potential voters our “friends,” when we do not even know them, degrades the word.

For the moment, I am still on Facebook. I have decided, however, that I will not like or click approval of any product or any unknown opinion piece. In fact, I will limit my viewing to personal notes from actual friends. And my time on Facebook will be minimal.

Wanted: Thick-Skinned Politicians

Barack Obama was named “Comedian in Chief” by news columnist Timothy Egan.

Obama joked a lot and never complained about cartoons emphasizing his big ears. Donald Trump will have to get used to the lampooning of his hair and physical characteristics.

Even more, Obama managed to respond with civility to outrageous insults. When Philippine President Rodrigo Duarte used a vulgar epithet for Obama, Obama responded that Duarte “was clearly a colorful guy.”

A politician’s family must cope with comments about him or her that go beyond mere humor. Trump’s ten-year-old son Barron will now face what Obama’s daughters have endured for eight years.

Michelle Obama taught her family: “When they go low, we go high.” Hopefully the Trump family will practice this as well.

Trump will need to take “Saturday Night Live” spoofs and political cartoons in his stride and laugh along with the public. Americans like politicians with a sense of humor.

I think it was the newscaster Harry Reasoner who said he wouldn’t trust any politician who lacked one.

Post-truth Age?

“Post-truth” is Oxford Dictionaries’ word of the year for 2016.

Post-truth means circumstances where “objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.”

The growth of a post-truth environment is heightened by the speed with which digital media can ramp up emotions with misleading information.

More than a few conservative and liberal media sites stretch the truth or bury it. The Seattle Times columnist, Danny Westneat, wrote about his city’s Bipartisan Report, which Westneat named a “click bait” site for liberals.

In response, the site founder said he was only following the successful formula used by Fox News. “What Fox does is accurate to a point. It’s based on facts and reporting, but, at the same time it’s giving people only the parts they want to hear. .. it’s not lying, but it’s leaving out critical information.”

The choice is ours. Plenty of news outlets lean conservative or liberal (usually within their acknowledged opinion pieces) without reporting dodgy news stories. We have a choice between reputable news sites or entertainment that stokes our prejudices.

Yogurt and the American Dream

You may not have heard of Hamdi Ulukaya, but you may know about, or even consume, Chobani yogurt. The company is based in Twin Falls, Idaho.

Ulukaya, a Turkish immigrant, bought a defunct yogurt factory in Twin Falls and turned it into a successful business. He now employs about 2,000 people, according to an article in The Seattle Times (November 6, 2016).

His story reminds us of other migrants before him: refugees from the religious wars that devastated Europe in the 1600’s, the Jews, the Irish, the displaced persons of Europe following World War II, Indochinese from Asian conflicts, and now victims of Middle Eastern wars. The list is long of the different ethnic, religious, and other groups who have found refuge in the United States.

As the Chobani business grew, Ulukaya needed more workers. Close to Twin Falls is a refugee resettlement center. Ulukaya hired about 300 refugees for above minimum wage jobs at his factory.

Sounds like the ultimate rags-to-riches story of the American dream.

Unfortunately, Ulakaya has received death threats on social media from some who claim Ulakaya wishes to “drown the United States in Muslims.” According to the Times article, “the far-right website WND published a story, ‘American Yogurt Tycoon Vows to Choke U.S. With Muslims.’”

The mayor of Twin Falls and his wife have received death threats for supporting Ulukaya’s work, which benefits their region with the money spent by the employees, as well as the taxes they pay.

Past history of other refugees has included hatred of new immigrants, including Irish and Jews. Today, however, we contend with the rumor hate mill of social media, spewing out invectives with no verification required.

How do we discourage these unfair attacks? Something to think about as a new administration takes office in Washington.

The Canadian Century?

Perhaps the twenty-first century will be called Pax Canada as the twentieth was known as Pax Americana and the nineteenth as Pax Britannica.

In a section called “Liberty Moves North,” the British magazine The Economist (October 29, 2016) suggested Canada might be a replacement for the United States as a leader for hope and justice in the world.

Maybe Canada will take up what some consider the fallen American (U.S.) guardianship of a rules-based order. The United States was the great influencer in the last half of the twentieth century. The country gained economic power and a measure of wealth for many of its citizens as a result.

Bucking the populist trend toward protectionism, Canada has just signed a trade agreement with Europe.

If Canada grows in influence as the United States did in the twentieth, perhaps Canada will allow the United States the same kind of protection that the U.S. afforded Great Britain and Europe in the past century.

Can the Democratic Lamb and the Republican Lion Lie Down Together?

 

“It is constantly assumed . . . that when the lion lies down with the lamb the lion becomes lamb-like. But that is brutal annexation and imperialism on the part of the lamb. That is simply the lamb absorbing the lion instead of the lion eating the lamb. The real problem—can the lion lie down with the lamb and still retain his royal ferocity?”
—G.K. Chesterton

Instead of wishing to annihilate those with whom we disagree (whether by eating them or suppressing them), can we acknowledge their right to exist? Not only their right to exist but their gifts?

Winners in a political contest can carry out their “mandate” in a wise and conciliatory manner or in a haughty one that humiliates the losers. Losers can react with hatred toward the winners or acknowledge their right to lead. Who knows? The lambs and the lions might discover a middle path they can walk together, one on the left, one on the right.

The Power Passes Peacefully

“Last night, I congratulated Donald Trump and offered to work with him on behalf of our country. I hope that he will be a successful president for all Americans.”
    –Hillary Clinton’s concession speech, November 9, 2016

“I had a chance to talk to President-elect Trump last night—about 3:30 in the morning, I think it was—to congratulate him on winning the election. And I had a chance to invite him to come to the White House tomorrow to talk about making sure that there is a successful transition between our presidencies.”
    –U.S. President Barack Obama, November 9, 2016

“U.S. President Barack Obama and President-elect Donald Trump met on Thursday for the first time, setting aside the deep rancor that dominated the long campaign season to discuss the transition to the Republican’s inauguration on Jan. 20. Their 90-minute meeting in the White House Oval Office, with no aides present, took place just two days after Trump’s stunning election victory over Hillary Clinton, Obama’s former secretary of state”
    –Reuters, November 10, 2016

The United States has endured a bitter election campaign, with unfounded hints of a “rigged” election. We can offer thanksgiving for a bit of redemption in this peaceful change of power, our tradition since John Adams took over from George Washington in 1797.

American Leadership Is Not a Given

Polarized Americans agree on one thing: Never again do they want a political campaign like the one they’ve just suffered.

The campaign has done more than traumatize American citizens. It has damaged the effectiveness of the United States’ ability to operate in the rest of the world.

In a quote in The New York Times, one Lebanese reporter, Hisham Melhem, illustrated the feeling: “. . . there were always pockets of people who had studied in the U.S. who still looked up to the United States . . . Now many of them have given up on the United States as a beacon of progress and enlightenment.”

One member of India’s ruling party asked, “These are the two best candidates they have to run the biggest economy and the oldest democracy in the world?”

Whether Americans seek military alliances to fight terrorism before it reaches the United States, customers to buy their products, or other underpinnings of American influence in the world, the United States requires the good will of others. Plenty of countries wait in the wings to take America’s place as a world leader.

No, I Did Not Vote for Donald Trump

I am a registered voter in Island County, State of Washington. In this state, voting is by mail. I received my ballot about three weeks ago.

I spent a couple of days studying the candidates, legislative issues, and other measures on the ballot.

I marked my choices and mailed my ballot to the Island County elections office.

My ballot will be placed with others in a controlled access room with 24-hour camera surveillance. When counting begins on November 8, the machine readable ballots will be run through a scanner. The scanner is not and has never been connected to the internet.

I did not vote for Donald Trump. I voted for Hilary Clinton.

Clinton may be a political elite, but Trump is an economic elite. He is an American version of Russia’s crony capitalist.

Judging from Trump’s business practices, I believe he favors policies for economic elites. He has used all available tax loopholes to avoid paying taxes on his wealth. He apparently is comfortable with middle and working class Americans bearing the cost of our government—including our military, which protects him from foreign enemies and allows him freedom to pursue his business interests.

I believe if Trump were president, he would support policies favoring the wealthy, further widening the gap between the economic elites and the working and middle classes.

So I did not vote for Donald Trump.

An Absence of Caregivers

Humans are dependent on others to care for them for the first several years of their existence. In addition, independent citizens can become dependent through sickness, old age, or misfortune.

Caregiving is as necessary for a society to function as are healthy political and economic systems.

In our justifiable concern with women’s rights, we have too often forgotten the caregiving performed by women over millennia. We made inadequate provision for it in the new system.

In the rush to give women the right to be “more” than mothers, we forgot the damage done to society when fathers neglect to be fathers. Children growing up without fathers compensate in often damaging actions, from drugs to gangs. We need both parents.

In a sense, mothers have followed fathers into a life not healthy for either parent. Both, in the words of Erika Bachiochi have chosen “to compete on a playing field designed for the unencumbered.” (“Embodied Caregiving,,” First Things; October 2016.)

For those who choose to be caregivers, what help do we offer them? Help may mean longer paid leaves, or part time work, or permission to drop out of a career for a while.

Caregivers need time more than any other gift, time to shape children’s lives and to provide services for the aged and the sick and the broken.

Decreasing the Demand Side of Abortion

No subject divides Americans like the abortion issue. David P. Gushee, a Mercer University professor, discussed abortion in a November, 2016, Sojourners article.

Since World War II, Gushee writes, “all kinds of factors have conspired . . . to create a society whose conditions constitute a perfect storm for abortion.”

Young adults need more years for education and training. Parents are less able to supervise dating partners for their children. From the age of sixteen or before, young adults have access to automobiles. Changing attitudes toward morality are evident in the films we see and the books we read.

We have Gushee says, “a culture deeply dependent on abortion.” Our efforts, then, should go toward preventing, as Gushee says, “that miserable drive to the abortion clinic,” a decision after the fact of pregnancy.

We could recognize valid needs on both sides of the abortion equation. One side sees an act requiring both a man and a woman, yet whose consequences are often borne by the woman alone. The man can walk away with his wombless body, back to his career and even to another woman, unencumbered by life within him.

Others ask: If it’s okay to stop life in the womb because it’s inconvenient, why is it not okay to take any life that’s inconvenient? Why do some accept abortion in general but become incensed with sex-selective abortion? Isn’t all life valuable?

Both groups might question why, in a time when women in developed countries now have many choices, we appeared fixated on two individuals and their attraction to each other without any care for the wider community.

What about the importance of goals, purpose, and meaning, especially for young women?

Homelessness, Drugs, and Purpose

The battle lines are drawn in Seattle, a ferry ride and an hour or so away from where I live. On one side are those who wish to remove Seattle’s growing homeless camps. On the other side are those who argue for the camps as necessary in a city with sky high rents and inadequate resources for dealing with mental illness and addiction.

Some of the homeless are responsible citizens with jobs but inadequate salaries to afford the high rents. Others have lost jobs through no fault of their own, victims of medical misfortune or of jobs lost in a changing economy.

Others are homeless because they are mentally ill, suffering from diseases such as schizophrenia. The state of Washington, through budget slashing, has seriously eroded the state’s ability to care for victims of mental illness.

The most difficult homeless are those addicted to alcohol and other drugs. These are the homeless that neighborhoods fear: the addicts who shoot up, dropping needles behind as dangers to children and other innocents; who camp on public spaces, leaving them trashed and unfit for human use; who attract drug dealers and turn neighborhoods into drug bazaars and sometimes murder scenes.

Dealing with addiction is surely complex and difficult. Any person under the terrible pull of drugs no doubt needs a strong purpose to conquer their awful hold: Family? A place of service? A pet to love?

If I had a loved one on drugs, I don’t think I’d want them living in a homeless camp. I’d want them removed to a safe place with supervision to help them find a way, a purpose for choosing a better life.

Safe spaces to rehabilitate require money, tax money. Cutting taxes may be a campaign pleaser, but sometimes cutting taxes means we pay higher costs down the road in wasted human lives and neighborhoods.

What’s the Secret of a Literary Masterpiece?

We sat mesmerized while the actors spoke in Elizabethan English and dashed around on a small square stage in the middle of four groupings of folding chairs. How could a three-hour play, William Shakespeare’s Richard III, written five hundred years ago, so capture our twenty-first century audience? An audience accustomed to movie masterpieces with all sorts of special effects?

What made the play speak to us? First of all, superb actors. They created emotions, ambition, and desire that spoke through the often unfamiliar and flowery language. They pulled us into a world of treachery and betrayal and ambition. They acted so well that the sniping, arguing, and name calling in the first act recalled twenty-first century political sparring followed on our mobiles.

Shakespeare’s stories remind us of unbridled ambition, as prevalent today, not only in our politics but in our corporate boardrooms, as in the bard’s England. He portrayed the universal type who sees others as no more than tokens on a chess board to be swept aside to win prizes. The story and the characters were real in a basic sense, despite their sixteenth century trappings.

It isn’t always the suspense of wondering how a story will turn out. Most of us in the audience knew what happened to Richard III. It’s the journey, the how and the why that captivates. Because these stories are repeated through the centuries, and we shiver at their familiarity.

Muslim Democracy

Of all the countries convulsed by the Arab Spring, beginning in 2010, only the small North African nation of Tunisia remains a serious contender for a democratic form of government.

One of the leaders of the democracy movement in Tunisia offered his thoughts on Muslims and democracy. (Rached Ghannouchi, “From Political Islam to Muslim Democracy,” Foreign Affairs, September/October 2016.)

Ghannouchi helped found the Ehnnahda Pary as an Islamist party years ago when Tunisia was still ruled by a dictator. He suffered imprisonment and torture for his activities,

He believes past Tunisian dictatorships forced secularism on Tunisians. Since the people now are free to practice Islam if they wish, Ghannouchi writes, he no longer sees a need for his party to protect Islam as a core political activity.

The new constitution, he says, “enshrines democracy and protects political and religious freedoms.” Muslims now are free to worship as they please.

But how free are religious minorities to practice their religion?

Most Tunisians practice Sunni Islam, but Christians, Jews, and other faiths are represented in the population. Some operate schools for their youth.

When I lived in Tunisia in the early 2000’s, before the Arab Spring, I attended a mostly expatriate gathering of Christians. On my way to the church, I passed a Muslim mosque and a Jewish synagogue. Local Christians also gather in Tunisia, as do Bahais.

Tunisia’s constitution declares Islam to be the country’s religion. The Tunisian president must be Muslim. Yet, the constitution also stipulates that the country is a civil state. It guarantees freedom of belief, conscience, and exercise of religious practices.

No doubt the average Tunisian accepts the concept of a state religion with some tolerance for other beliefs. The line between complete religious freedom and the pull of a majority religion is never easy for any nation.

For more information, the following link will take you to the State Department’s International Religious Freedom Report for 2015. Find your way to the report on Tunisia and other countries of interest to you.

Are Taxpayers Chumps and Losers?

William Falk, editor-in-chief of THE WEEK, wrote a sarcastic opinion piece, pretending he was a loser for paying his taxes (14 Oct 2016).

“As a working stiff,” he wrote, “I couldn’t write off my lunches, my car, my clothes, and my hairdresser as business expenses.”

Further, he wrote, “When I hired contractors and repairmen, I actually paid them the full amount that they billed me, instead of declaring their work shoddy and stiffing them.”

Still continuing his sarcastic diatribe, Falk says he wasted his taxes “on national defense, schools, clean air and water, medical research, and programs to keep the old and the poor from starving. What a schmuck I am!”

This last paragraph by Falk reminds me of why I pay taxes. Like Warren Buffett, I’m proud to have paid them since my first summer job as a college intern on my hometown newspaper. I consider it money well spent.

Graveyard of Empires

What’s the best bad way to cope with the Middle East? The next U.S. president had better be prepared.

The Middle East is called “the graveyard of empires.” The small region where Africa, Asia, and Europe connect has bedeviled conquerors for millennia.

An instructor in one of my classes when I worked for the U.S. State Department told us about a cliff or large rock in the country of Lebanon. The rock is inscribed with graffiti of various conquering groups passing that way over centuries, each presence erased by the next. The list might include Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, French, and British.

One of the last of the conquerors, Britain, wanted a friendly Middle East because of the Suez Canal and the desire for safe passage to India, one of their dominions. Untold numbers of British soldiers died in various wars in the region until Britain retreated from most of its possessions.

For one thing, different ethnic and religious communities live side by side throughout the region. Choosing allies from one group makes enemies of other groups.

Example: many of the Kurds, U.S. allies in the fight against the Islamic State, are enemies of the Turks, our NATO ally.

Another example: Iraq used to be governed by a dictator, Saddam Hussein, a Sunni Muslim, even though the majority of Iraqis are Shia Muslim. Now, after our war against Saddam, the Shia are the dominant force in the Iraqi government and have problems with the Sunni, who lost power. Some of the Sunni supported the Islamic State, which the Iraqi government is fighting.

The United States became interested in the Middle East when oil became important to our economy and massive supplies were found there. Now we are learning why this area is called a graveyard.

Humor as Comfort in an Election Year

Inscribed on a tee shirt: “I don’t approve of political jokes. I’ve seen too many of them get elected.” (The Lighter Side Co.)

In a dysfunctional election year, Americans use humor as a survival weapon.

David Horsey, cartoonist for The Los Angeles Times, said, that this year’s race between “the real estate mogul Republican nominee and the first female nominee has made for a presidential campaign year like no other.”

To celebrate the role of political cartoons in news coverage, Duke University and the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists recently hosted a three-day festival which included live cartooning.

“Satire . . . punctures hypocrisy,” said Frederick Mayer, one of the event’s officials.“It may be our best hope of really seeing clearly what is at stake in this election.”

One of Horsey’s cartoons shows a family huddled in a bombed-out building in Aleppo, Syria. The mother asks: “Has anyone mentioned us in the U.S. presidential campaign?” The father answers, “No, they’re debating Trump’s tweets about a fat beauty queen.” (Sentinel & Enterprise)

Swords into Plowshares: One Way to Deal with Guns

Michael Martin, a Mennonite from Colorado, turns guns into tools you can garden with. (“Gardening with Guns,” Plough, Autumn 2016.)

Martin and his wife, Hannah, decided to change guns from weapons of destruction to tools for growing food. Their first weapon was an AK-47 assault rifle. They turned it into hand cultivators.

One mother, who had lost her son to gun violence, pounded a handgun removed from Philadelphia streets into a hoe and tilling fork. It was used to plant flowers for gun violence victims.

Another mother, whose son shot several young schoolgirls before committing suicide, took a hammer to the barrel of a gun in a demonstration for Martin’s organization. The mother visits regularly with one of the survivors of the shooting, who is wheelchair bound from the incident.

A military veteran, saved from suicide by a passing stranger, turned his Smith & Wesson .22 into a tool he used for planting a garden.

Anther man, whose father committed suicide with a gun, donated it to the group.

Martin’s group, RAW (WAR turned around) does not take away gun rights. They simply transform guns into instruments for healing and growth.

Meditation After Another Mall Shooting

Last weekend, the news flashed across our digital screens: yet another mass shooting among mall shoppers in our normally quiet corner of northwestern Washington state,

Beyond the rise of gun deaths, which should trouble us all, I pondered the heartache of ordinary people. A carefree outing can vanish in the time it takes for a troubled young man to pull the trigger of a gun a few times.

Five people killed at random, out for innocent Saturday evening fun—shopping, movie watching, perhaps a meal out.

Then I remembered an eighth grade Valentine’s Day party when I was thirteen years old.
It was also the day my father was due to come home from the hospital, An ambulance had taken him there following a sudden heart attack. Now, so medical tests showed, he had recovered well enough to return to us.

Instead, in the middle of the Valentine party, a family friend appeared at the classroom door and took my teacher aside to talk to him. I will always be grateful to that teacher for then leading me outside and so gently telling me that my father had died.

I learned at an impressionable, early adolescent age that good things are not guaranteed to continue.

No matter that mall outings join the list of community spaces where innocent fun can change in an instant to soul numbing tragedies. Yes, we’re called to address the issues that allow people to be killed so easily, but first we must take care of families plunged into tragedy through no fault of their own.

After my father died, we learned the value of friends surrounding us with care. They led us again to believe in purpose. They moved us beyond tragedy, able again to enjoy life’s blessings, of which many more were to come.

Good times may not last, but neither do bad times.

Ten Reasons Why the United States Has Traditionally Shunned Torture

David P. Gushee, a professor at Mercer University, listed ten reasons in a Sojourners magazine article why the United States has not legitimized the torture of enemies. Gushee is professor of Christian ethics at Mercer University, founded by Georgia Baptists in the nineteenth century.

His list of reasons:

1) Our Constitution, in the 8th Amendment, bans cruel and unusual punishment.

2) Military traditions banned torture from our very beginning.

3) Our nation began with a founding narrative of having come out of British despotism and not wanting to develop such despotism in our own nation.

4) The U.S. was deeply involved in the development of international law and the Geneva Conventions, as in the United Nations, which meets on our soil. [The Geneva Conventions established standards of humane treatment in times of war, beginning in 1864 and continuing after World War II.]

5) We are a nation that began with “a due regard to the opinions of [hu]mankind.”

6) Checks and balances were built into the Constitution and all structures of government.

7) We began with realism about human nature and its tendencies toward domination, tyranny, and abuse.

8) We have for two centuries enjoyed a free press.

9) We are blessed with longstanding medical traditions in the Judeo-Christian-Hippocratic line.

10) Our nation from its beginning has been shaped by religious traditions.

Gushee believes the United States acted against these traditions after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. His opinions were stated in the April 2014 issue of Sojourners.