Our Hopes Versus the Hopes of ISIS

One reason some young people are attracted to radical Islam is the promise of hope for those who lack it. For years in too many Middle Eastern countries, corrupt elites have run governments like personal fiefdoms. They became rich while throwing crumbs to their citizens, imprisoning and torturing any who disagreed with their policies.

While the actions of ISIS repulse civilized people, ISIS has a reputation for cleaning up corruption. (They could hardly do worse.) It also offers a sense of purpose through the ISIS-inspired belief in a spiritual kingdom, bizarre though its practices may be.

Why are youth from Europe and North America attracted to ISIS, despite the greater freedoms, chances of material success, and more open governments of those countries?

Perhaps we have too often stressed freedom but have forgotten to emphasize the discipline and servanthood that partner with any successful freedom. Freedom has become a means to power and wealth, not an opportunity for meaning through service and community and an inner life of the spirit.

Showing Up on Easter

(Repeated from a post on April 19, 2014)

Jesus is crucified, his body taken away.

The religious rulers are satisfied. They’ve won. They’ve handled this challenge to their authority by hinting to the Romans that they could have an insurrection on their hands if they didn’t take care of this peasant leader. Their plan worked well, with the Romans handling matters in their usual efficient way.

The Romans are satisfied, too, with the possible exception of their man, Pilate, who expressed misgivings. He went along, however, understanding that it was in his interest not to upset the ones on whom his job depends, so no problem.

The disciples, all men, have fled, taking refuge in some out-of-the-way bolt hole.

Only a few women stay with Jesus, and they follow to see where his body is taken. They spend the next day, the day of rest, preparing for his burial. He must be taken care of, even if all they can do is carry out a proper burial. They’re only women, and no one pays them much attention.

So they come to the tomb on Sunday morning. They find it empty. They are the first to know and the first to tell. What no one else did, they did. They came. They showed up.

Escaping with Georgette Heyer

Regency romance is the quintessential formulaic genre. Yet, for escape reading, Georgette Heyer’s
stories prove that even formulaic genre can delight. The reader knows from the first few pages who the hero and heroine are and knows they’re going to end up committed to marrying each other by the end of the book.

I read it, not for its plot, but to enjoy Heyer’s use of dialog and ironic wit to draw us in. A good book is defined by its writing, not by its genre.

I don’t encourage a steady diet of escape reading, but a bit of comfort food sweetens life once in a while.

There’s escapism and there’s escapism. What’s wrong with using a book for escape? Call it an affordable vacation.

Short as the Watch That Ends the Night

My father introduced me to history. For him, it wasn’t a collection of boring dates. History was people.

He enthralled me with fascinating tales of hillbilly ancestors who fought in the Revolutionary War in lesser known battles like Kings Mountain. He told me stories of Winston Churchill and the Battle of Britain, when England stood firm against the Nazis after they conquered most of Europe.

With that upbringing, of course the stories I write now are rooted in time and place. The space that spoke to me and that I have put into my novels is the gray area that begins with the end of World War II. A schizophrenic time period—not historical fiction, but not contemporary either in its first decades.

I examine the times, asking why my country and the world changed so drastically during that time.

The Cold War with the Soviet Union descended almost immediately following World War II, when the United States accepted the mantle of world leadership.

Americans chose to enter the Vietnamese conflict, and it has haunted us ever since. Eventually, the world saw the miraculous end of the Cold War without a nuclear holocaust.

Spiritual changes were no less profound. The age of city-wide revivals passed into today’s age of the nones, the ones with no religious affiliation.

What did we do to the times and what did the times do to us? That’s what the characters in my novels seek to find out.

Why Write a Story?

In my “inspiration” folder, I keep articles by or about famous writers whom I admire.
Once in a while I review the obituary for Madeleine L’Engle, the author of the children’s classic A Wrinkle in Time, from The New York Times, September 8, 2007.

“Her writing transcended genre and generation,” Douglas Martin wrote in the obituary.

The series that included A Wrinkle in Time “combines elements of science fiction with insights into love and moral purpose . . .”

I ponder the concept of moral purpose.

L’Engle said of her most famous work: “It was only after it was written that I realized what some of it meant.”

I often write a story for no other reason than because the story is there. After I’ve written a draft or two, it dawns on me what are its reasons for being. It answers, I suppose, some question in my subconscious. The story is there, and I write it first.

In answer to the question, “Why does anybody tell a story?” L’Engle replied, “It does indeed have something to do with faith . . . faith that the universe has meaning, that our little human lives are not irrelevant, that what we choose or say or do matters, matters cosmically.”

We divide into two camps: Life has meaning or it doesn’t. L’Engle came down on the side of purpose and blessed us with her insights.

Return of the Smoke-Filled Political Backrooms?

Political parties aren’t mentioned in the U.S. Constitution. Political parties developed in the first years of the republic, however, and soon drove elections. Only recently have the party candidates been chosen largely by primary voting.

Traditionally, the choice of a party’s candidate wasn’t certain until the party convention itself. Deals were made in those smoke-filled back rooms. Not until after the 1960’s did the convention become a boring pep rally that merely rubber stamped primary elections.

The earlier method sounds undemocratic. However, some are calling for a return of true political conventions, where the delegates are not pledged to any candidate. Decisions are made at the convention.

A return to the earlier system means the political party leaders consider more than the wishes of their base voters. They take the longer view, considering how likely a candidate is to be chosen by the larger electorate. They search for a candidate who appeals to the independents and perhaps a few of the other party who might consider voting for an especially qualified candidate.

Listening to the anger-filled, even violent emotions of the current campaign, the return to those backrooms is appealing.

Who Eats Together Anymore?

Family therapists used to ask patients about their family meals in helping them understand their relationships. Apparently those questions are less relevant now because families don’t eat together enough to draw conclusions in many cases. This is how Les and Leslie Parott introduced their book The Hour That Matters Most.

Parents may consider meals a challenge: children crying, refusing to eat, or generally acting ornery. Apparently it’s worth the effort.

Studies have shown, the Parotts say, that dining together decreases the likelihood that the children will do drugs, become involved in promiscuous sexuality, or suffer serious depression.

Not every meal has to be a seven-course banquet. Simple meals may even be healthier: a salad thrown together, tuna sandwiches, and fruit for dessert.

Frankly, I’ve never found cooking as much fun as some do. Neither did my mother. We often had hastily prepared meals—canned corned beef hash or pork chops with mushroom soup and canned green beans, but we ate at least one meal together each day, more on weekends.

I’m glad she made the effort. I remember how pleasurable the talk was at the table (once we children grew into a more civilized state). Our discussions were civil, on just about anything and everything: politics, community, church activities, school activities, world events, and so on. We conversed, in other words.

Dining together promises a relatively easy way to promote healthy families. We all have to eat.

Finding the Best Bad Candidate

I know better than to look for a perfect candidate for U.S. president. Forget swallowing any candidate’s campaign rhetoric with worshipful awe.

Better that I coldly examine a candidate’s ability to lead (not coerce) a complex country in a complex world. They will be the leader not only of those who voted for them but also of those who voted against them.

Better that I ask how wisely they will react to unforeseen events, because the next few years will certainly bring them. Can they admit and learn from their mistakes? Because they will surely make them.

I should understand the limits on a president’s power. The president is bound not only by other branches of the U.S. government but by circumstances elsewhere in the world over which he or she has little control. Better a president who can react to sudden changes with creativity and the willingness to consider different opinions.

In addition, I judge them beyond domestic issues. Fairly or unfairly, the United States is expected to play a leading role on the world stage. How well do they understand that a reputation for decency and honesty and fair play is as important for the carrying out of our policies as the ability to shock and awe our enemies?

When Whole Populations Flee

We can understand why Syrians are leaving their country. Were we living there, the anarchy would tempt most of us to leave also. We can see why Afghans flee, too, a country split into corrupt, warring factions. Iraq? Not much better.

Others flee Libya, just as broken as the rest. Still others leave corrupt governments and economic hardships in Yemen and Somalia and Nigeria and a dozen or more other places.

Though neighbors to Syria—Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey—absorb the most refugees per person, masses flee toward the more diverse European countries. Why do so many refugees seek these culturally different countries?

Economic opportunity, of course, and relief from overcrowded refugee camps. Still, we might be surprised that so many flee toward Europe’s secular culture.

European countries uphold freedom of religion, impartial judicial systems, and representative government. Such policies create the societies toward which refugees flee. Do they understand what creates those societies? Can they, someday, replicate policies in their own countries?

Choose Politics or Dictatorship

David Brooks, columnist for The New York Times, recently wrote an article capturing our current political dysfunction. A diverse society like ours, he said, operates through either dictatorship or politics. “Our founding fathers chose politics.”

In our current political process, however, we gravitate toward a dictatorial approach. We are unwilling to settle for merely a piece of the pie. We want the whole thing. Either our side wins or we will bring down the country. Our opponents are not merely people with whom we disagree. They are traitors.

“The antipolitics people elect legislators who have no political skills or experience,” Brooks writes. “That incompetence leads to dysfunctional government, which leads to more disgust with government, which leads to a demand for even more outsiders.”

In a dictatorship, one group gets everything it wants. In politics, no group gets everything it wants. For whatever reason, too many of us today seem unable to live with this fact of democratic existence.

Circle the Wagons

During times of great change, we are tempted to circle the wagons against any perceived threats to our traditional ways of life, spooked even by unsubstantiated rumors.

Thomas Albert Howard reports on “The Dangers of Hindu Nationalism” in First Things (March, 2016). He reports on increased attacks against Christians and Muslims in India in the past few years, as Hindu nationalism revives. In 1948, Mahatma Gandhi himself was assassinated by a Hindu nationalist.

But a frightening, changing world encourages belief groups to grow more inward and arrogant, from young Muslims who embrace ISIS to Christians who burn the Quran to Americans threatened by a seeming loss of political faith in American institutions.

No belief system, liberal or conservative, is immune. Words that caricature simple faith as hogwash can fuel the flames as much as bigoted nationalism.

Just as a more radical Hindu nationalism encourages a clinging to the ancient Indian caste system, so any movement based in fear encourages its own “caste” systems, that is, encourages an us/them mentality.

The times call for a particular kind of bravery to hold strong personal beliefs yet not denigrate those who hold different ones.

Photo Finish Leadership

The first photographs were taken in the early 1800’s. Photography for ordinary people began when George Eastman’s Kodaks became popular in the early twentieth century. Physical photos reigned for little over a century before the current age of digital representation.

From the time before photography, we have only a few painted pictures of legendary figures like Napoleon and George Washington. Now, if we’re in the right place at the right time, we can take a selfie with one of our leaders.

During primary voting season, our favorites change in a few weeks, first ones discarded like we delete our numerous digital photos. A few days after a newly elected leader takes office, we begin looking ahead to the next election, the next leader.

How do our perceptions change with the changes in physical representation? Perhaps today’s casual shots of our movers and shakers, some less than flattering, are one reason a leader has such a short window to inspire and produce meaningful work.

When Democracy Works, It’s Beautiful

I had not wanted to come. For one thing, the incivility of our national election season has turned me sour on anything political. For another, the Saturday morning was beautiful after rain drenched days, and I could think of a hundred other things I either needed to do or wanted to do. I went anyway—to the public meeting with my state legislators. Sheer civic duty and nothing else.

Safe to say that the majority of the attendees had voted for some one other than the three legislators. This more sparsely populated end of the country tends to vote differently than the other two districts and is often outvoted.

The local telephone company (yes, we still have a local one) had provided their meeting room for the event. The local newspaper editor emceed.

The audience listened politely to the speeches, occasionally even applauding. A few of the following questions were pointed, but nobody screamed or insulted anyone. The legislators actually appeared to give thoughtful answers, leaving aside the canned jargon.

We broke up into three groups, one for each legislator. Individuals shared concerns. I asked questions about my pet subject, campaign financing reform. We all had our say.

As I looked around at my neighbors, the memory of a past absentee ballot reaching me in a country with no elections flickered through my mind.

We lived in other countries that held sham elections. Everyone knew the ruling party would win, as it always had. No one would have bothered to show up at a gathering like this if one were offered. Besides, probably not a good idea to offend the governing elite with criticism.

In my epiphany, I wanted to ask my fellow participants: Do you know what you have? Do you know how precious this process is?

Voting Against Ourselves

Wayne Flynt, a retired professor at Auburn University, has written much about poor whites in his native Alabama. In his book, Keeping the Faith, Flynt suggests an answer to why the less advantaged so often vote for politicians who pass legislation detrimental to them.

“For ordinary people, black and white, who were just moving inside the magic circle of middle-class economic security, fear of losing the first home they had ever owned or the private academy where they sent their kids to school, made them easy prey to demagogues and fearmongers with much greater wealth to protect.”

Working class folks, scrambling to hold down jobs, juggling too many tasks, have little time to read analytical articles or surf the net for opinion pieces. They are prey for those leaders who filter the news for them.

Self-addicted politicians, often wealthy or in league with the wealthy, know how to exploit fear. They play on fear, touting themselves as saviors to defeat all enemies, whether real or imagined, as easily as Hans Solo shoots a storm trooper.

Celluloid heroes aren’t much help when we leave the theater, though.

Those Favored Baby Boomers: Pay It Forward?

Today’s baby boomers, now beginning to retire, lived in a fortunate time. World War II ended before they were born. The Cold War never became the feared nuclear conflagration.

They were favored by the greatest equality yet known in an industrial society. Greater access to education and advancement narrowed the gap between the elites and the masses.

Today wealth is once again rising in society’s top tiers and falling in the middle and working classes. Even wealth for the much touted “knowledge” workers tends to accumulate only for a few at the top.

Ronald Inglehart writes: “In 1965, CEO pay at the largest 350 U.S. companies was 20 times as high the pay of the average worker; in 1989, it was 58 times as high; and in 2012, it was 273 times as high.” (“Inequality and Modernization,” Foreign Affairs, January/February 2016.)

What lessons can the aging baby boomers teach? That wealth should be the only reward for a career?

Why not pride in quality products, beneficial to society, not gimmicks to make money? How about better salaries for employees? How about more contributions to schools and teachers and programs that help the less well off catch up? Drug rehabilitation and treatment for mental illness? More opportunities for the homeless to become useful citizens? Working hours more favorable to families?

Baby boomers profited from favorable times, not the least of which was the opportunity to advance if one worked hard.

The Inefficient Egg

Our new microwave is efficient. A push of a button once or twice will give you the proper time for most cooking.

The button method works well except when I’m cooking an egg. Eggs require more attention, more individualized time, in other words. A few seconds one way or another is crucial for a properly cooked egg. Eggs are inefficient.

Efficiency is the watchword of our age. Corporations figure out patterns for how people buy products. They program their goods or services for those broad categories. Individualization doesn’t make as much money.

Sometimes efficiency means programming your staff to work their schedules around the schedule of the “majority customer.” Of course, an employee’s needs may not mesh with the efficient schedule for the majority customer: a child’s day care schedule or setting up an appointment with a doctor.

Certain individuals don’t fit neatly into majority roles either: the dreamer who can’t quite get it together; the student who appears dull-witted, yet bursts out with a sudden streak of genius in early adulthood; the person setting aside a well-paying job to work for a nonprofit.

The truth is, individual progress often comes by inefficient fits and starts—trying different jobs before you find the one you’re suited for, wasting time on day dreams until inspiration hits, or taking time away from work to recharge.

A little waste and inefficiency can lead to greater efficiency in the long run.

Finding Community with Wendell Berry and Port William, Kentucky

I discovered my first Wendell Berry novel, Hannah Coulter, through my book club. This book and the others portraying the mythical Port William, Kentucky, community are not suspenseful thrillers, the ones we hurry through to conclusion, then forget the next day. They are not tales of great tragedy or outrage, simply the telling of tender sorrows and joys of a community.

Berry’s stories chronicle the time when machine labor was replacing the labor of humans and their animals. In one of Berry’s short stories “A New Day (1949)” from A Place in Time, tractors have all but replaced horse-drawn farm machines. A young man, still with a team of horses, has trained them to become“the felt thought of a man, so that while their effort lasted he would not, he could not, distinguish between himself and them.” One could not picture such a relationship with a tractor.

I am not a Luddite fulminating against machines. I certainly don’t want to go back to scrubbing clothes in a tub. Machines free us in many way. But we have lost something in distancing ourselves, not only from animal labor, but from a life closer to the physical world and to our neighbors on whom we depend.

One could say Berry’s fiction idolizes a past life that, in reality, wasn’t ideal for everyone: victims of color or ethnicity, an ingrown culture, and poverty. The strength of the stories lies in reminding us of the precious small worlds that we have lost in our quest for more things.

Maybe we can use our supposed free time to grow our inner and outer worlds, to mature as well as to rescue the human misery that lurks at the edges of our new creations. However, it seems we often use the release from back breaking labor merely to make more money to buy more things that increasingly disconnect us from each other.

Iranian Escape: Because Canadians Chose to Help

American diplomats were seized and subjected to brutal treatment following the takeover of the U.S. embassy in Tehran in 1979. When the hostages were finally released in January, 1981, American citizens erupted in euphoria.

I had no idea when I joined the State Department more than a decade later that I would one day work with one of the hostages. Nor did I know that I would serve in a Middle Eastern embassy with two of six diplomats who escaped capture.

The day of the takeover, the two were working in the consular section of the U.S. embassy in Tehran rather than the main building They walked out with four others and eventually found their way to the home of Canadian diplomats.

The fascinating story was touched on by the movie Argo, which won the Academy Award for best picture of 2012. Mark Lijek, one of the six who escaped, has written a more truthful telling of the story. Hollywood may be forgiven for merely “basing” the movie on events. Lijek’s The Houseguests: A Memoir of Canadian Courage and CIA Sorcery gripped me with his detailed account of their rescue.

For the first few days, the refugees from the captured embassy wandered between various locations, sure that a militant or someone anxious for a reward would eventually spot them. One of them finally phoned the Canadians.

“Why didn’t you call sooner?” the Canadian diplomat, John Sheardown, asked them.

That, Lijek says, sums up the courage which eventually allowed the six to escape. Perhaps Canada’s willingness to accept Syrian refugees is not surprising.

That Yearning for a Sense of Place

Americans move often; yet American creative experience bursts with a sense of place: Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring, Pat Conroy’s Southern based novels, Grant Wood’s painting, American Gothic, Jhumpa Lahiri’s short story collection, Interpreter of Maladies. Perhaps because we change place so often (including original immigration journeys), we are better able to identify place and our yearning for it.

Sometimes a sense of place means alienation. Some of us are homeless. Others of us have a physical address but lack family roots. Career moves, military service in strange countries, and fast paced generational changes contribute to rootlessness. We can be lost in time as well as in place.

Who do we belong to? Who are our family? What does our rootlessness do to our children? Where do we go when it’s time to die? How do we care for each other when we are constantly changing place?

Finding My Bliss with Windows 10: Less is Better

We just installed Windows10 on my computer. We removed almost all the applications that came with it.

I decided I didn’t need apps that allow me to automatically sort pix, give me media access to shows and movies (I’d rather watch them at the local theater with friends and neighbors), and keep my music list up to date. Also, I don’t need apps for instant weather reports and several live news feeds. Don’t forget Xbox and video game apps.

Each of us has our own list of what is helpful and what isn’t, but how do we cope with the massive demands for real time inclusion?

Consider access to news feeds. The news is bad enough when I read it at a time of my choosing. Unless a big news event is breaking, I usually check news once a day from The Seattle Times on my iPad and the headlines from a favored news service, plus one news correspondent on Twitter. I don’t need more real time depression raining on my day.

Sometimes I feel like a puppet with a million strings, each pulled by someone trying to sell me something, including ideas. Quiet time, meditation, thinking—we have to fight for these like we have to fight the currents of mass consumerism.

We can win back our precious time only through a conscious decision to avoid what is not useful.

We start from the positive: what do we want our lives to be? (Do add a few fun things for spice.) Then we delete all that don’t contribute.