Patriot Tax?

 

How about a Patriot Tax to pay off the war debt which the United States accumulated as a result of the Afghan and Iraq wars? Those who favor tax increases to lower our debt and those who favor spending cuts might cease their constant paralyzing disagreements by considering this tax.

Those who wish to raise revenue through taxes could recognize a Patriot Tax as a way to pay off debts without cutting Social Security or Medicare. Those who wish to cut spending could nevertheless see the Patriot Tax as justified, since this tax would pay only for the debt from two wars voted by Congress, in which our troops risked their lives.

Normally, when the country fights a major war, Congress and the President raise taxes to pay for it. We did not do this for the Afghan and Iraq wars. Thus, a Patriot tax seems fitting, even if a bit late.

Shutdown, Day 9, View Not From Washington

 

State Department officials attempting to carry out U.S. policy overseas, despite the shutdown, must answer embarrassing questions from the foreign press. John Kerry, U.S. Secretary of State, answered one such question, as reported by ABC news.

“I am absolutely confident that when we get this moment of political silliness behind us, we will be back on track,” Kerry said in Indonesia, where he was attending meetings at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit. We have recently recognized the importance of Asian nations to our economy as well as to our security arrangements.

President Obama was scheduled to attend but canceled his trip to stay in Washington while Republicans and Democrats wrestle with funding the federal government and bringing roughly 800,000 furloughed employees back to work.

The news report indicates how the diversion of our energy to the shutdown, and possible debt default, affects our influence overseas. China, of course, scored brownie points off our humiliation. Chinese officials cautioned that a default might change their thinking about the creditworthiness of the US government.

Shutdown on Whidbey Island

 

Due to the U.S. government shutdown, hundreds of workers at the naval air station on Whidbey Island, Washington State, where I live, have been furloughed. The impact of hundreds of people worrying about their paychecks will certainly impact the local economy.

A country commissioner pointed out that the local government is just now recovering from the recession and sequestration. She wished that the national government would stop manufacturing crises that only hurt the ordinary citizen.

The executive director of one of the Island towns commented: “Let’s just hope for a quick resolution to this. When you take people’s pay away for no good reason, it hurts everybody.”

As of this writing, the shutdown has entered Day 5.

Why Rachel Left The Church and Why She Came Back

 

A millennial explains why she left the church. In a nutshell: “We’re not leaving the church because we don’t find the cool factor there; we’re leaving the church because we don’t find Jesus there.”

Then Rachel explains the reasons why she came back. They include: baptism, confession, healing, communion, confirmation, union with Christ.

Serious practitioners of Christianity have become a minority group in the United States. Searching Christians are driven away by the lack of sacrifice in a gospel that emphasizes material success for following Jesus. They are equally repelled by the lack of love evidenced in legalistic congregations.

Those Christians who have returned to the church after a departure may lead the church into a community more kin to its vibrant beginnings. This Christianity celebrates covenant community based on Christ’s love and discipleship. A minority community of committed “subversives” within the broader culture works likes yeast within dough.

Shutdowns, Debt Ceilings, and the Safest Currency in the World

 

The government may shut down. We’ve done this before, and Congress has usually resolved the issue in a few days time, albeit, at varying levels of inconvenience to constituents.

Far more serious is the threatened debt ceiling crisis. When Congress approached the brink on the debt ceiling in 2011, Standard and Poor’s, the credit rating agency, lowered the credit rating for the United States for the first time in history. At the last minute, Congress raised the debt ceiling (albeit at the cost of the infamous  sequester agreement) and the United States dollar remained the safest currency in the world. If we actually refuse to pay our bills this time, our premier standing will be at risk.

To our discredit, we lack understanding of how our financial crises influence more than our domestic interests. We don’t take into account how they affect our foreign standing in the world. How much would our influence in the world decrease if, say, the Chinese renminbi became the world’s top currency? And how can we expect others nations to aspire to democracy if they see the world’s most famous democratic nation writhing in constant financial paralysis?

Father, Dad, Mother, Mom

 

Our names for our parents or parent figures, the first adults we meet on coming into this world, tell a great deal about us: culture, age, status, and of course relationship with the parents.

I called my father “Daddy.” I never remember using “Dad.” I think this reflects my Southern heritage. I called my mother “Mom” most of the time, though occasionally my brother and I in talking of her would use the more affectionate Southern term “Mama.”

The parental terms used by the characters in my stories mirror these characteristics. In A Sense of Mission, Ethan, raised by elite New England parents, calls his father “Dad,” never “Daddy.” His mother he calls “Mother.” His aunt, brought up in an even more traditional atmosphere, called her parents “Mother” and “Father.”

Ethan’s son Brendan, reflecting their more intimate status, calls Ethan “Daddy” until he reaches a certain age, then calls him “Dad.”

Byron, the abused son in Quiet Deception, calls his father “Pop,” reflecting both ridicule and his social status.

Our names for the ones with whom we begin our lives mirror the affection (or lack of) that we first learn from them.

Ninety-Nine Percent: Less Money for Everything From Mall Trips to College Education

 

The top one percent (1%) of Americans earned over nineteen percent (19.3) of household income in 2012, according to news reports. This share is the largest since 1928, shortly before the Great Depression. Inequality is not merely the result of the recession that began in 2008. Income inequality has been growing for three decades, according to the reports.

Last year, as the recession eased, the income of the top one percent rose twenty percent. The income of the remaining ninety-nine percent rose one percent.

The generosity of wealthy people is well known: Warren Buffet, Bill Gates, and countless others. However, a vibrant economy needs a large middle class. They spend more of their income. They are more numerous and buy more goods and services.

We may, and should, discuss the morality of a country in which the rich grow richer and the income of ordinary workers does not pay for decent housing and education. A just society rewards those who work hard, even if they don’t make huge incomes. However, sheer desire for a productive, growing economy compels us to address the reasons behind the increasing income inequality.

Diplomacy The Old-Fashioned Way

 

Noting U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry’s peripatetic globe trotting, I remember a criticism someone leveled at U.S. diplomacy at the beginning of the digital age. Now that we have instant electronic communications, he said, we don’t need diplomats. Now the leaders can communicate electronically.

Thankfully, national leaders can and do utilize modern communications, but face to face meetings remain essential. These meetings do not magically appear. Venues, lists of invitees, translators, hotels, protocols (who will sit next to whom in an order established over centuries) must be organized, at times on short notice. Executive summaries, background papers, and talking points provide up-to-the-minute information for the principals, flying in for a day or two.

Diplomats who live in these countries and speak the language perform these functions. They hold conversations, not only with leaders, but with ordinary citizens of the country. They talk to the opposition who may one day lead and to the younger populace who will become the next movers and shakers. Person to person remains paramount. Electronic communication enhances. It can never replace.

Kerry is especially knowledgeable about the work of a diplomatic outpost. He is the son of a U.S. diplomat and spent at least a few years of his childhood living in U.S. overseas missions. Kerry likes to tell of the time when his father and family were posted to Berlin during the days of the Cold War. The twelve-year-old Kerry, using his diplomatic passport allowed him as part of a diplomatic family, biked through checkpoints one day over to East Berlin.

His father, Kerry says, was not pleased when he found out, confiscating his young son’s passport to prevent future such escapades. “You could have caused a diplomatic incident,” he lectured the future Secretary of State.

Syria Who?

 

Now with an agreement between the U.S. and Russia over the Syrian impasse on chemical weapons, we appear to have dodged the bullet, temporarily at least.

What a relief. Now we can return to what’s really important: Miley Cyrus, football, Justin Beiber, and the vendor who was fired for hating ketchup. As well as the personal tragedies (mostly American) served up to us on our news feeds as entertainment.

Iraqi Shadow Haunts Syria

 

I watched Colin Powell’s presentation before the UN Security Council in 2003 as he tried to persuade members to follow the U.S. lead into Iraq. Many members of the Security Council were unconvinced, as well they might be. The charge that Iraq harbored chemical or other weapons of mass destructions proved unfounded. We learned the truth only after the deaths of Americans, Iraqis, and those allies who, believing us, followed us into war.

Critics later charged that American officials molded U.S. intelligence to fit a desire to attack Iraq, though Iraq at the time posed no direct threat to us. The intelligence was flawed, deliberately “cherry picked” to suit our purposes. We are now paying for that choice.

As America lays out intelligence about the use of chemical weapons in Syria, where the evidence is much stronger, our past deception haunts us. No nation is unswervingly honest, but the United States before Iraq was trusted more than most. After the misuse of intelligence in the runup to Iraq, we lost our valuable credibility. Indeed, our right to lead in foreign policy anywhere in the world is now questioned.

Trust, once lost, is not easily regained.

 

Syria: Praying in the Peace

 

This afternoon Christians of all persuasions in our small island community came together to pray for the situation in Syria. The most peace I have felt in days washed over me in that quiet sanctuary.

I prayed for the people of Syria, for leaders in this country and abroad, for peace between Israel and Palestine, for the people of my faith in the Middle East, and for the people of all faiths in that conflicted land.

How often do we take time out of busy days to surround ourselves with listening silence, to pray without distractions?

I didn’t know such a quiet simplicity was so powerful. God grant peace to the nations such as I felt this afternoon.

Syria: Questions To Help Us Think

 

To attack Syria or not to attack Syria with missile strikes has divided everyone, it seems, Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives. Rather than give my own opinion (which is still evolving), I’m enclosing links to two thoughtful pieces. One is a general question-and-answer piece about Syria. The other is a colunn by Nicholas Kristof, a journalist for The New York Times whom I have always admired:

Question and Answer

Kristof article

 

Enemy of My Enemy Is My Friend?

 

Those faded photos on the walls of my office at the U.S. consulate in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, hinted at beginning bonds between two disparate nations. American oil prospectors sit in sand-dusted offices, close to where the consulate is now, resting a few moments before continuing the search for the black gold that would transform both nations. In 1938, Dammam well No. 7, a few miles from where I later was to work, began producing.

At the time, most Americans lived in small towns or central cities. Suburbs were mostly for the elite, founded on train lines that connected them to the still important city. Then came World War II, with its need for energy to power war machines. Following victory by America and her allies, Americans fled to the car-centric suburbs. The U.S. formed alliances with Middle Eastern governments, none of which could be called democracies, in order to keep the oil flowing for our cars and machines.

Americans had oil in their veins from the beginning of oil exploration in the 1800’s. Thousands of them from Oklahoma, Texas, and other oil producing states found jobs at Saudi Aramco, the Saudi oil giant, in a city built for them, with housing, swimming pools, restaurants, a commissary, and medical care.

Thus, the United States became bound to the Middle East, with all its religious divides, power politics, and ethnic hatreds.

During the Soviet era, the alliances were clear. We were against communism and so were they, at least the countries that provided us with oil. The founding of Israel complicated the alliances, but until the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, our friends were the enemies of our enemies.

Since then, our major conflicts have risen from those early alliances. The terrorism that haunts us grew out of them.

Syria, our current nightmare, while not a friend in any traditional sense, is the enemy of our enemy, a secular state that opposed our terrorist foes. Now it, too, is home to a human tragedy that threatens to engulf the whole region and the world beyond. Our NATO allies are intricately bound to the region, affected by refugees from its wars. China’s dependence on oil to power its growing economy makes it a front row participant.

So those rough prospectors pictured in my office at the U.S. consulate began something that we never learned to deal with in any long term way. We wanted the oil, whatever the consequences.

The consequences have arrived.

Syria: No Good Options

 

We are weary of our Viet Nams, our Iraqs, our Afghanistans, and our Libyas. We have fought, shed blood, and expended treasure for what we are not sure.

We are cured of our hubris that followed the end of World War II and later the cold war. We know that sending in our military when wrongs are done does not necessarily end the wrongs. As we contemplate the brutal evidence of innocent men, women, and children dying horrible deaths in Syria after a probable gas attack, we know a military response may not stop the brutality.

We should know, if we contemplate action, not to expect a democracy friendly to us or even a democracy at all as a result. It could even encourage another Iranian style theological state, quite hostile to us.

The bloody regime of Bashar al-Assad has not attacked us nor supported al-Qaeda nor Iranian nuclear ambitions. If we should decide to act in Syria, we should do so with the motive of, possibly, shortening this inhumane war. Pure altruism and nothing more. Most likely we shall gain, if anything, only that. No scenes of welcome as liberators. It may be enough—if we take the chance and lives are saved. But it is not a definite nor easy decision to make. We can at least refrain from name-calling the decision makers. Prayer for them, and sympathy, are more in order.

What Do the Youth of Afghanistan Want?

 

An article in The New York Times examines the youth of Afghanistan. They have adopted bits of American culture, some of the clothes and music. However, they also appear wedded to the mores and customs of their parents.

One young Afghan woman protested against Western values. She expressed fear that her society would be “corrupted like that of the West.”

These ideas are discouraging to many Americans. Women have been brutalized in that traditional society. We surely want an end to the inferior status of women.

We may learn other lessons, however. The first is that American culture is not always as desired in the rest of the world as we sometimes think, or, indeed, as it used to be in the past. We treasure equality and the freedom to pursue one’s own path. Others in places like Afghanistan see us as condoning drugs, promiscuity, permissiveness, and dysfunctional government.

Although we wish to see changes in Afghanistan, we can be sympathetic also to the views they have of America. We are, perhaps, not the beacon we once were.

Egypt and Syria: Worrying Prelude to the Future?

 

Are the Egyptian and Syrian conflicts typical of the near future for the Middle East? Good guys, bad guys, sometimes on the same side? Ethnic and religious attacks? Plenty of villains but no clear heroes? The Syrian conflict, especially, now involves nearby countries: masses of refugees, arms shipments, and occasional spillover of armed forays. Are these preludes to larger conflicts? What does past history tell us?

The Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939, a war forgotten by most of us, is called by some a prelude to World War II, which began a few months after the end of the Spanish conflict. The more traditional Spanish citizens, including many in the Catholic Church and landowning and business classes were called nationalists. Many urban workers, middle-class liberals, and some Communists were called republicans. The nationalists received support from Nazi Germany. The republicans received support from the Soviet Union.

Both sides committed atrocities. The town of Guernica was pounded to rubble by incendiary bombs. A third of its population was reported killed or wounded.

The United States was not directly involved, but some Americans joined the republicans, most in a youthful desire to liberate. Earnest Hemingway wrote about one such fictional character in For Whom the Bell Tolls. The story ends tragically for the hero just as the war did. For almost four decades afterward, Spain was ruled by the dictator Francisco Franco.

At the time, European countries had been in a state of tension caused by the horrible brutality of World War I and its unresolved ending. Hatred, pride, and humiliation all played a part in the inability of Europeans to come together to prevent World War II. This hatred was evident in the Spanish conflict. Unfortunately, a failure to understand hatred’s consequences prevented the compromises necessary to resolve the differences.

At this chaotic time, we follow the promise of talks between Israelis and Palestinians. All parties suggest that any progress will be difficult. Bitterness, grievances, and brutalities haunt the process. A look into history should convince us to try anyway, to understand, this time, that only forgiveness offers hope.

Boris Yeltsin And The Soviet Coup

 

Boris Yeltsin, in suit and tie, surrounded by worried colleagues, stands atop a tank in Moscow in  mid-August, 1991, twenty-two years ago this month, and reads a statement.

The recent end of the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the West at the time remained tenuous. Mikhail Gorbachev had become Soviet leader in 1985 and the great draw down of nuclear weapons between the United States and the Soviets began in the years following. Eastern European countries began their movement away from the Soviet orbit in 1989 and 1990. East and West Germany, split since the end of World War II, had united less than a year before.

Now, Russian hard liners wanted to roll back history and reestablish the Soviet Union. They took advantage of Gorbachev’s absence from the capital at that time to attempt a takeover.

Yeltsin led opponents of the coup,  jumping on a tank outside the chief Russian government building. He read from a statement calling on citizens to resist this step backward.

They did, and the coup failed. Gorbachev returned to Moscow. The Soviet Union was dissolved a few months later.

In hindsight, we mourn the turn Russia has taken since then: the chaos that overtook that first stirring of democracy; the return to authoritarianism under Vladimir Putin.

Yet, many dissent from Putin’s rule. They can take comfort in the remembrance of Yeltsin, a man with very human failings, daring to overcome his fear and call on his fellow citizens to resist the return to a dead past.

Farm Summers

 

When I was growing up, one of my family’s relatives owned a farm about a day’s drive from our home in Nashville. We visited from time to time in summer when I was out of school. Sometimes I was allowed to stay a few days with cousins while my family returned to Nashville.

Those days were bliss: building dams across the creek in front of the house, hikes in the hills around the farm, a huge picnic under the big tree by the creek, trips to the spring for drinking water (the house had running water, but my aunt preferred spring water), swinging from grapevines in the woods, playing in the hayloft.

I remember the books. Stacked on shelves in the living room were the literary leftovers of generations of readers. My cousin and I would pick out a book and take it upstairs to read before bedtime, falling asleep with the books by our sides. In the morning when the cock’s crow woke us, we would breathe in the rural fresh air through opened, unscreened windows and continue reading.

Looking back, I realize imperfections. We had to watch out for copperhead snakes. The hills that I so liked to climb were gouged and riddled by the phosphate companies, to which my aunt had sold the mineral rights. Trees had covered the mining atrocities by the time I came along, but the scars still intruded. The pond that my cousins swam in had scum. I had to help with dishes after huge meals. The unscreened windows let in lots of flies.

Yet the freedom of those days is a blessing all children should experience before they pass so quickly into adulthood.

Fear of Secularism

 

” . . . this preemptive assault on secularism with all it entails, strikes me as frightened and antagonistic.”

—Marilynne Robinson, When I Was a Child I Read Books

 

“His disciples remembered that it was written, ‘Zeal for your house will consume me.’”

—John 2:17 (NRSV)

 

No nation has ever belonged completely to God. The Jewish nation repeatedly fell into idolatry. So-called Christian nations, though influenced by Christian teaching, have erred greatly at times from carrying out the principles Jesus taught.

Today in the United States, Christians seem perplexed at secularism’s strength, as though it were something new. Secularism has existed beside Christianity since the first Christian missionaries carried the gospel to the Roman world and beyond.

In the fourth century, the emperor Constantine increasingly favored Christianity as the Roman Empire’s established religion. Before that time, Christianity grew because of the way Christians lived in a pleasure-loving, inhumane world. People were increasingly drawn to the “narrow way” which called its adherents to lives of forgiveness and compassion.

When Christianity became the “established” religion, it tended to succumb to the ways of the world and to seek power. Religious leaders like St. Francis, akin to Old Testament prophets, repeatedly called for a different kind of life, serving as role models for a return to the way of Jesus.

Christians have always lived amid secularism. Secularism wanes when Christians practice what Jesus taught and draw people to him. They are less effective when they seek power.

Barbara Pym’s Quiet Books

Quartet in Autumn

I recently read a review of the novelist Barbara Pym’s life. Pym, writing in the middle of the twentieth century, wrote gentle stories of ordinary people coping with life.

Pym’s books sold well enough until the mid-sixties. Then, as she said, rather than the ordinary lives she wrote about, writers turned to juicier subjects. Her novels, which she continued to write, were rejected for the next fourteen years.

In 1977 she returned to popularity. Her Quartet in Autumn (previously rejected several times) was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

Advice to writers these days emphasizes suspense. We must hook the reader from the first sentence and the first paragraph and in every scene thereafter. This is good advice if not taken too narrowly, else we end up refusing to write anything except murder and mayhem.

I enjoy a good mystery, even an occasional dead body, but I’m especially taken with a mystery like Gaudy Night by Dorothy Sayers. People are murdered in other Peter Whimsey stories, but Gaudy Night is a story of relationships and gray areas of right and wrong.

I have found that with most suspense novels, I’m now apt to skim, even skip, large sections in order to satisfy my curiosity about the end. Having finished, I rarely ponder them. My preference is increasingly for quiet writing, something to savor instead of hurry through. A desire for slow food versus fast food for those in the fast lane.