Tag Archives: Ann Gaylia O’Barr

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.

An Absence of Child Raisers

A society dies if it lacks child raisers. It literally dies if it does not produce children. It dies a slower death if it produces children but does not raise them.

Over the past century or two, life has become more difficult for child raisers. We have moved our work places further and further from our homes and communities. First, fathers left to work longer distances away from their children. Recently, mothers have followed the male model, working long distances from home.

Community, the village that helps raise a child, became less important. We separated first into nuclear families, then couples, now singles with perhaps an unmarried partner in tow.

Children, who need a great deal of care in the first years of life, are a hindrance both to the career-oriented lifestyles we have come to admire and the pleasure-oriented life others of us follow.

No one should be shamed into having children. Parenthood is a calling, and it is not for everyone. However, we need caring space for those who do want to become parents—time off to nurture their offspring, decent housing and schools, safe neighborhoods.

Our society lives or dies on how well we raise our children. How do we bring child raising back into the mainstream?

The Nightingale and All the Light We Cannot See: Different Perspectives But a Common Message

Two recent bestsellers, The Nightingale and All the Light We Cannot See, personify World War II from the viewpoint of a few European characters caught up in its horror.

The Nightingale’s main characters are women, two French sisters. One joins the resistance movement against the Nazis, and the other endures the German occupation with her daughter in her family home.

All the Light We Cannot See is set in the same time period but includes the German as well as the French viewpoint. One character is a blind French girl, upended by the occupation that takes her from Paris to a French village by the ocean and her subtle part in the resistance. A second viewpoint comes from a teenaged German soldier, traumatized by the violence he witnesses and struggling to find a way to overcome the sins he is called to commit.

Both novels highlight the awful suffering of ordinary people: starvation, rape, killing of civilians, and other brutalities. Even more tragic than the conflict itself is the understanding that it need not have happened.

The war was the culmination of centuries of conflict between European nations for mastery over the other. Each conflict produced a loser. National leaders preyed on the desire to overcome humiliation, increasingly demonizing other nations, until Hitler rose on a wave of Nazism fed by anger and economic hardship.

Unfortunately, such dynamics never die. They lurk in the background, like the evil that finally bursts out in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. How do we guard against the hatred and excessive anger that produces such horrors?

Poisoned Partisan Politics: We’ve Survived It Before

It may encourage us to know that the United States has survived other periods of bitter partisan divides. I recently read an article chronicling the battles between the president and Congress during the late 1940’s and early 50’s. (“When Congress Gets Mad,” Foreign Affairs, January/February 2016.)

I had thought of the bloodletting between the two major parties in this current era as the worst since the Civil War. In contrast, I pictured the years of the Cold War and our conflicts with the Soviet Union as one of cooperation between all Americans, all united against Communism. It was actually a bitter period.

The race between Democrats and Republicans in 1948 was extremely close. The sitting president, Harry S. Truman won, but Republicans bitterly criticized his foreign policy, saying he wasn’t tough enough on Communists.

He had lost China and given a green light to North Korea to invade South Korea, they said. One senator claimed that the blood of “our boys in Korea” should be directly placed on the shoulders of Truman’s secretary of state. “Contemptible,” Truman responded.

It was the era when Senator Joseph McCarthy used the public’s fear of Communism to begin witch hunts that ruined careers of innocent citizens.

Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower won the next election against Adlai Stevenson in 1952. He continued many of Truman’s policies and began an era of constructive relationships with Democrats.

McCarthy was censured by the Senate in 1954. McCarthyism became a synonym for a campaign of unfounded accusations.

 

What Dorothy Sayers Taught Me

One book I return to again and again is The Whimsical Christian by Dorothy Sayers. The title is a play on words, whimsical meaning quaint or fanciful, but also is a reminder of Sayers’ detective series featuring the English Lord Peter Wimsey, set between World Wars I and II.

Sayers was a writer of both fiction and Christian essays. Her private life included a fling with a man who refused to marry her after she became pregnant. Her spiritual life seemed to deepen after the birth of her child, though she never publically acknowledged him.

Like some of the characters in her books, Sayers was flawed. She found meaning in her writing.

She first introduced me to the sin of acedia. It’s a sin which tempts me, but I didn’t know its name. She called it despair as well as acedia and explained it in terms I could understand.

“It is the sin that believes in nothing, cares for nothing, seeks to know nothing, interferes with nothing, enjoys nothing, loves nothing, hates nothing, finds purpose in nothing, lives for nothing, and remains alive only because there is nothing it would die for.”

It seems to tempt those of us afflicted with melancholia. I have found that the only antidote is prayer, followed by going on to the next task at hand. Never just sit down and give in to it.

Daring to pray, daring to go on doing “whatever our hand finds to do” is, it seems to me, an act of faith that says life is indeed a gift, worth living.

Amazon Reviews: Political Weapons?

Even Amazon reviews have become tools for rampant anger. Some reviews are written by people who haven’t even read the book or used the product. The reviews are written as a political polemic. They encourage one-star reviews as a political vote—not on the book or product itself.

One woman, writing a book on finding forgiveness after the death of her small child in a mass shooting, was pilloried by radical guns rights activists. Regardless of one’s views on the Second Amendment, such disregard for human hurt counts as less than civilized.

Hank Davis, of Peacemakers Alliance, a group working with gangs and violence-prone groups, commented on the killings of three children in separate incidents in Cleveland, Ohio: “…social media websites, especially Facebook and Instagram, have helped fuel and ignite deadly disputes rooted in someone feeling disrespected.”

Perhaps the anonymity of the Internet encourages the temptation to antisocial diatribes instead of dealing with our anger in more mature ways.

We don’t see the ones we post to, whose needs we can ignore. They are not in front of us for any meaningful discussion. We don’t see their faces reacting to what we write. It’s all about us and our anger, and we can rant for as long as we wish with no one to check us. For many, the Internet is an ego magnifier.

To be sure, the Internet makes possible a more diverse discussion. It gives a certain amount of voice to otherwise voiceless, ordinary citizens. It has its place.

But our digital communications require what any civil society needs if it is to function: checks on our ego and a respect for the broader community.

Surviving the End of the World

Hendrik Hartog, a Princeton professor whose parents survived the Holocaust, said he learned from his parents that everyday life was a momentary accident likely to disappear.

All of us have read about, and some of us have experienced, a moment when ordinary living did disappear in the face of some unexpected tragedy or momentous event.

Families must cope after an attack by a terrorist or a deranged individual kills innocent loved ones. A tornado obliterates an entire town, leaving survivors to live without familiar symbols. Jews in 1930’s Germany faced a madman calling for the complete extermination of their race.

We assumed that the demise of the Soviet Union meant a world order leading ever upward toward democracy and civil society. Then angry young men from the Middle East intruded on a quiet September day in 2001 and upended that assumption.

Any person living long enough will experience unhappiness—the natural death of a loved one or loss of a job or a child making a wrong choice. What we do not expect is a gigantic break with the ordinary for large numbers of people.

How do those Syrians deal with it, those who became, in a short time, refugees taken from ordinary lives as shopkeepers and teachers and housewives?

How do any of us deal with the possibility that the ordinary can disappear for us, too?

Me or the Community?

Regardless of the deity we may believe in (the majority do believe in a deity) when we ask “Does God answer prayer?’ we usually mean: does God answer prayer positively? Does God give us what we want? The fact that those of us who pray don’t always get what we pray for is used as evidence that God doesn’t exist.

But a sympathetic deity would hardly give us what we want all the time. Does a good parent always give a child what the child wants? (Candy five minutes before a meal? “No, of course you can’t have candy now. Wait until after supper.”)

What about those cultures preferring sons to daughters? Some couples no doubt pray for a son. Yet the conception of males and females remains the same.

Suppose all those prayers were answered positively? We have only to consider China, experiencing problems because their one child policy (recently abandoned) led to sex-selective abortions of daughters. Many young men now lack marriage partners. China may experience a labor shortage in the future as fewer marriages take place and fewer children are born.

A son may give a parent status or ensure better care in old age in some cultures. Individually, having a son may profit. For the community, however, too many sons may bring disaster.

Why would God give me something I ask for if it would harm others, i.e., the community?

God, it would seem, cares for the community as well as for me.

The Hunger Games and Star Wars: Sacrifice, not Pleasure

The Hunger Games and the Star Wars franchises have risen during a period of world turmoil and suffering, of tragedy suddenly inflicted on innocents by angry malcontents, and of growing inequality.

They provide escape, as movies and books do when times are evil. J.R.R. Tolkien wrote much of The Lord of the Rings in Britain during the dark days of World War II. France had fallen with most of Europe. The United States was still officially neutral. England stood alone as German bombers rained death on the island nation, contested only by a few remaining British pilots.

The Hunger Games follows this tradition but is flavored with today’s anxieties. The leaders in the capital preside over the ultimate consumer society. The workers in the districts receive only crumbs, providing the capital with goods and, once a year, giving their blood for entertainment.

The heroes of this series are conflicted. The winners are not always pure. Evil is not completely banished, but must be guarded against, for humans are morally frail creatures.

Yet these kinds of stories forever show the little guy against the storm troopers, victims pushed too far, willing to risk all they are and have for the sake of a more just order.

When we are threatened, we are less interested in pleasure and more sympathetic to sacrifice.

Christmas: Lifting up the Lowly

My soul magnifies the Lord,
and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,
for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant.

Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed;
for the Mighty One has done great things for me,
and holy is his name.

His mercy is for those who fear him
from generation to generation.

He has shown strength with his arm;
he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.

He has brought down the powerful from their thrones,
and lifted up the lowly;
he has filled the hungry with good things,
and sent the rich away empty.

(Luke 1:46-53; NRSV)

Library as Community

Within the comfort of my home, I can immediately download a book for my digital reader from my local library system.

Books are instantly available after the library closes and I find myself with nothing to read. Zip. I’ve got a book within seconds. (I’d rather go without chocolate than have nothing to read—and that’s saying a lot.) E-books also are useful when I travel.

But checking out a digital book skips the community experience. When I physically walk into my library, I nod to the librarian. She recognizes a steady customer and nods back.

We don’t talk as much as we used to, since we readers now check out our own books at a terminal. Still, the library remains a community. Sometimes I see people I know. I enjoy the children visiting with their parents over in the children’s section, maybe listening to a story.

Others use the Internet terminals, allowing online access to those without money to buy a computer or a smart phone, leveling the playing field a little. Of course, leveling the playing field in the book world is one reason libraries exist.

I browse the book shelves on my physical visits to the library. Infinitely more books are available in the digital library, but here I can take one down and flip through the pages to decide for myself if it suits me. I don’t have to depend on the review of somebody I don’t know.

My digital library is a useful tool, but I have a relationship with my physical library.

ISIS Plays to its Base, the Non-Belongers

The terrorist group known as ISIS brutally murders in digital time for all the world to see. Their actions shock most of us, but ISIS is playing to its base.

ISIS leaders know decent people will be appalled, but they are not recruiting decent people. They target the disaffected young person, the one who doesn’t belong. ISIS is similar to a youth gang, a way for members to belong and pay back the belongers by breaking their rules.

In the case of ISIS, its members work for a revolution to give them meaning and purpose, a revolution against established values. They don’t want freedom of religion or democratic elections because such practices imply that no man or woman is God, that we are all imperfect and need the input of the larger community.

ISIS prefers a state run by a few leaders who claim a divine mandate to decide issues, not one where citizens are given a choice.

The Nazi regime also spoke to its base, those Germans humiliated by their losses in World War I. Jews were a convenient scapegoat. Leaders convinced other Germans that the Jews diluted their society and kept it from reaching the heights of a world power, superior to others.

American politicians may choose to play to their base of followers as well. Political speeches today shock some for incivilities, even lies. But the speakers are not playing to those who cherish civility; they are playing to those who feel injured by the status quo, the disrespected, the non-belongers.

Until we find ways to disagree without denigrating, to take seriously the non-belongers, some will seek other ways to gain respect.

A Clash between Religions or between Religion and No Religion?

In the waning years of the twentieth century, a few years before the terrorist attacks of 9/ll, Samuel P. Huntington wrote a best seller, The Clash of Civilizations.

The Soviet Union had dissolved, and the Cold War was over. Americans reveled in the dawning digital age, freed, they believed, from fears of a global conflict. Huntington, a professor at Harvard University, did not share their optimism for the new age.

In the absence of cold war ideology, Huntington suggested, religion was becoming more important, not less. Secularization had disrupted communities and cultures. I saw this disruption in the Middle Eastern countries where I lived during the 1990’s. Oil wealth led to vast change in one, Saudi Arabia. A consumer society emerged in one generation from an isolated, desert kingdom, bringing in Westerners who got drunk and watched x-rated movies. Most of the 9/ll terrorists came from this shell-shocked nation.

Humans needed, Huntington said, “new sources of identity, new forms of stable community, and new sets of moral precepts to provide them with a sense of meaning and purpose. Religion . . . meets these needs.”

Are the clashes and terrorist attacks since the publication of Huntington’s book only a struggle between religions or do they stem more from a struggle between religion and no religion?

Western societies have assumed an upward progress toward secular utopias with high rates of material benefits. In an age of rapid change, ordinary men and women may yearn for purpose and meaning. Where do they find them?