I BELIEVE, I THINK I BELIEVE

I believe it was Martin Luther who said "Lord I believe. Help my unbelief."

I tap dance on the line. Back and forth. The Methodist who reads Catholic authors. Especially Merton and West. Who believes Pelagius had the right idea. Tries to understand the Quakers.

Prefers the Celtic path to the Roman or Orthodox. And there were and are big differences.

I believe. At least part of the time.

FROM MY ARCHIVES WITH COMMENTARY

With commentary. See the bolded notes. 

This weekend is the fiftieth anniversary of death of a president. If you were in grade school or older on November 22 you’ll know who I’m talking about. If you weren’t you’re probably wondering what all the hub bub is about. I’ve never really thought of myself as part of a declining generation before, but that death in Dallas marked the beginning of a series of events that almost defined a generation. (fifty five years now, but who's counting)

Montgomery, Dallas, Birmingham, Selma, Memphis, Kent State, Watts, Los Angeles, Vietnam. History landed in our living rooms every time we turned on the evening news. The Summer of Love turned into decades of destruction that haunt us like hungry ghosts. Good laws had unintended consequences. The voting rights act allows minorities to vote. Gerrymandering state houses work to make sure they get to vote for as few candidates as possible. (of course now the voting rights act has been gutted and gerrymandering and out right fraud is still rampant)

Integrating the suburbs meant that those with money and mobility could leave the cities with their crowded streets and poverty behind. The city became the place where you worked, played, bought drugs and headed home to the house, minivan and 2.5 kids. Safe in gated communities we could ignore the blasted neighborhoods with too few jobs, crumbling schools and damn few local role models. Public spaces are turned into “free speech” zones or strip malls where there’s no “public” space at all. (and the free speech zones are usually blocks from the action)

Vietnam taught the military and the elected hired help two important lessons. Pay somebody else to do the dirty work and keep the media as far away from the action as possible. The mid seventies to the early nineties were years of death, torture and displacement for hundreds of thousands of people living in Central and South America as the US channeled aid, equipment and millions of tax dollars into the pockets of brutal dictators who claimed they were fighting “subversives” and our war on drugs. Turns out the war on drugs was a great way to channel off the books military aid into those countries. (and now drugs come in via container ships)

The Great Communicator challenged Gorbachev to “tear down this wall” in Berlin while our proxies were blowing up fields, shanties, tenements and refugees in El Salvador and Guatamala; it almost never made the evening news. It sure as hell didn’t make it into the local papers. (And now the refugees from those failed countries are fleeing gangs and drug lords trying for asylum in the country that blasted them. There's a lesson in there somewhere. If they were blond, white Protestants there probably would not be a problem.)

When we finally chose to do our own dirty work in the Middle East the military made damn sure that the correspondents weren’t allowed to go nosing around on their own. And some of the ones who did try ended up being murdered by the extremists on the other side. Now technology makes it possible for a technician in a control room in the continental US to push a button and kill without ever seeing the ones who die. No more Ed Murrows hitching rides on British bombers and filing reports on the missions.

Voters put a Black man in the White House in 2008 and we pretended that this proved we were living in a post racial society while every new day proves that the divides are deeper and deadlier than ever.

Who knows. Maybe this generation has to pass before we can finally heal the divisions and finally make at least part of the dream Jack Kennedy described for us when he took office half a century ago.

THE THIRD WORLD IN THE UNITED STATES?

Singer and activist Jackson Brown wrote this back in the eighties at the height of the US interventions in Central and South America. This is not the whole subject of this entry but it is a part of it.

SOLDIER OF PLENTY

God is great, God is good
He guards your neighborhood
Though it’s generally understood
Not quite the way you would
You try to take the slack
Stay awake and watch his back
But something happens every now and then
And someone breaks into the promised land
Ah boy boy
This world is not your toy
This world is long on hunger
This world is short on joy

A-e-i-o
You speak as if you know
What’s good for everyone
What’s good in what you’ve done?
What’s good about a world in which
War rages at a fever pitch
And people die for the little things
A little corn, a little beans

Ah boy boy
This world is not your toy
This world is, this world is
Long on hunger
Short on joy
How much longer
You gonna keep the world hungry boy?

You measure peace with guns
Progress in mega-tons
Who's left when the war is won?
Soldier of misfortune--
Soldier of an angry call
Soldier on foreign soil
I’m not here to fight your war
I know what you're fighting for

Ah boy boy
This world is not your toy
This world is, this world is
Long on hunger
Short on joy
How much longer
You gonna keep the world hungry boy?

There is poverty in this country. There is a widening of the gap between the richest and poorest. The rich who will never spend all they have and the poor running like marathoners just to stay in place. The disappearing middle class. Yes there are cities with more and more homeless. And yes we have an individual at the center of power who scares the living daylights out of many of us. This hemisphere has seen leaders who seemed to be insane before. This is a first for this country however. Yes we have a border patrol that seems more out of control than reasonable. 

But I have been seeing some links to news feeds that trouble me. That much of this country is now experiencing third world conditions. I have to wonder if this or those reporters have actually traveled in truly third world countries. 

Countries where women walk for miles in search of drinkable water and fuel for their cooking fires. Where children have little access to schools. Where the rich own most of the land and poor are forced into stining slums on the edges of shining cities. To countries like Guatamala or El Salvador where being a church worker, labor organizer, community organizer, literacy worker, outspoken reporter, supporter of land reform, in the wrong place at the wrong time during a sweep for so called subversives or even being a member of an Indian community could get you tortured or murdered or both. Countries where some citizens try to get by on a couple of dollars a day and their children dig through garbage dumps. 

We have problems in this country. Big ones. But we need to be careful when labels such as third world are used. If we have third world conditions in much of this country where does that leave much of the rest of the world? Fourth world? Fifth world? 

MERRY CHRISTMAS

From a Christmas card I made several years ago. The image is titled Polar Peace. Merry Christmas to all and to all a good day. To the ones with fur. To the ones with feathers, To the ones with fins and all the rest.

THE STAR

Back in the early fifties Robert Clarke of classic SF fame wrote a short story. The Star. The astrophysicist aboard a long range earth expedition to the Pegasus Nebula has made a discovery that has shaken his faith. The scientist is a Jesuit by the way. Something that causes no end of humor from some of his fellow crew members. A Jesuit astronomer isn't too crazy an idea. The current Vatican astronomer is a Jesuit. And while that is sinking in consider this. The Vatican has had an astronomer for well over a century. And they have their very own telescope. On top of a mountain in Arizona.

Now I don't know what faith, if any, Robert Clarke followed. But my interpretation is one hundred eighty degrees from the finale of the story. And my own faith has taken so many twists and turns that I'm never quite sure where I'm standing half the time. Heck perhaps it's a case of the glass being half full, but here goes.

What if, just if, knowing that the star is going to go nova God didn't destroy a civilization to provide that star over Bethlehem but timed that birth so that some little good would come from tragedy? After all the birth of the messiah was supposedly prophesied for SOME time in the future. It's not like Isaiah and his brethren said OK the kid will be born on such and such a day, at such and such a time in such and such a year after all.

And SF was a lot more fun when we didn't know so much. Now we know that a star likely to nova probably won't have planets with higher forms of life. It takes a long time to cook life resembling ours. Or probably will. About five billion years for earth. The giants stars and the super giants burn fast and hot. Their lives are measured in millions of years, not billions. But they seeded the universe with the building blocks of planets and life.

LIBERTY TO STARVE

Warning. One week before Christmas, AKA  shop until you drop, rant ahead.

Another  waste of skin and oxygen elected on the Tea Party wave of 2010 has chimed in on so called liberty. Doesn't seem to occur to nitwits like him that it is really hard to care about liberty when you are hungry, sick and half naked. Either that or you copy the folks from the old Shay's rebellion and you do your best to remind your new rulers just what you had been fighting for all those hungry years. The colonies issued paper money for their costs but when it was time for the taxes to be paid it was cold, hard gold and silver. In other words the new states did want their nearly worthless paper back. No thank you very much. In fact it was risings line the Shay's rebellion that led to that constitutional convention.

Read the prologue life, liberty and pursuit of happiness got changed to life, liberty and property. Notice how the declaration gets quoted, but it was a letter explaining why the colonies were rebelling. It has no legal standing.

Face it. When your kids are starving cold you are likely to follow anyone who promises at least one meal a day and some fuel to keep them warm.

BTW. The politician in question made his career in plastics. Has a degree in business and accounting. Frankly I believe we should close every business school in the country. Send accounting to the math departments and information technology to whoever is working with the computers. I have had so called business classes and found them to be pretty much worthless.

And frankly this shot makes him look like he's a couple of sandwiches shot of a picnic.

IN THE TIME OF NO ROOM

Thomas Merton died in 1968. Has it really been half a century. As the years roll by he reads more and more like an Old Testament prophet.

OK he is working from a Christian point of view. More realistically as a Roman Catholic Benedictine monastic. This is a fairly long, alright it's four pages, essay. It will probably take a bit to get through but I believe it just might be worth it. I don't know what that curmudgeonly Trappist hermit would have made of social media. But as we've watched the herd mentality on Facebook, Twitter and the rest he probably would have kept it at arms' length. Talk about your mass man and Christ at the borders.

Note: I have run across more than one essay or blog entry with the subject of Mary and Joseph not being THAT poor. Folks there were two classes of people back then those with money and power and those that didn't. They were definitely in the didn't class and from Galilee, AKA the back of Judean Beyond, to boot.

Actually now that I've copied from the word document it doesn't seem that long, but it is a little on the technical side. Shekinah BTW way can be translated as light or great light.

AN ESSAY FOR THE ADVENT SEASON

By Thomas Merton

So there was no room at the inn? True! But that is simply mentioned in passing, in a matter of fact sort of way, as the Evangelist point to what he really means us to see-the picture of pure peace, pure joy: “She wrapped her firstborn Son in swaddling clothes and laid him in a manger.” (Luke 2:7). By now we know it well, and yet we might still be questioning it-except that a reason was given for an act that might otherwise have seemed strange: there was no room for them in the inn.” Well, then, they obviously found some other place!

But when we read the Gospels and come to know them thoroughly, we realize that there are other reasons why it was necessary that there be no room at the inn, and why there had to be some other place, In fact, the inn was the last place in the world for the birth of the Lord.

The Evangelists, preparing us for the announcement of the birth of the Lord, remind us that the fullness of time has come. Now is the time of final decision, the time of mercy, “the acceptable time,” the time of settlement, the time of the end. It is the time for repentance, the fulfillment of all promises, for the Promised One has come. But with the coming of the end, a great bustle and business begins to shake the nations of the world. The time of the end is the time of massed armies, “wars and rumors of wars,” of huge crowds moving this way and that, of men “withering away for fear,” of flaming cities and sinking fleets, of smoking lands laid waste, of technicians planning grandiose acts of destruction.

The time of the end is the time of the Crowd: and the eschatological message is spoken in a world where, precisely because of the vast indefinite roar of armies on the move and the restlessness of turbulent mobs, the message can be heard only with difficulty. Yet it is heard by those who are aware that the display of power, hubris (power) and destruction is part of the kerygma (message). That which is to be judged announces itself, introduces itself by its sinister and arrogant claim to absolute power. Thus it is identified, and those who decide in favor of this claim are numbered, marked with the sign of power, aligned with power, and destroyed with it.

Why then was the inn crowded? Because of the census, the eschatological massing of the “whole world” in centers of registration, to be numbered, to be identified with the structure of imperial power. The purpose of the census: to discover those who were to be taxed. To find out those who were eligible for service in the armies of the empire.

The Bible had not been friendly to a census in the days when God was ruler of Israel (2 Samuel 24). The numbering of the people of God by an alien emperor and their full consent to it was itself an eschatological sign, preparing those who could understand it to meet judgment with repentance. After all, in the Apocalyptic literature of the Bible, this “summoning together” or convocation of the powers of the earth to do battle is the great sign of “the end.”

Ti was therefore impossible that the Word should lose himself by being born into shapeless and passive mass. He had indeed emptied himself, taken the form of God’s servant, man. But he did not empty himself to the point of becoming mass man, faceless man. It was therefore right that there should be no room for him in a crowd that had been called together as an eschatological sign. His being born outside that crowd is even more of a sign. That there is no room for him is a sign of the end.

Nor are the tiding of great joy announced in the crowded inn. In the massed crowd there are always new tiding of joy and disaster. Where each new announcement is the greatest of announcements, where every day’s disaster is beyond compare, every day’s danger demands the ultimate sacrifice, all news and all judgment is reduced to zero. News becomes merely a new noise in the mind, briefly replacing the noise that went before it and yielding to the noise that comes after it, eventually everything blends into the same monotonous and meaningless rumor. News? There is so much news that there is no room left for the true tidings, the “Good News,” the Great Joy.

Hence the Great Joy is announced, after all, in silence, loneliness and darkness, to shepherds “living in the fields” or “living in the countryside” and apparently unmoved by the rumors or massed crowds. These are the remnant of the desert dwellers, e nomads, the true Israel.

Even though “the whole world” is ordered to be inscribed, they do not seem to be affected. Doubtless they have registered, as Joseph and Mary will register, but they remain outside the agitation, and untouched by the vast movement, the massing of hundreds and thousand of people everywhere in the towns and cities.

They are therefore quite otherwise signed. They are designated, surrounded by a great light, they receive the message of the Great Joy, and they believe it with joy. They see the Shekinah over them, recognize themselves for what they are. They are the remnant, the people of no account, who are therefore chosen-the anawim, And they obey the light. Nor was anything else asked of them.

They to and see not a prophet, not a spirit, but the Flesh in which the glory of the Lord will be revealed and by which all men will be delivered from the power that is in the world, the power that seeks to destroy the world because the world is god’s creation, the power that mimics creation, and in doing so, pillages and exhausts the resources of a bounteous God given earth.

We live in the time of no room, which is the time of the end. The time when everyone is obsessed with lack of time, lack of space, with saving time, conquering space, projecting into time and space the anguish produced within them by the technological furies of size, volume, quantity, speed, number, price, power and acceleration.

The primordial blessing, “increase and multiply,” has suddenly become a hemorrhage of terror. We are numbered in billions, and massed together, marshaled, numbered, marched here and there, taxed, drilled, armed, worked to the point of insensibility, dazed by information, drugged by entertainment, surfeited with everything, nauseated with the human race and with ourselves, nauseated with life.

As the end approaches, there is no room for nature. The cities crowd it off the face of the earth. As the end approaches, there is no room for quiet, There is no room for solitude. There is no room for thought. There is no room for attention, for the awareness of our state.

In the time of the ultimate end, there is no room for man.

Those that lament the fact that there is no room for God must also be called to account for this. Have they perhaps added to the general crush by preaching a solid marble God that makes man alien to himself, a god that settles himself grimly like an implacable object in the inner of heart of man and drives man out of himself in despair?

The time of the end is the time of demons who occupy the heart (pretending to be gods) so that man himself finds no room for himself in himself. He finds no space to rest in his own heart, not because it is full, but because it is void. If only he knew that the void itself, when hovered over by the Spirit, is an abyss of creativity…yet he cannot believe it. There is no room for belief.

In the time of the end there is no longer room for the desire to go on living. The time of the end is the time when men call upon the mountains to fall upon them. Because they wish they did not exist.

Why? Because they are part of a proliferation of life that is not fully alive, it is programmed for death. A life that has not been chosen, and can hardly be accepted, has no more room for hope. Yet it must pretend to go on hoping, It is haunted by the demon of emptiness. And out of this unutterable void come the armies, the missiles, the weapons, the bombs, the concentration camps, the race riots, the racist murders, and all the other crimes of mass society.

Is this pessimism? Is this the unforgivable sin of admitting what everybody really feels? Is it pessimism to diagnose cancer as cancer? Or should one simply go on pretending that everything is getting better every day, because the time of the end is also-for some at any rate-the time of great prosperity? “The kings of the earth have joined in her idolatry, and the traders of the earth have grown rich from her excessive luxury” (Revelation 18:3).

Into this world, this demented inn, in which there is absolutely no room for him at all, Christ has com uninvited. But because he cannot be at home in it-because he is out of place in it, and yet must be in it-his place is with those others who do not belong, who are rejected because they are regarded as weak’ and with those who are discredited, who are denied the status or persons, and are tortured, exterminated. With those for whom there is no room, Christ is present in this world. He is mysteriously present in those for whom there seems to be nothing but the world at its worst. For them, there is no escape even in imagination. They cannot identify with the power structure of a crowded humanity which seeks to project itself outward, anywhere, in a centrifugal flight into the void, to get out there where there is no God, no man, no name, no identity, no weight, no self, nothing but the bright, self directed, perfectly obedient and infinitely expensive machine.

For those who are stubborn enough, devoted enough to power, there remains this last apocalyptic myth of machinery propagating its own kind in the eschatological wilderness of space-while on earth the bombs make room!

But the others: they remain imprisoned in other hopes, and in more pedestrian despairs, despairs and hopes which are held down to earth, down to street level, and to the pavement only: desire to be at least half human, to taste a little human joy, to do a fairly decent job of productive work. To come home to the family…desires for which there is no room. It is in these that He hids himself, for whom there is no room. The time of the end? All right: when? That is not the question.

To say that this is the time of the end is to answer all the questions, for if it is the time of the end, and of great tribulation, then it is certainly and above all the time of the Great Joy. It is the time to “lift up you heads for your redemption is at hand.” It is the time when the promise will be manifestly fulfilled, and no longer kept secret from anyone. It is the time for the joy that is given not as the world gives, and that no man can take away.

WHO DO WE SEE?

I discovered Oscar Romero quite by accident. He was a Savadoran. He was a priest. He became an archbishop who totally surprised those who elected him and thought they knew him. He became a martyr and the church finally decided to recognize him as a saint. He was speaking of the poor in his own country, but they are the poor in any country. Just change the job descriptions. 

A seven year old girl from Guatemala died in custody. I don't know all the details. He family came looking for life and found death. Hell they can find plenty of that in her own country. Especially if the family is Amerindian. 

Who do we see?

Each time we look upon the poor, on the farm workers who harvest the coffee, the sugarcane, or the cotton, or the farmer who joins the caravan of workers looking to earn their savings for the year…remember there is the face of Christ.

The face of Christ is among the sacks and baskets of the farm worker; the face of Christ is among those who are tortured and mistreated in the prisons; the face of Christ is dying of hunger in the children who have nothing to eat; the face of Christ is in the poor who ask the church for their voices to be heard. How can the church deny this request when it is Christ who is telling us to speak for Him?

…..A church that tries to keep itself pure and uncontaminated would not be a church of God’s service to people. The authentic church is one that does not mind conversing with prostitutes, publicans and sinners as Christ did-and with Marxists and those of various political movements in order to bring them salvation’s true message.

Oscar Romero, archbishop of San Salvador martyred in 1980.

I’d love to get the chance to read this in the presence of our God fearing Republican candidates and that sorry excuse for a current occupant and ask them what they were doing to fulfill Romero’s words. Did this child belong to a gang? Was she a "terrorist?"

JUST GOOD ENOUGH IS NOT GOOD ENOUGH

I ran across a quote from Sam Walton, the founder of WalMart, regarding the wages they pay their employees. “We pay them just as much as we can get by with.” In other words the pay is just good enough to get someone desperate for a job to work for you.

The Portland Oregonian ran a series on WalMart several years ago. It described the process suppliers of items like clothing go through to get their items accepted. If the buyer figures that one item of trim is enough that’s all that is ordered. If you can get by with no trim that’s even better. In other words, the garment is just good enough to get a customer to buy it.

I’ve run across this attitude in a lot of letters to the editor. Especially when the schools or public works departments are trying to get adequate funding. Sam Walton didn’t invent the attitude. WalMart is just the most blatant example.

Just good enough. Imagine if a surgeon does a job that’s just good enough. How about the people who clean up after the operation is over. Do you want to trust your life to just good enough? Do you want the mechanic who works on your brakes to do a job that is just good enough? How about the architect who designed the skyscraper you might be working in and the metal workers who drove the rivets that hold it together-do you want them to do a job that’s just good enough? When it’s time to dump treated wastewater into our rivers, do you want the job to be just good enough? There are a million examples and I know that any of you could come up with a great list of your own. That so many do such a fantastic job with so little is a testament to our shared pride in creation.

If we truly are made in the image of the Creator, and I believe that we are, then there has to be so much more. We share that urge to create and to look at what we create and to see that “it is good.” The ones whose hands and minds and hearts create the clothing, make the cars, build the houses, grow the food, clean our streets, teach our children, and care for ourelders deserve the greatest respect. And the way our economy is run right now doesn’t support that drive to create, it tears it down.

What they are doing is creating our world. They are the eyes, the ears, the hands, and the voice of Creation. That is worthy of the highest praise. And JUST GOOD ENOUGH doesn’t cut it.

Just good enough not only does not cut it, it is an insult to Creation and the Creator whoever or whatever you believe in. Reread the first Creation story in Genesis. At each step God pronounces the work as "good" and in the end the results are "very good."

And then we were created. In the image of God, male and and female. IN THE IMAGE OF GOD. Our fellow humans are worth more than "just good enough." And how are we treating the rest of Creation? Far below Just Good Enough. 

STILL A VERY SCARY STORY

I originally posted this several years ago. I don't believe we are any closer to robot soldiers but we do have drones controlled from this country dropping bombs half way across the world. And we have techies joyously rubbing their hands over artificial intelligence having increasing control over our lives. After you check out Star Trek try a viewing of The Forbin Project to see how THAT might work out.

Over the years I realized that the scariest story I’ve every watched on TV or the movies was an old Star Trek episode. The Enterprise is transporting a diplomatic party to an area where the Federation would like to open diplomatic relations and hopefully establish a base. An attempt had been made a generation before. The last message from the original party stated that the planet in question was at war with a colony world. When the Enterprise arrives they find the war is still going on. In fact, the war has been going on for nearly five hundred years.

The capital city is attacked while the landing party is on the ground. Funny thing is-no booms, no tremors, no radiation. Turns out, the whole war is being handled by computers. Since you can’t have a war without casualties, the citizens in the affected areas have a day to report to suicide stations. The planetary leaders state they finally realized their society was hopelessly warlike anyway so they figured they might as well make the process as “civilized” as possible. Since the story is no fun without threatening the ship and her crew, the Enterprise is declared a casualty and the crew ordered down. Of course the captain takes extreme exception to the idea and throws a large monkey wrench in the works. He and Spock blow up the war computer. In answer to the council leaders’ accusations that the Federation is just as warlike as his people so get off your high horse all ready. Kirk answer that yes, maybe they are, but they finally realized that while humans may be killers with generations of wars in their history, we “don’t have to kill anybody, today.” That’s the first step, “We don’t have to kill anybody-TODAY.” The story ends there. You never find out how the war ends, just on the note that maybe, just maybe both sides will be so terrified of the idea of fighting a war with real weapons that they might actually try to make peace.

This little summary was prompted by stories in both papers about the attempts to develop robot soldiers. The idea is to field automated troops that don’t get scared, don’t worry about getting killed, don’t care if their buddies get killed, don’t get hot tired, don’t get hungry, don’t get thirsty, and aren’t entitled to pensions twenty or thirty years down the road. I find this very, very scary.

You see, I think war is supposed to be terrible. It’s supposed to be horrifying. The idea of fighting one is supposed to scare the living daylights out of you. That’s so we don’t fight them unless we absolutely have to. I believe that aren’t face with the realization of the human costs of a war, it will remove a very important obstacle to starting one. Personally I think we should go back to swords and clubs. When you’re trying to take another’s life you should have to look that person in the eye.

There is a wonderful scene at the end of the D-Day episode in Band of Brothers. It’s nighttime and Easy Company has an hour or so to grab some grub and catch their breath before they have to move out again. The new company commander, a lieutenant Winters (the old one is missing presumed dead, along with everybody else on his plane)  is looking at the flames in the sky with that “thousand yard stare’ and promising himself that if he gets out of this alive he’s going to find a nice quiet little cornor and never fight again. He did and he did. 

TEARS FOR THE LAND

This is a repost of an early, very early blog entry. Read it and weep for the land. We are destroying what we absolutely have to preserve to live. The techies love to tell us that the future is in high tech and living in the city. Sounds like death to me. And Lisa is a very old friend.

Lisa tagged me to do an entry about my love (passion) for reading. While I’m working on that, here is the opening passage from one of my favorite books, Cry the Beloved Country. It was written in the late forties by an English South African, Alan Paton. If you have a love of the land this may be one the saddest things you’ll ever read.

A note some of the words. Ixopo is the name of a village. The x is pronounced with a ck sound. The veld is an open plain. The pronunciation is almost like fvelt. A kloof is a steep sided gully or small valley. The tithoya is a small bird like a plover and the name sounds like the birds’ call. Ingeli, Umzimkulu and Griqueland are pronounced pretty much as they are spelled.  The style in this novel is unlike anything I’ve ever read. It’s almost as if someone is writing down a spoken story. It probably breaks half the rules of conventional writing and that may be why I love it so much. The book is about people, the land, love, loss, forgiveness and acceptance.

So, here goes.

There is a lovely road that runs from Ixopo into the hills. These hills are grass-covered and rolling, and they are lovely beyond any singing of it. The road climbs seven miles into them, to Carisbrooke; and from there, if there is not mist, you can look down on one of the fairest valleys of Africa. About you there is grass and bracken and you may hear the forlorn crying of the tithoya, one of the birds of the veld. Below you is the valley of the Umzimkulu, on its journey from the Drakensberg to the sea: and beyond and behind the river, great hill after great hill; and beyond and behind them, the mountains of Ingeli and East Griqueland.

The grass is rich and matted, you cannot see the soil. It holds the rain and the mist, and they seep into the ground, feeding the streams in every kloof. It is well-tended, and not too many cattle feed upon it; not too many fires burn it, laying bare the soil. Stand unshod upon it, for the ground is holy, being even as it came from the Creator. Keep it, guard it, care for it, for it keeps men, guards men, cares for men. Destroy it and man is destroyed.

Where you stand the grass is rich and matted, you cannot see the soil. But the rich green hills break down. They fall to the valley below, and falling, change their nature. For they grow red and bare; they cannot hold the rain and mist, and the streams are dry in the kloofs. Too many cattle feed upon the grass, and too many fires haveburned it. Stand shod upon it, for it is coarse and sharp, and the stones cut under the feet. It is not kept, or guarded, or cared for, it no longer keeps men, guards men, cares for men. The titihoya does not cry here any more.

The great red hills stand desolate, and the earth has torn away like flesh. The lighting flashes over them, the clouds pour down upon them, the dead streams come to life, full of the soil that is left, and the maize hardly reaches the height of a man. They are valleys of old men and old women, of mothers and children. The men are away; the young men and the girls are away. The soil cannot keep them any more.

Alan Paton, 1948

SINGING SILENCE

Koosah Falls on the McKenzie River about forty five minutes from Springfield, Oregon.
I didn't grow up in the shadows of oaks,maples, or beeches. Outside of a few trees in the yards 
around Oakridge, and the two dwarf apple trees in our yard I grew up surrounded by evergreens.

And a single evergreen just won't do as an image for a world tree.

Is there such a thing as a world forest? There used to be a belt of evergreens that stretched

across Europe, Asia and into North America. In Siberia they call it the Taiga and say that

only the birds know where the Taiga ends. A world forest? Perhaps.Once upon a time. 

But a single evergreen simply won't survive by itself. Where an oak or maple has a low

lying single trunk that branches and branches and branches an evergreen spikes straight up.

I've seen a few cedars with a double trunk, maybe a triple but that's it. The branches tend
to slope downwards to survive heavy snowfalls and the root system is usually
shallower. Apparently only in the Pacific belt that runs through Oregon, Washington 

and British Columbia do you find the great trees that took multiple trucks to bring one

tree out. In most other places the trunks are thinner The trees shorter. This makes 

evergreens vulnerable in ice storms or severe windstorms. The best defense?

Grow in huge groves so that each tree is protected by the others. So a world forest 

as a symbol of the world we would love to see isn't too far off. Each tree protects

the others and any damage to one tree threatens the rest. So instead of one great 

tree, I find myself picturing a world with a great forest in every part of the globe with 

the roots reaching for the center.

So, where did this come from? As I read a guided imagery exercise my
little avatar didn't go looking for an oak or a maple. It made tracks for
the tall timber. Some place with tall trees, ferns, deep moss, some deadfall
for the mushrooms and lichens to grow on, and some berry bushes. If a
waterfall makes an appearance that is a definite bonus

If I can't have a waterfall then a drippy, misty, coastal forest will do very nicely.

So if my little spirit self doesn't head for the Cascades it heads for the coast.

Not to the beach, to the great basalt headlands graced with low-lying evergreens shaped
by the winds. To that Pacific Ocean that William Clark called the Great
Western Ocean. When he made the entry he said he wasn't about to call it the
Pacific. He hadn't had one pacific (peaceful) day since he laid eyes on it.

And silence. Not the scary, wake up in the middle of the night, where is
everybody silence. But the root deep silence of the world before the first
word was spoken. A silence that hums just below what you can hear. Bird song, wind song
and water song are part of that silence. A silence with a background hum. A
silence that begins to sing. To speak. 

SILENCING THE SONG

Sorry I've been out for awhile. Trying to find my voice. And this is what I'm starting to find. Look out amateur philosopher at work. Things may be a little disjointed while I get semi grounded again.

I was rereading Morgan Llewyllen's novel Druids when an idea started to slip into my consciousness. The idea of the Source as the foundation of All. It hit me. One Source. One God. The beginning of all. Life, love, music, poetry, law, healing. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God. In the beginning was the Singer, the Singer sang and it all began.

What does it matter. There is one belief in common. As long as the Speaker speaks, the Singer sings, Creation continues. Silence the Speaker, Silence the Singer and Creation ends.

But happens when our machines, our guns, our shouting, our greed, drown out the Speaker. Drown out the Singer. Reduce the voices in the Song of Creation? The song continues but with fewer and fewer voices.What will be left when the only voice heard is our hate?

DIVIDED WORLDS

I haven't been around for awhile. Political overload? Not really sure . We get these dry spells I guess. Anyway. Finally managed to replace my copy of Women Healing Earth. Some random thoughts half way through the intro.

The attitudes of white upper middle class and upper class feminists seem to have a disconnect with working class white women and women of color. And especially their second and third world sisters. How does our import, long distance food economy affect third world women who can not get enough food for their families because the best farmland is growing export crops? How about access too clean water because water is being diverted to grow GMO crops that need more water and fertilizer? What is the effect on families of debt taken on to grow crops with seeds that can not be saved and shared? How many of these problems fly under the radar while we share a picture of the president with paper on his shoe?

ELEMENTALS

I wrote this back in 2013. Considering the push back on the environment, and just about everything decent that has been done in the last century or so reposting this seemed appropriate.

The veils between the physical and spiritual worlds seemed thinner in the past. There was a time when it was easier to believe that there were spirits in the rocks, the trees, the streams. A vision of the world that’s still often dismissed as “Nature Worship” by mainstream society.

I don’t believe that the old Celts worshipped Nature as I understand word, but they were much more in touch with the world, seen and unseen, around them. This immersion in the spirit world seems to have persisted longest on the fringes of Europe. In Ireland, where Rome’s writ never ran. Or in the highlands and islands of Scotland beyond Hadrian’s Wall. Even the people of Wales held onto most of their independence until the thirteenth century and the invasions of England’s Edward I.

I’m not even sure that the Celtic concept of creation or creator is the same as the world view I grew up with. They certainly have enough different words to work with. And heck, maybe it doesn’t really matter unless you’re trying to learn how to speak one of these jaw breakers of a language.

The word often used in Irish for creator, Duileamh (always capitalized and pronounced dool-yev) doesn’t have the root word for create. It doesn’t have the root word for God, or the Almighty, or Supreme Being; all those words our world view equates with a supernatural Creator.

This difficult, for us, to pin down word can mean “being in the elements,” or “one who is in the elements” or “one who is the elements.” To make it even more interesting the root duil can also mean desire, hope, fondness or expectation. They’re all related, I guess, maybe…….oh heck I’ll take their word for it. Try asking Who is fond of What? Who desires What? Careful, the next thing you know you just might decide that Creator and Creation are caught in a web of desire, hope, and fondness that we aren’t used to facing in our world view of the sacred confined to a few hours on a certain day and tucked in the closet the rest of the time.

The highlanders of Scotland used to bless each other in a way that turns the way we treat each other and the world around us on its head.

“The love and affection of the moon be yours.

The love and affection of the sun be yours.

The love and affection of the stars be yours.”

And work their way through all the things of nature around them until they end with

“The love and affection of all living things be yours.”

Adapted from Yearning for the wind.

Perhaps it isn’t so strange to feel a kinship with the sun. The sun feeds the plants, the plants feed the cows and the cows feed us. I guess you could say we carry a bit of sunshine with us through the day; and the night.

If we really believed that the local river had love and affection for us we might treat it like the irreplaceable creation that it is instead of as a sewer. If we could stretch our minds around the idea that the mountains and valleys might love us perhaps we’d think twice about carving off the top of a mountain to get at the coal and dumping the tailings in the valley below. If we truly felt the living web instead of seeing board feet when we look at an old growth forest maybe we’d be more careful as we harvest the trees we need. As it stands we don’t believe we have the love and affection of our fellow human beings much less the rest of the world and the creatures in it.

The elements of creation. “The Love and Affection of the Elements. The Pure Love of the Elements. The Being of the Elements. The One Who is the Elements.” Tom Cowan notes that the participants were trying to discuss these concepts at a workshop for Celtic Shamanism. One woman in the group wished our language had words like these. Another broke in with “Wouldn’t it be great if our culture had ideas like this.” Taken from Yearning for the Wind.

Just wouldn’t it though?

THE WORLD IS NOT SO LARGE

"The world is not so large, it is quite small. There are 27 species of birds on the endangered species list which live in Hawai'i and nest in the Arctic Wildlife Refuge, and if they develop the oil in that refuge, we will not have those birds. The world is quite small . . . Because [each act] is a pebble in a pond. Small pebble  large ripple." From an interview with Hawaiian lands activist Miilani Trask.

 That was back in the nineties. Endangered birds. Endangered fish. Endangered animals. Endangered rivers. Endangered oceans. Endangered lands and underground waters. Endangered children. Endangered women. Endangered men. A screaming planet. It's all one. Little pebbles. Big, big ripples.

THE WAR AGAINST THE POOR

Back in the eighties a minister, Jack Nicholas-Pallmeyer, wrote a little book titled The War Against the Poor-low intensity conflict and Christian faith. He focused on the conflict in Nicaragua. But what was happening in Nicaragua was mirrored in the rest of Central America. Takes a bit of reading. It is a book after all. Read it and weep. And for those of us old enough remember that almost no coverage that didn't come from Reagan administration spokesmen was in the so called free press of the time.

And some of those actions, techniques, whatever you want to call them are being played out on our borders and in our minority neighborhoods. No bombs or morters. Yet

A SHEPHERD'S LAST PLEA

Oscar Romero was archbishop of San Salvador for three years. They thought they were getting a conservative. He was middle aged. His health wasn't that good. They thought they were getting a pussy cat. They got a tiger. For three years he defended his people. Until the last sermon.

"Brothers, you are from the same people; you kill your brother peasants...No soldier is obliged to obey an order that is contrary to the will of God. Now it is time for you to recover your consciences so that you first obey conscience rather than a sinful order...in the name of God, then, in the name of this suffering people, whose cries rise to the heavens, every day more tumultuously, I ask you, I beg, I order you in the name of Good: stop the repression."

 From the last sermon of Archbishop Oscar Romero. Preached just before Easter in March 1980. He gave this sermon knowing that he was risking his life. He was correct. He was murdered a few days later. During mass. Nearly forty years later no one is quite sure who was responsible although there are plenty of suspects.

Looking at the list of possible evangelical ministers, is there even one that would make such a call to the ICE, the Border patrol, TSA, or our military today.

THE APPARATUS OF OCCUPATION

"Whether the mask is labelled Fascism, Democracy, or Dictatorship of the Proletariat, our great adversary remains the apparatus-the bureaucracy, the police, the military. Not the one facing us across the frontiers or the battlelines, which is not so much our enemy as our brothers' enemy, but the one that calls itself our protector and makes us its slaves. No matter what the circumstances, the worst betrayal will always be too subordinate ourselves to this Apparatus, and to trample underfoot, in its service, all human values in ourselves and in others."

Simone Well i in the magazine Politics in 1945. Well was a French philosopher and activist during the thirties to the fifties.

The great majority of our population lives within one hundred miles of a national border or a coastline. Especially if you throw in the Great Lakes. When will that other army of occupation, the immigration service, move from asking everyone on a bus for their papers and demand that everyone show their papers?

OCCUPIED LIVES

Jackson Brown wrote this back in the eighties at the height of US support of the wars of repression in Latin America. Well the wars are fairly quiet, but we are still living with the fall out on our borders as the survivors try to get out of the killing zones.

And it isn't much better for citizens of color in too many sections of this country. There's no blood on the wire. There's no gun ships at the borders. Although there are probably drones. 

But read the histories of occupied Europe. Learn how the peoples of Latin America under the overt dictatorships lived from day to day. Stopped for little or no reason. Asked what you are doing when you are doing it in your own neighborhood. Even in your own house. Followed on your drive home and stopped for something as immaterial as a turn signal light not working. Unarmed citizens of color shot down because an occupier with a gun "feared for his life."

In too many parts of this country police are not functioning as police. They are an army of occupation.

LIVES IN THE BALANCE

I've been waiting for something to happen
For a week or a month or a year
With the blood in the ink of the headlines
And the sound of the crowd in my ear
You might ask what it takes to remember
When you know that you've seen it before
Where a government lies to a people
And a country is drifting to war

And there's a shadow on the faces
Of the men who send the guns
To the wars that are fought in places
Where their business interest runs

On the radio talk shows and the T.V.
You hear one thing again and again
How the U.S.A. stands for freedom
And we come to the aid of a friend
But who are the ones that we call our friends--
These governments killing their own?
Or the people who finally can't take any more
And they pick up a gun or a brick or a stone
There are lives in the balance
There are people under fire
There are children at the cannons
And there is blood on the wire

There's a shadow on the faces
Of the men who fan the flames
Of the wars that are fought in places
Where we can't even say the names

They sell us the President the same way
They sell us our clothes and our cars
They sell us every thing from youth to religion
The same time they sell us our wars
I want to know who the men in the shadows are
I want to hear somebody asking them why
They can be counted on to tell us who our enemies are
But they're never the ones to fight or to die
And there are lives in the balance
There are people under fire
There are children at the cannons
And there is blood on the wire

JACKSON BROWN

POLICED OR OCCUPIED

Some of these entries  may get a little disjointed as I work my way through.

After integration became the law of the land and the voting rights act was passed came Watts. King discovered that plenty of the inner city inhabitants has never heard of him, but they had heard of Malcolm. What was left of the neighborhood was in ruins and with more than thirty dead and thousands in jail the traditional civil rights movement looked like a tragic joke.

Inner city blacks could vote. It didn't get them much. They could eat wherever they wanted. If they had the money. Schools were not legally segregated, but that didn't count for much when you lived in a defacto segregated slum. They could even go to the library. If  they could find one.

 "formal equality did not change the material conditions of black people, especially those packed in the ghettos in the North. In fact their poverty continued to get worse, partly because of the progressive displacement of unskilled labor, further eroding their sense of somebodyness. After Watts, King concluded that without economic justice, the right  to a job or income, talk about 'life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness' was nothing but a figment of one's political imagination."

 "Martin did not take long to realize that poverty was no accident but was a consequence of a calculated decision of the wielders of economic power. Using Malcolm's language, Malcolm began to speak of the ghetto as a 'system of internal colonialism'. 'The purpose of the slumslum,' he did in a speech at the Chicago Freedom Festival, 'is to confine those who have no power and perpetuate their powerlessness ... The slum is little more a domestic colony which leaves its inhabitants dominated politically, segregated and humiliated at every turn..'"

 From Martin and Malcolm & America: A Dream or a Nightmare

Wendell Berry in his essay What Are People For quoted a psychologist friend that the local police had told him that a "major occupation was to keep the permanently unemployable confined to their own part of town."

Are minorities in this country being policed or occupied? Some of these shootings look less like holding your ground and more like the  tactics  used in the Central American civil wars.

WHO IS ON THE BORDERS OR IN THE CAMPS

Thomas Merton asked this question focussing on the dangers of nuclear war in the sixties. Well, we're looking at half a century or so later and where will we find Christ now? In the ruins of Central American countries fighting subversives? Subversives defined as priests, nuns, teachers, union organizers, lay church workers and death came labeled Made in the USA.

 The refugee trails through Mexico to the U.S.  border? Detention camps for children? Fill in the blanks for women and men of color caught in impossible situations because somebody with a gun was "afraid for their life." Anyplace where contaminated land or water has poisoned the crops, the fish, the animals? And what do you do when the choice is between poison and starvation?

"The Christian it's not only bound to avoid certain evils, but he is responsible for very great goods. This is often forgotten. The doctrine of the Incarnation  makes the Christian obligated at once to God and to man. If God has become man, then no Christian is ever allowed to be indifferent to man's fate. Whoever believes that  Christ is the Word made flesh  believes that every man must in some sense be regarded as Christ. For all are at least potentially members of the Mystical Christ. Who can say with absolute certainty of any other man that Christ does not live in him (or her, adult or child)."They

From "Can We Choose Peace" in Peace in the Post Christian Era page 10 by Thomas Merton.

WHAT IS PEACE

Thomas Merton in New Seeds of Contemplation chapter The Root of War is Fear. Not sure about the page numbers I was working off my Kindle.

"If men really wanted peace they would sincerely ask God for it and He would give it to them. But why should He give the world a peace which it does not really desire? The peace the world pretends to desire is really no peace at all.

To some peace merely means the liberty to exploit others without fear of retaliation or interference. To others peace means the freedom to rob others without interruption. To still others out means the leisure to devour the goods of the earth without being compelled to interrupt their pleasures to feed those whom their greed is starving. And to almost everyone else peace means the absence of any physical violence that might cast a shadow over their comfort or pleasure. (a little editing in this paragraph).

Many have asked God for what they believed was peace and wondered why their prayer was not answered. They could not understand their prayer was answered. God left them with what they thought they desired, for their idea of peace was just another form of war. This is one of the consequences of the corrupt idea of a peace based on a policy of  'every man for himself' in ethics, economics, and politics. " (again a bit of editing) Merton was a great writer but there were times when never met an adjective or and adverb he didn't like.

This was written in the sixties at the height of the cold war. Merton's was a strong voice against the idea that any country could defend its people and way of life by destroying both itself and the enemy. Along with the rest of their neighbors.  I don't believe there was any plan on the part of the US or the USSR to ask the rest of the world if they wanted to be reduced to radioactive ashes or end up glowing in the dark. Or their own citizens for that matter. Left that it to the science fiction authors to imagine the days, years, centuries after.

And especially the birds, bees, fish, animals, trees, flowers.  All the other citizens of this world who know nothing about the politics of humans and end up on the  firing line anyway.

DREAMS DEFERRED OR

that moment when the earth sort of shifts and you realize that you have been half blind. Most of the branches of my family tree were planted in New England and Pennsylvania.  Puritans and Quakers. At least for the first few generations. And congratulations to the Pennsylvania Quakers. They founded the first abolition societies in the colonies.

There were a few branches in the South, mostly in Virginia. One family were transplanted gentry. Anglicans mostly. The rest were Quakers, mostly.

One family that I know had slaves. There is a copy of a will that provides for two elderly slave women. Not fredom, but support. Since Virginia law required that freed slaves leave Virginia it was probably kinder to support the women where they were living and may have had family. That was the Anglican branch.

A first cousin several times removed of the Virginia Quakers split from his family, joined the revolutionary army in the South  and ended up in South Carolina and Alabama. It is more than probable that those relatives were slave owners. Heck, he helped settle Alabama. Has a town and a county named for him. Doubt if he could have done that WITHOUT slaves.

And then I discovered a young African American actress who shares the last name of that former Quaker. And there is probably, I hope, only one way that could have happened.  (Ownership not biology, I hope).

So. All those decades and centuries when those of us in the north patted ourselves on the back, and told ourselves "at least MY ancestors didn't own slaves" those ancestors profited from the trade. Whether they built the ships, supplied the ships, sailed the ships, made the rum, sold the sugar and other goods from the West Indies and never even set eyes on a slave they profited from the trade. And there were slaves in the north. Not many, but they were there.

Next month is the anniversary of the "I have a dream speech." That dream seems further away than ever.

(DIS)HONORABLE MEN

This is a very old post (2004) from a poor, ignored blog. If I was having a problem finding honorable men or women in 2004 finding some now is almost, freaking impossible. I suspect there is some good material out there that I can recycle.

One of the kingdoms in Return of the King is called Rohan. Early in the film the king, Theoden, describes one of the characters as “an honorable man.” I get the impression that this is the highest complement for a person that Theoden can bestow. This has been bubbling around in my head since I first saw the film. I’ve composed a lot of journal entries in my head and haven’t been happy with any of them.

When was the last time did you hear anyone described as honorable and it wasn’t part of a title? As in the honorable judge Hector Smith. There have been many business and political leaders in the news over the past few years. Certain members of the past and current administrations, certain business leaders, people in the news and entertainment industries that have had many adjectives joined with their names. I’m not sure that honorable would apply to any of them.

WE DON'T WANT TO GO THERE

Yeah, it would be a different world all right. I sure as hell wouldn't want to live there as much as I dislike fundies of any stripe. The atheists can be just as militant and just as insulting. 

I have experienced immanence. Something or someone is out there. But, that is personal to me. I can't explain it and I'm not going to condemn anyone because they don't share it. But, don't condemn me or insult me because I have this personal experience or belief.

OK follow this to the logical conclusion. This is the banner picture for Hitchen's personal blog Reason over Religion. How do you prevent parents from teaching their children. How do keep parents from taking their children to religious services. And that covers everyone from Amish to pagans. Trying to actually do this would make 1984 look like Sunday afternoon tea with the vicar.

HAIL BRITANNIA

This was too good to pass up.

It looks like we could take some lessons in protesting and sign creation.

THINKING CRITICALLY

 A few days ago this survey link showed up on my FB page. I shared it so it actually showed up on the page that friends can access. I got this comment from a friend,

'When I was in junior high and high school (back when dinosaurs roamed the earth), we had a class called "critical thinking skills" that was part of the curriculum, year after year. At the time, I questioned why we were being taught critical thinking skills. Now that I see the results of not teaching that concept, I understand."

And then I put a reply to the original comment. 

We didn't have a separate class but we did have a short assigned piece to read and answer questions. And then there was the ever popular research paper with footnotes and bibliography. I managed to avoid getting mine back without to many ??????? What were you thinking notes in the margins.

But, that got me thinking. Is it critical thinking skills or is it 'my mind is made up don't confuse me with the facts?" I got into a little comment "war" over the electoral college. I tried to explain that the electoral college was a compromise. One to strike a balance between a popular vote for president and having congress elect the president. And partly it was a bone thrown to the small states (along with the senate having two to a state) who were afraid they would be swamped by the larger states.

 Another compromise was allowing the slave states to count each slave as 3/5 of person in the census.This allowed states like South Carolina with a small white population more representatives than they would have has otherwise. 

The kindest comment I got back was being called a "dumbass.' I have finally learned that it doesn't do any good to answer back. The constitution. A monument to compromise and horsetrading. 

When we got a TV it was off more often than it was on. Now we have so called news going all day and all night i wonder how many hours of Fox News kids are exposed to be the time they start school. And it makes me wonder. Can a class in critical thinking skills get past hours and hours of propaganda? Teach it yes. But in every class along with an official class in thinking critically. 

I mean, don't you have to think critically about science, history, almost every class you take? 

THE RIGHTS OF EVERYONE AND EVERYTHING

"If this nation has a long way to go before all our people are truly created equally without regard to race, religion, or national origin, it has even farther to go before achieving anything that remotely resembles equal treatment for other creatures who called this land home before humans ever set foot upon it...while the species themselves... fish, fowl, game, and the habitat they live in-have given us unparalleled wealth, they live crippled in their ability to persist  and live in conditions of captive squalor...this enslavement and impoverishment of nature is no more tolerable or sensible than enslavement and impoverishment of other human beings...perhaps it is because we are the messengers that not only our sovereignty as Native governments but our right to identify with a deity and a history, or right to hold too a set of natural lass as practiced for thousands of years is under assault. Now more than ever, tribal people must hold onto their timeless and priceless customs and practices. Ted Strong in the introduction to All Our Relations by Winona LaDuke.

Mr. Strong is an activist for the Columbia River Tribes speaking for the rights of our non human neighbors, especially the salmon people.

scam warning

For all you amazon customers out there. If you get a call from someone claiming to be with Amazon and telling you that your someone has tried to access your account from a city far, far away from where you are hang up immediately. Especially if they have extremely heavy accents. Check your account to see if there has been any activity, call Amazon and request to change your password. I got scammed and am trying to sort it out.

And if you are dumb enough to start trying to sort it out with them if it doesn't make sense do not listen if they try to tell you 'this is how we do it"

Tried to sell me another fortunately I had my card blocked. 

ONE TIN SOLDIER

Listen people to a story
That was written long ago,
'bout a kingdom on a mountain
And the valley folks below.
On the mountain was a treasure
Hidden deep beneath a stone,
And the valley people swore
They would have it for their very own.

Go ahead and hate your neighbor,
Go ahead and cheat a friend.
Do it in the name of heaven,
You can justify it in the end.
There won't be any trumpets blowing,
Come the judgement day,
On that bloody morning after,
One tin soldier rides away.

So the people of the valley
Sent a message up the hill,
Asking for the buried treasure
Tons of gold for which they'd kill.
Came the answer from the kingdom,
With our brothers we will share,
All the riches of the mountain,
All the treasure buried there.

Now the valley cried with anger,
Mount your horses draw your swords
And they killed the mountain people,
So they won their just rewards.
Now they stood before the treasure
On the mountain dark and red
Turned the stone and looked beneath it
Peace on earth was all it said. 

Go ahead and hate your neighbor,
Go ahead and cheat a friend.
Do it in the name of heaven,
You can justify it in the end.
There won't be any trumpets blowing,
Come the judgement day,
On that bloody morning after,
One tin soldier rides away.

MEMORIES

It was spring of 1968. Fifty years ago. I was a senior in a small logging town in Oregon. We had a new teacher for junior year US history. He was young. He was an army veteran and somehow, some way, he had access to archive films from the end of WW II.

I suspect his students had to get permission slips. I don't know. maybe not. Seniors who had study hall were invited, I don't remember that we needed them. After all it was 1968 and there were still plenty veterans who were still around.

The films were taken in liberated concentration camps. Bodies so starved you could not tell if they were men or women being bulldozed into mass graves. Soldiers wearing masks in hope of cutting the stench.

Survivors, if you could call them survivors, huddled together. Some in scraps of prison uniforms. I could not keep looking. I could not look away. I don't remember if there was a soundtrack. What could be said anyway? Such and such a camp? So many dead? So many so far gone they wouldn't survive? So many who would wish they hadn't survived? A few would build new lives?

I haven't remembered this in years. A plague on those who voted for Trump, on those who stayed home, those who were too pure to vote for the candidate who had chance. I'd say the hell with it but I still have a sliver of hope.

WHO ARE YOU?

An adaptation of something I wrote several years ago.

I was the song, I was the singer.

I was the earth, I was the willow.

I was the hill, I was the badger.

I was the stone, I was the moss.

I was the meadow, I was the deer.

I was the flower, I was the bee.

I was the marsh, I was the heron.

I was the river, I was the salmon.

I was the sea, I was the dolphin.

I was the sea, I was the wave.

I was the wind, I was the gull.

I was the sun, I was the mist.

I was the dream, I was the dreamer.

The line about the gulls was influenced by something we saw on on the coast several years ago. We were watching gulls flying up the beach against the wind. A few minutes later a white blur could be seen flashing in the other direction. It was the gulls. Fighting  against the wind so they could ride the wind back down the beach.

It was fun watching them.

HISTORY REPEATS ITSELF: OVER AND OVER AND OVER

Read this quote first, do not skip to the bottom. The little blank hides the identity of the subject of the passage. Source is after the quote. But does this sound dreadfully familiar?

 "In a state of constant self-suppression, for the one thing their master could not bear was for anyone to disagree with him, to have an opinion apart from his own. What he seemed to seek in his surrounding was a chorus of approval from persons who had sunk their own personalities, submerged them for the the time, while they themselves played the role of listeners. At first I rather despised this complacent courtier-like attitude, yet insensibly  I too fell into it, found myself searching for points of agreement with ......., rather than risk displeasing him by any form of polite argument. "

From George, Nicholas and Wilhelm: Three Royal Cousins. The subject was the German ruler Wilhelm II. He does sound a lot like "he who shall not be named." Wilhelm had the attention span off a gnat, hated to read anything of substance, insisted on constant approval, had trouble finishing what he started and so on. The quote was from Anne Topham, an English governess to the German royal family. English governesses were very popular in more than one of the European royal courts.