A DATE WITH A BULLET

The radicalization of the preacher of nonviolence.

"However deeply American Negroes are caught in the struggle to be at last at home in our homeland our the United States, we cannot ignore the larger worlds house in which we are dwellers. Equality with whites will not solve the problems of either whites or Negroes if it means equality in a world society stricken by poverty and in a universe doomed to extinction by war. " MLK in  Martin and Malcolm and  America: A Dream or a Nightmare.

So of course he had a date with a bullet in Memphis.

NOW THAT THEY ARE SAFELY DEAD

Repost from an earlier entry on MLK day. King isn't the only prophet who safely dead and can't speak for himself. 

Now that he is safely dead

Let us praise him.

Build monuments to his glory

Sing hosannas to his name

Dead men make such safe,

Convenient heroes:

They cannot rise to challenge the images

We would fashion from their lives.

And besides,

It is easier to build monuments

Than to build a better world.

So, now that he is safely dead

We, with eased consciences

Will teach our children

That he was a great man…knowing

That the cause he lived for

Is still a cause. And that the dream

For which he died is still a dream.

A dead man’s dream.

Carl Wendell Hines Jr. in Drum Major for a Dream

This piece was written in memory of MLK Jr. However it could also describe the fate of the teachings of a certain footsore rabbi who came a cropper when he went against the combined power of Rome and the Jerusalem power structure.

We don’t know what HE taught. He didn’t write anything down. People with their own agendas did write things down and out of those writings at least one author has identified eight distinct theologies. And he believed that seven of those were wrong.

Now that He is safely out of the way we can make just about anything we want out of the scraps that were allowed into the accepted canon and proceed to beat each other over the head with them and build fences with safely locked gates. Above those gates are the words Keep Out.

WHAT IS NOT JUST

OK. So it's MLK Day and I'm on a roll. I love Thomas Merton. He spoke out for peace and against nuclear weapons when almost no one else was.  He mentored individuals like the Berrigan brothers. His order tried to silence him telling him writing about war and peace was not a job for an enclosed religious. And he started his speaking out at a time when King was leading marches and concentrating on civil rights.

But Martin Luther King faced some of the same arguments. What does a preacher know about war? What does a civil rights leader know about war? Stick to what is safe. Stick to the person we believe we know.

But as the backlashes in the north increased and the guns took money from the poverty programs King pushed back against the critics and spoke out. You can't have peace without justice. You can't solve the problems without justice. And most importantly you can't solve the problems of minority injustice and poverty unless you solve it for everyone. And you can't solve the problems of poverty and injustice in one country without addressing poverty and injustice in all countries.

Hoover called King the most dangerous man in the country. To be honest the Kings and the Mertons were and are the most dangerous individuals in the world.They reach a place where they recognize the dangers and decided to push ahead anyway.

"A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily upon the glaring contest between poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America only to take the profits out with no concern for the countries and say "this is not just." It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and say "this is not just." The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from  them is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: "this business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and law. A nation that continues to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual doom." .

From MLK's speech Conscience and the Viet Nam War

Martin died from a bullet on the balcony of a Memphis hotel. Merton received permission to attend an ecumenical gathering in Thailand and died accidentally in his room after his speech. One man was carried to his grave in a farm wagon drawn by a couple of mules. The other came home in a military transport filled with the bodies of service men killed in action in a war we never won and still haunts us.

And as usual I started out to write one thing and ended up somewhere else.

DRUM MAJOR FOR A DREAM

DRUM MAJOR FOR A DREAM

Ira G Zepp, Jr.

Your dream was clear,

We understood it perfectly.

Liberty and justice for all –

But that was too costly

For us, too expensive

Too dear, as they used to say;

Have-nots having

Disinherited, inheriting.

Is that what you meant by

Lowering mountains and

Exalting valleys?

But you beat your drum

Slowly, persistently, non-violently.

Your dream was clear,

We understood it perfectly.

Heaven on earth.

But heaven can wait.

It is often unwise and untimely for color of skin

To give way to content of character: for black, white

Brown, red yellow

To live together in Shalom.
Is that what you mean by

Making rough places plain

And crooked paths straight?

But you beat your drum

Lovingly, redemptively, faithfully.

Your dream was clear.

We understood it perfectly.

Love your enemies,

But that is impractical, not

Calculating enough.

Loving those who despise you

Who speak calumny against you

Enables us to be brothers and sister

In the Beloved Community.

Is that what you meant by

Seeing the Promised Land?

We understood all of this

So perfectly, saw it so clearly

That we beat the drummer

Senselessly, violently, fatally.

IN MEMORY OF A MARTYR

A US publisher couldn't put out this little volume. It took a workshop of Indian writer's. For the man who still walks through walls.

A silence now stands

Where hope once spoke.

The voice in the wilderness

Of inhumanity crying

Against the indifference

Of the righteous

Is heard no more.

Silenced?

So then is justice,

So then is hope.

So then is faith.

Decency

Dignity

And a dream

Where one dies thousands rise

For Martyrs are made to

Multiply.

The stars catch the sound

The wind carries the word

The earth contains the eternal law

Struggling to be born in

Man.

In the silence

Where he once stood

The children grow

The poor gather

And those now mourning know

They shall be comforted

- Comforted – and fulfilled.

N. Ellsworth Bunce in Drum Major for a Dream.

DANGER BLOGGER THINKING IN PUBLIC

This is a repost of some ideas that came together when I discovered the Greek novels of Mary Renault. The novel cycle begins with Theseus and ends with the break up of the conquests of Alexander of Macedon. The Bull From the Sea, The King Must Die, The Praise Singer, The Last of the Wine, The Mask of Apollo, The Fire From Heaven, The Persian Boy and The Funeral Games.

Google Internet Archive. It's a free online library and search under the titles if you are interested. There might be a wait list for some of them. But they are excellent reads in my opinion.

I’m not sure if this was discussed in Sunday school or my Great Religions class at the U of O, which was taught by a retired minister by the way. But, once things start bouncing around the old brain box who knows what will come out. The Sabbath was presented as an improvement over earlier religious practices because it set aside a day as holy. Well duh, turns out that the so called pagans had holy days and festivals year round. Many of them could last several day. One of the most famous was the Olympic Games but it wasn't the only one.

Greek philosophy described an ultimate God/dess who had more than one face. And some of the Gods had more than one face as well. Poseiden was the God of the sea, but he was also known as Earth Shaker. There were various versions of Apollo, Athena, or Artemis and they all had festivals. Dionysus was not only the patron of the vine but of actors and the theater.

Many of the festivals presented tragedies and comedies as part of a contest, sometimes as part of actual worship. And, in theory, actors were under the God’s protection so they could travel from city to city even if those cities were at war with each other. Of course the troop might find that circumstances had changed since the contracts were signed. You might get to your next stop only to find that the men were away fighting, the women and kids were barricaded at home and the occupying troops were bivouacked in the theater using the scenery for the cook fires. Whoops, guess we don’t get paid for that trip.

There was a rich spiritual life that has been either dismissed or barely acknowledged because what became our way also became the only way. Period, end of discussion.

What was accomplished by setting a specific day as holy, by breaking the links to a changeable calendar that was tied to sun and earth? It undermined the authority of the astronomer/priests for starters. Among their responsibilities was tracking the coming of the full moon for certain festivals of the goddess. Also they kept track of the orbit of the sun to signal the passing of one season to the next and the solstices and equinoxes that were the midseason festivals.

By undercutting the authority of the astronomer/ priests it helped to reinforce the authority of the Mosaic priesthood. And it isolated the followers of the Mosaic Law from their neighbors. No shared festivals. No ties of guest friendship that allowed people to travel from town to town and be sure of some sort of welcome even if your co religionists didn’t live there.

Under the old calendar any day could be a holy day for somebody. If one day is set aside as holy what does that make of the other six days of days of the week? If only one group within a society is labeled holy because they were born into that “tribe” where does that leave the rest of us? If God lives up on a “holy” mountain, is the rest of the earth not holy?

I don’t think so. I believe that holy ground is right outside my door. And I also believe that if we listen the way we should, any one of us can hear the Song.

TARGETS ON OUR BACKS?

I will be the first to admit that this entry is more than a little disjointed. There are ideas perking I'm just not sure how to express them.

"There is one winner, only winner, in war. The winner war itself. Not truth, not justice, not liberty, not morality. These are the vanquished. War wins. reducing them to complete submission. He makes the truth serve violence and falsehood. He causes justice to declare not what is just but what is expedient as well as cruel. He reduces the liberty of the victorious side to a servitude equal to that of the tyranny which they attacked, in defense of liberty. Though morality may intend and endeavor to lay down rules for war, in the end war lays down rules for them. He does not find it hard to make them change their minds. If he could he would change God's own mind War has power to transmute evil into good and good into evil. Do not fear that he will not exercise this power. Now more than ever he is omnipotent. He is the great force, the evil mystery, the demonic mover of our century with his globe of sunfire and his pillar of cloud. Worship him."

Thomas Merton's intro to his essay "Target Equals City" in The Nonviolent Alternative.

Merton was writing in the mid sixties. His targets were the rise of bigger and better nuclear weapons and the widening wars in Southeast Asia. He was looking back at condemnation of the Nazi air raids on cities like Warsaw, Rotterdam and London. And how quickly condemnation became Hamburg, Dresden and Tokyo. The fire bombing of Tokyo produced more casualties than Hiroshima, it just took more bombs and more planes.

Merton died before the era of "we had to destroy the village to save it. He didn't live to see the civil wars in Central America explode into near genocide. Once you decide the targets are not human it really doesn't matter if you kill one, say a priest or an archbishop.

You can target a few, say some missionary nuns coming back from a conference with names like Ita and Dorothy. They were not only beaten, raped and killed in December of 1980, but the US government practically tied itself in knots to avoid blaming troops in El Salvador for the crimes. They weren't really missionaries claimed our ambassador to the UN. Ms. Sanders isn't the first spokes person to lie with a semi straight face. Their van crashed trying to escape from pursuing members of the Salvadoran military. The condition of their bodies showed that to be a lie.

Once you decide that where people live are targets you start hearing about collateral damage. Or they were supplying or supporting rebel forces or partisans. It doesn't matter if it is a city or a village, if it's one bomb, a hundred or mortar fire. The people living in those apartments, houses, huts or lean to's end up either just as dead or as refugees. And the refugees discover that they are still targets as women, children, the sick and the elderly try to get out of the killing zones.

WHO IS REALLY SANE?

From the intro to the essay on a website titled Tom Joad.

In 1966, Thomas Merton, Christian mystic and peace activist, wrote this meditation on what it means to be sane in a world gone mad with nuclear weapons and war. It is fascinating to note, that any person now active in the military who changes their mind and refuses deployment will be subject to a full psychiatric evaluation. Not so for those who simply follow orders to kill or be killed.

Note: Thomas Merton was writing as a Christian to a mainly Christian audience. But you could just as easily substitute Jew or Muslim or even Buddhist when describing those who might or might not be sane enough to work for peace instead of war. 

And I believe that by 1966 Merton was beginning to lose patience. That might explain the sarcastic tone of parts of the entry. And remember by the time of Merton's death in 1968 Viet Nam was just really getting started. 

And Eichmann was not really one of the architects of the Final Solution. He just made sure the trains got loaded and ran on time. He never really "killed" anyone himself. 

A Devout Meditation in the Memory of Adolph Eichmann

One of the most disturbing facts that came out in the Eichmann trial was that a psychiatrist examined him and pronounced him perfectly sane. I do not doubt it all, and that is precisely why I find it disturbing.

If all the Nazis had been psychotics, as some of their leaders probably were, their appalling cruelty would have been in some sense easier to understand. It is much worse to consider this calm, "well-balanced," unperturbed official conscientiously going about his desk work, his administrative job which happened to be the supervision of mass murder. He was thoughtful, orderly, unimaginative. He had a profound respect for system, for law and order. He was obedient, loyal, a faithful officer of a great state. He served his government very well.

He was not bothered much by guilt. I have not heard that he developed any psychosomatic illnesses. Apparently he slept well. He had a good appetite, or so it seems. True, when he visited Auschwitz, the Camp Commandant, Hoess, in a spirit of sly deviltry, tried to tease the big boss and scare him with some of the sight, Eichmann was disturbed, yes. He was disturbed. Even Himmler had been disturbed, and had gone weak at the knees. Perhaps, in the same way, the general manager of a big steel mill might be disturbed if an accident took place while he happened to be somewhere in the plant. But of course what happened at Auschwitz was not an accident: just the routine unpleasantness of the daily task. One must shoulder the burden of daily monotonous work for the Fatherland. Yes, one must suffer discomfort and even nausea from unpleasant sights and sounds. It all comes under the heading of duty, self-sacrifice, and obedience. Eichmann was devoted to duty. and proud of his job.

The sanity of Eichmann is disturbing. We equate sanity with a sense of justice, with humaneness, with prudence, with the capacity to love and understand other people. We rely on the sane people of the world to preserve it from barbarism, madness, destruction. And now it begins to dawn on us that it is precisely the sane ones who are the most dangerous.

It is the sane ones, the well-adapted ones, who can without qualms and without nausea aim the missile, and press the buttons that will initiate the great festival of destruction that they, the sane ones, have prepared What makes us so sure, after all, that the danger comes from a psychotic getting into a position to fire the first shot in a nuclear war? Psychotics will be suspect. The sane ones will keep them far from the button. No one suspects the sane, and the sane ones will have perfectly good reasons, logical, well-adjusted reasons, for firing the shot. They will be obeying sane orders that have come sanely down the chain of command. And because of their sanity they will have no qualms at all. When the missiles take off, then, it will be no mistake. We can no longer assume that because a man is "sane" he is therefore in his "right mind." The whole concept of sanity in a society where spiritual values have lost their meaning is itself meaningless. A man can be "sane" in the limited sense that he is not impeded by disordered emotions from acting in a cool, orderly tier, according to the needs and dictates of the social situation in which he finds himself. He can be perfectly "adjusted." God knows, perhaps such people can be perfectly adjusted even in hell itself.

And so I ask myself: what is the meaning of a concept of sanity that excludes love, considers it irrelevant, and destroys our capacity to love other human beings, to respond to their needs and their sufferings, to recognize them also as persons, to apprehend their pain as one's own? Evidently this is not necessary for "sanity" at all. It is a religious notion, a spiritual notion, a Christian notion What business have we to equate "sanity" with "Christianity"? None at all, obviously. The worst error is to imagine that a Christian must try to be "sane" like everybody else, that we belong in our kind of society. That we must be "realistic" about it. We must develop a sane Christianity: and there have been plenty of sane Christians in the past. Torture is nothing new, is it? We ought to be able to rationalize a little brainwashing, and genocide, and find a place for nuclear war, or at least for napalm bombs, in our moral theology. Certainly some of us are doing our best along those lines already. There are hopes! Even Christians can shake off their sentimental prejudices about charity, and become sane like Eichmann. They can even cling to a certain set of Christian formulas, and fit them into a Totalist Ideology. Let them talk about justice, charity, love, and the rest. These words have not stopped some sane men from acting very sanely and cleverly in the past.... No, Eichmann was sane. The generals and fighters on both sides, in World War II, the ones who carried out the total destruction of entire cities, these were the sane ones. Those who have invented and developed atomic bombs, thermonuclear bombs, missiles; who have planned the strategy of the next war; who have evaluated the various possibilities of using bacterial and chemical agents: these are not the crazy people, they are the sane people. The ones who coolly estimate how many millions of victims can he considered expendable in a nuclear war, I presume they do all right with the Rorschach ink blots too. On the other hand, you will probably find that the pacifists and the ban-the-bomb people are, quite seriously, just as we read in Time, a little crazy. I am beginning to realize that "sanity" is no longer a value or an end in itself. The "sanity" of modern man is about as useful to him as the huge bulk and muscles of the dinosaur. If he were a little less sane, a little more doubtful, a little more aware of his absurdities and contradictions, perhaps there might be a possibility of his survival. But if he is sane, too sane ... perhaps we must say that in a society like ours the worst insanity is to be totally without anxiety, totally "sane."

copyrighted in 1966. Published by Burns and Oates.

from Raids on the Unspeakable by Thomas Merton

WHO IS RESPONSIBLE?

I believe it's always been here, further under the surface than it is now, this cult of the individual. We are called to be responsible, rightly, in our actions as individuals. But what about our responsibilities as members of a community or nation to oppose tyrannical policies or actions? Or worse stand by and not only do nothing but worse make excuses or hide behind civic religion when confronted by actions that were or are not only an affront to the social community but are, dare I say it, sins against the community of faith. And not only the Christian faith but all who call for the care of the least and weakest among us?

Read the comments on social media. Before the thread is barely started somebody will bring up abortion. Well, what about it? That is a whole other subject that will probably never be solved to anyone's satisfaction.

I've started reading Thomas Merton again. Always a dangerous occupation. Especially for a former Methodist, who be Quaker who has been tap dancing on the line between in and out for years but keeps coming back on the in side of the line. I suspect we will be hearing more about the not always comfortable in HIS religious skin for awhile.

Merton died in 1968 and I have no idea where he would have come in on the so called pro life debate. I suspect that he would not have approved of abortion. But, big but here. He was also a strong voice for nonviolence, for the dignity of all men and women and vocal opposition to the Viet Nam war and nuclear weapons. When his order forbade him to publish, he obeyed, sometimes reluctantly. So he wrote letters, lots of letters. Articles appeared in magazines like the Daily Worker. He was suspected by some of having pro communist sympathies.

And strangely enough his teachings on Christian contemplation are considered to be heretical in some conservative circles. Protestant and Catholic. Fifty years after his death more than a few regard him as one of the strongest Christian voices in the last half century.

That is it for now. And as usual I ended up where I didn't plan to go. Shrug.

WHILE WE ARE STUCK ON HOW WE'RE GETTING THERE

we don't spend enough time facing how we are going to deal with the results. Found this in my files while looking for something else. 

Yet another letter in the local paper this morning with the theme that Global Warming in a figment of overheated liberal imaginations. And the remarks of that noted conservative and game show host Pat Sajak. “I now believe that global warming alarmists are unpatriotic racists knowingly misleading for their own ends.” What climate change has to do with racism or patriotism eludes me.

First I got cranky and then I had an epiphany similar to the one I had several years ago. It doesn’t really matter why the glaciers are melting and the seas are rising. HOW ARE WE GOING TO DEAL WITH THE RESULTS? Maybe if we quit arguing about the whyfors and the wherefors and start thinking about the cost of dealing with the one foot or more rise in ocean levels that some are predicting in the next century then the cost of cutting back on emissions to slow it will look relatively cheap.

I live in Oregon. We don’t have a lot of beaches and the ones we have get smaller and further apart as you go north. We already get significant erosion during hard winters. High winds and high tides combine to take the sand right out to sea. So we’ll probably lose a lot of the beaches we already have and the seas will start to undercut the sandstone cliffs that have houses on top of them. What about the coast aquifers? They’ll probably fill with salt water that much faster. The coastal streams are already tidal but the salt water will probably go further in and stay longer affecting those ecosystems.

And what happens to state road 126 between Eugene and Florence? The strip between Florence and Mapleton is barely above river level in some stretches. And since the road is built on former marshland it sort of goes up and down in waves as it is. Do we lose the highway or spend millions to try and shore it up?

Our main coastal highway is Route 101. It cuts close to the beaches on some of the low lying stretches. What happens when the sea rises and the beach goes away leaving the road bed vulnerable to storm damage? All together now. Spell giant sinkhole.

We’re all ready having problems from the other direction. Took a few decades but now we’re discovering that basalt may be one tough rock but its structure makes it prone to large scale erosion during very wet winters. That and erosion makes soil, soil attracts plants, plants have roots, roots loosen rock. You get the picture.

Stretches of roadside cuts have and are being sheathed in chicken wire to try cut down on the rock falls. Lots of chicken wire. And on the other side of the highway it cuts damn close to the edge of the sea cliffs. This highway was built long before the era of semis, RV's and big ass SUV's. There are some stretches with literally no shoulders.

Our only port capable of handling big cargo ships is at Portland, seventy miles inland. The Columbia Bar Pilots are the only pilots in the world who go out in helicopters when the weather is too rough for their pilot boats. These are highly trained and experienced men and women who hold masters papers. They could skipper a ship anywhere in the world. And they lost a pilot in several years ago. He was trying to make the transition from the freighter to the base ship in bad weather and didn’t make it. They don’t call the Columbia bar the Graveyard of the Pacific because we like to exaggerate. The Port of Portland is literally one the hardest ports to reach in the world. But it’s the only game in town between Frisco and SeaTac.

Believe it or not there is a port in Lewiston, Idaho. Thanks to locks on the major dams you can ship freight from the interior to Portland on barges powered by tugboats. Between the freeways and the barge traffic on the Columbia, Portland handles freight for a large section of the country. Will a rise in sea levels make the bar easier or harder to handle? There was a temporary spike in agricultural traffic when New Orleans was out of commission after Katrina. What happens when the other Gulf and South Eastern Ports get hit with Katrina reruns?

What happens to cities like Miami as the sea rises? Hell what happens to the whole state of Florida? It may not be flat as a pancake but it’s damn close. The highest place in the state is about 345 feet. Heck we’re higher than that here in Springfield. If parts of Oregon flood out we can up sticks and move down the Willamette Valley or east of the Cascades. And that’s only a couple of million people. There’s more than that in Miami-Dade County alone. Where are they going to go? And that’s just one metro area. The whole state has nearly sixteen million people. Expand that to the whole Gulf Coast and the Southern Atlantic seaboard.

Of course while each side is trying to convert the other to its point of view they don’t have to come to grips with the result. I believe that it’s time to quit arguing about the how and concentrate on the what. Once we start brainstorming the costs of the worst case scenarios of rising seas maybe we’ll start to realize that while it doesn’t matter where the green house gases are coming from, there are some sources that are more open to control than others. If we think switching to other energy forms and slowing the destruction of the seas and forests is expensive and disruptive just imagine trying to relocate the population of Florida or Bangladesh.

FROM THE ARCHIVES TATTERED THREADS

And slightly revised. From 2005.

It looks like my cranky genes are rearing their heads big time. This has been simmering just below the surface and it finally had to come out.

William Raspberry was an African American writer with a forty year history of writing for the Washington Post when he retired in 2005. So I suspect this may have been one of his last columns. This piece was in the paper one Monday discussing the changes in our community life since the end of WWII. I believe I understand where he was coming from. While I’m not sure I want to give up ease of travel that the car gives us or the fingertip access to entertainment and information that television and computers give us, the loss of community that has crept into our lives over the past forty or fifty years frankly scares the bejesus out of me. 

And the chasms we have created since 2005 scare more than the bejesus out of me.

When my folks got married they moved into a little place on D Street in Springfield about four blocks from the main drag. Basically the butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker were within a dozen blocks of the house. Folks walked a lot more and the meat cutter knew just how you liked your pot roast trimmed. They used an ice box for the basic needs, the milkman still made deliveries, there was a garden in the back, mom canned anything that wasn’t nailed down or failed to salute and if you needed to store frozen food you rented a locker at the market on main street.

 They bought two items right after they were married. A sewing machine and a pressure cooker. Man that puppy was heavy. Processed seven quart jars or nine pint jars. And I'm not sure but that house may, I repeat may, still have had a wood stove for cooking. 

We moved to a logging town about forty miles from Springfield, Oakridge, right after I was born and came back to the same house eighteen years later. Richer by two sisters and poorer by a disabled,stove-up logger. Dad wore himself out working in the logging industry. When his legs and his back gave out he ended up on the scrap heap. Thank you FDR for Social Security Disability. We moved again four years later. We ended up about five blocks west and four blocks north from where we started. 

Ironically the house on Kelly was about four blocks from where my sister's first husband was raised. 

 All the basic shops are gone from Main Street except for a large fabric store. They’ve been replaced by second hand stores, small offices and vacant storefronts. The store that housed the lockers is now a nice little butcher shop where you can still point out the steaks you want, they grind their own ground beef, make their own jerky and the beef is raised locally.

The closest grocery store is still a Fred Meyer. It’s about a mile and half away on the other side of several very busy streets. Nobody walks there if they can help it, nobody really knows you and almost everything comes wrapped in plastic. There is a small bulk food department that is nothing to write home about. You drive there in your individual tinted window vehicle, you drive home behind your tinted windows and nobody looks you in the eye if they can help it.

We’ve been sold self-service in the name of convenience but all it really does is cut down the number of people they need to hire and pay employee taxes on. And checking out your own groceries doesn't get you a discount on the final total. The trick is to tell us we're getting it our way, when what they're selling is their way. Orwells’ Newspeak is alive and well. Marketing managers are fluent in it

Instead they use the money they save on people to try to convince me to buy stuff I probably don’t need, didn’t even know existed until I saw the commercial and isn’t worth half what they want for it in the first place, if that. When mom talks about what she and dad had when they got married it wasn't much but they seemed think it was enough. Madison Avenue was just getting into the game of convincing us that no matter how much we have it isn't enough. That somehow if we buy just the right combinations of stuff we’ll  somehow be smarter or sexier or some darn thing. We keep shoveling things into the black hole at the center of our spirits and wonder why all we keep hearing is the sucking sound as little pieces of our selves follow them in

I don't want to make those early days of mom's marriage sound better than they were. People spent a most of their time just making sure the basics got done. A lot of time was spent doing the wash in a wringer washer, hanging the clothes to dry and then ironing the blessed things. And man, you did not want to let my grandmother get near the laundry. Dad used to say she could shrink a house if she put her mind to it and no button was safe. The trick was to fold the shirt so that the buttons were on the inside, safe from the wringer. Most of the time anyway. 

There were just as many gossips per square mile as there are now. They just had to be nosy closer to home and most of the local nosiness stayed local. Now thanks to the internet we can be nosy half way round the world and the axiom that a lie circles the world while the truth is pulling up its socks is truer than ever. 

I really don’t know how the repair the tatters of the threads that tie us all to each other but I think we’d better start mending………real fast