Common Wonders
Co-creating a culture of peace
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State of Fear
This was the headline: “Zimmerman, Martin’s parents to face off in court.”
The words, of course, merely summed up a moment in the news cycle last week. We, the news-consuming public, were primed – by CBS, but it could have been any mainstream outlet – for a tidbit of potential drama the next day in the hottest murder trial around right now. But in the process, we were also silently reminded, yet again, that everything is spectacle. At the level at which we call ourselves a nation, nothing is serious, not even matters of life and death.
Growing up, Falling in Love
The AP story on military maneuvers in the Arctic reads like the gleeful report of a mugging.
“To the world’s military leaders, the debate over climate change is long over. They are preparing for a new kind of Cold War in the Arctic, anticipating that rising temperatures there will open up a treasure trove of resources, long-dreamed-of sea lanes and a slew of potential conflicts.”
Chemical Warfare
To fight our insane wars, we’re wrecking our soldiers’ ability to live with themselves and function in society, then regulating what’s left of them with chemicals, which often make things immeasurably worse.
In the pursuit of order, could we possibly be creating more chaos, not simply externally — in the shattered countries we’re leaving in our wake — but internally, in the minds of those soldiers?
The Alchemy of Forgiveness
“Fifteen men beat us and raped us,” the young woman said. “I was 12. There was one man I knew. My uncle. That man I still see around — whenever I see him I feel afraid.”
This was during Sierra Leone’s civil war, 11 years of hell that ended in 2002 but in point of fact hasn’t really ended, because the survivors, their culture shattered, their sense of community broken, were left in a state of seemingly unbridgeable mistrust of one another. More than 50,000 people died in the war. Many more were crippled and disfigured; thousands of children were abducted and turned, on pain of death, into child soldiers — into murderers. This was the war that popularized the term “blood diamond.”
Finding the Wisdom We Need To Survive
I’m far more interested in forgiveness than justice.
I say this just to calm myself down after a morning of media overkill, so to speak. There are so many murdered mothers and children in the news, some with names and faces, so many just adding anonymously to one death toll or another.
THE BAD APPLE
So it turns out that mass-murder suspect Robert Bales once used a bad word in a Facebook conversation.
This is one of the more bizarre details of his life that has come breathlessly to light in the media, along with his big smile, arrest record and disastrous financial dealings.
Cancer of the Spirit
Can we squeeze the glory out of the word “war”? Can we talk about savage irrationality and lifelong inner hell instead? Can we talk about the wreckage of two countries?
Can we talk about spiritual cancer?
In the extraordinary documentary On the Bridge — an unstinting look at the reality of war and the terror of PTSD, directed by Olivier Morel — each of the six Iraq vets who opens his or her heart in the course of the film has a moment of deep, almost unbearable silence at the end, staring into the camera and through the camera at the viewer . . . and at the nation they are committed to waking up. In that silence, those are the questions that begin to emerge.
A Green Tree in Your Heart
“Keep a green tree in your heart and perhaps a singing bird will come.”
Building community is a sacred process, so I begin here, with a Chinese proverb that a healer and social worker turned into a song. The sacred has an intensely personal dimension to it, and the singing bird rips it open for me.
Saying No to Militarism
No mail on Saturday, maybe, but small-town police get armored personnel carriers?
Let’s take a moment — in the context of these bitter times, and President Obama’s recent austerity budget proposal — to celebrate the questions the residents of Keene, N.H., are asking their city council about the kind of world we’re creating.
Happy Savages
“Thirty seconds to zero . . . six, five, four, three, two, one.”
Suddenly a big orange blossom fills the screen, accompanied by ukuleles and lovely — I mean Strangelovian — Polynesian music. The blossom is actually Castle Bravo, a 15-megaton hydrogen bomb blast, the largest U.S. test ever, detonated over Bikini Atoll on March 1, 1954.
The Barbara Tree
My daughter went jogging to the lake. When she came back, she reported: “Dad, someone hung a bird in the Barbara tree.”
When I went out to investigate, sure enough, it was still there, a brightly painted, reddish-orange papier-mâché bird, dangling on a wire from a low branch.
Transforming Troubled Schools
What happened?
Can the world shift on such a simple question? Imagine yourself sitting eye-to-eye with a kid in trouble and that’s the first thing you ask. No lecture, no sarcasm, no judgment, no explosion of lost patience and a cry of “Why did you do that?” Just: What happened?
Works in Progress
I’m sitting in my daughter’s Baltimore apartment thinking about works in progress. This city is a work in progress and its pockets of vibrancy delight me, partly because, like my own hometown, Detroit, it is too frequently written off in the national mindset as broken, dying — above all, an undesirable place to live.
My apolitical thought on this rainy January afternoon is this: Shatter in your own mind the prejudgments of popular culture, the grinning media dictates of who or what is in and who or what is out. Shatter also any notion of what you can and can’t do.
The Dignity of Corpses
Civilization hasn’t successfully drawn a moral border at the sanctity of human life itself, but because it needs to put some limit on human behavior, it has, apparently, taken a last stand at the dignity of corpses.
It’s OK to kill your enemy, but not to urinate on him, at least not after he’s dead.
A Momentum of Cynicism
But no matter how futile, repulsive or dysfunctional war may be,” Barbara Ehrenreich wrote in her book Blood Rites, “it persists.”
A fascinating story in the New York Times just after Christmas showed this persistence unfolding before our very eyes.
The Hollow Democracy
Maybe they’re trying to remind us that democracy isn’t merely a matter of casting that little vote once every Leap Year — but, far, far more significantly, it’s about getting that right to vote in the first place, keeping that right, and having it matter.
Every one of these rights is in jeopardy as 2012 opens and another presidential election season gets serious. But this is nothing new.
The Big Lie Marches on
The war is over, sort of, but the Big Lie marches on: that democracy is flowering in Iraq, that America is stronger and more secure than ever, that doing what’s right is the prime motivator of all our military action.
And the troops will be home for Christmas. Hurrah! Hurrah!
The Spiritual Jackpot
The topic was “Indians of the Midwest” and the professor was knowledgeable and conveyed serious respect for Native culture, but something kept gnawing at me as she talked.
There are two types of Indian stereotypes, she said — the negative (the ignorant savage, the abductor of white women, etc.) and the romantic (woo-woo, New Agey, let’s play Indian, “go ’Skins!”) — and left it at that, implying, OK, if you are non-Native, the best attitude to strike is a certain respectful distance, neither denigrating the culture nor seizing hold of it like an idiot. If you want more, attend lectures and look at the artifacts on display behind glass cases, but DO NOT TOUCH.
Used-up Heroes
At a sports bar in downtown Minneapolis called Sneaky Pete’s, “Young men fueled with alcohol begged Boogaard to punch them, so they could say they survived a shot from the Boogeyman.”
I’m thinking, wow, we power our society as much on adolescent energy as we do on fossil fuels. And the consequences are probably even more devastating.
Project Bugsplat
“The Lakotah had no language for insulting other orders of existence: pest, waste, weed . . .”
But what about “bugsplat”?
That’s the word for the cop at UC Davis, walking up and down the line of students sitting with their arms locked, zapping them in the eyes with pepper spray. It’s the word for the Tunisian police and bureaucrats who humiliated Mohamed Bouazizi and destroyed his livelihood as a street vendor. It’s the word for anyone whose power exceeds his humanity.
Saluting Rapists
Remember that awkward silence that fell across the nation back in ’94 when Bill Clinton’s surgeon general used the M-word?
Jocelyn Elders, speaking at an AIDS conference at the U.N. about reducing the risk of sexually transmitted disease, said that masturbation “is part of human sexuality, and perhaps it should be taught.”
Sanity in Exile
Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran . . .
Or as Mitt Romney put it, playing the irresponsible-lunatic game convincingly enough to become the leading Republican presidential candidate: “If we re-elect Barack Obama, Iran will have a nuclear weapon.”
The consensus congeals: Our next war must be with Iran. A report issued by the U.N.’s International Atomic Energy Agency, which the New York Times called “chillingly comprehensive” (though this is debatable), stoked this long-simmering agenda. It charges that Iran has conducted secret experiments on nuclear triggers and created computer models of nuclear explosions, among other things, which proves that the nation, despite its leaders’ protestations to the contrary, is pursuing . . . oh God, oh God . . . a nuclear weapons program.
Public Enemy No. 1
“Play faster!” he cried, wildly, over and over. “Play faster!”
The dame who was tickling the ivories complied, out of control herself. The music revved to a dangerous velocity — oh, too fast for decent, sober, well-behaved Americans to bear — and . . . well, you just knew, violence, madness, laughter were just around the corner. The year was 1936 and, oh my God, they were high on marijuana, public enemy number one.
The News of Empire
“Mr. Obama and his senior national security advisers have sought to reassure allies and answer critics, including many Republicans, that the United States will not abandon its commitments in the Persian Gulf even as it winds down the war in Iraq and looks ahead to doing the same in Afghanistan by the end of 2014.”
I pluck a paragraph from the New York Times and for an instant I’m possessed by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, aquiver with puzzlement down to my deepest sensibilities. I hold you here, root and all, little paragraph. But if I could understand what you are, root and all, and all in all, I should know what empire is, and hubris . . . and maybe even, by its striking absence, democracy.
Iraq Syndrome
This won’t be Vietnam, exactly. No helicopter whisking the last remaining Americans off the roof of the embassy. A contingent of 16,000 State Department contract employees — over 5,000 of them armed mercenaries — will be staying on, running what’s left of the American operation in Iraq.
But there’s little doubt we lost this war — by every rational measure. Everyone lost, except those who profited from (and continue to profit from) the trillions we bled into the invasion and occupation; and those who planned it, most of whom remain in positions to plan or at least promote the wars we’re still fighting and the wars to come.
The Abandoned Class
Will Occupy Wall Street hold together long enough to cut to the deep chase?
Will it find a voice to articulate not merely the pain of the struggling middle class but the endemic unfairness and racism of inescapable poverty? “Everyone is important,” read the sign of an elderly protester. My God, what if it were true? What if we could see, in the desperate thrashing of the abandoned class, everyone’s future, that of the 99 percent and that of the 1 percent?
Building Community, Building Peace
In our techno-saturated society, we have the casual capacity to capture any unfolding event on film — even an act of shocking violence — and send images of the live action around the globe just by whipping out a cell phone.
Two years ago, Chicago’s Fenger High School had its 15 minutes of horrific fame when the beating death of one of its students, an honor student named Derrion Albert — waiting for a bus after school, caught suddenly in a surge of gang violence, savagely beaten with two-by-fours and railroad ties — was recorded on someone’s cell camera and became an international spectacle.
Our Overripe Moment
“The Future is calling and has some serious concerns. Please pick up.”
It’s a Sunday afternoon, fivish, the sun is sinking and a chill is in the air. Ah, Chicago, vibrant with culture, crime and capital, but sort of dead at this hour of the ebbing weekend. I’m downtown and I’m not sure if the future is calling, but my heart is pounding as I walk west on Jackson to LaSalle, in the shadow of the great edifices of capitalism.
Beyond the Nation-State
Is there such a thing as a relaxed nation — one that isn’t, you know, obsessed with its borders and sense of identity?
We can easily see how absurd it all is when we read about the hikers recently released from prison in Iran, where they were held in cruelly restricted confinement for more than two years because they had inadvertently strayed across the border, out of U.S.-occupied Iraq. The inhuman nature of Iran’s response — the trumped up charges of espionage against the two young men, Shane Bauer and Josh Fattal, and their companion, Sarah Shourd, who was imprisoned for over a year — were gleefully obvious to the American media . . . because they were Americans, and Iran is part of the Axis of Evil.
The Old Integrity
The old order and the old integrity slowly collapse, but the statues remain, and the words. How odd they sound:
“The founder of the University of Chicago, John D. Rockefeller, on December 13, 1910, made provision for the erection of this chapel and thus defined its purpose: As the spirit of religion should penetrate and control the university, so that building which represents religion ought to be the central and dominant feature of the university group. Thus it will be proclaimed that the university is dominated by the spirit of religion. All its departments are inspired by religious feeling, and all its work is directed to the highest ends.”
