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I Am Because You Are

Their grief is too profound and too public. Their words have to be taken seriously — allowed to mix with the politics and the self-interest and the fear, those generic trivializers of the national conversation.

“This is a Promise we make to our precious children. Because each child, every human life is filled with promise, and though we continue to be filled with unbearable pain we choose love, belief, and hope instead of anger.”

The Empowerment Project: the column

Finally, perhaps, this is bigger than personal safety. It’s about rescuing our humanity.

Two images compete for my attention as I write this, a month after Newtown, a week after the shooting at a high school in Taft, Calif., with hundreds of murders in between. One image is of Robbie Parker, father of slain 6-year-old Emilie, offering public condolences to the family of the shooter and pleading, through his tears, “Let it” — the murders of 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School — “not turn into something that defines us, but something that inspires us to be more compassionate and humble people.”

The Empowerment Project

This is an ongoing project. Stories will be added as they come in. My intention is to puncture the idea that we must be armed to be empowered, indeed, to break the grip that guns have on our society and pierce what theologian Walter Wink calls The Myth of Redemptive Violence: the notion that some violence is good.

Stories of nonviolent dispersal of danger

Letters from readers telling stories of nonviolent dispersal of danger. This is an ongoing project. Stories will be added as they come in. My intention is to puncture the idea that we must be armed to be empowered, indeed, to break the grip that guns have on our society and pierce what theologian Walter Wink […]

Unarmed Empowerment

“But my instinct was that if someone is shooting at you, it is generally better to shoot back than to cower and pray.”

This is the hidden argument for guns as America’s primary peacekeepers — that the debate comes down to gun ownership vs. helplessness.

The Social Context of Mass Murder

Hey, loser!

And so the nail is driven in. This is isolation; this is the coffin. And there are so many ways of saying it.

The social context of being human has been shattered for far too many people, and one manifestation of this is the eerie rise in mass murders — seemingly senseless, impersonal rampages — over the last four or five decades. Since the 1960s, they have increased fourteenfold in the United States, far exceeding the rise in population, according to sociologist Peter Turchin, whose four-part essay, “Canaries in a Coal Mine,” ran at Social Evolution Forum shortly after the Newtown killings.

The American Paradox

“Evil visited this community today,” the governor of Connecticut said, though he might have been more accurate if he had quoted Pogo.

“We have met the enemy and he is us.”

A Gospel of Wealth

“I’m pregnant,” she said.
Well, OK. She wanted $4. I could have done the “pretend not to see you” thing. Taking that option is part of life these days, especially in Chicago. She’d been standing in the middle of the intersection, trying to get money so that — if she was to be believed —she and her daughter could get dinner at the McDonald’s on the corner. When the light changed, she came over to me. I was out for a walk. It was a beautiful, cold December night.

Pile of Skulls

The boy is in his bed crying because there’s a monster in the room. Dad walks in, snaps on the light . . .

This is the setup for Joe Dator’s macabre, punch-in-the-nose-funny cartoon in a recent New Yorker. “See,” says Dad as he points to the wall, “there’s no monster in the corner — it’s just a pile of old skulls.”

Brand Names and Mass Graves

Cheap clothes!

Their cost, it turns out, is beyond calculation.

“Babul Mia said he identified his wife Mariam Begum, 25, who was apparently burnt beyond recognition, but he could identify her bangles and her small teeth,” reported Bangladesh’s main English-language newspaper, The Daily Star.

Honor and Rape

Here’s one take on U.S. militarism and the culture of domination:

“Americans love to fight, traditionally. All real Americans love the sting and clash of battle. You are here today for three reasons. First, because you are here to defend your homes and your loved ones. Second, you are here for your own self respect, because you would not want to be anywhere else. Third, you are here because you are real men and all real men like to fight.

An America Yet To Be Born

Legalization of pot (in Colorado and Washington state), a big hurray for gay marriage (in Maine), lots of progressive women in the Senate and resounding defeat for the champions of “legitimate rape” (Akin, Mourdock) — oh my! Election Day 2012 went better than I thought it would.

And Barack Obama, the designated Lesser Evil, clobbered Mitt Romney in the swing states, despite Republican efforts to keep likely Democrats from voting there. I went to bed last night feeling an irrational joy, an enormous inner cry of relief, that the neocons and right-wing crazies were held at bay for four more years.

Hurricane Sandy and the Living Planet

Suddenly we all know Sandy, the superstorm that whacked New York City, left 55 people dead across the East Coast — and about that many in Haiti as well — knocked out power to millions and caused some $20 billion worth of property damage.

What I find fascinating is that the storm has a name.

The Future of Politics

“I have no secret plan for peace. I have a public plan.”

I listen to these words with fresh awe, 40 years later. They pierce the soul. Once upon a time, presidential politics was this open, this responsive to moral concerns. The speaker, of course, was George McGovern. The words, delivered during the Democratic National Convention in 1972 — and the campaign that followed — represent the political high-water mark of the social change movements of the 1960s.

The Moral Equivalent of Nuremberg

My favorite quote was from the British government spokesperson, who assured us: “All ammunition used by UK armed forces falls within international humanitarian law and is consistent with the Geneva Convention.”

Tears come to my eyes as I think about the kindness of coalition bullets, the empathy of coalition bombs — unlike, I’m certain, the ammo used by terrorists, which is cruel, which hates our way of life and wants only to destroy it.

Empire and Its Consequences

Ever notice the way certain basic human values quietly transform into their opposite on their way to becoming national policy?

At the human level, the immorality of murder is fundamental, and most people understand the insanity of armed hatred. Keeping these dark forces under wraps is essential to the existence of human society. So why is it, then, that at the abstract level of nationalism, those forces are honored, worshiped, saluted, extolled as glorious, and given command of an enormous budget?

War, Vets and Moral Injury

It’s not just suicide. It’s also drug overdose, car crash — quasi- or secret suicide, carried out in fearful isolation.

Young Iraq and Afghanistan vets are dying in increasing numbers by their own hands in “a largely unseen pattern of early deaths that federal authorities are failing to adequately track and have been slow to respond to,” according to a recent story in the Austin American-Statesman based on a six-month investigation of the causes of death of 266 Texas veterans, out of the 345 known to the Veterans Administration to have died since their return from duty. At least 142 of those deaths were self-inflicted in one way or another.

The Buzzing Wasps

Somewhere between predatory self-interest and insanity lies the drone.

The war on terror, the testing ground for drone technology, may be no more than the threshold of a brand new, barely imagined form of human hell: hell that buzzes like a wasp. How long before the technology comes home to our own neighborhoods?

The Innocence of U.S. Foreign Policy

The Saturday headline in the Wall Street Journal was: “Anti-U.S. Mobs on Rampage.”

The next day, a NATO airstrike killed eight women collecting firewood in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan, an event that garnered virtually zero mainstream U.S. headlines.

Pragmatic Racism

No, it’s not the brutal, hate-twisted racism of the old days. Today’s Republicans are capable of adoring select right-wing African-Americans. The Jim Crow revival they’re pushing — the large-scale disenfranchisement of primarily minority voters — is pragmatic.

They’re outnumbered. They couldn’t win a fair national election. What a dilemma for such a righteous political organization. Winning — securing power, implementing their agenda — is the whole point, and that means they have no choice but to put the big squeeze on Democrat-leaning voting blocs. And the most obvious of those blocs are racial and ethnic.

The Breton Fisherman’s Prayer

“Oh God, thy sea is so great and my boat is so small.”

The Arctic ice is melting at a record pace this summer — just one more measurable phenomenon indicating that extraordinary change in the global ecosystem is in progress. As the ice melts, and the vast polar reflecting surface diminishes, the planet absorbs more and more of the sun’s energy and . . . grows warmer. More ice melts.

Rape, Patriarchy and the Bomb

“Every sperm is sacred . . .”

Todd Akin could have worked on the script for the 1983 Monty Python movie, The Meaning of Life: “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.”

But wait, there’s more. “But let’s assume that maybe that didn’t work or something,” the Missouri Senate candidate said in his recent, now infamous TV interview. “You know, I think there should be some punishment, but the punishment ought to be at the rapist and not attacking the child.”

Beyond Money

“Everyone loved him.”

The hole was too deep; these words couldn’t fill it. But there they remain, floating on the regret, vibrant with the possibility of a different kind of world. We’ve always been in the process of building that world, but the process has lacked a central cohesion . . . a god, if you will, to bless it and keep it.

Nuclear Righteousness

This is American exceptionalism: “Now I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds.”

But you have to say it without the doubt, the regret — the horror — of Robert Oppenheimer, theoretical physicist extraordinaire and director of the Manhattan Project, who famously uttered these words in reference to the Trinity nuclear explosion in New Mexico’s Jornada del Muerto desert on July 16, 1945.

Community in the Crosshairs

We wrecked Iraq, we pulled out, we redeployed in Anaheim.

This ain’t working, guys — I mean, firing rubber bullets into anguished crowds, siccing attack dogs on moms and children. I mean, inventing enemies, going to war, unleashing state-of-the-art firepower in all directions and eventually losing, but not before we’ve inflicted maximum suffering on the innocent and magnified the original problem tenfold.