Category Archives: Current Affairs

Free Will vs. Compelled

Church-2678We had Easter at Michele’s familial home the weekend after the Indiana pizzeria said they wouldn’t cater a gay wedding. Sitting around, what I like to think of as the typical American family table, we had a couple of interesting conversations about politics that spilled over to religion (or religion that spilled over to politics). We were, very roughly, evenly split between Liberals and Conservatives and the Conservatives were spit between those who had gone to church that morning and those who hadn’t.

One thing we did agree on, surprisingly, is that people should have the right to be assholes, within limits, but that governments shouldn’t. To be clear, I wouldn’t say that we completely agreed, but we did come close to agreeing that there were differences between public acts in public spaces and private acts in private spaces. We all agreed that if a store is open for business, they have to serve everybody that walks in, but we differed on how restrictive they could be in the hypothetical catering of a wedding.

That conversation drew us into a – unexpected, for me – minefield. Maybe it shouldn’t have been unexpected, because I was the primary wanderer, owing to my fascination with religion’s special privileges. It is illegal for me to take peyote because I enjoy it, but, under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993, I can take it if I am taking it as part of my religion. My question was Why should religion get special privileges? The only answer I got to this question was something along the lines of We are a Christian Nation, as if that would answer it. As the conversation staggered on, however, my question did get answered in a fashion.

To back up, when we are in Napa on a Sunday morning, or around a religious holiday like Christmas, Michele usually goes to church with her step-father, Jim (who was one of the church goers in the group, duh!). During the conversation, Michele’s stepfather said something, I don’t remember what, that led to Michele countering that she wasn’t raised as a Christian and wasn’t a Christian now. Jim was surprised, If you aren’t a Christian, why do you go to church with me? Michele said that she went because she enjoyed it. That was even more surprising to Jim.

Isn’t that why you go? asked Michele. No, I don’t go because I enjoy it, I go because, as a Christian, I have to go, Jim  said, laughing in a dismissive way as if that should be self-evident. In a way it was the answer that I had been looking for.

Still, not being a believer, Jim’s answer shocked me. Actually, I am a little reluctant to say Not being a believer, because I think of myself as a believer in A Divine that transcends what we know of the ordinary world. I don’t believe that science knows all the big answers and we are now only working on filling in the details, I don’t believe the world is all material and we are only a result of our DNA. I do believe that there is A Mystery, I’m just not a believer in any particular religious dogma (and I especially don’t believe that there is a personal God that cares how we act, that holds a grudge if we don’t go to church, that is interested in how we have sex or what we ate for lunch).

My life is not governed by a god telling me to live it a certain way. Not being a believer in that dogma means that I don’t get my morality from somebody’s interpretation of what God wants us to do. The church goers were pretty adamant that, without God telling us the rules or providing the moral guidelines, to say it in a little less dogmatic way, we would have no morality. Michele said that she is a Scientist and her morality is based on the scientific principle that acts have consequences. I sided with Michele and added that I liked the Buddhist Eightfold Path that includes don’t harm others and the Church goers looked at us like we must not have any moral principles at all, like maybe we were OK with serial killing.

Looking across the table, I could almost understand that somebody could believe that they weren’t homophobic, but their God is and they have no choice but to follow along. That gulf between our beliefs, between our belief structures,  seems much bigger than I had imagined.

Walking Russian Ridge, thinking about religion and violence

Russian Ridge-1
Charlie Hebdo being equally nasty to Islam and Judaism

I woke up yesterday morning to the headlines of the attack on the people behind Charlie Herbo and I have been thinking about it ever since. It seems incomprehensible to me, senseless.

It seems to me that even these deranged killers must know that what they are doing will only hurt the Muslim community in France. Maybe that was the point, as I remember, General Field Marshal Cinque of the Symbionese  Army thought their actions would get the police to over react and, thereby, getting the general community to join their side. Maybe these  deranged killers were part of a recruitment drive as Juan Cole supposes. Maybe it is just senseless violence fueled by helplessness and anger. What ever the reason, I don’t see it improving the plight of Muslims in France.

Selma is coming out this week and, as I walk along Russian Ridge watching the sunset over the pacific Pacific, I think of how powerful non-violence is.

Looking down into the mirk on a No Burn Day
Looking east, down into the mirk over the Bay, on a No Burn Day

 

January sun setting over a pacific Pacific
Looking West at the January sun setting over a pacific Pacific
The end of a warm, calm, day
The end of a warm, calm, day

 

 

 

The Donner Party, Community, and Ferguson

Donner-0578 The last day we were at Squaw Valley, Michele wanted to work (when most of your work is in cyberspace, you can work from anywhere). For some time now, I have wanted to photograph Sierra Valley and this was the perfect opportunity.

As I left Truckee, I, passed by Alder Creek, one of the two sites where the Donner Party was stuck over the winter of 1846-47.  Tamzene Donner and her husband, George, died here as well as George’s brother, Jacob, and his wife, Elizabeth. Still, all five of Tamzene and George’s children lived as did three of Jacob and Elizabeth’s seven kids. In addition, there was one single woman who lived. But, out of the seven single men who were with the party as teamsters and animal handlers, only two lived.

Two of the children who lived were only three years old. The five teamsters who died ranged in age from 23 to 30, the two who lived were both 16. The only person over 16, who lived, was Dorothea Wolfinger, the single women (who had been widowed on the trail). Clearly, this was not survival of the fittest. Rather, this was a case of the fittest sacrificing for the least fit. If it had been any other way, the survivors would have been considered beasts. If the teamsters had lived by letting the children die, they probably would have been tried for murder.

But I don’t think that is the reason they saved the children, I think that they considered themselves as part of a large family. Family might not be the right word; maybe small community would be better.

Going into Sierra Valley, it struck me that this was a community also.

Donner-0623

Donner-0631

Donner-0636

Donner-0638

It is a community that is spread out, but – in my imagination, at least – a community that would not let its three-year old children starve to death.

Donner-0616

Donner-0653

As I drove through the Sierra Valley, passing ranches, separated by miles of seemingly nothingness, I kept mulling over the idea of Community and how it affects its member’s actions. When Romney was running for president, he seemed particularly hard-hearted and out of touch, but people who knew him thought that he was generous to a fault. However, his generosity was to people that he knew or were in the same church, in other words, in his community. When I think back on the Conservatives I know and have known, they were all generous. Indeed, they are often more generous than many of the Liberals I know but, they are only generous to members of what they consider to be their community. The Liberals, however, tend to consider their community to be more diverse – and, I think, larger – than Conservatives so that their community includes homeless Guatemalan children trying to get back to their parents (although Liberals are not so diverse that they would want to give money to the Westboro Baptist Church).

I entered Sierra Valley from Truckee, going through Sierraville and as I left it at the eastern end of the valley, I saw a train loaded with Armored Cars. They fascinated me, they seemed so out-of-place and, in a very strange way, so lovingly conceived. They were brutal with exquisite detailing, the kind of that can only happen when something is built with, close to, an unlimited budget. Donner-0707

Donner-0716

Donner-0713

It also struck me that anybody inside that armored car – looking out through the bulletproof windows – was completely separated from whomever was outside. They are in a different community. Soldiers, riding in those behemoths, in Iraq or Afghanistan, are saying We are not you, we are separate, and we can do anything we want. Cops riding on city streets are saying the same thing, not only to the citizens outside, but to themselves.

Donner-0917

San Mateo County is about 42% white, 27% Asian, and 25%  Hispanic with a per capita income of $57,906 and we have an armored car. Our armored car – owned by the people but run by our local Sheriff’s Department, to be used against the people, if needed – even has a ring on the top so that it can be equipped with a  machine gun. There is no sane use, in my San Mateo County – anybody’s San Mateo County – for a mobile fort. More germane is that there is no sane use for a mobile fort in Ferguson.

But, it turns out, the Armored Cars – were pretty much free – through a Department of Homeland Security program to fund armored vehicles after 9/11 – so they are hard to turn down. But, again, they are actually bad for everybody concerned. When all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail; armored cars get used. The police, looking through the windows, are no longer part of the community, they have become an occupying army. They say things like Bring it, you fucking animals!

That’s the problem, the militarization of the police is not good for anybody except the people actually selling the military equipment. Armored Cars don’t help deter crime, they don’t help catch criminals, Armored Cars don’t help with crowd control, they don’t even help in riot control (although, I guess, one could argue that they would help in a mass zombie attack).

The tragedy of Israel

Smoke and fire from an Israeli bomb rises into the air ove Gaza CityFrom the The Huffington Post

GazaFamilyFleesFrom 91.3 FM, voice of the Cape

Gaza damageTyler Hicks/The New York Times

One Day, Many Years from Now, people will ask how come we were bystanders  An anonymous Israeli, Jewish, PhD student whose blog Reality Check Point is revelatory.

Israel was born in hope. Not just the hope of Jewish refugees fleeing the horrors of being second class – or third class or not even – citizens in Europe and, later, much of the Muslim world, but the hope of  non-Zionist Jewish people all over the diasporic world. That hope held Israel out as a beacon of Western, Humanistic, Democratic, values. For years, those values have been increasingly subjugated to Israel’s fears and brutality. A brutality that destroys the brutalizer as much as the brutalised.

Sadly, I doubt that it could have any other way, no matter how intense our hopes. For years we have known, on a personal level, that battering the child makes a brutal, battering, adult and the Jews were battered by experts; from the Roman Armies starting the diaspora, to the Spanish inquisition, to the pogroms of Eastern Europe and Western Russia, to the Shoah carried out by the German military under the Nazis. The lessons the survivors learned were not lessons of peace and tolerance, they were lessons of hate and fear. They were not lessons of the futility and ultimate failure of brutality, the lessons the survivors learned were of the effectiveness of raw power.

Why should Hamas, or any Palestinian for that matter, believe the world will shelter and secure them, help them, value them; the world has already said Move off your land, we are giving it to somebody else, you don’t count. People who hide behind their own children after striking out, have no faith in their own future. And a nation that sends their Army in to destroy schools, saying We are justified, the terrorists were hiding behind the children, has lost its moral bearing.

In this atmosphere, anybody who really thinks that a two state solution to Palestine is actually possible, hasn’t looked at the map. It is already one state, a nasty, brutal, apartheid state but one state nonetheless. West Bank HistoryIn October, 2003, Tony Judt, a Jewish intellectual I have come to admire, after being introduced to him by Richard and Tracy,  said in The New York Review of Books – in a thoughtful article I think is very much worth reading – The time has come to think the unthinkable. The two-state solution—the core of the Oslo process and the present “road map”—is probably already doomed….The true alternative facing the Middle East in coming years will be between an ethnically cleansed Greater Israel and a single, integrated, binational state of Jews and Arabs, Israelis and Palestinians. Sadly, things have only gotten worse since then and, now, even Reuven Rivlin, the Israeli President seems to agree.

I don’t see any ethical choice except a single, integrated Israel/Palestine and it is tragic that the dream didn’t come true, but it didn’t.

Trying to ignore Israel and Gaza

Tunnel-1133

I don’t want to read about Israel and Hamas. All it does is upset me ( maybe enrage is a better word). Almost everybody writing or commenting about this cluster fuck has already taken sides anyway – I know I have – and are now putting all their writing and commenting energy into making the other side wrong. This is much easier than trying to make their side right because nobody is really right here. There may be different degrees of wrongness but they are miniscule.

Meanwhile, Israel has killed over 575 Palestinians, over 100 of them children. Still, that isn’t the worst of it, it seems to me; how many mothers are huddled in the dark, worried shitless that their child will be next? how many fathers watch helplessly as their families are terrorised? how many children – not killed – are making vows of vengeance?