Prodigal Prophet

Quite a few years ago now, I was taking my niece and nephew, now 37 and 34, respectively, to Six Flags Over Georgia, when an argument ensued in the backseat of the car—of a sort many parents deal with regularly. After several attempts to stop the brouhaha, I heard one of them call the other stupid, and though I was on I-285, I whipped over to the emergency lane and stopped the car. “Here’s the deal,” I said. “Either this stops now and we go on to Six Flags where we can all have fun, or it doesn’t and we all go home. It’s your choice.”

I wasn’t surprised at my niece and nephew, nor was I concerned about their maturity—they were about 12 and 9 years old at the time. Learning to control yourself, to compromise, to take responsibility for your contribution to conflict and make decisions to give up something for something else that in the end benefits everyone—long before the trains of narrow-minded bravado threaten to collide—is a developmental task for adolescents, and as their aunt, it was, I thought, part of my responsibility as an adult who loved them to contribute to that learning. They were, after all, adolescents and I had no doubts that the fights were time-limited, that they would grow up and into their lives as adults with respect for each other.

Since 1976, I’ve voted for people I didn’t agree with 100%, but I always assumed they were adults who’d achieved that developmental milestone—adults who demonstrated a capacity for self-control; an ability to look at a problem from all sides and debate the pros and cons of various courses of action; the maturity to admit when they’d made a mistake, ask forgiveness and offer the same grace in return; the decency to show respect for another’s opinion and make a genuine effort to understand his or her concerns; and the awareness that to earn respect you have to show it, another one of those things we learn in the safe microcosm of our families. I assumed I was voting for people capable of suspending their judgment until they’d listened, grownups who’d long since figured out that we aren’t blessed with the ability to define another’s motives and that character is what one does when nobody’s looking and you won’t get “caught”—revealed by adversity, not born of it. But at the moment, I’m not very confident in my assumptions about any of the people we’ve voted for.

But I’m not terribly worried. Just frustrated. And disappointed. There will be other elections—and one way or another, we will live through whatever reality we create for ourselves, the level of taxes we pay, whether the deficit is reduced in 10 years, 15 years or never. The good news is that there will be breakthroughs to new and wonderful inventions born of necessity, a truth Ben Franklin once said though he could not have imagined the necessities or inventions we know today, just as you and I cannot imagine the amazing solutions those who follow us baby boomers will come up with.

I know that it’s true because, on a day long ago, though for a brief moment we came to a screeching halt on the side of I-285…

We went to Six Flags.

Vally

Perhaps you know the Cliff’s Notes version of the story, but if you’ve never read the book, seen the stage musical or ventured out yet to see the movie version starring Hugh Jackman, Russell Crowe and Ann Hathaway, among others, stop here. I don’t want to play the spoiler nor do I want to influence your impressions going in.

I saw Les Misérables Sunday morning. Yes, I skipped “church.” Depending on the movie, sometimes, unfortunately, I have to admit that I’m more “convicted” or inspired by the message of art in one of its many forms than I am in most contemporary services and this is one that does it every time.

Of course, I knew the story—I attempted to read the book once and I saw the musical in London almost 15 years ago. This time my thoughts took a slightly different turn.

I thought about Rick Santorum. I know that may seem strange, but stay with me.

I can’t tell you where or when he said it, but I remember seeing a video clip back during the Republican primaries when somebody asked him what he thought about the fact that other Christians disagreed with one of his religiously-underpinned political stances. His response was that there are different “stripes” of Christianity.

At the time, I remember being slightly offended. The principles of the Christ I know are not made up of a blending of democratic principles that can be symbolized like different colonies or states by distinct stripes on a flag, and I thought he’d confused his spiritual life with his patriotism. At least for me, they are two very different things. “My kingdom is not of this world” pretty well sums that concept, suggesting to me that we each have to learn to manage the paradox, finding a way to live as “one catholic and apostolic church” and simultaneously participate as American citizens, recognizing that any given “stripe” doesn’t have all the answers, unlike Jesus. Find a human conflict today and I can find a statement or parable that applies.

But watching Les Misérables yesterday, I decided that though Rick was referring, I think, to the differing beliefs of various denominations with respect to the issue at hand, he had stumbled onto something. There are, I think, at least two stripes, and the demarcation line has to do with the same issues Les Misérables examines. English professors might say that the issues are those of law and grace, but—in the vernacular of Christians—I would describe them as justice vs. mercy. Not justice and mercy, which I believe Jesus taught, but justice versus mercy. And that’s where our biggest differences lie. If we focus on either without the other, we are lost, just like our current Congressional Republicans and Democrats over how we should approach the fiscal issues we face.

My contention is overly simplified, of course, but I’ve decided that which “stripe” we are depends on whether we identify more with Javert (Russell Crowe) or Bishop Myriel, who sets Jean Valjean on a path of redemption by not only not claiming an entitlement to vengeance over silver, but, in front of the policemen who brought Valjean back to face him, tells Valjean that he’d “forgotten” two candlesticks when he’d slipped away in the night.

Yes, the prophet Micah said we are required by God to “do justice, love mercy and walk humbly with God.” But we don’t “do” justice well. We can’t. Justice is in the eye of the beholder, and only One is omniscient, only One knows all. Too often, the meaning of justice is narrowed to mean to “vengeance” and not equity, which is closer in our current language to what Micah probably said. Today, someone is necessarily in the “wrong,” and it is seldom “us.” I’ve written before that I don’t think Jesus would have so prominently included in “The Lord’s Prayer” the line about forgiving others their offences as we have been forgiven for ours if we weren’t prone to err in sticking our noses into business that isn’t ours.

But Javert couldn’t live with himself. He didn’t know what to do with mercy.

I’ve decided, for now, that which stripe we most identify with depends on experience—specifically whether or not we’ve ever been shown mercy and if we have been, if we realized it. What I mean by that is whether or not we’ve ever been caught dead to rights (that’s an interesting phrase, isn’t it?), flat out guilty, knowing that we have committed a crime toward another and are deserving of punishment, and yet have been shown mercy. Cause if you have, you know it, and it changes you. It changed me.

It changed a man named Saul, too, who’d stood by watching as Stephen was stoned to death, changed his name, and spent the rest of his life telling people about it. He even died because of it. Come to think of it, I’ll bet it changed the woman caught in adultery, too—the one Jesus stepped in to save from stoning. I’ll bet she never slept around again and never tired of telling the story of the strange man who stepped in to save her from certain death from the justice of her peers.

It changed Javert and, in the end, he couldn’t reconcile it with his version of justice. For Valjean it was different. It changed Jean Valjean, too, so much that he spent the rest of his free life offering justice and recompense to Fantine by becoming father to her child, and looking, as the song says, “into the face of God.”

He couldn’t help himself—it was two for one. He “did” justice by loving mercy. And in the end, he found out that reconciling the two was easy. As with most paradoxes, the solution lies in the knowledge that they are simply two sides of the very same “stripe.” So, I disagree with Rick.

There may still be an either/or here, though. Either you do justice, love mercy and walk humbly with God, or you don’t.

Those who know me know I’m what I call an “anniversary girl.” It derives itself from the fact that I have, good and bad, a propensity for recalling dates. Even innocuous ones. A friend of mine once described himself as “a repository of useless information.” To other friends, I could easily share that moniker myself.

For that reason, I guess, though I am Christian by tradition and certainly appreciate December 25 and all the symbolism we attach to the time of the winter equinox, it’s New Year’s Eve that elicits more of an emotional response in me. Maybe it’s because the man-made concept of time is a convenient way to contain and process the passage of our lives, a way to put a wrapper around a section and put it aside—not too far in case we need something but out of our constant view—a way to encapsulate and catalogue our experiences, both joyful and painful.

New Year’s Eve has always been filled with anticipation for me—an anticipation for things to be better in the coming year than they were in the last, no matter how “awe full” or awful I’ve perceived the events and experiences of the year before to have been. This one is particularly interesting to me. New Year’s Eve 2012 is the 10^th day of the 13^th baktun of the Mayan Long Count Calendar, expressed thusly: 13.0.0.0.10. Today, December 29, 2012, is 13.0.0.0.8. (It’s actually the 14^th baktun, but to enter into that discussion is to re-open the argument of whether the last century ended in 1999 or 2000, or whether babies are actually 0 years old until that first birthday rolls around. Which, in turn, brings up a more pertinent question for me: “If you wear a Size 0, does that mean you’re invisible?”)

A baktun is a cycle of 144,000 of our 24-hour solar-revolution days, which means that to be alive at the end (or beginning) of a cycle is serendipitously amazing. The executive director of the Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies, Inc. (FAMSI), said, “For the ancient Maya, it was a huge celebration to make it to the end of a whole cycle.” I much prefer that idea over the recently suggested (and fortunately inaccurate) one that the world itself would end on December 21, and I would give a nod to her since she knows a helluva lot more about the Mayan civilization than I do.

I prefer it not because the world didn’t explode, but because it simultaneously gives me a sense of personal hope for the future and a reminder of my relative insignificance in the grand scheme of things. Given that we can’t imagine what the humans of 2407 will be like, the originators of the long count calendar back in 3114 BC (BCE) had no idea I was coming, either. The fact that I’ve apparently made it through 2012 has, therefore, been no world-changing accomplishment to anyone except me. And, hopefully, the few other organic grains of sand I’ve had the pleasure to encounter in my 20,217 days thus far.

Yet, I believe, too, as Jesus and the Psalmist suggested, that we are each known by something far greater than any of us can conceive of or name, and that is enough. After all, think of it! I was here at the beginning of a century, and now I’ve seen the turn of a baktun. What more could I ask for?

May 2013 be all you create it to be…and then some.

Vally

The message was subtle, just one line in the book and the movie Jurassic Park, but it hit me right between the eyes. Jeff Goldblum’s character said it (Dr. Ian Malcolm). If you sit back for a moment and think of all of Crichton’s books, you realize it is such an important truism that it was the only thing he wrote about. “Yeah,” says Malcolm to John Hammond (played by Lord Richard Attenborough, who interestingly also played Kris Kringle in the 1994 remake of Miracle on 34^th Street) but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could they didn’t stop to think if they should.”

I thought of the line as soon as the whole gun control debate sprang up after the egregious events in Connecticut a week ago, along with another quote spoken by Albert Einstein about his contribution to the development of the atomic bomb in the aftermath of its use on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. “The release of atom power has changed everything except our way of thinking…the solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind. If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker.” He would later elaborate, “I made one great mistake in my life—when I signed the letter to President Roosevelt recommending that atom bombs be made…”

Consider the two thoughts together, and what floats to the top for me is clear: Our “way of thinking” must be adapted so that the question “Should we?” instantly follows “Can we?” and is based squarely in the “heart of mankind.”

The creation legends of Genesis (yes, plural, because there are at least two streams of thought mashed together) point to it too, in my “way of thinking.” It was not the tree of good and evil, after all, that God told Adam and Eve to stay away from. It was the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. I don’t think it was knowledge that God was trying to protect them from. It wasn’t the knowledge of good and evil so much as the arrogant illusion that any one of us has the capacity to differentiate between the two. It was the fact that we are prone to make ourselves gods, addressed in the very first commandment (of both versions, and yes, there are two of those, also), the fact that once unleashed, the idea that “my” way, my definition, is the “only” way is both viral…and deadly. Once we’ve decided something or someone is evil, we determine to destroy it, and do so with the pump of a fist or a rifle, with no inkling of doubt about our omniscience. My way is right, your way is wrong, and anything goes in the battle to not only squash your influence, but annihilate you in the process.

Thank you very much, says Smith and Wesson, but my right to make and sell a gun to whomever I can sell it trumps your right to life. Hey, I know, just run out and get a gun, two, three, twenty of your own. Kill yourself for all we care. You’ve already given me your money, and that’s all that matters. And, by the way, that guy over there is evil. He wants to take the guns you already have away from you. Maybe you should upgrade and go out in a virtual blaze of glory. Why do we do it? Because we can.

The solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind.

Thank you very much, says Wal*Mart, but keeping our profits around $25 billion is more important than paying a reasonable wage for those who peddle our cheap goods from Asian sweatshops. So, we’ll let you dumb slobs flocking to buy those same cheap goods foot the bill for healthcare in your state. The deal YOU get at the cash register is the only thing that’s important. Why do we do it? Because we can.

The solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind.

Thank you very much, says the big union boss, but we long since quit caring if the company makes a decent profit. We don’t care if the whole place goes down. Why do we do it? Because we can.

The solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind.

Thank you very much, says the representative, but I sold my soul to the devil. Keeping my promise to Grover Norquist is more important than keeping my promise to you. (Oh, yeah, we know Grover’s on the board of the NRA.) Why do we do it? Because we can.

The solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind.

“Why did you do it? Why did you even let the thing with Monica Lewinsky happen?” an interviewer asked Bill Clinton on his tour for the thousand-page tome, My Life. “Because I could,” he said.

Maybe, just maybe it’s time to ask, “Should we?”

But I’m not sure we can.

God, I miss Michael Crichton.

Are we mutating as a species away from the capacity to suspend judgment long enough to consider what the world looks like through another’s eyes? Is it a matter of narcissism or ignorance or just lack of practice? Is our imagination so limited to a view that accounts only for our own experience of reality, the rest of the world be damned?

It used to be that we considered those of us who believe ourselves to be at the “center of the universe” to be impaired in some way—emotionally wounded so that their very survival required that their full attention be focused only on their own feelings and perspectives, to the exclusion of others. Parents know that’s perfectly natural when we’re two-year-olds. Sometimes Mom needs a break, but the fact that I’m scared, I’m hungry, I’m soiled, I’m wanting to play with this or that is the only thing of importance—her only role is meeting my needs and desires. Our brains haven’t been around long enough, our experiences too limited to develop the awareness that other people exist—other people whose needs co-exist and sometimes compete with ours—requiring evaluation of the relative order in which those needs must be met for a civilized and mostly democratic society to exist.

We give in to two-year-olds because we know that, in time, as their brains mature, they’ll grow out of it, hopefully having learned that living with others requires that they consider, truthfully, the boundaries of their kingdoms, and yield when another’s needs supersedes their desires without throwing a tantrum. By the time they’ve reached the “age of majority,” we assume they are capable of negotiating that terrain successfully. But lately, I’m not so sure it’s a given anymore.

One of the tasks of civilized society—especially in a so-called “democracy”—is the give and take, the hem and haw, the yin and yang required to reach the best solutions for the most people. More than a few among us act as if we’re playing a game or involved in an all-too-common modern-day business negotiation where the “winner” takes all, instead of a compact between equals to ensure that the solutions leave the inalienable rights of all unmolested.

In a country of 350 million, of countless ethnicities and experiences, that takes more than a little effort, and a measure of wisdom, which includes awareness of the concept that there are some things no single individual can know. For instance, I am a 55-year-old white female born and raised in the southern United States. If I live 1000 years, I will never know absolutely what it feels like to be 30 in 2012, or male, or the nuances of life and memory of those born even in New York, much less Japan or Pakistan or Iraq or Libya.

To have any conceptual understanding at all of how the world looks through the eyes of another, I have to separate the things I share with him from the things I don’t, balancing those things common to all humans, like what it feels like to be hungry and disappointed and afraid, against the knowledge and experiences and conclusions that are uniquely his.

Recognizing my limitations with respect to the latter, I must learn as much as I can about those unique events, what he thinks, what affects his perspective about a given subject, by listening to him, searching my memory for unique experiences of my own which may compare so that I might broaden my perspective and the accuracy of my empathy the next time. In doing so, it is my hope that when it is my turn, he will listen to me with the same attention and respect.

Listening with the intent to better understand is not synonymous with agreeing. And disagreement isn’t synonymous with disrespect. Self-confident, informed, reasoning adults know that because you allow someone to express his views doesn’t mean you have to submit to believing its content. Buddha was reported as saying, “Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense.” I absolutely agree, as one who never studied from other people’s notes, even in school. But if I’m honest, I have to say that I remember no time that I truly listened to another’s perspective on something that really mattered to both of us without chewing on a point I would never have even thought of otherwise.

We owe it to ourselves to explore every option, every view, every idea to its fullest extent, no matter where it comes from, examining it for its potential for positive impact and, of course, its flaws. No matter who’s talking, there will always be flaws in our reasoning—none of us is omniscient. But the exploration itself cannot even begin if we’re misguided enough to think that we already know what another is thinking and dismiss it without even a hearing. I mourn all the possibilities that have never seen light, the wounds to hope sustained in battles that should never have been fought. We must do better. And we can.

Maybe I’m nuts, but it seems to me that reclaiming our empathy—not just the emotional capacity to experience what another is feeling, which should result in the exercise of self-restraint, but the mental capacity to embrace that the universe in which even the closest to us lives is not the same as ours, do our imperfect best to consider what it feels like to walk in another’s shoes, and start listening to each other—is the only path to peace and progress for the good of humankind.

But if any of you have other ideas…

VMS

I loved the show “Designing Women.” Having lived in Atlanta for about five years at the time, and being a native Southerner to boot, it felt pretty real, except, of course, for the fact that the only association to Atlanta were the occasional outside shots used as segues from one scene to another. “Matlock,” which gave the late Andy Griffith a second career, was similarly unreal. I gave up even trying to pretend that Matlock was actually in Atlanta after an episode in which an actor talked about going to Lake Lanier and pronounced the name with three syllables—and emphasis on the first. But I stayed with “Designing Women,” mostly because I could classify the girlfriends of my lifetime according to which of the characters each most resembled. I still can.

Who was I? Well, I wasn’t a Suzanne. In the first place, my cleavage has never measured up, and in the second, beauty pageants were not my style. If pushed to decide, I suppose I was a bit of cross between Charlene Frazier and Mary Jo Shively—hopelessly naïve about some things and admirably savvy about others.

But I wanted to be Julia. I wanted to be Julia because when Julia had had enough, she could reel off zingers about things in her craw that I agreed with but could never think of fast enough to say when they might have had the greatest effect.

This is one of those times. But Julia Sugarbaker is nowhere to be found, so I’m gonna have to do my best.

It’s time for this picayune adolescent bickering to stop. It’s time we grew up and faced the fact that no one is or will ever be perfectly safe—that at any moment, as long as humans populate this earth, tragedy will befall even the richest, the smartest, the kindest, the best among us. There is no line we can draw, no law we can pass, no wall we can build, no holy book written by humans (and they all were) that can provide the answers. That includes, by the way, the Bible, as well as the Quran, the Bhagavad Gita, the Torah, and the Book of Mormon.

In fact, if those so quick to parrot other imperfect humans’ interpretations bothered to read the Bible, especially the part where Jesus comes in, we would already know it, and would have moved past the expectation that any one of us has any authority, much less control over the behavior of anyone other than ourselves (minor children excepted). The rain falls on the just and the unjust, Jesus said. Translate: Bad things happen to those who don’t deserve them as well as those who, in our arrogance, we decide do deserve them. But bad things will happen, and our character is shown, not only in how we respond, but in whether we continue to act with humanity toward each other long after the residual of those bad things has passed.

I heard today that the event of this morning in Newtown, Connecticut was considered the second worst of its kind in U.S. history. I am offended by that, because the judgment was based on a number. I am offended by that because no one who was there in person this morning, no parent of a dead five-year-old will ever describe this as the second worst anything.

Knowing that there is no perfect solution, it’s time we sat down at the table together, pledged our sacred honor to each other as our Founding Fathers once did, and find the best, albeit imperfect, solution we can, together, to the problems that face us.

Among the obvious solutions we need is a way to regulate gun ownership that allows the men and women among us who are responsible adults (and not swaggering over-aged adolescents) to pursue the outdoor sports they love, while restricting access to weapons our Founding Fathers couldn’t have dreamed of. If you want to argue that the Second Amendment has anything to do with whether or not a 20-year-old has access to a Sig Sauer, you waste your breath with me because you will only clearly demonstrate that you never should have been awarded a high school diploma, because you obviously weren’t paying attention in history class.

And while I’m at it, the next time I hear someone in a political party in the United States of America say he is a victim of “tyranny” while eating out at Bones, I’m liable to borrow your messianic delusion and invoke my right to bear arms against ignorance. As a 10-year-old, I was pretty darn good with the Winchester rifle my grandfather taught me to shoot, and I had sense enough not to point it at other humans—just squirrels endangering a pecan crop.

I digress. The Second Amendment doesn’t apply here, anyway. It seems the three (yes, three) guns our perpetrator used were legally purchased by his mother (yes, his mother) who now lies cold tonight herself. I halfway expect that in somebody’s decrepit little mind, this will turn out to be her fault.

Someone told me once that in a fight, the one who runs out of ideas first is the one who throws the first punch. If that’s true, then many who call themselves leaders today have no ideas at all. Their only strategy is to mow down those who would oppose them with salvos to remove attention from their own inadequacies.

Here’s the deal. The physical violence will not stop until the emotional and spiritual violence demonstrated every day in our legislatures and in our media and in our homes comes to an end.

Though I saw my share of troubled people in the days when I was a therapist, I didn’t pretend to know then and I don’t know now what goes wrong in the head of a 20-year-old. Did something go awry in his brain when he was two? Was he played as a pawn in his parents’ divorce? Was he abused, bullied, ridiculed as a child? We will never know the answer.

Was there anything we could have done to stop it? Is there anything we can do to keep it from happening again? Perhaps, but probably not. The rain falls on the just and the unjust, the 2% and the 98%, the innocent and the guilty.

But I do know one thing. There are people in Newtown, Connecticut who are faced tonight and will be faced tomorrow and the day after that and the day after that with the challenge of finding a way to go forward, of reaching deep inside themselves to find the will to go on in the face of unspeakable tragedy, just like the families of Columbine and Virginia Tech and the World Trade Center casualties and countless others we will never meet in life. I pray that the grace of our Beloved holds them up when they cannot stand.

It’s in times like these, my friends, that the ruthless nature of faith becomes clear. And let me be clear. I’m not talking about “faith” that if you “accept Jesus as your Lord and Savior,” nothing bad will ever happen to you or the “faith” that something good will happen to you (which usually has something to do with getting what you want) or “faith” that the man or woman standing in a pulpit on Wednesday or Saturday or Sunday knows anything more about God than you do. And certainly not “faith” that there is a place in the sky that qualifies as the prize for voting for the “right” candidate in a political election or making the owner of a chicken restaurant even richer than he already was.

I’m talking about the unwavering faith that no matter what happens, even if we are nailed to a cross, we are loved—that all things will work for good, even if we won’t survive to see it. I’m talking about the faith that makes it possible for us to overcome our petty narcissism and really and truly fulfill the only request Jesus ever made of us. To love each other as he loved us.

So far, we haven’t done so well. I dare say it’s high time we got started.

I sit in a chair in the cubby-hole of an apartment in Asheville, NC that I recently moved to with my forever best friend. It is early on Thanksgiving morning—the sun hasn’t yet appeared—and my feline muse Sally lies quietly on the top of the recliner behind my head, satisfied to be wherever Jan and I are.

Sally is the living caricature of a “fraidy cat.” Move too quickly and you’ll see a blur heading for the farthest, darkest corner she can find. Make an unexpected sound and a similar retreat occurs. She went missing in our empty apartment the night after the movers came to take our household furnishings to storage. Having looked in every closet and behind every door—none of her usual hiding places were available as there were no beds or chairs left to look under—I had almost convinced myself that she had disappeared down the dryer vent shaft, newly exposed by the absence of the clothes dryer we’d donated to a local homeless shelter.

I’m not sure why I looked again in the kitchen cabinet. I had opened the door and glanced in on my trip through the rooms in search of her, but I hadn’t bothered to kneel and inspect the recessed shelf where we’d kept the skillets. But this time I did, and there, looking back at me with pupils the size of quarters, lay Sally. I had to admit she was one resourceful kitty—she’d managed to open the door with her paw—but I groaned at the prospect of the four-hour drive with her in the car that awaited me the next day.

Visits to the vet had never been pleasant and except for those, she hadn’t been outside in the open air since we’d adopted her seven years before. Though she’d been nicknamed “Squeaky” by her foster mom, that little halting meow of hers could be grating on the nerves when used nonstop to protest my unwillingness to feed her in the middle of the night or register her complaints regarding a closed door between us. She’d learned that from her older brother Harry, whom we’d had to euthanize after discovering he had cancer two months before.

I decided to have her ride in the contraption I’d devised to carry him back and forth to the vet after his surgery. Harry’s 20-lb self wouldn’t fit comfortably in a standard carrier, so we’d tied two laundry baskets together—one upside down on top of the other. The clinic staff thought us brilliant, or so they said. A friend called it our “red-neck” cat transporter, but it worked.

Sally had adored Harry, and though he would scarce have admitted it, he adored her too. While he was alive, their everyday pastimes included snuggling five-hour naps, so I thought any lingering smell from him might be of some comfort to her. And then, after lining the bottom of the carrier with a holey sleep-shirt of mine—as an afterthought, I grabbed a couple of towels from a box in the back. When I’d seat-belted her in, I covered the carrier with the towels, leaving only a small aperture through which she would be able to see me.

The old “birdcage” trick worked—with only a few brief exceptions, Sally didn’t make a single sound from the time we cleared the Mall of Georgia exit until we rolled off I-240 onto Merrimon Avenue four hours later.

I’ve been here now for 22 days, and I realized this morning, as I watched the emerging sunlight wax and wane through the transom window, that I know just how Sally feels. Sometimes, holing up in a warm, dark spot is exactly what one’s spirit needs to successfully negotiate the unexpected stuff of life. Her four-hour ride translates to one that has lasted several years for me, a downward slide through buffeting from the winds of a perfect storm. But, unlike many this Thanksgiving, I have a cubby-hole in which to hide—a cubby-hole known to those still prominent in my life—those who know me best, those who have always been there when I needed them, those for whom I hope I’ve been a lifeline in darkness too, a constant for them as I am for Sally.

I have much to be grateful for. And if you are reading this, no matter how things may seem or how you’re feeling today, so do you. All you have to do is open your eyes and look around.

From my cubby-hole to yours…

Happy Thanksgiving.

Greetings from Asheville!

Yep, for those of you who didn’t already know, I moved from Atlanta to Asheville on November 1. So far, as a newly adopted home city, Asheville is measuring up nicely in terms of what I need—time to rest and think in a place of simplicity, mostly, as I reinvent my life.

Considering that I am technically homeless and one of those who no longer shows up on the registers of the unemployed because I ran out of unemployment benefits a year ago, I have—as a result of the great fortune of having adopted family members with the wherewithal to offer a free, comfortable and cozy place to live for a while—the freedom to say what I think without undue concern for how it may be misinterpreted. The old Kris Kristofferson song “Me and Bobby McGee” is, for the record, right. Freedom IS another word for nothing left to lose—in a material sense, of course.

I’ve gained a new appreciation for who my friends are and who my thought-they-were-friends-but-turned-out-to-be-just-acquaintances are as well. Facebook aside, if I hadn’t already known based on the emotional support and assistance I’ve received (and am still receiving) through the financial debacles of the last decade, the recent presidential election certainly provided plenty of fodder for differentiating one from the other.

I recognize that my emotional vulnerability has an impact on my current perception, so if you are wondering if you are one of those to have fallen off the friend “cliff,” you can put that aside for now. I only “unfriended” about five people on Facebook and I probably shouldn’t have “friended” them in the first place, politics or no. I’m hoping that what I saw from some of you and participated in myself to some extent was a reflection of the frustration and disappointment and fear that we all feel in varying degrees and not a showing of “true colors.”

Even so, I am disappointed in many of us, including myself—especially those who represent themselves as Christians—and the degree to which our behavior before the election and even now has fallen far short of the glory of God and of Christ in particular.

I’m disappointed because I learned that there’s a whole host of us who have either never thought about or don’t seem to grasp that our views are just that—views. Not facts, not truths, not immutable laws—God’s or otherwise. Changeable given a shift in vantage point, affected by individual memory and perceptions, fill-in-the-gaps-with-whatever-seems-to-fit-from-our-obviously-limited-experiences…VIEWS.

I can’t put a number to the flat-out easily-exposed falsehoods I saw in print, presented as “proof” of nothing more than wishful thinking. Perhaps it’s because I spent time as a counselor early in my career, but I find it offensive to “bear false witness” against any other human—never mind the fact that it’s one of the Ten Commandments every Judeo-Christian wants to throw around in accusation, but not obey him- or herself. I’ve seen perfectly wonderful people who didn’t deserve to be treated the way they were destroyed by lies in the past. To elect a president by seeing who can outdo one another with ridiculous invective is unacceptable.

We cannot read each others’ minds. We cannot assess another’s motives. And to proclaim that we can is, to me, a failure to obey another of those Ten Commandments—to have no other idols before the God whose purpose we cannot know, despite the arrogance of those who claim authority. I’ve borne witness to a whole lot of people who seem to hold their opinions in higher honor than God, especially with respect to who is and who isn’t a sinner based on who they voted for.

But I digress—that’s a topic for another day.

What dismays me about it all as an American is that because of the diversity of belief and opinion and conclusions drawn from experience, we have an opportunity to create solutions to the problems facing us that no nation homogeneous in ethnicity or religious tradition or racial background will ever have—solutions that provide what every one of us needs and require that we give up the illusion that life is ever fair. The rain falls on the just and the unjust, Jesus said. And so does the sun. Bless you if the sun’s still shining on you in this time when many like me are still struggling for our lives—but don’t think it has anything to do with God’s love or favor on you as opposed to me. Unless you know me and the circumstances of my life, you don’t know. I am loved and adored just as much as you, irrespective of what choices I have made that worked out and those that didn’t, regardless of what kind of car I drive or whether I spend what little money I have on things you would’ve bought. I will live with that reality, not you.

We have squandered massive potential to this point and are living in the bed we’ve made. The opportunity costs of congressional standoffs and blustering adolescent bravado are astounding. What might we have achieved together in the time we spent throwing slurs about dog shit on cars or birth certificates? What of true value might the money spent on these elections, whether won or lost, have created? How much farther along could we have been toward righting this ship?

As the lucky-by-birth American citizens most of us are, we are all responsible—both for where we are and where we are not—and it is clear that we, to this point, are considerably less capable of self-government than our founding fathers hoped when they started this experiment. We have shown that we are incapable of wisdom in governing our own lives, our own mouths, our own behavior, much less working together to sustain the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our posterity. We’re too busy trying to restrict the blessings of liberty for everyone else except those we “think” believe like us and look like us and agree with our rather foolish perceptions.

“Tell the truth, tell the truth, tell the truth,” as Elizabeth Gilbert wrote. Accept responsibility for your part in this fiasco to date (and you have much, as I do), take off the black armbands and attitudes that brand your abdication of responsibility (the 47% in Romney’s faux pas aren’t the ones who think they’re “victims” now), and grow up. Shit happens, life isn’t fair, and no matter how hard we work to ignore the facts, sometimes our best efforts don’t measure up and all of us will one day die.

But until we do breathe our last, starting today, let’s expend a little effort and use the brains and hearts God gave us to count for something more than this.

A friend from college days with whom I have become recently reacquainted shared on Facebook an article about the polarization of Americans with respect to President Obama and more recent presidents. With it, she posted the words, “…must not despair…must not despair…”

I posted a comment. “Reckon how that happened…”

I’m sure my comment was taken by some as sarcastic, perhaps accusing, given that this friend and I have often appeared, to the uneducated eye, to come down on opposite sides of this presidential election. But it wasn’t intended that way. It was, instead, a rhetorical question, asked in the hope that it might stimulate self-analysis, an examination of how we two may have contributed to the polarization, unwittingly or otherwise.

As it happens, her posting echoes a refrain I have repeated to myself at least once a day for the past 20 years or so—not just with respect to presidential elections, but to what I perceived was happening to the American polity in general and to the things I hear daily, thanks to the internet, spoken by many who share with me an “affiliation” with Christendom.

I, for one, have never had a great deal of trouble reconciling the tenets of my personal theology and the principles of democracy as they were revealed to me in my own reading. For the record, I have read both the Bible and the documents enshrined by our “founding fathers” numerous times—the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, the U.S. Constitution (especially the Bill of Rights). Many of those tenets and principles are based on similar ideas—not an accident, given that most of the learned men of the commonwealths of Massachusetts and Virginia came from traditions steeped in Anglicanism.

Fortunately, when they sat down together, they managed to keep the heart of the message I hear when I read the words of Jesus, while discarding the crafty, oppressive projections of mankind added through the centuries. The most important departure from the Anglican tradition, in my opinion, was the notion that there would be no “national” church, no particular set of religious doctrines or beliefs that would be used as instruments for denying the stated “inalienable” rights of life, liberty or the pursuit of happiness to citizens who didn’t subscribe to them.

Only 100 years before, the irrational yet all-too-natural human pendulum swing from oppressed to oppressor had resulted in the deaths of innocent souls in Salem. How very quickly those who’d less than a century before escaped religious oppression in England and come to America turned on their own community members! And thank God for the wisdom of those who eventually overruled them. It is lost on some that among the judges who stopped the witch hunts of 1692 was Increase Mather, the father of the very man who’d written the “manual” on the trials themselves. It is also lost on others that the son, Cotton Mather, a prolific writer, was among the first proponents of inoculation for smallpox—a practice that some might have deemed a bit “witchy” themselves.

But I digress.

My point is this: Jesus’ counsel to “Love your neighbor as yourself” is a suitable framework, a commandment that serves two purposes—to underscore the equality of humans in the eyes of God, as stated in the Declaration of Independence, and to provide a practical guide for decision-making when “inalienable” rights to protections of that equality is threatened.

Jesus was pretty darn clear about the definition of “neighbor,” too. There is no doubt if your reading comprehension exceeds the fifth grade level that the “neighbor” Jesus said one was to love in the same way one loved oneself could not be designated by membership in a group delineated by ethnicity or gender or religious belief or sexual preference or any other category dreamed up by fools in search of power. There was a reason Jesus chose a Samaritan. The Samaritans were hated by the Israelites, despite the fact that they were both descendants of the same guy.

The bastardization of what Jesus said was almost immediate, so immediate and so insidious that few notice it, especially today. We both see and don’t see the guile, the prejudice with respect to the story itself every day—emblazoned in the names of charitable organizations around the world. Even the man-made headers in the New Testament itself betray us, with one little word rendering the very message of the parable moot.

Look it up. Jesus didn’t say anything about a “good” Samaritan. We’re the ones who added that word, as if this one man, this one Samaritan, was an exception to the rule. Can you hear it?

“Oh, yeah,” we say. “The Samaritan was definitely the neighbor in that story. He was a ‘good’ Samaritan, unlike the rest of his kind.”

“Oh, yeah,” we say. “I’m surprised. That black guy is pretty smart.”

“Oh, yeah,” we say. “I have a gay friend. But he’s different.”

“Oh, yeah,” we say. “I have a liberal friend, I have a conservative friend, I have a Christian friend, I have a Muslim friend, I have a Buddhist friend…” You finish the sentence.

Love your neighbor as yourself.

I must not despair…I must not despair…

Before I go one step further, let’s get one thing out of the way. I’m not against charter schools or innovation in our educational systems. Nor is a “No” vote on the proposed constitutional amendment a vote against charter schools. What I’m against is a government agency or commission having the authority to overrule local folks with respect to whether or not a charter school will be allowed in their districts, and as a result, funnel budgeted funds away from the schools already there. And that’s what this amendment is really about. Don’t be fooled.

There are already 162 charter schools in the state of Georgia. By definition, these schools are released from having to comply with some state mandates, which means they operate with a degree of freedom not allowed to other schools. “Pilot” projects of a sort, their goals are to demonstrate alternative methods that result in higher test scores and graduation rates. God knows that as a graduate of both a rural Georgia high school and a Georgia college, I hope that charter schools eventually succeed in their missions. But the cold honest truth is that they haven’t…yet. Earlier in the year, a report to the state Department of Education revealed that in the 2010-2011 school year, charter schools became not more, but less successful relative to their “traditional” counterparts in meeting federally mandated annual yearly progress (AYP) targets.

So what is this about? I’m not sure, but it sounds like sour grapes to me. Or perhaps special interests. People who don’t care much about whether their model works or not or whether they know what they’re doing or not—just that they get their way. They’re persistent, though.

Let’s review.

What a “Yes” vote will do.

·         It will give authority to a state agency to approve charter school applications OVER THE OBJECTIONS OF THE LOCAL SCHOOL BOARDS.

·         It will take already severely reduced funds ($5.7 Billion has been cut statewide since 2002) and divert them away from the public schools in the area OVER THE OBJECTIONS OF THE LOCAL SCHOOL BOARDS.

·         It will take decision-making and control over how school taxes will be spent out of local hands and placed in the hands of a state agency. (For those of you in rural Georgia, like Cordele, where I went to school, that means Atlanta will have the power to make decisions for you.)

What a “Yes” vote WON’T do.

·         It won’t give the power to establish charter schools. That approval was given a decade ago and a well-functioning system for evaluating applications is already in place.

·         It won’t improve graduation rates or close the achievement gap. The evidence so far is mixed on the effectiveness of charter schools, not only in Georgia, but nationwide.

WE DON’T NEED AN AMENDMENT TO GIVE AUTHORITY TO A STATE AGENCY TO OVERRULE LOCAL SCHOOL OFFICIALS APPROVING SOMETHING THAT DOESN’T WORK.

Be careful what you vote for. If you truly believe in limited government and in reducing the effect of special interest groups (like the Charter School Association) on decisions made for you without your consent, please vote NO.