Prodigal Prophet

I read somewhere that when “Good Night and Good Luck,” George Clooney’s film about Edward R. Murrow, was screened in LA, some of the audience wrote in review that they thought the actor portraying Senator Joseph McCarthy “over-acted.” Those remarks were quite interesting, in that Clooney didn’t cast McCarthy’s part. Instead, he had used actual footage of the senator, whose rampage against fellow citizens would be one of our darkest hours as a nation.

In an article published in 1952 in the Las Vegas Sun, a staff journalist wrote of his behavior at a party function in Nevada: “…McCarthy in his typical wild swinging fashion, with no regard for the facts but with hold on his audience that is frightening called [Hank] Greenspun ‘an ex-convict’ and ‘an admitted Communist.’” (Greenspun was the Sun’s publisher who had been convicted of smuggling arms to the Israelis.) It had been two years since the start of McCarthy’s “witchhunt,” and it would be two more years before he would be revealed as the severely alcoholic demagogue he was—a mentally deranged man who preyed on the fears of the populace and ruined, without cause, the reputations and lives of hundreds, if not thousands of innocent Americans.

It would not be a Congressman or a Senator who would deliver the knock-out blow to McCarthy’s “hold.” It would be his over-reach, his accusations with respect to the Army on live television, a new and powerful communications medium that had, ironically, fueled his rise—a mistaken judgment of his own power. (He had gone after the U.S. Army at a time when the President was the very popular general who only a decade before had been one of the masterminds who’d led the Allies and turned the tides of the Second World War.) And it would be the Army’s chief attorney at the time, Joseph Welch, whose sound-bite would be remembered: “Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness…let us not assassinate this lad further, senator. You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?” (Click here to see the actual footage.)

Applause erupted from the chamber when the attorney concluded his remarks, and when the hearings were over, McCarthy would be condemned by his peers for abuse of power, for “conduct contrary to senatorial traditions.” Less than three years later, he would be dead, succumbing to peripheral nephritis secondary to cirrhosis.

McCarthy wasn’t the first, by any means, to use these tactics. Nor would he be the last. It can be argued that the demagoguery of the high priest and those in religious power killed Jesus of Nazareth by playing on the fear of their constituents. Alexis de Tocqueville, a Frenchman and political scientist, had referred to this particular brand of American political manipulation a century before, when he wrote, “In America, the majority raises formidable barriers around the liberty of opinion; within these barriers an author may write what he pleases, but woe to him if he goes beyond them.” That’s okay, as long as the majority opinion is the “right” one (translation: the one my party espouses). But woe to us when it turns out not to be.

De Tocqueville wrote a lot more as well. For instance, “America is great because she is good. If America ceases to be good, she will cease to be great,” and the perhaps chillingly prescient statement, “The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money.” Those two quotes placed side-by-side give me pause.

I was born the year McCarthy died. And though the decades of my childhood and adolescence were quite turbulent as my peers will agree, I still believed in the goodness of America, in the gentleness and kindness of the American people individually and as a whole. I believe in Superman, too—Superman who came from the heartland of America and unceasingly fought “the never-ending battle for truth, justice and the American way.”

But the “American way” that I’ve seen of late has no regard for truth or justice. We have become McCarthy-esque, reckless in our accusations, wild swinging with no regard for the facts and precious little concern with justice for those harmed by cruel words and thoughtless decisions made in service of empty political rhetoric. And we have long since been bribed by Congress with our own money, the result of which we recently saw in action. To borrow a phrase from that journalist 59 years ago, “the holds [of some] on [their] audiences…is frightening.”

I’m still hopeful, though, in spite of myself—ironically because of yet another de Tocqueville quote. My adolescent pride at being an American survived because of it. The gist of it is that, though it has admittedly sometimes taken a while, in the end, Americans have done the right thing. “The greatness of America lies not in being more enlightened than any other nation, but rather in her ability to repair her faults.”

Let it be so again.

The following is an extended response to a comment thread on Facebook, reproduced below:

ORIGINAL POST BY A FRIEND: “If the US Government was a family, they would be making $58,000 a year, they spend $75,000 a year, & are $327,000 in credit card debt. They are currently proposing BIG spending cuts to reduce their spending to $72,000 a year. These are the actual proportions of the federal budget & debt, reduced to a level that we can understand.” – Dave Ramsey, professional financial advisor and author.

 MY ORIGINAL COMMENT: Unfortunately, however, the government isn’t a family. I like Dave and his programs but the analogy doesn’t fly. If the government were a family, it would also change parents at least once a decade, based on the children’s judgment.

RESPONSE FROM JOHN (a fictitious name): Vally, it is still a good analogy. An analogy only has to have one point of contact. If I say, boy that guy runs like a cheetah, you know that the only point of comparison is speed. Just because the guy is not furry and does not walk on all fours, the analogy is not invalid. No analogy holds up if you move it beyond the intended point(s)of comparison.

MY RESPONSE TO JOHN:

You’re right, John, of course, about the fine point of analogies. I apologize for taking the discussion off-road into the tangents, and will say what I really wanted to say instead.

If Dave had left it at the end of the first sentence, where the analogy, in and of itself, ended and the applied judgment begins (the part about the BIG reduction in spending), I would be perfectly happy with it. Well…not happy, exactly…but at least satisfied with the comparison.

So let’s go back before the opinion and expand on the analogy in its current context.

Let’s agree that Dave’s scenario, for purposes of discussion, is factual in basis. Let’s talk about the actual composition of the family instead of pretending we’re not part of it. (The “US Government” does not exist separate from us—in effect, we elect parents for our 300 million member “family” and give them a checkbook, and we are bound by the decisions they make for the period of time we allow them to be there.) And for the ease of numbering, agree that Dave’s family has 100 members.

One addition to the scenario, however. In this family, the salary was once $75,000, but has recently been reduced to $58,000—10 of the family members are out of work, and not currently able to contribute. Though one, maybe two got jobs making less than they were before, they were quickly replaced by two other siblings. While they were losing their jobs, another ten actually made more than they did before.

The debt, however, didn’t go down. As Mary, the original poster of the quote, remarked later, it is one of the “sins of the fathers.” Doesn’t matter a whit who’s responsible (even though, technically, we all are)—it’s still there to deal with. It’s money already spent, my friends.

It isn’t that I disagree at all with what I think Dave was saying. Because I haven’t seen the context in which he said it, I assume that he was frustrated with the fact that the amount of spending reduction is barely a drop in the bucket toward any real change. But I seem to remember that Dave gained his great wisdom after going bankrupt himself, which means whatever debt he used to have “went away” with no negative consequence to anyone except those to whom he owed the debts, his credit rating and those who depended on him. He’s obviously done quite well. Nothing quite like a reformed smoker when it comes to smokers, is there?

My discomfort comes from the fact I am once again reminded of the old story about the elephant and the blind men. I’ve mentioned it before, but if you’re unfamiliar with the story, the essence is that four blind men are introduced to an elephant and asked to describe it. One, of course, talks about the trunk, another the tail, another the body. You get the picture. At the end of one version of the story:

O how they cling and wrangle, some who claim
For preacher and monk the honored name!
For, quarreling, each to his view they cling.
Such folk see only one side of a thing.

We seem to be unable to take off our blindfolds and look at the whole animal for what it is. I’m personally tired, as many seem to be, of the “re-election-focused” blame game. We’re making decisions about “trunks” with no regard for the effect of our decisions on the “tail.”

A case in point: Here in Georgia, out of fear and prejudice and an unwillingness to put partisan bickering aside and find a solution to how to keep financially-contributing immigrants here legally, we passed an immigration law. At the time, Tom Smith, a finance professor at Emory University, said Georgia businesses were bracing for the impact and watching Arizona, since Arizona’s law cost the state as much as $250 million in convention business. “People are looking at the history in Arizona and thinking, ‘Could a law in Georgia have the same impact?’ ” he said, according to one article. “We’re waiting to see whether that will happen in Georgia now.” Never mind the other question—since 70 million baby-boomers are headed for retirement (well, we were until our retirement packages and stock portfolios evaporated), of how our 30 million children were going to replace twice their normal tax revenues. Ten years ago, when the question was posed, the best answer they came up with had to do with immigrants in the labor force, by the way.

Meanwhile, down in south Georgia where I am originally from, crops in the field lie rotting, un-gathered because already beleaguered farmers don’t have the wherewithal financially or physically to do the job. And matters will only get worse—you can’t sell crops, even at a discount, that you can’t gather, supply goes down, prices go up…and that $58,000 now doesn’t go even as far as it did before we started. But we didn’t think of that…and we’re not through with the fallout.

Nor will the powers that be who drove the legislation through likely admit their folly with due humility, admitting that maybe they pulled the trigger a bit early, and work with their other blind brothers and sisters to find a solution that provides the possibility of a win-win for the greatest number of people. Instead, on the basis of their description of the “tail,” the ONLY right description, they’ll explain how it was the fault of the legislature two terms ago, and act surprised when the elephant decides to sit down on all of our heads.

If we are, in fact, the strongest nation in the world…if we are, in fact, the nation that put a man on the moon in a decade’s time…if we are, in fact, a “family,” then we need to act like it, looking for ways to stimulate job creation so there will be more people to pay taxes, make good on the promises made in our names to take care of those who took and take care of us—like our parents, our teachers, our troops and veterans, our police and fire departments—and have the character to say when we’re wrong without trying to pin our bad decisions on our siblings.

I don’t care who’s to blame. Doesn’t matter a bit. Like the debt, none of this mess will change as a result of knowing who did it or why. Besides, the answer to that question is easy.

It’s us. We’re the “such folk” of the elephant story, all guilty of seeing only “one side of a thing,” the side that we touch, the side that affects us and ours. We don’t give a damn about those poor schmucks who didn’t do what we told them to until we wake up and figure out the poor schmucks are the ones looking back at us in the mirror.

Sorry, guys but that doesn’t sound like “family” to me. 

I was reading through reviews of a book I just converted into an ebook and one of them said, “It changed my life.” My mind wandered for a moment.

Is there a book on my shelf that I would say that about, that by virtue of reading it, had had that kind of impact on me? Life-changing? No book, of course, literally changes your life unless you’re the author of a new best-seller. If the words of another have impact on our lives at all other than providing information or entertainment, they either change our perspective or confirm our prejudices, more deeply entrenching our beliefs around a subject.

I thought about my absolute favorite, To Kill a Mockingbird.  Did it change my life, my perspective? Not really. It was one of those “Wow, somebody else understands how I feel” kind of books for me, a white girl in the troubled South of the 1960s as Nelle Lee had been in the 30s. A confirmation, in other words.

How about God is No Fool, the book of Christian meditations given to me as a Christmas present by my older sister when I was 12? It certainly influenced my views about spirituality during that just-about-to-move-into-the-teenage-years angst, enough that I sought out the author and asked for the rights to republish it 35 years later. But had it changed my life? No, it had simply provided affirmation of what I’d already begun to think and believe, given my then relatively short life.

Several other books passed through my mind—more recent ones. The Kingdom Within by John Sanford, The Active Life by Parker J. Palmer, virtually all of Fritz Buechner’s books. Nope—all confirmers.

I went back to work and banished the idea from my mind for the moment, but later that day, when I was taking a break, the image of another book came to me. At six years old, I had pulled it down from the shelf of a man who, in many ways, served as a surrogate father in my early days, and I had been surprised to find it there.

I’d always thought of Roy as a “hard” man, not the sort you necessarily wanted to crawl into the lap of. He’d risen to the top of a corporate ladder and fallen flat on his face after barely surviving a small plane crash. His voice was always stern, his words challenging, his face serious. As you might imagine, he had little patience for small talk—the events of his life turned most of my everyday complaints into minor annoyances. He never went to church during the time I knew him. Perhaps he never had. Yet the dust jacket was wrinkled and worn, so I knew it had been perused several times.

A precocious child and voracious reader, I devoured the book in a matter of days, planning to give it back as fast as possible. “Be sure to return it,” he’d barked as I left the small apartment in which he lived. And I did, but not before it changed my life.

The book was The Day Christ Died by Jim Bishop.

It wasn’t the part about Jesus’ life per se that would change my life. Born into a Southern conservative every-time-the-church-doors-were-open-we-were-there family, I was well-versed in that story by the time I was seven. Nor was it the historical information presented. Scholars today, 55 years after the book was first published, would argue with most of the conclusions of Jim Bishop’s research.

It was the other parts—a description of what would later come to be called Judaism and its practice, musing about what life was like in Jerusalem and surround in that period when Jesus walked on the earth, the sociological interplay of Roman culture and the “my god is better than your god” clashes—that got my attention, expanding the world view of a little girl who, for reasons that are hopefully obvious, had assumed without thinking that Jesus was a handsome 6’2” blue-eyed young Anglo-Saxon man.

I remember going to our 1959 World Book Encyclopedias and looking up the Middle East to get a glimpse of what he might have really looked like. Although I already knew about the Holocaust and World War II from family stories, there were only two Jewish families in our small town in south Georgia—owners, as one might expect, of the two department stores. I was friends with members of both families—a daughter in one and I were born just a couple of hours apart. I thought about our celebration of Christmas and was suddenly curious about what my “birthday buddy” did during what were then called the “Christmas holidays.” Until then, the word “Hanukkah” hadn’t even crossed my vocabulary’s doorstep.

From that day, I never again took the word of anyone else about what Jesus might have looked like, did, or said without considering the context of the world in which he lived and how what he looked like, did and said related to that world. I would never again blindly accept another’s religious or spiritual view as my own.

It only followed that the view from anyone else’s eyes would be affected by their experiences—experiences I might or might not have had, and that my perceptions about others, their motivations, their beliefs—even those closest to me— were at risk of being misperceptions unless I asked them and then listened carefully to what they told me. (That includes God, by the way.)

For a while after I read the book, the lonely child in me felt even more isolated than before. But as I grew up and older, I realized that beneath the different outer shells we wear, including the multi-colored, multi-shaped bodies we haul around, humans are humans, and we all have the same basic feelings,  responses, motivations, and needs for love and respect.

No one is greater than I am nor anyone else. No one is less, either. And nothing can elicit the fire of my anger faster than the arrogance of one who deems himself judge and jury of another’s behavior, value as a human being or his motivation without talking to him first.

We’ve all been victims of such judgment. I know I have. And imperfect as I am, I’m sure I have diminished others by judging them unfairly as well. Only one person in history, as far as I know, succeeded in defeating the judge in himself, though he was judged unfairly and executed as a result. I am nonplussed at how quickly we are “up in arms” over his mistreatment, yet rationalize the same behavior in his name.

That same fellow reportedly said something to the effect of “Don’t judge or you’ll be judged,” the mirror of something else he is recorded as having said. “Love others as you love yourself.”

What a novel idea. Do unto others what you would have them do unto you. Don’t do unto others what you don’t want them to do unto you. Don’t judge others unless it’s perfectly okay with you if they return the favor. It’s a pretty good starting place. Of course, as with Jesus, there’s no guarantee that others won’t judge you if you don’t judge them, but there’s an almost airtight guarantee that they will if you do.

When Roy died in 1972, his widow asked me if there was anything of Roy’s that I wanted and the book was the only thing I could think of. Its dust cover is more tattered now than it was in 1963, just as I am. Memory has transformed Roy’s sternness into a tired resignation, his impatience into a trait I happen to share, and his penchant for getting up every time life brought him to his knees came to represent a courageous act worth emulating.

It’s funny what time and a change in perspective will do. Sometimes it changes your life. It can change the world, too. It did once, after all.

It’s not an accident that a lot of what I write has to do with spirituality and healing from a different point of view. That’s true of my two books: Simon Says—Views from a Higher Perspective and Andrew’s Eyes. Click here to learn more about them.

There was always a chance that this grand experiment would fail. Our founding fathers knew it—we were entering uncharted territory, they thought. Never before had the masses been defined as equal, intentionally given the power to create their own reality.

They patterned the structure of their new government loosely after the Roman empire, and called on the Magna Carta and theories of more recent philosophers like John Locke. For the most part, they were Englishmen—some landowners given charters, some debtors escaping destitution with the hope of building new lives, some religious sorts persecuted because they didn’t believe the “right way.” The latter battle had been going on for centuries. So had the civil wars, all about the same things—who got to say, “My way or the highway” for a moment.

One branch of my family came to America from France, by way of England, to escape the oppression of three choices—swear loyalty to the belief system of those in power (Catholic vs. Protestant), become a slave in the hold of a ship, or be hung for doing neither. One son got out. His parents found the noose, apparently. Another branch, descended from a bookseller whose home and office in the doors of St. Paul’s Cathedral had been taken away from him because he’d been vocally supportive of the soon-to-be-beheaded Charles I, indentured his two sons to a man setting sail for Virginia. About the same time, up the coast a bit, new countrymen of his sons (among whom were members of yet another branch of my family), a group who’d set sail without a charter, running for their lives (again for religious reasons) would blame their failed crops and dying relatives and cattle, not on the harshness of life itself or the folly of their decision-making, but on witchcraft and the red-skinned humans they were surprised to encounter upon disembarking. (God, by the way, would be thanked for the demise of those red-skinned people instead of the smallpox (and muskets) brought by the Englishmen themselves.)

It would take only 150 years or so before this somewhat disjumbled group would take the war back across the sea against the mother country, another 90 after that before they were at each other’s throats. And now, here we sit 150 years after that.

Will we make it through another cycle of 90 years? As the world watches and waits, our grand experiment teeters once again at the edge of oblivion, the blame for our woes attributed to witches and warlocks of a different name—Republicans and Democrats. Burn them at the stake! Dunk them under water! He did it! No, she! (Cotton Mather would be proud. So, for that matter, would be Joseph McCarthy…)

Our founding fathers were wrong about one thing, I’m afraid. That notion about us creating our own realities started long before 1776. We did it in the proverbial Eden, and have never stopped. The only question is what reality exactly are we creating? Sounds to me like we’re just repeating ourselves.

“Where there is no property, there is no injustice.” –John Locke

“And knowing their thoughts, Jesus said to them, ‘Any kingdom divided against itself is laid waste and any city or house divided against itself will not stand.’” –Matthew 12:25 (Abraham Lincoln quoted this one, too.)

“United we stand, divided we fall.” –Patrick Henry

Are you a divider or one who seeks to unite? Our reality awaits its creation.

I’ve been confused for a while about why some of the people I know seem to be up in arms over the idea of “closing the loopholes” or increasing taxes for the “rich.” But today when I shared a link to an article posted by a friend of mine and she asked me to elaborate on what I said about it, it occurred to me that those who inhabit the Congress of the United States need a more forceful clarification as to why we elected them in the first place. Some seem to have gotten the wrong idea.

You see, it all started when Orrin Hatch said in a speech the other day that the “rich are paying too much in taxes” and that the “poor” needed to take some “responsibility” for lowering the deficit. He supported that statement by saying that “the top 1 percent of the so-called wealthy pay 38% of all income tax, the top 10 percent pay 70% of all income tax and the top 50 percent pay almost 98 percent of all income tax.”

I wanted to pull out a violin and serenade him until I looked at a couple more statistics, like the fact that the top 1 percent received between 21 and 23 percent of all US income in 2007 and the bottom 50% combined earned only 12.3%. Then I got mad.

Note the difference between the words “received” vs. “earned.” That’s where the subterfuge in Mr. Hatch’s argument lies.

I suspect if you looked at Bill Gates’ tax return, you wouldn’t find a W-2. Or if you did, his gross “wages” wouldn’t even compare to the other income “received.” Income that isn’t subject to the graduated income tax most of us struggle with on our 1040s every year.

That top 1% who “received” between 21 and 23 percent probably didn’t “work” for it. It was income, yes, but the tax rates applied come from a different place in the tax code. The part that deals with capital gains, for instance.

The capital gains tax, the death tax, the taxes we’ve battled over in years past apply for most of us fewer than 5 times in a lifetime, or at least it used to. The only time I heard the term “capital gains” growing up was with respect to the sale of a house, and what I assumed would always be true—that there would be some. Gains, I mean. We know how that turned out.

Taxes on capital gains are something like 12% if you’ve owned the asset (house or stock, for instance) for 18 months or more, 18% if you’d owned it for fewer than 18 months, considerably less than the 25-39% tax rates of the past on “earned” income, that money that comes in your paycheck once, twice, four times a month. And here’s the real rub…there’s no social security or Medicare tax unless it’s “earned.”

And the story gets worse. Even if you “earn” more than $107,000 per year, there’s no Social Security tax withheld from the excess. Been that way for a while—I benefited from the law 10 years ago. (By the way, the rank and file Senator like Orrin Hatch makes $165,000, not counting his other income. And on another note, if everyone paid that 6.2% of 100% of their income, no matter how that “in-come” came in, reckon how much that would reduce the deficit?)

Don’t get me wrong. I have no argument with Bill Gates, or the top 1% or even the 10%. If they learned how to play the corporate game, or have leverage to negotiate $17 million severance packages while their companies lay off thousands, or get paid to “manage” those hedge funds made of other people’s money, or were born into wealth…more power to them.

But I don’t feel sorry for them, Mr. Hatch, and the calculation of their “fair share” of responsibility for lowering the deficit is a matter for debate, irrespective of percentages, especially when their income is largely generated by the productivity of “poor” schmucks like me.

Well, it used to be. I have to admit that my weekly unemployment check doesn’t do even a bit for the top 10 percent’s investment portfolios.

But I pay taxes on it and when I find a job, I’ll be glad to pay more if that’s what it takes to solve the problem.

I’m doing my share, Mr. Hatch. Now I’d appreciate it if you would shut up and start doing yours.

A dear friend and I were talking on the phone and she said, “I guess you have to be older to come to terms with your limitations—to really appreciate your gifts and your weaknesses for what they are.” She was talking about the joy she feels about the volunteer role she performs at her church and the quiet sense of accomplishment she feels when she carries it out, knowing that by doing it, she makes things easier for some and the worship experience meaningful for others. It’s not something everyone likes to do, but it comes easy to her. The accolades she might have sought once aren’t an issue.

After we hung up, I thought of an essay I wrote a few years ago about why I thought kids in school don’t usually list history as their favorite subject. I wrote that I thought it was because we started teaching dates and events and giving multiple choice tests in social studies, when the essence of history is in the stories—who the people were, what the conditions were, what hardships they faced, what courage or cowardice they showed, what they achieved. I still think that’s true in some part, but I’ve come to the conclusion that to appreciate history you have to have lived long enough to have one and remember it.

In youth, we face outward. We are invincible, energetic, physically virile. We dare not think of ourselves as limited in any way. We push ourselves toward more and more achievement, pushing the envelope, holding our own within our sphere with respect to money and acquisitions. We don’t generally stop and think about where we are or where we’re going or what it means because, in the world of the young, he who hesitates is lost.

There’s nothing wrong with that. In the first part of our lives, the primary goal should be one of finding out just how far we can go, pushing to see where our limits are, identifying and celebrating our unique talents until we reach the peaks, the primes, the pinnacles of our lives.

The proverbial “mid-life crisis” arrives right on time—just when we start to notice that we can’t run quite as fast as we used to or the display of reading glasses suddenly attracts our attention or fitting into the same size clothes we wore at 25 is about all the limit-pushing we have energy for. Activity gives a nod to contemplation and we enter a period that theorist Erik Erikson called “integrity vs. despair,” that time of life when we evaluate our lives in retrospect and decide how we feel about it all.

If we find ourselves in “despair,” we mourn the things we meant to do and didn’t, and bitterness creeps in. But if we find ourselves in a state of “integrity,” once the mourning is done, we realize that the richness of our lives is not as much about the experiences we had, the battles and awards we won, or the mark we made.

Instead, it is in savoring those things that for now, only we and God know we did. And smiling, because we know that no matter how large or small, significant or insignificant in the eyes of the world, in the end, it was enough.

And by virtue of being exactly who we are, so were we.

I was stunned by the verdict, as many were, based on what I knew. But in fairness, I didn’t pay a whole lot of attention to the case until the last few days. I’m about sensational murder trials as I am about basketball games—I don’t watch them until the very end. Too much of an emotional roller coaster, and I’ve had my share of those lately.

But, as I’ve looked at what the jury members who’ve spoken have said about how they came to their decision, I’ve been more settled than stunned, more hopeful than nonplussed. In the end, the prosecution failed to demonstrate in a way that “removed all doubt” a connection between Casey and the crime scene.

I don’t know if she’s guilty of killing her daughter. I don’t know if she’s innocent, either. Not my call. But to those whose call it was, I am grateful. They restored my faith in our judicial system by demonstrating the restraint that enabled them to look at what was presented to them, and, irrespective of how they may have felt about Casey Anthony’s behavior, surmised was true, or what they believed about her based on intuitive feeling and judge her on the basis of the instructions they were given. We’re human after all, and sometimes we make mistakes. And I personally would prefer that those mistakes be in the direction of mercy. It’s a tough moral choice, I know, but for me, to err on the side that allows some who may be guilty to go free is the lesser of two evils. To convict an innocent soul, punishing him or her for crimes not committed is a much greater sin.

Today, I am more confident in my peers because of the jury in Casey Anthony’s case. I know too well from personal experience that circumstantial evidence is just that. I suspect we all do, in one way or another. What leaves me pensive, though, are the Christians who would have “put her under the jail,” convinced that she is guilty and that they are all-knowing. I’m pensive because that’s exactly what happened to Jesus, and yet they seem not to make that connection. Jesus was tried, convicted and crucified because the high priests of the time, threatened by his obvious influence over the people, presented circumstantial evidence that he intended to lead a mob and try to overthrow the Romans. And they succeeded in their aim.

We know what we believe happened after that, but we are smug in our self-righteousness that we wouldn’t have been a part of that crowd.

And yet, I wonder…

My oldest friend (in terms of time, not of age) and I have been discussing via email different issues with respect to our faith perspectives.

Today she wrote me, after spending time in Proverbs that God’s attention to detail was astounding, in that he came to earth in human form as an “XY” and not an “XX,” because, as she said, it “encompassed all of humanity.”

If we were able to leave it at that, explaining the “decision” by God to come in physical form as a male as a function of inclusion rather than exclusion, I would be perfectly fine with the idea. After all, in recent years, when my Episcopal parish was recruiting a new rector, I argued that very thing from a different direction. We had a longstanding female deacon (in the Episcopal church, deacons are ordained clergy), and I thought it would be in our best interest to hire a male rector—to achieve the balance, to give both the men and women in our congregation a same-gender pastor to whom to go with gender-specific spiritual concerns.

When all was said and done, however, the vestry hired a wonderful woman, and soon after, for entirely other reasons, our deacon resigned. Today, we have an equally wonderful male deacon, which re-established the balance I’d hoped for. XX and XY.

But we don’t leave it at that. Even as I speak, parishes have “pulled out” of the Anglican Communion or threatened to, over the fact that in 2006, the ECA elected a female presiding bishop, and in 2010, the way was opened for appointment of female bishops in the worldwide church. The Southern Baptist Convention continues to rail against female leadership in the “top” position in any church, quoting the heavily 1^st Century culture-biased suggestion that women should keep silence in the church or misquoting based on culture-biased translations.

One who once aspired to the ministry in that latter church, until as my spiritual director said, I “discovered I was a girl,” I continue to be saddened over being judged “insufficient” by virtue of my being an “XX,” regularly astounded by the inability of some to see the direct contradiction of their demands to the “neither male nor female, slave nor free, Jew nor Greek…” inclusion of membership in the body of believers. Nothing can separate us from the love of God, but we sure can be separated from the use of the gifts given to us by one and the same if the sperm that gets through just happens to have an “X” chromosome embedded in it instead of a “Y.”

I adored William P. Young’s The Shack for a number of reasons. But I mourned the fact that it stimulated such resistance from some. It reinforced the fact that though we have made great strides, we still have an awful long way to go before gender and race, both chromosomes carried in those sperms and eggs, become non-issues with respect to mental and emotional and spiritual capacity. It revealed to me that I won’t live to see that Promised Land. (If you haven’t read The Shack, I hope you will.)

To make God fit the mold of our perception of any demographic group is to diminish the power, the awesomeness, the inconceivability of the great I Am, chopping the source of life and breath and love into tiny bits we can digest. We are, indeed, blind people describing a never-ending elephant. Even our language fails us, forcing us into rigid adjectival boxes.

Whoopi Goldberg once said that she rejected the description of herself using the hyphenated moniker “African-American” because it implied that she was less than “wholly” American, instead of referring to a characteristic of her wonderful uniqueness. I reject the idea of a male-only God for the very same reason.

Sometimes, I need a daddy to run to, with big, strong arms to keep me safe, defending me from my “tormentors.” But sometimes, I need a soft bosom in which to lay my head, comfort for a skinned knee, an “XX” Higher Power who looks like me. Sometimes, I am  bold to say,  “Our Mother, who art in heaven…”

And when I do, my God comes running, just the same.

Here’s wishing you independence from a limited God.

I watched the GPB special on Margaret Mitchell the other night. It’s the 75^th anniversary of publication of Gone with the Wind this year, and I realized that though I have seen the movie an untold number of times and even own a special edition DVD, I never got around to reading the novel itself. So I downloaded a copy on my Kindle.

The Kindle version is based on a 1996 publication, and has a preface by Pat Conroy. I found it odd at first that what he wrote was designated a preface and not a foreword, as prefaces are generally written by the author of a book and forewords by someone else. But as soon as I’d finished Pat’s overlong and self-absorbed Scarlettine essay, I understood why. The wounds persist for both of us. There were many phrases that were almost ghostly in their similarity to things I’ve written as I’ve sought to reconcile the fragments of self with which many Southerners like me are afflicted, and try as he might, Pat hadn’t seemed to have succeeded in exorcising those demons 15 years ago.

You have to be truly Southern to understand. There is no way to adequately describe in words ancestral grief transferred through marrow, impotent rage denied its object and shared by those who were reared in the post-Civil War South. I’ve often wondered if the hawkishness of today’s Southern attitudes, if the eagerness with which we regularly choose war over compromise reflects the mitochondrial DNA of Scarlett O’Hara. At times it reminds me of the knight in Monty Python’s “Holy Grail,” who, though he has been deprived of his arms and legs and blood is spurting from every wound, continues to taunt his slayer. I am a fan of British humor, but I never found that scene particularly funny.

Don’t be mistaken. I speak from the heart of a girl who wanted to be Scarlett, to have a 17-inch-waist and draw men like magnets with grace and charm, but my body never cooperated and I never learned the art. And I speak, too, from the heart of a girl who sometimes despised the ground Scarlett walked upon.

I wish that I could claim total joy in the incredible beauty of the red clay of God’s creation, the culture of uniquely Southern art and music, the politeness of “Yes, M’am and No, Sir,” while simultaneously banishing the equally strong images of backs whipped, of nooses hung, of fire hoses wielded by the hands of those whose blood courses through my veins. I wish that I could think of the former without the other rising up from the depths, that I could save the latter to think about on a tomorrow that never comes.

But I can’t. It is the reason To Kill a Mockingbird, which celebrated its 50^th anniversary last year, is my favorite of Southern books instead of Margaret Mitchell’s tome. Scarlett had the “gift” of denial. Scout, on the other hand, did not.

Therein lies the chasm between my Southern “selves”—a divide that I, like Pat Conroy, haven’t succeeded in bridging. If you’re a Southerner, you must publicly choose to be one or the other but not both—one cannot be Scarlett and Scout, Rhett and Atticus. And yet, in the end, I think we have to be both to be whole.

As an aspiring author, I used to wonder how a meeting between Peggy Mitchell Marsh and Nelle Harper Lee might have gone, what knowing glances and fireworks might have passed between them had they had a chance to stand in the same room—these two Southern women whose literary triumphs would be both their firsts and their lasts. We will never, of course, know the answer because of a speeding taxi on Peachtree Street in 1949. Funny, though. After watching the documentary, I eased up on Margaret Mitchell a bit. You can’t judge a woman if you haven’t even tried walking in her shoes, which is the very point Atticus Finch makes to his young daughter.

When all is said and done, I will always dream of what it must have been like to walk into a room like Scarlett and have every male head turn, but I will always dream, too, of reconciliation. And if I have to choose one…I know what it will be. In the meantime, I’m off to read Gone with the Wind on my Kindle. And with any luck, this time I’ll see between the lines the struggle of two parts of Margaret Mitchell, and, just as I did when I first read To Kill a Mockingbird, I’ll know I’m not alone.

So here’s to you, Gone with the Wind. Happy Anniversary!

PS. I wrote a novel, too, about a woman looking back 30 years at the events that would change her life forever. It’s different in that the time she looks back to is now, but you’ll find the details vaguely familiar.

Click here to read more.

Andrew’s Eyes is available on Kindle, coming soon to Nook.com, and may be ordered in print at www.andrewseyes.com.

I accidentally read the new figures on unemployment claims today. I turned on my iPod touch to check the Indeed sites and there they were staring me in the face, in an article put out by AP.

“The number of people who applied for unemployment benefits last week rose by the most in a month,” it said, “signaling growing weakness in the job market.” After plowing through a recital of statistics and an “expert” opinion or two, I reached another paragraph that began, “The economy needs to generate at least 125,000 jobs per month…”

At that point, I closed my iPod touch and got another cup of coffee. Not very uplifting for someone who’s been unemployed for going on 15 months.

As a student and practitioner of psychology, I was a specialist in statistics and their use in psychological tests. As a corporate manager and non-profit marketing director, I plied my trade in the study and interpretation of statistics with respect to buying and giving behavior and motivation.

Back in my psychology days, I used to laugh with colleagues at articles in the Journal of Polymorphous Perversity, a “magazine” that poked fun at poorly designed experiments and studies that touted meaningless statistics as “signaling” the absurd. My favorite was a psychological report describing the paranoid delusions of one “Klaus, Nicholas J.,” who believed himself able to fly one day each year. A close second was a fake journal article, written in crisp APA style, called “The Etiology and Treatment of Childhood,” which, based on the all-too-true statistical observation that taller children score higher on standardized intelligence tests, concluded that height and intelligence were strongly correlated. (Never mind the fact that 4^th-graders have always been taller than 1^st-graders…) Another conclusion was that a common characteristic of this “illness” called “childhood” was a condition described as “legume anorexia,” or the disinclination to eat vegetables, opting for peanut butter sandwiches and hotdogs instead. I thought it was pretty darn funny.

But when I read the article this morning, I wasn’t laughing. The fact that the number of people who applied for unemployment benefits last week rose by the most in a month doesn’t necessarily signal a growing weakness in the job market. The only thing we know for sure is that the number rose, period. Why it rose and what it signaled is an entirely different question. And then there’s that thing about the economy having to generate jobs. I don’t think so. Economies don’t make the decisions to lay people off, nor do they make the decisions to hire them. People in positions of power generate jobs and eliminate them for a number of reasons, as we all know too well.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist or an economic “expert” to understand the way the basic cycle is supposed to work. If people have jobs, they have income. If people have income, they spend it. If they spend it, businesses make money. If businesses make money, they hire people, who then have…jobs. Conversely, people don’t spend money if they don’t have jobs. And, even in they do have jobs, if they’re afraid, they don’t spend it. (FDR was quite right when he said, “There is nothing to fear but fear itself.”)

To look with wisdom at the core of our distress, seek to soothe that fear and push up one’s sleeves and make decisions that affect the fewest of those on whose backs they stand is an exercise for tall people who eat their vegetables.

So, tell me…do the unemployment numbers signal a growing weakness in the job market? Or do they signal that an awful lot of citizens, primarily those who operate small-to-medium sized businesses (and in good times have always been responsible for the majority of the jobs in America), are tired and scared and discouraged or maybe not very wise? Or do they signal that we have allowed ourselves to be distracted from common sense by initially well-meaning, but almost instantly self-serving people whose primary concern is making us afraid of their political opponents so they can keep their jobs?

Wait! Did I say jobs?

You know, I may have been going about this job search thing all wrong. Maybe I should be doing “pick-and-choose” research about the last person in the job, and in my cover letters, calling him a socialist or a neo-conservative, denigrating his religion, downplaying anything he might have done (even if it benefited me) and trying to convince them that he’s the reason their sales numbers are down, despite the fact that they’ve been down since the last guy was there and the one before him. That way I can distract them from the fact that I don’t have a plan, and won’t until I get there and have a look around to see what I’m dealing with.

It has almost always worked in the past. Remind me. Who is it that they work for?