Maikimo.net taxonomy tags

I’ve been silent lately: I’m doing overdue work inside and out toward letting go of poisonous anger and unforgiveness. I can’t very well counsel others to do this if I’m not willing to. I can’t very well fight injustice if I’m consumed by the belief that unrepented support of BushCo can never be forgiven.

Then today I read Cindy’s account of her forcible arrest at last night’s SOTU address — for quietly wearing a T-shirt that read, “2245 Dead. How many more?”

And again rage rises, and tears well up, at what we’ve lost. I feel with Cindy when she writes —

After I had my personal items inventoried and my fingers printed, a nice Sgt. came in and looked at my shirt and said, “2245, huh? I just got back from there.”

I told him that my son died there. That’s when the enormity of my loss hit me. I have lost my son. I have lost my First Amendment rights. I have lost the country that I love. Where did America go? I started crying in pain.

What did Casey die for? What did the 2244 other brave young Americans die for? What are tens of thousands of them over there in harm’s way for still? For this?

The enormity of the loss hits me, too. Then when I imagine myself in the shoes of a U.S. or Iraqi parent whose child is now dead, like Cindy, I nearly fall down in grief.

Beyond the presenting problem of a nation enthralled, huge as that is, there’s a deeper, more enmeshed problem that threatens despair: How have we as a people become so dissolute as to not only allow this dismantling of America, but also that a substantial percentage of us still support it?

I have much more work to do.

Lincoln’s words have been haunting me lately — thanks to Al Gore for reminding me — words that speak powerfully to the present as well as to the time into which Lincoln spoke them (State of the Union, 1862, during the U.S. Civil War):

The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.

Fellow-citizens, we can not escape history. We of this Congress and this Administration will be remembered in spite of ourselves. … The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down in honor or dishonor to the latest generation. … We, even we here, hold the power and bear the responsibility. … The way is plain, peaceful, generous, just — a way which if followed the world will forever applaud and God must forever bless.

Supporting the present powers, endorsing today’s systemic injustice that is fueled by fear and sustained by deception and violence, casts a shadow over one’s whole life. I’ve already experienced friends and acquaintances die while still praising these powers, and my memory of them is ever shadowed by their choice.

I think this is what “we can not escape history” means. I don’t want to be remembered as complicit. I don’t want my friends and family to be, either.

What if here in the last days of the Republican Party, its players returned to the values of its beginning? Honor, responsibility, peace, generosity, justice?

What if we all do? What if we “think anew and act anew” to solve our problems? [instead of lashing out in age-old ignorance and vengeance]

I cannot yet forgive, but I can at last pray for conversions on the way to Damascus — whacked-out-of-the-saddle transforming flashes of insight — for all of us.

My friend Dale writes about not only his Kerry/Edwards yard signs being stolen, but his God is Not a Republican or a Democrat sign was taken, too.

I’m at 7-8 9 10 11 12 Kerry/Edwards signs stolen during this past month the past 6 weeks. Just flat-out made to vanish under cover of darkness. This phenomenon recapitulates for me an entire worldview’s unfortunate M.O.: trespass, steal, suppress dissent and all contradicting evidence. It’s a strange and unconvincing plan from people preaching “freedom” and “democracy,” I think.

Two things help me short to ground my occasionally flaring anger at practitioners of this M.O.: specifically, a boxful of K/E signs that allows me to replace the sign daily if necessary, and generally, (mis)remembering the adage “Anger is like taking poison and waiting for the other person to die.” (Google reveals Malachy McCourt actually said “Resentment is like …” but that’s close enough to work.)

Beyond my obvious-but-ridiculously-hard choice not to take poison, my prayer asking how I’d best respond keeps returning an image of the prodigal father — that is, one extravagant with his love — who watches, watches, watches for his wayward son to repent and come home, and when he finally sees his son a long way off he runs out to embrace him.

Yikes, that’s a difficult example to follow. (Whether father or son.) But imagine the result — the homecoming — what a celebration that will be!

Dale’s sign, “God is Not a Republican. Or a Democrat,” refers to Sojourners’ ongoing petition to “take back our faith,” a stance I support as well. (Sojourners is “a Christian ministry whose mission is to proclaim and practice the biblical call to integrate spiritual renewal and social justice.”)

In his About.com article on this topic, Charles mentions the conviction —

A politics that privileges the powerful over the weak and the rich over the poor, and favors violence and the unilateral use of force over the use of diplomacy in the resolution of international problems, cannot be reconciled with biblical ethics.

That’s my inescapable conviction, too, one that arose in me during several years of seminary study:
I cannot reconcile prevailing U.S. political behavior with biblical ethics.

It’s not an exclusionary, “my way or the highway” kind of conviction — because I don’t know everything — but it’s nonetheless a fire-in-the-bones conviction in me that I understand as providing sufficient work-that-needs-doing to last me the rest of this lifetime.

For me and my house, then, this conviction is why I’m happy to support, work for, and vote for Kerry/Edwards and the Democratic worldview, however short of perfect it may be, and why I’m unable to ever, ever, ever support the Bush/Cheney worldview.

(“My house” tells me right away whenever she thinks otherwise. :-) )

half a day later:

And sometimes, like now, rage seems like a perfectly appropriate response, not to be shorted to ground. Meteor Blades reminds me:

In between my unfettered rage at the ideologues who lied us into the Iraq war and my cautious elation that we may elect someone who brings an end to that nightmare, I sometimes catch myself going numb. The statistics are numbing. Perhaps 25,000 people dead, most of them civilians. Perhaps 100,000 wounded, many of them maimed forever. …

Damn, bouncing between idealism, rage, and numbness is awkward. But part of human being, I think. Seasons turn: buds of spring burst to life, ease into fiery summer, wind down to autumn spent and brown, then cool down to icy winter, and back again. Likewise, our bodies run in cycles, ebbing and flowing throughout the day, the month, the years. Even scripture is cyclical, boldly wandering through the range of human emotions, unflinchingly touching on all extremes.

Life’s a rollercoaster all over, I think. Some of us loop-de-loop more than others, and some of us half fall out, but none of us bounces alone.

O Lord, just please deliver us from permanumb.