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In response to yesterday’s Friends Committee on National Legislation (FCNL) action message, The Senate Can Stop Torture, which points out that

Congress is in a bind. Many members of Congress are opposed to any legislation that would condone torture, secret prisons, or other programs that would undermine U.S. security, and violate the moral principles on which this nation was founded. But members of Congress are under pressure because the president is arguing that these techniques are necessary for the defense of the United States. Hearing from their constituents now could help them resolve this dilemma and do the right thing.

I respond, with full resolve, by writing my senators:

Dear Sen. _____:

I oppose torture with every ounce of Jesus-led spirit in me.

Therefore please do not vote to further U.S. use of torture, or to water down its definition, or to retroactively justify its illegal use in any way.

In fact, please act forcibly against torture — against every form of brutal, inhuman, and degrading treatment — and against use of secret prisons.

Very little in the world is black or white, but this is:

NO TORTURE.
NO EXCEPTIONS.

Thank you.

(FCNL is a “Quaker lobby in the public interest,” founded in 1943.)

“We need a way to seek the healing of the world.”

Eyes Wide Open (EWO) — “an exhibition on the human cost of the Iraq War” — is coming back to Memphis:

First Congregational Church (map), Memphis, TN
Wednesday, March 15 thru Tuesday, March 21, 2006

EWO was last here January 28–30, 2005. I was deeply moved by it; here are the two weblog entries I wrote in response:

• Eyes Wide Open in Memphis, Jan. 28-30, 2005 (Jan. 30, 2005)
• Maker monologue (Eyes Wide Open and “counting the cost”) (Mar. 12, 2005)

I think viewing EWO is important because it lets you simultaneously pay respect to the dead and heed Jesus’ advice to “count the cost.”

EWO is sponsored by the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), the Quaker action organization. Local planning provided by the Mid-South Peace and Justice Center.

Please see their sites for official info.

The prayer attributed to St. Francis — Lord, make me an instrument of Thy peace — has hovered at the edge of my awareness since childhood, when I first saw it on a plaque in my small-town Methodist church fellowship hall.

I’m still working on forgiveness, whose longstanding shortfall in me toward those who support(ed) BushCo threatens my undoing. I want to applaud daylight dawning on anyone. Really.

On the one hand, Hunter masterfully, justifiably, and with much truth today puts words to the phenomenon of people insisting they’re right even when they’re demonstrably wrong. I like being right, too, but “right” needs to mean “the assessment nearly all people of good will, clear thinking, and command of facts inevitably converge to,” as is now happening about BushCo [as evidenced by its plummeting poll numbers]. When discernment [finally] trumps deception, of course that’s a good thing, a wise thing. The earlier on, the better.

OTOH, spiritual health and community are more important than [kudos for] “being right.” And forgiving, yea, even forgiving willful dumbassery, past and present, is a prerequisite for both. Vengeance, I finally remember, is not mine.

In the process of working on forgiveness, still becoming — on the inside, and maybe soon, on the outside — a Quaker (which may or may not entail giving up use of the word “dumbassery”). You know that eerie, wonderful homecoming feeling you sometimes get as you learn more about something? Like, “Dear God, have I been a Quaker all my life, but didn’t know it?”

What’s being impressed upon me today, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Russian Nobel laureate, says well, speaking to the perennial assumption that has undergirded support for this war, that “if only we can get rid of those people, then we will all be safe and happy” (as reported by Anne in Friends Journal, Becoming an Instrument of Peace):

If only it were so simple. If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were simply necessary to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being, and who among us are willing to destroy a piece of their own heart?

Anne’s experiential vignettes concerning becoming an instrument of peace in the midst of war are speaking to my condition today:

To walk a path of peace in a country that is deeply involved in war brings us to our growing edge.

Yes. As in, for example, growing a commitment to forgiveness where there was none. Then Anne pinpoints where I’m mostly still at in her observation —

My self-righteousness has the poisonous high of an addiction: I like it and I know that I have to root it out of my life. Over and over and over.

[I’m] busted.

Building bridges instead of burning them is such a better plan.

Walking a path of peace sometimes brings us not just to our growing edge, as Anne says, but to our dying edge, too. Rest in peace, Tom Fox. Thank you for your work, your life, and your example.

2006-03-13 update after more thinking:

So where does justice fit in? In all my “foolish talk” about forgiveness, am I whitewashing over BushCo immorality and crimes against God and humanity (e.g., fiscal irresponsibility, destroying creation, screwing the poor, spying illegally, bearing false witness, war, torture)? Are they not accountable?

Here’s where I’m at today: I think if “justice roll[s] down like waters,” then BushCo and enablers will be repaid. Here’s the kicker: But not by me. According to scripture, God says, “I will repay.” Who do I think I am? My job is to lift up, care for, forgive.

(Sometimes I daydream, wondering if it’s as hard for God “to avenge” as it is for me to forgive. In each case, the action seems to run counter to our natures. Mystery indeed.)

As to whether we should be confronting others in their complicity, I observe that all evidence needed to see is already in front of us. Are not those with eyes to see, seeing? Can anyone be forced to see? I think not: we have to be wooed to see. (Still thinking. Insight welcome.)

2006-09-27 update (months later during a Quaker Spirituality class):

I’m clued in enough to recognize in my class reading today that Quaker author Parker Palmer is most definitely speaking to me:

When I give something I do not possess, I give a false and dangerous gift, a gift that looks like love but is, in reality, loveless — a gift given more from my need to prove myself than from the other’s need to be cared for. That kind of giving is not only loveless but faithless, based on the arrogant and mistaken notion that God has no way of channeling love to the other except through me. Yes, we are created in and for community, to be there, in love, for one another. But community cuts both ways: when we reach the limits of our own capacity to love, community means trusting that someone else will be available to the person in need. …

When the gift I give to the other is integral to my own nature, when it comes from a place of organic reality within me, it will renew itself — and me — even as I give it away. Only when I give something that does not grow within me do I deplete myself and harm the other as well, for only harm can come from a gift that is forced, inorganic, unreal.

—Let Your Life Speak, Parker J. Palmer (1999), pp. 48–50

What I’m not sure of is whether this applies in the case of forgiving, especially forgiving those who advocate torture, etc.

Months after I wrote the article above, my hellbent determination to forgive when no forgiveness is forthcoming does indeed appear to me “forced, inorganic, unreal.” Is my forced determination coming more from “my need to prove myself” than from “the other’s need to be [forgiven]”? I think it is.

For if I’m truthful, I must acknowledge I have reached the limit of my own capacity to forgive. What has been done in my name — making war based on false witness, torturing, maiming, killing — is for me, for now, unforgiveable. I hadn’t considered I may be causing harm by pretending otherwise.

Outrage fatigue or not, I’m responding to this new one, U.S. secret eavesdropping
[because spying on U.S. citizens takes my   o u t r a g e   to a whole new level]:

President Bush said Saturday he personally has authorized a secret eavesdropping program in the U.S. more than 30 times since the Sept. 11 attacks and he lashed out at those involved in publicly revealing the program. …

Appearing angry at times during his eight-minute address, Bush left no doubt that he will continue authorizing the program.

Since one of the groups reportedly identified as “a threat” was a Quaker meeting in Florida, I infer the system has run amok: Won’t people realize — even those with little more than a passing idea of Quakers — that a commitment to peace, not terror, is the most consistent quality of Quakers?

That the system in place is too indiscriminate to distinguish nonviolent peacemakers from terrorists? That if it can’t make that distinction, no one’s safe from being targeted?

That you have no way of knowing whether you’ve already been targeted?

Won’t people realize that if a present president can step outside the law to eavesdrop without cause on those people now — for almost any value of those people — a future president may just as readily eavesdrop without cause on you later?

Or toss you into Gitmo without recourse?

This is a precedent that characterizes dictatorships, not honest democracies. Of course it must be forcibly rebuffed in its entirety if we want to keep calling the U.S. a democracy, much less an exemplary one.

I have little confidence in my current congressional representatives’ willingness to rectify wrongs — heck, one is a member of the egregious RSC — but I’ve written them today anyway because

• I’m glad to still have representation, even if it’s currently only nominal

• presumably there exists some outrage sufficient to rouse them to responsible, laudable action — and this one pegs the outrage meter for a lot of people

• as all congressional representatives do, they deserve to hear their constituents’ views and requests, whether they ever intend to heed them

(Also, the RSC lists itself as being dedicated to “the protection of individual and property rights,” so this seems an excellent opportunity for its members to demonstrate said dedication.)

So I write my senators and representative:

This morning I heard the President of the United States say, as I understood him, that he intends to continue to violate federal law and the U.S. Constitution by authorizing spying on U.S. citizens with no oversight by the courts, or accountability to you in Congress or to us the people.

This is [a] grave mistake: No person is above the law, especially not the U.S. president, ostensibly its chief enforcer.

The point of a checks-and-balances system is that no one entity going off the rails can bring down the entire system. Any system, governmental or mechanical, that can be taken down by the failure of one of its parts is not a failsafe system; it is a broken system. But our government’s design is not broken: Congress is the mechanism designed by the Founders to respond to Executive Branch failure to abide by the law, to contain the damage being done to the whole.

As your constituent, I respectfully and forcibly request that you make an immediate clear public statement denouncing this gross misuse of U.S. military and intelligence resources.

No system of government that breaks its own laws and spies on its own citizens without cause or warrant can properly be called a democracy. Hence I will account your statement as defending democracy itself.

Thank you.

BTW, Scott Bateman provides a succinct audio summary of today’s presidential address as an animated short film.

[Many expletives were deleted in the publishing of this entry.]

2005-12-26 update:
I am not an expert just as IANAL, but I infer that the terms “wiretapping” and even “eavesdropping” don’t capture the full reality of what’s happening: I expect to learn that significant amounts of U.S. citizens’ phone-, email-, and of course webpage data are being bulk scanned and data mined.

This would explain the “screw getting warrants” attitude — because warrants aren’t feasible at the scale they’re engaging — and how Mr. Bush can say as recently as 2004 that literal wiretaps still require a court order.

It’s seeds of Big Brother, writ large.

Hmmm, what’s the distinction between “warrant” and “court order”? I see I’m using them interchangeably, but they’re probably legally distinct terms.

2006-01-06 update:
Developing research from the amazing Soj:
JPEN: The military is using NSA intercepts to spy on Americans

This, along with James Moore’s report Wednesday (author of Bush’s Brain) about being on the No Fly Watch List for at least a year — and numerous others reporting they’re on it, too — has kinda pressed my paranoia button. Damn. We used to be better than this.

An imagined monologue from God, peering up from God’s browser (arising from Eyes Wide Open exhibit, after musing on “counting the cost”).

In this critical time, Eyes Wide Open speaks directly to our hearts and minds, shattering the claim that the war has made America safer and challenging us to confront our fears and let our dreams, not our nightmares, shape our collective future.

I survived Black Thursday.

I attended my first Quaker meeting today.

BTW, the formal title of the Quaker movement is “Religious Society of Friends (Quakers).”

I had read Thomas Hamm’s The Quakers in America at Martin’s suggestion, so I was better prepped than I think I’ve ever been for attending a new worship context. In this case the reality I’d read about meshed perfectly with the reality I encountered in an unprogrammed Friends worship meeting. In a gentle and non-spectacular way, it felt like going home.

As I told one of the Friends I met, I was visiting because I haven’t been able to stay in community with my Christian brothers and sisters who support present U.S. administration policies — and because I value community, I simply need to find someplace else to be. No disrespect intended to anyone I know, but my peaceful experience at the Friends meeting highlights for me the violence I feel elsewhere in the cracks between worship among ones who agree with current U.S. foreign policy.

The good news is, there’s apparently somewhere to worship for everyone, even ones with nervous systems cranked up to 11, like me. :-)

(For anyone interested, Marsha provides a lovely one-page introduction to unprogrammed Quaker worship and values.)