Tread lightly on the things of earth

Seen today at WorkingForChange:

Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to befoul the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of the day.
—Theodore Roosevelt

Let’s elect us some statesmen, then.

After spending a while reading this weblog, a friend wrote the following to me, and I responded.

In light of all the references to Bush (covering a lot of ground, with the hanging possibility of a personality disorder) how do you reconcile it with Romans 13:7 and your admiration and frequent quoting of MLK, especially “Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction.” …

Saying all that, I don’t have any difficulties collecting the information your site provides, but I do have difficulties with it as an argument for “love your neighbor as yourself.” Now, this may be an over generalization on my part, but it is the feeling I leave your site with.

Interesting. Hate is not my experience on the inside. (Although yes, self-deception is always a possibility).

I did spend all of 2002 so angry I couldn’t see straight—anger at loss, anger at the spiritual forces invading us, anger at our astonishing vulnerability to them (visible in our violent, unthinking responses). But during 2003 I’ve been working diligently to reel in/redirect my anger, aiming at—though usually missing—a more pastoral voice.

I was under the impression I’ve been careful not to mix Bush et al. the persons and their followers—the vital part of the picture bearing the imago Dei—with their behavior owing to the principality in which I think they’re embedded, wherein they may be, for all I know, unintentional dupes.

I’m less troubled about the personalities involved than with the behavior befitting the spirit of the antichrist that’s being done, either explicitly or implicitly, in Jesus’ name. This behavior must be confronted. It emits from every one of us to some degree, I think; my constant prayer is for deliverance from my own self-righteousness, a deliverance I still sabotage more often than not.

I indeed link extensively to others who are not so constrained as I am, whose sometimes-prophetic boldness I admire but am not yet courageous enough to emulate.

All in all, a weblog (for many) reflects an ongoing process of coming to grips with what’s going on. Engaging this process out in the open seems important to me. I want others to be able to have insight into who I am—good, bad, and ugly—from the start. I delight in reading others who are similarly aiming for openness.

So my motivation proceeds partly from a longstanding, God-given determination to be more open, and partly from the ~recent jarring experience of learning I have church friends who celebrate the killing and maiming of others. At minimum, I want my warts to catch no one by surprise.

As long as I’m quoting people I admire …

This tidbit conveys, in a nutshell, how I know there is no righteousness in our U.S. actions in Iraq and the Middle East. Our whole brute-force approach is fundamentally flawed:

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that.
Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.
Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction. …
The chain reaction of evil—hate begetting hate, wars producing more wars—must be broken, or we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation.

[seen at MLK Online, cited from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s 1963 book, Strength to Love]

I love reading The Preacher. In particular, his words about myth — in his observations on the movie The Fast Runner — have stuck in my head:

Myth laughs at centuries and leaps across millennia. Myth punctures our provincial culture sacks and seeps into the world. Myth is patient, though not always kind. Myth is the soft womb out of which we came and to which we would return if we could.

Myth is the language of God. It is the larger and older language of value that has birthed us and created us in its image.

I wish more Christians would embrace the myths of the bible and not be afraid to name them as such. To force a brutal literalism on such powerful stories is like bitch-slapping your mother because she’s slowed down with age.

Yes. How very different from the popular definition of myth, that it means “fiction or half-truth” — when in fact myth conveys the truest truths a culture knows.

After a week off, I’m back in the saddle.

A gallstone tried to get the better of Steph on Monday, but rapid medical intervention stopped any of its fellows from repeating the performance. Laparoscopic surgery is amazing: four small holes—then no more gall bladder!

I spent the hospital room time configuring an install of Gentoo Linux/PowerPC on a TiBook/667. Takes a lot of dickering to get it like I want it. Then with an emerge mol command—and more dickering—I’ve got Mac OS X (OSX) running alongside Gentoo in Mac-on-Linux (MOL). Ctrl-Opt-F1, I’m at Gentoo’s first text console; Ctrl-Opt-F7, I’m in Gentoo’s X11; Ctrl-Opt-F8, I’m in full-screen OSX. Woo-hoo! Amazingly, I’m not noticing much performance degradation in OSX; it remains completely usable (once I got X11 and MOL video settings correct, that is).

Why run Mac OS X and Linux? After all, OSX is a full-blown Unix system; install fink and you can build nearly any Unix software you need. Yet I persist in wanting to run Linux, too. Here’s my starting list of reasons:

• Linux is leaner and somewhat faster than OSX on any given hardware
• Familiarity: I already run Linux (Debian) on most of the PC boxes I tend to
• I’ve been reading Richard Stallman’s collected essays (Free Software, Free Society) and am freshly aware how much I value the societal benefits of truly free software. (GNU/Linux, of course, is completely free—free beer and free speech—whereas OSX is half free, half nonfree.)
• I like fiddling with cool tool combos more than I like assessing the practicality of doing so :-)
• Because—thanks to the efforts of some of my free software heroes—I can

This Gentoo Linux/Mac OS X combo is seriously cool. But drat, I’m too [tired|lazy] to write up my current settings. That’s okay because Christophe and Nicolai have already done an excellent job. Thanks, guys.

(Why Gentoo Linux? Because I already know Debian GNU/Linux runs like a champ on PowerBook hardware; I’m a huge Debian i386/ppc fan. I’m interested in Gentoo’s build-everything-from-source nature because it reminds me of NetBSD, which I also inexplicably love. Since NetBSD doesn’t yet have many laptop power-management niceties AFAICT, Gentoo strikes me as kind of a cool Debian/NetBSD hybrid. And more ready for prime time than the real Debian GNU/NetBSD project.)

I’d like to be able to participate in the high-fives going on around me today in response to the apparent news that Baghdad falls to US forces.

But I cannot. I am too much aware that this war has cost us at least 132 U.S. military lives and roughly 3,570 Iraqi lives (2,320 military, 1,250 civilian) [updated 2003-04-10]. Many of the civilian deaths are children. (And is anyone counting the maimed?)

If even one of these dead or maimed children belonged to any of my high-fivin’ colleagues, they’d instantly recognize the cost as too high. And, I fear, they’d be out for blood, more blood, yelling “let’s bomb those bastards even further back to the Stone Age.” Yet now they expect grieving Iraqi parents to appreciate “what we’ve done for them.”

In today’s UK Mirror report Bombs blast homes instead of Saddam:

Behind [the reportedly bomb-targeted al-Sa’ah restaurant] there is now just a huge crater and mounds of rubble.

One body was pulled out dead after a couple of hours. Others were still buried when I got there, including the wife and two children of Abdil Hassad.

Abdil is a Christian who owns a shop. He is a handsome, well-dressed young man in his mid-30s.

He escaped the blast but wife Sena, 36, and daughters Rana, 10, and seven-year-old Maria were not so lucky. I found him sobbing uncontrollably by the pile of rubble.

“My wife and children are there,” he cried as he crouched over the pile of masonry.

These little ones are not dismissable collateral damage. These little ones are not expendable just because they’re not ours. Each person maimed or killed at our hands is precious to God. No matter how much we cheer, the fact of these injuries and deaths is not something that goes away.

Will we be held accountable for our actions? Will Christians in particular be held accountable for our disobedience to Jesus who says, “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you”? Will our haughtiness be brought low?

My head, heart, and gut all tell me yes. If God is just, then yes.

(I assume the high-fivers have also not yet much considered the staggering financial costs.)

This is why I’m not cheering.

I had lunch today with a friend who believes, based on poll data, that “most Americans” agree with him in supporting the U.S. war on Iraq. This belief, I assume, makes him more comfortable with his position. (To his credit, he admits that poll question wording can influence responses and therefore lead to, umm, varying conclusions.)

In this Daily Kos post about a recent poll, I see two comments that highlight for me the peril of using “most Americans agree” to endorse one’s position.

“The position of Bush/Blair/Aznar is ‘solid’ in the same way that the crusty bits on top of a lava flow are solid: they float on a river of red-hot effluvium (namely, a good proportion of the people of the world) that can consume them at any moment.” (eugenio)

“It isn’t as important what the ‘mass’ of people think—as reported in polls—as what those who are passionate on the issue think. It’s the passionate who can turn the tide. And you can’t say that passion is with the pro-war crowd on this one. The ‘oh, gosh, yeah, I guess the war is OK even if we don’t find WMD’ crowd has as much substance as the fog.” (BobOnLSD)

It’s the passionate who can turn the tide.

Yes. That’s always been true, and I had forgotten.

Thanks, eugenio and Bob.

In article The Reason Why at The Nation, George McGovern states the obvious, and bravo for doing so:

The President frequently confides to individuals and friendly audiences that he is guided by God’s hand. But if God guided him into an invasion of Iraq, He sent a different message to the Pope, the Conference of Catholic Bishops, the mainline Protestant National Council of Churches and many distinguished rabbis—all of whom believe the invasion and bombardment of Iraq is against God’s will.

Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one (Deut. 6:4). The Shema implies, I think, that the Lord speaks with one voice—not speaking one thing to some people and its opposite to others. In the presence of conflicting messages, I conclude Mr. Bush is hearing incorrectly, or else hearing from someone besides the Lord.