Tread lightly on the things of earth

“We must show courage in a time of blessing by confronting problems instead of passing them on to future generations.”
—George W. Bush, Inaugural address, January 20, 2001

“The Bush administration has shelved a report commissioned by the Treasury that shows the U.S. currently faces a future of chronic federal budget deficits totalling at least $44,200bn [$44 trillion] in current US dollars.”
—Financial Times UK, US ‘faces future of chronic deficits’, May 29, 2003

Saddling future generations with a multi-multi-trillion dollar debt easily satisfies my definition of problem.

Okay, that’s the Treasury prognosis. Now, a diagnosis and treatment step from Dr. Dean:

“The economic plans put forth by President Bush and the Republican party are a fundamental assault on the basic American ideals that we all share — an assault on our schools, our health care, our environment and our social security.  …

“Let me be clear. The President’s tax cuts are part of a radical agenda to dismantle Social Security, Medicare, and our public schools through financial starvation.  …

“My central commitment upon taking office will be to repeal these tax cuts to put our fiscal house in order, and save the very fabric that holds our American community together.

“We will not be able to meet our fundamental obligations to teach our children, care for our parents, and defend our nation if we bankrupt our country.  …”

—Howard Dean, We must put our fiscal house in order (see also Dean for America)

I’m pondering Gandhi’s call to satyagraha, which he calls “an intensely active state—more active than physical resistance or violence.”

Jonathan Schell says Gandhi’s term satyagraha combines the Sanskrit word sat (“that which is,” or “being,” or “truth”) with graha (“holding firm” or “remaining steadfast in”) and is usually translated as “truth force” or “soul force.” Schell describes satyagraha as “direct action without violence in support of the actor’s beliefs—the ‘truth’ in the person.”

In a comment to Rumsfeld backtracks on WMD claims, jonME reminds me why political activism is so important now in facing down this domination system:

Inaction is a weapon of mass destruction too.

“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson

“The only completely consistent people are dead.”
—Aldous Huxley

I’m reading The Unconquerable World by Jonathan Schell. His chapter on Gandhi set me thinking.

I’m constrained in my writing by trying to be utterly consistent across time. Ack, what if I write something today that contradicts something I wrote last year? But in fact my thinking is constantly evolving in response to reading, discussion, observation, prayer, contemplation — and so my writing should be evolving, too.

Schell shows very clearly the evolution of Gandhi’s thinking in his writings — from gung-ho apologist for the British Empire to the Hind Swaraj (or Sermon on the Sea) in which he furiously “portrayed the civilization of England and her empire as an unmitigated evil,” to advocate of satyagraha (“soul force”) nonviolence that won India’s independence from England. Do we remember Gandhi as inconsistent? Or do we remember him as someone committed to growing in wisdom and taking action accordingly?

There’s a useful lesson here, I think —

It’s important to think clearly/write clearly/act accordingly now — don’t wait for that state of profound enlightenment that’s surely just around the corner :-) — because today’s insights/clues/actions might be just what someone else, someone facing a similar struggle, is looking for.

Meanwhile, keep reading, learning, growing, becoming wiser. Keep climbing the spiral staircase.

Then as each future “now” gets here, welcomed with the same advice — think clearly/write clearly/act accordingly now — it’ll be the same staircase, but a different floor — complete with different others looking for and sharing different insights/clues/actions.

Maybe “being utterly consistent across time” is my fancy-sounding euphemism for staying stuck. No more.

Of course, some consistencies are worth cultivating — one’s steadfastness endures, one’s framework of integrity endures (IOW, one’s internal congruence endures) — but the content flowing through (as visible in one’s writing) is free to change in response to ongoing education, revelation, and inbreaking wisdom.

The U.S. media blasts its definition of “patriotism” into our lives, and thereby creates lots of U.S. peer pressure to exhibit “patriotic behavior.” But intellectual honesty compels me to examine the costs and benefits of that collective “patriotic” behavior before I can assent to it. Just a few gathered notes/thoughts:

Financial cost? RonK points out the Concord Coalition’s Pete Peterson’s congressional testimony that “in just two years, America has witnessed a $10 trillion projected deficit swing.” This $10T is the total of the 2001 Congressional Budget Office’s 10-year projected budget surplus of $5.6 trillion, now evaporated, plus the CBO’s current 10-year projected ~$2 trillion deficit, plus estimated war-related costs that push the 10-year projected deficit to more than $4 trillion.

How much is $10 trillion?

Here’s one way of bringing it down to personal scale. There are roughly 100 million households in the USA. $10,000,000,000,000 [$10T] divides out to $100,000 per household [for every household in the USA].  …

Here’s a more concrete benchmark: the replacement cost of America’s housing stock — every house, duplex, condo, apartment and trailer, from sea to shining sea — is roughly $10T.

[See revised deficit total in update note below.]

Human cost? Yesterday’s CSMonitor says “Evidence is mounting to suggest that between 5,000 and 10,000 Iraqi civilians may have died during the recent war.”

Corroborating that, today’s count at the Iraq Body Count database is 5,334 (min) to 6,942 (max) civilian Iraqi deaths.

Add to that number U.S. and coalition deaths (196 so far), plus the ongoing counting, plus the ongoing dying; let’s estimate 7,000 dead as a result of recent U.S. action.

How many is 7,000 dead people?

Bellevue Baptist is a massive church in Memphis whose leadership happens to be, as I understand it, in favor of war. According to this Googled link, Bellevue’s seating capacity is 7,000.

So imagine a packed house at Bellevue, say, on Easter Sunday morning, standing room only. An ocean of people. Lots of life, lots of hope, lots of plans for the future.

That many people, then — all innocent, all alive on March 17. All dead now.

Benefit?

• Are we safer now? Apparently not.
• Have we unearthed and disposed of Iraq’s stash of the “most lethal weapons ever devised”? Have any at all been found? (Molly Ivins comments interestingly.)
• Are the Iraqi people better off? Alongside grieving dead (and maimed) family members and friends, they’re also now having to deal with lawlessness, starvation, and long-term toxicity.

The costs are staggering. The benefit is elusive. The people are dead.

Hence, given its costs and outcomes, I can’t in good conscience engage in U.S. media-defined “patriotism.” I can, however, engage the more comprehensive task of being a here-and-now activist citizen of God’s kingdom. This citizenship steers in a different direction altogether; it transcends national boundaries, sees life and creation as holy and, as mysteriously conveyed in Jesus’ gospel parables, intrigues me no end.

Hmmm, I remind myself of a song I love by Peter Mayer, Everything is holy now (MP3 sample).

2003-05-29 update: According to Financial Times article US ‘faces future of chronic deficits’, the U.S. financial situation is much worse than I knew last week:

The Bush administration has shelved [and omitted from the FY2004 budget report] a report commissioned by the Treasury that shows the US currently faces a future of chronic federal budget deficits totalling at least $44,200bn in current US dollars.

Note that’s $44 trillion in deficits over the span of time being projected. And we’re slicing revenues further by enacting a tax cut? Can there be any doubt that “the lunatics are now in charge of the asylum”?

See also Boston Globe editorial An economic ‘menu of pain’ by Laurence J. Kotlikoff, chairman of the Department of Economics at Boston University, and Jeffrey Sachs, professor of economics at Columbia University.

I’ll post more details as I see them.

The Rockford Register Star reported earlier this week — Speaker disrupts RC graduation, via AlterNet — that invited speaker Chris Hedges was booed off the stage for giving an antiwar speech at the Rockford College graduation (speech text).

Look, Chris is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist whose most recent book is War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. The book is about exploding the false myth of heroic war, written by a journalist who’s been immersed in the blood and guts of war around the world for many years. (I’m reading it now.) What the hell else did they expect him to talk about?

“War in the end is always about betrayal. Betrayal of the young by the old, of soldiers by politicians and idealists by cynics,” Hedges said in lecture fashion as jeers and “God Bless Americas” could be heard in the background.

Observation #1: People who won’t learn the lessons of history aren’t well educated, no matter how many years they’ve spent in college.

Observation #2: People who say “God bless America” as they jeer what is essentially the New Testament message of peace discredit themselves. And they discredit God in the eyes of others by misusing his name in a prideful way. In this context it’s like saying to God, “Bless us because we think we deserve it — even though we won’t heed your message, we won’t try to love our neighbors as ourselves, and we won’t tolerate anyone who reminds us otherwise.”

We in the United States have let nationalism get out of control; we’ve made it our golden calf. At the feet of this nationalism we’ve put our treasure, and our hearts also. Bloodlust and sanctimoniousness, mingled together. This isn’t like us. Why are we doing it?

We … can … do … better … than … this.

Today I see a follow-up interview with Chris, The Silencing of Dissent on Graduation Day. Unlike me, Chris speaks with courage, understanding — and yes, compassion — in the face of this sputtering crowd who (ironically) makes his case for him:

You know, as I looked out on the crowd, that is exactly what my book is about. It is about the suspension of individual conscience, and probably consciousness, for the contagion of the crowd for that euphoria that comes with patriotism. The tragedy is that — and I’ve seen it in conflict after conflict or society after society that plunges into war — with that kind of rabid nationalism comes racism and intolerance and a dehumanization of the other. It’s an emotional response. People find a kind of ecstasy, a kind of belonging, a kind of obliteration of their alienation in that patriotic fervor that always does come in war time.  …

People chanted the kind of cliches and aphorisms and jingoes that are handed to you by the state. “God Bless America” or people were chanting “send him to France” — this kind of stuff and that kind of contagion leads ultimately to tyranny, it’s very dangerous and it has to be stopped.

I’ve seen it in effect and take over countries. But of course, it breaks my heart when I see it in my country. That’s essentially what I was looking at was in some ways a mirror of what I was trying to speak about. I think I managed to touch upon it somewhat when I talked upon this notion of comradeship as a suppression of self awareness and self-possession to sort of follow along, locked in the embrace of a nation, or of a group, or of a national group unthinkingly, blindly.

I will never give up on us, but God, I’ve come close.

2003-05-27 update: See also Steve Gilliard’s thoughtful review of Hedges’ book as it relates to Al Qaeda.

I just noticed that this recent build of my favorite Mac OS X web browser Camino (Build 2003051604) has a speedy text-finding trick up its sleeve —

If you start typing in an active browser window with no insertion point anywhere, Camino jumps to and selects any page text that matches the characters you’re typing! (Like Emacs’ I-search.)

Wow, this shaves seconds off the process of opening a find dialog to find text on a page.

New friend last week:
Eric at The ericrice.com Journal.

Eric’s working with audioblogging techniques, and used my Sideblog “Interesting Links” setup entry as a starting point toward displaying his audioblog entries on his main page.

Michael explains some of why he blogs:

This blog is my pressure valve, my doodle pad and my gymnasium. I come here to blow off steam, to try stuff out, and to keep my writing muscles in trim.

This might sound daft, but when I don’t write for a while, I find I grow stupider. …

I can hear myself becoming less articulate, less engaged, and far less engaging in everyday discussions. The circuits in my brain that manage coherence rapidly atrophy without regular exercise.

I understand. My variation is it’s here I learn, well, how stupid I really am. This was a disappointing discovery at first. But after a while I realized I’m better off taking a deep breath, embracing the stupid, and proceeding ahead as unstupidly as possible instead of dawdling in my illusion of brilliance. :-)

Like Michael, knowing that anyone can read this doodle pad presses me to focus, form, articulate to the fullest extent I can muster. As a result I’m much clearer where I stand on important issues, on what matters to me, than I would be left to my normal semi-coherent devices. I like coming back months hence and seeing how my thinking has refined itself (or not) as I’ve learned new stuff.

I’m still something of a chickensh*t when it comes to writing about controversial topics, though. But I’m getting better.