Tread lightly on the things of earth

For some reason I keep blogging in my Reading section instead of here in my, uh, Weblog.

Reading Steve Gregory’s extraordinary meteorological coverage of Hurricane Rita feels like watching a train wreck in slow motion.

I believe in divine intervention, because I’ve seen it happen many times in my reality-based world. On top of the human preparation and evacuation efforts, now would be a good time for it to happen again.

Now that’s what I’m talkin’ about:

    Street Prophets: Faith and Politics
    (as announced by kos and pastordan)

As Pastordan describes:

I am proud to announce Street Prophets, a Scoop-based community website dedicated to progressive religion and politics. …

Street Prophets will be an explicitly welcoming place, open to all who wish to find support within a tolerant, progressive community.

Thanks, Markos, Dan, and all contributors. We need you.

Paul Krugman, writing today as seen here, makes a striking observation the American half of which I hear almost every day where I live in the southern U.S.:

A middle-class European, thinking about the poor, says to himself, “There but for the grace of God go I.” A middle-class American is all too likely to think, perhaps without admitting it to himself, “Why should I be taxed to support those people?”

“Which of these [two],” Jesus is likely to say, “do you think was a neighbor to the [poor persons] who fell into the hands of [society’s] robbers?”

The true Christian response is clear, as the next verse reveals:

The expert in the law replied, “The one who had mercy on him.”

Jesus told him, “Go and do likewise.”

Any response other than active mercy is “wanting to justify [one]self,” just like the expert in the law at the start of the story. It’s missing the mark.

We’re all neighbors on this pale blue dot. Let’s start acting like it.

I am struck today by this comment in this thread (props to ThatBritGuy) that addresses — with more understanding than I usually display — how psychology influences worldview:

My experience of Right Wingers is that their psychology revolves around two poles. One is lack of empathy. So when you and I see people suffering, they see a blank space. The other is lack of imagination. So when you and I see what’s coming, they see a row of dots and no trend line joining them up.

Hence, for example, the conservative shortfall of outrage and heartbreak (so far) at the loss of life and limb among all players in the Iraq war, and the non-acknowledgement that U.S. actions there have inflamed anger and escalated danger in the world as night follows day.

Another example: blaming the devastated residents of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast instead of assessing leadership accountability top to bottom, identifying points of failure, and replacing incompetence with competence for a more effective next time.

It’s really a kind of pathology. The pattern only breaks when sooner or later the trend line [IOW, connecting the dots] becomes really obvious and unavoidable. That’s when you get conversions. The rest of the time you have to sit on your hands and remind yourself that these people have cognitive disabilities that make it impossible for them to connect to the real world without a big effort.

Now I probably wouldn’t have accepted this explanation 5+ years ago, because I hadn’t witnessed this psychology in action again and again. Now I have.

I think this empathy/imagination explanation dovetails with George Carlin’s observation on the September 9 edition of HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher that the Right Wing focus is usually property (“interested in property values, property, property rights”) while the Left Wing focus is usually people (“concerned with … human beings and human concerns, … the care of humans”). (I paraphrase; transcript not yet available to verify my recollection now available.)

Property concerns are valid, of course, as are people concerns. But in any contest between property and people, people is the choice I want to make every time. (It’s well to remember, “Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth … For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.”)

This leads me to my big question —

Maybe in the wake of Katrina the trend line among the last five years’ dots has finally become “really obvious and unavoidable” and now the conversions have begun. (Poll numbers finally imply this.) Maybe our collective conversion is toward a saner way of being that values people, nurtures competence, faces problems head-on, and transcends political polarities.

That’s the most hope I can muster today. But it may be enough.

When I close my eyes and see, sometimes I do see clearly but I can never quite make out when now is. See Empire undone (from July 15, 2003).