Tread lightly on the things of earth

A fellow Memphis blogger makes one of the more hopeful regional observations I’ve seen in a while:

I can’t shake the feeling that Memphis is just about to bust wide open, we’ve held [ourselves] back for so long that something’s got to give. There is a [tangible] sense here of a city about to give birth to itself. Like I said, I’ve lived here all my life, and the city has never seemed like this before. I don’t know what it is, but it’s coming soon.

Check out other writings at The Pesky Fly, “a group blog in Memphis, Tennessee.”

While I was discouraged, a friend reminded me why dissent is vital, why we must keep speaking out against religio-political cultures of corruption and oppression everywhere, and especially here in “the land of the free” (the U.S. description of itself):

“Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about the things that matter.”
—Dr. ML King, from a jail cell in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963¹

Yes. Some significant number of us frogs have to stay alert and show the others how to jump out of the pot before we all cook. (“Yes, I know you think it feels like a hot bath in here. But I’m tellin’ you, I see bubbles on the bottom.”)

Here’s another nugget of Martin Luther King, Jr. (MLK) wisdom I recall as I ponder another correlative between prevailing political worldview and violent outcomes, the tenacious belief that ends justify means.

I consider that since “ends justify means” means anything goes as long as it gets you the results you want, it is a belief that is fundamentally immoral. (I think this is the historical philosophical assessment as well.)

MLK presents the same conclusion in a powerful, positive form:

“And the leaders of the world today talk eloquently about peace. Every time we drop our bombs in North Vietnam, President Johnson talks eloquently about peace. What is the problem? They are talking about peace as a distant goal, as an end we seek, but one day we must come to see that peace is not merely a distant goal we seek, but that it is a means by which we arrive at that goal. We must pursue peaceful ends through peaceful means. All of this is saying that, in the final analysis, means and ends must cohere because the end is preexistent in the means, and ultimately destructive means cannot bring about constructive ends.”

—Martin Luther King, Jr., “A Christmas Sermon,” 24 Dec 1967 (38 years ago)

A “war on terror” can only reliably lead to more violence, more war, more terror. Any peaceful outcomes would be by chance; thus this “war” is not a very wise investment of a nation’s youth and much of its treasury if the goal is peace.

Hence I infer that the engines of war are driven by those who do not want peace: industrial war profiteering (e.g. Halliburton) is one obvious motivation for promoting unending war, another is that of apocalyptic Christians who think they’re “helping God out” by bringing on Armageddon.

Neither motivation, it should go without saying, coheres with the Gospel.

We can’t very well say “Peace on earth, good will toward men” and at the same time say “except now, because now war is the solution.” Unless we’re nuts.

And once we’re paying attention, I don’t think we’re nuts.

(See also Myth of redemptive violence.)

Some years ago as I was taking a course on Martin Luther King’s life, sermons, and writings, I suddenly realized I was already older than MLK ever got. What a knock upside the head that was. Now I realize I’m older than John F. Kennedy ever got. JFK’s life ended as mine was getting underway, and now I’ve been here longer than he was. I think I need to lie down.

¹While this “silent” quote is uniformly attributed to MLK, I see it is only hinted at, not directly present in, his April 1963 Letter from a Birmingham Jail.

With Sojourners, I assess that the 2006 budget bill passed by the Senate yesterday — at Christmas! — is immoral because it cuts spending for those among us least able to sustain further financial burden, even as U.S. military spending spirals out of control ($6 billion per month on Iraq alone).

That my senator Bill Frist declared this vote “Victory No. 1” conveys more to me than he probably intended.

Because the bill has been amended, the House of Representatives must vote on it again soon. Hence with full sincerity I write to my representative again today:

As a person of faith from Tennessee, I ask you to please vote NO on the new budget bill that the Senate passed. Please do not take away health care from low-income families, the elderly, and others, as this budget will do.

I believe the scriptural wisdom, “He who oppresses the poor shows contempt for their Maker, but whoever is kind to the needy honors God” (Proverbs 14:31).

As a U.S. taxpayer, I want to help my neighbor in need. In contrast, I do not want my tax dollars going into the bottomless pit of military spending.

Yes, be vigilant about controlling federal spending, but please do it in a way that accrues blessing according to the Bible, not a curse.

Thank you.
Mike

We can do better than this. And indeed we must, else “God bless America” will be drained even further of meaning and likelihood.

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.

Woo-hoo, I just stumbled onto Pandora, available in both free and subscription forms:

At Pandora Media … we have a single mission: To help you discover new music you’ll love. …

With Pandora you can explore to your heart’s content. Just drop the name of one of your favorite songs or artists into Pandora and let the [Music] Genome Project go. It will quickly scan its entire world of analyzed music, almost a century of popular recordings — new and old, well known and completely obscure — to find songs with interesting musical similarities to your choice. Then sit back and enjoy as it creates a listening experience full of current and soon-to-be favorite songs for you. …

I don’t know yet if Pandora will work for me, but the idea fits my head like a key in a lock:

We believe in the value of music and have a profound respect for those who create it. We like all kinds of music, from the most obtuse bebop, to the most tripped-out drum n bass, to the simplest catchy pop tune. Our mission is to help YOU connect with the music YOU like.

Excellent marketing. I’m in. (FAQ)