Jesus did not stay safe. He used his death consciously to dispel fear.
Don’t undo his work! Learn from it!
The only way to dispel the mentality that guides the ISIL self-guided (suicide) bombs is to plant the seed of compassion in their minds.
Category Archives: Government
Lessons From Bengazi
Hillary Clinton’s closing statements at the Bengazi hearing seized the high road. During eleven hours of redundant testimony, Mrs. Clinton educated Republican members regarding State Department operations and the proper boundaries between political and personal spheres. In summation, she offered that the problems that led to the death of four diplomats demanded consideration by policy makers. She hoped that such investigation would be conducted with an eye to problem solving, and that all involved would listen seriously to each other.
It is that last point that concerns me now. I did not watch the hearing, but what I observed in the excerpts was prosecutorial conduct that never would have been tolerated in a formal court of law. In a court-room setting, any judge – given the bulging case-loads created by Congressional refusal to empanel federal judges – would have allowed a defense team to raise objections to the relevancy of most of the questions asked by the panel, and prevented the questioners from interpreting testimony. As it is, the lack of a judicial figure in Congressional hearings allows license that was abused yesterday.
One of the most heart-breaking moments in Bill Clinton’s memoir concerns the suicide of Vince Foster, who was responsible for managing the White House relationship with the Whitewater investigators. In reflection, Mr. Clinton notes that the team of public servants he brought with him from Arkansas was simply unprepared for the destructive dynamic of Washington politics.
My concern at this time is that the fishing expedition engaged by the Bengazi panel will continue to be politicized. As with the violation of court orders that prohibited the release of illegally acquired videos of Planned Parenthood operations, I worry that the political operatives behind the Bengazi hearing will use the information they have gathered to attempt to break the will of those that associate with the Clintons.
This, to me, is intolerable – that popular politicians should find themselves ostracized by the threat that everyone in their personal circle can be caught up in the meat-grinder of a Congressional investigation. To prevent such abuse, I believe that Congress should be required to allow those testifying before it to request the presence of a federal judge to oversee the proceedings. If nothing else, that might motivate Congress to take action to fill the vacancies in the federal courts.
This is Power
in 2002, Time magazine published a cover article that related the scientific consensus regarding the end of the universe. It was a terribly depressing outcome, with iron planets and neutron stars scattered across intergalactic space, all except the matter that was vacuumed up in black holes.
I was going through a really depressed stage of my life, and faced the strong urge to rebel against that outcome. One option was to take the day off from work to lie in bed. The other was to reach for another alternative. It came to me in this way: at the core of almost every galaxy is a super-massive black hole – an “Active Galactic Nucleus.” We know that galaxies are bound together in clusters, and every now and then pass through each other. Over a long enough period of time, it seemed to me that the AGN’s will eventually collide, spewing out the matter they have absorbed to initiate a new cycle of stellar evolution.
Then I thought: “Well, if that’s how stars get made in the end, maybe that’s how they got made to begin with. Maybe stars don’t come first, and then collide to form black holes. Maybe the black holes are made first, and the quasars we see in the earliest age of the universe are the signature of the light and matter created in that process.”
Scripture offers us three kinds of wisdom:
- Regulation, the accumulated wisdom of what does and does not work in relationships.
- Situational ethics, describing how the Divine presence led our ancestors out of trouble when they made mistakes.
- Meaning, revealing the evolutionary process that provides understanding to guide our investments in the future.
When I look at the situation in Congress today, I see a terrible perversion of this process. I see:
- In our penal code and permissive gun laws, a process that segregates our population into camps based upon fear, undermining relation.
- A “survival of the fittest” mentality that insists that poverty is a sign of unfitness and wealth a measure of greatness. People that fall ill are consigned to misery, those that cannot master rapidly changing technology are pushed aside in the workplace, and those that do not subscribe to predatory management practices are ostracized.
- The unchecked politics of terrorism, where those that resist the changing future throw legislative Molotov cocktails, threatening their opponents with impeachment, harassing civil servants and not-for-profit leaders, and obscuring or simply denying objective truth regarding the consequences of their policies on global climate change, economics, international relations and campaign finance reform.
I would like to be able to corner Rep. Chaffetz to ask, “Mr. Chaffetz, did you ever withdraw during ejaculation? Did you ever avoid sex while your wife was ovulating? If so, then you intentionally prevented the birth of a child. When do you intend to turn yourself in for manslaughter?”
I would like to be able to confront the Biblical literalists with the insight that the whole experience of the nation of Israel from Noah to Jesus was to demonstrate the inefficacy and injustice of fixed systems of laws. The Law of Moses was authorized by God, but it is not “God’s Law” because it condones murder, contrary to the experience of Cain and the teachings of Jesus. The only law that binds a Christian is the law of love, and when you attack and demean those that serve the disadvantaged, you violate that law.
He walked up the sidewalk, his mind whirling with the pattern of creation unfolded from beginning to end. But at the periphery of the beauty were the people that brought him forth but rejected him, and the women that he would serve but that had resolved to force him to comply with convention. Those stains threatened to spread.
In his mind’s eye, a light entered the atmosphere, rushing downwards, clouds rolling away from the super-heated air in its wake. It passed over his shoulder and slammed into the hills ahead, a huge cloud of dust engulfing the spring day that he walked through. In his mind, a great cry of fear arose.
“No. No. I choose that spring day. I choose life.”
Two months later, in the home of a woman that loved him, he found a newspaper open to an inside article that documented that a planet-killer asteroid had passed between the earth and the moon two months before.
That is power. It is power that arises from looking into the things that are wounded and seeing the possibility of their healing. It is to forgo destruction of that which is broken and ugly. It is to serve those that serve, rather than to be a servant to convention.
Rather than seeking glory, it is to be regulated by the sorrows of the world.
All males are created to change things. It is far easier to change things by breaking them that it is to create something new. We indulge the former in boys. It is time for you to be men. If you don’t like tet way the world is, give us concrete and documented demonstrations of what does work.
Otherwise, get out of the way.
Dreams of a Worthy Man
When I took my sons out to Georgia three years ago, my uncle led the way up the highway to his boat house. He pulled over at a wilderness station, and as I dropped down from the driver’s seat of his VW bus, I was immediately ravished by the lush exuberance of the woods. He made his way into the station for some purpose, my sons following, but I stayed in communion with the sense of life that had become so desicated in Southern California. Eventually, he came out and said, “You know, there’s an exclusive resort on the other side of the hill.”
I don’t know why, but I thought of that when my son started talking about Jimmy Carter. Since Mr. Carter’s illness was made public, I have had this urge to go out to Plains and sit in on his Sunday school. When I shared that with Greg, he said “Well, maybe you should.”
A couple of Saturdays back, as I was puttering around the house in the morning, I found myself visualizing what would happen in that event, finding myself guided into a role as interpreter of a passage of scripture. As is perhaps obvious from my writing here, it’s hard for me to couple my experience of life to the world of daily affairs. So I fumbled around with big picture issues – meaning of life and process of Christ abstractions – until I finally struck on “You know, what I really want to do is to celebrate you, and the contributions you have made to society.”
I haven’t gone out to price travel to Plains – I’ve been distracted by other issues. But it keeps on popping up, and became particularly pointed this morning. I found myself standing in a long line outside of the church, and realized that I didn’t actually need to be in the class. I went to the door and introduced myself to the Secret Service agent, saying that I just wanted to offer Mr. Carter my blessing.
So I was ushered into a waiting room. He sat calmly in a chair. I walked up and placed my hands on his shoulders, and then on his scalp, trying to feel the shape of the wound that he carried. A chair appeared behind me, so I sat to embrace him gently, rubbing my hand in circles on his back over his heart. As I laid my left temple against his, I felt this shaft of anger and fear piercing his mind – the anger and fear of those that had fought to sustain control against the influence of the tolerance and caring that Mr. Carter manifests so consistently.
I moved my hand so that my fingers interrupted the painful flow, and sent healing behind it. With the pressure relieved, his grace bloomed outwards into the conduit, relieving fear and pain as it went.
He was eager to leave at that point, but I held him still. “I want them to see your radiance,” I explained. I pressed our hearts more firmly together, and arched as the power of Christ filled him with joy. As he took the floor, I watched in the doorway as the gathering stared in awe.
The Practice of Freedom: Speech vs. Abusive Speech
In response to this conversation:What is Abuse? I was inspired by the intellectual ping-pong across the U.S.-Canadian border.
I’ve been working through the issues relating to freedom out on my blog for the last two months, in ways sometimes veiled and sometimes overt. It’s been coming up in my conversations with friends, so it’s obviously a sticking point for me.
The exercise of freedom comes with responsibility. Abuse on the internet often reflects the decoupling between our actions (writing of strongly-worded statements) and their psychological consequences to the reader. In the worst case, some manage to create whirlpools of angst that they use to suck psychic energy out of others.
It is that pure spiritual experience – clicking on a link and feeling the energy drain out of me – that causes me to shy from the American celebration of “freedom of speech.” Speech is an action that generates a psychological context that creates a social dynamic. We need to ask ourselves “What kind of society are we generating with our speech?”
In all except a very few cases, Jesus did not attack the powerful. He built a community of disciples around him – the weak and dispossessed. When his teachings were contradicted by the religious authorities of the day, he would expose their hypocrisy, but always for the benefit of the understanding of his disciples. So I think that the it is necessary to focus first on trying to use our words to lift up those that have been beaten down, and only turn negative when deconstructing the conventions of thought that hold them down.
Dying in the Face of Reason
The latest assault on public safety: On the Chris Hayes show last night, an opponent of gun control stated that “nothing that proponents have suggested will work.”
Simple fact: America’s death rate by gun violence is three times the rate in any other advanced democracy. Our rate is forty times the rate in the United Kingdom.
So if you won’t do what we say, do what they do.
The Criminals Will Get Them Anyways
Among other opponents of gun control, Marco Rubio has been in the news stating that additional regulation is counter productive, because criminals will get guns anyways.
What does the evidence tell us?
Chicago, with strict gun control laws and among the nation’s highest rate of gun fatalities, is interpreted by some as evidence that gun control fails. But a Newsweek article points out that New York City has similarly strict gun control laws, and a far lower rate of gun fatalities. The singular difference is that New York is surrounded by states with similarly strict gun control laws, while the states around Illinois have among the most permissive gun sale controls.
It is for this reason that Walter O’Malley says that gun control should be brought under federal regulation. This is the same rationale used for environmental control: when lax state regulation allowed dumping of industrial waste into major rivers, it affected the citizens of other states. When the clean water and air acts were passed, it was because all across the country rivers were toxic (or flammable) and the air was raining down acid. Federal regulation was required to protect the people and ecosystems downstream from polluters.
In failing to respond the evidence that lax gun regulations bring death across borders, what Carlo Rubio is really indicating is his favor for policies that facilitate the acquisition of weapons by criminal gangs that dominate their communities by murdering anyone that stands up to them.
O’Malley is also echoing others who have recommended that the industry be held to strict safety guidelines. For example, gun “enthusiasts” used to put about that many semi-automatic weapons could be converted to full automatic by taping a penny behind the trigger. This is a design defect that could be remedied. Similarly, microstamping would enable police to trace guns from factory to crime scene, and by identifying corrupt sellers to prevent rearming of criminals when they abandon a gun after a crime.
Rather than supporting measures to prevent criminal use of guns, Congress has passed legislation that protects the gun industry from product liability lawsuits, thus shielding them from the need to reduce the threat to police and law-abiding citizens represented by their products.
What astonishes me is that these common-sense measures are interpreted as an leading to the confiscation of guns. I have yet to figure out what it is that drives that concern. Nobody is talking about taking away guns lawfully purchased and managed – what we want to do is reduce the fear that drives people to believe that they need a gun. Rather than walking about the world in suspicion, we want people to focus on caring for one another.
To be without fear is the foremost exhortation in the Bible. Jesus demonstrated the power that comes from a commitment to peace. To be blunt, politicians that facilitate the spread of fear through violence are simply anti-Christ.
The Roseburg Ostrich
The Sheriff up in Roseburg, OR is a little testy about gun control.
More than a little, maybe, having put up a post recently in a public forum that suggested that New Town was staged by the federal government in order to build public favor for additional gun control legislation.
Anyways, his office has revealed that the college shooter had obtained all thirteen of his guns legally.
Thirteen.
Really.
That doesn’t strike anyone as an unhealthy obsession? That doesn’t strike anyone as something that law enforcement would have benefited from knowing about before the community was shattered by death and permanent disability?
Or does the sheriff send men around to check on households and rattle windows and doors at night if they find less than ten guns on the premises?
Renewed Town
This was originally published at anewgaia.ning.com on April 24, 2013. It gives some sense of how deeply enmeshed I am in this problem:
The news of the Senate’s failure to overcome NRA resistance to extension of gun control measures has been pressing on me for the last week. It is simply absurd that we should, as a matter of public safety, require people to qualify themselves to drive cars on a regular basis, but allow unrestricted access to devices whose only purpose is to kill.
That the parents of New Town were sitting in the gallery added salt to the wound, and I have been carrying them in my heart for the last week. It was further focused on Saturday where, at a rally in support of Senator Feinstein’s work, several gun enthusiasts drove by to flip the bird at us.
One of them in particular managed to shove his ego into me, and I calmly tracked the car visually as it drove away, getting a good fix on him. Saturday night was hard – I had been put into contact with a dark pool of anger and aggression. As always, I simply embraced it, and then reached through to find the people that were cowering in its shadow. Exhaling into that psychological space, I blew the winds of change into the communities dominated by that fear.
Sunday was hard. I went out to Awakening Your Power in Santa Monica, and the frenetic energy, while well-intentioned, was attractive to the powers that I was wrestling with. I spent a fair part of the session sitting aside, calming my interior spaces. It seemed at the time that I would have been better off going to church.
It was only at the end of Resonance that I finally connected to the energies that were waiting for us. Mariane put on Snatam Kaur’s live “Ong Namo”. It starts with an acknowledgement that we were sent here to heal. The words penetrated to the core of me, and I had to hold my breath as the pain washed through me. Then I reached up and began to dance alone to the sacred words. Looking again into that space of fear, I became that larger self that sees the world from outside. Gathering the healing energy of the Divine in my left hand, I pushed it towards America, and blew the winds of peace behind it. Three times, and then I focused on New Town, and staggered under the weight of their sorrow. Gathering myself, I reached back again with my right hand, and blew love into their hearts.
On Monday night I was in the room with a teacher lying protectively on the bodies of her students as the bullets tore through them. I created a space of separation from the terror, doing my best to protect them from the spiritual sickness that had infected the gunman.
I bought Kaur’s “Essentials” on Tuesday, and have been playing its healing lyrics into the space of that sorrow for the last twenty-four hours. Last night, as I laid in bed listening again to “Ong Namo”, I found myself again in the presence of one of their mothers. “Long Time Sun” filled us with images of light. I opened my heart to the heavens, and the energy that had been prepared on Sunday settled on us. Using the pattern of her feeling, it raced outwards seeking the myriad spirits that had lost a child to violence.
Her son came to her, and held her heart in his hands. Witnessing her sorrow, he wordlessly honored her love, and resolved to organize spiritual resources to wash away the evil that had devastated her. I offered my recognition of the honor due to the mother that had nurtured such a spirit.
It hurts. It hurts yet. But there are some wounds that can only be healed by taking them into us.
Bad things happen to good people because their light is needed in the darkness. Shine brightly, spirits of New Town.
Just a Merchant of Death, on Average
Just before the shooting in Roseburg yesterday, I was at Kaiser getting my flu shot. A man walked out of the examination rooms wearing a black t-shirt that proclaimed, “If guns kill people, then so do pencils.”
I guess the point is that a pencil is used to design a gun. It would seem reasonable, then, that God is the cause of all of our trouble with gun violence, for originating this reality in the first place. We have no responsibility for anything, do we? Not even for keeping weapons out of the hands of the people most likely to misuse them.
There are those that face the threat of gun violence every day. They are generally the disadvantaged: families walking through mean streets, the criminal militias known as gangs that seek power through violence, and the police that try to keep them apart. What the last group tells us about the second is that stemming the flow of weapons to criminals is impossible because we do not ensure traceability from the factory to the crime scene. If that information was maintained, they could identify and punish the merchants that purchase for illegal resale to known felons.
There are solutions to this problem. One would be to require that every gun be fired before leaving the factory, and the bullet registered with a federal ballistics database. Another solution is microstamping. A microstamp is an engraving on the firing pin that puts an identifier on every bullet when it is fired. The inventor of the technology has surrendered his patent to public use.
In California, Attorney General Kamela Harris has moved to require microstamping on all guns sold in the state. This came to my attention when I interrupted a young man at work bitching about how purveyors of excellent products would be forced out of the state due to this unfair requirement. This was indeed the threat made by the leading producer of semi-automatic handguns.
So I did a little digging, and found this: the average time between sale of a semi-automatic handgun and recovery at a crime scene is less than four years. Assuming that legitimate gun owners hold their weapons for life, this means that the vast majority of these weapons are sold to criminals.
It seems pretty obvious that the reason the manufacturer wished to pull out of the state is because microstamping would cut off this trade, and therefore eviscerate their profits.
The police, on the other hand, favor microstamping.
Who are we protecting, with our claims of Second Amendment privilege? The criminal militias that terrorize the inner city? Those that produce and sell guns into those communities?
It is certainly not our families or public servants.
everdeepening 