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Be a Mom, Hillary

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“You know, Senator Sanders, my biggest concern for you is that if you win office, the same thing will happen to you that happened to President Obama. You make promises that you can’t keep to a young sector of the electorate. When President Obama did that, he stepped into the White House with every intention of delivering on his promises. He fought every day of his two terms to accomplish them, investing the energy of his Cabinet in determining what leeway there was to take executive action when the Congress refused to act on climate change and fair pay, and using his veto to frustrate Boehner and McConnell in their attempts to claw back our gains in health care, social justice and taxation.

“But despite all of his efforts – and I believe that history will show that Barack has been one of the great American presidents – when the chips were down in 2010, the people that elected him chose to stay home. Rather than doubling down for President Obama, they handed control of the House, Senate and many state legislatures to a party that has gerrymandered to protect their tenure, that has attacked public and private sector unions to drive down wages, that delayed action on global warming in service to private oil interests, and that held the entire government hostage to secure tax breaks for their wealthy taskmasters.

“You talk about moneyed interests and their power in politics, but the fact remains that President Obama was elected twice against those interests. The American system with its voter protection laws makes it extremely difficult for an informed and active electorate to be cheated of their rights. What my experience with President Obama has shown to me is that your youthful supporters need to get out and vote. They need to walk out of the factories and restaurants and schools on election day and support those that fight for them.

“Senator Sanders, we have fought for the people of America for decades. You describe that as a struggle against moneyed interests, while I highlight the goal of empowering each person. But we can’t do it alone. The American people need to support us in turn. The key to accomplishing our shared goals is not to whip them up in anger, because that hot emotion will just turn to frustration as the road gets steeper. The American people need to make a strong and reasoned commitment to stay the course. They need the wisdom and understanding to confront injustice themselves in city halls and state houses across the nation. But most of all, they need to make their voices heard on election day!”

Life of Sorrow

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Frieda Kahlo, in a letter to her husband Diego Rivera, testified that he was “by far the worse” of the two disasters that defined her life. The first, remarkably, was the perforation of her uterus in a bus accident at age 18.

Of all the insensitivity of men, Diego epitomized the worst of it. Not only was he extravagantly unfaithful to Frieda, but he failed to appreciate the huge investment of self she made in him. Frieda, in many of her self-portraits, put a bust of Diego on her forehead. The day after her death, a friend observed that he appeared to age ten years, and finally testified that “I never knew how much I loved her.” No, lummox! You never understood the power of her devotion to you!

Diego did care for Frieda, supporting the drain on his finances of more than thirty surgeries related to her accident and spinal bifida. But he eventually divorced her, and this pressed Frieda into depression. Self-portraits of the period show her attempting to reclaim the European mantle carried by her father, where for years she had dressed the part of the Mexican peasant. A few weeks before her death, she penned the line

I hope the end is easy, and I hope never to return.

This strikes deep into my heart. In Golem, I write of a cosmic convocation of masculine minds that lost their women to sorrow. Their ladies take haven in a place that masculine minds cannot penetrate, the super-massive black hole in the center of our galaxy, leaving men without their primary inspiration in the struggle for justice. We need women like Frieda, and any testimony of their abandonment of us is, frankly, terrifying.

I learned the details about Frieda at a seminar presented by Dr. Gloria Arjona. Dr. Arjona is also a singer, and these two passions combined in her investigation, as Spanish Lecturer at Cal Tech, of the fragments that Frieda inscribed on her self-portraits. Most penetrating of them are these words from a Mexican adaptation of Cielito Lindo:

Arbol de la esperanza mantente firme

Tree of hope, be strong

Dr. Arjona spoke of Frieda as representative of the universal human condition, which is the struggle against sorrow and pain. After her presentation, I stopped to take her hand and thank her for “representing Frieda so faithfully.” For Frieda does indeed represent that struggle so universal in Latin America, though foreign to the American middle class. The experience on Saturday was a link for me, as I learned this morning when humming the tune to the chorus of Cielito Lindo

Ay, ay, ay ay. Canta y no llores

“Sing, and do not cry.” It is an assertion of will emanating from those that have nothing but their voices, and even then only in moments of private celebration that are yet always touched by the pressure of sorrow. It is to claim the right to be loved, a claim that almost broke my heart as I began to weep.

I love you. We are strong enough. Come to me.

Up in the Cloud

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Information Systems, the discipline of organizing computers and software resources to facilitate decision-making and collaboration, is undergoing a revolution. The opportunity is allowed by cheap data storage and high-speed networking. The necessity is driven by the unpredictability of demand and the threat of getting hacked. These factors have driven the construction of huge data and compute centers that allow users to focus on business solutions rather than the details of managing and protecting their data.

As a developer, this proposition is really attractive to me. I’m building a sensor network at home, and I’d like to capture the data without running a server full time. I’d also like to be able to draw upon back-end services such as web or database servers without having to install and maintain software that is designed for far more sophisticated operations.

The fundamental proposition of the cloud is to create an infrastructure that allows we as consumers to pay only for the data and software that we actually use. In concept, it’s similar to the shift from cooking on a wood-fired stove fed by the trees on our lot to cooking on an electric range. Once we shift to electricity, if we decide to open a restaurant, we don’t have to plan ahead ten years to be certain that we have enough wood, we just pay for more electricity. Similarly, if I want to develop a new solution for home heating control, I shouldn’t have to pay a huge amount of money for software licenses and computer hardware up front – that should be borne by the end-users. And, just as a chef probably doesn’t want to learn a lot about forestry, so I shouldn’t have to become an expert in administration of operating systems, databases and web servers. Cloud services promise to relieve me of that worry.

It was in part to assess the reality of that promise that I spent the last two days at Microsoft’s Cloud Road Show in Los Angeles. What I learned was that, while they pursue the large corporate customers, Microsoft is still a technology-driven company, and so they want to hear that they are also helping individual developers succeed.

But there were several amusing disconnects.

Satya Nadella took the helm at Microsoft following Steve Balmer’s debacles with Windows 8 and Nokia. Balmer was pursuing Apple’s vision of constructing a completely closed ecosystem of consumer devices and software. Nadella, head of the Azure cloud services effort, blew the top off of that plan, declaring that Microsoft would deliver solutions on any hardware and operating system that defined a viable market. Perversely, what I learned at the roadshow was that Microsoft is still very much committed to hardware, but not the kind of hardware you can carry on your person. Rather, it’s football fields stacked three-high with shipping containers full of server blades and disk drives, each facility drawing the power consumed by a small city. None of the containers belongs to a specific customer (actually the promise is that your data will be replicated across multiple containers). They are provisioned for aggregate demand of an entire region, running everything from a WordPress blog to global photo-sharing services such as Pinterest.

This scale drives Microsoft to pursue enterprise customers. This is a threat to established interests – large data centers are not an exportable resource, and so provide a secure and lucrative source of employment for their administrators. But that security comes with the pressure of being a bottleneck in the realization of others’ ambitions and a paranoid mind-set necessary to avoid becoming the latest major data-breach headline. The pitch made at the roadshow was that outsourcing those concerns to Microsoft should liberate IT professionals to solve business problems using the operations analysis software offered with the Azure platform.

To someone entering this magical realm, however, the possibilities are dizzying. At a session on business analytics, when asked what analysis package would be best to use for those looking to build custom algorithms, the response was “whatever tool your people are familiar with.” This might include R (preferred by statistics professionals) or Python (computer science graduates) or SQL (database developers). For someone looking to get established, that answer isn’t comforting.

But it reveals something else: Microsoft is no longer in the business of promoting a champion – they are confident that they have built the best tools in the world (Visual Studio, Office, Share Point, etc.). Their goal is to facilitate delivery of ideas to end customers. Microsoft also understands that means long-term maintenance of tightly coupled ecosystems where introduction of a malfunctioning algorithm can cost tens of millions of dollars, and viruses billions.

But what about the little guy? I raised this point in private after a number of sessions. My vision of the cloud is seeded by my sons’ experience in hacker communities, replete with “how-to” videos and open-source software modules. I see this as the great hope for the future of American innovation. If a living space designer in Idaho can source production of a table to a shop in Kentucky with a solid guarantee of supply and pricing comparable to mass-produced models, then we enter a world in which furniture showrooms are a thing of the past, and every person lives in a space designed for their specific needs. As a consumer, the time and money that once would have been spent driving around showrooms and buying high-end furniture is invested instead in a relationship with our designer (or meal planner, or social secretary).

Or how about a “name-your-price” tool for home budgeting? If you’ve got eighty dollars to spend on electricity this July, what should your thermostat setting be? How many loads of laundry can you run? How much TV can you watch? What would be the impact of switching from packaged meals to home-cooked? Can I pre-order the ingredients from the store? Allocate pickup and preparation time to my calendar?

Development of these kinds of solutions is not necessarily approachable at this time. The low-end service on Azure runs about $200 a month. From discussion, it appears that this is just about enough to run a Boy Scout Troop’s activity scheduling service. But I am certain that will change. Microsoft responded to the open-source “threat” by offering development tools and services for free to small teams. Their Azure IoT program allows one sensor to connect for free, with binary data storage at less than twenty dollars a month.

At breakfast on Wednesday, I shared some of these thoughts with a Microsoft solutions analyst focused on the entertainment industry. I ended the conversation with the admission that I had put on my “starry-eyed philosopher” personality. He smiled and replied “You’ve given me a lot to think about.” It was nice to spend some time with people that appreciate that.

Climbing the Mountain of Healing

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After eight years of fear-mongering and greed under the Bush Administration, on the day of Barack Obama’s inauguration, I stood in the conference room at work to watch the proceedings. Breathing more easily, I felt the will of Christ stretch itself across the nation to join with that of our new president.

I caught a clip of the Tea Party responder to this year’s State of the Union (a motivational speaker named Root) warming up the crowd at a Trump rally. While I can’t call it a message, the energetic peak of his oration was the statement “This is war!” That is one way to look at society, as a struggle to the death of factions in a world where there is just never enough. To survive, we have to find that mythical figure epitomized in our history by Washington, Lincoln or FDR: a great general and leader to whom we can entrust our lives.

The problem is that fear is a deeply ingrained physiological habit. It is a way of relating to the world that destroys reason. When the enemy is gone, the habit remains and turns inwards. For some, the escape is into substance abuse, but for others it finds release in seeking enemies among their fellows.

Again and again, our society has raised up representatives to heal those divides, and those representatives suffer terribly for our sins. Jackie Robinson and the Central High Nine were all abused for the privilege of entering the lily-white citadels of baseball and education, and understood that they could not respond in kind. I heard one of the Central High Nine speak on his experience, and while my first reaction was outrage, it was closely followed by awe at the strength and discipline he had demonstrated.

Barack Obama spoke about this problem in his confrontation with the bigots in the federal legislature who declared early on their intention to oppose him at every step. His response was of the type. It was captured for me in a photo: During one of the budget stand-offs with the House, he invited the Speaker to play golf. The event was memorialized on one of the greens with Obama crouched low over his ball, pointing to lay out the line to the hole while looking over his shoulder at Boehner for agreement.

I write this today because I find myself dumbfounded by the political analysis of Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

Obviously among the Republican front-runners we find those parroting the legacies of FDR (Trump) and Washington (Cruz). Their are bombastic and shallow, but raise fervor in their frightened partisans. There is much to be alarmed by in this phenomenon – it was the root of fascism in Europe. I consider it to be a cancer in the body politic.

On the Democratic side, we were promised a different dynamic, a dialog informed by reason. After the first Democratic debate, one headline characterized it as “The Adults Take the Stage.” But there are significant differences between the candidates, and these are not just in substance but in tone. The pundits have tried to characterize these differences, and now tend to settle “forward thinking” and “heart” on Sanders while saddling Clinton with “hanging on to the past” and “head.”

Sanders earns these designations for his fiery railing against the monied class. This appeals to the youth of our nation, those whose disdain for politics has allowed the establishment to secure its privilege by buying the House and Senate in off-term elections. Sanders promises a radical departure from the past, a storming of the castle to take back the wealth of the nation. He yells and gesticulates, demonstrating a strong emotional connection to his program that promises dedication to its achievement.

I have already expressed my discomfort with the similarities with the Republican front-runners.

I see Hillary struggling with her characterization. The body politic does seem to want passion, but when she projects it in her campaign stops, it rings false. That is picked on by the pundits, who have now taken to comparing her to Bush. But I believe that comparison reflects a deep and systemic misunderstanding of the disease facing our nation, and the fact that the temperament that makes Clinton so attractive to me at this time is simply incompatible with the politics of the males in the field.

Consider this: if you had liver cancer, would you feel encouraged by an oncologist who said “This is war! Your liver is evil! I’m going to take it out and stomp on it! And – oh yeah – thanks for putting my daughter through college.” Or would you like to be given sympathy and encouragement with specific options for treatment along with a description of side-effects and costs.

In other words, would you want a warrior or a healer?

In Hillary, I see the latter. Although I see it in Obama, it’s typically a feminine proclivity. Have some sympathy for her as she struggles against the burden of the pressures that have kept women from full and equal participation in our body politic.

A Matter of Character

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In his final State of the Union address, Barack Obama eschewed partisan politics and stretched for the heights of statesmanship. Frustrated in his most heart-felt passions by the institutions that foment mistrust of government, his program of political renewal is built around appeals to cherished notions of our national character. While composed of practical steps – among them redistricting and campaign finance reform, voting rights, and extension of public education by two years – its illustrations were drawn not from  isolated instances of specific lives transformed by those benefits, but from abstract descriptions of relationships transformed when we act from hope and trust.

Obama supported the authority of his prescription by outlining the results of seven years of quietly doing what was possible while his opponents trumpeted doom. This includes enhanced international cooperation to isolate and weaken the agents of violence, improved terms of trade to protect workers and the environment, enhancement of personal security with health care reform, and revitalization of America’s manufacturing and energy sectors.

His restrained rhetoric is set against a collection of voices that trumpet conflict. This is not limited to the field of Republican presidential nominees – the growing strength of the Sanders campaign is fueled by harsh rhetoric targeting the financial elite. I believe that the popularity of those voices reflects the sense that for the average American, security is precarious. This is supported by polling that reveals that as regards their condition, 49% of Americans have become more angry over the last year.

As wages stagnate and costs rise, inevitably every choice faced by a working family is fraught with consequence. Any single error can set us on the hard road to poverty. In that state, our natural desire is to make our choosing less difficult – in much popular political rhetoric, to remove the impediments imposed by the state. Unfortunately, this logic appeals to the interests of those that siphon financial energy from the system. One of the Koch brothers, after the federal investigation of climate science racketeering by Mobil-Exxon, appeared in public to state that in many ways he is a liberal – he believes that businesses are most successful when the individual worker is free to make his own choices. As “success” to Mr. Koch translates to “higher profits,” what history has shown is that a family man will accept lower wages when facing competition from a younger, unburdened candidate. “Freedom” as understood by Koch translates to a lack of security that eventually pits every man against his neighbor for the benefit of owners.

In his book The Guardians: Kingman Brewster, His Circle, and the Rise of the Liberal Establishment, Geoffrey Kabaservice argued that the American century was birthed on the battlefields of WWII. For the first time, the American elite went to war, and came back appreciating the strength of the brotherhood that leads men to sacrifice their lives in service. It was this brotherhood that motivated the Veterans’ Acts that opened college and home ownership to the lower classes. And it was the clawing back of those gifts by that generation’s children that steadily weakened the lower classes as we entered the 21st century.

The fragility of the post-war Golden Age must lead us to ask: is Obama right? Is our national character one of quiet service, or a narcissistic struggle for privilege that slowly grinds down the weak?

Against the cynicism of the realist, Obama marshaled the words of the man that prophesied his presidency. In his last public address, Martin Luther King, Jr. promised his audience that they as a people would see the Promised Land. Obama borrowed not from that speech but from King’s Nobel Peace Prize address, in which the prophet heralded the ultimate victory of “unarmed truth and unconditional love.”

That may sound like another flimsy basis for policy prescriptions, but it actually leads to an analysis that shows the inevitability of our exit from this era of untrammeled selfishness. Throughout history, when economic activity expands into a new scale (from the city to the state, from state to nation, from nation to globe), those managing the expansion are able to erode the rights of those that created the technologies and products that allow the expansion. They do that by transferring knowledge to impoverished labor markets (or by importing cheaper labor). By selling goods back into the originating society, owners are able to reap enormous profits.

What ultimately happens, however, is that as wages equalize, poor workers motivated by the hope that they, too, would achieve the rights of their richer cousins gain the courage to organize to secure those rights. Having played out the cheap trick of producing in cheaper labor markets, the elite is brought under ever increasing pressure to actually increase the value of labor through organizational strategy. They then confront the truth that a competent and creative worker is the best source of operational improvements, and that personal security is essential to avoid fear that distracts her attention.

This has been played out again and again through history, in each of the transitions listed above. We now face the last transition to the global stage, and growing economic instability in  China suggests that the cheap trick has just about played itself out.

So if the morality of Obama’s appeal doesn’t resonate in the pragmatic mind, I believe that it yet reflects the wisdom of historical experience. His prescriptions are the investments that we need to make now to ensure that when the burden of poverty is leveled, we as a nation are prepared to lead the charge into a future of common accomplishment safeguarded by international compacts of economic and environmental justice.

While the elite may create panic with rumors of “one world government” and “black helicopters,” the past proves that the lower classes will eventually recognize their common experience, and organize to ensure that the government that creates the rules by which power is allocated will do so in a way that ensures that power servers that greater good, rather than the whims of the elite. All the lower classes need do is to marshal the courage to believe in the commonality of their experience (which is the root of all truth) and recognize that when they invest in each others’ power (loving unconditionally), they strengthen themselves.

Cliven Bundy: Occupy DuPont – Please!

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On January 6, the New York Times published a survey of the work of lawyer Rob Billott in uncovering the unrestricted spread of PFOA throughout the global environment. The breaking event in the investigation was a West Virginia cattle rancher who reported that DuPont was dumping a soapy substance into the river upstream of his ranch, and that since the dumping began, the cattle had manifested violent behavior, gross physical ailments and birth defects.

Filing a subpoena to obtain DuPont’s toxicological studies of the substance, Billott discovered that they had knowledge of its side effects for decades, but hid the information because it was “too risky” to replace the substance, which is used in the manufacturer of Teflon. Unfortunately, everyone who has ever used Teflon now has PFOA in their blood stream – as do fish, birds and animals throughout the world.

During the course of the litigation, state regulators refused to intervene to prevent open disposal of PFOA, to order DuPont to provide treatment for the water used by tens of thousands of people, or to order health studies of those exposed. The lawyers representing DuPont eventually rose to high office in the state even as the case evolved, and those agencies arbitrarily raised the safe drinking water level for PFOA in order to protect DuPont from regulation. When the EPA finally completed its analysis, the final drinking water limits were nearly 200 times lower than those adopted by the state.

The frightening thing about this case is that the EPA is only allowed to regulate chemicals for which it has evidence of toxicity. It has only ever banned the use of four chemicals, of more than 60,000 produced by the industry. Now it appears that the industry intentionally hides evidence of toxicity from regulators. We have absolutely no idea what we are being exposed to.

Note that not all companies are bad actors. When Monsanto first began selling PFOA to DuPont, it advised that the material should be incinerated. That DuPont chose to release it to the environment was their choice. That the substance is unusually resistance to degradation was not unknown to them.

DuPont’s response to these revelations is damning: DuPont has also chosen to litigate each personal damage case individually, rather than as a class. At the rate of litigation, almost all of the claimants will be dead when a trial date is set. DuPont is also planning a merger with Dow Chemical, and has taken the unusual step of spinning off their chemistry business as Chemours. This appears suspicious. Given the culture revealed by Billott’s litigation, I wouldn’t be surprised if PFOA was only the tip of the iceberg.

Yoga Limits

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The constraints of my professional life have driven me to yoga twice. Both times, I was suffering from back pain that constrained my ability to sustain my focus while sitting at my desk. I recognized that the problem was tight hamstrings and a weak core, but I channeled my need for exercise into jogging, which didn’t address either condition.

The first practice was held in the meeting room of a spirituality bookstore. The instructor was an Indian lady, and I was the only man that showed up consistently. As I got stronger in the practice, I eventually found myself with thirteen women hitched to my wagon. At the time, I didn’t have the energy to manage the load, so I quit.

I was able to stay away for a few years, and then I discovered the Bikram yoga studio in Agoura Hills. I have to admit that it’s been a struggle for the owners as much as it has been for me. I am a tall string bean with a large chest.

The relative narrowness of my frame results in transmission of stress into the stabilizing muscles in the hips and lower back that are supported by bones that provide limited leverage. This means that muscle balance is absolutely essential not only to achieve postures, but to avoid overuse injuries. As I strive for that balance, I’ve been developing muscle groups that had always taken a free ride in the past, which means that I become exhausted doing postures that are often placed in the “warm up” or “recovery” category.

After four years I’m finally able reliably to stay in the 105 degree room for the full ninety minutes. While the owners were often frustrated by my bailing out in the middle of class, some of the instructors are impressed by my persistence. Several have observed that the practice is not designed for my body type.

The attraction to me is a feature that many find intolerable – the dreary repetition of the practice. The Bikram formula is a series of twenty-six postures that the instructors describe with a rote dialog. Fortunately, the more difficult postures are progressive. This means that we aren’t expected to achieve full expression, and so I have the latitude to focus on trying to figure out how to get my muscles to work together. It’s a process that has caused my to look in the mirror on occasion and burst out in laughter in the middle of class.

This opportunity to focus on my physical self has been critical to my peace of mind over the last four years. While not typical, I have dreams in which people show up seeking help to keep societies and ecosystems glued together. There’s not much I can do except to offer them the sanctuary of my heart as a place of restoration. It’s frustrating and grievous to me.

So I should have intervened early today when the instructor continued reading his story during the srivasanas that punctuate the exercises of the floor series. Although I realized that it was interfering with my ability to focus on aerobic recovery, I was fascinated by the enthusiasm that filled the room, . The diversion provided some relief from the normal thoughts – people struggling with the urge to escape the room.

The story contrasted the experience of two caterpillars. The humble yellow caterpillar (which I’ll call ‘she’) encounters a grey caterpillar spinning a cocoon. While uncertain about the possibility of becoming a butterfly, the yellow caterpillar finally chooses to try, and discovers comfort in the realization that spinning a cocoon is a natural skill.

The second, striped caterpillar (which I’ll call ‘he’) has chosen to climb a pillar of caterpillars, symbolizing the struggle for social success. As he nears the top, stepping on those below, he is finally unable to penetrate the clinging mass, and becomes trapped. He looks out and sees a field littered with caterpillar pillars, and realizes that his struggle is meaningless – with so many pillars, attaining the pinnacle of one signifies nothing.

As he weighs his options, the yellow butterfly arrives to rescue him. She attempts to pull him out of the pillar, but he draws back, and sees this terrible sorrow in her eyes.

It was at that point that I walked out, the class laughing at my explanation. I laid down on the couch in the lobby, crying “Oh, God!”

I live this every day, and it’s not that simple. They don’t just refuse assistance.

They pull off your wings and drive nails through your hands and feet.

One of the students told me, as I was passing him after class on the way out the door, that “I had missed a good story.” Really? I don’t come to yoga for a spiritual fill-up, or for entertainment. That’s supposed to happen at church or the movies. I come to focus on keeping my body strong enough to bear the burdens that I carry. If I can’t focus on that, then I’m going to have to quit again.

Being Atypical

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I met a new friend today who blogs as Anonymously Autistic. She writes honestly and openly about the challenges of adapting to the world of conventional interaction. I have had my own struggles in this regard. After listening to Amythest Schaber’s testimony of a life spent learning to love herself, the following experiences came to mind. I don’t know if they will resonate with those that are autistic, but I offer them in that hope.

When I went through the darkest part of my life, I went through six jobs in eight years. Job six was a bail-out from my scientific peers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. It required me to move away from my sons, which was difficult for me.

The interview was not attended by one of the program principals, who was away on travel. He actually drove down Interstate Five to my house (rather than flying) to converse with me. He said something unusual at the time – he said that I have “presence,” comparing me to the great singers that he had worked with as a member of the San Francisco choir. It was the first time anyone had been that direct with me.

The team I had joined worked with a community of information security specialists in the federal government. When the director brought her team out for a program review, we gathered at a winery so that they could meet me (I had not completed my security clearance, and so was not part of the review). When we had been introduced, we collected around the table and my friend, noticing the reactions of the team, suggested “One of the characteristics of autistic people is that they have trouble with personal boundaries.”

Both characterizations surprised the hell out of me. I have since recalled the young lady in college that, after our introduction, held on to my hand and laughed, “You are incredibly dense.” When I protested, she clarified, “No, not stupid, just – DENSE.” In fact, I didn’t encounter somebody that could roil my waters until after I was forty.

Amythest talks about dancing with her hands, and I think that I know what she is talking about. When I was in junior high school, at the dances I would enter into a trance-like state, dancing with an energy that the other students found hilarious if not disturbing. I have since learned to manage that focus. The way that I characterize it, to those that ask me how I dance as well as I do, is that my Higher Self is looking down on me. I actually don’t know what the heck I am doing, and could not possibly reproduce it later. But afterwards people go out of their way to tell me that I am a great dancer.

The point that I am working towards is that when I became aware of how much spiritual energy I was managing (that “density” mentioned by the coed), I spent a couple of years trying to organize it. I began to have burning pains in my sides (often reported by those with shingles) and burning at the base of my skull. When I focused on those side-effects, I realized that I was trying to channel spiritual energy through physical constructs that were simply incapable of handling the load. It was like trying to run 30 Amps of current through a wire rated for 20 Amps. In that instant, I simply shifted the flow out of my brain, and began to work directly with the spiritual structures that generated it.

Amethyst talks about the enormous depth of the love that she feels. My experience causes me to wonder if she isn’t an angel trying to squeeze herself into a representation that people can relate to. Part of that includes forcing her to engage them in the normal way. If she’s in any way like me, however, that’s just not going to work. There’s too much energy in her soul, and it overwhelms her physical apparatus. She needs to find things like ecosystems and cultural moires to channel it into.

Shot-Sighted

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As a boy that grew up scampering through the sage brush on the hills above the school, when we stopped for a bathroom break on one of our early camping trips, my first thought was to duck under the barbed-wire fence and wander in the woods it protected. I was tame enough to check first with my mother, who drew my attention to the sign:

NO TRESPASSING

Violators will be shot on sight

 “Don’t they have to give you a warning first?”

“That is the warning,” my father observed.

Looking up and down the lonely road, I thought, “But what if their car broke down and they need help?”

It was my first collision with the thought that property ownership trumped human life, and I was a little shaken by the experience.

I don’t see the signs much in my area any more – perhaps because most of the agriculture and ranching has disappeared. But technology may also have something to do with it: with helicopters and radio trackers, it’s probably pretty hard for cattle rustlers to disappear into the wilderness, and aerial crop dusting probably dissuades most casual fruit pickers. The spread of drone aircraft will also make easier to bring thieves to justice without risk of a confrontation.

It was only later that I learned that these signs were also posted frequently by those engaged in illegal activity. The classic image is the moonshine distiller or hillbilly sending off the “revenooer.” But I was confronted by another case when working on a friend’s deck up in Redding one summer. A piercing scream of terror came from the house across the fence – but there was the sign. None of the locals so much as turned a head in concern. I guess it wasn’t the first time.

The Bundy Family now camped out at the Wildlife Refuge in Oregon says that they are “defending their way of life.” One of their number, finding himself in the minority in a discussion of violent confrontation, went out to make a stand in the cold, observing that he had grown up with the wind in his hair and the sun on his face, and he would rather die than spend a single day in jail. On hearing this, I thought of Michael Douglas in Falling Down. A defense industry engineer, laid off and denied visitation rights to his child, trades in weapons in an escalating rampage, finally being gunned down before his daughter.

The Sheriff in Oregon has asked the invaders to leave, observing that they don’t have the right to come in with their guns and tell them how to live. But I wonder if anybody has asked the Bundy’s to consider what would happen if we all chose to act as they did. Will they take cause with the older software developer, defaulting on his mortgage because ageism makes it difficult to find employment?

The scariest exhibition, however, was the Alabama legislator who avowed on national television last night that the reason we have remained a democracy is because our government is afraid to confront its armed citizens. Comparing the M-1 Abrams tank and fighter jets to the hand-held weaponry in the homes of our citizen militias, we might draw a comparison with the armed knights of the middle age and every farmer with a pitchfork. Comparable parity of weaponry in the Middle Ages did not deter tyranny, nor does it do so today.

The Founders designed an institutional system that pitted the three branches of government against each other in a federation of states with their own security services. This institutional competition was designed to prevent any one branch or level of government from being able to impose its will on citizens. That the legislator suffers from a such a deep misunderstanding of how our constitutional system safeguards our liberties is perhaps the most frightening aspect of this situation, particularly because it has often been the Federal Government that has stepped in to ensure the rights of those intimidated by state and local authorities.

Devolving coercive power down to the citizens seems to promise only that those that relish and glorify violence will be able to terrorize those that don’t. We’ve worked long and hard to escape that condition. Why give in to it now?

Give Me Liberty, and Forgive My Threats

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As I was studying Microsoft’s support for XML Paper Specification last week, for some reason I choose the Gettysburg address as lorem ipsum source material. Lincoln’s great address begins:

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.

It was not the first time that the proposition had been tested. In the aftermath of the Revolutionary War, Europe brought financial pressure on the new nation by refusing to extend credit to its merchants. That class also held a great deal of the debt for the war, and sought to avoid bankruptcy by passing hard credit terms on to subsistence farmers that previously settled their debt in goods. In Massachusetts, the farmers gathered together against the state militia in 1891 in an action known as Shay’s Rebellion, eventually forcing the merchants to relent. Similarly, grain farmers in the western territories rose in the Whiskey Rebellion in an attempt to force the repeal of a tax on whiskey, which served popularly as a means of concentrating grain for transport. It was repeated in the early 1900’s, when the coal mine owners brought in armed guards on rail cars to gun down striking workers.

The central question in all of these cases was how to balance personal property rights against the obligations of the nation to foster the security and survival of its citizens. Over time, the problem of survival has expanded from immediate threat to specific individuals or populations to include sustainability of the social system as a whole. Environmental legislation, financial regulation, immunization laws and social security taxes are all part of that expanded scope.

The appeal of liberty, however, is central to us as a people. Survival is not enough if it comes at the cost of leading lives without hope of meaningful personal accomplishment, and that requires the freedom to make our lives unique. Rules and regulations constraint our latitude. They force our lives into patterned molds.

At my current place of employment, during a cash crunch, the owner complained about the expense of “government” regulations that set minimum landscaping requirements. Walking later in the parking lot, I looked up at the hills, lined with high-end housing, and thought, “Well, that’s your ‘government’ – it’s your neighbors trying to protect the value of their housing.”

There is an essential difference between those that decry government regulation that frustrates their ambitions and those that face poverty and death due to regressive policies that sustain a privileged elite.

Among that elite are families that have title to use federal lands for private commerce. They pay fees to the Bureau of Land Management that monitors their usage to ensure that the land is not damaged or misused – for example, for gold mining rather than the allowed ranching.

We have in the news today two stories of ranchers facing governmental sanctions for misuse of their land rights. In Washington, the Hammond family set a fire to clear invasive brush that was impeding their cattle grazing. The fire spread to federal land, damaging the forest. The Hammonds, known for their support of charity, were given light sentences. Unfortunately, the terms did not meet minimum sentencing guidelines, and they are voluntarily surrendering themselves to serve up to four more years. The elder Hammond “hopes” that he still has a ranch upon his release.

In Nevada, the Bundy family runs a ranch on federal land, owing more than a million dollars in unpaid land use fees. Their response to Land Management actions to settle the arrears was to claim that federal ownership of the land was unconstitutional, and to call upon a posse of extremists from across the West to help them prevent the seizure of their cattle. Faced with a gang toting military assault-style weapons, the BLM backed off.

Emboldened by their victory, the Bundy family has intervened in the Hammond case, gathering a portion of their posse to seize a tourist center on federal land in Washington State.

The Bundy clan justifies its constitutional claims on a specific interpretation of the process used by the Western states to gain statehood. In that era, much of the West’s population was concentrated in cities. The states ceded control of the wild areas to federal control. The Bundy interpretation is that the federal government coerced the transfer of land. The rational interpretation is that the states did not have means to police the wild places, often occupied by hostile natives and outlaws, and so chose to ensure that management of the land was in federal hands, and so financed by the Eastern elites that were interested in securing the continent.

In the intervening years, the civilized West entered an epoch of regulated access sustained by usage fees. The cavalry forts were replaced by tourist centers and ranger stations. Perhaps too soon: the Bundy clan and their ilk are outlaws with modern weapons. Rather than threatened patriots seeking to ensure their voices are not forgotten in the halls of power, they are failed businessmen using the threat of violence to force others to support their privilege.

They should not be forgiven, and as Lincoln said, if they are not brought to heel, the very basis of our system of government is called into doubt.