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The Practice of Freedom: Speech vs. Abusive Speech

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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.

Tea Party Bluish on the Future

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Incredulous regarding claims that the Koch Brothers could be savvy enough to run the nation’s largest privately held corporation but still stupid enough to ignore the onrushing debacle of global climate change, this blogger delved deep into the records of Heartland city council meetings to discover the true goals of the freedom fighters in the Tea Party.

Tired of dominance of federal politics by the high-density “blue” states on the nation’s coasts, the Tea Party reflects the unification of the jealous red states to enjoy all the privileges of their coastal neighbors. Trained to literalism by generations of fire-breathing bible-thumpers, the freedom fighters seek to accomplish their goal in concrete terms: actually flooding the coastal states with the rising oceans generated by global climate change.

The Koch brothers, leading financiers of fundamentalist libertarians, were inspired in their childhoods by the title of their paper products company: Georgia-Pacific. The geographical oxymoron inspired a whimsical vision of uniting their lumber empires. The climate scientists in their pay have produced detailed projections of the final outlines of the US coast once Greenland and Antarctica have shed their ice.

These projections are mirrored in the placement of fracking installations across America. Confronted by the daunting barrier of the Rocky Mountains, Koch geoengineering specialists realized that accomplishment of their vision would require significant lowering of the nation west of the Mississippi.

Deep-well extraction of oil through fracking is a major part of the engineering effort. Not only is it intended to allow the Pacific to breach the Rockies, it is also being conducted to shape the coastline to ensure that the heartland states share equally in the benefits of their future status as coastline states.

This blogger, eager to relocate to friendlier climes, is now considering opportunities in the neo-coastal “blue-to-be” states.

Dying in the Face of Reason

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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

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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.

Anger Got the Best of Me

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I apologize to those who have been following my commentary on Roseburg. I spent most of Friday morning at work with the Kleenex box when I wasn’t holding my head in my hands. I am emotionally worn out, and have been indulging my anger when I should have been focusing my intentions toward the community that has been so deeply wounded. I pray that they find the strength to open their hearts to Christ in this moment, so that he may help them bear the burden of their sorrow.

However, Friday day ended with a message from James Kushner, who heads the Society of St. James, publisher of a number of conservative Christian magazines. His message regarding abortion echoed many of the statements I made in my post on September 30th. He pronounced the Supreme Court decision as the beginning of a long descent into moral darkness for America.

Given the use of abortion as a political issue to redirect attention from inaction on gun control and financial justice issues, I felt obligated, as the shooter in Roseburg specifically targeted Christians, to respond with following message.

Mr. Kushner:

I know that this is a contentious issue, but following the killing of Christians in Roseburg yesterday, your message touches a raw nerve.

As evidenced by Jesus’s crucifixion, laws are no substitute for compassion. I won’t prescribe policy for you – you need to follow your own conscience. But as you do not write of specific spiritual experience, I hope that these thoughts give you some sense of the complexity of the problem of abortion as I navigate it. The spiritual aspect of pregnancy is something that not every man is sensitive to.

I therefore ask your consideration:

1. A sin is a sin because it leaves wound in the soul, delaying our reunion with God.
2. I am concerned by your resort to material reductionism. Life does not begin when the sperm penetrates the ovum. It begins with the infant soul enters the womb. This can happen long before material conception, or well into the process of development, and typically ONLY THE MOTHER KNOWS.
3. Early in development, the fetus is a weak anchor for the infant spirit. The primary wound of an abortion is therefore entrapment of the infant spirit in the womb. A loving father has the capacity to rescue the unborn child. I have done this upon encountering spirits trapped for years after the procedure. They were ready to give life another chance.
4. The wound of an abortion is not less than the wound of growing up unloved or in a household ruled by fear. Rather the opposite, in my judgment. It is up to the parent(s) to negotiate with the unborn spirit the circumstances of its birth. I have participated in one such negotiation, and the consensus of the mother and child was that they should wait until a man was joined to the family. To be explicit – they agreed that the pregnancy should be terminated.

While most pregnancies abort spontaneously, I would prefer that no surgical abortion be committed. However, as a child I was confronted by the story of a young woman in my religious community who came back from Mexico in a pine box. Making abortion illegal is not going to prevent harm when out-of-wedlock pregnancy carries powerful stigma. The only lasting solution is to make our youth stronger. Those of us with the opportunity to create strong children should not judge too harshly those that grew up without that benefit – and we should certainly not force a woman to carry the burden of a weak man’s aggression. As Jesus did, we need to meet people where they are, and focus on healing and learning, rather than beating them down with the cross of their mistakes.

In entering through the “narrow gate” of self-control, I see our struggle with our sexuality as an essential part of the journey, much as is our struggle with gun violence and “freedom” (the “broad gate” that Jesus warned us against). But I doubt that any surgeon finds satisfaction in performing an abortion, unlike the youth who taunted the Christians he murdered yesterday, or the hedge fund manager who takes home a billion dollars a year. Not everything can be settled on this one issue, and abortion policy should not be offered as a cover for those committing far more egregious crimes of governmental negligence.

Brian Balke

The Roseburg Ostrich

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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

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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

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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.

Please Help Me Understand

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After reading the summary of the today’s mass shooting in Roseburg, Ore., I made the mistake of opening the comments. The posts were dominated by Second Amendment prattle – you know, “prying my gun out of my cold, dead hands.”

Not a word of sympathy.

Not an offer of support.

Does a heart beat in your chests?

Or is it that it beats too hard, that you face anxiety every day, and the only way to cauterize your fear is to go out to the gun range and shred a silhouette with automatic weapons fire?

I guess it boils down to this, for me: America’s Gun Lobby is a mechanism that we use to prove that we can’t use the threat of violence to protect ourselves from pain. It binds us to wander in fear through the valley of the shadow of death.

Wandering until we turn our faces upwards to the healing light of love.

How often does a gun clutched to a chest serve any purpose other than to prevent us from “baring our arms” to help each other? To clap shoulders in welcome? To offer and receive an embrace?