Yesterday morning I got up, had my usual coffee and bagel, showered, looked into my bathroom mirror, and smiled. This is election day. The day I go to the polling place alongside every other morally responsible American, and cast my ballot. As with all other election days, some choices I make leave me feeling I've done something good, assisted in positive change, helped a little old lady across the street. Others, not so much, as though I need to go home and take another shower. It's the way I feel when I know the best I can do is enter the boothe, hold my nose, and cast my ballot for the least objectionable, stench-reeking, dirty, rotten scoundrel whose vulgar name I would never say out loud in front of my mother.
What? You missed it? You missed election day? You didn't vote? Well, no, you didn't miss it. And you did vote, several times, a dozen times, more than a dozen, maybe a thousand, or more. In America, every day is election day. Here lately, I've been trying to choose my polling places with a bit more discretion. Growing up in the sixties, the only child of Kennedy Democrats, I was taught that voting was a sacred act, not all that different from going to church.
This particular morning I was certain of doing the right thing. I headed for my local Wachovia Bank branch, today's first stop on my tour of local polling places. A bit nervous, I exited my very used old dodge and headed for the door. Would this be the gunfight at the OK coral? What would I say when they asked, as they surely would, "Why are you closing your account?"
How could I keep my cool? How could I keep from launching into a two-hundred page dissertation detailing the long list of faults and crimes against human dignity of which I found this foul establishment guilty as charged? These are good people who work here. They are not the enemy. The real enemy is far more subtle, more hidden behind cloaks of respectability. These are my neighbors who, as Lama Surya Das reminds me in his Prayer for the New Millennium, "want and need as I do." The criminals I'm after live in gated communities, guarded by rent-a-cops, meet in suites, ride in limos, and, not having to work three jobs waiting tables to make ends meet, usually tip quite poorly.
I approached a nice looking lady at the counter, handed her my check and said, "I'd like to close this account, please." I didn't want trouble. But then, here it came. "I'm sorry, sir. But I can't do that. You'll need to speak to the manager." Careful, I thought to myself. Breathe. Don't reach for that verbal six gun. Repeat. "She's not the enemy... She's not the enemy..." The last time I felt like this was upon many of the occasions in high school when I got kicked out of class and sent to the dean's office. Once again, referred to a higher power for judgment.
With trepidation, I approached the manager's desk, took my seat, and stated yet again the cause for my visit. "I'd like to close this account." She smiled. Good. Maybe this won't be so difficult. She took my info, then the fun started. Here it came. The question. The opportunity to state my case. Would I follow through, or wimp out? "Why are you closing your account?" A moment of pride, courage welled from the depths of my battered consumer soul. I sat up straight, looked into her eyes, and delivered the big one: "Because of Wells Fargo/Wachovia's disproportionate support of the Republican Party and it's policies."
The poor woman could not have looked more surprised had I leaned over the desk and slapped her across the face with a wet and slightly rotten flounder. Ah, I thought. I've landed a point. A moment of awkward silence ensued. "I'm sorry," she said. "Did you say you're closing your account because we don't support the Republican Party enough?" Prior to this moment, I'd always thought I spoke fluent English. Apparently not. Pulling another smelly flounder from my bag, I sallied forth with another attempt. "No. I'm moving my money because this bank disproportionately supports a political party, the Republican Party, whose agenda and policies I am vehemently opposed to." There, I thought. That's got to do it. We have a meeting of the minds.
Reaching for her mouse, she scrolled down her screen, befuddled, taken aback. How to record this frontal assault, this arrogance, this act of defiance of the establishment status quo upon my permanent record? More awkward silence. The system didn't allow for this impertinance. Surely, she must have thought, these things do not happen in civilized society. No one defies the mighty Wells Fargo/Wachovia Empire! She breached the silence that had fallen between us. "I guess I'm just going to have to check other."
Out the door, smiling, I'd made my statement, defied the status quo, struck a blow against the establishment. This must be the kick ass feeling King David had when he let fly the stone that slew Goliath!
Down the street I flew to Freedom First Credit Union, where I struck a second blow for human dignity and freedom. Sitting down with a very nice young lady, Leslie, I opened my new account. I'd studied this phenomenon, done my homework. Respected friends, far more in the financial know than I, told me credit unions are most often locally owned and operated, worked for their members rather than just the stock holders, and that I, indeed, such as I!! actually had a stake in the enterprise! I'd cast my ballots of cash against the tax dodging, foreclosing, blood sucking, CEO bonus taking with my tax money Evil Empire! "Take that you generation of Swine!"
I headed for my next polling place. More ballots to cast. Another statement to make. But this time, it would leave a foul stench my nostrils. I pulled into my local Walmart. Walmart. Was I really going to stoop this low? Pulling my hat down low over my forehead, I hoped no one would recognize me as I passed through the door, a pilgrim in an unholy land.
Yes, this was one of those hold-my-nose choices I had to make, despised though it was. Walmart has a long history of discriminating against women, and generally of treating their employees as chattle. And here was my moral dilemma. I have a choice to make. I can spend a few bucks here, cast a few cash ballots, and have a few left over to put into the collection plate on Sunday morning where God knows my church, not to mention other charities I support, needs such little as I can give. The choices we face on election day are not always pretty, nor easy. The electoral politics of the market place are rarely pure as the driven snow. Nothing high minded about this, I thought as once again I plunked down my hard earned debit card.
In America, every day is election day. Some choices are more good than bad, others more bad than good. There are always choices. And all choices are in between choices. No ballot I cast is without taint of moral ambiguity. Despite most everything I read these days, I'm sure the big banks, and even Walmart, do a little good every now and then. Even if it's no more than providing a decent job to some of my neighbors while saving me a few bucks to give to causes I really believe in.
Another election day has passed. Having cast my ballots, I return home where I will get online and puruse the daily records of humanities' endless struggle to find, let alone do, the right thing. This is not unimportant, though I often find it infuriating. There's war going on. A war in which, like it or not, I am a combatant. A war declared by the rich against the rest of us. A war of budgets that take from those who can least afford it, and give to those who already have more than their fair share. Daily we read of it's disasters and the hooray for me and to hell with you battles.
Naysayers will tell you it doesn't mean shit to Wells Fargo/Wachovia or any of the rest of the big banks that one guy moves a few hundred bucks out of their coffers. They lie. What if the one gets multiplied by a million? ten million? tens of millions? An avalanche starts with the slipping of a single stone. Movements that bring down tyrants begin with one pissed off sister who decides she's mad as hell and isn't going to take this lying down.
Goliath is big, but he doesn't always win. Every once in a while, we David's get to strike a blow for the little guys.
Mahalo,
The Jawbone
Thursday, May 12, 2011
Tuesday, May 3, 2011
Death of a Terrorist: Is the Celebration Misplaced?
"Being rational and free, human beings are capable of being diabolic. This is a feat which no animal can duplicate, for no animal is sufficiently clever, sufficiently purposeful, sufficiently strong-willed or sufficiently moral to be a devil." (The Perennial Philosophy, p. 229, Aldous Huxley)
Dancing in the streets. Waving the flag. Boisterous gatherings from Times Square to Pennsylvania Ave. to L.A. and everywhere main street USA. Understandable. Let us be clear. There is no doubt evil in this world of ours. Evil that must be confronted, and, when absolutely necessary, eliminated. Such is part and parcel of the tragedy of human existence. Caution, however, should prevail. Let us not be overzealous. Zealots, it seems, are always blind.
I remember where I was when word came that JFK had been shot in Dallas. Mrs. Trinko's seventh grade American History class at Breckenridge Jr. High School. I was sitting behind Cathy Webb when another teacher knocked on the door, entered, and gave us the news.
When you're in the seventh grade, there's not enough lived experience to allow you to process such an event. I doubt most of us could even have spelled assassination. In a moment everything changed. We'd felt safe, but now, who knew if we were safe or not? I remembered my Dad telling my Mom one night in a conversation they thought I couldn't hear from my bedroom down the hall. "If the sirens go off, take Alan, and go downstairs to the shelter." Was that what was coming? Was it time to "duck and cover?" This was the moment that defined our generation.
Flash forward. September 11, 2001. The event that began to define my daughters' generation. I was probably one of the last people to find out what had happened. We were living in NH, and, as we all remember, it was a beautiful day. I got up, looked out the window, flipped on Surf Line, heard the waves were up--storm surge--tossed my board and wet suit in the back of the truck and made for the coast. An hour and a half before mid-tide. I could get there just in time.
Beaches in NH and ME, especially those frequented by surfers, are rocky and somewhat secluded. What summer crowds we are plagued with are gone by then. We rode for a couple hours, then just hung out, enjoying the day. Pease air base was just down the road. Huge tankers lumbered in and out every hour or so. Nothing unusual. A little body surfing on the low stuff and I decided to head home. 4:30 in the afternoon. Tossed the gear in back of the truck, headed out, and flipped on "All Things Considered." The coastal route 1A is lined with some pretty fancy digs, and I wondered why all the flags were at half-staff. It didn't take long to find out.
"Do you think an anti-missile system would have helped New York?" or some such thoughts were the first words I heard. To call this a WTF moment is an understatement. First thought: Somebody finally dropped the big one. Second thought: Is NYC still there? If memory serves, it was a good ten to fifteen minutes before they got around to repeating the headline. About the time I answered my cell to discover my wife, sobbing, had been trying to get in touch with me all day. "This isn't over, is it? It's not going to stop, is it?" was all she could get out.
As the horrors of the day were played again and again and again that night, I remember thinking how close to the brink we were. "What does it mean, Daddy? Is there going to be a war?"
I'd grown up with a Dad in defense, with dinner table stories of what the inside of Cheyenne Mountain looked like, bomb shelters in back yards and basements, the Cuban Missile Crisis. It meant our jets were in the air, our submarines at launch depth, missile crews out in the Montana desert on high alert. Nervous fingers on hair triggers. Nobody on either side of the ocean slept well that night. But we all woke up to a different world, again....
Fast forward. Okay. Ten years after. Got the bad guy. "Justice has been served." True enough, I suppose. And we didn't wipe out half a continent in the process. So maybe in some tragic way it's a step forward. But I think we disrespect 9/11 if we don't look a little deeper than that.
Violence, wrote Reinhold Niebuhr, is not limited to the use of the knife or the gun. The overt violence of the knife or gun is but an outward manifesting of the more subtle violence of real or perceived injustices to our fellows, to nature, and our willed separation from the Divine Source of Our Being.
Returning to Huxley on human suffering, at length: "The truth is, of course, that we are all organically related to God, to Nature, and to our fellow men. If every human being were constantly and consciously in a proper relationship with his divine, natural and social environments there would be only so much suffering as Creation makes inevitable. But actually most human beings are chronically in an improper relation to God, Nature and some at least of their fellows. The results of these wrong relationships are manifest on the social level as wars, revolutions, exploitation and disorder; on the natural level, as waste and exhaustion of irreplaceable resources; on the biological level, as degenerative diseases and the deterioration of racial stocks; on the moral level, as an overweening bumptiousness; and on the spiritual level, as blindness to divine Reality and complete ignorance of the reason and purpose of human existence." (p. 233.)
As Huxley is careful to point out, this is a fundamental truth of every religious expression; true for the Jew, Muslim, Hindu, Christian or obscure aboriginal tribesman. Everything stands or falls apart on proper relationship.
More precisely, if we are truly concerned about the violence of the gun and the knife; we cannot be content merely to trade eye for eye, tooth for tooth, life for life. We have to go deeper than that and look at the root causes of suffering and address those issues such as economic inequality, poverty, and the insidious darkness that one finds in every religious fanatic--the tendency to elevate my faith to a position of absolute rightness against and above all others. More violence has been visited upon humankind in the name of that absurdity than any other. Killing in the name of God has to be the ultimate expression of human evil.
Is this celebration a bit misplaced? Probably. At least it's a bit too exuberant for my comfort. If only because so much of what I hear in the streets seems less a celebration of justice served and more of revenge carried out.
Ten years after. Okay. Got the bad guy. Now where do we go?
Dancing in the streets. Waving the flag. Boisterous gatherings from Times Square to Pennsylvania Ave. to L.A. and everywhere main street USA. Understandable. Let us be clear. There is no doubt evil in this world of ours. Evil that must be confronted, and, when absolutely necessary, eliminated. Such is part and parcel of the tragedy of human existence. Caution, however, should prevail. Let us not be overzealous. Zealots, it seems, are always blind.
I remember where I was when word came that JFK had been shot in Dallas. Mrs. Trinko's seventh grade American History class at Breckenridge Jr. High School. I was sitting behind Cathy Webb when another teacher knocked on the door, entered, and gave us the news.
When you're in the seventh grade, there's not enough lived experience to allow you to process such an event. I doubt most of us could even have spelled assassination. In a moment everything changed. We'd felt safe, but now, who knew if we were safe or not? I remembered my Dad telling my Mom one night in a conversation they thought I couldn't hear from my bedroom down the hall. "If the sirens go off, take Alan, and go downstairs to the shelter." Was that what was coming? Was it time to "duck and cover?" This was the moment that defined our generation.
Flash forward. September 11, 2001. The event that began to define my daughters' generation. I was probably one of the last people to find out what had happened. We were living in NH, and, as we all remember, it was a beautiful day. I got up, looked out the window, flipped on Surf Line, heard the waves were up--storm surge--tossed my board and wet suit in the back of the truck and made for the coast. An hour and a half before mid-tide. I could get there just in time.
Beaches in NH and ME, especially those frequented by surfers, are rocky and somewhat secluded. What summer crowds we are plagued with are gone by then. We rode for a couple hours, then just hung out, enjoying the day. Pease air base was just down the road. Huge tankers lumbered in and out every hour or so. Nothing unusual. A little body surfing on the low stuff and I decided to head home. 4:30 in the afternoon. Tossed the gear in back of the truck, headed out, and flipped on "All Things Considered." The coastal route 1A is lined with some pretty fancy digs, and I wondered why all the flags were at half-staff. It didn't take long to find out.
"Do you think an anti-missile system would have helped New York?" or some such thoughts were the first words I heard. To call this a WTF moment is an understatement. First thought: Somebody finally dropped the big one. Second thought: Is NYC still there? If memory serves, it was a good ten to fifteen minutes before they got around to repeating the headline. About the time I answered my cell to discover my wife, sobbing, had been trying to get in touch with me all day. "This isn't over, is it? It's not going to stop, is it?" was all she could get out.
As the horrors of the day were played again and again and again that night, I remember thinking how close to the brink we were. "What does it mean, Daddy? Is there going to be a war?"
I'd grown up with a Dad in defense, with dinner table stories of what the inside of Cheyenne Mountain looked like, bomb shelters in back yards and basements, the Cuban Missile Crisis. It meant our jets were in the air, our submarines at launch depth, missile crews out in the Montana desert on high alert. Nervous fingers on hair triggers. Nobody on either side of the ocean slept well that night. But we all woke up to a different world, again....
Fast forward. Okay. Ten years after. Got the bad guy. "Justice has been served." True enough, I suppose. And we didn't wipe out half a continent in the process. So maybe in some tragic way it's a step forward. But I think we disrespect 9/11 if we don't look a little deeper than that.
Violence, wrote Reinhold Niebuhr, is not limited to the use of the knife or the gun. The overt violence of the knife or gun is but an outward manifesting of the more subtle violence of real or perceived injustices to our fellows, to nature, and our willed separation from the Divine Source of Our Being.
Returning to Huxley on human suffering, at length: "The truth is, of course, that we are all organically related to God, to Nature, and to our fellow men. If every human being were constantly and consciously in a proper relationship with his divine, natural and social environments there would be only so much suffering as Creation makes inevitable. But actually most human beings are chronically in an improper relation to God, Nature and some at least of their fellows. The results of these wrong relationships are manifest on the social level as wars, revolutions, exploitation and disorder; on the natural level, as waste and exhaustion of irreplaceable resources; on the biological level, as degenerative diseases and the deterioration of racial stocks; on the moral level, as an overweening bumptiousness; and on the spiritual level, as blindness to divine Reality and complete ignorance of the reason and purpose of human existence." (p. 233.)
As Huxley is careful to point out, this is a fundamental truth of every religious expression; true for the Jew, Muslim, Hindu, Christian or obscure aboriginal tribesman. Everything stands or falls apart on proper relationship.
More precisely, if we are truly concerned about the violence of the gun and the knife; we cannot be content merely to trade eye for eye, tooth for tooth, life for life. We have to go deeper than that and look at the root causes of suffering and address those issues such as economic inequality, poverty, and the insidious darkness that one finds in every religious fanatic--the tendency to elevate my faith to a position of absolute rightness against and above all others. More violence has been visited upon humankind in the name of that absurdity than any other. Killing in the name of God has to be the ultimate expression of human evil.
Is this celebration a bit misplaced? Probably. At least it's a bit too exuberant for my comfort. If only because so much of what I hear in the streets seems less a celebration of justice served and more of revenge carried out.
Ten years after. Okay. Got the bad guy. Now where do we go?
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