Tag: cabaretic

Eleven months after President Obama took office, many Progressives are feeling understandably shortchanged.  We were led to believe that finally a candidate with authentic liberal credentials had a legitimate shot at the White House, and so we embraced pragmatism when the most liberal candidates dropped out of the race.  To be sure, there were several voices screaming out that Obama, if elected, would be far more indebted to the center then he ever would be to the left.  These were loudest in the blogosphere, by far, and a few of them have recently exercised the cathartic, but ultimately hollow right to say I-told-you-so.  This song and dance has historical antecedents that stretch back decades, but it would be best if there were no need to repeat the process once more.  

I think we may have put the cart before the horse.  I think we might have assumed that reform could be accomplished purely by political means, instead of reform being reached by grassroots mobilization that forced government’s hand.  Recently we have become aware, once more, that the American political system is not designed for sweeping change.  The rules of the Senate were instituted to ensure that those with sober contemplation, not rash passion, ultimately won in the end.  We can lament this fact and rightly decry it as anti-democratic and elitist, but the truth of the matter is that this is how the system works.  I don’t think that the President failed us nearly as much as the system did.  In mentioning this, I’d much rather focus on going forward than licking our wounds.  

I understand why we placed our trust in Barack Obama.  We recognized the destruction wrought by eight years of neoconservative rule and with it the disconcerting notion that government predicated on evil can level its opponents and eviscerate easily.  That it is much more difficult to build up rather than ruin is perhaps the toughest lesson of all.  But with it comes the realization that established precedent is nearly impossible to reverse when passed.  We may be unhappy with the scope of the bill, but we would be wise to celebrate that if someday Republican rule returns, it will be difficult for them to dismantle that which will be signed into law shortly.  We should not accept this as any final word on the matter, but neither should we refuse to note how an eighteen-round fisticuff with the American mentality ultimately turned out in the end.  This country was forced to confront some of the most massive fault lines that lie deceptively harmless most of the time, until seismic tremors threaten to shake us apart.            

Any worthy social movement promising transformative change begins among an oft-quoted small group of thoughtful, committed citizens.  The Civil Rights Movement, Women’s Rights, and our latest struggle for LGBT marriage equality fomented and were codified from well outside the Beltway.  Though ultimately legislation was proposed and passed by means of the Legislative branch, the energy and forward momentum swept up a million unsung heroes whose names may be lost to history or relegated to obscure footnotes, but whose bravery and achievements cannot be understated.  

While it is touching that during the Presidential Election we temporarily shelved our skepticism as a result of being star-struck, we should not have failed to recognize that leadership comes from everywhere and every corner, not just the occupant of the White House.  We focused our entire attention and hung our hopes upon the success or failure of one person, and while it is true that one person can change the world, his or her leadership ability must be augmented by other leaders.  These inspirational individuals are frequently not pulled from the ranks of public service.  Their occupations vary, just as those who desire change pull from all walks of life and all vocations.  It is more leaders and more passion that we need.

Dr. King may have been the towering giant of the Civil Rights Movement, but Ralph Abernathy, Bayard Rustin, Ella Baker, Fred Shuttlesworth, and many others less well-known filled out the inner circle that produced progress on a scale that is still difficult to fully comprehend.  Along with the notable names are a million others who are the pride of their city or town, but little more than strangers in other places.  I hardly need note that none of the public figures I have outlined were members of the House or the Senate.  Reformers are rarely beholden to the political game because it requires a kind of willingness to bend to the prevailing will and howling winds of popular sentiment, else one find oneself out of power.  So long as this is the case, real reform measures will be stymied or watered down during the process of deliberation.  

I almost need not mention that Congress is meant to work for us, but that it only pays attention to our concerns when we articulate them with force, clarity, and with united purpose.  When we are united behind a cause, not a personality, and especially not a party, then the sky is the limit.  Making our dreams a reality requires more than one election cycle and we ought to really contemplate why it took a once-in-a-generation candidate to patch up the variety of competing interests and disconnected factions of the Democratic party to achieve a sweeping victory.

Instead of cursing our fate and gnashing our teeth out of betrayal, we should re-organize, but this time around the issues that our elected representatives either will not touch, or will whittle away to ineffectual mush.  We have before us a fantastic opportunity to change our priorities and establish successful strategies.  Legend has it that right before they put the rope around his neck, the labor leader Joe Hill stated, “Don’t Mourn!  Organize!”  Liberalism is alive and well and if we learn from this experiment we will not have failed.  The new birth of freedom long promised is ours for the taking, provided we grasp hold of it.  We will live to fight another day.    

A few weeks back, I wrote about my trials, travails, and tribulations achieving food stamps.  I am pleased to report that due to my own persistence and the fantastic support of an advocacy agency, I was granted an EBT card.  Earlier today I trudged through areas of town which have not seen much in the way of a plow or a shovel.  I literally did have to walk a half a mile uphill in the snow both ways to arrive at the proper place, though I’ll save that lecture for another time.  Since I have joined the ranks of the unemployed, I’ve had to swallow quite a bit of pride, which isn’t always a bad thing, all told.  The complications that went into obtaining food stamps were easily explained, once I met with the proper person, and with resolution I have no further griping to share on that matter.  

A well-designed website imploring those wishing to apply for food stamps to submit their claim by mail, after, of course, entering pertinent information and printing out several pages of a lengthy form sounds attractive enough.  However, I learned that while the mechanism may exist, budget shortfalls prevented the DC government from being able to hire the workers needed to process internet-based claims.  It would not be much of a stretch to deem this situation an glaring example of an unfunded mandate.  Reform cannot proceed without the allocation of funds and while we often are curtly dismissive of throwing money at a problem, granting low income citizens the ability to feed themselves somehow doesn’t seem to be on par with all of these anti-underclass talking points that find their way into the mouths of Republicans and Republican politicians.

If one considers Maslow’s famous hierarchy of needs, then food falls right down there at the bottom of the pyramid.  Without the literal requirements for human survival, it’s tough to be a Welfare Queen or milker of the system.  According to Maslow, it’s only after our base needs for survival are met that anyone could ever even entertain the notion to willfully freeload.

With their physical needs relatively satisfied, the individual’s safety needs take precedence and dominate behavior. These needs have to do with people’s yearning for a predictable, orderly world in which injustice and inconsistency are under control, the familiar frequent and the unfamiliar rare. In the world of work, these safety needs manifest themselves in such things as a preference for job security, grievance procedures for protecting the individual from unilateral authority, savings accounts, insurance policies, and the like.

But until one has the security of knowing he or she will be fed on a daily basis without having to worry about potential financial famine, safety is not a concern.

As for my own situation, my packet of information sat on a desk for over a month, unprocessed.  Because a meeting with a claims associate regarding whether or not food stamps will be granted or denied must, by rule, be granted and scheduled within 30 days, once I was approved I was given a month and one week’s worth of groceries I should have received earlier had everything proceeded in a timely fashion.  Though I received only $200 a month in food stamps, which is approximately half of what my grocery bill is for the same period, I am not about to look a gift horse in the mouth.  In all fairness to the DC Food Stamp program, it has won awards for how promptly and effectively it processes claims and while my situation is uncommon, it is hardly unusual when one considers the food stamp programs in other states.  In a fairer society, I would have had my entire food budget subsidized, saving me from having to rob Peter to pay Paul as so many of us have to do these days, but perhaps someday we will learn that though we have a tremendous amount of financial resources in this country to go round, even in times of recession, we spread them around unequally and in so doing shortchange the least among us.          

Part of the problem is the stigma and the misinformation that still persists regarding accepting government aid of any kind, food stamps being merely one example.  One would think that welfare cheats salivate at the very idea of eating from the public trough, if you’d believe the stereotype.  DC Hunger Solutions, the advocacy agency who so kindly went to bat for me and got my situation resolved, corrects many of the myths and stigmas surrounding food stamps.  

Only 83% of eligible District residents, and 36% of eligible low-income working families, receive food stamps. Every $1 of food stamps spent in the community generates $1.85 in local economic activity. D.C. would gain millions in federal funds by signing up eligible households – funds that would stimulate the local economy. People who work sometimes assume they are not eligible for food stamps, or that time-off from work is required to apply. This is not true. A family of 3 with a minimum wage earner could be eligible for over $3,000 annually in benefits, and working families can complete phone interviews rather than go to the food stamp office in-person.

The true impact of the Economic Stimulus Package has become a political football of sorts, in part because what it promised could not be easily measured or highlighted in concrete detail.  If, however, we shifted at least some of the focus towards fully funding both the programs that provide food to the poor and the monies necessary to provide more assistance, then these would be highly visible symbols of what good government is capable of if it puts its mind to it and does not get distracted with superficial squabbling or red tape disasters.  When close to two dollars worth of gain comes as a result of every one dollar spent, one cannot overlook the overall benefit.  We often believe that reform of any sort ought to be an awe inspiring and highly complicated matter, when sometimes the simplest solutions are the best.  Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.  

While I and millions of DC residents are cleaning up after a huge snow storm, I look out my window this morning and notice strangers giving aid and assistance to drivers of cars stuck out in the wintry mix.  Stodgy, suspicious, ponderous Washington has momentarily set aside its default setting to lend a hand.  It is only when events this big and massive disrupt the status quo that this city shrinks in size and shared humanity begins to creep into the proceedings.  DC is a city full of cross-currents and diversity, so it is rare that anyone is truly on the same page with another for very long.  A Type A city ruled by Type A people means that often everyone is in a hurry going nowhere for no good reason, utterly consumed with their work to the detriment of every other facet of their lives.  Though retailers will undoubtedly even lose money here in these crucial days leading up to Christmas, I can’t say that I am entirely saddened by the development.      

Had this been any average year, the media would have run half a dozen stories (or more) gently chiding us for again, yet another year, completely destroying the meaning of the Christmas season.  Many of us would assume our time-honored roles, mournfully nodding our heads up in down to signify that we agreed, but could find no solution to stop the orgiastic aspects of capitalism from overrunning the most important of holidays.  A recession ought not only provide purely negative consequences.  If we can learn from it, then all is not lost.  If we are to face discomfort and pain, my hope is that we can understand that simplicity is a virtue, not a hindrance, and that accumulating possessions is a bit like accumulating inches of snow.  In the beginning, it’s fun, but after a while, it begin to pose a serious problem.  Not only that, others who believe in the grass is greener principle have a tendency to envy accumulation without understanding its notable drawbacks.

I personally am enjoying fewer crowds, less traffic, and less panicked looks.  That it took a weakened economy and with it the loss of buying power surprises me not a bit.  If the free market promised freedom from producing more problems than it fixes, I would be wholeheartedly in its corner.  Some of the strongest people I ever met were those of my grandparents’ generation, who had faced a Great Depression and a World War, and whose iron resolve and stoic attitude showed the results of having gone fifteen rounds with hardship and tragedy and emerged stronger than steel.  No shrinking violets were they.    

As for these times, the only time I saw anything remotely similar to the traditional Christmas insanity was Friday of this past week, shortly before the snow fell, when thousands upon thousands of residents in our nation’s capital rushed madly to scoop up enough provisions and finish up their seasonal shopping.  Everyone seems to be cutting back this year and I certainly am as well.  Some have mentioned that the tinsel and electric excitement that requires a robust pocketbook is lacking, making this a bummer of a Season’s Greetings, at which point I suppose I have to note that I have grown so cynical about Christmas reality that I have embraced a kind of deliberately sparse rendering.  All that twinkles is not gold.  Some might assume that less money in the bank is the true War on Christmas™, though I believe that to be the overwhelming opinion of bankers.          

The generation of my parents’ parents have been romanticized as “The Greatest Generation” but while the moniker is fitting, I saw nothing particularly superhuman about them.  They were indebted to the same flaws as humanity has displayed ever since humans began to walk upright.  If we faced the same challenges and abject perils as they, I am firmly convinced that we too would respond the identical way they did.  The human body and the human mind have a way of being incredibly adaptive to adversity.  It is fashionable in some circles to take pot shots at Baby Boomers or their children out of some desire to shame us all into acting properly or that we might better appreciate that which has fallen into our lap, but I will refrain from that line here.  We have been incredibly fortunate, certainly, but neither do I think beating us over the head with our privilege is much of a solution.  My hope is that we will retain the memory of what it felt like to not revel in excess and that we will apply those examples to our own lives and to the lives of those who we directly influence.    

If this were truly some pitched battle against all that is sacred and holy against Christmas, then the true enemies would not be a secular society gone wildly astray, having embraced the confusion of political correctness.  Instead, the enemies would be those people and things which fool us into thinking that we are the center of the universe and that there is no need to take into account the lives and struggles of our fellow beings.  As I said before, 364 days out of the year, this city runs on the twin forces of preoccupation and workaholicism, but it has only been now when the roads are still largely impassible, many businesses and places are still unreachable or closed, and public transportation is barely functional that we recognize the folly of our ways.  Still, I imagine a thousand nervous fingers madly punching keys on their Blackberries, expecting a fresh batch of places to go, people to see, and things to do.  

I know personally of many people who believe that bringing their work home with them aids and assists those in need.  Worthy causes exist, of course, and the belief among many is working themselves to death provides help to those who would otherwise not have it.  I know others who have built their entire self-esteem, self-image, and self in their vocation, at the expense of any other facet in their life.  This is tragedy to the extreme.  We lose our humanity when we become robotic and monolithic.  DC needs a snow day like this to re-think its priorities and my hope is that it doesn’t take a series of blizzards, both literal and figurative, to change the conventional wisdom.

I have recently been musing over a particular passage of scripture.  The frustration I and many have felt regarding the health care legislation that has stalled in the Congress has led me to wonder if perhaps a solution exists that has never been attempted prior to now.  The power of the blogosphere has provided me a sense of solace and inspiration that comes from rational explanation and insightful commentary, and I cannot overstate my confidence in the visionary souls among us.  It is a temptation to lament and understate our own capacity to bring about change, but quite another one to solicit answers from the passionate, knowing that through collective action, much good can be brought to pass.  It is in the spirit of facilitating dialogue that I write this post, my prayer being that it will find an audience and give rise to subsequent discussion.  

As a bit of needed exposition, St. Paul wrote an epistle to the church in Corinth, a city which had fallen into division and disorder.  The Corinthian church, mirroring the makeup of the city where it existed, had been fraught by immorality and spiritual immaturity.  In a letter whose endearing images and passages are still in wide use today, an age where strict devotion to organized religion is increasingly on the wane, our own skepticism cannot yet overtake the power and thrust of the text itself.  Shortly after outlining a beautiful definition of the concept of selfless love, Paul spends several subsequent chapter, talking about incorporating this degree of unconditional devotion into practice in one’s daily life.        

Pursue love, and desire spiritual gifts, but especially the gift of speaking what God has revealed. When a person speaks in another language, he doesn’t speak to people but to God. No one understands him. His spirit is speaking mysteries.

But when a person speaks what God has revealed, he speaks to people to help them grow, to encourage them, and to comfort them. When a person speaks in another language, he helps himself grow. But when a person speaks what God has revealed, he helps the church grow.

Now I wish that all of you could speak in other languages, but especially that you could prophesy. The person who prophesies is more important than the person who speaks in another language, unless he interprets it so that the church may be built up.

Language is a construct of humanity.  To someone who does not speak a particular tongue, the sounds themselves appear mysterious, impenetrable, and indecipherable.  Moreover, there would be no point to a system of language at all if only one person spoke it.  Language, and indeed, the richness of language depends on the number of people who speak it and whether or not they share their own spiritual gifts with everyone else.  At times, we seem to believe that talking one-on-one with God or with our muse of inspiration is sufficient to undertaking the vast number of challenges which face each and every one of us.  Injustice is rarely ever consigned to one singular person, nor can one individual begin to turn the tide without help from others.      

Our earthly existence is a basically selfish, self-centered one.  What drives our economy and feeds our desire for riches is a sense of private ownership.  We would go so far as to copyright our own thoughts if we thought others might use them without permission or if there was money to be made in selling them to others.  I, me, and mine are the search engine keywords that drives capitalism, but they are utterly incompatible with one’s spiritual life.  Imagine if we all believed that our own innovations were to be used for the benefit of all, rather than for the benefit of a privileged few.  Indeed, if we spoke what God has revealed to us and translated it into the common vernacular rather than insisting it be phrased in a different language that locks out others from understanding, how many problems could be solved!      

Far too many people are covetous of what has been granted them by God and in so doing, they fail to understand that spiritual gifts are given to benefit all of us.  If one’s spiritual gift is that of forming a new language of a new social movement, how much richer would that language of reform be if everyone spoke the same tongue, not just the inner circle.  Ego has no part in the metaphorical church of which each of us is a part.  I have seen far too many movements and far too many groups established for altruistic means collapse under the weight of division caused by elitism or by covetousness.  If one is blessed by the gift of far-sighted analysis, don’t lock it away from sight!  Explain it to us, since which that which was granted you may have come from your brain, but it is God who gave you the ability to think it.

The members of the Corinthian church were using the gift of language for their own benefit, to make themselves feel better about themselves.  Clearly, the problem stemmed from the fact that there were too many foreign language speakers in the gathering and not enough translators.  This runs contrary to the health and growth of any established group.  Our greatest aim is to treat others in the same way we wish they would treat us and if we are granted talent in other areas, well and good.  But our talents are worthless if they merely lift us up and lock others out.  Humility isn’t merely a virtue we are to follow for its own sake for some sort of aesthetic rationale—it is a moral guidepost that points us towards a healthy society.  Lest we forget, it isn’t all about us.  It was never all about us.  It never will be all about us.    

In this circumstance, we have the answer.  We have always had the answer.  The answer, of course, is complicated by a day to day existence which runs contrary to that which we need for health and peace of mind.  Isolating ourselves from the madcap pace and twisted expectations of the world is no solution.  Any worthy challenge seems daunting at face value.  I have said this before and I will say it once more.  We must get our own selves and our own house in order before we can ever expect to reverse course. One cannot begin to love anyone else until he or she loves himself or herself.  By this I do not mean romantic love or narcissistic obsession, but rather a genuine point at which we make peace with our own failings, our own shortcomings, and our own flaws.  Until we do this, ego will drive us and with it a lust for individual achievement will follow close behind.  Those two things give rise to the inevitable hierarchies and unfair systems which are the antithesis of equality and social evolution.  The only requirement in life is love.  Everything else, as the saying goes, is just commentary.                

A recently released survey stated what many of us had long suspected, namely that the sexting hysteria is vastly exaggerated.  Sexting is merely the latest in a series of overwrought histrionics to consume and articulate the fears of parents.  Before that it was rainbow parties.  Before that it was sex bracelets.  Nothing inflames passions more than the mortal fear that children are being led astray by a culture of evil that is growing more corrupt by the microsecond.  This degree of hysteria never stops at those we deem most vulnerable, which is a big part of the problem.  In a massive rush to judgment, we impose our will without understanding the context.

To provide a bit of needed contrast, here are a couple examples of past moral panics, which at least to these eyes seem as though they could easily make their way onto today’s cable news cycle.

In Victorian Britain, campaigning journalist William Thomas Stead, (editor of the Pall Mall Gazette) procured a 13 year-old girl for £5, an amount then equal to a labourer’s monthly wage (see the Eliza Armstrong case). Panic over the “traffic in women” rose to a peak in England in the 1880s. At the time, white slavery was a natural target for defenders of public morality and crusading journalists. The ensuing outcry led to the passage of antislavery legislation in Parliament.

However, it has been reported that the most extreme claims “were almost certainly exaggerated”. Investigations of alleged abductions in Victorian England often found that the purported “victims” had participated voluntarily. Still, the “climate of prudery” prevalent in the late Victorian era made for easy scandalization of almost anything sexual, and various prohibitions were enacted. (emphasis mine) Parliament passed the 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act, raising the age of consent from thirteen to sixteen in that year.

This is, of course, not to say that the fervor over the sex trafficking which continues today has no basis in reality or fact, but rather that once something this patently inflammatory comes to light, for every genuine instance worthy of outrage, someone jumps on board the train to make a profit or to grab the attention of a ravenous public.  (See Woods, Tiger, et al.)  Nor is this meant to somehow negate the hard work or passion of activists in our age who do us all a great service by voicing and reporting upon the human trafficking of women that occurs on a far too frequent basis.  What I am saying is that the real instances of oppression are damaging enough and shocking enough without the need of clearly fabricated cases that effectively bring the matter to a raging boil.  When even one eventually disproved example enters the picture, many people have a tendency to lose interest or to discount the entire movement as a whole.  All of that hard work for nothing.  This may not be fair, but it is the reality any group clamoring for reform must entertain.  

Not only that, laws that are enacted to pacify massive societal outcry often find themselves being used for nefarious purposes that their original intent never implied, nor intended.  

In our country, a similar panic broke out around the same time as that of the UK.

A subsequent scare occurred in the United States in the early twentieth century, peaking in 1910, when Chicago’s U.S. attorney announced (without giving details) that an international crime ring was abducting young girls in Europe, importing them, and forcing them to work in Chicago brothels. These claims, and the panic they inflamed, led to the passage of the United States White-Slave Traffic Act of 1910. It also banned the interstate transport of females for immoral purposes. Its primary intent was to address prostitution and immorality. The act is better known as the Mann Act, after James Robert Mann, an American lawmaker.

The Mann Act was frequently used as a blanket piece of legislation to deliberately ensnare those who happened to defy existing social mores or who spoke out publicly against the status quo.  Though usually used to prosecute men involved with loose women or who pursued relationships with underage girls, prosecutors rarely stopped there.  Jack Johnson, the World Heavyweight Champion of his age and first Black sports superhero, was unfairly prosecuted under the Mann Act because of his fondness for white women, particularly prostitutes.  Though Johnson’s dalliances were consensual and not adulterous, he never made any attempt to conceal them, which many a conservative figure found odorous and deplorable.  As an aside,

In September, 2008, sixty-two years after Johnson’s death, the United States Congress passed a resolution to recommend that the President grant a pardon for his 1913 conviction, in acknowledgment of its racist overtones, and in order to exonerate Johnson and recognize his contribution to boxing. In April 2009, Senator John McCain of Arizona joined Representative Peter T. King of New York in a call for a posthumous pardon for the boxing legend by President Barack Obama.

Charlie Chaplin’s unashamed leftist views led him to be indicted under the auspices of the Mann Act, damaging his reputation and leading him to leave the United States to live in exile in Switzerland for the rest of his life.  The Mann Act seems to be an equal opportunity offender of sorts, since even women found themselves on the wrong side of the law, as Canadian author Elizabeth Smart found out in the 1940’s.  One would have thought by now that we would have learned that legislating morality is both a very bad idea and quite impossible.  Still, some persist in pushing it, even though the end result almost always backfires.        

Going back to the idea of protecting children and teenagers by way of communal panicked cry, gallons of ink, and legion of self-proclaimed experts in the field, I think at times many of us believe that while we might not be able to control our own impulses or desires or even control the forces which push us in directions we do not wish to go, we can at least assert our force of will upon our children or, for that matter, someone else’s children.  However, that is a very dangerous and deeply unfair assertion upon which to base any act, because it completely removes free will from the equation.  The Mann Act might have been crafted to protect women at face value, but it ended up being applied in the same ways and to the same extent that keep women from having control over their own bodies or from being able to make their own decisions for themselves.  This condescendingly Paternalist point of view persists into our day and the sexting nontroversy is part and parcel of it.  If only we could, in all seriousness, claim that we know better.

Simply because adolescents aren’t legal adults yet doesn’t mean that they can’t make informed, healthy choices for themselves.  Teens are probably much more inclined to use their sexuality in responsible ways then we give them credit for, but instead we are consumed with the ones who don’t.  This would be like believing all citizens of a country are exactly like its law-breakers.  Furthermore, it’s a myth that adults are somehow supremely evolved enough that they don’t end up exhibiting childish behavior on a frequent basis.  We like to believe otherwise, of course, but all one needs to do is read the first ten comments on any web forum and that assertion flies right out the window.  No troll I have ever met could ever be confused as mature and rational.  Many of them are likely older than I am, and I’m merely pushing 30.  The superficial facade we display to the world outside of the internet apparently stops the instant we log on and start typing madly away.          

A quote from the movie American Beauty has stuck with me over the years.  In it, Lester Burnham, Kevin Spacey’s character, describes the struggles of his rebellious daughter, Jane.

Janie’s a pretty typical teenager. Angry, insecure, confused. I wish I could tell her that’s all going to pass, but I don’t want to lie to her.

True.  But it doesn’t mean we have to linger in a state of arrested development, either.  Immediately after I reflect upon this quote, a very familiar refrain comes to mind, one that has grown truer and truer with every passing year.

When I was a child, I spoke like a child, thought like a child, and reasoned like a child. When I became an adult, I no longer used childish ways.  Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.

Trust, love, respect, hope, faith, empathy, and compassion.  These are adult traits and these are virtues which promise not just the assumption of the mantle of adulthood, but bring us into greater community with our fellow person.  Once having adopted these things, there is no need for moral panic.  Upon living them, there is understanding in the place of fear, love in the place of hate, shared purpose in the place of division, trust in the place of suspicion, and compassion in the place of anger.  I would hope that we would wish to negate the charges of hypocrisy slung back and forth like some unceasing war with no end game ever even proposed.  The boldest example we give to our children and to other peoples’ children is our own conduct and our own behavior.  We lead by example in ways we cannot even begin to fathom.

Julia Angwin’s column entitled How Facebook is Making Friending Obsolete provides a revealing look into the ways that supposedly free services like Facebook and Twitter are mining the data of unsuspecting users for profit.  The tactic is unethical at best, but it highlights just how desperate some companies are to turn a profit.  The idea of monthly or yearly subscriptions, which were the bread and butter of old media cannot be relied on in this medium because online users refuse to pay them and then gravitate to the latest platform that can be used for free™.  As for my own personal leanings, any technology that subverts the established system and forces it out of its comfort zone is worthy of praise in my book, but I suppose this degree of perfidy and with it monetary gain ought to be expected under the circumstances.  The basic idea of capitalism is built on the idea of change and the next big thing, but this, of course, threatens the establishment that doesn’t like having to think outside of its cozy comfort zone.  

Angwin sets up her column by saying,

Friending wasn’t used as a verb until about five years ago, when social networks such as Friendster, MySpace and Facebook burst onto the scene.

Suddenly, our friends were something even better – an audience. If blogging felt like shouting into the void, posting updates on a social network felt more like an intimate conversation among friends at a pub.

That degree of false intimacy, however, proved to have consequences.  It lulled many into an imagined sense of security that could be broached by ten mouse clicks or less.  Potentially embarrassing personal details could be accessed easily by complete strangers, and when these users complained and very publicly cried foul, the media picked up on it by running stories and op-eds that adopted the tone of a finger-waggling parent.  Apparently it deemed that the best way to keep from oversharing personal details online was a good hearty dose of stern lecturing and abject moralizing.  To be sure, irresponsible behavior led to the establishment of a thousand or so online-based drama queens and flame wars.  That which had been an interesting concept in drawing people together began to show some serious flaws.      

Or, as Benjamin Franklin put it,

Three can keep a secret, if two of them are dead.

I never recognized how repressive a culture of which we are all a part until I incorporated the internet into my daily routine.  The guise of anonymity that cyberspace provides gives people the opportunity for people to come clean with a million different, but highly related fears, phobias, neuroses, and insecurities as though we were all members of a giant support group.  Unlike some, I don’t get much pleasure out of observing the scars of other people, no matter how selfishly rendered they may be.  I pity those who feel that the only way they can truly be honest with themselves and in so doing brave vulnerability and sincerity is when among those who they cannot see, hear, or speak to face to face.  And yet, each of us is like that to some degree.  

Regarding keeping ourselves in check a bit, I don’t mean it in a kind of Puritanical repressive sense, but rather that the immediate gratification and instant attention the internet provides us caters to a sense of narcissism and me-centered discourse.  If intimacy with friends is what we were seeking, the Wild West freedom provided by the technology makes a true circle of trust and discretion nearly impossible.  One can only work within the limitations of the medium itself.  Whatever ends up being broadcast online usually can be discovered with enough searching.  

When I was younger, I volunteered information in cyberspace that hindsight allows me to recognize that I probably should have been a bit more discerning.  But again, I was a teenager then, and every adolescent is half child, half adult, and all insecure.  I am fortunate I had the internet at that formative time in my life because I met other people my own age going through the same things I was and I had a shared sense of solace there.  Had I been born even five years earlier, I would not have had that outlet and would have suffered mightily in its absence.  

Returning to the larger point, the true lesson here is that major sectors of our capitalist wilderness are desperately trying to find ways to make money and are doing so by methods that openly violate our trust and our sense of security.  I suppose I could jump up and down, screaming about constitutional statutes and right to privacy being broached, shortly after contacting the ACLU, but I doubt it would do much in the way of good.  The recession merely exacerbated trends that had been slowly, steadily progressing of their own accord.  That certain companies would have the testicular fortitude to so sneakily use our own information and thoughts for their gain is damning enough, but provided we remain complicit and enabling in it, more companies will attempt similar tactics.  

Any system based on profit will be adaptive and find a way to use our humanity against us.  In an age where we are lonely, desirous of companionship, isolated by distance, and hoping to find a means to be a part of something larger than ourselves, Facebook arrived to fill the void.  It captured the Zeitgeist, for better or for worse, and now it is merely the latest manipulator for profit.  I am decidedly not a purist in this regard and though I will certainly take care to make sure I don’t resort to blarf on the page, neither will I take stock that someday social networking will replace what face-to-face personal contact ought to provide.

It is a testament to the fact that judge not, lest ye be judged is probably the moral teaching we disregard the most in this day.  That we judge ourselves more harshly than any troll or disapproving person ever could gets down to the root cause of the matter.  These are “guilty before proven innocent” times.  These are Nancy Grace days.  If we wish to change them, learning to forgive ourselves for being imperfect might be a good place to begin.  Embracing this unfair, didactic standard forces us to feel as though jumping through hoops and adhering to an obstacle course of needlessly complex, self-appointed guidelines is the key to living a satisfying life.  Micromanaging every aspect of who we are is the quickest road to misery I’ve ever seen.  We have unfortunately adopted a belief in the letter of the law, not the spirit of the law.

Intentionally following the letter of the law but not the spirit may be accomplished through exploiting technicalities, loopholes, and ambiguous language. Following the letter of the law but not the spirit is also a tactic used by oppressive governments.  

This is something, quite predictably, with which we have been struggling for a very long time.

While Jesus was having dinner at Levi’s house, many tax collectors and “sinners” were eating with him and his disciples, for there were many who followed him.  But when the teachers of religious law who were Pharisees saw him eating with tax collectors and other sinners, they asked his disciples, “Why does he eat with such scum?”  When Jesus heard that, he said to them, “Healthy people don’t need a doctor; those who are sick do. I’ve come to call sinners, not people who think they have God’s approval.”  

But neither do we need to appear self-righteous in talking about self-righteous, egocentric behavior.  That is deepest irony and part of this same judge-addicted culture.

Twitter’s updates were also easily searchable on the Web, forcing users to be somewhat thoughtful about their posts. The intimate conversation became a talent show, a challenge to prove your intellectual prowess in 140 characters or less.

People are competitive in nature.  I take it Angwin finds this sort of conduct distasteful.  I myself have used my Twitter posts to underscore the larger points I was mulling over at the time, often while in the process of constructing my posts, but the point was never to be adored or to win a fan base.  Often I felt a compulsion to put down something substantive to counterbalance the vast amount of trite banter that makes its way onto status updates.  Along these same lines, I notice that many people seem to make it a challenge to see how many friends they can achieve on Facebook, no matter whether they actually have ever met in person or not.  Life may be a talent show, but no one forces one to sign up for a space, either.      

Angwin concludes her column, vowing,

…I will also remove the vestiges of my private life from Facebook and make sure I never post anything that I wouldn’t want my parents, employer, next-door neighbor or future employer to see. You’d be smart to do the same.

We’ll need to treat this increasingly public version of Facebook with the same hard-headedness that we treat Twitter: as a place to broadcast, but not a place for vulnerability. A place to carefully calibrate, sanitize and bowdlerize our words for every possible audience, now and forever. Not a place for intimacy with friends.

While I agree with the author’s conclusion, I also add that being careful about that what we post in a public forum might not be a bad habit to get into, after all.  Her frustration with Facebook is quite palpable, but I’m not sure cutting off our nose to spite our face is a good solution.  Nor am I completely certain that there was ever some golden age where vulnerability on any online platform could be safely protected and manipulation of intimacy did not exist.  Secrets have a way of spilling out, even among friends, and even in real life.  

Nothing can be covered up forever and the paradoxical reality about success and increased exposure is that the larger a profile a person has, the more public is his or her life.  When I was growing up, my mother frequently invoked the old saying that just because you have dirty laundry doesn’t mean you ought to put it out on the front porch for all to see.  I’ve always disagreed with the statement and what it implies, because I think being vulnerable need not be purely irresponsible.  It’s a matter of degree and it’s a matter of balance.      

The internet has catered to a fickle side of who we are.  MySpace was once the end-all, be-all of social networking sites, and now it has given way to Facebook.  Twitter, not to be forgotten, has muscled its way into the public consciousness.  Anyone designing a social media network should keep in mind that success is ephemeral in the internet age and that one needs only look back roughly a decade to see all of the companies, platforms, programs and their ilk that have fallen out of public favor.  We are no longer beholden to brand loyalty, which is probably what separates Baby Boomers from their children regarding the strongest sense of disconnect.  

Today Facebook, tomorrow something else.  Whatever comes afterward will probably have to be monitored, too, but my belief in our economic system was that so long as we cling to Adam Smith’s invention, we will have to be our own regulators, but neither does this mean that all of our efforts should be devoted to plugging the dam.  I have no doubt that if we adopted socialism wholesale we’d need to be mindful of its shortcomings as well, but neither should we be utterly consumed with finding fault.  Life is too short.      

Once upon a time, we saw progress, particularly technological and medical progress, as both miraculous and uniformly desired.  The romanticized meta-narrative of the the Twentieth Century was that it was the age of startling innovation and that indeed humanity might find its salvation in the latest invention to improve the human condition.  The most common utterance at the time to describe this phenomenon was what will they think of next?  The airplane and the automobile revolutionized travel and with it the spread of information and population dispersal.  Penicillin was considered a wonder drug upon its introduction and indeed many lives were saved when it began being used on a wholesale fashion to combat infectious disease.  The first pesticides were considered miraculous because they greatly increased the yield of crops, with the hopes that their introduction would increase the food supply and in time make widespread hunger a thing of the past.  It was believed that our own ingenuity would be our salvation and in time, there was no telling what long-standing problem would have a easy, understandable solution.

Later, however, we began to cast suspicion on any advance lauded in messianic or wildly optimistic terms.  To our horror we discovered that the drug which took away morning sickness also created tragic, hideous birth defects in babies born to women who took it.  Then we read that the pesticides that, though they meant to increase the food supply, actually created major problems in the ecosystem around them—problems that skewed the natural environmental balance quite unintentionally but quite undeniably.  In attempting to eradicate one pest, we often caused a huge increase in population of another organism, creating a brand new problem in the process.  The system of pest control as set up by Mother Nature then was seen as more desirable as the one shaped by human hands.  And this idea began to take shape in the minds of many to the degree that this belief has many adherents in this age.  Take a stroll down the aisles of your local Whole Foods if you need a visual demonstration.      

But I will say this.  Old ways of doing things are not necessarily better ways of doing things.  Though we may have swung the pendulum from one side to another in the course of half a century or so, we shouldn’t lose sight of the true balance of things.  Anyone who has walked down a street where automobiles are not available and where all traffic directed down a major thoroughfare is pulled by horses knows the filth and the stench that fills the air and collects on either side of the roadway.  It is for that reason, among others, that the horseless carriage was developed in the first place.  We must not ever assume that the motives of those who came before us were summarily evil or distasteful simply because they did not have the ability to measure what they did by the power of hindsight.  Any of us could look like geniuses if we had that in our favor.  We often look for an easy enemy when the true hard work is to work to reach the point where we recognize that there are no easy answers and no easy targets.  Demystifying the past does not imply that we ought to summarily scrap its lessons.  The mythology of past ages needs to be removed, but those who view past behaviors and past events without rosy gloss can find many helpful examples for contemplation, provided, one doesn’t heave it into the trash can in one go, assuming the whole bunch is rotten all the way through.        

The larger point I am making is that it is tempting these days to assume that the advances of the past are purely evil, based on their unforeseen and unintended consequences wrought by best intentions.  We have gotten to the point now that we are reluctant at times to modify the world around us even in the slightest, lest we upset the fragile balance of energy, life, and movement that defines existence as  any being currently alive.  While we are humans, we are also animals, too.  Our will dictates the shape and pace of the world around us, of course, but so also does our very existence.  Global Warming is the buzzword phrase of the moment and while I do believe that human decision making has modified the climate and weather patterns for the worst, I do also know that the environment has a way of being adaptive that we often do not grant it, nor fully understand.  We see things through such selfish, human terms at times, and even our best intentions do not disguise the fact that everything often relates back to us in the end.  We were created selfish.  Self-preservation is what consumes us above any other preoccupation.  Still, this is an impulse we must fight against if we ever wish to live in peace with each other.  We have more in common than we admit, but it’s often the very things we don’t like to admit even to ourselves.  There is a limit to our understanding, and in fifty years from now, perhaps we’ll set aside Global Warming for the latest theory that defines our guilt and gives us a rallying point that demands we be unselfish not towards each other, but towards all living creatures.      

Whether we are kings and queens of the beasts is a matter for debate, but we do have the benefit of higher brain function, and this is what makes us so much more influential than the average mammal.  We seem to confuse at times the fact that we are both animals and also beings beholden to reason, somehow simultaneously separate from the fray.  We exist in our own orbit and while it is wise to understand that the earth does not strictly belong to us, we do modify it by our very presence.  When a butterfly can create a ripple effect just by flapping its wings, imagine what the average person creates by stepping outside on his or her way to work on the morning.  I’m not saying that we ought not be aware of our carbon footprint and we ought not recognize that being less wasteful and more protective of nature is worthwhile, but that one can micromanage one’s degree of social consciousness to an extent that ending up miserable is the inevitable byproduct.    

In a broader context to that, I notice how we lament the slow progress of reform and regulation.  Our split loyalties are often to blame for this as well.  If we were able to reach a happy medium between the supreme authority of old ways and the supreme authority of new ways, then we might actually get something done in a timely fashion.  So much of Liberalism and Progressivism these days is conducted from a defensive posture, with the belief in the back of the mind that no matter what is set in play, it will inevitably blow up in the end and create more problems.  Well, with all due respect, this is merely part of being alive.  Any decision made will create future problems that no one could ever predict at the outset, but this shouldn’t paralyze our needed efforts, either.  

Again, reform is a constant process of refining, re-honing, and revision.  It’s foolish to expect that one bill, one policy statement, or one innovative strategy will come out perfect and never need to be updated to reflect changing times.  Rather than seeing this established fact as frustrating or limiting, we need to modify our expectations.  As President Obama said last week in his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, “…[W]e do not have to think that human nature is perfect for us to still believe that the human condition can be perfected.  We do not have to live in an idealized world to still reach for those ideals that will make it a better place.”  We are imperfect.  Our ideas, no matter how immaculately crafted at the time, are imperfect, and the passage of time will render them more imperfect.  

But there is a difference between expecting individual or communal perfection on a case-by-case basis and not striving to improve the lives of those around us.  A century from now, if there is a blogosphere, I’m sure many people will laugh at the nonsensical barbarism of a previous age where every citizen of the Earth did not have health care coverage from cradle to grave.  But in this hypothetical example, it would be easy for them to make this judgment if they made it based on a naive, cavalier understanding of our times.  If they viewed them purely through the lens of their times without understanding the events, beliefs, and myriad of factors which led us to undertake the great struggle before us, then their own perspectives could not be taken seriously.  Again, we might be wise to understand why we always seem to crave an enemy.  Voltaire mentioned that if God didn’t exist, it would be necessary for humanity to invent Him.  Likewise, if enemies didn’t exist, it would be necessary for us to invent them.  That the very same people who speak of unity and can’t understand why we don’t have it are among the first to construct an antagonistic force and project all of their frustrations upon it is the deepest irony of all.  Our most powerful enemy is us.        

President Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize Speech reads to me, in many ways, more like a sermon than a political or ideological treatise.   That those who report and announce the news are either commenting upon a very small segment on that which was said, or taking a very minor section of the speech completely out of context like the increasingly malcontent Howard Fineman is regrettably par for the course.   Nothing silences more than visionary language and far-sighted analysis, and notably none of it can be spun out into confusion by two split-screen talking heads yammering away at each other on a simultaneous satellite feed.   We do a lot of talking these days, but frequently not a lot of listening.          

Kathleen Parker and other pundits responded merely to this section, as it is the easiest to pick apart, but much like everything else in the world, full context is crucial to fullest understanding.

“For make no mistake: Evil does exist in the world. A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler’s armies. Negotiations cannot convince al-Qaeda’s leaders to lay down their arms. To say that force may sometimes be necessary is not a call to cynicism — it is a recognition of history, the imperfections of man and the limits of reason.”

With those words, Obama aligned himself with conservatives, who believe in the fallibility of human nature and in an enduring moral order. At the same time, he left room for moral conundrum: the difficulty of reconciling two seemingly irreconcilable truths — “that war is sometimes necessary, and war at some level is an expression of human folly.”

As for the former assertion, not necessarily.   As a Quaker, I daily navigate this own moral conundrum, as Parker phrased it.   No amount of eloquent justification will ever sway me from the belief that war in all forms and for all reasons is morally wrong.   Still, I do believe that while evil and good might be indebted to shades of gray, I do not believe in a hierarchy of sin and transgression.   Wrong is wrong in a moral context and I leave it purely to the law of humans in a court to determine which wrong is more offensive than the next.   Moreover, believing that human nature is inherently imperfect does not necessarily mean that we ought to wrap our arms around this fact and fail to continue working to improve conditions for our fellow person.   Though I might believe that direct revelation from the Inward Light of God is a deeply, personal individual one which may vary from being to being, I do not believe that the liberty inherent in embracing one’s own path means one also gets the right to formulate for himself or herself precisely what constitutes good or evil, divisive or unifying.   Peace, as Obama mentioned later in the speech, comes with sacrifice and sacrifice is a team sport.   We will never arrive at it as a people unless we devote as much common energy towards securing peaceful means as we do when we channel our blood lust in the direction of an enemy who has wronged us.    

We must begin by acknowledging the hard truth that we will not eradicate violent conflict in our lifetimes. There will be times when nations – acting individually or in concert – will find the use of force not only necessary but morally justified.

Again, I disagree with the President.   But to return to conundrums and paradoxes, in this instance I recall the 1927 film version of the famous anti-slavery book Uncle Tom’s Cabin, written by Harriet Beecher Stowe.   The original novel portrays Quakers in heroic terms, eager to put their very lives on the line by actively transporting slaves by way of the Underground Railroad to Canada.   One of the main characters, Eliza, miraculously makes her way across a frozen river into the North, pursued by dogs, and carrying her child with her.   After being rescued by a kindly man from an adjacent farm, she finds a settlement of Friends who agree to send her towards freedom.   She and her young son eventually escape slavery and settle beyond the reach of the Fugitive Slave Act, which required even Northerners to return runaway slaves under penalty of law.  

The movie version, however, modifies the original plot considerably.   Eliza makes her way across the frozen river as before, but is this time rescued from the ice and the damp by a particularly dexterous Quaker man.   He and his wife eagerly agree to give both Eliza and her child a place to stay for a while, but notably do not stand up to an armed slave catcher by the name of Loker when he knocks at their door the next day.   Full of good intentions, naive, utterly helpless to resist, and wholly powerless in the end is this version’s portrayal of Quakers and non-violent resistance.   Both renderings have their own bias and both border on propaganda at times.   Both, it must also be pointed out, have a degree of truth to them as well.        

That aside, to me, the very heart of the speech lay in this passage.

As the world grows smaller, you might think it would be easier for human beings to recognize how similar we are, to understand that we all basically want the same things, that we all hope for the chance to live out our lives with some measure of happiness and fulfillment for ourselves and our families.

And yet, given the dizzying pace of globalization, and the cultural leveling of modernity, it should come as no surprise that people fear the loss of what they cherish about their particular identities:  their race, their tribe and, perhaps most powerfully, their religion. In some places, this fear has led to conflict.  At times, it even feels like we are moving backwards.  We see it in the Middle East, as the conflict between Arabs and Jews seems to harden.  We see it in nations that are torn asunder by tribal lines.

This passage challenges me to examine again my own goals and intents.   The urge to surrender our individual identities on behalf of progress or perceived progress can sometimes be believed as doing away altogether with the depth and breadth of religious expression.  While this is a fear of conservative people of faith more so than their brethren on the left, even I am gripped at times by a similar anxiety.   In a desire to keep alive the rich uniqueness of my own faith group, I do not wish to see it incrementally reduced to nothing in the process.  In that spirit, I push hard that we Friends might never forget the biblical underpinnings that inspire what we believe and which led to the formation of our Testimonies.   Average Americans already, if a relatively recent survey is to be believed, selectively choose the precepts they incorporate into their own individual canon from a variety of religions.

By a three to one margin (71 percent to 26 percent), Americans say they are more likely to personally develop their own set of religious beliefs than accept a comprehensive set of beliefs taught by a church or denomination, a Barna study, released Monday, shows.

Born-again Christians were among the groups least likely to adopt an a la carte approach to religious beliefs, but even most in this group say they have mixed their set of beliefs (61 percent).

In other words, the Barna survey’s findings show that people no longer look to denominations or churches for a complete set of theological views. Rather, combining beliefs from different denominations, and even religions, is becoming the norm.

While tribalism and factionalism, particularly along religious lines has done much to set us apart from each other and has even compelled us to kill others in times of war, I find nothing wrong with separate identities, provided they do not separate us in the process.   The Esperanto movement in linguistics, for example, sought to provide a international secondary language.   The concept was predicated on the belief that the human race was needlessly divided by language barriers and that men and women could use Esperanto as a lingua franca to be used in conversation with those of other nationalities or those who spoke a different primary tongue.  The intent was never that Esperanto would replace one’s native language, merely that it would facilitate diplomacy.

If this process were merely the latest evolutionary step, I would not have reason to be afraid, but I sometimes worry that we are jettisoning not just our religious identities, but our shared sense of purpose and love for our fellow being.   The post-modernist believes that all we are these days is that which we ourselves have created and that we are only as deep as our own constructed reality.   What a sterile world that would be, were it to be true!   Let us not make idols of our own cynicism, too.

One must not forget the paradoxical story of the Tower of Babel as found in Genesis.

Now the whole world had one language and a common speech.  As people moved toward the east, they found a plain in Shinar [Babylonia] and settled there…They said, “Come, let us build for ourselves a city, and a tower whose top will reach into heaven, and let us make for ourselves a name, otherwise we will be scattered abroad over the face of the whole earth.”  But the LORD came down to look at the city and the tower the people were building.

The LORD said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them.  Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.”  So the LORD scattered them abroad from there over the face of the whole earth; and they stopped building the city.  That is why it was called Babel–because there the LORD confused the language of the whole world. From there the LORD scattered them over the face of the whole earth.

At face value, one would assume that God’s purpose in this act was to keep people divided, else they find more value within themselves than devotion to a God.   In accordance with a literal interpretation, God is a jealous deity who desires no rivals and quickly strikes back against the idea that humanity through collective action might eventually believe  that it feels it no longer has no use for God.   Perhaps it speaks to the very idea of faith, as well, and with it the assertion that human endeavoring and human construction can never fully explain the divine or rationalize away the need for a higher power.   Some interpretations over the years have seen the building of the Tower as a contemptuous and rebellious act toward God himself, in effect declaring war on God’s supreme authority.   God does work in mysterious ways, after all.      

So are we meant to be divided, else total unity rip our moral fabric and station to shreds?   Is division just a part of life that serves as a deterrent, else we get too big for our britches?   If one is a Christian, one believes that we are all a part of the metaphorical Body of Christ.   Some faith groups or denominations have sought to define it different ways, but the concept itself is more or less the same.   Though often used to reinforce this belief in shared Christian fellowship, St. Paul’s words in his first letter to the Corinthians can be read to go beyond just devotion to a particular religion or a particular cause.

Now, dear brothers and sisters, regarding your question about the special abilities the Spirit gives us…There are different kinds of gifts, but the same Spirit.  There are different kinds of service, but the same Lord.  God works in different ways, but it is the same God who does the work in all of us.  A spiritual gift is given to each of us so we can help each other.  To one person the Spirit gives the ability to give wise advice; to another the same Spirit gives a message of special knowledge, to another faith by the same Spirit, and to another gifts of healing by the one Spirit, He gives one person the power to perform miracles, and another the ability to prophesy.

He gives someone else the ability to discern whether a message is from the Spirit of God or from another spirit. Still another person is given the ability to speak in unknown languages, while another is given the ability to interpret what is being said.  It is the one and only Spirit who distributes all these gifts. He alone decides which gift each person should have.  For even as the body is one and yet has many members, and all the members of the body, though they are many, are one body, so also is Christ.

President Obama concluded his speech this way, saying,

Adhering to this law of love has always been the core struggle of human nature. We are fallible. We make mistakes, and fall victim to the temptations of pride, and power, and sometimes evil. Even those of us with the best intentions will at times fail to right the wrongs before us.

But we do not have to think that human nature is perfect for us to still believe that the human condition can be perfected. We do not have to live in an idealized world to still reach for those ideals that will make it a better place. The nonviolence practiced by men like Gandhi and King may not have been practical or possible in every circumstance, but the love that they preached – their faith in human progress – must always be the North Star that guides us on our journey.

For if we lose that faith – if we dismiss it as silly or naive, if we divorce it from the decisions that we make on issues of war and peace – then we lose what is best about humanity. We lose our sense of possibility. We lose our moral compass.

Amen.

I thought I’d never be the next person to write about Tiger Woods.   That is, until today, when the sensationalist aspects of this incredibly bizarre story gave way to more substantive critiques.  In a different time, where concerns about the economy, the passage of health care reform, the uncertainty of a war in Afghanistan, and a variety of matters that collectively form the winter of our discontent, following glorious summer, this would have been endlessly digested and discussed.   Woods is at least fortunate that his great fall happened when the rest of the country and the news media was too distracted with other things.   If only in future we could give soft news its rightful place in a profoundly subordinate role behind serious matters, but this may be asking too much.    

As for Tiger Woods, when a revealing racial dynamic begins to enter the picture after an interested public and tabloid media, desperately churn up wild rumor after wild rumor regarding the scandal, then I have something to work with after all.   The New York Daily News, itself at times a scandal sheet, does at least outline something very interesting.    

When three white women were said to be romantically involved with Woods in addition to his blonde, Swedish wife, blogs, airwaves and barbershops started humming, and Woods’ already tenuous standing among many blacks took a beating.

On the nationally syndicated Tom Joyner radio show, Woods was the butt of jokes all week.

“Thankfully, Tiger, you didn’t marry a black woman. Because if a sister caught you running around with a bunch of white hoochie-mamas,” one parody suggests in song, she would have castrated him.

In addition to re-emphasizing a stereotypical portrayal of the sassy, no-nonsense Black woman, offensive in and of itself, the unveiled implication behind it as plain as the eye on one’s face.  Within the Black community, dating or marrying a white woman was seen as a form of social mobility.   Or, if you prefer, moving on up to the East Side.   Indeed, it still is.   Though the comparison may be a bit of a stretch, do also contemplate that both of Michael Jackson’s wives were white, as was the mother of his children.   The early Twentieth Century boxer Jack Johnson, an undisputed heavyweight titan of his time, broached social mores with abandon, and in so doing surrounded himself with white women.  That many of these women were considered of low moral standard, low social class, and often inclined to toil in the service of the world’s oldest profession did nothing to decrease the ire of both Whites and Blacks during his career.

Another figure who was very much front and center in the public eye in his day and also had a particular fondness for white women was Richard Pryor, who addressed the matter in his classic 1974 comedy album, That Ni**er’s Crazy.

Sisters look at you like you killed your mother when they see you with white women.

A sense of sticking to one’s place and staying with one’s own kind,  though it has decreased with the passage of time, still lives within the minds of many.  If it were merely a one-sided assumption, then it could be more easily fixed, but issues this large rarely are.  

As one blogger, Robert Paul Reyes, wrote: “If Tiger Woods had cheated on his gorgeous white wife with black women, the golfing great’s accident would have been barely a blip in the blogosphere.”

The darts reflect blacks’ resistance to interracial romance. They also are a reflection of discomfort with a man who has smashed barriers in one of America’s whitest sports and assumed the mantle of the world’s most famous athlete, once worn by Muhammad Ali and Michael Jordan.

Regarding the highlighted sentence above, I take some liberty with the author of this column.  It’s just not that simple, though the AP seems to always wish that it were.   Blacks aren’t so much resistant to interracial romance, but they are frequently disappointed and dismayed when African-Americans who attain some degree of fame make a concerted effort to exclusively date and then marry Caucasian women, particularly those who are the epitome and definition of what this society deems beautiful.   Our culture still pushes the blonde-haired, thin-waisted, Barbie doll look in almost every conceivable fashion, which relegates attractiveness and desirability to a very specific and very discriminatory standard, leaving out a good 90% of the rest of womanhood in the process.   This is particular true for women of color.  For any minority group, assimilation with the majority has been the quickest way to achieve “respectability”, though the resentment it creates in those left behind never subsides.        

Regarding a desire for African-Americans to date and marry other African-Americans, the column deems it “loyalty”, but this is an inexact qualifier at best.   It is a sort of racial pride, but comedian Sheryl Underwood advances the notion a bit farther.

“Would we question when a Jewish person wants to marry other Jewish people?” she said in an interview. “It’s not racist. It’s not bigotry. It’s cultural pride.”

“The issue comes in when you choose something white because you think it’s better,” Underwood said. “And then you never date a black woman or a woman of color or you never sample the greatness of the international buffet of human beings. If you never do that, we got a problem.”

Years after Loving v. Virginia, the shock of interracial relationships has subsided.   The film Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?, deeply controversial in its time, produces smiles when viewed in our age because of how dated its subject matter appears to today’s audience.  Perceiving matters through a strictly racial prism, particularly one with only two settings can only take us so far towards understanding.   The irony is that while everyone seems to find no fault in interracial relationships, many are still reluctant to push past their own discomfort or date outside of their own racial group.   And I must admit, in all fairness, that I myself am guilty of that as much as anyone else.    

So to conclude, we should not summarily assume that with Tiger Woods being proven to be utterly human and wholly flawed that some part of our trusting innocence needs to perish alongside his indiscretions.   One of the deepest hypocrisies we continue to advance is holding our heroes to a moral and ethical standard that we feel incapable of achieving ourselves.   In a way, it’s a bit of a cop-out when we transpose this crusade for perfection felt deep within ourselves onto those whom we idolize.   They end up having to do the heavy lifting for our sins and when they fail, pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall.   Even so, shelving this instinctive impulse that assumes any being will reach some Nirvana-like state before our very eyes based on accomplishment alone might be the best thing we, as a body of people, can do for ourselves.   This doesn’t mean anything goes or that extramarital affairs should be permissible or that mistakes should always be rationalized away, but it does mean that we ought to consider keeping our indignation at a responsible volume and tempered by responsible expectations.    

As it stands, USA Today posits,

So it won’t matter that Woods won’t be getting that Congressional gold medal and we won’t care that the future of his business empire remains steady.

Columnist Christine Brennan writes about it being a long road back but it is a road back.

Still, Woods was an athlete we trusted. We feel a bit foolish with all those claims that he was the one athlete whose only interest was winning. That while others were pursuing outside interests, Woods was beating golf balls and figuring out ways to win.

Former president Ronald Reagan used to say “trust but verify.”

Sometimes we are more angry and the bitterness lingers when we didn’t see it coming.

So, has Woods spoiled it for other guys?

Does the fact that we got fooled by this guy now make us less trusting of all athletes?

Ronald Reagan quote aside, I don’t think trust is the matter at hand here.   Or if it is, trust ought to be applied to ourselves first before we place it in the hands of some arbitrarily appointed industry, entity, or agency who has based its entire focus and revenue around a single person who happens to be notable based on a high degree of achievement.   This is true in sports, it is true in politics, and it is true in life.   Be the change.  Above all, be the change.  Don’t lay the change on someone else’s shoulders, no matter how broad you think them to be.   That road leads to ruin.    

Time Magazine, or at least its online edition, seeks to understand why Google seems to love highlighting a particular “news source” in its search results.  The very subtle, but nonetheless evident message implanted within the article is that search engine algorithms might have the same biases and favoritism embedded into them as any other corporation who owns or has partnership with other media companies.  I know that by monitoring IP addresses that visit my site by use of a tracker I frequently notice when Google bot sweeps periodically come through to make a note of and reference recently posted columns I have written.   It isn’t very long after that before I notice that traffic has been directed to my site as a result.   However, let me say that I do make a concerted effort to write something unique and meaningful, qualities which are in short supply when effort is not rewarded by much in the way of money.

If you type the name of a celebrity – say, Angelina Jolie – into Google News, chances are somewhere in the top five results you’ll get a story from Examiner.com. This is particularly true if the celebrity is in the news that day. For early December that means searches for Tiger Woods, Sandra Bullock and Weezer on Google News consistently brought up Examiner.com stories in the topmost results. And in those stories, by the way, there was very little actual news.

Absolutely.   The only currently existing model available to those who blog for pay is centered around advertising revenue as the most important variable of all.   Instead of providing a unique perspective on the news, instead one gets a bare minimum of original content and a whole e-farm’s worth of hyper-linking and search engine keyword baiting.   It needs to be noted, of course, that Examiner.com is not the only site out there using a similar strategy to press a similar agenda.   But in that regard, it is not much different to any kind of freelance work which promises sporadic assignments, minimal pay, few benefits, and no real job security.   The signer of the paychecks or distributor of funds to the PayPal account still holds most of the cards at the table.   In a field where so many are fighting to be heard and where competition is fierce and often cutthroat, employers get utterly inundated with prospective writers and many of them have the ego and the swagger but none of the talent to back it up.   Proceeding directly for the easy sell and the low hanging fruit has padded profits but has rarely advanced a civic discourse or issue evolution.    

They also have very little news value. Generally, an Examiner.com news story is a compendium of tidbits culled from other websites, neither advancing the story nor bringing any insight (a description, it should be noted, that can be just as fairly applied to many offerings of more mainstream media). Most Examiners are not journalists, and their prose is not edited. CEO Rick Blair, who helped launch AOL’s Digital Cities, an earlier attempt at a local-news network, calls them “pro-am” – more professional than bloggers, but more amateur than most reporters. You might also call them traffic hounds: because their remuneration is set by, among other things, the number of people who click on their stories, Examiners will often piggyback on hot news, or oft-searched people. The Angelina Jolie story, from a celebrity-fitness and -health Examiner, discussed Jolie and husband Brad Pitt’s recent night out at a movie premiere and assessed their health by their appearance.

Put this way, here is a decent enough description of most collaborative blogs.   However, before one buys into this description hook, line, and sinker without taking into account the underlying intent it must be added that Daily Kos was described by Time as one of its “Most Overrated Blogs of 2009” in very searing language.

It wrote,

Markos Moulitsas – alias “Kos” – created Daily Kos in 2002, a time he describes as “dark days when an oppressive and war-crazed administration suppressed all dissent as unpatriotic and treasonous.” Be careful what you wish for. With the Bush years now just a memory, Kos’s blog has lost its mission, and its increasingly rudderless posts read like talking points from the Democratic National Committee.

Easy for you to say, Time.   Dear pot, kindly meet kettle.

Returning to my original point, at the beginning of this post, I referenced an article written to encourage a spirit of full disclosure, no matter how stealthy proposed.   I would be similarly remiss if I did not state that I, too, am a reporter for Examiner.com.   Yet, I note, however, that in nearly a month of writing for it I have made under $20 for my efforts, even though my pieces usually attract a respectable audience that frequently exceeds the average number of hits which typify the typical DC Politics Examiner.  I don’t run away from controversy in that which I write, but neither do I seek to provoke without backing up my points, buttressing my argument, and taking into account the inevitable counter-arguments of my opponents.   Still, one simply can’t keep up with those who dispense romance advice, bicycle repair, child rearing tricks, and pet psychic services.   Nor can I keep up with the barrage of ultimately meaningless drivel that might be the opiate of the masses but tends to put me into an opium-based sleep.   I do not expect to make much out of any of what I do but I will say that I seek to strategically position and my postings to get maximum exposure.   I am no different from many of you reading this, I daresay.  

So why does Examiner.com’s fairly superficial posts on the big stories of the day end up so often near the front of Google’s news queue? “It’s not a trick,” says Blair. “We have almost 25,000 writers posting 3,000 original articles per day.” Examiners take seminars on writing headlines, writing in the third person and making full use of social media, all of which are Google manna. But Blair thinks it’s mostly the scale of the operation that makes Examiner.com articles so attractive to search engines, from which more than half of the site’s traffic comes. That is, by stocking the lake with so many fish every day Examiner.com increases the chances the Google trawlers will haul one of theirs up.

And here we have a perfect example of why an unholy combination of made up celebrities, made up drama, and manufactured crises for the sake of readership threaten to choke out everything wholly decent.   Weeds are on the verge of taking over the garden.   Or, as Howard Beale would say, “And woe is us! We’re in a lot of trouble!”   Speak softly, though, because to some extent we’ve already been handcuffed by the almighty dollar and may always be.   Some realities go well beyond our poor power to add or detract.

In a coy final note, the Time article concludes,

The goal of all these companies, eventually, is to snare local advertising, a $141 billion market that, according to Blair, has been left largely untapped by the Internet.  Examiner.com will start rolling out ad packages in the next few months, and will hit up its network for leads.

In the meantime, these pro-am armies are giving the big media companies plenty to worry about. The mainstream media’s news-harvesting machines are no match for a swarm of local locusts buzzing over the same crop. And Big Media is starting to take notice. CNN, which already uses a lot of crowdsourced material with its ireport arm, just invested in another local outfit, outside.in. Perhaps the news giant figures that if everybody’s going to be a reporter, they might as well work for CNN.

The note is winking and coy because Time is, after all, owned by CNN.   I, too, have been an iReporter for CNN, for the same reasons I write at Examiner.com.   I don’t make a dime out of it, but I do get my name out in the hope that someone, somewhere, is listening, reading, and contemplating.   My hope, of course, is that at least with my post there will be an alternative, thought-provoking voice in the middle of all the fluff and unsubstantial content.   Perhaps that is what we all wish for when we put our fingers to our keyboards and begin typing or begin synching up our digital cameras.  We want to be better than that which we just finished reading or want to be provide a better analysis than a pundit who makes thousands upon thousands of dollars a year to sound supremely ignorant.   Yet, we might also need to contemplate our current realities before we get caught up on our own narratives.  Recall Network once more.

You get up on your little twenty-one inch screen and howl about America and democracy. There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and ITT and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today.

We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale. It has been since man crawled out of the slime. And our children will live, Mr. Beale, to see that perfect world in which there’s no war or famine, oppression or brutality — one vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock, all necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused.  

This post is written in response to a very well-crafted argument against the resumption of military conscription.  What I will say is that I have engaged in hypothetical discussions at times about what the resumption of a draft would produce in reality, versus what goals and reforms we might assume would transpire as a result.   I’m not entirely sure that I agree that those who advocate the return of conscription are making specious or at best hypocritical arguments.  Though I am opposed to war in all forms, one cannot disagree that war shapes so much of our consciousness and influences who we are as both Americans and humans to a degree that we are sometimes unaware of its complete impact.  War and warfare is that pervasive and it is that enmeshed in who we are as a people that merely criticizing it from the outside may not simply be sufficient.

In another online forum, I suggested that perhaps if women were included in the draft that their presence might successfully overturn gender-based inequalities and begin to reform Patriarchal excesses.   A previous generation of Feminists believed that the way to be recognized as the equals of men was to de facto refine the idea of masculinity by building it into its own image and idealized notion.   Feminists of today have taken special care to embrace their femininity and sex while simultaneously redefining both in an effort to also reshape repressive ideas of masculinity and manhood.   Gender as a social construct has become especially problematic to many, since transgender and intersex rights have turned conventional gender norms and gender arguments completely upside down.   If applied to current draft regulations, it could easily raise a huge to-do.  

The truth of the matter is that if a draft were resumed today, only men would be drafted.   My argument, which again was set forth purely as food for thought, was that if women wished for full equality with men then they ought to seriously consider lobbying to be included as part of the process.   My rationale for this was that women have for far too long been seen purely as keepers of the hearth and home and that their presumed status solely as nurturing figures and caregivers is restrictive and based on assumption, rather than reality.   Another huge can of worms that goes along with this is that if Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell were ever to be revoked and if LGBTs were allowed to serve openly in the armed forces, the draft laws as written would apply to gay men, but not to lesbians.   One gets in thornier territory than that when the question of trans men, trans women, and intersex individuals enters the picture.   When we are only now beginning to confront the fact that what constitutes “male” and what constitutes “female” is far more fluid than any of us could have ever before believed, then we see what happens when the gender binary falls unforgivably short.    

I seek not to seem ignorant or unaware of draft board realities.   My own father did not serve in Vietnam because of his high draft number.   By sheer luck, the highest number called for his group was 125 and, since the system focused on date of birth to determine draft status, his announced number 215 worked out in his favor.   Still, Dad was labeled 1-A (available for military service) and taking no chances he continued to pursue a college degree and served for a time as a state trooper, since both of these options made it unlikely that he would be forced to serve in combat.   I do recognize that if those times were our own, then as now, those unable to afford college or so poor that they could not use the privilege of middle class or upper class affluence to their benefit, advantages that most of us take for granted—they would be the first to go.   My grandfather used his business connections with the people at the local county draft board to ensure that his sons did not go to Southeast Asia.   In business, in politics, and in all of capitalism, ultimately it comes down to precisely who you know.    

Assuming the draft was (God forbid) ever resumed, perhaps a brand new group of underprivileged souls would be sent off to fight and die.   It’s not as though gay men live and are born only in affluent cities, states, or regions.   Nor is homosexuality a phenomenon relegated purely to Whites.   Perhaps the recent transitioned trans man, fresh from top surgery finds zirself for the first time as a prime target to be forced to fight for a country that still hasn’t quite acknowledged the unique struggles of transgenders.   One would hope that if this situation were ever to come to pass that it would not force trans men to be disinclined to undergo the process of claiming a gender of which they were not assigned at birth while desperately seeking to feel authentic to who they are inside.   One would also hope that resentment would not build within the gay community due to the unfortunate fact that gay men could be sent off to die but gay women could not.

One now understands why Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, for all its flaws, is still in force.   But I do understand my history, as well, and I know that the Twenty-Sixth Amendment raised the uniform voting age in this country from 21 to 18.   A compelling argument raised by young Vietnam War Protesters, which stated that young men who were being drafted and sent to die in the jungles were without the right to vote in or vote out the legislators who were in charge of making that awful decision—this push led to resolute action.   Quite unlike the legislative logjam we are now facing today in other reform measures, the process of enactment and ratification was not a particularly contentious one and it didn’t take long for the amendment to take effect.   When I consider today how many eighteen to twenty year olds only vote when the name Obama is on the ballot, it really makes me sad.   Yet, at least that right exists, and at least combined effort towards good produced satisfactory results.   We might learn from that when it comes down to pushing our own unique ends and aims.   If we are going to increase the scope and span of conscription, an act so unfair and so completely unjustified as to border on complete evil, perhaps we might be forced to learn some lessons and to confront the hypocrisies that don’t merely influence some, but influence all.