Fooling around with Photoshop again...

You may want to click on the images to see them larger.

He came up from the river bottom

and said he’d been wondering

if frogs and dragon flies see 

the world

the way he and presumably

everybody else sees it

then wandered on

to another subject altogether

and said

seems like one thing

then all at once a change comes

and it’s another

which he said isn’t such a bad thing

The silk floss tree, originally from Brazil and Argentina,

thinks its back home in its native land where it's spring.

The exquisite flower stays fully open only a short time

then slowly transforms itself into a big green seed pod

which eventually bursts into a silk ball of seeds that can 

be scattered by the wind.

Like most Americans, I’ll be watching what Congress does in the few weeks before the end of 2012 and our nation approaches the edge of what has being called “the fiscal cliff.”  My Wednesday-after-the-election sense of relief still feels good; but as the has drama moved from the larger national stage to the smaller one in Washington, I’m still feeling uneasy.  My Republican friends are also a little tense. Not all Republicans are willing to be content to wallow in the disappointment of defeat or to play the blame game.  Many are making an intellectually honest effort to examine the details of their party’s failed campaigns... to try to figure out, despite Fox News reluctance to do the math, why they suffered a rout last Tuesday.  

Paul Krugman, a Nobel Prize winning economist, said in a New York Times opinion piece on Sunday that President Obama should not even begin to participate in the game of chicken that tea party representatives keep pushing Boehner to play.  Krugman is concerned that President Obama has already hinted that he is willing to discuss spending cuts, and that the cuts tea party politicians want would hit the poor, middle class, and elderly.  The President has said often that he will not turn to that group of Americans and ask them to pony up more of their income and assets in an effort to get the money to pay down the deficit .  The President has insisted that the wealthiest Americans can well afford to pay more, and he will continue to insist that they do so.  

The the most extremely conservative Republicans who apparently fancy themselves to be reincarnations of those folks who threw tea into Boston Harbor in 1773 obviously fail to recognize that Democrats and moderate Republicans are not the biggest threats to the GOP.  They have failed to see that they themselves are the enemy.  The tea party will be the cause of the demise of the Republican Party if it happens... and I don’t want the Republican Party to disappear.  The good health of our democracy depends on dialogue, debate, and compromise in American institutions of government.  It’s not dialogue if it comes from just one kind of thinking.  America needs both intellectually healthy parties. Some of the tea party people heading to Washington were elected, and reelected, to Congress in overwhelmingly conservative districts where there were not even enough moderate citizens to vote out a pitifully inadequate representative up for reelection like Michelle Bachman.  That’s going to happen again and again... until those districts are changed by younger, more progressive voters... and that change will come eventually when many more of the older mostly white gray beards in my age group who still listen to the last-minute pleas of evangelical preachers like Billy Graham have died off. 

Many Republicans whom I know and respect are smart and have recognized that we are a diverse nation, ethnically and ethically. Some of my Republican friends don’t believe there is a big old parent God somewhere out there in the cosmos who loves America more than any other nation.  They recognize that America is not now and must never be a theocracy. They are embarrassed by the assumption by some leaders in their Party that all Republicans are Christians and all Christians should be Republicans.  Many are chagrined by the suggestion that a “good” Republican must work toward an American future where abortion, marijuana, contraception, and gay marriage are illegal.  

The Republican friends who know me well know that I am a practicing capitalist.  My house is full of stuff, much of it I don’t really need... but got because I like it and because I could get it.  Some of it I got because I was in the right place at the right time, and some of it I got because I worked extra-hard to get it.  

Most of my friends know I like to think of myself as a citizen of the world.  I have heard them describe me as a “bleeding heart” liberal.  I don’t mind that description.  I’m not pushed out of shape when someone who doesn’t know me well uses the “socialist” label to describe me because I show concern for the poor in China or India or the Sudan or in the southeast corner of my own city.  

My Republican friends recognize and celebrate America’s ethnic and ethical diversity.  I respect that they believe in an economic, fiscal approach that is different from mine.  We respect each other because we agree that we want a strong America for all Americans.  Neither they nor I want the important Republican voice in American politics to be replaced by two-centuries old, Boston Harbor- tea party thinking. 

Sometimes a short phrase from a poem or a hymn jumps out and presents itself to me as if I’d never seen or heard it before.  Today, listening to the Chancel Choir in church sing an arrangement of Love Divine,  the lines “lost in wonder” grabbed my attention. It wasn’t a “Lost in Yonkers” sort of thing... The Neil Simon play always gives me a lot to think about when I see it or reread it... but “lost in wonder” launched a fresh way of beginning a discussion with myself about what “being lost” means.  Perhaps I didn’t get Mary Oliver’s challenge out of my system (yesterday’s BLOG writing): “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” 

I like being lost in wonder... lost in the appreciation of being alive, of actually having my very own wild and precious life.  I like the fact that I am discovering in my old age that life continues to be  “wild and precious.”  I often wonder when I’m smack in the middle of doing something or thinking something if I would have liked doing or thinking whatever it is I’m doing or thinking when I was a young man.  When I was younger would I have approved some idea that I now fearlessly defend and find intriguing.   I wrote yesterday that I like Mary Oliver for all sorts of reasons. She and I are the same age.  I wonder if Mary would have thought to write “Tom Dancer’s Gift of a Whitebark Pine Cone” when she was twenty; and I wonder, if she had written it then and I had read it, would I have been repulsed by the notion of eating a pine cone that had passed through the digestive system of a bear... I wonder if I would have wrinkled my nose at the suggestion... would I have missed the point of her poem?  

Here’s the poem.  I’m thinking about it... lost in wonder.

Tom Dancer’s Gift of a Whitebark Pine Cone
Mary Oliver

You never know what opportunity is going to travel to you, or through

you.

Once a friend gave me a small pine cone-one of a few he found in the 

scat

of a grizzly in Utah maybe, or Wyoming.  I took it home

and did what I supposed he was sure I would do-

I ate it, thinking

how it had traveled through that rough and holy body. It was crisp and

sweet.

It was almost a prayer without words.  My gratitude to you, Tom Dancer,

for this gift of the world I adore so much and want to belong to.  And

thank you too, great bear.

One of my favorite living American poets is Mary Oliver, with whom I have a couple of things in common.  We were  born in the same year and in the same month; she was born two days before I was.  One other thing we share is a deep love for poetry... for language that makes poetry possible... and for life.   In her New and Selected Poems, she said, “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

I was reminded of Mary Oliver earlier this week when I got an e-mail from a trusted, good friend.  She closed the note she sent to me with a Mary Oliver poem, which she said was one of her favorites.  It has been one of mine for awhile, too.

The Uses of Sorrow

(In my sleep I dreamed this poem)

Someone I loved once gave me

a box full of darkness.

It took me years to understand

that this, too, was a gift.

                  --Mary Oliver

The poem always reminds me of one of Margaret’s very good friends, Embi Friedberg, who died a couple of years ago after a recurrence of breast cancer.  Embi wanted to die in her own home, so her friends kept a vigil day and night toward the end. It was my turn to be there on the night she died.  I was alone with her when it happened. 

Once a long time ago Embi gave Margaret a little statuette, which she keeps on her desk.  I took a picture of it today for my photo du jour.  It reminds me of Embi... and of Mary Oliver’s poem.

The 2012 election went mostly the way I had hoped it would go. There is something else I hope we Californians (and people in thirty-one other states) will get around to doing soon. We’re still deliberately killing people. I hope we will sometime soon stop it.

Fifty-three percent of California voters cast votes against Proposition 34 which would have ended the practice of killing people in California who have been sentenced to death for capital murder. Texas has executed 13 people since January 1st of this year. Eighteen of our United States have voted to abolish the death penalty. Connecticut citizens voted to abolish the death penalty in April of this year.  The repeal in that state, however, was not retroactive, leaving 11 people on death row... but at least it’s a start. 

Since 1992, fifteen prisoners on death row have been set free when newly discovered evidence has exonerated them, leaving any reasonable person to wonder how many people have been executed who were actually not guilty of the crime for which they were convicted and sentenced. In 1950, a man named Timothy Evans was executed after being convicted of murdering his daughter.  Three years after his execution, authorities discovered that another man, who had rented a room from Evans, was a serial killer and had killed the daughter.  Timothy Evans was innocent.  As recently as 1991 a man names Cameron Willlingham was sentenced to die for the deaths of his three daughter who died in a fire that Willingham was accused of setting.  Evidence that was originally said to prove his guilt has since been shown to be inconclusive.  Although his innocence cannot be proven, if he had not been put to death, the case might have been reopened and there is the strong possibility that he would have been found innocent on appeal.  Jesse Tafero is perhaps the best known case of an innocent man having been executed and later found to be innocent.  He was accused of murdering two police officers.  There were two accomplices involved in the incident.  One of them testified against the other two in exchange for a light prison sentence.  He later admitted that he was the one who killed the two officers, but even with the new testimony Tafero was put to death. It is believed that Tafero would have been set free were he still alive for an appeal 

The possibility of killing an innocent person is not my primary reason for voting against the death penalty.  An execution is carried out by the State of California.  I am a citizen of the State of California, and although I object to such a barbaric act as deliberate execution of a human being, as a citizen I am complicit in the execution.  I object.  Vengeance should never be the overriding reason for an act of violence, and the only logical explanation for an individual’s assent to an execution is vengeance... an eye for an eye... evening the score.  That argument is an attempt to make a case for immoral action in response to someone else’s immoral behavior, and it just doesn’t make sense.  The deterrent argument makes even less sense.  There is absolutely no evidence that the possibility of being put to death for murder has ever stopped anyone from committing the crime.  

Let’s try again to do away with death penalty.

                            fo sit yrtnuoc yM My country tis of

                  niaga gniyrt strats wen new starts trying again

                 elbakahs tub elbisividni indivisible but shakeable

evohs ot semoc hsup nehw yllanif finally when push comes to shove

             tnuoc ohw elpoep lla s‘ti it’s all people who count

                  tnaw ew roop eht neve even the poor we want

                           efil doog erahs ot to share good life

Hey!  We’re all exhausted out here in the real world... from being witness for too long to the battering dozens of candidates have aimed at each other... and from media’s blow-by-blow delivery of those quarrels.  I’m resting for awhile. Today I’ll let the photographs I found  serve as metaphors for the future I assume may be in store for us as the “winners” and their colleagues in Washington go about the business of government.

Clyde's cookies...

Tension was high from early morning in my house. I considered sleeping right through the late afternoon and evening and night and tomorrow morning until all the dust is settled; but, of course, I couldn’t do it.  It’s hard to go to sleep when you’re sitting on pins and needles. Why am I not surprised that Florida has screwed up the voting procedure again... Why am I not surprised that the evangelical patches of population in the country had a majority of their people voting as if they has just today returned from the 800 B.C.E. land of Deuteronomy or perhaps Afghanistan...  Why am I not surprised that the people who funnel obscene amounts of money into Super PACS show no concern about difficulties ordinary lower-middle class people in America are having just getting by.... BUT the networks and newspapers are declaring a second term for President Obama... YET at 8:30 Pacific time the Romney people are refusing to concede... so we won’t set off the fireworks just yet.  BUT I am going to relax and believe President Barack Obama has been reelected and has become only the fourth Democratic president to be given a second term in the last hundred years.  If Republicans in Washington and indeed in the country choose another four years of gridlock, they will be deciding to aim and shoot at their own foot. 

 Governor Romney has conceded... The President will speak in a few minutes.  Donald Trump has Twittered that he is mad.  I'm going to bed happy.

Get thee glass eyes;

And like a scurvy politician, seem

To see the things thou dost not.

In Act IV, scene VI of Shakespeare’s King Lear, a little while after the breathtaking scene when Edgar, dressed like a peasant for disguise, pretends to lead his father Gloucester to the edge of a cliff at Dover where the distraught old man wants to jump.  If you know the story, you’ll remember that Gloucester’s eyes were gouged out by Cornwall, the husband of the very most evil of Lear’s two evil daughters... After the tired, sadly deceived old king discovers his old friend’s blindness, he says, “Get thee glass eyes; And like a scurvy politician, seem to see the things thou dost not.” 

I got today's pictures in an out-of-the-way corner of Balboa Park where fallen logs have been used to make the borders of a dirt road.  I went there after making calls as a volunteer at a phone bank urging people in Ohio and Wisconsin to vote.  I had politicians on my mind...

This is a strange time... a time out of joint. The candidates on the American political stage are very much like characters in a Shakespearean play.  I can’t decide if the play should be classified as history or comedy... or perhaps tragedy.  I keep trying but am not able to empathize with Governor Romney (who we know is Governor now only in name, not in fact... like a person playing a part in a play) as he brings his great wealth and his noble heritage to his tremendous effort to depose the man in the President’s office... not to usurp but to win the office by getting the vote of a majority of citizens.  The Romney character plays at times the humble missionary servant insisting he knows how ordinary citizens live and what they want and need, and at other times his hubris swells to classic proportions beyond any of his actual accomplishments.    

The other players are all too familiar.  We could describe the man playing the vice president role.  A colorful character indeed, but let's look instead at another exceptional player... the intellectual, long-suffering Secretary of State who was once humiliated by her husband in front of a whole nation... the woman who stayed faithful to her husband and constant beside him as she worked to help him restore his reputation. She went on to national prominence in her own right by striving to be the candidate to represent her political party for the office of president only to be beaten back in that attempt by the man who now, if there were one, would wear the crown.  She humbly accepted the job as his Secretary of State and has served him and the nation brilliantly.  

No character in this political play is more Shakespearean than the President.  The son of a black African intellectual and a white university student, he wasn’t bred to nobility but gained it by the strength of his intelligence and will.  His parents wouldn’t have been able to marry in several states because of anti-miscegenation laws. As recently as 1967 the Supreme Court ruled against the Commonwealth of Virginia for condemning a black woman and white man to five years in prison for cohabiting in that state after they were married in the District of Columbia where their marriage was legal.  It wasn’t until 2000 that Alabama, the last state with an anti-miscegenation law, complied with the Supreme Court ruling and removed it’s statute. His parents marriage failed when he was a small child; his mother remarried to another non-white man and moved to Indonesia. Several characters, buffoons all...one with a laughable bouffant hair style... have provided what in a real play would be considered comedy relief by insisting, for instance, that the President is actually an illegal immigrant who in not eligible for election to his high office. 

Other cast members of this incredible play have often played more like made-up characters than real members of America’s nobility.  Boehner can be relied on to cry on cue. Cantor is the Laertes to McConnell’s Polonius.  Ryan can be anything you want him to be, and we can decide for ourselves who is the fool.  My vote goes to Rush Limbaugh.  These characters would be laughable if they were not real... But enough... Enough indeed!

The high drama will end on Tuesday night after the votes are counted.  I wish we could say as Hamlet does with his last words in the famous play, “The rest is silence.”  But, of course, there will be no silence and, alas, probably no reconciliation.  At least we will experience what may seem like silence when the obscene television and radio advertisements stop.   

p. 

Kumbaya

AN UNCOMFORTABLE TRUTH is that racism is still a significant skein of threads running through the fabric of American culture... a skein, not a single thread. Racism is not a white or a black condition.  It isn’t Republican or Democrat, male or female.  It’s easy to recognize in a guy at a political rally wearing a “PUT WHITE BACK IN THE WHITE HOUSE” T-Shirt.  It’s not so easy when the N-word is replaced by foreign, which has become it’s proxy in genteel conversations. When your Aunt Susan says at dinner that she is worried about the growing number of foreigners on the street where she lives, the others at the table probably don’t react the way they would if she said she wonders why there are more blacks or more Latinos on her street. 

The Washington Post reported that according to an Associated Press poll “Racial attitudes have not improved in the four years since the United States elected its first black president.”  In a survey conducted with researchers from Stanford University, the University of Michigan and NORC at the University of Chicago, polls show that 51% of Americans express anti-black attitudes.  When measured by an implicit racial attitudes test, the number of Americans with anti-black sentiments jumped to 56%.  According to the survey, Republicans were more likely than Democrats to express racial prejudice in the questions measuring explicit racism (79% among Republicans compared with 32% among Democrats), the implicit test found little difference between the two parties. The test showed a majority of both Democrats and Republicans held anti-black feelings (55% of Democrats and 64% of Republicans), as did about half of political independents.

So... where do we turn in our culture to find a way out of this uncomfortable condition. Like many citizens of San Diego I live in a large condominium community. The 334 units are home to just about every demographic group in the city. The buildings and grounds are maintained, with only the occasional exception, by Latinos. Maybe that’s not significant, but economic realities probably should be kept in mind when one is seeking reasons for racial and ethnic inequalities in a community. 

I should like to be able to say with some confidence that we might turn first to the various religious institutions for answers, but the complexions of most individual congregations within any denomination are either colored or white, rarely evenly mixed.  A church’s ministry to a special group, usually ethnic rather than purely racial, often takes the form of separate language services and programs, not segregation by dictum but by the habits of the larger culture.  The church which I attend is “open” and affirming, yet only a few blacks and Latinos attend services on a regular basis and a growing filipino population sits mostly together in a cluster both in worship services and in the social hall for coffee and visiting before and after services. The church clearly aims for diversity.  Five full-time pastors, three male and two female, serve the First United Methodist Church of San Diego.  One of the pastors is a Korean whose first language is English.  

The most disturbing thoughts occurring to me as I write this journal piece is that folks are to some extent hard-wired with racial resentment, not genetically but by early cultural experience. Is it possible that the majority of parishioners filling the pews on Sunday morning in the church I attend, mostly older white people, would be reluctant to participate in programs designed specifically to promote racial and ethnic diversity and harmony.  Negative racial attitudes can manifest in practice, even when the stated policy affirms equality. I wonder what the result would be if the five pastors in the church I attend were to set a goal of diversity within the congregation that mirrors the diversity of our city.  What would happen if they were determined to make it happen because “all God’s children” really means all God’s children?  What would happen if they believed they could change the way the folks in their church are mostly hard-wired to believe what they believe and react to others the way they react.  

Actually, it sounds a lot like something Jesus would do.

In October, 2007, I was traveling on a ship through the Kiel Canal (Nord-Ostsee Kanal) on my way from Dover to St. Petersburg. Lots of people, presumably mostly Germans, stood on the banks of the wide canal and watched as as the ship passed.  I’ll never forget, and I have a photograph to remind me, a man running along the bank of the canal as the ship passed.  He was carrying an American flag.  I couldn’t hear what he was yelling, but I knew it was something good, something positive.  I was moved... and very, very glad to be an American.

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor introduced Mr. Romney to a Virginia crowd yesterday by saying that Republicans have been unable to get anything done in Washington because President Obama and Democrats have created four years of gridlock in the nations capital.  Say again!  What! Cantor, Speaker of the House John Boehner, and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell have spent four years boldly refusing to cooperate with Democrats in the House and in the Senate on any project, saying out loud and in public that their first priority has been to make sure Barack Obama is a one-term president. They designed the gridlock that has frozen government.  Knowing full well what the game plan has been for the past four years, Romney said, “Let me tell you -- for me to get the things done, I just described I’m going to have to reach across the aisle and meet with good Democrats who love America, just like you love America, and there are, there are good Democrats like that.”  

Cantor’s introduction and Romney’s speech dripped with cynicism and hypocrisy.  The speeches disgust me, but the part that implied that there are, after all, a few “good Democrats who love America, just like you (Republican faithful) love America” makes me mad.  I am a Democrat. I’m sick of the shallow thinking on the part of some people who push the idea that only Republicans are true patriots. Out here in the real, honest-to-goodness America where most of us live, most people manage to relate to each other in places of commerce and in venues for entertainment and in social environments with an understanding that we citizens of the United States are a wonderfully diverse population... and we know that tolerance and compromise are necessary if we are to be a civil society.  Most of us recognize that patriotism isn’t expressed by bumper stickers or lapel pins but by the way we treat each other.  We are America... all of us, Democrats and Republicans and independents, Green Party folks and those disinterested altogether in politics... Muslims, Christians, Buddhists, Jews and those who don’t affiliate with any church and have no interest at all in religion are Americans.  We are America.  

America is what we are when we go about the business of making a living for our families... and when we take time off from working at our jobs to relax and to worship and to participate in the processes of government not as government employees but as enthusiastic citizens, we are patriots.  Cantor, Boehner, and McConnell aren’t taking time off from their work when they participate in government activities.  Government is their employment.  They have government jobs which pay exceedingly well, provide them with excellent health insurance, guaranteed no-stress retirement, and other cushy benefits.  As a matter of fact, they work for us, the American people.  

I am offended when Romney or Boehner or Cantor, or McConnell or any other politician, either Republican or Democrat, suggests that we, the people, don’t love American when we don’t agree with them.  Among the many reasons I support and promote the reelection of President Barack Obama is that he does his work and conducts his campaign for reelection without implying that the people “on the other side of the aisle” don’t love America. I like the way he goes about his business, which he understands to be America's business... my business... the business of all Americans.  When he takes time away from business, I like the way he takes care of his family.  I like the things he says about his wife, the only wife he has ever had, and I especially like the things he says about what he wants for his children and for all American children... and not just for American children but for all the children of the world. 

Four More Years!  Four More Years!  Four More Years!