A truly pompous pondering that I'm wholly unqualified for, but who cares

Recently I've had a couple of conversations about religion with people whom I know very well, which have me thinking. I feel a need to compose my thoughts, so painfully and imperfectly articulated, into some kind of order. Before I launch into that bit, I should probably spend a moment on Unitarian Universalism, since I've found most people know little about it. This will seem like an essay but bear with me. It is in no way intended as evangelism for Unitarian Universalism - this essay will show that evangelism is contrary to the very nature of the beast - but it provides some legitimate context for the later bits.

Unitarianism and Universalism, which merged in the 1960s, started in the Protestant reformation. Unitarianism's particular heresy was anti-Trinitarian, that is, they rejected the Christian concept of Trinity as something that doesn't appear in scripture and was made up by men. This may not sound like a big-whoop now, but back then it got Unitarianism's founding theologian burned at the stake by a very cranky John Calvin. Universalists, somewhat like Quakers, believed in the universality of divine spirit - the divine in all of us - and universal salvation - no such thing as hell.

Both faiths moved away from Christianity in the 1800s, the Unitarians more so after the influence of the Transcendalists - the Alcotts, Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne - which emphasized divine revelation from the natural world (think of Thoreau), the relentless exploration of individual conscience (Emerson), and the mandate of reformist action in the world (Alcott).

What eventually emerged from all the evolutions and merging is a faith that has core principles*, but intentionally demands no creed. It draws on the Judeo-Christian traditions that gave it birth, but others as well. You can believe in god, broadly defined, but you don't have to. About 20% of UUs think of themselves as Christian, and 80% believe in God in some form. About 20% think of themselves as humanists, seeking revelation of truth primarily through the human intellect. What really ties everybody together is a passionate commitment to the individual pursuit of spiritual truth, and the call to put justice and compassion into practice in daily life. That, and the love of a good book - supposedly we buy more books per capita than any other religious group.

Ok, that was long, but here's the point. I keep having conversations with non-religious people who are stuck on the idea that religion requires God. They can't be religious because they don't believe in God. I think lots of monotheists have discarded the anthropomorphic, bearded, male deity, but God still seems pretty critical to the whole endeavor. Yet as the preceding essay indicates, I hang with a crowd who don't think that's true. But lest you dismiss us as marginal, bear in mind that Buddhism has no god concept - rather a universal divine force not unlike that of modern Universalists or even liberal Quakers.

So this got me thinking - what is religion? How is it different from faith, or the ubiquitously generic "spirituality?" Here's what I think.

It's a natural human urge to ask questions of meaning and purpose, and to explore the sense of awe that life sometimes brings. Every now and then we hear or read or experience something that makes us go, "Yes! That's what I feel!" It's not perfect, but it seems to approximate some bigger truth that we're grasping at, aiming for. Sometimes the moments of clarity seem to come more readily when we talk with other people who are thinking about the same kinds of questions.

When we achieve those rare moments of clarity, we want to capture them. It's hard work, thinking about The Meaning of Life or Why Bad Things Happen to Good People. It's elusive, that sense of wonder we feel when gazing at a beautiful mountain view, or grasping the tiny fingers of a baby. So when we get something that works for us, we write it down, or set it to music, or develop a ritual that seems to reliably recreate our satisfying sense of awe or peace or clarity. We get with our like-minded friends and we agree, yes, this is what we think. This is what works for us.

But then, because the words and the rituals are imperfect, and because we are constantly evolving as thinking, experiential beings - the written words and the rituals don't stay just right forever. Some of the people are more concerned about maintaining the purity of the words and the rituals, and seem less interested in the underlying truth, and that bothers us. Maybe our group of friends is able to keep evolving, but maybe they don't evolve well enough for us. Maybe we leave the group and start over someplace else.

The striving towards truth and meaning and awe - I think that is spirituality. I think nearly every human being has that, whether they think about it that way or not.

The urge to articulate it, and put it into durable form - that is faith. Not faith as in "have faith in God" but as in the concept of a faith tradition. A set of beliefs - however loose or specific - and ways to act on that belief. Not everybody feels the need for a faith.

The group of people who agree to get together and work those beliefs and actions together, that is religion. Religion is the institution or community of people that is created around beliefs, ideally to nourish its members' spirituality, to elicit each person's best self in community with others. Religion is tricky, because it suffers from the same foibles and inconstancies as any other human endeavor. It is often co-opted for societal purposes that have nothing to do with either spirituality or faith.

I further believe that as humans, we've gotten these concepts all confused. Many people are - understandably - repulsed by many things that have been done by religions, and can't see that sometimes those religions nonetheless have very lovely faiths underneath them. People see that most religions have a god concept, and think that spirituality requires God. There are too many people who think their particular faith and religion has the only right answer, which drives other people to run screaming from the whole concept. Religion is at its best when it understands these distinctions, and looks for the common themes of faith - the golden rule, peace, justice, human dignity, the interconnectedness of all life on earth - rather than the differences between religions.

That's what I think. At least as of today. Because I believe in a free and responsible search for truth and meaning, I reserve the right to think something different tomorrow - and because I believe in the right of conscience, I'm happy for anyone to argue something different.

The seven principles affirmed by Unitarian Universalists:

• The inherent worth and dignity of every person
  
• Justice, equity and compassion in human relations
• Acceptance of one another and encouragement of spiritual growth in our congregations
  
• A free and responsible search for truth and meaning
• The right of conscience and the use of the democratic process within our congregations and in society at large
• The goal of world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all
• Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part

Populist leftist freak that I am

Here in Seattle, we have hired ourselves a new superintendent of public schools. The rest of the country may be unaware that the Seattle public schools have been in a state of conflict, financial distress, and general turmoil for some time. I have a friend who has become a prominent citizen activist on this subject, and started a blog that now draws lively discourse and thousands of visitors.

A recent post on the site (not from my friend) talked about behavior expectations in middle school and high school. Attire, gum-chewing, headphones and sunglasses in class, cursing, and back-talk were all discussed, with a general sense of shock at what was tolerated, and wondering whether the adults were fuddy-duddies in their expectations, or the schools were too lax, or the parents too complicit (since after all, somebody bought the hot pink thong and low-rider jeans for the 14-year-old girl).

Once again it makes me ponder my unlikely and fortunate high school experience. Students didn't have to go to class - well, some departments made you go, and some didn't. English required attendance, as did PE because nobody would've shown up for that. But other departments didn't take attendance. You had to do your work and pass your classes, so in that sense it was like college - skip at your own risk.

We had a student-only lounge, where we hung out on grungy furniture, much of it salvaged from street corners on the university campus or purchased second-hand. Kids went there during free time (or skipped classes) to sleep, socialize, study, dance, and snuggle. There was a beautiful, long wooden table - easily 20 feet long, like something from a medieval castle - where students did homework or played cards. The lounge was governed by a committee, with one member elected from each class, which set and enforced rules of behavior and was also responsible for the upkeep of the lounge. That meant raising money to replace furniture or buy amenities - which was done partly through a jukebox but also through other entrepreneurial activities - and then prioritizing needs, making decisions, and arranging the necessary purchases or repairs.

In short, within the confines of that room, we were our own little democratic republic. Short of something really extreme, no adult was going to come in and settle disputes or discipline anyone. It was up to us, either directly or through our elected representatives. We lobbied and campaigned for what we thought should happen, and occasionally even experimented with non-violent protest. (For example, the time a student played "Live and Let Die" on the jukebox a dozen times every single day until we all begged to have the song permanently removed. As Enrico can testify, to this day I can't listen to more than two bars of that song without lunging for the OFF button.)

Now, there are many, MANY ways that my high school was not normal, I will certainly grant that. Not least that it was very small, just 300 students in five grades. But I have often wondered how that experiement in self-governance impacted us, our understanding of rights and responsibilities, and the compromises necessary for the common good. I wonder how it changed our behavior in class, when there was an adult around to instill order. I wonder how much adult intervention actually happened behind the scenes, even when we thought we controlled our own destiny.

A few years ago I went back to my home town and visited the school. The lounge is still there, but there's no jukebox; the beautiful medieval table is gone (how did they even get it out the door?). The crazy furniture was replaced by sterile plastic picnic benches. Maybe there's still a Lounge Committee, I don't know, but I wonder if the great experiement in self-government, for decades part of the educational experience at that school, came to an end.

If so, I think it's a shame. Maybe part of teaching kids about societal expectations is making space for them to create their own society. A middle ground between demanding that they follow rules set down by - and inconsistently enforced by - weary adults, and leaving kids to their own devices entirely. How else do you learn empathy for somebody who has a completely different view on how things should be run? How else do you learn empathy for the person who has to negotiate a compromise, or enforce a rule when it's unpleasant to do so? These are the experiences that modulate our behavior, that allow us to say, "Well, I don't agree with that person, but I was in the minority last week and I remember how it felt" - and thus to talk to our peers with respect and compassion, even in conflict. Of course kids are learniing that all the time, from a young age, from their families and schools and the world. But by middle school and high school, we should be able to up the ante and get serious about the lesson. Surely it's no less important than the three Rs.

Things learned and pondered

I'm pretty sure this will be the last post relating to the storm. I'm sure folks have every right to think, move on already! But this is less about the storm and more about the reflections that resulted. So, top ten things I learned and observed, in no particular order:

1. I would have made a really crappy pioneer.

2. I understand why people used to live with their livestock in the winter. Four creatures in a freezing cold bedroom sharing body heat is better than two, and I didn't care one whit what species my companions were. A dairy cow or a goat would've been quite welcome.

3. Sometimes the greatest gift you can give is a warm beverage and clean underwear. We were in a 8-by-2 block area that was persistently without power after much of the neighborhood got it back, and the woman across the street actually had electricity (apparently getting hers from the next feeder down). Now, I know her only to say hi and this is truly not intended to judge her - I know nothing about her as a person nor about her circumstances, and it's always harder to see the needs of others when you don't share them. However, I learned that if I am ever the one house with power, I will put little flyers on the doors of all the immediate neighbors, saying "Hey, if the power is still out in the morning, feel free to stop by for a hot beverage. I'll have tea and coffee from 7 to 9 for anyone who wants it. I can't offer everyone a shower, but you can at least use my bathroom to freshen up a little, maybe change your underwear without risking hypothermia." That little bit of comfort would be much appreciated.

4. The hot water bottle should make a come-back. The one way we were able to create heat was by boiling water outside on our little one-burner camp stove. I would have paid - well, a lot of money - for an old-fashioned rubber hot water bottle to take to bed at night. We looked at a couple of drug stores, and it was all electrical heating pads.

5. We are ridiculously dependent on the Internet. It took the radio announcers and government officials a surprisingly long time to catch on and stop saying "You can get more information about [school closures/emergency shelters/places for a hot meal] on the Web, at ...." I think at first they didn't realize how many people had so little hope of connecting to the Internet, and of course lots of low-income folks have no way to connect at home even with electricity.

6. Some people are buttheads. There have been over a hundred cases of carbon monoxide poisoning from people using grills, campstoves and generators indoors - several of them fatal, the majority among people speaking limited English. After several days the health department started going door to door in targeted neighborhoods, and the newspapers published front-page warnings in a half-dozen languages. Well, conservative radio listeners and letter-writers have actually spent mental energy condemning this (and I quote an example from the Seattle Times): "Shame on you! You and others are making a big deal out of how friendly you want to be to people who don't read or write English well. English should be our language in this country and we should not be enabling people not to speak or learn it." Excuse me? We were talking about a deadly public health threat that was causing people to actually die, and you want to withhold information that prevents deaths as a sort of linguistic tough-love policy? Heartless idiots. These people should be expelled from the country to live somewhere where they don't speak the language. Somewhere really fun, like Turkmenistan.

7. Gratitude is too quickly forgotten. The inevitable analysis and questioning has begun: Did the city/county/utilities do enough to clear dangerous trees? Are property owners to blame for not clearning their trees? Why did City Light send their workers home the night of the storm, and did that cause delays in the recovery effort? Why aren't our electrical wires underground? (Hello, anyone worried about earthquakes... ?) AAaanyway - that's all fine, we have the right and the responsibility to challenge our public services and make them better. But let this in no way denigrate the work done by the actual crews, day after day in cold and rain, getting our power back up. Somebody should throw these people (and their families) a big-ass party come January. Perhaps one or two of those hotels that made an unexpected windfall...

8. I should probably overcome my hatred of pumping gas. All the emergency prep literature says "never let your gas tank go below half full." I never follow this advice, because I loathe pumping gas and I leave to the last possible moment. But I may reconsider that policy. In a real disaster - well, if nothing else you might be able to get the hell outta Dodge.

9. I understand why newspapers, musical skills and storytelling used to be so valued. Remember learning in history class about how Americans on the remotest frontiers bought newspapers and devoured every detail of the Lincoln-Douglas debates? How there used to be hundreds of daily newspapers? You know how in Jane Austen novels they are always learning with enthusiasm that Miss Paddington has consented to entertain with a few tunes in the evening? Have you ever read The Decameron? It all makes sense now. When you have no other way to get information about things that affect your life, you pounce on a recent newspaper. And, when it's too dark to read, you can still while away the dark hours playing an instrument, singing, or making up stories.

10. And speaking of Jane Austen...You know how they're also constantly going out on walks? Miles and miles of walks across the pastoral English countryside? That makes sense too. Gotta keep the blood moving to stay warm.

Apparently the Universe is a Buddhist

On Sunday, there was a fabulous sermon at church. Seriously, one of the best sermons I've ever heard. The preacher was working from some Buddhist writings by Pema Chodron, about the techniques that we use to avoid what scares us and therefore to avoid being fully present and awake for ourselves and others, and before she was done she'd managed to roll in a story about screaming kids on a plane and a wrap-up story about a family gathered around their dying father, which had half the congregation in tears.

It was a tour de force. I left feeling inspired and refreshed and centered and determined. All I had to do was hold on to that moment of insight, FOREVER, and I would be a perfectly enlightened human being.

Alas, I've realized I have to go to church every week because the centering and perspective and humility and whatever it is one gets from a good sermon does not last forever. It doesn't even last a week. By Sunday afternoon, I was trying to explain to Enrico about the great sermon - which he would have loved because he resonates with Buddhist thought - and I couldn't produce a remotely articulate summation of what I'd just heard. Oh well. I'll just have to wait for the podcast. (Just imagine what Ralph Waldo Emerson could have done with podcasts!)

Meanwhile, by Monday, I had worked myself into a snit about a board meeting that I was about to attend. My piece of business wasn't on the agenda the way I wanted it to be, this group moves too slowly, I end up doing too much of the work, wah wah WAH. We're always short on money, I'm the treasurer, nobody else worries about this as much as me, wah wah WAH. Even as I worked myself into said snit, there was a part of my brain that stood back and watched, saying, "You know, this isn't at all helpful. Or even accurate, for that matter. Why are you doing this?" That part of my brain apparently remembered about Buddhism and creating our own suffering. But, the rest of my brain didn't care. It barrelled merrily along creating this very satisfyingly self-righteous snit.

And then, two things happened in rapid succession. I won't go into the details, but suffice to say that money for this organization appeared from two unexpected places. Not one, but two. Just at that exact moment. It was like the Creative Force of the Universe saying "Ha! You think everything hinges on you, do you? Well, let me teach you a little lesson."

The moral of the story isn't so much that I think we're powerless in the events around us - on the contrary - but that we constantly, stubbornly, blindly misunderstand the nature of that power. That, and the fact that sometimes the Universe really knows how to rain on a good snit parade.

Miscellaneous Shellfish

Lots has been said elsewhere about the election and its implications. I have a few random thoughts. In no particular order.

First, I am happy to see the Republicans get their thumpin'. One thing that has made me crazy for a long time are the conservative Christian Americans who say "well, I don't agree with the war, and I think the government has screwed up a lot, but I still support the President because he's a Christian and I know he prays." I don't understand this at all. If your accountant, or your lawyer, or your hairdresser, proved to be incompentent - they lost your money and undermined your legal rights and gave you really bad haircuts - would you keep them around just because they pray? Hell no, you'd fire them. Why would this expectation of competence apply less to the most important jobs in society?

Second, although I am happy to see the Democrats win, I have little hope that they have a cohesive program and a sense of grounded leadership. I hope I'm wrong and I'm more than happy to give them a chance.

Third, regardless - I am delighted at the prospect of the first female Speaker of the House. That is a fabulous and much-overdue milestone regardless of what else happens.

Fourth - the occupation of Iraq. It seems to me that we have broken that country, and it's possible that it simply cannot be fixed. I empathize with people who say, "The war was a terrible idea, but now we've broken the country and we owe it to the Iraqis and the rest of the world to try to bring some stability there." My heart says that same thing. But, it's recently been revealed that military scenario models, conducted over the past decade by the US military think-tank people, showed that even 400,000 US troops - more than three times what we have there - could not prevent Iraq from sliding into civil war.

It is possible that we as a country will simply have to admit that we made a mistake, and no amount of earnest trying can now fix it. We might have to just leave the mess to heal on its own. All of us as people make mistakes like this in our lives - ones that we cannot fix, that have repercussions that leave us sad or guilt-ridden or sick to our stomachs with the wish to go back in time and make different choices. The absolute hardest thing in the world to do is to take responsibility for those mistakes, acknowledge the consequences, and wait in all our powerlessness for the healing to happen. This is not a "cut-and-run" path, a cowardly path. It takes courage to admit you've been wrong, and strength of character to unconditionally accept responsibility for harm you've caused. I hope we have that courage as a nation, if that's what we're facing.

Lastly, I wholeheartedly agree with the speaker currently on my local NPR talk show, who is asserting that "the moral values crisis in our society is greedy consumerism." I actually think that outraged liberals and outraged religious conservatives are both responding to a comon sense of moral sickness, of something being fundamentally off in society. I just think we assign that unease to different causes - corporate greed or gay couples? Entrenched poverty or abortion? I'm as worried about violent video games, and exploding internet pornography, and inappropriately sexy clothing for pre-teen girls, as my religiously conservative fellow citizens. I just happen to articulate the harmfulness of these things in terms like dehumanization and objectification, rather than offensiveness to God. I hope that in our current collective exhaustion, we can find common ground about what really saps our moral core - a fundamentally selfish and materialistic way of life that diminishes our humanity, our sense of connection, and our sense of accountability for the planet and everything on it.

Poised for what?

I have been reading two books - well, more than that but two in particular that have come to be linked in my mind somehow. One is A Woman in Berlin, an anonymous diary written by a female journalist living in Berlin in the weeks after it fell to the Russians at the end of World War II. It's very grim and I'm not sure I'll be able to finish it; the main take-away is the enormous incidence of rape by Russian soldiers of German women and girls. The second is A Chronicle of the Last Pagans by Pierre Chuvin, about the Roman Empire in late antiquity. Enrico had picked it up at the library as part of his quest to Understand Italy, and then I picked it up as a reprieve from the relentless grimness of wartime Berlin.

Both of these books feed into a swirl of thought that has rattled in my brain for a while now, thinking about people at other moments in history and whether they had a sense of what their world was poised for. People sitting on the verge of great conflagrations, or change. What did people reading the newspaper in the US in 1938 think? Did they have any inkling of what was to come? Do people ever have an inkling?

I know that by definition it's not possible to know the future, but I look at the times we're in and I wonder what we're on the edge of. And so I feel a strange sense of connection back through history with people of those times, living their regular lives, perhaps feeling great unease at the way things are going. And I'm fascinated by accounts of people living through great upheaval, the dismantling of their life's most basic daily realities as well as their society's foundational structures and assumptions; who find themselves adapting to conditions they never could have imagined a few years or weeks or days before - whether in Berlin or Lebanon.

"And yet it is worthwhile to take the viewpoint of the vanquished - those who seem to have been behind their own times - while bearing in mind that they did not consider themselves defeated or backward...Today we are too prone to believe that their world was dramatically collapsing. Accordingly, we readily attribute to the Romans of the fourth and fifth centuries A.D. our own deceptive luidity, mixed with the bitter resignation of 'waiting for the Barbarians'...In reality, never was imperial power more efficient, more absolute, more centralized. And the events that appear singularly ominous to our eyes - the invasions of the Huns or the Goths - would have appeared to contemporaries as difficulties of a familiar kind, which would have to be dealt with sooner or later in any case."
- - Pierre Chauvin, A Chronicle of the Last Pagans

In empathy

As I sit here working, fighter jets are screaming overhead. No, I'm not in a war zone - it is my city's annual summer "festival" which includes an "air show" of military jets. I live in the neighborhood where the jets fly closest to the ground.

I know that there are people who enjoy this form of entertainment - obviously, it draws the summer crowds like crazy - and while I do not judge it, I absolutely do not understand it. To me, this is the most viscerally unpleasant sound I have ever experienced. A bone-rattling roar that gets lounder and louder until you think it's not possible to crescendo any further, and then, at its peak, adds a screaming pitch like an enraged, vicious animal. Knowing that I am in no danger, it still activates adrenal fear responses - heartrate, respiration - and I can appreciate the role of these machines as agents of intimidation and fear as well as destruction in a real situation of war.

Which brings me back to the people around the world trapped with this sound for real, day in and day out, along with the bombing and explosions that come with it. Every year at this time, I wonder how people survive that experience with their minds unfractured by the strain.

On that note, and at the request of a reader for more information on a previous post, I pass along an update from a relief agency that we support that is providing aid to civilians trapped and displaced by the fighting in Lebanon (and also Gaza). Mercy Corps is a secular nonprofit based in Portland, Oregon that is familiar with Lebanon through its economic and civic development projects there, and is now one of the few organizations braving ravaged and dangerous roads to deliver food, water and sanitary supplies to southern Lebanon. Just as with Hurricane Katrina, many of the people left behind closest to danger were those with the least ability to evacuate: elderly, incapacitated, poor, without private transport, families with multiple small children and no way to move them. A million people are now estimated to be displaced in Lebanon.

Whatever your view on this war - and I know I have friends who disagree with mine - I hope we can all laud these efforts to deliver the most basic life-sustaining support to civilians caught in the horrific crossfire. I hope you will consider giving your support. (To see a video story following along with this Mercy Corps convoy, see this NY Times video story.)

* - * - * - * - * - *

Dear friend,

Two Mercy Corps truckloads of critical food supplies and blankets reached the beleaguered town of Marjayoun on Tuesday - one of the first organized relief convoys to reach this devastated part of southern Lebanon.

Because of the increasingly desperate situation there, we made the decision to go without waiting for a response for a guarantee of safety from Israel - something that has been holding back convoys from the UN and other colleague agencies.

We need your help to continue and expand these efforts. Support from our regular, dedicated donors like you enables us to be bold, creative and quick in our response.

The crisis in Lebanon is our No. 1 priority. I am currently in Lebanon lending support to our relief team, underscoring our commitment and trying to draw more attention to the immense humanitarian needs here.

If you haven't donated yet, please make a donation today. Every dollar you give can help us secure at least $7 of food, water, fuel and other critical supplies on the ground.

If you have already given, we THANK YOU on behalf of the people we've assisted so far. You can help us even more by forwarding this email to your friends and family.

Finally, I'm attaching an email that I received on Tuesday from our team on the ground. I'm immensely proud of their heroic efforts to help innocent civilians who are caught in the crossfire.

Please spread the word and give what you can today.

Thank you,

Neal Keny-Guyer
CEO
Mercy Corps

--- Original Message ---

From: David Holdridge
Subject: LRT Daily Brief
Date: 8/1/06
To: Neal Keny-Guyer

--Left Beirut early this morning, arriving Marjayoun at about 12:30... The mayor and vice mayor met the convoy in the central square and welcomed our team. (We actually helped rehabilitate the square, Soukh Marjayoun, last year as part of our tourism project.) We followed them to a school, where there were about 24 families (about 6-7 members per family) ... and then went to a second school, approx. 16 families. Distributed food and blankets both places.

--Back at the central depot, about 25 men helped offload the remaining food items and blankets... no food in the depot from anyone else, so it made a significant difference that we went.

--The trip was arduous. It took about 5 hours... normally 45 minutes. So many parts of the main roads aren't passable... it was difficult. At times we had to drive through olive groves and on dirt roads. One truck had 240 cartons (food for one family of ten for a week) ... heavy cartons. In the second truck there were about 50 bales of blankets (30 blankets per bale). We had a Lebanese police escort, and I was on the phone with the mayor in Marjayoun every 15-20 minutes as we approached.

--Our distributions in the Aley area southeast of Beirut still ongoing... 600 families Sunday, 600 families Monday. We have a warehouse up there now. Continue to deliver food parcels, blankets, mattresses, hygiene kits. Filling water tanks on top of schools, other buildings where displaced families are staying. Hope to reach 100,000 people in the Chouf.

--We're going to try to get down to Nabatiye with some food convoys in the coming days. Hard to find drivers who will go there because of the danger ... awful lot of fear about moving south. But we will persist.

----
Mercy Corps * 3015 SW 1st Ave., Dept. W * Portland, OR 97201

So, so sorry

I just want to say, for the record, that I disgree in the strongest possible terms with my country's support of Israel's bombing the shit out of of Lebanon. I do not think it's ok, not at all. I am embarrassed and angry that my tax dollars are going to buy more weapons to bomb more Lebanese civilians and to destroy the basic everyday infrastructure that they rely on for their basic everyday lives. I go through my day trying to imagine what I would do if all the roads around me were bombed, and I couldn't get anywhere, and I had no food, water, electricity or information, and I didn't know whether my house might blow up at any moment, and I couldn't get ahold of any of my loved ones to know if they were alive.

I'd like the rest of the world to know that we don't all buy into the assertion that this incredible death, displacement and suffering among Lebanese civilians is somehow a necessary evil, or reasonable tradeoff, or fair gamble, or whatever is that's being argued by my insane government officials.

That doesn't mean I'm hostile to Israel or Jewish people or their right to a safe home. I simply believe that this kind of destruction is morally bankrupt, no matter who perpetrates it or whatever their reasons. You reap what you sow. Scorched earth retribution is the worst kind of laziness.

I am sending money to relief agencies that are helping people in Lebanon and Gaza. I'm probably on some government watch list now, but I don't give a crap. I wish I had more pull, really I do. I'm sorry that we are so self-centered and such a source of suffering to the world, so willing to sacrifice everyone else for our smallest conveniences and our unsustainable way of life. Not everybody here feels that way. Hell, not everybody here even benefits from the conveniences.

Why don't the dissenters turn out en masse in the streets to protest, you might reasonably ask? I don't know. I wish I had the answer. All I can say is that the protests in my town are small, and depressing, and unfocused, and generally run by people whose righteous indignation seems to demand all-or-nothing agreement with their every viewpoint, and I don't see how it helps. Enrico still goes. He's a better person than I in that way.

There are still good things about the United States. The founding fathers, they were onto something with the democracy and the freedom of speech and the checks and balances. As a woman I realize I have more respect and rights and opportunities here than in most places on the planet. Don't give up on us completely, because we really do have something to offer, if we don't completely extinguish it with our government's war-mongering, fear-mongering, swaggering, dictatorial, willfully ignorant destructiveness.

Enough

I have been feeling sad and angry and unsettled by the state of the world. I would love to put together a sharply written and philosophically dazzling essay, but alas, it is beyond me. I will just put out a few random thoughts.

First of all: The photos of the incinerated, blown-apart Lebanese toddlers trying to flee Israeli bombing...I am sorry, but there is no acceptable excuse for incinerating children. Period. I understand that the Israelis are surrounded by people who hate them, and that missiles are dropping on them, and that the world seems unable to resolve these problems. But I gotta say, I'm done with all those arguments. It is simply morally unacceptable to say that your only option involves incinerating children, and of course it's not your intention to do so, and therefore any toddlers you happen to incinerate are really on the conscience of your enemy who started the fight. No. Sorry. It doesn't work that way, ever.

I'm sick of this world view that has somehow taken hold in all quarters - American, Israeli, Iraqi, Al-Quaida - that says that if you're defending your people and fighting for the side of right against people who hate you, any means is justified. This swaggering Protector of the People act that declares that any human cost is by definition justified if you just say the code word - security, terror, right to defend, resistance. A world view that ignores facts and logic as much as suffering. That says the life of a military professional, engaged in war, is fair trade for the life of a trapped civilian unable to escape. That says punishing an entire population - or abandoning them to chaos and war and hardship for years to come - over the misdeeds of a few in their midst is an acceptable tradeoff. Somehow, the whole world seems to have bought into it.

This is a world in which extremism of thought is a virtue, violence in the name of a righteous cause is by definition acceptable, and your side is always right. It is the same philosophy adopted by both George Bush and Osama bin Ladin, and the Israelis are as poisoned by it as anyone. And I'm sick of the assumption that if you point that out, you must be unsupportive of Jews, and their right to a safe home, and the truth of their terrible, hard history.

My sister just came back from India, and we were discussing our belief that India will eventually be the dominant world power. Mr. Tata (I'm sorry, I don't know his first name) is the next Bill Gates. Enrico pointed out that in the previous glory days of the land that is now India, their predominantly Hindu faith held them back from building a colonial-style empire. Now they are tenaciously, methodically building a business empire while we are mired in folly. Good for them. Bring on the age of Indian dominance.

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow

This week Enrico and I were talking about the immigrant marches, and he said that while he's all for the underlying goals - recognizing the economic contribution of immigrants, legalizing their employment in a marketplace that clearly needs them, the right of families not to be torn apart by differing citizenship status, etc. etc. - he was a little unclear about what the marches themselves were supposed to accomplish.

I had been all happy about the marches in a generic, power-to-the-people kind of way, but I hadn't given it much thought beyond that. I liked the flags of many nations, the big sombreros, the people doing traditional Samoan dances, because if there's one thing my life choices demonstrate (well, besides the addictive properties of Cocoa Crispies and Saturdays in your pajamas with a murder mystery), it's that I absolutely believe in the life-enriching benefits of more languages, more cross-cultural experience, and strange cuisines. The more, the merrier. So I really don't get the whole English-first, assimilate-or-else mindset.

But when pushed to think about it, what really made me happy about the marches this week was the sight of so many people choosing not to be in fear. I heard some butthead on NPR saying menacingly "I'm making lists of all the businesses that are closed today, and reporting them to Homeland Security, so they can raid those places." Many of the people who marched this week live in shadows, invisible to us as they pick our food, build our buildings, clean our hotel rooms. They don't take their kids to doctors, or go to parent-teacher conferences, because the kids are citizens but the parents aren't. And yet on Monday, they made a choice to refuse fear.

We live with so very much fear. It's been said that fear is a choice, but our government cultivates it these days. Fear of terrorists, avian flu, unfamiliar people destroying our way of life, gas shortages, sex offenders, cancer, a vengeful god, identity theft - fear that we're on a government list of some sort and we're being watched. But this week, we got a great gift, a big fat dose of Not-Fear.

Musings posed by my iPod on a run in the park

Twenty-five years ago they spoke out and they broke out
Of recession and oppression and together they toked
And they folked out with guitars around a bonfire
Just singin' and clappin' - Man,
What the hell happened?*

Yes, a very good question, from the poetic guys of Smashmouth. I don't want to idealize the sixties, I know they were a complicated time. But from the outside looking in, I can't help but be envious. A majority of people are against the war today, but what is anyone doing about it, really? What was it like to feel like you could do something to make change, or at least like you could refuse to participate in an immoral and corrupt system? What was it like when society was full of people willing to get arrested, go into exile, break the law to try to stop their country from doing things they considered profoundly illegal and immoral?

So don't sit back kick back and watch the world get bushwhacked

Where did that sentiment go, that commitment, that sense of moral outrage? I really want to know what it's like. And why we seem to have lost it, so completely. Did we think the issue was settled, after Vietnam - never again could this happen? Or did life get comfortable; lobsters slowly boiled in the pot? Is the world just too interconnected now, too mega-incorporated, to see how to escape from the web, resign from the system?

I don't want to live in a VW bus with my dogs on ropes. I don't want to go live off the grid, grinding my own flour and putting up preserves and making macrame hammocks for pin money. I just want my government to stop killing people, please.

Thank you very much for your attention to this matter.

* Walkin' on the Sun, Smashmouth, from Fush Yu Mang

Earth Day musings

One thing my sister and I have in common is that economics was our worst subject in college. I actually had to take more economics in graduate school, although MoxieVanilla was smart enough to pick a subject that didn't require it.

Moxie, who is one sharp cookie, has nonetheless been carrying around a vague sense of her own stupidity as a result of being unable to grasp economics, and I have been trying to reassure her that she doesn't understand economics because it doesn't make sense. People try to pretend economics is a science, like physics, but please - it's totally value-laden while pretending to be objective. We're talking about a discipline that says:

• people getting cancer = economic growth (because of medical services consumed)
• cleaning a toxic waste dump = economic cost

So, I tell her, be grateful that economic theory makes no sense to you. It means you're sane. For me, the fundamental insanity of it is that I don't really believe we can "create" wealth. There's only so much stuff in the universe, and it just gets moved around. If you take raw materials and turn them into a finished product that you can sell for more money - well, the value of the raw materials, human time, energy, environmental damage etc. all went into that final product.

It's a big shell game. I can admit a little room for the value-add of genuine artistic talent, or intellectual discovery. But that's about it. Wealth is only "created" within the confines of a small canvass, because in the big picture you eventually hit the first law of thermodynamics, i.e., The Big Shell Game.

There's an article in this month's Harper's about the real estate bubble, and it has one of my all-time favorite factoids that demonstrates the inherent absurdity of economics as a "science:" If you had one penny the day Jesus was born, and you were somehow able to put it in the bank and earn 5% annual compounded interest - today you would have a solid gold sphere 150 million times the size of the Earth.*

Indefinite growth is a myth. Unending wealth creation is a myth. The sooner we accept it, the better off the whole planet will be.

*For a variant on this argument, see Garret Hardin, Living Within Limits, Oxford University Press 1993. He makes the argument that if the 30 silver coins allegedly received by Judas for betraying Jesus were converted to gold and put in the bank for 2000 years at 5% interest, they would grow to the equivalent of 4.78 x 10-to-the-42nd grams of gold - or 8 x 10-to-the -14th solid Earths of gold.

New life

I was feeling the easter vibe yesterday, let me tell you. Not in a savior-rises-from-the-dead kind of way, but in the more universal way - easter, pasqua, rebirth, new life. The universal celebration that humankind has always lifted up at this time of year, when green things burst forth and color blooms and birds build nests. Just as the Christmas season is another incarnation of the primal human urge to pray for, and then celebrate, the return of light after weeks of lengthening darkness, so Easter is another incarnation of the primal celebration of the return of life after a cold, dead winter.

To me, it's comforting in its universality. Supposedly Christians didn't start believing in the literal resurrection of Jesus until a couple centuries after his death, when - out of convenience, or nostalgia, or just the way beliefs evolve - the new religion began to be overlayed onto the old, lining up the major events of Christianity with the old, familiar pagan holidays. That concept freaks some people out, but not me. These holidays have resonance for me because they are so universal, so inescapable, so compelling, no matter how many new religions we humans invent.

I love that to this day, the major popular icons of Easter have nothing to do with Jesus and everything to do with fertility and fecundity: eggs, bunnies, tulips. I also love that inventive Christians managed to embody this compelling concept in a man. Some feminists see that as an indictment of Christianity's misogyny and patriarchy, but I think the Goddess chuckles.

That's not to disrespect Jesus, by any means. Indeed, the universality of the spring fertility rite, in whatever form it may take, is what makes it True, with a capital T. Deep, intuitive, mythological Truth, which is so much greater than truth with a little t - factual, literal, narrow truth. The Truth of the Christian Easter is what makes it powerful, not the literal truth (or lack thereof, depending on your point of view) of the resurrection story.

It is Truth that will, I hope, unite us all some day, helping us to overcome our squabbling over truth.

Happy Easter, everybody. Whatever it means to you.

Service versus sacrifice

How do you draw the line? Is it necessarily bad to sacrifice, or just unhealthy to put yourself in the habit and mindset of doing so to the detriment of your own well-being? What if they come bundled together, and you can't be of service without a little sacrifice? Is it no longer a sacrifice if you make a willing choice, in order to do service that pleases you? Is the distinction between service and sacrifice entirely in the mind, that is - if you feel good and fulfilled afterwards it was service, if you feel cranky and lessened (psychologically, emotionally, financially) it was sacrifice? Or is there some intrinsic measure that can be applied to the act itself? Is sacrifice merely service that became boring, or overstayed its welcome?

Things I know for sure, Part One

This month in The New Yorker there's an article on scientific research and the ways that the Bush administration is undermining and contorting science for the sake of ideology, particularly religious ideology. There's even a quote in there from somebody suggesting they'd object to an HIV vaccine because to cure or prevent HIV would remove a disincentive for premarital sex. Excuse me? Let me get this straight. It's worth it for millions people and their children die a horrible, wasting death in order to try to control how and when people have sex? Where the frack in the Bible does Jesus suggest that would be his preferred trade-off? This just blows my mind. I don't even know how to formulate a response to this type of thinking, on any level. So you wish death by a horrible, wasting disease on other people - even children - at the same time that you're all fired up about the sanctity of a "life" the size of a dot on this i? By golly, the dot-sized life is invaluable, but once humans are out of the womb their life ain't worth shit. Excuse my language.

I just don't know what to say to that. But here are some things I know for sure.

The Golden Rule, for one. And a friendly amendment to the Golden Rule: If you wouldn't want something for the people you know and care about, you can't wish it for any human being. AIDS, prostitution, pornography, slavery, having your house bombed - it goes for all those things. And beyond that, if you don't wish it on other human beings, you need to do your best not be a part of perpetuating it. Which we all do, whether we like it or not, being part of a global economy. So first, if you don't want something for your loved ones, don't promote it directly. And second, although it's complicated, we all ought to at least think about what we can do to avoid promoting it indirectly.

I was just in Texas the last couple of days. On the way to the airport, as my colleagues were chatting away in mutal liberal understanding about gay rights, I fell into conversation with our linebacker-sized limo driver - a hard-drawlin' Baptist who'd never lived outside Texas except while in the military. A classic moment of red state meets blue state (or, as he cheerfully put it, "fruits and nuts"). Feeling brave, I asked him what he thought of my colleagues' discussion.

"Well," he said thoughtfully, "I figgur just because somebody wants to rent an apartment from me, or work for me, it ain't no business of mine who they love. If God cares about stuff like that, I suppose we'll all find out after we die, won't we? Until then, we'd all best just treat other people the way we want to be treated, rather than make judgments that ain't ours to make."

Amen. It gave me a little bit of hope.

A lamentation and a prayer

In the weeks after September 11, 2001, I remember feeling an overwhelming sense of loss for what could have been. I remember seeing the pictures and news clips of people all over the planet, lining up at US embassies to sign condolence books and leave candles and flowers. I remember the mind-boggling array of nationalities among the fatalities and missing persons.

It was a moment when nearly all of the world's human population was drawn together in a sincere, intense yearning for peace. United in our fatigue with conflict, the majority of humanity was poised at that moment to say: Enough. Enough of trying to douse violence with more violence, enough making excuses as to why the problem is everyone else but us. It was a moment that could have been seized by a truly gifted leader, the type of person who comes along only rarely in human history. If that kind of person had been in a position of leadership at that moment, maybe he or she could have galvanized the world in the wake of our shock and disgust, in the reminder of our common humanity, and turned the tide.

George W. Bush, of course, was not that leader. Not only was the moment lost, it was trampled. Crushed by arrogant bravado, tin-eared and ignorant turns of phrase, and eventually, violence.

He has brought war down upon the heads of millions, justified by false information that he all but demanded from government employees accountable to him - and now he disingenuously shrugs that he was misled, but admits he would have gone to war no matter what. He endlessly trumpets the same circular logic - "It's my intention to make Americans safer, therefore by definition my actions do make Americans safer." And yet Hurrican Katrina revealed our pitiful inability to deal with any kind of disaster, indeed the wholesale dismantling of the very disaster-response infrastructure that has supposedly been strengthened. Iraq has gone from a despotically ruled but relatively powerless country, to a massive training ground for angry and opportunistic terrorists. As Iraqis suffer, genuine relief at ejecting a tyrant turns to bitterness, while our own government shrugs off the incompetence of the occupation - how were we to know it would be hard? Because it was your job to know, before you played with other people's lives. More people the world over hate the United States more intensely than ever, and more terrorist acts are committed now than in 2001.

Our government has spent unfathomable amounts of money on all of this, betraying the fiscally conservative values of the president's political party and cutting basic services to his own citizens. He has fueled religious extremism and intolerance, wrapping himself in a banner of so-called Christianity while demonstrating either complete ignorance or disdain for the teachings of Jesus. The civil liberties and separation of powers that underpin our constitution are trampled, the president and his advisors loudly declaring that he is above the law. The values of democracy and liberty that we are supposedly spreading, and which many people in the world genuinely admire, are looking tarnished and hollow these days. More and more, our government uses the tactics and rhetoric of fascism, telling us in vaguely menacing tones that we should be fearful of unspecified enemies who lurk at every turn, that secrecy is necessary for our own protection, that debate is unpatriotic.

While in Rome last summer, touring the ruins of the ancient Roman Forum, I commented to Enrico that every U.S. president should be required to visit that spot before taking office. The mammoth size and splendor of the buildings are still evident, and surely the people who walked those bustling streets and corridors thought to themselves: We are it. It's a cautionary tale that should be emblazoned in the minds of all U.S. leaders, and the leaders of all superpower nations to come.

I thought that perhaps September 11 would prove to be the event that brought us back from the brink, an event so destructive that it united the people of the world in a vision of how we want to live our daily lives, what we want for our children, how we want to exist together. It was not to be so, and I have no doubt that history will judge this presidency as a mammoth and tragic failure. Perhaps, though, the Bush presidency itself will eventually prove to be that decisively destructive event, the catalyst for change, the planetary disaster that paves the way for an exhausted humanity to say: Enough.

In which I once again reveal too much about my inner workings

I thought I had contained Overzealous Ozzie, limited his ability to be a pain in my ass without pulling out the big guns - but it appears I may have underestimated him. Damn you, Freston, and your evil minion Ozzie! But it's ok. After all, I'm just a temp. A temp CEO, but a temp nonetheless. And though I do get exasperated when somebody repeatedly suggests I'm a complete idiot, I ultimately understand what I'm in service to.

Several years ago, I saw Robert Kennedy Jr. speak - which, as an aside, is the only time I've ever gotten a sense of the electricity, the inspiration that people felt when listening to John Kennedy, or Martin Luther King. But - I digress. Kennedy was talking about his work as an attorney with communities in the Hudson River Valley, and their efforts to hold accountable the corporations who had polluted the river, leaving dead ecosystems and disease-causing toxins in their wake.

Kennedy talked about the fact that we in the US have lost sight of what it means to incorporate. Incorporation, he pointed out, is a structure that we, the people, chose to create within our laws to allow people to associate together for some social benefit that could be better achieved collectively rather than individually. You have to apply for incorporation, and through your articles of incorporation, you describe the social good that you expect to achieve through the power of association. When an incorporation is approved, it creates a social contract wherein we, the people, agree that this arrangement will further the interests of society. The fact that this simple act of incorporation happens so frequently and mechanically does not take away that fact that corporations exist at our pleasure because we, the people, through our laws, have given our permission and our blessing. Whenever we endow corporations with the same rights as individuals, when we let them damage people and communities and the world, we are doing something very dangerous. If those corporations do not live up to their end of the social contract, to create social benefit, we the people have not only the right, but the responsibility to withdraw our permission.

I loved this description, and it combined with another concept that a mentor of mine used to espouse: that there is both overt social change, like protesting or writing politicians or spending your time trying to change the world, and covert social change - where you simply live your life as if it is the way you want it to be. Which sounds silly, until you think about the fact that if every person acted as if the world were that way, it would, de facto, be that way. If you can keep your mind and your intention in that space, every mundane act can become radical, an act of social change.

So when I'm working for an organization, I try to think of the corporation the way RFK Jr. made me see it, as it would be in the world I wish for: a sacred social contract, intended to foster social good as specified when the organization incorporated. I try to think of myself as moving through the organization, for a time, in service not just to the mission, or the board, or the people I work for, or the organization's constitutencies - but to the underlying social contract. In moments of confusion I even visualize a little imaginary committee of citizens who reviewed and approved the original incorporation request, and who are periodically checking in to make sure we're doing what we said we would. I picture them as regular, honest folk, in simple clothing and a rustic little courthouse, reviewing our organization's promise to society, and whether we're living up to it. It may sound a little nutty, but it keeps me grounded.

I explain this to people who work for me, because it has odd side effects, like making me a sticker about annoying legalities. I figure all those labor laws and stuff are part of the social contract, and if I want to behave as if that contract is sacred, I have to respect all of it - or make an effort to change the contract, the laws. I explain to employees I don't expect them to work long hours, or put their job before their personal lives; I just expect them to show up and be authentically in service to the social contract, however they may conceptualize that.

So when Ozzie tries for some baffling reason to be the boss of me, I just try to remember what I'm in service to, rather than give in to the urge to crush him like a bug. However, y'all might want to start my legal defense fund now, in case I'm driven to murder Ozzie while I'm in Texas next week. Texas would be a particularly unfortunate place to be driven to murder, given their love of executin' folks down there. Let's just hope it doesn't come to that, and I'll keep visualizing my rustic little Council of Citizens.

Light and Darkness

Last night our power went out around 7:30, and was still out when we went to bed. I was returning home from class and drove through miles of eerie, inky darkness. We're having what passes for a cold snap here, so the house was getting pretty chilly when I got home. I found Enrico bundled up in fleece, extra blankets on the bed, in the dark, listening to the iPod. We lit some candles around the house and found a battery-powered radio. We went to bed knowing that we had a battery-powered alarm clock to get us up. It was cozy.

However, I must say, I learned a few things. One, I need to keep more batteries around the house. Two, I really hope the big earthquake comes during the summer months. It's partly the problem of the cold, but more importantly, having no power during the time of year when we get a mere 8 hours of sunlight would really suck on a long-term basis. Sitting there reading my book by candle lantern and battery-powered head lamp, I thought about the people living in dark, cold, northern climes before electricity. You'd probably develop highly evolved conversation and story-telling skills, and get lots of sleep, and become great at word games. But I have to believe there's just a lot of boredom involved in living with that much cold darkness.

It made me appreciate the Advent season - the Christian incarnation of this time of diminishing light. I'm sure that going back to the beginning of human time, people have marked this period, when the days get shorter and shorter, and the darkness seems to be winning the battle. What if the sun just kept disappearing, the days diminishing to nothing instead of getting longer again? At some point in human history, this must have genuinely seemed like a possibility. Hence all of the rituals around light - the Advent candles, the menora - that compensate for the diminishing sun, encourage it to come back. And meanwhile, you embrace the dark, the waiting, the introspection that inevitably comes from being stuck indoors with your own thoughts under a lot of blankets, with little to do.

And then, imperceptibly, the days get longer. The sun is returning, and has not abandoned its children on earth. So of course - you have a big honkin' holiday to celebrate. You create stories and metaphors about the coming of light, of new life, new beginnings. It all makes perfect sense.

Here's one for the analyst's couch

When I was in the third grade, we went to live in Cincinnati for a year. The schools in Cincinnati were not as good as those in my little home town, and the year was mostly review for me. My mom had to come down to the school and obtain special dispensation for me to check out books from the fourth-grade "section" of the library.

I was a very shy child, so making friends in a new place for a year was hard, and it wasn't made easier by being ahead of everyone in class, the only kid with security clearance for the fourth-grade library books. It really didn't help that I had a teacher who picked obvious favorites. I would have loved to melt into the back row, but alas - front and center, constantly held up as having the best test scores. (I was happy to keep my mouth shut and my hand down, but I drew the line at intentionally throwing a spelling quiz, dammit.) Nonetheless, I managed to make enough friends, and it was a happy year, most of which I spent exploring the two-acre back yard of our rented house, complete with a creek and a stone bridge and tadpoles and snakes. Snakes!

There was a boy a few doors down who was, I would say, "troubled." A year younger than me, he was in a special ed class, and had behavioral difficulties of some sort. This boy (I'll call him Todd, I don't remember his name) used to bully me on the way to and from school, and I was baffled as to why he had taken such a vigorous dislike to me, although with adult hindsight I can see that it had nothing to do with me personally. This went on for some time, and one day the teacher called me out into the hallway, where I saw Todd and his teacher. My teacher asked if it was true that Todd had been hassling me on the way home from school. Surprised at how she knew this when I had told no one, not even my parents, I nodded.

"Slap him," she said.

I looked at her, stunned. Surely a teacher - two teachers! - were not telling me to hit another child? She repeated herself, explaining that because he had harmed me, I got to hit him. I hesitated, then gave him a light slap across the cheek, ready to turn and run back into the classroom. Harder, she instructed me, slap him harder. I gave him a good whack, and then (as ordered) one more, and it was finally over. He never bothered me again.

I can vividly, vividly recall the shame and guilt I felt at hitting that poor boy across the face, knowing it wasn't right, no matter how mean he'd been. I can honestly say I felt no satisfaction at seeing the fear and humiliation on his face. I remember my confusion - my brain simply couldn't compute, couldn't reconcile the trusted authority figures with the instructions that I knew to be wrong. As an adult, I've told this story to parents, and a few teachers, and they are always dumbstruck. Of course, this was a school that still actively used big wooden paddles for discpline, which was a bit of a throw-back even in my day.

It turned out that two boys in my class - boys I scarely knew - had seen the bullying and reported it to the teacher. Despite the bizarre events set in motion by this act, the act itself demonstrated such decency from a couple of eight-year-old strangers that, to this day, I am astonished and touched to think of it. It's at least as astonishing as the poor judgment of the two teachers. The whole memory, the good and the bad, comes to me from time to time when I think about what we know about right and wrong, and violence, and how we learn it.

The more things change...

Tonight we watched Dr. Zhivago, the old one with Omar Sharif and Julie Christie. I read the book years ago, during my Summer of Russian Literature, but the movie struck me for its compelling portrayal of the hardness of life in a disintegrating society. Perhaps not a realistic portrayal - I wouldn't know - but striking nonetheless.

I think sometimes about what would happen if this society just fell apart for some reason - economic collapse, war, a massive electromagnetic pulse that disables all electronic devices...pick your apocalypse. I envision us wandering the desolate countryside after the apocalypse with our dogs on ropes, and I joke about this frequently enough that my friend Megan once said, "Why are your dogs always on ropes in this scenario? Are there no leashes after the apocalypse? Will there be some kind of doomsday leash-vaporizing machine?"

A couple of weeks ago in Phoenix, I had a cab driver who came to the US from Somalia at 17, during the war. I commented that Seattle, my home, has a large east African community and he nodded and held up his cell phone - he had just been talking to someone in Seattle, in fact. Many Somalis move to Seattle, he said, because it is like home, with its mountains close to the sea.

I got to asking him more questions about what Somalia is like, and he explained that most of the country is peaceful, but there is no central government, just local governing authorities that are tribally based. "Do people want a central government again," I asked, "or do they prefer localized government?"

"Oh no, people are ready for a government again. The whole tribe thing...When I was growing up, my parents never told me what tribe we were from, even though it was one of the big ones historically, a powerful one. That wasn't important any more. It was only after the war started, suddenly people reverted to 200 years ago - who was from what tribe, which one used to control this area or that. After all these years, people started teaching their children, 'you're from this tribe, they're from that tribe,' and the children learn that." He shook his head. "The bullshit that people teach their children, it sticks, you know?"

"Yeah well. I think most cultures have their bullshit that they teach their children. We certainly do in this country."

"Oh, yes," he said. He held up his arm and pointed to it. "Like about skin color."

Indeed, about skin color. We rode in silence for a while. "When we came to this country," he said tentatively, "I had no other home to go back to. And I am very grateful. This is a good life here. But people here...they don't understand what a good life they have. They don't understand what it's like elsewhere, what happens when the life you know just - disappears."

I asked how easy it is to go back and visit now. It's possible, he said. His mother in fact just went back to visit her elderly mother, because she couldn't stand to be away any more. "Eventually," he said with a shrug, "people get tired of killing each other."

Well, let's hope he's right about that.