"My Life Is Sustained Through the Gifts of Others"

"My Life Is Sustained Through the Gifts of Others" 

David Ketchum

September 26, 2021

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“How amazingly unlikely is your birth”

Attempts to calculate the improbability, or the inevitability, of any particular human life surface every so often. A decade ago, in 2011, Dr. Ali Binazir posted an entry on the Harvard weblog that became a bit of a rage. It was a thought experiment that assigned probabilities to key moments leading to your existence: your parents meeting, getting pregnant, getting pregnant with the particular egg and sperm that led to your particular genetic makeup, and, working backwards,  that happening with each set of your ancestors. His conclusion was that the probability of any one person existing is something like 1 in (10)x(2,685,000). For everyone who replied that the probability of existence for something that actually exists is 1, Dr. Binazir emphasized that –

“The probability of sentient life is not something that can be measured accurately, and hundreds of steps have been deleted for simplicity.  It’s all an exercise to get you thinking, … . And no matter how you slice it, it’s pretty remarkable that you and I, self-absorbed scallywags that we are, stand at the end of an unbroken chain of life going all the way back to the primordial slime.  That’s the point.” (https://web.archive.org/web/20110927044810/http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/abinazir/2011/06/15/what-are-chances-you-would-be-born/#comments )

Dr. Binazir reposted this thought experiment earlier this year (https://happinessengineering.com/miraculous-you-on-the-probability-of-being-born/ ), as a reminder of the wonder of life during a pandemic that has constantly reminded us of death. The general lesson is that the most improbable, amazing thing any one of us could ever do is exist. Having evolved the consciousness to understand and wonder at this, you might think that we would naturally be the most grateful, generous, kind, and wise creatures imaginable. But the  horrifying reality, as you know, is otherwise. One could, for example, decide to spend this amazing and improbable existence protesting life-saving covid vaccines outside a local hospital. (https://www.news-leader.com/story/news/politics/2021/08/16/anti-vaccine-protest-held-outside-springfield-mercy-hospital-missouri-covid-19-misinformation/8130578002/ ) 

Perhaps this is why you’re more likely to hear me humming Monty Python’s “The Galaxy Song,” with its ending that may fit better a society filled with conspiracy theorists and anti-vaxxers – 

“We're thirty thousand light-years from Galactic Central Point, 

We go 'round every two hundred million years; 

And our galaxy itself is one of millions of billions 

In this amazing and expanding universe. … 

So remember, when you're feeling very small and insecure, 

How amazingly unlikely is your birth; 

And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere out in space, 

'Cause there's [none at] all down here on Earth!” (https://montycasinos.com/montypython/scripts/galaxy.php.html )

In my many conversations with earnest conspiracy theorists, climate change deniers, anti-vaxxers, and others, what’s struck me is how these delusional beliefs are often rooted in a person’s desire to be happy and to explain unhappiness. Sometimes, it is a desire to fit in with a group, to adopt beliefs and positions as an expression of belonging. Sometimes, it is an attempt to make sense of something baffling in the world, to have a feeling of control amidst chaos or crisis. Sometimes, it seems to just be an inexorable slide toward mental assent; outrageous claims feel less improbable as they become more familiar with constant repetition. Combine this with a culture that doesn’t value or teach critical thinking or basic scientific knowledge, then put us in the middle of multiple intractable crises, and we have a recipe for disaster. We cling to delusion as we bear with our suffering – to explain it, make sense of it, assign guilt and blame, and cope with our misery. 

Produce and Consume 

This is our dilemma. The consciousness that allows us to wonder at the improbability and beauty of existence, also makes us aware of the suffering and brutality of existence. How we respond to this dilemma makes all the difference. Wisdom teachers have pointed out for millennia that we tend to cope with some combination of 1) grasping for sense pleasures, indulging every hedonistic whim we can in an effort to distract, absorb, and escape; 2) pushing away everything unpleasant, whether through anger or despair, violence or apathy;  and 3) attaching to our self-views of who we are or might become, constantly postponing our well-being in the present in deference to identifying with our achievements or even to an imaginary ideal. Caught up in all this, the wonder of our existence escapes most of us, most of the time. 

    There are many complicated reasons for our individual responses, but for the moment I’d like to focus on one ubiquitous source of both our delusions and unhappiness. For many, probably most, of us, our lives are dominated with messages that reduce our worth to productivity and consumption. We are exhausted with constant comparisons and competitions and trapped in a ruthless cycle of praise and blame. To survive in such a hostile system, we learn to internalize oppressive messages. We then police ourselves, training our minds and bodies to conform to the expectations of society. As a survival skill, this can be helpful. But if well-being is our goal, this is all exhausting and harmful. 

    Unfortunately, the phenomenon happens in reaction to every oppressive system and culture, from racism to sexism to gender and sexuality antagonisms to ableism and more. In the case of capitalism, we internalize that incessant pressure to demonstrate our value by being productive, and the incessant desire to signal our value by consuming the products of others. This becomes the basis of our self-worth, an antagonistic relationship with ourselves, others, and society.

Anders Hayden, political science professor at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, describes some of the common impacts of internalized capitalism in terms of dehumanization: "You can't feel value in yourself just for being alive – just for being a human being. You have to be a 'human doing' to have any value." (https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/health-wellness/2021/06/17/internalized-capitalism-harms-mental-health-productivity/7723416002/ )

     As a result, we tend to identify with the work we do, assess our place in society based on the social values assigned to our employment, have a difficult time giving ourselves permission to rest, judge ourselves as lazy or as failures if we don’t work constantly, and undervalue our well-being. Internalized capitalism combines with other oppressive systems to reinforce disparities. For example, systemic racism and ableism make it more difficult for people who are not white, and people who are disabled, to access educational and employment opportunities that society puts a high value on, redirecting them toward underappreciated and overexploited professions. This both reinforces prejudices of inferiority and the justifies exploiting labor. 

    Hayden connects this tendency with the grasping for certainty that accompanied the old Calvinist teachings on predestination and the so-called Protestant work ethic: 

“The Calvinists ... had this incredible doubt of whether they were worthy and to prove that they were worthy, they had to be able to show that they could be continually industrious, and continually producing and frugal as well … .” (ibid) 

Can you feel the differences becoming clear? There is a huge gap between doing something in order to prove you are worthy, and doing something to express love, joy, or compassion. In the former, we have to constantly outshine our competitors, grab all that we are entitled to grab (what we earn and what we deserve), and defend it against others. In the latter, we participate in the abundance of life; we live in compassion, rather than competition. But for any of us socialized into production and consumption, that takes training the mind. 

“My Very Life” 

For myself, there’s a very simple chant from the Buddhist tradition that has been a vital part of my daily practice for many years: “My very life is sustained through the gifts of others.” It’s not a new insight, but it is one that is easily forgotten. That’s why it is included in a chant called “Ten Subjects for Frequent Recollection,” which I first encountered in the Thai Forest tradition of Buddhism (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XMy6e-VfJiQ ). With a title like that, you probably aren’t surprised that there is a lot of repetition involved. It’s a common technique to help with memorization, to reflect the process of building and keeping habits, and to support focusing and concentrating the mind. So for each of the recollections, you chant, “This should be reflected upon again and again by one who has gone forth.” 

Adding reflection to recitation is key. The recitation helps train the mind to pay attention in a certain way and then to recognize insight and understanding when we do so. But it’s not one and done; we reflect “again and again.” This acknowledges that new habits of thinking and doing take time and practice to establish, especially if we are unlearning and healing from internalized oppression. In the Buddhist tradition, a person who wants to prioritize this kind of training can become a monastic, dedicating their life to reflecting again and again. This brings us to that next phrase, “one who has gone forth,” for a monastic has left home, secular employment, and all the pleasures, conveniences, and (the illusion of) security of the socially expected.

    We can connect this with our experience today of internalized capitalism. Buddhist monastics choose a lifestyle completely out of step with the capitalist values of production and consumption. They are sometimes described as “owning nothing,” and many traditional orders still go on alms round each morning to receive their daily bowl of rice. Their lives are quite literally dependent on their neighbors’ generosity for food, medicine, shelter, and clothes. This is the original context for reflecting: “My very life is sustained through the gifts of others.”

I am not a monastic, but I still chant these words, usually every day, as part of training my mind. The repetition has been a key part of the ongoing work of undoing internalized capitalism, and the shift in perspective is continuously liberating, at least for me. I am invited to reflect on how I can relate to life, others, and the earth with more gratitude, open-heartedness,  and joy. I often catch myself throughout the day reflecting on this phrase. “My very life” means, not the life I’ve imagined, not my perceptions and desires, and not the expectations I’ve been socialized to believe are real, but the actual, very life that exists in this moment. This very life is breathing, eating, drinking; laughing, singing, playing; reading, teaching, supporting; cleaning, sleeping, caring for the body. My very life is made up of silly jokes, painful toothaches, cooking meals for friends, savoring a cup of hot tea, and watching the butterflies sip nectar from the New England Asters. 

     It also means the intimate and intricate microbiome that has evolved with humanity, each of us a walking universe of “eukaryotes, archaea, bacteria and viruses,” living on and in us, whose cells outnumber the cells we call human by as much as 10 to 1. In many cases, we depend on these microorganisms as much as they depend on us, for functions from digestion to immune response. (https://www.hmpdacc.org/overview/ ) And on the macro scale, my very life cannot be separated from the lives of my ancestors, whose genes live on in me. Nor can I sever myself from the billions of other humans I share this planet with. “My very life,” it turns out, includes much that I would otherwise ignore or forget about. These reflections shatter the illusion that I am somehow utterly independent, or that I can ultimately separate out my life and wellbeing from the lives of others. We are intimately connected to one another in so many ways. 

     This is part of the meaning of the next phrase, “is sustained,” which reminds me that my very life is not permanent and is not guaranteed. My body is a wondrous process and amazingly resilient for all I’ve asked of it through the years. Yet it is also so dependent on things outside of my immediate control. Think, for instance, about how our lives are sustained by the air we breathe, and which we share with every other living being on this planet. When we do so, each breath becomes a gift, if I’m willing to remember it as the amazing process it really is. For example, the average human breath contains about 25 sextillion molecules, that we share with all other beings. A sextillion has 21 zeroes – in every breath. (https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/air-gas-caesar-last-breath-sam-kean ) To look at it in another way, Ethan Siegel, answering the question “How Many Atoms Do We Have In Common With One Another?,” wrote that: 

“right now, if you take a deep breath and then exhale, by the time a year goes by, approximately one atom from that breath will wind up in every other person on Earth's lungs at any moment in time. … Every time you breathe in, you're breathing atoms of air that were once inside another human being. Every time you take a drink of water, you're drinking water that was once inside another human being. And every bite of food you take consists of atoms that were inside another person. We all share the same planet, the same biosphere, and — at a fundamental level — even the same atoms. / At an atomic level, we're all incredibly deeply connected. Inside your body, right now, are hundreds of billions of atoms that were once inside each other human being on Earth. Throughout the generations and the aeons, those same atoms continue to make up everything: the atoms of the dinosaurs, the plants, the trilobites, and even the single-celled organisms that once dominated our planet are now inside you. / It's your turn now.” (https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2020/04/30/how-many-atoms-do-we-have-in-common-with-one-another/?sh=54fb31801b38 )

“We Are Made to Live Together”

  We could never deserve any of this; we cannot earn the opportunity to live. It is all a gift. And, if our hearts are open, we understand that the very lives of others are also sustained through the gifts we share with them. We become free from the fears that systems like capitalism instill in us: fear of losing status and reputation, fear of not consuming the expected things in the expected ways, and the looming fear of not being worthy of care, life, and love. Like “one who has gone forth,” we can embody this freedom, and savor the joys of generosity, kindness, and love. “A human being, if she is a true human being,” Thich Nhat Hanh taught us, “is enough to make the whole world rejoice.” (Touching Peace, 14)

  In what would be his final Christmas sermon, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., observed that we are all interdependent, “caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied into a single garment of destiny.” Our lives and choices affect one another, whether we like it or not. King insisted that “We are made to live together because of the interrelated structure of reality.” Our wellbeing is bound up together. As King asked,

“Did you ever stop to think that you can’t leave for your job in the morning without being dependent on most of the world? You get up in the morning and go to the bathroom and reach over for the sponge, and that’s handed to you by a Pacific islander. You reach for a bar of soap, and that’s given to you at the hands of a Frenchman. And then you go into the kitchen to drink your coffee for the morning, and that’s poured into your cup by a South American. And maybe you want tea: that’s poured into your cup by a Chinese. Or maybe you’re desirous of having cocoa for breakfast, and that’s poured into your cup by a West African. And then you reach over for your toast, and that’s given to you at the hands of an English-speaking farmer, not to mention the baker. And before you finish eating breakfast in the morning, you’ve depended on more than half of the world. This is the way our universe is structured, this is its interrelated quality. We aren’t going to have peace on earth until we recognize this basic fact of the interrelated structure of all reality.” (https://onbeing.org/blog/martin-luther-kings-last-christmas-sermon/ )

As King knew so well, there is much that is unjust in this world, and so much suffering. But King also knew that – 

“we will never have peace in the world until [humans] everywhere recognize that ends are not cut off from means, because the means represent the ideal in the making, and the end in process, and ultimately you can’t reach good ends through evil means, because the means represent the seed and the end represents the tree.” (ibid)

Our movements for social change, and our daily practices for changing ourselves, need to hold all this together. We need to be with the injustice and suffering with unflinching honesty; we need to be with the goodness with unflinching honesty. We carry both grief and gladness within us. We mourn what is wrong, even as we appreciate all that has to go right for us to even be able to notice what goes wrong. We don’t diminish injustice, but we also do not diminish joy. By doing so, we stay grounded in wellbeing, and aligned with what makes fighting for peace and justice worthwhile in the first place. 

     It takes time, and it takes practice, to remember that: “My very life is sustained by the gifts of others.” But all of this is possible, and we can do it. It is made up of our normal, everyday, human lives; it is the gift of being alive. But whatever world we sustain, it will be our choice. We can heal the suffering born of greed, hatred, and delusion, and we can bring into existence communities filled with generosity, compassion, and truth. We have this amazing gift of life; let’s live in such a way that the whole world will rejoice. 

“Whistleblowers in Prison – because truth is treason in an empire of lies”

“Whistleblowers in Prison – because truth is treason in an empire of lies”  

Sept. 12, 2021    Dr Roger Ray

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Marjorie Cohn - Truthout

On July 27, a federal district court judge in Alexandria, Virginia, sentenced former U.S. Air Force intelligence analyst Daniel Hale to 45 months in prison for revealing evidence of U.S. war crimes.

In 2015, Hale, whose job involved identifying targets for drone strikes, provided journalist Jeremy Scahill with secret military documents and slides that exposed shocking details about the U.S. drone program. Hale’s revelations became the basis of “The Drone Papers,” which was published on October 15, 2015, by The Intercept.

Although the government admitted it had no evidence that direct harm resulted from Hale’s revelations, in 2019, the Trump administration charged Hale with four counts of violating the Espionage Act and one count of theft of government property. Facing up to 50 years in prison, Hale pled guilty to one count that carries a maximum sentence of 10 years.

https://www.laprogressive.com/drone-whistleblower-daniel-hale/?utm_source=LA+Progressive+NEW&utm_campaign=05de149f6e-LAP+News+-+20+April+17+PC_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_61288e16ef-05de149f6e-287023684&mc_cid=05de149f6e&mc_eid=8b0c1bc0a0

 

 

I would be very interested in hearing a social anthropologist explain the difference between the way Julia Robert’s portrayal of Erin Brockovich and her fight against Pacific Gas and Electric, made Erin Brockovich a household name and Meryl Streep’s portrayal of Karen Silkwood, even with Cher and Kurt Russell in supporting roles, was a real sleeper and, I fear, many of you can’t even remember who Karen Silkwood was. 

 

Maybe it was the difference of a generation, Silkwood was released in 1983 and Erin Brockovich in 2000. Or maybe it was the fact that Erin Brockovich is still alive and doing environmental activism while Karen Silkwood is dead, apparently murdered by the corporation she was investigating, Kerr-McGee plutonium in Oklahoma. 

In my mind, both Karen Silkwood and Erin Brockovich were prophets in the sense that they stood up to power and spoke important truth on behalf of poor people who were being abused. I am reminded of that scene in the 7^th chapter of Amos when Amos is confronted by the king of Israel, Amaziah, who told him to stop preaching in his city and Amos replied, “I am neither a prophet nor a prophet’s son, I am just a herdsman and a farmer.” 

 

To be a prophet doesn’t mean you have to be a Gandhi, or a Martin Luther King, Jr. You don’t have to have degrees, a powerful pulpit, or a following of thousands. You just have to be willing to act in the presence of injustice to make it right. 

 

I was only 12 years old when Bobby Kennedy was assassinated. He was famous, handsome, and rich and running for president and may very well have won but at his funeral, his brother, Teddy, stood before 2000 mourners, all dressed in black, and I can remember hearing him say:

“My brother need not be idealized, or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life; to be remembered simply as a good and decent man, who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it,” and while you can appreciate the humility of this sentiment, I think that we should idealize the Bobby Kennedys of the world, the Erin Brockovich’s, the Karen Silkwoods, because they were good and decent people who saw wrong and tried to right it. . . Bobby Kennedy was assassinated, Karen Silkwood was murdered, and, realistically, we should be thankful that Erin Brockovich survived her courageous stand against Pacific Gas and Electric. Many such whistleblowers have not fared as well. Still, what I am trying to emphasize today is that what they did was right whether they got Julia Roberts to play them or not. 

It is always the right time to do the right thing. It is never ok to witness injustice and remain silent, either in the public or the private sphere. A few whistleblowers become heroic legends, but most are lost to history and many, almost against all reason and justice, have languished in prison as their reward for doing the right thing.

Let me test your memory: do you recognize this woman? In 2001 she was a vice-president of Enron. She wrote a memo to Ken Lay, the CEO, about his use of fraudulent accounting practices that made Enron one of the largest and most lucrative corporations in America. As soon as she spoke to Lay about the use of illegal bookkeeping methods to steal money from investors, he called in corporate attorneys to start finding a legal way to fire her. Sherron Watkins said that she counts herself among the more fortunate of whistle blowers because Enron was taken into bankruptcy before Ken Lay could exact the kind of corporate revenge on her that he had planned. And, you may recall, this time it was Ken Lay who died just before he was sentenced to prison.

 

Sherron was named Time’s Person of the Year and has received a number of public accolades for her honesty and integrity, but I don’t think that she ever got another corporate job. She is sort of the Colin Kaepernick of CPAs. Lots of public applause and recognition, but no job and no future. Not everyone who goes to the cross gets resurrected and praised. Most likely get killed and are forgotten, others survive and are largely ignored. Still, that doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t be done.

 

What can be worse, in many ways, is when you are a whistleblower in government. That can get you sent to prison. 

Like a lot of other white liberals, I spent a cold week in a blizzard on the Standing Rock reservation, joining in on the protests of the Dakota Access Pipeline project in December of 2017, and after a miserable week, I came home.  But these 5 Native Americans were arrested during the protests and served or are still serving, four to six years in prison for standing up to both the energy company and local law enforcement. Admittedly, all I took to the protest was a clerical collar and some of these protestors brought guns, and Red Fawn shot hers but whatever their real crimes were, they were nothing in comparison to the crime of pumping this toxic sludge out of the ground in Canada and then sending it through pipes under the Missouri River and across Native American land. 

 

There were instances of property damage against the construction equipment but was that worse than what they were doing to the environment? These things are not always equal but if you take the gospel accounts seriously, you can’t really assume that Jesus is on your side when you insist that anyone can demonstrate but destruction of property is never acceptable.

 

Most of the New Testament gives us a fictionalized version of the life of Jesus but one of the more historically defensible accounts was of the violent cleansing of the temple. That little Black Lives Matter riot is probably what really got Jesus arrested and executed.  

 

When all else fails in silencing the voice of a prophet, governments often go back to the absurdly trumped up charge of “disturbing the peace.” 

Challenging the status quo, disrupting business operations, that cost Socrates his life, and 400 years later, it cost Jesus his life, and we could mark the trail of blood through centuries of martyrs who died for daring to tell the inconvenient truth in an empire of lies. The empires change, but the lies remain the same.

 

I took as our wisdom lesson for today a clip from the Intercept about Daniel Hale’s nearly 4 year long sentence for revealing to the media that our military drone program was illegally targeting and assassinating civilians. That happened in 2019, under the Trump administration, and most of us can almost placidly accept that Donald Trump would do anything immoral or illegal if only for his own entertainment, but as troubling as the case of Daniel Hale was, we must never forget Chelsea Manning, who was also a military whistleblower, releasing files regarding war crimes committed by our troops to Wikileaks. In both cases, the American government could not demonstrate harm from these leaks. In both cases, they revealed war crimes but none of the soldiers involved in murdering civilians were prosecuted or punished. Hale got 4 years in prison. Manning was sentenced to 35 years, but her sentence was commuted after 7 years . . . 7 years during which time she was often kept in solitary confinement, held naked and cold and nearly starving, being tortured by the government of the United States of America, under the direction of President Barak Obama. That part, folks, is hard to even make myself say. 

 

I know that Obama was not a progressive, in fact, he was a rather hawkish right-of-center Democrat, but I always wanted to think of him as being a reliably logical man who was, at heart, a decent person. 

 

But describing Obama as being decent is a pretty hard sell when you think about how Manning was treated. Manning provided video evidence of our military murdering civilians, journalists, and medical first responders in an incident in Baghdad. You could hear those involved literally laughing about what they had done. Then they called in a military vehicle to repeatedly run over the bodies to make their identity indistinguishable. 

 

I ask you, could that Taliban do worse? Would Al Qaida be worse? Why would we be fighting Isis if we are no different from them? Those involved in these crimes did not suffer suspension, discharge, or even demotion for the murders they committed. Chelsea Manning spent 7 years being tortured in an American prison and she is never free from government threats and harassment. 

 

I won’t even mention Julian Assange, I believe you can look up my thoughts on his case online if you feel like I am leaving something out here. I have told you before how my reporting of my denominational officials for hiding sex crimes and stealing designated funds got me booted out of my former denomination. I won’t repeat that unless I write a “tell all” one day. 

 

What I know from personal experience and from history that being a whistle blower is very unlikely to get you rewarded or declared to be Time’s Person of the Year. It is more likely to get you fired, to make you unemployable for life. It might land you in prison and it might get you killed, but I know this: it needs to be done.

We don’t tell hard truths to make ourselves seem to be important at the expense of others. We don’t raise a prophetic voice to be noticed. We do it to help to make the world a better place. And we do it so that we do not become passive accomplices to the worst evils in the world, whether they are committed by our enemies or our friends, or our own tribe. 

 

Martin Luther King, Jr. said, "A time comes when silence is betrayal. Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government's policy, especially in time of war. Nor does the human spirit move without great difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought, within one's own bosom and in the surrounding world."

 

The burden of carrying the truth is typically very heavy, and nearly impossible to bear in the worst moments, and yet we must not be silent. The playwright, George Bernard Shaw made the very obviously true observation that, “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

 

Don’t just go along with the injustices you encounter at work, in government, or even, dare I say, in your own circle or friends or family. Be the one who protects victims, who stands up for what is true and good and virtuous.

 

My own experience is  best summed up by the Boston novelist, Alexander Jablokov, who said “The road to truth is long, and lined the entire way with annoying bastards.”

 

Just don’t let the bastards get you down. 

"Greater & More Outrageous": Twenty (More) Years of Imperial Tragedies

"Greater & More Outrageous": Twenty (More) Years of Imperial Tragedies 

By David Ketchum, September 12, 2021

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    Twenty years ago, Holly and I were living in the woods. I had left my position at a university in 2000 because we wanted to live close to the land, and we had some friends with property where we could all learn together. We were young, and we were enthusiastic and optimistic, though not so much about society in general as confident in ourselves. We believed we could help change the world, with our bookshelves full of Foxfire anthologies, Back to Basics, The Encyclopedia of Country Living, and essays by folks like Wendell Berry, Wes Jackson, and Aldo Leopold. This wasn’t a complete leap of faith; all of us came from families where we grew up with some combination of gardening, camping, backpacking, building, or farming. We weren’t against technological innovations, but we were trying to be intentional about our lives and livelihoods. We wrote poetry, painted landscapes, and hosted literature-themed dinners. There were some hardships and frustrations, but, looking back, it was idyllic.

On September 11, 2001, we were working on the cabin. I was in the front yard, prepping lumber for a window repair. We got a call to turn on the news, that the US had been attacked. We spent the rest of the day listening to NPR on a little battery powered radio. The news did not slow down over the weeks and months ahead. Congress authorized US forces to be used in response to the 9/11 attacks on September 18. By October 7, the United States and United Kingdom invaded Afghanistan in an operation they named Enduring Freedom. 

The Answer Is Always the Same

    On October 15, The Washington Examiner would publish an editorial by Max Boot making “The Case for American Empire.” His words captured the spirit of the nation, or at least of my neighbors and community. He insisted that: “The September 11 attack was a result of insufficient American involvement and ambition; the solution is to be more expansive in our goals and more assertive in their implementation.” He insisted that the USA must occupy Afghanistan, but not for imperial gains. This would be merely “a temporary expedient to allow the people to get back on their feet until a responsible, humane, preferably democratic, government takes over.” The US needed to not only kill bin Laden but make it impossible for another to replace him. “We must not only wipe out the vipers,” he wrote, “but also destroy their nest and do our best to prevent new nests from being built there again.” (https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/weekly-standard/the-case-for-american-empire )

Still, there was some hesitation. So, on November 2, Thomas Friedman famously wrote in The New York Times that we should “Give war a chance.” (https://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/02/opinion/foreign-affairs-one-war-two-fronts.html ) War did indeed get its chance. The US and the UK were joined by other allies, including the Northern Alliance, and, by December 17, they drove out the Taliban. It was a surprisingly swift fall, and the victors then built military bases across the nation and settled in for nearly 20 years of ongoing violence. There was never a declaration of war, other than the ubiquitous and ambiguous War on Terror. 

Our child was born in 2002, and his first bit of social activism would be on a sidewalk in London amidst signs protesting the not yet, but inevitable, invasion of Iraq. We had traveled to the UK, in part, to provide support services for Kurdish refugees, the victims of another long history of violence. The invasion of Iraq would begin just two months later, in March 2003. In terms of peace and justice, there was definitely a feeling that our collective voices were being drowned out. It seemed that anything could be justified by the terrors of 9/11, from the stripping of our civil rights, to secret prisons and indefinite detention, to torture and death squads, to massive corruption and greed, and more. You could feel that the world had shifted even further towards coercion, anger, and fear. Violence was the answer to everything; no matter the question, the answer was always the same. 

Yet all of us committed to peace and justice around the world continued to speak and act up. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were a big part of my own personal work shifting from life in rural Missouri, with an emphasis on family conflict and violence, to life in post-conflict Cambodia, with an emphasis on community development and conflict transformation. Our time in Cambodia, three overflowing but brief years, gave us an even more sobering context for the US’ War on Terror. Even though the Khmer Rouge lost power in 1979, civil war continued. The situation became desperate enough that in 1992-1993, the United Nations governed Cambodia in attempt to disarm the warring factions, promote stability and resettlement, and begin the process of rebuilding the shattered infrastructure. One of my colleagues at Peace Bridges told me, in those days, it was cheaper to buy bullets than rice. 

We were there from 2007 to 2010, but the work we were doing was still rooted in the violence that plagued Cambodia for all those decades. The impacts were everywhere: lurking in laws, hidden in reinterpretations of culture, displayed in the huge industry that had grown up around international aid and NGOs, passed on through intergenerational trauma, and displayed in the museums that continuously collected unexploded ordnance and landmines. On my first  trip to the southern countryside, I also encountered a stunning visual reminder. I kept noticing shallow ponds that were used for agriculture in some way. I thought at first that this must have been some special project, but the reality was grimmer. These were the craters left from US bombing of Cambodia during the Vietnam War. I learned an old lesson in a new, visceral way: it is fast to drop a bomb, fast to destroy, but life takes time and hard work to heal and grow. 

Twenty Years of Violence

My mind has been full of these kinds of memories as we mark the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks and watch the continued and tragic fallout of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan. I understand the outrage, and I share it. I am heartened by all the people and organizations mobilizing to receive and advocate for refugees, or to provide ongoing support within Afghanistan. I feel the fear for people facing so much uncertainty and violence, whether in a devastated homeland or in an unfamiliar, and perhaps not always hospitable, place. And there is plenty of room to criticize and protest the way President Biden and his administration has handled this withdrawal. But I am also concerned that too many people in the USA have forgotten what has happened in the last 20 years. The peace worker in me keeps crying out: where was your outrage for the two decades of coercion, violence, and domination? How did so many people in the United States manage to forget that we have subjugated the people of Afghanistan, military personnel, aid workers, and journalists to the horrors of war for 20 years? 

I am not questioning that there is genuine compassion buried in our outrage. Watching the news of people desperate to escape, making impassioned pleas, not just for help, but for justice, should break our hearts. But we could have been listening for 20 years; we could have been exercising compassion for 20 years; we could have been working together to put an end to the violence for 20 years! So why now? My suspicion is that our collective outrage over the withdrawal is connected to perceptions of American weakness, as much as it is to compassion for the people of Afghanistan. As a society, we have entertained ourselves with fantasies of American exceptionalism, and with delusions that every violence enacted by others is suspect and evil, while every violence enacted by our nation is virtuous and good. We train our minds to believe that we don’t make mistakes, that we are the white-hat-wearing good guys. It is convenient to hide the horrors of 20 years of war and occupation – the secret prisons, the torture, the countless and horrific civilian deaths, the now ubiquitous buzz of drones with bombs – because we viewed them as justified costs of American dominance. 

If the withdrawal had gone as planned, and if the Taliban’s return to power had taken place over months and years, rather than days, all of these current tragedies would have unfolded more slowly. Most importantly for preserving our civic myths, the United States would not have been in the middle of it all. It would have been easy to feel sad, reassure ourselves that we did our duty, and console ourselves that it was someone else’s fault and someone else’s responsibility. But the swiftness of the collapse in Afghanistan will not let us escape this introspection. Despite the insistence that the War on Terror was making the world a better and more democratic place, even those who believe that war can be “an engine of freedom” have concluded that the last 20 years has amounted to “fighting wars against our own democracy” (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/made-by-history/wp/2017/09/11/how-911-triggered-democracys-decline/ ). If you are angry and horrified by what is happening in Afghanistan now (and you should be), you should have been angry and horrified for the last 20 years.

Yet how can we possibly measure these horrors? We turn to statistics, but it is easy to forget that, behind every number, there is a life and a story. Ellen Knickmeyer, drawing on data provided by Harvard University’s Kennedy School and the Brown University Costs of War project, has summarized some of the costs: 

• In time, twenty years is almost a generation, and nearly 25% of the US population has been born during the war and occupation. 
• In lives lost, 2,448 American military members; 1,144 allied military members; 3,846 US contractors; 444 aid workers; 72 journalists; 66,000 Afghani military and police members; 47,245 Afghani civilians; and 51,191 Taliban and other fighters have died. 
• In money, Knickmeyer points out that this war was paid for “on credit, not in cash.” In contrast to the Korean War (which saw President Truman pay for by raising the top tax rates by 92%) or the Vietnam War (when President Johnson raised top tax rates 77%), President George W. Bush “cut tax rates for the wealthiest, rather than raise them,” by “At least 8%.” The result is an estimated $2 trillion in war costs in Afghanistan and Iraq “that the United States has debt-financed as of 2020”. By 2050, the interest costs are estimated to be “Up to $6.5 trillion.” 
• To this, we add more than $2 trillion in expenses for continued and much needed services to roughly 4 million veterans (“in health care, disability, burial,” etc.  (https://apnews.com/article/middle-east-business-afghanistan-43d8f53b35e80ec18c130cd683e1a38f ) 

     These figures are no accident, neither the callous disregard for life nor the profit made from death. Despite the humanitarian rhetoric, the last 20 years have largely been about neoliberal war profiteering, extracting profit from the suffering of thousands. (https://bostonreview.net/war-security/faisal-devji-violent-logic-humanitarianism ) Right after the 9/11 attacks, a top manager for the National Security Agency, Samuel Visner, saw the opportunity: “We can milk this thing all the way to 2015 … . There’s plenty to go around.” (https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/obamas-crackdown-whistleblowers/ ) Visner was only wrong about the timeline; the War on Terror has continued well past 2015 to fatten the wallets of military contractors while decimating the lives of the people of Afghanistan and Iraq. As Jon Schwarz reported in The Intercept, 

“If you purchased $10,000 of stock evenly divided among America’s top five defense contractors on September 18, 2001 … and faithfully reinvested all dividends, it would now be worth $97,295. This is a far greater return than was available in the overall stock market over the same period. … That is, defense stocks outperformed the stock market overall by 58 percent during the Afghanistan War.” (https://theintercept.com/2021/08/16/afghanistan-war-defense-stocks/  ) 

Is Another World Possible? 

Though you can find thought experiments imagining what we could have done with the money spent on war (https://theintercept.com/2021/09/03/war-on-terror-911-cost-climate-health-care/ ), we have never invested in peace at these levels. Nevertheless, movements to bring healing and peace continue to spring up around the world, usually among marginalized people and without the support of those who control money and politics. This makes it tricky to gauge the relative amount of violence or peace in the world. 

According to the Global Peace  Index at Vision of Humanity, there has been an increase in diplomacy and a –

“shift away from large-scale violent deaths and heavy militarisation, towards democracy. Battle deaths in the last 25 years make up only 3% of battle deaths in the last 100 years, or 7% excluding World War II deaths. The number of alliance agreements in place in 2012 was 77 times the amount of alliances in 1918.” (https://www.visionofhumanity.org/world-become-peaceful-since-wwi/ )

However, these improvements have been paralleled by increases in internal conflicts, military spending, and incarceration: 

“For the 11 countries with incarceration data available since 1950, excluding the massively higher rates of the US, the average increase in incarceration rates was 142.9%. Incarceration levels, population displacement and security spending speak to the resources necessary to maintain peace. A more peaceful society could reduce spending on security and instead invest in structures that improve stability and build peace — education, physical infrastructure and strong business.” (ibid)

    This roadmap toward social health reminded me of the ongoing research on altruism and cooperative behavior. A 2012 study argued -

"that humans developed cooperative skills because it was in their mutual interest to work well with others -- indeed ecological circumstances forced them to cooperate with others to obtain food. In other words, altruism isn't the reason we cooperate; we must cooperate in order to survive, and we are altruistic to others because we need them." (https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/11/121119094629.htm )

    This is our evolutionary reality. Yet we have been taught for ages that, although violence is the last resort, it is also, somehow and ultimately, the best answer for the problems we face as a society. (https://www2.goshen.edu/~joannab/women/wink99.pdf ) Commitments to nonviolence, or at least to sustaining communities where violence is something to be healed and transformed, have been criticized and dismissed on the basis of being naïve or gullible. We are blamed for creating the possibility for violent men to come to power. These are important insights and cautions, not to be dismissed. And proponents of transformative justice, or of nonviolence, non-hierarchalism, and regenerative communities, need to be open to dialog, criticism, and change. But in my experience, we have been willing to do that.  

What I have not witnessed is a willingness to reconsider the logic of violence or the persistence of Western powers in clinging to the legacies of imperialism fueled by White supremacy. (https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-08-29/beltway-fantasies-fueled-afghanistan-tragedy ) As I mentioned earlier, destruction is quick work, and I think that is one of its appeals. It offers the delusion of a fast solution. The rich and powerful among us keep traumatizing and devastating the peoples and ecologies of the world, and it is the nurturing and caring among us that then spend decades and centuries attending to the healing. You drop a bomb in a moment and consider yourself a mighty man, but the power of destruction is nothing compared to the power of creation and life. You bury us beneath the rubble of 10,000 years of coercion, domination, and death, and we keep rising up, like dandelions in cracked pavement. 

    When people are tired of feeling outrage, when their anger dwindles, the people of Afghanistan will still be hard at work trying to fashion a society where they can live and thrive. Decades from now, the work to heal and grow will still be ongoing. If you want to feel hopeful about the future, consider this: even though the violence continues, even though the bombs are detonated and rights are crushed, there will be people who insist on working for change. There will still be people who, in the face of national and international war machines, still say that peace is possible. There will still be people who, in the face of terrorism, whether in the form of violent extremists or domestic abusers, still say that we can create communities where violence is not needed. 

    War has always been the answer, but it is ultimately the wrong answer.  As Daniel Berrigan observed, 

“One is called to live nonviolently, even if the change one works for seems impossible. It may or may not be possible to turn the U.S. around through nonviolent revolution. But one thing favors such an attempt: the total inability of violence to change anything for the better.”  (https://news.fordham.edu/living-the-mission/university-mourns-death-of-daniel-berrigan-sj-peace-activist-and-poet-in-residence/ )

    We need these idealists and dreamers. We need to keep a vision of humanity alive that doesn’t rely on coercion or violence. We need the hope and determination to do the hard work that too many people are afraid to do: to face the devastation wrought by inflicting and suffering violence, and to begin the process of healing. We need to insist on creating communities that invest in the beautiful and wonderful things that create, rather than destroy, life, and savor joy. When Afghanistan and all its troubles leaves the headlines, the people who believe these things will still be there, doing the hard work, like transforming bomb craters into fish ponds, teaching children to read, offering trauma-healing workshops in remote villages, developing family violence programming, and advocating for human rights. So please remember the people of Afghanistan who are and will be keeping the possibility of peace alive, even when they are forgotten.  Support them, and others like them around the world, and join their ranks, if you want to help make another world, not just possible, but something real.

An Economic Wakeup Call (Labor Day)

An Economic Wakeup Call (Labor Day)   September 5, 2021  

Dr. Roger Ray, pastor

click here to see the video

Newsweek, BY EWAN PALMER ON 7/27/21

Restaurant workers in Missouri have been fired after staging a walkout protesting for higher wages and alleged poor working conditions.

 

At least seven workers from the Aviary Cafe in Springfield were let go after failing to turn up for their shifts on Sunday.

…"They have told us time and again recently that we have broken numerous sales records for the restaurant," Perry Ashlock, who worked in the kitchen at the Aviary Cafe, wrote on Facebook.

"We have all managed to accomplish this with a less than minimal crew. Our staff is working, at times, from 7:30 AM to well past closing hours.

 

"We could never get new employees to stay with us because they didn't like the level of work, or the hours they were having to put in. Most, if not all, of us were promised raises that were never followed through upon," Ashlock added.

 

Ericka Loredo, an Aviary sous chef, said that she had been "consistently" working 65 hours over the summer as the café struggled to find staff amid the pandemic.

"I often had 14-hour workdays just because you're trying to get everything ready. From 7:30 in the morning until past closing. But again, we got no breaks. Just in general the place is really toxic. I felt like a slave. We were being overworked like slaves," she told the Springfield News-Ledger.

 

In an updated Facebook post, Ashlock posted an unconfirmed claim that the Aviary Cafe had given employees who didn't walkout a raise to $20 per hour.

"Just goes to show they could have been doing it the whole time," Ashlock said.   

            

Last month the world was treated to a history making billionaire space race. Perhaps each of them had some business interest, not so much in developing new space worthy ships to service the needs of scientific research, but to begin to make it look like space tourism might one day be a thing, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Richard Branson each spent more than $5 billion of their corporate wealth to slip the surly bonds of earth to touch the lower edge of what might be called space. 

None of them actually orbited the earth but they did more of a sling shot ride up and down again in a few seconds, and yet they are calling themselves astronauts. 

 

I didn’t pay much attention to this contest that was part corporate advertisement and part adolescent adult ego competition. Certainly, there were many who decried the financial waste and talked about what humanitarian project could have been funded rather than this waste of resources, but I didn’t pay attention until I ran across Jeff Bezos’ rather tone-deaf shout out from the post-flight press conference when he said: ‘I want to thank every Amazon employee and every Amazon customer because you guys paid for all this.’ 

 

And yes, on the one hand, what he said was obviously true, but it was one of those truths that might be overlooked until it is uttered aloud as if you were proud of it. During these nightmarish months of the pandemic, Branson, Musk, but especially Bezos, have increased their wealth by billions. The employees that Bezos gave a shout-out to reportedly are sometimes forced to work shifts as long as 10 to 14 hours while wearing wrist bands that measure their minute-by-minute productivity. 

 

They are not allowed access to their cell phones, and they can be pat down at any moment by security guards to be sure that they are not stealing anything. Some employees in Great Britain even reported that they worked in warehouses where the closest restroom was down 4 flights of stairs so they reportedly had to pee into empty drink bottles to keep up with their production quotas to keep their $15/hour jobs, while Bezos could blow $5 billion on a 11 minute ride into quasi-space. 

 

Defenders of these billionaires in space say, “It was their money. They can spend it however they want to.” But, hold on a minute, is it really their money or is that just a fluke of the way we structure employment in the western world? 

 

When the ancient Hebrew prophet, Isaiah, spoke of the way the world would be when the children of Israel escaped their bondage in Babylon, he said of them:

^{Isaiah 65:21} They shall build houses and inhabit them;
    they shall plant vineyards and eat their fruit.
²² They shall not build and another inhabit;
    they shall not plant and another eat;

 

Can you hear the prophet asking, “How come everybody works in the vineyard but Bezos gets all the fruit?” Sure, it is legal for the owner of a business to set employment standards and salaries, but do you ever wonder who wrote those laws? Did waiters, dish washers, and cooks write those laws, or did business owners and investors write the laws that make exploiting the poor not only legal, but something that the wealthy can brag about. As Bezos basically asks, “How do all of you over-worked and under-paid little people like watching me blast your profit-sharing and pensions into space in my 11-minute joy ride?”

A local hip restaurant about a mile from my home here in Springfield also made national news last month. Several members of the staff at the Aviary walked off the job recently in protest of what some called “slave like working conditions.” Where many restaurants have had to restrict hours and days of business because they couldn’t get enough employees, the managers of the Aviary found a solution, just make your employees work longer hours. Now, these are not ICU nurses in the middle of a pandemic, these are young people making dessert crepes and bringing your bill to you, folded neatly into an antique French children’s book. 

 

They walked off the job, demanding better pay and working conditions and they were, of course, immediately fired because there are no effective labor unions in this area, especially not in the food service arena. Rumor is that once the national media showed up for the demonstrations, everyone who had not walked off the job got a raise, but the employees who were fired for demonstrating were not re-hired. Because, you know, power. 

 

Clearly, if they can afford to pay better now, they could have afforded it before. We do not have a labor shortage in America, we have a problem with wages that are lower than what it costs to live. We have an economic system that allows the rich to control the government and right now we are in a standoff between low waged workers who are refusing to return to slave labor and employers who would rather lose business in the short term than to give in to paying a living wage. 

 

Only organized labor can change this, especially in the food service arena. We have to give collective power to the poor to be able to stand up to the oligarchs who control the economy and the government. 

 

And, yes, though we are rarely conscious of it, we all know, at least in the back of our minds, that those who can make political donations in the millions are not giving to charity, they are buying legislation . . . they are buying tax policy . . . they are buying contracts for military manufacturing and building interstate highways, mass transit, and infrastructure . . . you know that, but this week I need to draw this distinction down to a very specific case of buying off the government because this one should be making every American’s blood boil.

Over the past two decades, about a half a million Americans have died from opioid overdoses. Millions have suffered from addiction. The number one offender in this scenario is Purdue Pharma. They aggressively marketed their opioid pain relievers to doctors, lying repeatedly about the dangers of addiction. Many of the people who were started on OxyContin, when the legal supply ran out, turned to heroin with disastrous results.  

 

I have presided over a funeral for one such person myself, a delightful young woman who had back surgery and was prescribed OxyContin to manage the pain. When she became addicted, her physician cut her off of the legal drug, so she turned to heroin and soon died from an overdose. This story has been repeated hundreds of thousands of times in the USA. 

 

You have probably seen documentaries about the Sackler family and their Purdue Pharma. They clearly, knowingly, pushed sales of this dangerous drug, and found ways to provide absurdly large amounts of the drug to small communities that could not have had a legitimate use for even 10% of the drugs they were selling, but the family became obscenely wealthy as the opioid epidemic grew. 

When news began to break about the corruption and deceit behind Purdue’s meteoric profits, the family started moving large amounts of cash into off-shore accounts, hiding their wealth all around the globe. On Wednesday of this week, it was announced that the federal judge in the trial of the Sacklers had signed off on a settlement agreement that has the Sacklers paying about $4.5 billion into a fund designed to help affected families and to operate drug rehabilitation. In exchange for this amount of money, the Sacklers admit to no wrongdoing and are protected from any future liability claims from millions of addicts or the survivors of the more than a half a million people who have died in this crisis.

 

It reminded me of an old joke that has been mistakenly attributed to Groucho Marx, it was really some British journalist but it sounds better if you imagine Groucho Marx asking a woman, “Would you have sex with me for one million dollars?” The woman replied that she would. Then Groucho asks, “Would you have sex with me for $5?” To which the woman shrieked, “No, what kind of a woman do you think I am?” And he allegedly replied, “We’ve already determined that, now we are just haggling on the price.”

 

Do we have an actual justice system, or do we have a corrupt legal system that can be bought off? Apparently, we are so corrupt that you can kill a half a million people in the process of illegally making a fortune and then you can buy your way out of trouble for $4.5 billion. We have no way of knowing how many tens of billions of dollars the Sacklers have hidden around the globe, and we will probably never know. They get to keep that money and escape all prosecution.

 

The United States is not a democracy. We do not have a justice system. We are at best an oligarchy, but we are well on our way to having a fascist government in which the rich and powerful live in a world with no rules and the rest of us can be sent to a prison work camp at the drop of a hat. If that doesn’t make you mad as hell, then you either don’t understand what we are losing, or you are already so defeated that you no longer care. 

 

I keep banging on this drum, but it is very hard to get laborers to wake up to what is being done to them. For the most part, in every wave of immigration in our country, employers have used cheap labor to keep wages down, trying to get workers to blame the immigrant and not the employer.

I love this cartoon that so graphically illustrates how employers trick workers into thinking that their enemy is the poor immigrant who wants to take their job when, even without immigrants, employers are doing everything they can, legally and often illegally, to keep wages down and to keep unions from ever organizing labor.

Let me repeat what this meme says so succinctly and clearly:  No immigrant has taken your job. You were laid off by a capitalist who required cheap labor and took advantage of that immigrant to increase his profits, and nothing makes him happier than to hear you blame the immigrant and not him.

 

You have reason to be angry, but not at the immigrant.

I am not, in the least, sympathetic with the “Make America Great Again” crowd. I don’t think that you can look into America’s past and find an ideal nation. We were born in the throes of slavery, engaged in pathological land theft through genocide of Native Americans and taking farm land from Mexican land owners, all followed with racial segregation and discrimination against women and minorities. America has never been a shining city on a hill, but, I can tell you this:

When I was born in 1956, the tax rate on top income earners was 91%. Eisenhour was president, the construction of our nation’s infrastructure, including interstate highways, was underway, and a person who worked a full time, unskilled job, could buy a house and a car, support a spouse and children, and retire at the age of 65 with financial security and dignity. 

 

The past 40 years have seen massive cuts on taxes levied on the most wealthy people and tax loop holes such that billionaire, Warren Buffett, observed in an interview a few years ago that the taxes he actually pays amounts to a tax rate of 17.7% while his support staff pays an average tax rate of 32.9%, almost twice what Buffett pays. We have corrupted our tax system and our political system so that the tax burden has been shifted onto the shoulders of labor rather than where the real money is, among wealthy capitalists. 

 

America wasn’t great in the 1950’s but, in the post war world of that time, we at least had the tax system worked out so that we spread the wealth around the population in a much more equitable way and while the super wealthy were not taking quick joy rides into space, kids like me got to ride in the back seat of a Ford to school every morning. 

There are many issues that concern those of us who hope to see a more just society arising from the current chaos but when it comes to economics, the classic labor union advice still holds:  tax the rich, support labor unions, and buy locally whenever you can.