A Note on Rep. Mark Meadows and Racism

"There's not a racist bone in my body." - Rep. Mark Meadows after exhibiting a 'black friend' to prove neither he nor President Donald Trump are racists, 7 years after declaring that he would like to send President Barack Obama, "Back to Kenya or wherever he's from." 


Let us begin with this basic truth: racism is not what is in your heart, that's prejudice. Racism is participating in structures of oppression that are based on the lies of 'race'. Mistaking prejudice, one's internal thought-world and conscience, for racism (or the lack thereof) perfectly describes the madness of my experience in a place like Evergreen Park, Illinois. When I lived there as a teenager red-lining laws were still on the books effectively making it illegal to sell a home in that city to a black person. There was, as far as I can remember, no black people living in Evergreen Park. Just across the tracks outside the city, however, it was almost entirely black folks. And yet, talk to the people of Evergreen Park and curiously, not a single person was a racist. "Not a racist bone in my body." 

When we white folk take the subject of racism to be our own internal feelings rather than actual people who are the object of oppressive structures in law and social interactions we are simply perpetuating racism and participating in it as more sophisticated racists.

When a person (like Rep. Mark Meadows, or like any number of the people living in Evergreen Park in the late 1980's) says, "There's not a racist bone in my body," what is revealed is not a lack of prejudice or a sophisticated analysis of racist structures and a capacity to have dismantled all of them and not participate in any of them (both of these are, frankly, impossibilities under even the slightest bit of self-examination). Instead, what is revealed is a need to exonerate one's conscience, to be seen as good. These are essentially the words of a hypocrite.

I recall a conversation I had with a professor of mine at Calvin Theological Seminary in the fall of 2000 in which I asked him why he thought 90%+ of all African American voters voted for Al Gore over George W. Bush. He answered, "Now look, there's not a racist bone in my body, but the fact is black people are just too stupid to vote in their own self interest. Let's be honest, those people shouldn't be allowed to vote until they can show the ability to think for themselves." You'd be hard pressed to find a more racist sentiment. You'd be hard pressed to find a more oppressive and racist structure than disenfranchisement of the vote based on race. Here was a professor who prided himself on the sophistication of his thought, morality and spirituality. And here was a person whose racism had absolutely held him captive and enslaved his spirit because he was willing to believe the lie that racism only had to do with his own subjective judgment about his own interior feelings. I'm sure, somewhere, at some time, he had a black friend. 

A white person who is genuinely concerned about racism asks:
1. What are my internal prejudices and bigotries? How have I internalized thoughts and feelings of superiority vis a vis the lies of race, and how can I destroy such thought and feelings root and branch? 
2. How have I participated in structures of racist oppression? How can I dismantle those structures? 

As a white person it is essential that we center these questions if we are to make headway against the evil of racism. Living with these questions teach us that being racist is not a binary option (not an on/off switch). Racism is inherent to being white in America. It is inherent to America. The question isn't, "Am I racist?" The question for anyone who seeks moral and spiritual honesty is this: "What am I doing to dismantle racism?" Am I becoming, more and more each day, a champion of anti-racism? 

On Baseball and the Essential Truth of Each Moment

Grant Brisbee is my all time favorite baseball writer. But recently he wrote something that led me to a (slightly tongue-in-cheek) rumination on the nature of life and of baseball. Grant wrote, "Baseball isn’t meant to be decided over a best-of-seven series, but some jerk thought it made sense for some reason." I get where Grant is coming from.  In the world of baseball fans who believe that the data analytics are the actual substance of the game and not say, the actual catching, throwing, hitting, running and so forth of the game this has become somewhat axiomatic – there’s no way you can tell over a 7 game series which is the better team. Post-season baseball is a facade, a sham, a veil that hides the truth of baseball which is best discovered in decimals that become accurate only after thousands upon thousands of iterations.

But frankly, this is not true of baseball nor is it true of life. Philosophers have been wrestling with the limits of experience in the face of the overwhelming variety of possibility for millennia – the age old quandary of ‘the one and the many’ has long vexed us. But in baseball, as in life, there come rare moments that carry more weight than others. I have lived over 17,000 days. I can remember barely a hint of any of them. But there are some that matter. The day my first child was born. The day my first crush broke my heart. The day I came down with an incurable illness that for all practical purposes ended my life. Perhaps these things shouldn’t matter in the vast expanse of days – both those days I’ve lived and the billions of days other people have lived. But they do matter.

And so does a 7 game series. The idea that a 7 game series isn’t the way baseball should be played is as ignorant of the existential nature of life as is the idea that the death of a dearly beloved beloved friend doesn’t really matter because, hell, there’s 7 billion more people out there. The actual truth is that baseball has had 7 game series in the fall decide the champion for more than 100 years and more often than not the experience of it has been utterly thrilling and, in its own way, indicative of the truth that in moments of intensity everything that rises must converge. 7 games carry the imprint of eternity every bit as much as 162 games. Were the Giants in 2012 the better team than the Tigers? The question is absurd. The truth is when the moment arrived Romo threw a fastball straight down the middle and the best hitter and baseball just watched it like he were a statue. And much joy ensued in Giants land while tears were shed in Detroit. And every fall there’s another iteration of the 7 game microcosm and every fall it is glorious. Just the way it was meant to be.

The Lord's Prayer - American Christianity Version

The Lord's Prayer - American Christianity Version


Our Father, who art on Wall Street, 
     trademarked be thy name. 
Thy portfolio come, thy reign of terror be done, 
     in ghettoes and prisons, 
     as it is in refugee concentration camps. 

Give us this day our daily AR-15s, 
      and grant us moral impunity, 
      as we demand harsh sentences for others. 
Lead us not into compassion, but deliver us 
      from truthfulness, 
For thine is the hatred, the violence, 
     and the self-righteousness forever. 
Amen.

- Dan Hutt   October 2018

Is Trump the Whale, or Is He the Bait?

Hypothesis: Trump isn't the white whale that Mueller is bringing down. Trump is the bait. The white whale is transnational organized crime (TOC). Semion Mogilevich. That's the name to remember. Dutch and UK press have been covering this story for years. For whatever reason we're still largely unaware of what's happening here in the states. So let's begin at the start of where we should have been paying attention... 2011 President Barack Obama declares transnational organized crime officially to be a "National Emergency." Executive orders direct a series of high level actions to counteract the threat. The threat is enumerated as follows: - Transnational Organized Crime (TOC) is infiltrating nation states globally and the US in particular in every key institution: political, business, government, judicial, press etc. - The key syndicates are based in Russia, Mexico, Italy and Japan. The reach is international and the danger is that TOC is coordinated at levels of sophistication and cooperation unseen before. - Russia is the key, though, as its government isn't merely compromised by TOC, it actually is, in fact, a crime syndicate. Semion Mogilevich is the boss. A group of oligarchs including Putin fill out the ranks. Putin is the puppet dictator of the TOC syndicate in Russia. - Russia's TOC/Oligarchic/Puppet model of governance is to become the template internationally. Again, this was all laid out by the Obama administration as a National Emergency back in 2011. And it is vital to understand that Robert Mueller was tagged to bring down TOC from the start. 2011, if you'll recall, is when Robert Mueller gave his famous "Iron Triangle" speech laying the foundation for going after Semion Mogilevich and the criminal enterprise he's built (including, we now know, Trump associates Felix Sater and Paul Manafort). The threat is urgent b/c Putin/Semion have perfected a means of manipulating nationalism, religious ideology (male patriarchy and homophobia the two points hit hardest world-wide and becomes the link for people like VP Pence and Franklin Graham to become pro-Putin), ethnocentrism, fear of immigration and economic degradation as fulcrums of power. Turkey falls spectacularly and Erdogan patterns his rule after Putin. TOC invests heavily in reinvigorating Narco-states in Central America. Death squads in Honduras, Guatemala, etc. send waves of refugees north to the US seeking asylum. Mexican cartels get into the human trafficking racket. The US is roiled in anti-immigration fervor that Trump masterfully manipulates and RU created propaganda hammers. Meanwhile, Russia, along with multiple narco cartels, human trafficking cartels and the newly aggressive Saudi Arabia weaponize refugees by taking advantage of destabilized Syria, Yemen, and swaths of North Africa. Waves of immigrants are driven to Europe. (I wrote about Putin's weaponization of Syrian immigrants back in the fall of 2016 in case you were wondering). Immigration fallout in Europe is coordinated with RU money and propaganda. Marie LePen hammers anti-immigration fervor in France, Geert Wilders in Netherlands, Italy falls into chaos and is driving towards exit from EU, Poland goes full fascist, Austria elects an openly Nazi government, England is masterfully manipulated by RU into Brexit. September of 2016 Hillary Clinton declares Trump to be "Putin's puppet." America's mainstream press mocks Hillary. Rogue elements of the FBI, coordinate with Trump lieutenant Rudy Giuliani and bad actors in the NYT to hit Hillary with false investigation charges a week before the election. "Lock her up!" comes home to roost. FBI Director James Comey panics and craps the bed. Election hijacked by RU/GOP and we enter a nightmare. Trump's mission is to destroy rule of law in the US and internationally. The purpose is building a global system friendly to TOC styled oligarchy in the US and internationally. Trump's racism, nationalism, and embrace of religious ideology are fulcrums to power. However, white supremacist true believers such as Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon are essential to power. 'Build The Wall' is the golden calf that makes it all work. The trophies that Semion and Putin want in exchange for Trump's Capo status as puppet of America are... - Destabilizing and fracturing NATO (check) - Delegitimizing structures and institutions for international human rights (check) - Destroying international trade agreements with their meticulous regard for regulations (check) - Destabilizing delegitimizing the EU (check) - Realigning US international interests away from liberal democracies and towards international dictatorships (check) - Bringing corruption into every facet of federal governance. (Wilbur Ross, Scott Pruitt etc. etc.) (check) - Turning the press into the "Enemies of the People" (in process) - Building a corruption friendly judicial system (in process) - Delegitimizing US elections process and/or hijacking elections altogether (check/in process) - Halt efforts to restrain, regulate, and unwind nuclear weapons as military options. Begin working together with Russia to harness the threat of nuclear weapons as a fulcrum of power. (in process) - Halt efforts to end organized crime through structures such as Magnitsky Act. (in process) - Delegitimize and/or destroy structures for anti-corruption law enforcement such as the FBI, CIA etc. (this is the war we're watching in real time as Mueller stands in the gap) (in process) In order to achieve the above for Semion's OIC international order and as a feature of Trump's own warped fetish for genetic purity there's the ethnic cleansing and religious purification of America. To wit: - Give authoritarian powers to racist law enforcement branches such as ICE. Build key structures of privatized militia unrestrained by law (in process) - Treat asylum seekers and would-be immigrants as beings who have zero protection of law ("No rights that a white man is bound to respect" to put it in the language of Dred Scott and the US supreme court of 1854). (check) - Move to bring legal immigrants under same status as having 'no-rights' as asylum seekers. (in process) - End birth-citizenship and make ideology/ethnicity the basis of citizenship in the US (in process) - Strip as many minority citizens of the right to vote as possible (check) - Build a seamless identity between ethnic identity, religious identity, political party, and authoritarian leader. This is the building of politics as "a people" completely under the sway of authoritarian leadership. Real Americans are MAGA Trumpists. (check) - Foment easily winnable battles between Trumpists and targeted scapegoated minorities. ("First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out because I was not a socialist...Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak for me.") (in process) So here's the deal. We're up against a highly coordinated TOC syndicate that is the brainchild of Russian mob boss Semion Mogilevich. This syndicate has multiple nation-states already under its sway and now owns the better part of the executive branch of the US. A key feature of this syndicate's success is that it is capable of drawing on decades worth of research and development on propaganda, governmental destabilization, installing puppets, fomenting national instability and civil wars from one of the world's most sophisticated intelligence branches (the KGB). They are capable of coordinating with the RU govt's current security and espionage apparatus (the GRU) as the GRU is essentially an arm of the Russian mob.

It hurts me to say it, but the Obama admin, the FBI and CIA were caught off guard in the 2016 election by just how thoroughly the GOP and various conservative institutions had already been compromised by organized international crime and Russian intelligence. The good news is that the US intelligence community had a good five-years or more run up in preparation for the crisis we now face. When Mueller went to work in May of 2017 he already had all the tools in place. The Obama administration secured every document. Plans were made and are being executed. By all appearances Mueller's investigation has been nothing short of brilliant. Mueller has Trump all but caged. Having said that, we are still in a heap of trouble b/c Trump isn't the big fish. In my own mind the biggest issue facing America now isn't Trump, it's this: the building of a seamless identity between ethnic identity, religious identity, political party, and authoritarian leader. The spiritual realities of corruption, ignorance and hatred always exist. They never go away. One of the basic element of a peaceable, civil society is that these three dark spiritual realities are isolated and forced to live outside of the structures and institutions of society. What we have now in Trumpism isn't actually something new in America. It's a rebirth of Dred Scott America of 1854. It's a rebirth of the "Birth of a Nation" America of 1915. It's a rebirth of the "Trail of Tears," Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren from the 1820's and 1830's. In the twisted minds of Trump and his supporters this really is MAGA. The danger we face is that the darkest shadows of evil that have always haunted America: the unholy trinity of genocidal hate-centric Christianity, celebration of ignorance, cultivation of greed and corruption, have once again seamlessly merged to become a single identity that claims to be the 'real' America. The good news is that Trump is a moron. His cruelty, shrewd dishonesty, and lack of restraint are weapons that caught us off guard after living under the shelter of Obama's decency. I think a lot of us became afraid and quite literally too sick to fight. But Trump's weapons are steadily losing their power as most Americans refuse to be afraid any more and are starting to get righteously pissed off. And this presents us with a unique opportunity. Imagine if Trump weren't just shrewd, cruel and unrestrained but was sharp, controlled, able to modulate his emotions and acts of cruelty or at least to pretend to. Imagine if Trump didn't have dozens of criminal ties and recorded criminal acts. Imagine if Trump actually knew how to use the immense power of the office instead of just blundering around from one crisis to the next as if crapping the bed and smearing feces were actual strategies. The thing with Trump is he is so thoroughly despicable that he can be vilified and tied to each branch of the unholy trinity that so haunts America. If we fight wisely and well we can come to a place where for a couple of generations or more we'll be able to use Trump as a cautionary tail against the dangers of scapegoating, racism, unrestrained and unregulated corruption, ignorance, lying, propaganda, and toxic and authoritarian religion. For generations we'll remember just how important our institutions and values are to a civil and peaceable society. We'll remember to cherish and protect a free press. Uphold the rights of each citizen to vote. Value the rights of human beings and stop treating corporations as deities. Cherish truth, honesty and integrity. Resist the temptations of scapegoating. Remember that differences, when coupled with patient understanding, make us stronger, wiser and more compassionate.

The Danger of Propaganda-Driven America Part 2

[Note: This is a follow up to "The Danger of a Propaganda-Driven America" that I wrote in September of 2017] Propaganda works because it flatters core flaws in one's character: envy, anger, resentment, fear. And the truth, which is hard work, just doesn't seem worth the effort anymore when Fox News etc. is willing to serve sweet, intoxicating lies.

Once a group of people become organized around the principles of the propagandist they become helpless before the power of the lies - essentially enslaved to the lies. Having lost the will to submit to the hard work of seeking what is true, the will becomes enslaved to base emotions. It becomes gratifying to participate in the lie. It becomes addicting, thrilling to become angry when even the most obvious lies are called out. Lashing out at truth tellers becomes something of a blood sport. When a group of people get to this point things become dangerous.
The propagandist, if malicious, can instill a nearly irreversible course of political violence if the lie is one of scapegoating (blaming social and personal ills on a person or class of people, or classes of people).

I believe we are at an inflection point in our nation's history where political violence caused by a significantly propagandized portion of the populace (both in amount of people who've fallen prey and the sheer malice of the propaganda) is *inevitable* on our current course. The path we must take to avoid such a disaster is in a non-violent intervention by the non-propagandized through massive protest and civil disobedience (both of which must remain peaceful). It is in this collective action that truth can gain entrance into the collective consciousness and conversation. Only when truth re-enters the conversation as something more valuable than victory, can other virtues such as compassion, justice, courage, etc. begin to flourish in any collective sense. Only when truth re-enters our collective purpose is there even the possibility of the work of seeing each other in our full humanity. However, if even a significant minority of us willfully choose to be lost to the rule of lies, the possibility of belonging one to each other is out of reach. History has shown that under such conditions the direction a society will take, indeed, must take, is the path of tragedy.

Jubilee Justice and 'Dikaiosune Theou'

"Seek first the kingdom of God and its justice." - Jesus (Matthew 6:33 NEB) "I have come to see in deeper ways the implications of my faith... I can no longer proclaim the Cross and the Resurrection without proclaiming the whole message of the Kingdom [of God] which is justice for all." - Billy Graham in Transformation Jan. - Feb.1989 The bifurcation of 'social gospel' from 'spiritual gospel' is at the root of our long-standing national crisis of claiming the 'righteousness' of Jesus while simultaneously enacting some of the most evil acts of oppression the modern world has seen (chattel slavery, mass genocide of native peoples, etc.) The biblical concept is that to enact Jubilee Justice is the righteousness of God. They aren't bifurcated. They aren't competing. There is no point at which struggling alongside of the oppressed becomes too political and messy and so we should give it up and focus on spiritual truths and salvation of souls. The Biblical thought is the Jubilee Justice is salvation. It is righteousness. It is the gospel. What's more, the Biblical concept is that when God's people try to separate justice and liberation from the oppressed as something other than God's righteousness, God sends prophets to declare God's hatred of their spirituality, private good works and morality, and their worship. (See for instance Isaiah 58) God's repeated refrain in the scripture is that any act of worship that occurs when justice is actively being denied is in fact an abomination. Much of the confusion we face today comes through some poor translation work where historically we've insisted on using the word 'righteousness' in place of 'justice'. This flaw shows up in the Christian translations of Old Testament from the Hebrew as well as in the New Testament from the Greek word dikaiosune. Here's a short video primer on the translation from the Greek in particular. I urge you to watch it as it is the essential point of this post. [Note: You'll have to click on this link to get to the video footage as I cannot find a way to embed from Vimeo.] By erasing the Biblical concept of Jubilee Justice from the heart of what modern evangelical Christians call 'the gospel' and putting in its place Righteousness modern evangelical Christianity has turned the gospel into a private spirituality the purpose of which is to obtain eternal life for one's self. However, if we go back to the Biblical concern for Jubilee Justice as taught by the Torah, the Prophets, Jesus and yes, even Paul, suddenly private salvation is no longer the central message of the gospel but is rather a byproduct or a footnote to the divine project of liberation from oppression. We are saved when and insofar as our love for our neighbor (as defined by the Parable of the Good Samaritan) has become inseparable and indistinguishable from our love of self. Suddenly, the gospel become less and less about private spirituality, morality, and salvation and more and more about the politics of liberation through solidarity with the oppressed, the outsider. Jesus never said, "As you were polite to the most wealthy and powerful of people on the planet, taking every measure to ensure they can eat at whatever posh restaurant they want to whenever they want to, so you've done it unto me. And in fact, this is the essence of salvation and your participation in it." But Jesus definitely said something very close to, "When you worked to release children who were stuck in concentration camps to return them to their families, and ensured that they received sanctuary either where you lived or some other place they could call home, so you did it to me. And in fact, as much as you did so you participated in salvation. And to the degree you didn't care about refugees, or actively participated in their oppression, or equivocated about their importance because private morality made you uncomfortable, you participated in your own damnation."
If you have ears to hear the time to start hearing is now.

Sanctuary as an Act of Worship

In the winter of 2016/17 I began meditating on the spiritual meaning of a refugee. I encourage you to read the post at the link before finishing here. As a guide for my meditation I turned to Hannah Arendt who wrote at length on the topic as her moral philosophy was shaped to a large degree by her experience as a refugee. Hannah Arendt was a Jewish refugee fleeing Hitler who was then shunned and condemned to the status of 'meaningless' and 'valueless' by the rest of the world because she was a refugee. One must remain a refugee because one has become a refugee.
Ah, but what is a refugee? A refugee is one who has no place on earth. What is a refugee who is forced to remain a refugee? A person who everyone else, in seeing that a person has no place on earth, consciously decided that they must remain a person who has no place on earth. To refuse to give refuge to a refugee is way of negating the return of a human being to the land of the living, giving them a status of the living dead. It is to have the opportunity to offer salvation to the damned and to consciously choose to re-damn them.
To refuse a refugee, then, is an act that is, frankly, more violent than murder. Perhaps this is why scripture is so vocal about the raw evil of refusing to help a refugee.
But there's more. Refugees are more vulnerable than any other group of being used as a political weapon. In the winter of 2016/17 it became clear to the world that Putin was creating a humanitarian refugee crisis in Syria (with the help of Assad) in order to cleanse Syria as well as to destabilize Western Europe. I wrote at the time: "What does it mean to use people as a weapon, as Putin has done in Syria, by turning millions of 'undesirables' into refugees? What does it mean to refuse refuge to those whose de-humanized status is being used to destabilize democracies, to undercut the principles of rule of law and inalienable human rights? These are the pressing questions we must ask in this time if we are to remain morally and spiritually resistant to genocide." My fear at the time was that it would only be a matter of time before Trump attempted to copy Putin by weaponizing refugees and immigrants for political gain in America. The danger we are in is that if we take the stance now that refugees must be met with "Zero Tolerance" rather than with refuge, is that we will have then crossed the threshold of being complicit of a type of genocide. Because a refugee is a sort of human zombie in the political and social sense it should be a chief calling of Christians to be the vanguard of refuge. This is precisely why a place of worship is called a 'sanctuary.' The worship of the church is to be, literally, the place of refuge for the refugee. The body politic will always have strong incentives to damn the damned, to demonize and reject the refugee. The calling of the church should be to guide the conscience of the body politic, to be a moral restraint to damning the damned, to refusing refuge to the refugee. It is time for us to lift our voice and to open our churches for the act of worship that is 'sanctuary.'

The Era of Human Rights Is Ending

Why did the US leave the UN Human Rights Council? Trump has been openly telegraphing this move and the reasoning behind it for years.

The end goal of Trumpism is to end the era of human rights and international treaties/agreements. I've been harping on this for two years now because that is literally what Trump has been saying over and over again and I always take people at their word. Well, here we are. There are no non-malicious reasons to end human rights agreements. It is purely a pre-text for the rest of Trump's campaign promises: 1) To reintroduce torture 2) To strip other nations of their natural resources through military means 3) To terrorize other nations for economic gain wherever it suits our economic purposes 4) To rebalance global power away from global cooperation and into the hands of strong dictators 5) To make nuclear weapons an active threat as a part of our regular means of business 6) To reassert white male dominance and 7) To enforce mono-culturalism at a national level and to ensure mono-culturalism globally.

We are in the deepest global crisis since the late 1930's. It is time to wake up!

Where You Sit Is Where You Stand

Permanent orphans.

I know a lot of people are wondering what they can do. This is what's been percolating in my mind. The simple truth is that white Evangelical Christians have been the political force driving Trumpism. We are where we are now because this is where white Evangelical Christians have steered the ship. Watching this unfold I've been thinking a lot about Dietrich Bonhoeffer's call to end Christianity as an organized religion as the Christlike response to the failure of the church in Germany. I know this, if you belong to a congregation where this is not addressed from the pulpit on Sunday you should absolutely leave that congregation immediately. When pastors stop drawing a paycheck and elder boards wonder how they'll make the next rent payment all sorts of theology will furiously and suddenly be 'discovered.'

What's more, there are all sorts of congregations that practice a simple, humble faith. Find a congregation that worships in Spanish. Find one that is intentionally multi-cultural and where congregants are encouraged to give money to the poor with greater intensity than to the leadership or the building fund. Find a congregation that actively harbors refugee families. Find a congregation that practices what Jesus' brother called, 'True religion' - which is to say caring for those on the margins. The reason bad religion is winning right now is because far too many folks are more interested in getting along with those who practice false religion than they are in "proclaiming good news to the poor."

Here's a quote that sounds pretty revolutionary:
“Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. 35 For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. 36 And a person's enemies will be those of his own household. 37 Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me, and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. 38 And whoever does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me. 39 Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it."

It's time to choose sides. As the saying goes, "Where you sit is where you stand."

I Am a Citizen of a Nation that Puts Innocent Children in Concentration Camps

Just because something seems morally obvious (such as you shouldn't hold children and infants in concentration camps - ripped away violently from their families - for political or any other purposes) doesn't mean that society will naturally bend in that direction. Quite the opposite.

For example, when I attended Calvin Theological Seminary I wrote a lengthy paper about the editorial stance of the Christian Reformed Church's journal, "The Banner of Truth," on the rise of Hitler in Germany. I read every editorial in "The Banner of Truth" from 1932 up until Pearl Harbor in my research. I was shaken, but not overly surprised, to discover that the CRC editorial posture was that while Hitler may not have been a savory character, he was by far and away the best leader in the world (compared to the evil FDR, etc.) and so worthy of Christian support (though not a full throated endorsement). Hitler was, to use today's Christian lingo, 'God's Cyrus'.

Ultimately the editorial board changed their stance. However, there was no argument that persuaded the editorial board otherwise, no moral outrage at Hitler's use of ghettoes (an unsavory but necessary measure in their eyes), but rather a response of self-preservation and fear that changed the editorial response as it was Pearl Harbor that led them to change.

I've been asking myself for close more than two decades: how could it be that the Christian Reformed Church was (albeit reluctantly) pro-Hitler? The longer I ponder the more clear it becomes to me that moral and spiritual myopia are particularly intransigent among people who consider themselves to be good or righteous. One could reasonably argue that the central negative topic Jesus addressed in his life and teachings was the spiritual blindness of religion and the religious. (Recall, Jesus had no problem addressing the religious teachers of his day who were most adamant about conserving religious tradition and purity, 'children of Satan.')

Things don't seem to change much in terms of moral and spiritual myopia. Anyone with the slightest bit of spiritual imagination could see that the crimes against humanity that America is perpetrating today were inevitable in a Trump Presidency. Cruelty towards immigrants and people of color was the central tenet of Trumpism from the onset. What's more, the type of evil we are seeing today is completely of a piece of America's leadership as the primary developer and exporter of racialized prejudice and violence over the past few hundred years. So what's happening now is no historical aberration, it's just jolting to many of us who thought we might be able to live free of these types of moral and spiritual struggles.

The idea of trying to have a dialogue to reasonably come to an agreement together on what is morally and/or spiritually good, and how to then translate that into a peaceable society, at a time when collectively we are clouded in a daze of hatred and divisiveness, is laughable. This is a time for battle. This is a time to stand. Each generation is given the task anew to see the world as it is and to discover and cherish the sacred spark that resides in each one of the oppressed and marginalized people of the world - in our age that means, more than anyone, the refugee and the immigrant.

When you see pictures of those children and those families terrorized, held in cages like animals who do you see? For those with eyes to see each child stripped from his or her mother's arms is Jesus. Each mother is Mary. And who is King Herod? We all are. We all have blood on our hands because it's happening on our watch, in our generation. The question is this: what will you and I do about it?

BBC Report: "Trump migrant separation policy: Children 'in cages' in Texas"

Thoughts on MECFS as a Spiritual Teacher

Salvador Dali's "Skull of Zurbaran" is a profound meditation on 1) the duality of religious experience as both a stairway to the life of the divine as well as the means by which humanity enslaves itself to death and destruction and 2) mortality as the greatest teacher of spiritual truth and the doorway to divine presence. For me, it has become a metaphor for life with ME/CFS. 


One of the advantages of having an incurable illness is that, as the saying goes, I've got 'no fucks left to give'. OK, I've got a handful of fucks, but those are for my family whom I love deeply.
I have found emotional and spiritual freedom and a corresponding detachment to the 'things of this world that have grown strangely dim' that no amount of meditation, contemplation and prayer could have led me to.

I wouldn't wish #MECFS on anyone in the world. And yet, I wouldn't trade what I've learned from it for anything in the world.

Life with #MECFS is like having died, but yet remaining conscious. Living with dreams never to be fulfilled. To take a walk in the hills just one more time. To write that book that you have hundreds of pages of notes and years of research stacked up sitting there on your desk.

Life with #MECFS is a waking death, a living nightmare, endless pain and exhaustion, all invisible to everyone but those closest to you who are willing to believe you and not to shame you.

Life with #MECFS is a cruel and unrelenting teacher of limits. What will I do today, shower or cook dinner for the kids? I can't do both. Or can I? Maybe today is the day I can sneak in a shower and still cook dinner. I'll try it. I'm not that sick. Boom. #MECFS has its own ideas. I did too much again. I crash. Not hard. But I lose a whole day the next day. I sleep 16 hours. I sit on a couch when I wake. Not even the Warriors game can cheer me up.

#MECFS sings to me, "Oops. You did it again." It forces me to constantly think through my limits. Can I walk to the kitchen, 15 feet away, and get a glass of water, or will that knock me out? I hold out until I have to use the bathroom. Then I only have to get up and walk once.

But #MECFS' constant cruel teaching of limits opens me to a greater vista that can hardly be described. I can see what matters in this world with eyes that only a handful of spiritual leaders that I have known in my life (and I have known many great ones) can see.

#MECFS teaches me the foolishness of grasping. "Vanity. Vanity. It is all Vanity" as the Hebrew teacher of wisdom pointed out regarding the limits of human achievement, ambition, and even of wisdom itself.

#MECFS teaches me to cherish truth and to despise falsehoods. To give no quarter to the lies of my false self or the mask wearing of hypocrites (from the Greek word for 'actor' or 'thespian') the thin, cheep veneers of self-righteousness, performing 'goodness', and reputation.

But most of all #MECFS teaches me that spiritual reality is more real than can be taught in words - it must be experienced in love and compassion and in a fearless embrace of truth, even truth that strips one to the core, even truth that pushes you to the abyss.

It is here, at the edge of the abyss that #MECFS teaches me to hold on to love. Nothing else endures. As the Greek philosopher taught, as the Apostle John wrote, the substance of reality and of the divine realm is love. I would not trade the experience of this truth for anything. (March 8, 2018)

Facebook and Giants Baseball: Yeah, I've Got Thoughts

Tomorrow, (Thursday May 10) the Giants play the Phillies and the only place you can watch it is in Philadelphia or on Facebook. I've got some thoughts about baseball on Facebook. 

Let's begin with Facebook. What did Facebook take of mine? 

My friendships, some of more than 40 years. My relationships with my parents and siblings. My love for my wife and 3 children. The movies that made me cry. The books that changed my life. All of this and more. The most intimate and sacred pieces of me and my network of relationships. The entirety of my 'social capital.' As much of what it means to be human that they could wrap their sharp-clawed algorithms around.

I will say, legally speaking, Facebook didn't steal this information from me. They gathered this information while I willfully used their platform to share ideas, keep up relationships, and in some cases, build new friendships. I knew I signed away control of my data on their platform. I knew they compiled and sold it to corporations. I figure, "I'm a savvy consumer. I'll know when I see a car ad on my feed not to go buy a new car."

But what FB has been doing is something altogether different than advertising. The truth is that they have been compiling all of my intimate data, the essence of my private relational life, and compiling the deep intimacies of my life (along with the deep intimacies of your life) and selling the collective human psyche in all its sacred nuance to the most evil actors on the planet for any and every form of manipulation, violence and deceit possible. Facebook has used and/or enabled this data to help foment racist hatred here in the US, to overthrow democracies, for ethnic cleansing and genocide among the Rohingya. The list goes on and on. All without as much as a whiff of remorse. If there’s no justice for Facebook and Zuckerberg this world is fucked. Which, of course, it is, because there doesn’t exist any type of accountability for Facebook or Zuckerberg. The power and technological capacity of the elite in today’s world is unmatched by any previous generation. At the same time our collective capacity for restraint is negligible. Our capacity for moral and/or spiritual thought and behavior is diminishing at an alarming rate. Brave New World here we come!!

I know, I know, I sound unhinged. But I was/am a friend and conversation partner for a few of the pioneers of Silicon Valley and I’ve had this conversation a hundred times or more: what happens when our technological capacity outstrips our capacity for moral and spiritual restraint? I can tell you that many of the folks who built the computer age are filled with overwhelming dread as they watch the devolution unfold in real time. As one such pioneer confided in me some years ago, the whole computing age is nothing like Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel and much more like Hieronymus Bosch' vision of hell on earth. If only he could have seen where Zuck and Facebook have taken us. 

So, yeah. Rob Manfred is dragging baseball onto Facebook where watching the Giants game tomorrow won't be an option among many options, but will be the only option for watching the game. It's a minor thing but it's also just another indication that in the competition between greed and humane, ethical action greed will win every time. 

The Legacy of Feeling the Bern: Migrant Labor in California Edition

In the years following NAFTA migrant labor from south Mexico, the vast majority of them indigenous farmers who had lost their livelihood, were pouring into the fields of California (as I’m sure all sorts of agricultural centers around America) b/c the American agricultural industry buried small farmers in Mexico via NAFTA. We pick up the debate in the 2000's when the hope of immigration reform was to 1) slow down the migration to the US and 2) give those who had been working in our fields and whose livelihoods had been destroyed by American corn agribusiness a path to citizenship. Bernie supported the first part (as did pretty much everybody except for large American agribusiness). However, he was so opposed to NAFTA that he worked alongside white ethno-nationalists (who also were also very opposed to NAFTA and free trade in general) to ensure that comprehensive immigration reform was killed. This is where Dolores Huerta took up arms against Bernie and why their feud spilled into the past election. 

Bernie’s position began to change around 2008 when he went to see the tomato workers of Florida. Now it has evolved to the point where he actually was for comprehensive immigration reform in 2013. But by that point the chance to get reform was over. Millions of people here in California are now getting screwed. Yes, it’s not only b/c of Bernie. But certainly b/c of his rigid ideology of the 2000's at least in part. Every family that gets rounded up here that easily could and should have been citizens by now is a testament to his failure at a key moment. And yes, at that time, Bernie’s calculations were very much driven by a narrow vision of labor in America as working white class only.

Receipts. When it comes to Bernie's legacy their aren't many and most are negative. I just don't get him. 

On Following a New Generation with a New Voice

Let me explain why I listen to the survivors of the Florida shooting when they say that our thoughts and prayers are unwelcome, and frankly, agree with them.

The gist of my point is not that prayer as such is an abomination, but that bullshit prayers are. Obviously you and I are not into bullshit prayers. Clearly we're among the sincere ones. But I think we (and the religious and spiritual leaders of America) are too easy on ourselves. The young people in Washington DC today protesting with a 'lie in' / 'die in' are showing us the way. https://www.mercurynews.com/.../photos-students-stage.../

What they are doing is what our generation of leaders in the church, the pastors, elders and deacons etc. should have been doing years and years ago. We have been the shepherds who have been silent. We have been the shepherds who betrayed the generations younger than us by being silent when we should have spoken, who have preferred the status quo than to protest. Our generation of spiritual leader failed the children when it was on us. It was always on us and we have failed. We should have been doing the die-ins and lie-ins. We should have been staring down the culture of guns and violence that has come to supplant Jesus' teachings on peaceableness and non-violence.

When these young people in Florida tell their Senators and House Reps and the President that their prayers are bullshit they are telling the leaders of this country that they are whitewashed tombs that look beautiful on the outside with their thoughts and prayers, but are corrupt on the inside, willing to take money for their silence and inaction. But if you listen carefully and discern the spirit of their pain you will also hear that the spiritual leaders of this nation, including you and I, are included in their cries. We have let the NRA and the American obsession with guns and violence define the spiritual and moral landscape. Our generation of spiritual leaders have been so busy praying and doing church that we have failed to be the salt that we are called to be. 

But when the shepherds fail, God's Spirit always raises up a generation who will lead. That generation is standing up now and showing us the way. They are asking us to listen to them and to walk with them in solidarity. And, much like Isaiah, they are telling us that our public prayers are no longer welcome. And so, while I agree with you wholeheartedly on the principals of contemplative action, there comes a time when if it is plain that the prophetic imagination has failed a generation of leaders we who were called and did not answer must reckon with why.

The Kids Are Alright

"We're children. You guys are the adults. You've got to take some action." - David Hogg, survivor (See linked NY Times article)

I have 3 teenagers and I've got to say the biggest fear I have for them isn't about drugs, alcohol, grades, relationships or what college they go to but that they'll be gunned down at school.

Having said that, my general impression of kids these days is that they're awesome! I love my kids. I love their schools, I love their friends, I love their soccer teams. The orchestra and bands they play for are amazing. They work hard, they're intelligent and curious, they're playful and have a sense of humor that keeps me laughing and cheerful even during weeks when I can barely leave the house. I honestly don't understand why there's a Baby Boomer cottage industry based solely on bashing 'kids these days'. The drumbeat of disdain and criticism that younger generations go through in the media and mass culture I just don't understand. In my experience the kids are smarter, more interesting more fun and more hopeful than I remember being - and I've got to tell you that makes me glad.

I also am utterly baffled that as a nation our actions regarding the upcoming generations is that we just don't give a damn about them. They get slaughtered in their schools with regularity and yet we still vote for the NRA. We make sure it can happen again, and again, and again, and again. We say with our mouths that we are heartbroken but actions speak louder than words. And what our actions say is that we want it to happen. We need it to happen. We don't mind seeing their blood, guts and brains splattered all over school chalkboards and linoleum floors. We vote and celebrate our death culture. We might as well worship Baal and Moloch.

Every time I overhear my kids having a conversation with their friends peppered with gallows humor about how global warming is going to destroy the world as we know it, or how they better go whale watching now while the ocean can still support life, a little bit of me dies inside. The truth is that we adults have failed our children. We've failed them miserably. We have lived selfishly and we have concerned ourselves, for the most part, with what our kids can give us, how they make us look, how they reflect on us.

When I look at a video like this and I listen to the words of children who have just survived a mass murder more or less sanctioned by a society that doesn't care I am humbled. Listen to their heartfelt plea. It's not on them to change our world. It's on them to try to understand and survive a mad world we've created and brought them into.

The kids are alright. We've got to listen to them. Love them. Get to work for them. They're worth it. And if the world is going to make it it will be because of them.