Looking Back

My Top 10 international stories of 2011  (not necessarily in any order of importance)

1. Osama bin Laden - dead.  US college students party in the streets like it’s 1999 and I am embarrassed by and for us as a nation.
2. Arab Spring
3. Purported end to US occupation of Iraq.  Irony: those in the US who supported its war against the people of Iraq (claiming it was to depose tyrant Saddam Hussein), opposed the Arab Spring, out of so-called concern about what would fill the vacuum created by the loss of dictatorial leadership in places like Egypt - apparently, that was not a concern when it came to Iraq.
4. Occupy Wall Street
5. Tsunami in Japan with the attendant nuclear power disaster, the long-term effects of which remain unknown.  Related story: failure of governments of the world to reach agreement on further climate-change strategies.
6. US proving that any boy  really can grow up to be president, as many in the very party she personifies will not support Michele Bachmann because she is a woman – irony may not be news, but it sure is interesting.
7. The US wages yet another undeclared war in the Middle East in the deposing of Gaddafi of Libya and calling it a NATO action (as if NATO is something different than the US).
8. World-wide economic tail spin
9. Death of Kim Jong Il, the effects of which for North Korea, its neighbors and the world, remain unknown

10. Oh, and apparently, the most interesting thing for the world to check out online was making a 13-year-old girl’s attempt at fame (Rebecca Black sings Friday) an international joke.

My Top 10 Personal Stories of 2011
1. My son got a job and moved away from home . . . again . . . and I must admit how much I miss him.
2. The lights were on at Obaugh’s way too often this year. . . Obaugh’s is the local funeral home in the community where I live and when someone dies, owner G. W. turns on the front porch light.  In this tiny place, we said far too many good-byes, including from our own church and the families in our church . . . Bobby McCray, Sonny Smith, Ruth Wade, Eugene Hodge, Levi Armstrong and Joey Roberts.  Levi and Joey were young, killed within weeks of each other in car accidents.
3. Chris & Heather Scott and their girls Ruth and Esther moved away, leaving me with one less ministerial playmate . . . I still feel their absence.
4. I stayed close to home most of this year but did manage to visit friends in Chicago and have friends visit me from Scotland and Pennsylvania.  Oh, and I went on my first and maybe my last cruise (I didn’t get seasick, but that was just way too much ocean for me)
5. I got a new car, well, new to me, anyway . . . and a new computer.
6. Inspired by RevGalBlogPals and my good friend Liz Crumlish I started to blog.  And technology came to our church by way of Podcasts (temporarily suspended while we get a new web site up and running) . . . we’re on FB now, and I’m a guest blogger on the Thoughtful Christian’s blog Gathering Voices (shout out to David Maxwell for thinking I’ve got something to say)
7. At age 56, I began cello lessons and am even learning to read music for the first time!
8. There was an earthquake in Virginia and Ben and I felt the shocks
9. I saw an abundance of butterflies, squirrels and deer, insects and bunny rabbits.
10. I went to my first film festival

History may be writ large, but it is lived small . . . in the everyday-ness of our existence, we find our meaning, purpose and place in the world.

This year mine has been less about the larger world and its events and more about home and family and friends.

In the small as well as the large, so many have suffered so much and my heart aches for them all.

But as for me, it has been, by and large, a very good year.  For that, I am thankful.

And I am wondering . . . what have been your Top 10's for 2011?

Newt Gingrich's "Let Them Eat Cake" Moment

At the Iowa Family Values forum on Saturday, presidential candidate Newt Gingrich commented on Occupy Wall Street activists, saying, “Go get a job right after you take a bath.”  It’s likely not a coincidence that his remarks came on the heels of Gingrich having been heckled by Occupy folk while giving a speech at Harvard.

Whether Occupy Wall Street folk are clean or unwashed is pretty much beside the point as I see it.

Gingrich sought to tie his remark to the challenge of Captain John Smith to aristocrats in the early American settlement to either work or starve, “If you don’t work, you won’t eat.”

Unfortunately, Gingrich’s remarks are more consonant not with Smith, but with the remark, “Let them eat cake,” apocryphally attributed to Marie Antoinette during a time of famine in France.

There are no studies of those participating in the Occupy Wall Street protests and communities across the nation, but among those on the streets are those who do have jobs as well as those who do not; those who have worked for a lifetime and those who are waiting to enter a job market that has no place for them; those who have protested wars at home and those who have fought them.

The unemployment rate (which measures those who do not have jobs who are looking for jobs) for young adults has topped 19% during this economic crisis and hovers consistently at above 16%.  The Wall Street Journal, "Generation Jobless"

The young are being hit the hardest in these times.  And this is while corporate profits have hit all time highs.

Given that joblessness is so high for young people who are looking for work but not finding it, Mr. Gingrich, might I suggest that telling those who are looking for work to get a job hardly qualifies as either helpful advice or meaningful challenge.  Rather, it smacks of an utter lack of awareness of lived realities for so many in this country.

Admittedly, we continue to be much better off as a nation than many other countries.

But I stand with the 16th-century Reformers on this one: human beings were made for work, for vocation.  Our work is our divine calling.  We serve not only ourselves and our community with our work; we also serve our God.  Being denied work is tantamount to being denied the opportunity to serve God.

Unfortunately, from this presumption, work is equated, wrongfully, with worth in our society.  No work; no worth.

And, Mr. Gingrich, your remarks smack of that same assessment.

But the folks on the streets are not worthless.  They are human beings.  And they are working.  They simply aren’t being paid for their work.

We can disagree with each other.  We can challenge the foundations of the opinions of others.  We can call into question the reasoning of someone whose opinion differs from ours.  But we cannot dismiss or denigrate the very existence of others.

There’s a word for that: dehumanization, the effort to make a person or persons something other than a fellow human being, so as not to have to take them into account.

It is beneath you, Mr. Gingrich.  It is beneath you as their fellow human being.  It is beneath you as someone who would seek to hold the highest office in our land.  And most especially, it is beneath you as a Roman Catholic Christian follower of Jesus the Risen Christ, who took us all into account.

Occupying Our Voices

How might our view of ‘them’ be different if we at home viewed the Occupy happenings not as a ‘movement’ but as a society being built before our very eyes?

Societies are made up of various components, the first of which is an actual gathering of people living and working in the same geographic area, in other words, a community located in time and space.

The stage-setting for various children’s stories about magical places often begins with a description of the place: what it’s like and how it’s different from where children usually live.

And maybe that’s a good lens through which to ponder Occupy Wall Street, especially for those of us on the outside.

The communication practices in Occupy Wall Street, such as General Assemblies, are designed to allow each community member and visitor to have a voice and for that voice to be heard, both literally and figuratively.

What might it mean for the central ethos of a society to be just that: assuring that the members of the society can each and all be heard?  What lies at the heart of such an ethos?

Some well-known givens in the United States come to mind: the free expression of thought; the protected rights of protest and the seeking of redress; respect for the individual.

But there are other aspects to the idea of being heard as playing out in the Occupy society-building enterprise as well: acceptance of all; valuing voices out of the mainstream of the society; responding to even unpopular voices with, at a minimum, a listening ear; connectedness, by virtue of a process which welcomes and embraces all; peacefulness with neighbor as Occupy’s truths are communicated firmly and persistently, but generally with respect.

Take a look at their signs and you’ll get a better sense of what’s happening here. . . You know things are messed up when librarians start marching . . . If only the war on poverty was a real war, then we would actually be putting money into it . . . When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace [my favorite, not least of which because the woman holding the sign stands beside a policeman making the peace sign] . . . I love humanity.  Let’s figure this s---- out together . . . I am a human being, not a commodity . . . You can’t arrest an idea . . . Due to recent budget cuts, the light at the end of the tunnel has been turned off . . . The experience we live is of our making . . . Education in personal finance should be required like math, science and history . . . The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion. . . A better world is possible . . . It’s easier to buy a gun than my education . . . I’ll believe corporations are people when Texas executes one . . . You have the right to remain silent, but I don’t recommend it. . . [held by a baby] If I can learn to share, you can too. . . 

There are, of course, other signs, other voices, not so humorous, clever, or even kind.  But, it strikes, me, the revolutionary thematic of Occupy Wall Street is not the demand that things change, but the real, genuine, enacted belief that they can, one voice at a time.

So as new societies emerge in tent cities across the United States and the world, society-building is happening right alongside . . . free health care clinics are springing up, food is shared, alternative energy sources to power their needs are explored and used, problem-solving is happening in collaborative ways, resistance to external pressures to disband, to ‘create’ a cohesive message (translate: give us a 60-second sound bite for the evening news) is firm, consensus building is happening, and those on the ‘other side’ are viewed not as enemies but as allies-in-waiting.

And it all began with one radical idea: lifted voices don’t create change . . . lifted voices actually are change.

On Wall Street, Occupations and Such: When is Enough Enough?

Last week in Chicago for Christian Peacemaker Teams’ (CPT) 25th anniversary Peace Congress, some friends and I joined the Occupy Chicago protest outside Bank of America and in front of the Chicago Board of Trade.

Drums, not bullets or rocks, were the medium of expression for anger and determination.

Community building happened before our eyes as a general assembly convened for business sublime and ordinary.

What might have been street kids mingled with college grads, grandmas and grandpas and everyone in between.

And the signs were a crash course in economics, with quotes from such folk as Adam Smith blazoning messages of the need for change.

It was peaceful, convivial, respectful of passers by, cheerful and focused.

The political structures of the day seem at a loss as to what to ‘do’ with the Occupy movement.  Politics and politicians are largely irrelevant in what I saw.

I can’t express the credo for this movement; but the question I come away with is this: When is enough enough?

When we arrived, my friends and I, we milled around a bit, observing, listening.  We had come without signs, but noticed a pile of them, available to all.  Looking through them, I found the perfect one for me: Stop telling the truth.  I am trying to be normal.

I don’t know what the author intended, but what I took away was this:

(1) as a follower of Jesus, speaking Truth and truth is my obligation as well as my privilege.  It often isn’t comfortable or welcome, the business of speaking Truth and truth.  What it is is a calling; the calling of every Christian.  Living truth, following The Truth, we may not, we cannot, remain silent in the face of lies, especially the great ones; and

(2) When we live our lives trying to pretend that everything and everyone is okay when it and they are clearly not, the Truth and the truth are very uncomfortable.  Not thinking about, not acting upon, the call to and for justice is a luxury Americans in general and Christians in particular do not have.

So when is enough enough?  It is a personal question and all I can offer is my own personal answer in all its particularities.

In material terms, when do I have enough?  Enough stuff?  Enough wealth?  The answer is a very long time ago I accumulated all I would ever need and more besides.  I give my 10% to my church and still have more than I need.  In a lifetime of 56 years thus far, I have already expended far more than my personal share of the world’s resources.

This is my confession and my challenge.  I cannot undo what has already been done.  But I can change. . . change patterns of consumption . . . the desire for things . . . the enculturated feeling within that enough is never enough . . . I can use less and share more . . . I can stop pretending that all is normal . . . I can listen and learn . . . I can stop supporting structures that oppress the generations. . . and I can lend my voice, my presence.

I can.  The question is will I?