Grandpa, You Can Come If You Don't Talk About War

I am about to head out to New Haven. It is always a pleasure. Not New Haven, but my daughter, Hira, my son in law, Todd, and my five year old grand daughter, Lucy. It's only two hours which is much better than the cross country trip that I would regularly take when they lived in Seattle.

This time is different. I was to drive Vish, the father of Hira's best friend and the grandfather of Ruby, who is a year and a half. But Vish just called to say that he has a flu. It has been going around. This is a possible scenario: Ruby got it and gave it to her dad. Her dad gave it to Lucy at a Christmas party we had. Lucy had a cough and a fever and finally got on antibiotics and is getting over it. And now Vish may have it and can start the cycle all over again.

Of course it's different when you have kids. Ailments go around and around and around. But neither Vish nor I wish to be the Typhoid Mary's for our respective grand children.

Soooo, I am encouraging my friend not to go. Usually I go for more than a weekend. And I thought about not going--for a millisecond. I called Hira and told her of the situation. There was a sound from the background--a Lucy sound.

Hira reported. "Lucy says you can come but you can't talk about war."

Don't get me wrong. Lucy loves her grandpa (who she sometimes calls "grandpoo"). I feel confident of that. That confidence is borne of the fact that she does not mince her words.

Lucy hates war. She hates everything that is connected to it. She hates the very mention of it. And there is nothing ideological about that.

I tell her stories. In fact I have been telling one that involves some of her stuffed animals and a few others to boot. I do not fill these stories with killing. In fact they are very benign. Yet, every time there is something that is scary in the very least, Lucy will tell me to stop.

I don't know when the issue of war entered into our discussion or stories. I can't even imagine. But I am sure there was something, sometime, somewhere. Maybe it was when I was telling her about the Civil War. And, perhaps, the fact that I can't remember is more a commentary on me than Lucy.

Fact is that my five year old grand daughter is very clear. She wants nothing to do with anything involving killing or war. And when she is clear she makes that clarity known.

Some people might smile and say that it is sweet that a child wants to avoid violence. Some people might say that this is something that she will outgrow as she learns what the "real" world is all about.

I say that my five year old grand daughter has a more civilized view of the world than most of the adults who are running it. For repulsion at the very thought of killing other human beings is the most human of sentiments. War is the sanctioned murder of others. It is barbaric and I am amazed and pleased that my grand daughter can feel and see this. Let us hope that the five year olds will run the world someday.

I am a Jew

I am a Jew. Always have been. I never went to Hebrew school. I never got Bar Mitzvahed. But I am a Jew, nevertheless. In fact, being a secular Jew is as much a part of the Jewish tradition as being a devout Jew.

For me being a Jew is not about religion. Religion is a very personal thing. I never have been into organized religion. Never did like the idea of people telling me what to believe or not believe. Never did like rules even if they had been around for a few thousand years.

As I get older I am able to define just what it is about me that is Jewish, for it is ridiculous to say or think that culture makes no difference in the character of a person. More and more I see that there are aspects of Jewish culture that are part of who I am. Recent events have brought this to the fore.

As the armed forces of the State of Israel bombed and machine gunned people in Gaza I felt revolted. As the armed forces of the State of Israel made it impossible for hospitals to treat wounded, as the armed forces of the State of Israel blew apart women and children in the name of retribution, I felt sick to my stomach.

So let me contradict myself and propose a rule. Under no circumstances do you murder women and children. I am really not interested in the reasons. We Jews are smart. We have a history of intellectual discussion. This is rooted in the Talmud itself. Maybe that’s why there are so many Jewish lawyers.

We also have a healing tradition—a tradition of compassion. Maybe that’s why there are so many Jewish doctors.

As Jews we have been subjected to millennia of persecution. Mothers have been killed in front of their children. Jewish children have been gassed, burned, shot and tortured for thousands of years.

As a Jew, I cannot sanction the murder of women and children, no matter what excuse. I cannot support the killing of women and children at any time in any place. How can we?

Where is our morality? Where is our memory? Have the echoes of the machine guns at Baba Yar or Auschwitz faded out so far that we don’t realize that murdering of innocents is unforgivable?

There is a story of an ancient rabbi who sat with his students in an olive grove. He asked his students when we know the difference between dark and light.

One student answered, “When we can tell the difference between a donkey and a camel.”

The rabbi shook his head.

“Light is when we can distinguish the olive trees against the horizon,” another student said.

Again the rabbi shook his head.

The students were getting agitated. “Is it when we can see our hands in front of our face? Is that when we can distinguish light from darkness, rabbi?” asked a third student.

Again the rabbi shook his head.

“Tell us rabbi,” the students chorused. “When can we tell the difference between dark and light?”

The old man pointed to the horizon and then to his hands. “It is neither there nor here,” he said. “Light is when we see ourselves in others. All else is darkness.”

This, to me, is the essence of being a Jew. Even as we are outsiders we can see ourselves in others. Because we have been outsiders we can see ourselves in others and others in ourselves. For me, compassion is the essence of being a Jew. In that sense it is no wonder that Christ comes out of the Jewish tradition.

But governments have nothing to do with compassion. They never have. And armies are made for killing, whether they are Russian or German, Israeli or American. Finally, like that Dylan song, every country thinks they have God on their side. How many thousands of years have people slaughtered each other thinking that God was on their side?

Marx once spoke of this period in which we live as “prehistory”. It is prehistory when grown up human beings can actually justify the state murder of thousands.

Of course, the continual state sanctioned murder of women and children in Iraq is a modern atrocity that keeps on being renewed. This, too, is an abomination.

But the calculated Israeli destruction of people in Gaza has a different flavor for me. It is the constantly perpetuated myth that the state of Israel is somehow representative of Jewish culture. It is the constant lie that the State of Israel represents all Jews.

The State of Israel is a state. Like all states, it has no heart and can be cynical and destructive. And now it is engaging in the killing of women and children. It does not represent me. Nor does it represent what I love about the Jewish tradition—compassion, sensitivity and wisdom.

Just as the Vietnamese were able to distinguish between the people of the United States and the government which napalmed their population, so I distinguish between the State of Israel and the people of that country. Apparently there is more serious protest in Israel about the actions of the government than there is in this country. How strange is that?

I really don’t care “who started it.” There is something very childish about that argument. I mean really childish. Just yesterday I saw two brothers, age five and six fighting. “He started it,” said the five year old, but the fight was in the relationship not the acts.

Can we learn nothing from five year olds? Look at our family. Jews and Muslims are of one blood. We are brothers and are fighting a family feud that began a very long time ago. It is time to grow up.

Of course the irony is that Jews and Muslims have lived together in peace for quite some time before this last century. While the Inquisitors of Christian Spain were burning Jews at the stake, the Caliphs of Bagdad welcomed Jews into the civilized culture of their world.

I am not a pacifist by belief. In fact, I try not to believe in anything and really don’t hold much with the notion of faith. But in this day and age it is insane for states to operate as they have since Babylonia.

We, in this country, are emerging from an eight year period of darkness. Millions of people adapted the slogan of “Yes We Can”. Like all slogans that can be cheapened and we Americans can turn anything into a bubble gum ad. But there was something much deeper in this last election. It is the possibility that people can start thinking in new ways.

Maybe, in this tenth year of the twenty first century we can start thinking and acting in new ways. Maybe we can start to listen to our hearts. Maybe we can stop justifying the unjustifiable. Maybe.

Loud Hallelujahs Let Us Sing

Never has history been so alive for me as at this very moment. Thomas Jefferson’s campaign song has been ringing in my ears for over a year now. I have been waiting to sing it. Now I can: “The gloomy night before us flies, the reign of darkness now is over…”

We have been in darkness these past eight years. It has been a darkness of fear and suspicion. Fear of terror. Terror of fear. Fear of Muslims or those who look slightly different. Fear of those who are not “real Americans” as the losing Vice Presidential candidate put it. Fear of foreigners as if we were not all born of foreigners. It has been a darkness of division and exclusion. It has been a darkness where politicians have manipulated our lowest animal instincts—our lizard brains. Our fears.

We have been in darkness. Our congressional representatives in both parties have collaborated in the invasion of a country that posed no threat to us. We have watched as sons and daughters, father and mothers, sisters and brothers both American and Iraqi have been maimed and killed—for no good reason. We have watched super rich corporations get richer and richer in a war that has drained us dry. We have watched tax policies that grant the super wealthy tax cuts on a theory that was outdated seventy-five years ago. “Trickle down”??!! That went out with Herbert Hoover only to be resurrected by this moribund outgoing administration.

We have been in darkness. Not even during the notoriously corrupt administration of Warren G. Harding have the corporate partners of the ruling party so blatantly robbed the public coffers as they have these past eight years.

We have been in darkness where words have lost their meaning. “Freedom” has come to mean invasion and war. “Liberty” has come to mean government sanctioned torture and spying upon citizens without cause or legal permission. And “Prosperity” has come to mean growing indebtedness, crumbling roads and schools, unemployment, and economic collapse. Even George Orwell could not parody these past eight years.

We have been in darkness. And yet with darkness there is light. Always there is light, burning even brighter for the darkness itself.

We Americans have a history of independence. As a country we were born in a revolution for independence. We have a history of resisting attempts to tell us what to do or who to be. We are a nation of uprooted people. We are a nation of strangers in a strange land. Most of us are descended from folks who pulled up stakes in their homeland to seek a new life in a new world. Or we were ripped from our homelands to servitude across the vast oceans that divide North America from Africa.

Yet, for ninety years after the first guns of the American Revolution were fired at Lexington, the curse of slavery lay across us like a shadow. Our liberty could not be liberty while millions were enslaved.

There is no greater division in a country than civil war. The War came and slavery was abolished. It was a long and bloody war of brother against brother. And, at the helm of the Union government was Abraham Lincoln, a self educated lawyer from Illinois. It was Lincoln at his second inaugural address at the end of the War that called for “malice to none and charity to all.” It was Lincoln that called for healing after so many anguished years of death and division.

Today we stand divided. No civil war has torn us apart, but divided we are. This last campaign showed that. On one side there was an appeal to the “real” Americans. On one side there were as an article in Harper’s Magazine pointed out, more slime and lies than in any other campaign. On one side there was fear. There was hatred and there was anger. When the Republican candidate gave his concession speech, the crowd booed more than once at the mention of Obama. There was hatred. There was anger.

On the other side, Barak Obama, a Black man, called for unity. He has called for a gathering of our people to solve the issues that need to be solved. He called upon our country as a whole to realize its potential—to recognize its unique history and move into the unknown. For moving into the unknown is part of our history from the gates of Ellis Island to the shores of Plymouth, from the slave ships at Charleston harbor to the “prairie schooners” of Nebraska.

Barak Obama has consented to represent the best in us. And we have responded in kind. There is no arrogance here but the greatest humility which is probably why he is the most unique political leader we have had since Lincoln. President-Elect Obama has recognized his rendezvous with history profoundly. He nurtures the empowerment of an entire people. “Yes we can.” This is not just a slogan of a political campaign. It is something much larger even than the man himself. And he seems to clearly know that as well.

Never have I felt greater hope and excitement about our country than I do at this moment. Franklin D. Roosevelt took office at a time of crisis. “The only thing we have to fear,” he said, “is fear, itself.”

We are now in a moment of crisis. Yet there is a wave of hope throughout this land.

Fear is the mind killer. Fear is the constrictor. Fear is the opposite of love. President-elect Barak Obama is leading us out of fear by recognizing that we can change our lives---and ourselves. And the only way that healing and unity can occur is if people begin talking and listening and reaching out to each other. That can happen only on the basis of expansion and love. What a wondrous time this is!

Of course there are still private interests. Fact is, however, that ninety-nine per cent of the American people are potential friends. Fact is that improved quality of life is something that benefits us all.

This is not just about a man. It is about what that man has taken upon himself to represent. And that defines the greatness of the man.

Our history has been linked to song. At the Lincoln Monument in 1963 Martin Luther King rang out the words “free at last! Free at last! Praise God almighty, we’re free at last.”

When the powerful British army confronted the rag tag armies of the American colonists, another song rang out. William Billings of Boston was a classical American misfit. He had one eye, was lame in one leg, had a deformed arm and wrote the battle song of the American Revolution, “Chester.” He wrote of how British

“vet'rans flee before our youth,

And gen'rals yield to beardless boys.

Today is a victory for the young in heart as well as young in age.

The song concluded. It rings down to all of us.

What grateful off'ring shall we bring,

What shall we render to the Lord?

Loud hallelujahs let us sing

From the mountains of Vermont to the harbor of San Diego, from churches, synagogues and mosques, from the Ninth Ward of New Orleans to the Finger Lakes of New York--Loud hallelujahs let us sing. Amen!

We Have Reasons to Be Proud

By the morning of November 5, 2008 there is an excellent chance that a majority of the people in the United States of America will have elected a Black man President of the United States.

By the morning of November 5, 2008 there is an amazingly good chance that the people of the United States will have elected someone whose father was African and whose mother was Caucasian.

By the morning of November 5, 2008, there is a wildly wonderful possibility that the people of the United States will elect someone who grew up in a non traditional family. He was raised by his single mother and his grandmother.

How far we have come in such a short period of time.

I remember my first visit to my relatives in New Orleans. It was in 1953 and I was fourteen. It was the first time I had ever seen the segregated south. There were water fountains for “Colored” and water fountains for “White”. There were adjustable seats in the trolleys where the rear section was “Colored” and the forward section was “White”. It seemed pretty stupid to me at the time and I liked to hear the story about how my grandma and her younger sister would come down South to visit and that the two old ladies would always march down to the “Colored” section and sit down. Nobody tried to tell my Grandma what to do.

It would be two years after my visit that Emmett Till, a fourteen year old Black boy from Chicago was beaten, shot and killed in Money, Mississippi. His crime was to have whistled at a white woman. He was beaten so badly that his face was unrecognizable. It was a a ring that he wore that provided clear identification.

It was only a few years earlier that the president of the United States abolished segregation in the military. Black soldiers did not mix with white before then. The catalyst for this change happened during the Korean War. A platoon of Black soldiers took a hill. Their white soldiers thought they were North Korean and shot them down.

A year after my visit to New Orleans the United States Supreme Court struck down segregation in the schools and Jim Crow began to die. It was hastened on its way by a whole generation of young folks, black and white, marching, sitting, , waiting for service in restaurants, getting people to vote. But uniquely, the leadership of this movement was mainly young black men.

The late Chou En Lai, Premier of the Peoples Republic of China was a most sophisticated and well educated man. He had attended the Sorbonne in Paris. He knew a great deal about world history. A few years ago, some interviewer asked Chou whether the French Revolution had any effect on China and the world. He thought for a moment and answered, “It’s too soon to tell.” The French Revolution had been around for almost two hundred years. The Chinese have a different historical perspective.

A hundred and fifty years ago, the United States Supreme Court held that a Negro had no rights that a White man was bound to respect. That was the law of the land.

This same Supreme Court decision held that all people of African descent that were brought as slaves could never be citizens of the United States. It held that the United States Congress could not prohibit slavery in the federal territories that would become states. That was the Dred Scott decision of the United States Supreme Court. That was the law of the land one hundred and fifty years ago. Some perspective: when I was born there were people alive who were alive when the Dred Scott decision was made. Not so long ago.

Less than a decade after this decision, slavery was over. Less than a decade later, Congress and the country amended the Constitution extended the right to vote regardless of “previous condition of servitude.”

How fast things change. How fast people drop old beliefs.

And then there’s the family. In that dulled period of the 1950’s the happy family was all over the place, on t.v., the movies. Divorces were much rarer then.

I went to a wonderfully nurturing very small camp called Journey’s End Farm. There were rarely more than twenty-four of us but there were a significant number of kids from “broken homes”. (My home was broken when I was nine and my dad died).

Single mothers were off my radar when I was a kid. With the exception of my own, of course. There just weren’t too many of them around.

When I was a kid the one thing that was quite a bit weirder than “broken homes” was “mixed marriages”. My step father had a very close friend, Ray Stowe. He was a direct descendant of Harriet Beecher Stowe who wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin. His wife, Bea, was Black. I think that they did not have kids because of just how complicated that could be. Even my open minded mother would lower her voice when talking about “mixed marriages” like it was a problem to be endured by those engaging in it.

We, the people of the United States by the morning of November 5, 2008 very likely will have elected a man born of a marriage between a Black man and a white woman. We will have elected a man brought up by a single mother and a grandmother.

More than this, we will have elected a man who rose like an American myth through his hard work and persevering to transcend and to help us transcend our false divisions. This truly is an independently tough human being. (The other presidential candidate has rarely done anything new. I mean, after all, he went into the family business of war. No originality there. McCain and Grandsons—Killers of Men. Some Maverick. Raise the Flag. My Country Right or Wrong. All That Jazz.)

It is, perhaps, the unique greatness of the man that allows us to drop our old biases. It is the individuality and honesty of the man that touches us before we even notice the color of his skin. His intelligence and sincerity are intelligent and sincere.

Point is that millions upon millions of voices will be raised to elect a man president who would not have been able to sit in a Woolworth lunch counter if he had been born forty years earlier.

We have got to this point, so many tens of millions of us. No matter what the results of November 4, we have got to this point. And for that we can be proud of ourselves as Americans.

The Gloomy Night Before Us Flies

We in Europe are at a loss to understand what is going in the USA. We can only think that the American people are being fed pure propaganda, as was the case in Hitler's Germany prior to the 2nd World War, and that because of this their ability to make reasoned and educated judgments has suffered a serious setback. Sadly, this is the only explanation that many of us can find. I, for one, find it almost beyond belief that Bush was re-elected. I would have thought that one term would have been more than enough. To me he is a madman in a Peter Sellers movie…..

Poet In Residence

[The above appeared as a comment to the previous article on this blog, “Feeding the Wolves, 2008”]

Dear Poet in Residence,

First, I want to say what a gas it is that we have already met. Both of us write haiku for the “Autumn Haiku” (which followed the “Summer Haiku”) site. I assume that’s where you found this site. So here we are, two poets mixed up in the center of things, trying to make sense out of insanity .Maybe politics really is too important to leave the politicians.

No Peter Sellers movie ever captured the loonyness of this moment. We have, I think, reached the point in this country where a satirist might merely be a cold reporter of the news. That’s why John Stewart’s show is so popular. He’s not making jokes. He’s just putting out the facts, usually without any opinion.

It’s hard to keep a sane head in this madness. And by madness I mean a presidential candidate making outright lies again and again. And these are lies that he knows are lies. The Republican candidate has lied about everything: his own record on regulation, his position on the economy. I don’t ever remember a presidential campaign where one of the candidates created such a litany of lies. And then, with the Vice Presidential candidate, the lying escalates. The Governor of Alaska is lying about her record as a “reformer”, “maverick” whatever.

Now, these two Republican candidates have expanded their level of lies to attack Barak Obama. It is almost at the point where I hesitate even to give examples. Like Obama never advocated sex education for five year olds. Jesus! Peter Sellers could not have created a tragic-comedy as powerfully unreal as this reality. Not even Bertholt Brecht could do that. And we are living in it.

After saying all this, I can’t imagine living in a more exciting time. No, I don’t think that Chinese wish, “may you live in interesting times,” is a curse. I think it is a blessing. I feel blessed to live in such times as these. And in such a place as this. Who needs boredom?

I used to think that it was overboard when people made analogies between us in the U.S. and the Germans in Nazi Germany. Of late, I have played with that analogy myself.

There are some similarities. I don’t mean the similarities of storm troopers knocking at the door and arresting Jews, Gypsies, Communists, Socialists, Liberals. We are very far from that even with the present administration’s disregard for constitutional process. There are real similarities between what is going on in this country and what went on in Nazi Germany. But it is not the concentration camps nor the secret police.

This country has invaded another country that posed it no threat. It has killed and maimed hundreds of thousands of people for a war whose very reasons for existence evaporated years ago. Nazi Germany invaded other countries on the pretext that its self interest was threatened. There’s a similarity.

Young German boys bought the bullshit and died thinking they were protecting the homeland. How many American young men and young women have died thinking they were protecting our homeland? Homeland Security?

Another similarity is the big lie. The Nazi’s were really good at that. They would consciously create total lies and it seemed like a lot of folks believed them. Again, how many times does the Republican presidential candidate have to repeat the explicit and conscious lie that Barak Obama wants to teach sex education to five year olds? And the repetition gets stated over and over on the satellite propaganda machines of the media like Fox News. And what clever Republican Party Ph.D. in Psychological Manipulation thought of that wonderful way to link a child sexually to a Black Man?

The big lie is now the stock in trade of the Republican political machine and its candidates. Every time you think they can’t get any lower---they do.

Another similarity between the Nazi’s and our government is that it is totally of, by, and for giant corporations. The biggest economic beneficiaries of the Hitler years were the loyal corporations. And today? And here.

One other similarity between Nazi Germany and my country today is the manipulation of fear. There is no question that fear was the giant motivator in the Nazi invasions of other countries. Fear that the Germans would be brought to their knees again like they were after World War I. Fear that other countries feared them and would attack them. Fear. How many times did speakers use the word “terror” or “terrorist” at the Republican presidential nominating convention of 2004? This whole administration is based on fear—of terrorists—of losing your way of life—of gays—of [pick your own].

But there the similarities end. Karl Marx once said, “history repeats itself. The first time as tragedy and the second time as farce.” So you look at the Gotterdammerung of Nazi Germany—the fires that consumed a once proud people and raged into a Holocaust. An extermination of millions of people orchestrated by an intensely charismatic Fuehrer and his cohorts who consciously mobilized the power of the dark force in the psychic traditions of a people. Here truly was a Knight of Evil. This was tragedy beyond tragedy.

John McCain as the Fuehrer? That’s farce. What a sad and querulous old man who probably knows next to nothing about what moves him. This is farce. Or how about George W. Bush and Adolf Hitler? Dick Cheney would, I guess, love to be able to be a Fuehrer. But would you buy a used car from a face like that?

I love this country so very much. My study of American history was a labor of love from undergraduate school through a doctorate. Goose stepping is about as non American as you can get.

There is a strong element of truth about the pioneer spirit. Not the Fourth of July day speech pioneer spirit. Fact is that all of our ancestors are immigrants. These were two groups of folks. There were those of us whose ancestors pulled up their roots and chose to enter a new world—an unknown world. There were those who were pulled up by the roots and brought in chains to this new world. All of us and our families have been strangers in a strange land and I do believe we carry that spirit with us.

I do believe that the American people have a short bullshit span. In some ways Americans are as hard to corral as cats.

We Americans have been through periods of temporary insanity before. Take the McCarthy period. Please. I mean that guy really was leading the country with lie after lie after lie…….and fear.

I was a teenager during the McCarthy period and my parents were leftists. They were radicals. They were Reds. So I started off with a head start identifying the insanity. These were people I loved and they loved me. My stepfather, the guiding political light of the family, was a stubborn, bullheaded, dedicated, totally honest and caring human being. I guess he had to be single minded. The pressure during this period on anybody slightly left of center was great. And he lost job after job---as a professor of music, no less—after the F.B.I. whispered in the college president’s ear. Subversion of music was a serious thing back in the 1950’s. So I had a good view of the 1950’s madness that was quite different than that which people saw on the television program, “Happy Days”.

I was the enemy. I was the person that was going to subvert the government and destroy democracy. I was something to be feared. I, as the popular anti Communist t.v.show titled, “led three lives” or certainly two.

And yet I had friends. I connected with the folks in my class. We respected each other as human beings. We had proms. We all knew each other since the class only had fifty four people. There was sanity in the midst of the insanity.

By the time I graduated college, the 1960’s were dawning. It was like the heart of the country had opened up again. Where people were terrified to open their mouths in the 1950’s, ten years later, people were growing in the streets to express their opposition to American intervention in Vietnam.

There was a time in 1960, when I could actually feel a new and fresh wind blowing over the land. It was not, by the way, created by John F. Kennedy et familia, but was definitely used by them. In the midst of a horrendous war, it was the dawning of a new time. Aquarius or whatever.

I feel that dawning now. Thomas Jefferson was running against John Adams in 1800. Adams, despite his other attributes, was overtaken by fear of “the others”—in this case the French and their sympathizers at home. (Remember how Congress changed the name of French fries to freedom fries in 2003 when the French wouldn’t support the invasion of Iraq?) So the Adams administration, out of fear of others, passed a series of acts. These were the Alien and Sedition Acts, which provided, among other things that newspaper editors could be thrown in jail for criticizing the president. This was another period of insanity. Adams lost the election.

There was a campaign song in the presidential campaign of Thomas Jefferson. I have sung the first verse so many times with glee over the past several years. It begins,

“The gloomy night before us flies

The reign of darkness now is over

Its gags inquisitors and spies

Its herd of harpies is no more.

Rejoice Columbia’s sons, rejoice

To tyrants never bend the knee

But join with hand and heart and voice

For Jefferson and Liberty.”

Now the gloomy night is fleeing. The spark that has ignited in this country cannot be quenched. It cannot be quenched even if Obama was not elected. Here another song wills to mind. Peter Gabriel’s “Biko” about the murder of a Black South African leader by the government:

You can blow out a candle

But you can’t blow out a fire

Once the flames begin to catch

The wind will blow it higher.

The candidacy of Barak Obama has come to represent something infinitely larger than the man himself. It has come represent a swelling group of Americans that are tired of division. It has come to represent people who are feeling the possibility of empowerment. And I definitely include myself in that swelling group. It is not a group of others. It is a group of us. It is a group of people that recognize that the overwhelming majority of Americans are potential friends.

I am writing this before the second debate between the Republican presidential candidate and Barak Obama. Chances are that the Republican candidate will continue to lie blatantly. (I must say that there are few times in my life when I recall anybody, other than a kid worried about being punished, consciously lying openly to my face). The latest lie is that Obama pals around with terrorists because he sat on a community group board with Bill Ayers, a former Weatherman who committed his violent acts when Obama was eight.

Yes, there are people who believe the lies. But, like Lincoln said, “you can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time. But you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.” And less and less people are being fooled.

I am writing this at a time when the middle is disappearing. There really are choices this time around. And sure Obama has corporate supporters, but even many of them have not benefited by the mayhem of these past eight years. We are part of those legions of supporters that are not corporate but just folks. Not the “just folks” of the Republicans that excludes other folks who are not like them. I am talking about the “just folks” that all of us are. There are a lot of us.

I am writing this a time when there is something much larger than Barak Obama happening. And I think he has the wisdom, experience and humility to recognize that. That is the kind of leader we need now.

I am writing this at a time when millions of Americans are looking for ways to change their lives. They recognize that our government is founded to “Promote the general Welfare.” Community—people taking care of each other—is part of our American heritage as well.

On the frontier, in the slave cabins, in the trade unions, in the building of towns, community has been part of our history and our psyche. The Republican ideology has redefined community as corporate socialism and individualism as greed. What a perversion.

However, community always seems to surface. It’s one of those things that define us as human beings. It is one of those things that define us as Americans. How appropriate that a community organizer is running for president.

I am writing at a time when I feel more kinship with my fellow Americans than I have in a long time. I know that there will be people who will believe the lies. There always are. There always will be. And hucksters from Karl Rove to P.T.Barnum have used that one. Still, even those who are duped can be unduped if we are willing to listen as well as talk.

I am writing this at a time when there is a new burst of creativity in our land. It is the flip side of the dead old fears. I am writing this at a time where people are listening with their hearts as well as their minds. We come from the gloomy night of fear and suspicion into light.

It is a time of poets, singers and artists, of writers and dancers as much as it is a time of politics as we have narrowly defined it. It is a time of celebration.

Sun spreads on the fields

Slowly emerging from the clouds,

Like a second dawn.

Feeding the Wolves 2008

It’s elections again. It’s another time, after four years, for us to elect a president. I have lived through the presidencies of 10 men. I have been able to vote since 1960, and, quite honestly, presidential campaigns have bored the hell out me. They have been so contrived—just what have been the differences? Very few. Until now. That includes the election of 1960 where John F. Kennedy faced off Richard M. Nixon.

Let me be clear about my biases. I am not one of those who revere the Kennedy mystique. I remember the “debates’ between Kennedy and Nixon where the two tried to outdo each other on who would be the greater asshole towards Cuba. Sure, like that little island constituted a threat to the United States. It was a contest between a coiffed hairdo and Hollywood good looks, on the one hand and five o’clock shadow and shifty eyes on the other. An assassin’s bullet and a legion of mythmakers have transformed an otherwise mediocre president into sainthood.

The presidential election of 2008 is different. I am so excited. My hope is rekindled. I feel the excitement that I have felt when I read about the election of 1860 – about the election of Abraham Lincoln. That was a time when the parties made a big difference and the minority Republican Party was the voice of the future. Then, the Republican Party was the voice of what was becoming – a new nation in birth based upon free labor and free men regardless of race “or previous condition of servitude.”

It didn’t start that way, in 1860, but that’s what it became after four years of bloody civil war. And at the helm of the Republican Party in 1860 was a man, a man who had risen on the frontier. He really had. He was self-taught. There was no privilege or wealth in his background. And there was integrity about him. There was wisdom in his humility. That’s what made Abraham Lincoln great.

“I claim not to have controlled events,” Lincoln wrote to a reporter. The reporter, in the middle of the Civil War, wrote to Lincoln to ask what it felt like to have controlled events. “I claim not to have controlled events. But confess plainly that events have controlled me.” In my view, without humility, “leadership” is pure ego and politics is an egoists’ playground.

Lincoln knew his own demons well enough – his deep, deep depressions. He faced the core of his own soul – his darkness – and owned it. He wasn’t one to see evil outside of himself, although he came to detest the institution of slavery. Seems like Lincoln really didn’t judge people personally and built a cabinet of people, many of whom hated his guts.

Then, the Republican Party, led by a poor Illinois lawyer, represented the exciting unknown. It represented a leap into the future. It represented the force of freedom.

How times do change! Now, the Republican Party puts up an old man with old ideas. This old man stands against a man who personifies the American dream – a man who so clearly represents real change and hope as he has experienced it in his own life. You would think that this election would be a slam dunk.

Just think. On one side is an old man who has grown up in privilege and has married into inestimable wealth – a man who has come from three generations of warriors. War is in his blood, you might say. That’s all he seems to know, and he fairly froths when he speaks of war or bombing or endless occupation. His main claim to fame is having survived a prisoner of war camp in Vietnam – a country that neither he nor the United States had any business being in to begin with.

This is the candidate of the Republican Party – a party that has faithfully created and supported the policies of the administration of George W. Bush over the past eight years. It’s the party that has overseen an invasion and occupation of another country based on a tissue of lies. Even the Nazis had as coherent an argument for the invasion of Poland in 1939 as the United States’ “reasons” for the invasion of Iraq. And, of course, a good chunk of the Democratic Party crumbled, too.

This old man represents what has become the party of Robin Hood in reverse. It has robbed from the poor and given to the rich. Never since the Gilded Age of the late 19th century has government policy so loyally served the greed of the few. At least the robber barons of the Gilded Age built something. J.P. Morgan consolidated banking and railroads. Our present robber barons are just robbers – gangsters in suits who swindle poor people out of their homes, oil barons whose profits leap over 30 percent in one year while prices soar, pharmaceutical bigwigs who oversee skyrocketing prices while health coverage declines, and so on…and so on…and so on.

How can this be a contest? This John McCain is the candidate of the party that has bled us dry. The cost of this war was half a trillion dollars at four o’clock on September 14 and going up at the rate of a million dollars every five minutes. This McCain represents a party that has outsourced war itself, paying mercenaries ten times more than enlisted soldiers taking the same risks.Billions paid in a war that benefits only the investors in it.

All this while schools, health care, roads, and quality of life itself dissolve before our eyes. How can this be a contest? This McCain reflects the self-interest of perhaps one percent of the entire population…or maybe less.

On the other side is a candidate who, like Lincoln, comes from poor beginnings. Barack Obama is a man whose mother married a black man; whose father married a white woman. Here is a man brought up by a single parent. Through his own hard work this man achieved a scholarship to Columbia University, Harvard, and became the first African-American to become editor of the Harvard Law Review. This is the stuff of novels. Here is a man who is literate and intelligent, a man who writes his own speeches. Here is a man who speaks to us as if we, too, are intelligent. Here is a man who trusts us to look at the issues. What a change! Here is a man who chose to use his legal skills and training to help folks on the south side of Chicago. He could have made millions as a corporate lawyer, especially at that time when Wall Street wanted to look like it was an “equal opportunity employer.” Here is a candidate who opposed the US invasion of Iraq from the beginning. Sure, he wasn’t in the Senate then, but opposition to the Iraq invasion was a very unpopular opinion at that time.

Here is a man who is calling for universal health care coverage. Here is a man calling for funds to rebuild our infrastructure. Here is someone calling for returning the taxes on the very wealthy that were cut during the past eight years. Here is a man who has spelled out the beginning of policies that would increase the quality of life for, and express the self-interest of, 99 percent of the country. It would seem that at least 90 percent of the population would support the candidacy of Barack Obama. There are no shades of difference here between the candidates – there is a Grand Canyon.

What is going on? To me, what is going on is a crisis of consciousness. What is going on is the manipulation of our own unconsciousness.

There is an old Cherokee tale that keeps coming back to me these days. An old grandfather is telling his grandson that there is a tumultuous fight going on inside of him. “It is a massive fight,” the old man said, “between two wolves, two wolves inside me. One is hateful. He is angry, judgmental, righteous, blameful, envious, suspicious, greedy, arrogant, full of self-pity, guilty. The other is lovely and loving. He is accepting, joyous, peaceful, filled with humility, kind, giving, compassionate, trusting, generous, and truthful.”

The grandfather paused. “The same fight is going on inside you and inside every other person, too.”

The boy thought about this for a moment and then asked. “Grandfather, which wolf will win?”

The old man answered simply, “The one I feed.”

More and more this election campaign has become a matter of feeding the wolves. Feeding the wolves of fear and anger has been part of the Republican strategy at least since the pioneer slimemaster, Lee Atwater, dragged out the Willie Horton ad campaign to defeat Michael Dukakis in 1988.

Jon Stewart, commenting on the Republican national nominating convention four years ago showed film clips with the speakers repeating “terror” and “terrorism” so many times that it became an hypnotic mantra.

We all have the wolves. We all have the struggle inside of us. We all have our dark and our light side, our unaware and our aware, our bestial and our divine. That is what makes us human. As soon as we project our darkness outside of ourselves we give ourselves permission to act without compassion and without sensitivity. Witness the Nazis and the Jews. Witness the demonization of Arabs today. It is significant that in this election campaign Barack Obama has consistently appealed to our higher selves. He has consistently reminded us that power lies in the people. This comes from his experience as a community organizer, not from some glib speechwriter. He has told us again and again that we can make things happen.

The Republicans have responded. The speech by the former mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, derided all of this. Before cheering crowds, the Republican vice-presidential candidate exhorted Americans to obey their worst impulses. It was “us” and “them” yet again. “Us” didn’t care about the rest of the world except that it constituted a threat. “Us” had no place in our minds or hearts for those who held other views, led other lifestyles—or were different. This voice of the former mayor of Wasilla, Alaska was a voice from a dark cave, echoing with fear and cloaked in that last refuge of scoundrels – patriotism.

We all have anger. I have noticed how easy it is for me to roar into rage when I read the latest distortions and outright lies perpetrated by the slime artists in the shadow of the RNC. And yet, am I not being manipulated by the very same forces that I oppose? We all have fear.

I hear good people say that they are terrified about the outcome of this election. I have good and courageous folks tell me that they will leave the country if the old man from Arizona is elected president. One of these, my oldest friend and a brilliant artist, once told me that we cannot be creative from a space of fear. Are we not being manipulated by the very forces that we oppose?

We all have envy and, that flip side of envy, superiority. How many times have I heard good people speak of the stupidity of the American people? Who are we and why do we separate ourselves? Why do we let ourselves be separated? Are we not being manipulated by the very forces that we oppose?

So much of the social and political discussion of the past eight years has been dominated by the Bush administration and its spin masters. Even our great American majority has defined itself as against this administration. Against. Against. Against. In defining ourselves as “against” we are defining ourselves by that which we oppose. Are we not being manipulated by the very forces we oppose?

This is a time of action, not reaction. Let the reactionaries react. And Barack Obama has chosen to be at the head of a movement that is much larger than he is. My guess is that, like Lincoln, he has the humility and intelligence to understand and act upon this. This election campaign is not about Barack Obama. It is not about just how pretty the Republican VP candidate is. Is about a sea change that is happening and Obama has tuned into it. Certainly he is a politician. So was Lincoln.

No one has a monopoly on awareness. No one is a fountain of consciousness. Yet these times we live in have provided stark contrasts of darkness and light. In such times awareness can blossom. At this time we cannot lose. Polls, pundits and a rancid media cannot turn turds into gold.

Perhaps for the first time in American history, the consciousness of the individual is a potent political force. It is not for “others” to become aware. It is for all of us, individually and together, to recognize the wolves that live inside of us, and we have the opportunity to choose our higher selves. People, we people, can take charge of our lives.

How rare it is when the issue of consciousness becomes national. It happens at times of crisis. And, as the Chinese word for crisis (wei-chi) implies there is both danger and opportunity at such times.

The nation is going through a dark night of the soul. Such journeys lead to consciousness. Such consciousness leads to light, freedom, and empowerment. We are all part of this journey. Let us rejoice!

No Journalist Left Behind

The recent Democratic "debate" in Pennsylvania provided an example for present educational theory in this country. It was a classroom, broadcast to the nation and the world. No journalist was left behind. Yet, when the long hour was over, many viewers were wondering just what happened.

The ABC extravaganza is yesterday's news. But, like a plastic flower, it does not fade.

At the time of the debate, people were losing their houses all over the country because of the unregulated greed of mortgage lenders. Oh yes, there were folks who thought that they could make a killing on their houses but the banks were the ones who profited. And, when it came time to pay the piper--when the house of cards collapsed and millions faced foreclosure--the government came to the rescue. It came to the rescue of the banks. The taxpayers of the United States bailed out the banks compliments of the present Republican administration.

At the time of the debate, the war in Iraq was moving towards draining a trillion dollars from the United States. The taxpayers of the United States were supporting a war that had lost all of the original excuses for waging it. Everybody knew that there were no weapons of mass destruction. That had been conclusively proved . That was the first major rationale of the Bush war--down the drain. Then, on the same day that the press danced its righteous dance over the governor of New York's dalliance with a prostitute, the second pillar of the war collapsed. The report of the Inspector General of the Department of Defense officially declared that there was no evidence (that's no evidence) of any connection between the government of Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda. The second pillar of the war in Iraq crumbled even though Vice President Cheney repeated the fictional connection on the same day the Department of Defense made the report public. But, hey, who cares about facts?

A few facts do remain clear, however. On the day that George Stephanopoulos and Charles Gibson confronted Barak Obama and Hillary Clinton, the economy was going down the tubes, the rationale for the war in Iraq had disappeared, billions were flowing out of the United States into the coffers of Halliburton. And United States servicemen and women were dying as well as hundred of thousands of Iraqis in the war that had no rationale.

Health care is deteriorating in this country. The economy is going down the drain. Gas prices skyrocket while oil companies boast windfall profits. The government is no officially tied to torture. The United States has lost the respect of much of the world. There is certainly no shortage of issues this presidential campaign year.

ABC News' Charles Gibson and George Stephanopoulos used up the first fifty minutes of the debate asking why Obama Baraka did not wear an American flag in his lapel or whether his minister loved America as much as he did or whether he disavowed his association with a political activist who had been a Weatherman when Obama was eight years old. (I am surprised that Obama's early toilet training didn't enter the debate).

Now some people, like Derrick Z. Jackson of the Boston Globe, have suggested that Gibson and Stephanopoulos were biased. Some folks have noted that when the now sanctified Ronald Reagan began his presidential campaign in 1980 he chose a spot in Mississippi near where the three civil rights workers were murdered in 1964 to proclaim his loyalty to "states rights" (i.e. segregation). Nobody from the media ever questioned Reagan about that in subsequent debates.

Some people have suggested that, as long as we are on the question of racial hatred, it is strange that neither Mitt Romney nor George Bush senior nor George Bush junior were ever questioned about their endorsement of and by Bob Jones University, a place that banned black students until the 1970's and prohibited interracial dating until 2000, just in time for the election of George junior.

Some people have suggested that the press, as represented by Gibsonstephanopoulos, is biased. Some have suggested that Stephanopoulos was a senior adviser to Bill Clinton might have some effect on the gentleness of his questioning of Hillary Clinton.

All of this may be true. But let me suggest that these two journalists are poster children for our present educational system.

The manic devotion to testing children has been rendered national in the "No Child Left Behind" act. Now, children are being tested from the first grade on. Simultaneously, play time, recess time, is disappearing throughout the country. When my daughter and I were investigating schools for my grand daughter in New Haven, we found a public magnet school that had a lovely feeling to it. The school boasted of two ten minute recess times for the kindergarten kids. That's twenty minute of play a day for five year olds. That qualifies as child abuse. But, the "No Child Left Behind" act deprives money from schools that don't meet the tests. And schools across the country, starving for funds, just aren't doing as well as, say, the mercenaries that taxpayers finance in Iraq.

The French educational pioneer, Jean Piaget, said famously that "play is the work of the child." These days there is no play and children are studying from the age of six to pass standardized tests. And teachers are teaching for the tests since they can lose their jobs if the kids don't score high enough.

There are a couple of flies in this testing ointment. For one thing, you can't test creativity. Creativity is based on what is not known. It is based on the ability to go beyond knowledge. The person who invented the wheel would not have done well on a test administered by the "No Child Left Behind" act. You can't test the ability to think for yourself. (Do you think it's possible that the authors of the "No Child Left Behind" act did not want kids to think for themselves?) You can't test thinking outside the box since the whole idea of standardized testing is a nationalized, standardized box. The idea is that if you can't test it, might as well throw it out. So art and music are joining recess as school districts across the country streamline for testing. You give the right answers for the right question so you won't be left behind.

In Japan there is a saying that "the nail that sticks up will be pounded down." The message is clear: you try to be unique or original you will be "pounded down." Seems like our educational system is taking a few pages from the Japanese book. Difference is that, in Japan, the trade off is that the individual is cared for by the society. No fear of that here where even wounded veterans are nickeled and dimed out of treatment and benefits by a government that needs to save its money---for war.

Messrs. Gibson and Stephanopoulos are poster children for our educational system. they are children who have not been left behind. Far from entering into the creative or original thought they stay comfortably within the journalistic box. Why Stephanopolous even took his questions from Fox fulminator Sean Hannity.

Of course the question is who administers the tests. After all, the person that poses the questions determines the right answers. Who pays the piper calls the tune. Gibson and Stephanopoulos were following scripts that had been prepared by other journalists. Who know where it began? Just gets digested, redigested and re-redigested. There wasn't a single original question during the whole debate.

Not a single original question. Rehash of old stuff--old accusations--old red herrings. These guys passed their test well. These journalists would not be left behind.

Self appointed teacher, David Brooks of the New York Times dutifully graded his fellow journalistic students. ABC got a grade of "A" from the Times headmaster. Clinton got a "B" and Barak Obama got a D+. I think that Brooks was being kind to Obama. Maybe it was because he was Black. After all, Obama has been doing the unthinkable. He has actually tried to raise real issues and has, more and more, been thinking outside of the box.