that I've ever heard

This is the most intelligent and heartfelt articulation of the issue (as I’ve experienced it, evolved in it, being raised in it, and ~usually~ deeply believing in Christ) that I’ve ever heard. And he’s 21. Wow.

We are half a soul.

There is a hungry ox

the kind you see that never lifts its head

but only feeds on the endless rolling hills of grass,

never full but only stepping every few bites for fresher leaves

of grass. That is me. I am looking to be filled by something like grass

but not grass. I am looking for the other half of my soul.

I am looking.. but ashamed of looking, because I might

even be ashamed of being an ox, thinking instead

that I am a man, a tamer of beasts.

This is profound to me

(from Brian McLaren's blog)

Here's the Q:

How are you? In serious gentleness and fairness, let me say at the start, I'm not in your camp. I'm also not going to be venomous in my attacks...
[I am involved] with a ministry to the gays and lesbians; led by a couple of brothers who have found victory in Christ over their own battle with homosexuality. I pray for them regularly. They, indeed, are my heros!
I met one of them the other day and asked "should I quit interceding for you?". Of course he said "no" and then told me what to pray for. He, with deep shaking tenderness and concern said, "The church is softening its position on homosexuality". I've thought about this deeply and here's what's coming to my troubled mind.

Isn't this the ultimate act of betrayal? A couple of gentle warriors for Christ have come through to victory; and now the very institution that should be backing them up is turning her back on them.....
How can this be? I believe this should make us weep with Jesus and cause us to repent deeply... Troubled and in prayer,

Here's the R:

First, let me thank you for the tone of your note. Sadly, it's rare, I think, that folks any one of the many sides in this issue can ask a question or share a story like yours without implying insult and disdain for those "in other camps." So your gentleness and fairness are already a gift to readers of this blog. Thank you.

I think I should try to do two things in response. First, without delegitimizing your concern in any way, I should try to make it clear that the same compassion you have towards your two brothers motivates many of us to be concerned for the many brothers and sisters in our lives who are gay and have tried all available paths to "victory," and have concluded that for them, that promise of victory is a false promise that betrays them. In other words, I'm grateful for your compassion, and I'm quite confident that if you knew on a deep level a wider array of gay people, that compassion would force you to be concerned both for those who seem capable of sustained and authentic change (like your two friends) and those who do not.

And then second, I want to validate your concern based on my experience as a pastor and propose a way to be more compassionate to all lgbt people, and not only one segment.

We all come to this issue with many assumptions. Some of those assumptions aren't even apparent to us. When we surface the assumptions, we can at least discover where our deeper disagreements lie.

Many people share the assumption that their are two (or three) kinds of people: straight and gay (and bisexual). I used to believe this, but my experience as a pastor forced me to change that assumption. Now I believe that inborn human sexuality could be more accurately understood as lying along a continuum.

(This is horribly oversimplified still. And I'm aware that our understanding of sexual identity and orientation is highly contested - not just in religious spheres, but also in the social and biological sciences. I imagine that decades from now, people will look back on all our current understandings as terribly limited and unenlightened. But at the same time, we can only be where we are, doing our best to understand and speak the truth, which is always "the truth as we now see it." Also, I'm aware that there are a number of studies that provide a range of percentages for where people might like on any continuum of sexual orientation, so the numbers I'm about to propose are obviously only approximations or hunches based on a variety of scientific data. The words "about" and "or so" are important.)

If we picture people lying along a continuum rather than being lumped together in three distinct bins, I think that most of us - say about 80-90% - cluster towards the heterosexual end of the continuum. Then, another 5-10% or so are spread across the middle. Then, another 5-10% or so are clustered closer to the homosexual end.

For many if not most of us in the 80-90%, homosexual attraction rarely or never crosses our mind. We feel ourselves sexually attracted to the opposite sex exclusively, and our affiliations with people of the same sex are consistently non-sexual. For people at the opposite end of the spectrum, the opposite is the case. What we share in common is a deep sense of orientation, and to go against it would feel unnatural, unpleasant, even repulsive. Even if people in these categories could be habituated to tolerate and even derive pleasure from sexual behavior that goes against their orientation, that wouldn't remove the deeper orientation that they experience as being innate and unchangeable.

Many of those in the middle of the spectrum might be classified as bisexual. Their attractions are not clearly defined in terms of gender; personal attraction is what matters, regardless of gender. (There's another whole category we might call asexual - who experience little or no clear sexual desire - and they are often ignored or misunderstood in all the polarized debates.)

And then there are people who are naturally among the 90% who have been subjected to sexual and/or emotional abuse of some sort, or who through any number of environmental factors (chemical? parenting? nobody yet knows the mechanisms of such a process, if it exists) feel they have been brought into a state of sexual confusion or disorientation. Some people deny the existence of this category, but in my experience as a pastor, I met people who would say this accurately describes their experience, and I believe them.

My suspicion is that "ex-gay ministries" offer some help in the area of behavior-modification to people in these last two categories - bisexual people and victims of abuse. And perhaps that would describe your two friends. (By the way, people in the strongly homosexual orientation may, at a young age, manifest certain behaviors that molesting adults recognize and steer themselves towards, so just because a gay person experienced abuse as a child doesn't mean that their orientation was originally heterosexual before the abuse.)

All that's to say that I think ex-gay ministries, for all their good intentions, do real harm to authentically gay people by making a faulty moral diagnosis of their orientation (which I wrote about under "the authority question" and "the sex question" in A New Kind of Christianity), by raising false hopes about the possibilities of change, and by employing techniques that in the end only intensify their feelings of failure when "victory" either never comes or doesn't stick. But at the same time, I do not doubt that there are innately heterosexual people whose sexual identity has been damaged, or bisexual people who want to live as heterosexuals, and for them, ex-gay ministries may provide help - even though I think their moral diagnostics (including their way of using the Bible) are faulty. Perhaps one could also add to this group innately gay people who would rather live in lifelong sexual tension than be forced to leave a conservative religious community in whose belonging they find rewards that compensate for their sexual frustration. And perhaps one could also add to this group innately gay people who have married heterosexually and who, for love of spouse and children, feel they have a moral obligation to maintain a heterosexual marriage even though it requires them to go against their natural "hard-wiring," so to speak.

But I must add an experience I've had that would not in any way negate your experience with these two good friends in your ministry, but that deserves to be taken as seriously. I've met several people in this category over the years, but let me share one memory ... sitting in a fast-food restaurant with a woman whose husband had been an Evangelical pastor for most of their marriage. As she shared her story, I felt as never before the agony of another kind of betrayal no less real than the one your two friends now feel.

Before she met him, her husband knew himself to be gay, and like many good Evangelical Christians, he believed it was sinful and so he struggled against it with all his determination and spiritual fervor. Leaders in his Christian college fellowship counseled him and prayed with him, and helped him achieve what they believed to be "victory" over homosexuality. As a result, a victorious "ex-gay," he went to seminary to prepare for the pastorate. There he met and married this woman.

The only problem was the victory was only on the level of stopping homosexual behaviors. No matter how he tried to "perform" sexually in their marriage, the wife knew that he wasn't truly attracted to her as a woman. They had a son, and everything appeared outwardly to be victorious, but inwardly, they were both in deep pain.

I can't forget her emotion and conviction as she said to me, "Can you imagine what it was like, every day of my marriage for over twenty years, to know that the man I loved was faithful to me in the sense that he didn't run out and have affairs, but that he found me sexually uninteresting and even, truth be told, repulsive? Believe me, it was horrible beyond words for what it did to me, what it did to him, what it did to our son to grow up in this kind of superficially-functional but deeply-fraudulent marriage."

Add to this the necessity of keeping up the appearance of a happy Christian pastor's family ... and gradually her husband sank into depression, had to leave the ministry, and eventually, they divorced. As you can imagine, there were tears falling at our table as people ate their fast food around us.

"My life, my potential for a good marriage, was stolen by a religious system that forced my ex-husband, whom I love and respect to this day, and for whom I have nothing but compassion, to deny what he was and pretend he was something he was not. Never forget, as you speak out about this issue, about all the people like me and my son who are unacknowledged casualties of this system."

Now I should add that I know other stories where marriages like this have worked quite well, including among close friends who I know well enough to know they aren't just putting up a front. So I can only conclude (I may be wrong, but I'm simply telling you the truth as I now see it) that the men in question were towards the middle of the spectrum to start with, rather than over on the exclusively homosexual side.

So, I wish there were a way for Christian communities to accept and support brothers like the two you work with who wish to reorient sexually, without creating nightmares like the one I learned about that day in the fast-food restaurant. Perhaps the best we can hope for is that some churches and ministries will help people at some points on the continuum, and some will help people at other points on the continuum. It would be nice if each could do so without condemning the others. I don't think that's too much to ask.

I want to affirm once more your compassion for the two men you work with. And I hope readers of this blog will also hold them in compassion - and you, as well, as you share their struggle. As I explain in my newest book,Naked Spirituality, the practice of compassion is one of the most important spiritual practices ... learning to (as you said) "weep with Jesus" and so feel with God, embracing your two friends, the woman whose story I shared, and everyone wherever they are on this or any continuum, holding them with the tenderness and empathy in which God, who knows every story in intimate detail, holds so profoundly every human being, and every living creature.

So thanks again for sharing your story and your question. I hear it, and I feel it, and I won't forget it. And I hope you can hear this story as well. May we all keep listening and practicing true compassion, for without compassion there is no true righteousness or holiness.

Susan Sontag's In America.

Growth

It makes me feel nasty and conflicted to wish I'd bought more things just to prolong the opening of presents on Christmas morning. Things no one needs, like DVDs of movies that were just decent.

It is this casual desire for an overflowing pile under the Christ-mas tree, like the plume of a rocket that blinds you in its brightness, noise, and atomic bomb shaped cloud spreading in slow-motion, that fuels the economy of growth.

The more they can have us think that way, of perceived-manufactured/in/a/board/room needs, the more presents we buy, the more things are created, the more jobs created, the more americans we can have employed, the happier the president is, the happier america is with the president, the more kids we can afford to have, the more taxes we can ingest, the more farms we can subsidize, the more dominion over creation just like God promised.

Conflicted, because it is such a joy to see your mother feel loved with presents and the thoughtfulness of her children.

and it seems to me that growth is terrifying, and obviously terrifying, and yet every smart economist speaks only of growth. Maybe they must mean smart growth, that starts to exchange breadth for depth... growth in quality of life for the individual, not just the population of the suburbs and the strength of track-housing-development. Maybe.

that said, the spirit of Christmas is a beautiful thing. I love beautiful things. I relish it. but I think of Tolstoy,

'What a strange illusion it is to suppose that beauty is goodness.'

The world as it is, all beautiful things on this planet have a shadow. The ocean is a killer. The rose is red with blood. The shadow we are called to fight and shake, if at least perceive.

Family, today

I come from remarkable people,

or said the same, ordinary people

who have pushed beyond the human-family tradition of awkward

shoving and turning stomachs of things said and unsaid, the jamming of imperfection into the too-tight baby clothes of expectation.

I opened presents yesterday in one warm room with my former step-mom of 18 years,

now without legal status in my life, but still referred to as a 'mom', in spite of the

truth of her being the impetus of my parents split, my single dad, my brother and his 20 year old wife, myself with a never-spoken-of-in-front-of-me difference from the rest,

my half-sister and her newish boyfriend, my former step-sister and her three sons

of three different fathers, her ex-husband wearing a large jersey and looking tired but

friendly and cautious, my former step-brother and his wife and child and three

children of an undisclosed father,

and the house was alive with laughter and Christmas and prayer before the meals

and cigarettes on the front porch and scripture before the opening of humble presents

from grafted-in family that hardly knows me but proudly calls me 'brother' and brags about my life of traveling and Africa.

and now today, my single father sits with my single mother, the woman he left for another woman 25 years ago, and we watch A Christmas Story together, and we are a family. Laughing in full volume. (this comfort was a long time coming, through much thickness in the air, but it came)

And this generosity of community is not all-forgiving, or all-endorsing. It is not so heady as that. It is the survival of the heart. It is generous, and less patient for change than understanding of this condition of frailty and hunger and tiredness of vice.

It feels modern, but I doubt it is, as the human tenderness that overlooks what 'should be' for 'what is',

that loves and welcomes and is kind,

is as old as humanity

and the child born of this day.

Stories

There is nothing we’ve imagined

that is not just a reordering of what we’ve seen.

No place or creature is original to the mind of man.

But the mind of man is an original of the place it woke up to.

Your thoughts are the mechanics of the arrangement of your

memories of senses,

in play with the longings inborn, waiting to haunt a body of thoughts.

And so, we get our stories.

The sun is telling us the truth.

The truth of God is being told at every moment, by everything.
If it seems a lie, it is not a lie, but a half told truth not yet realized. (sometimes I think our fear of lies is fertile ground for lying)

A rich man happy in his riches is a half told truth:

the honest story of man's search for meaning, his temporary belief in
his present comfort, his many beautiful things,
the certain and coming erosion of that joy, and
his necessary movement to find new happiness, or certain misery.
Sometimes that movement is jumping deeper into the half told story:
more things, more riches will appease the relative boredom of purpose
that comes with achievement...
but again, it is the first half of the story, the repetition of an exposition already told.

It is God sewing into us an insatiable desire for meaning, for true mingling-belonging in the universe that cannot be owned, but only belonged to. And the hunger to own is just the bastardized craving of being one-with. How the rancher, when he owns the land, feels it a part of him, and extension of his arms.

I see man, made in the image of God, bastardizing his making with lies. Speaking half truth or poison in an attempt to create reality in the mind of another. But even if a man is doing so, squandering his birthright of creation... the Lord of truth is righting his wrong with nothing less than the Universe and its ever-present working.

I see God telling the truth in everything.
Each day dies at dark and mourns until it is reborn again in blinding sharp white glory sunrise.
Everyday we must die to our self and believe the night lasts only so long as to reflect
on our death, and then believe in the coming sun.

The seasons also tell us of this true cycle of spirit.
The tides tell us.
The stages of human life and aging tell us.

And the sun, what a story of God:

It is the source of all life,
It is the marker of day and the opposite of night.
If you abuse it, if you get too close it will kill you.
If you stare at it too long, without reverence or bowing your head,
you will go blind.

How obvious it must have been to ancient people to worship the sun.

And the truth continues: if you try to find energy from other sources,
like oil and your own toil, you will some day run out...
and you will surely destroy the planet and the place you call home. Maybe not today,
but this is a half told story.

to say something plain

to requote a hero of mine:
We have too many high-sounding words, and too few actions that correspond with them


i am a piece of a focused machine that has deployed US troops
to help pursue a warlord, a mass murderer, a leader of a rape-cult,
a child destroyer, and potentially kill him and his commanders

i believe Joseph Kony is a human being with a childhood and a soul

our call is to arrest him. But we understand that in forceful arrests, he may resist,
and in that situation, he will be killed

i accept that I may be, in a way, killing a piece of a man
or many men

i accept that i could be instrumental in the death
of an american soldier fighting for congolese victims he has
no national interest in protecting

and that that exemplifies a selfless hero
and that we don't see those very often

i believe in action

and i believe in monsters

and that all human beings have the potential to be monsters

i believe in the chance of redemption, and a trial and life in prison is what we demand

and i believe in peaceful resistance to the detriment and even death of myself,
from regimes that are mistaken and capable of hearing the overwhelming voice of the people

but i also believe in sociopaths who use human beings as fleshy-holsters for their machetes. for a dark dark dark that can move into the mind of a man and turn him into a force of nature

i believe in human beings no longer capable of persuasion. or said differently, the patience it would take to continue discussion would enable them to kill another, and another, and another, and another, and another, and another, and another as I wade in blood with a megaphone saying 'please'

if a brain injury can render a man incapable of speech and motor function, could not a spiritual injury render a man beyond the reach of words and reason? resolute to destroy other human beings and amused by their begging tears? by spiritual injury i may mean brain injury. just that more important part of the brain

at that point, his prolonged days on this earth are a hindrance to his redemptive crash with the Lord.

this dark line can only be manifest in his actions and the exhaustion of diplomacy

i am crass because war is crass and to kill a man even a monster is crass

i am uncomfortable with the purity of fundamentalist pacifism

as i am uncomfortable with any fundamentalism

because it denies the fact that nothing exists in a vacuum and

the assumption that it does empowers a lie that empowers its opposite

but let me be plain with you, i want this man arrested. for arrest saves me the weight of holy decision. if we let the man live his days robbed of the lust and drunk stupor of his jungle power, the fragrance of redemption may just find him.

i am not the first to struggle. much greater men, Bonheiffer. Lewis. taught me these things. as did the victims.

and i believe we cling too desperately to life
like nasty bundles afraid to die

and the people most noble understand this
and the people most powerful understand this, and that power can be used for evil
and sinister spirituality and magic and murder and the LRA

and G-d understands this better than i. that when our flesh falls
He has something to do with it

that every knee shall bow

but if i am the wall, or the builder of the wall, that blocks the wave from the town
then so be it.

i would rather save the town
and stand before G-d honestly mistaken

than sit beneath the tree and write of the shame of it all
as i keep my legs pulled tight so as not to touch the blood

for we are too afraid to die, yes

but we cannot be afraid to live

and a monster makes the world afraid to live.
and a monster invites the world to produce heroes that will sacrifice their comfort
and maybe even their lives to define nobility, equality, virtue, and sacrifice

i believe the physical life matters,
but
i think the spiritual life matters more

but i don't know how that ties in to all of this.

but i am acting on lofty words, and have been, and believe there is virtue there.

may G-d have mercy.

The laws were wrong

In light of the recent discovery that the speed of light is no longer the speed limit of the universe. and the other incredible discovery this year that the universe is expanding at an ever-increasing rate, meaning that some force is pushing it to move fast and faster... because physics tells us that an object will remain at a constant speed unless acted upon by a force... therefore some invisible and absolutely unknown force is at work... my framework of scientific wonder has been expanded. and wrapped up in that, my sense of spiritual wonder is again ignited as if new. The things we believe to be laws are not laws. but shadows of laws. and a few hundred years ago, it was a sin-punishable-by-death to presume that the sun did not orbit the earth... I am silenced by the beauty of discovery, and the humility of wonder, and the admonition to the Fear of G-d. It makes wonderful sense.

i love that tiny shutter window frozen moment that i’ve always wanted to see without knowing it

The many layers of a picture and the people frozen in the space behind the subjects

Unless the layers are the subjects and perhaps every picture is a painting of the insane

history of the universe that brought those souls to be standing behind those eternal souls

‘there are no ordinary people, only eternal souls becoming gods and monsters’ or somethinglikethat cs lewis said

i think about that a lot as i ignore a jabbering homeless woman that looks at me with distant eyes dehumanizing me as a pocket-book-preppy-asshole-with-spoiling-parents

as i dehumanize her as the result of a long string of short-sighted-self-serving-corroded-willpower-weakness-decisions

and she tells me some weak and tired lie that once probably sounded real about a bus ticket to see her children and i might buy her something at 7/11 although

i probably wont because i’m rushing somewhere far less important than the state of her life

and as with everything I am, so enter the mitigating factors of: my belief that a free society must give people the right to suffer from their decisions, and my spread-too-thin lifestyle of care can destroy me and more importantly them as they see in me a promise i cannot fulfill… blah blah

there are no ordinary people.

freedom is a shaking off in a culture of choice

My skin is thinner and my jaw is set,
My bones have set and my muscles grow long and thin,
And I am a man now with the whimsy of a boy
and a fox and a canyon.

How pleasant that I sink into this body
and the wisdom of time, with wonder and whimsy intact.

I want to take off the garments made by shaky rotten wooden legs
that creak and sway.
shake them off as when you throw your arms back and fling the sleeves back and
thrust your chest to the sky

and walk up stream with some few souls.

and make a promise to my cold creek skin
to never grow tired and bitter
at a world that will not bend.

Not sure who reads this...

but I appreciate it. It's a place to hold my thoughts to find later.
When I don't pour them into something, they mist away.
and your comments (especially those kindreds that find this a place
to connect with me) mean a lot to me.

But if anyone prefers, I'm gonna start doing this on tumblr too...
maybe even switch completely over to tumblr bc I like the aesthetic more
and I found a widget that sucks all your blogspot posts into a tumblr automatically.
(http://jonnytran.tumblr.com/post/221876842/import-blogger-posts-to-your-tumblr)

http://thewaterisblack.tumblr.com/

just saying. just staying. just swaying.

jedidiah.

Back to (the wrong) school

From Seth Godin:

A hundred and fifty years ago, adults were incensed about child labor. Low-wage kids were taking jobs away from hard-working adults.

Sure, there was some moral outrage at seven-year olds losing fingers and being abused at work, but the economic rationale was paramount. Factory owners insisted that losing child workers would be catastrophic to their industries and fought hard to keep the kids at work--they said they couldn't afford to hire adults. It wasn't until 1918 that nationwide compulsory education was in place.

Part of the rationale to sell this major transformation to industrialists was that educated kids would actually become more compliant and productive workers. Our current system of teaching kids to sit in straight rows and obey instructions isn't a coincidence--it was an investment in our economic future. The plan: trade short-term child labor wages for longer-term productivity by giving kids a head start in doing what they're told.

Large-scale education was never about teaching kids or creating scholars. It was invented to churn out adults who worked well within the system.

Of course, it worked. Several generations of productive, fully employed workers followed. But now?

Nobel-prize winning economist Michael Spence makes this really clear: there are tradable jobs (making things that could be made somewhere else, like building cars, designing chairs and answering the phone) and non-tradable jobs (like mowing the lawn or cooking burgers). Is there any question that the first kind of job is worth keeping in our economy?

Alas, Spence reports that from 1990 to 2008, the US economy added only 600,000 tradable jobs.

If you do a job where someone tells you exactly what to do, they will find someone cheaper than you to do it. And yet our schools are churning out kids who are stuck looking for jobs where the boss tells them exactly what to do.

Do you see the disconnect here? Every year, we churn out millions of of worker who are trained to do 1925 labor.

The bargain (take kids out of work so we can teach them to become better factory workers) has set us on a race to the bottom. Some argue we ought to become the cheaper, easier country for sourcing cheap, compliant workers who do what they're told. We will lose that race whether we win it or not. The bottom is not a good place to be, even if you're capable of getting there.

As we get ready for the 93rd year of universal public education, here’s the question every parent and taxpayer needs to wrestle with: Are we going to applaud, push or even permit our schools (including most of the private ones) to continue the safe but ultimately doomed strategy of churning out predictable, testable and mediocre factory-workers?

As long as we embrace (or even accept) standardized testing, fear of science, little attempt at teaching leadership and most of all, the bureaucratic imperative to turn education into a factory itself, we’re in big trouble.

The post-industrial revolution is here. Do you care enough to teach your kids to take advantage of it?

sister island

I sit beside my sister today, she is fresh home,
and grasp a gift of adulthood.
When you see the woman as you see the stranger,
studied for what she is, her face a unique mystery
of shape and familiar structure. I see my face in hers,
and I see a face that is new to me.

and so I put on the shelf of nostalgia
the bundle of inconveniences,
as children see their siblings, as only in relation to them.


And I see her for what she is, or at least partly.
What a wonderful gift of age and distance.

Promise to wake me up

If you catch me with blood on my hands,
when I am forty,
with a cul-de-sac comforter
and plenty of soft and malleable money in the bank,

If you catch me with blood on my hands,
because my heart has hardened to the softness of empathy,
and my cage is not the earth and the handiwork of G-d
but rather the ends
of my real.estate.

If you catch me with blood on my hands,
please come to my gilded door,
and throw red paint on it.

but first knock,
so that if I'm home
and if I can pull myself up off the leather couch,
you may paint me as well.

friendship vs duty of kindness

Mark this well, you proud men of action!

"Mark this well, you proud men of action! you are, after all, nothing but unconscious instruments of the men of thought." - Hebbel

I am reading the biography of John Adams, and feel somehow kindred. Perhaps that is bold and silly to say, but we grow only as we believe we grow, and we are fashioned by our heroes.

Yesterday Jason, Ben, Laren, Chris, Zach, Kimmy and I sat around a lunch table by the ocean for 5 hours discussing the world we want to see in 100 years. And how that hundred year vision could be wrought in some small way in the spring of 2012.

"Intention is everything" as Jason has become fond of saying. And he is right. We must unscale our eyes from the lies of what is, and see what could be. And not wait, but build such a nation now. As Gandhi took to the sea to make his own salt. As Adams and Washington and Hamilton and Jefferson sparred over old and new ideas become one.

All this talk of principles and vision makes my eyes glaze over. I start to lose the forest for the thickness of the brush. But then, as Steinbeck says, the black reasoning comes to me in the morning.

I am utterly convinced that in 100 years, the current use of free market capitalism and the abuse of natural resources in the worship of growth will be looked upon with the same disgust as we now see the economy of slavery.

Not because capitalism is wrong, but because it's lordship is endowed by a fiction: namely that growth is success.

But despair is not my motif. One thing I love about capitalism is that it is mindless, and therefore will not be offended when it is replaced with a sustainable and downstream logical framework. Even the most hardcore of free market lovers knows that when resources become scarce to a degree of danger, we will adapt. And perhaps this is still Capitalism... for when it changes to the will of the people, it will have done what it always promised: to blindly reflect the freedom of individual choice.

I only mourn the smallness of the massive mind to count the cost of what is lost as the dumb fat worm chews the stalk that holds it up. Jeremy Rifkin believes we may already be too late. God stands above us and winces, though he wrote this play. Take heart.

I am fired up because I read this > http://www.organicconsumers.org/btc/berry.cfm

Talk is sound

Political theory and the summersault acrobatics of language make me tired. It seems to me the human mind can hardly hold on to complicated ideas, and so it clings to simple ones uncluttered with inconvenient facts or circumstances. It can with athletic ease disregard information that challenges assumptions and cling with blood-ties to fragments of truth that support a pre-conceived universe.

Like 'the free market is the answer. If you take away people's money, they won't have incentive to work hard, and besides, if the government can't spend money responsibly, why would we give it to them.'

or

'the rich are poisonous vacuums that hoard and support a wealth gap that suffocates the poor in an endless cycle.. until the gap is so severe that the poor rise up, overthrow the aristocracy, and redistribute by force.'

and so we get the endless unconstructive cycle of debate that gives shape to partisanship and stagnation.

This same calcification of thought, i.e. the exchange of holistic understanding for informative cherry picking, is not just seen in politics. It is seen in religion. It is seen in family history and the disappointments of family. It is why we stay angry at a sibling for years, or our mother, or a friend. It is why we stop asking questions in our twenties and hang like weak handed children to a few facts that sound right in a dinner argument.

What if we clung to the first and second commandments of Jesus? That alone is a life's work. Instead we cling to Ayn Rand or John Piper.

I'm speaking out of both sides of my mouth.

Because I believe people cling to two types of simple things.

1. Simple fragments of truth that make men fools. These are used as weapons to maintain a status as 'right.'

2. Simple foundations of truth that make men great. These are used as quiet humble fuel for action and example.

All this talk engages me, challenges me to take part in the constructive dialogue (if it exists) of building a better future... because the founding fathers of America believed that ideas could change the system, and they did.

I also believe this to be true:

“Mark this well, you proud men of action! You are, after all, nothing but unconscious instruments of the men of thought.” – Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.

And so I think.

But I get tired...

and see great merit in leaving my hat on a hook at the front door, stepping out of my living room, and living amongst the real problems of real people.

Thoughts on the Fourth Estate and my time in an RV that followed.

How do you digest a hurricane? How do you swallow the moon and the earth lit up by the moon? Some things are too big, too inextricably bound up in the world to be consumed. I want to know The Fourth Estate. A conference designed to spark an ideological movement: a commitment to global citizenship and responsibility to justice. I want to analyze and categorize it. But it cannot be held in my hands because there were too many miracles in the orchestra to hold.

Each individual experience, the unique events of every life and the wash of one video on one pair of eyes and a speaker’s words on another. I will never know the stories, the ruffles of the heart that were the very moment of a life change, or the seed falling in the crack of stone, invisible for years, only to grow into a mighty tree in years I will not know.

I held the face of new loves, cried with them as we said goodbye, I hugged a million works of art and wrote my name in books that will hold the words of great men and women not yet written.

I spoke with my heroes, listened to them address and articulate a future and a present and the human condition.

I heard great minds give credit to science for life, to God, to something more but not quite God. Each man, each woman bringing her motivation, the deeper hunger, to the stage, inviting each member of The Fourth Estate to take the wild wonderous magic of living seriously, the profound duty to examine the phenomenon of existence and behave with intention. Intention is everything.

If these members walked out a bit dizzy, stumbling over thoughts too big for the brain, we have done our job. If these members walked out convinced of nothing except the dignity of human beings and a desire to protect that dignity, then we have done our job.

If these members exchange self-serving profit for life-serving purpose, if they see their lives as part of a living body, and not an ignorant cancer, we have done our job.

If we prioritize worthy things, and marginalize unworthy things. If we celebrate beauty and mystery and belonging, and if we critique abuse, the rape of the human soul and the natural world, the fragmented fiction that my choices are separate from yours… then we have done our job.

If we stop blaming injustice on laziness, culture, and history, and start solving injustice with love and focused attention, then we have done our world a service.

And if there is a God, He will be well pleased.

As I traveled the east coast in an RV, celebrating Brady’s bar exam, exploring the Carolina’s and sitting at Lincoln’s feet in DC and walking the streets of New York with Orion (a fresh poet’s eyes seeing the temple of man for the first time), I carried with me the glory of The Fourth Estate. The sense of purpose, the crater of impact scarring my face and shoulders with value. It was a haunted drive, my thoughts present in the Charleston rain and above the clouds in the lingering ghosts of the prior week. It was the perfect meal: swallowing the moon with brothers of chosen blood and adventure, digesting the hurricane that circles inside me, wrecks the islands of doubt and rests its quiet eye over my heart.

If there is one thing

If there is one thing that keeps a human being alive

it is belief.

or said differently: hope.

it is hardly evidence. hardly even experience.

Belief is why we wake up everyday, the hope of some good outcome, prolonged or immediate,

it is why we enjoy meeting new attractive people, if we are single or not single,

it is why we so easily remember their names and forget the names of plane looking people,

that some unsaid unimagined unthought connection will grow into something unthought

but always imagined,

or it is why we make status updates: the hope of being noticed and affirmed

it is why we blog: the hope of being read, and someone finding the

tiny personal single life we live to be, in some small way, important,

which of course to us is hugely important,

even if no one ever ever reads it, or we get the rare affirmation,

that one affirmation gives birth, sets free, our lustful imagination

for all that could be reading it.

or even our journals, those secret things that shall never be read,

how few of us would burn those books,

how few of us write to write,

without the hope that someone in the future might stumble across it

and find that we said something,

or even the sexy thought that someone has found us interesting

and tip-toed into our room, glanced over their shoulder,

and read without us knowing.

and in so hoping, we bait hope for hope,

if we win, and someone does affirm us or notice we are breathing,

they too are hoping, they are attracted to us and want to understand,

to consume and be better,

or to know us, study us, grasp us, and win us. It is an exchange, and when even

it is perhaps what Love is, a type of Love, but it is

not always even... and so we find unrequited hope, which is heartbreak, which

is defeated belief.

I believe humans hope for such things, because we are unfulfilled

and therefore hungry. We hope for dinner and hope for a spouse and

hope for children and hope to retire and hope our children love us and hope

to make them love us right and hope to be healthy and hope for heaven so that

we have something else to hope for when what we hoped for wasn't what we wanted

and then we grow tired, and the desire starts to be tired, and we stop laughing,

and so many lose their faces.

I sound like I'm critiquing. But the alternative is nirvana, freedom from desire,

which of course is death. Hope is what living is.

Hope can sound an empty common word,

but it seems so much more real than most things I hear of Love.

This is what I'm writing for work. It is the manifesto for an ideological movement of citizenship and global identity.

Every generation is invited to endow its share of history with a name. It begins with recognition. If the events of the day are marked by a growing contrast: the comfort of some is removed by a widening chasm from the tragedy of many, and the voices of the dying are hushed by the hands of the wicked, such a day is set to end.

This recognition is followed by response. First, by bold symbolic action, usually by the young.

Then, in the audience of the effected, a proper articulation of the problem emerges. Then a movement of change, often sweeping so quickly the Establishment fumbles to trace it.

We are at such a time.

The Fourth Estate is a recognition of human identity in the face of global connectivity and the responsibility that flows from it. It is a blueprint of the future founded in humanity's bold endeavor to seek a more perfect peace, a more perfect unity, and a more honest expression of success.

We have always experienced empathy for our neighbor, our family. In a novel age such as this where the stories and faces of humanity writ large are brought to our living rooms, our eyes and our ears, and what's more: our products and consumption touch the globe as a whole: this empathic responsibility has outgrown its ancient limits of proximity.

It is a coalition of minds that believe there are no national boundaries, no laws, no man made rules that trump the law of common humanity written on the heart. It is not something new, it is the proper expansion of something old, truths that are self evident, God-breathed, and manifest in the history of discontent:

We believe all men are created equal, and that justice for some is not justice for all. We believe that human evil is the responsibility of all men. When we turn our face from horror, we bless it to continue. We believe our task is to live the simple and true things, and work them out no matter how hard: that men and women, no matter where they live, are equal. and loved. and worthy. and that we are all connected, not just in a complicated global exchange of goods and commodities, which is undeniable, but in a human web of innate value.

And these things define us: We are not the intellectual elite. We are not the bored idealists in the lounge chairs of comfort. We are the young people on the sidewalk. We will sleep where we fall and work until our hands are raw, connected like never before to the central nervous system of mankind.

In the face of a modern world that is inextricably connected in a web of exchange, we accept the responsibility to protect those that are victimized by extreme cases of injustice. It is not 'their' problem. It is a humanity problem.

We believe in starting with the specific to prove the universal. We are starting with Joseph Kony, the rebel leader of the Lord's Resistance Army that has systematically abducted children to fight as soldiers in his rebellion.

We will not ignore his murderous campaign simply because his escapades do not impact us economically or threaten us militarily. We will respond because he destroys human life.

And our responsibility to protect does not invalidate our national identity. We believe in the pride of cultural expression and society. But we do not believe in the fiction of self-interest in isolation. Our choices echo to every single corner of this globe, and we should respond with reason and temperance.

To the degree in which society denies the affect of its choices on its own citizens and those of its neighbors, is the degree it will fall victim to history as a failure. As a decaying monster.

It is about rejecting the concept of the 'other,' the belief that 'they' are the problem and 'they' are out to get us. We understand that 'they' are us, and we are 'them.'

When we acknowledge the mystery of value in every human life, and witness to such, we thrive, and succeed, and protect one another.

We choose to stand up for that belief. We will fight for it, expand our talent, exhaust our bodies in its pursuit, and define a generation of human belonging.

We are The Fourth Estate.

Truth is truth is truth

Playboy: Much of the controversy surrounding 2001 deals with the meaning of the metaphysical symbols that abound in the film — the polished black monoliths, the orbital conjunction of Earth, Moon and sun at each stage of the monoliths’ intervention in human destiny, the stunning final kaleidoscopic maelstrom of time and space that engulfs the surviving astronaut and sets the stage for his rebirth as a “star-child” drifting toward Earth in a translucent placenta. One critic even called 2001 “the first Nietzschean film,” contending that its essential theme is Nietzsche’s concept of man’s evolution from ape to human to superman. What was the metaphysical message of 2001?

Kubrick: It’s not a message that I ever intend to convey in words. 2001 is a nonverbal experience; out of two hours and 19 minutes of film, there are only a little less than 40 minutes of dialog. I tried to create a visual experience, one that bypasses verbalized pigeonholing and directly penetrates the subconscious with an emotional and philosophic content. To convolute McLuhan, in 2001 the message is the medium. I intended the film to be an intensely subjective experience that reaches the viewer at an inner level of consciousness, just as music does; to “explain” a Beethoven symphony would be to emasculate it by erecting an artificial barrier between conception and appreciation. You’re free to speculate as you wish about the philosophical and allegorical meaning of the film — and such speculation is one indication that it has succeeded in gripping the audience at a deep level — but I don’t want to spell out a verbal road map for 2001 that every viewer will feel obligated to pursue or else fear he’s missed the point. I think that if 2001 succeeds at all, it is in reaching a wide spectrum of people who would not often give a thought to man’s destiny, his role in the cosmos and his relationship to higher forms of life. But even in the case of someone who is highly intelligent, certain ideas found in 2001 would, if presented as abstractions, fall rather lifelessly and be automatically assigned to pat intellectual categories; experienced in a moving visual and emotional context, however, they can resonate within the deepest fibers of one’s being.

—Playboy’s interview with Stanley Kubrick in its entirety (1968)

Wisdom from a sometimes hated man

"When people spend their own money on themselves, they are careful about how much they spend and about what they spend it on. If people spend their own money on others, they are careful about how much they spend, but not as careful about what they spend it on. If people spend other people’s money on themselves, they are not careful about how much they spend, but they are careful about what they spend it on. If people spend other people’s money on other people, they are not careful about the amount of money they spend, nor are they careful about what they spend it on. That is government.” - Donald Rumsfeld. Written in his private notes while Secretary of Defense.

This not only summarizes the psychology of government, it also describes man's general self-preservation and self-attention superseding all other understanding. We can only truly know our own needs. That is why we are commanded to 'love one another as we love ourselves.' There is no deeper love.

And if we find ourselves in such a state where our insecurities and self-hate act as the foundation of our identity, I'd argue that such a person is incapable of free and true love.

mingle with the truth. our feet know more than books. but books know more than self-promotion.

don't know about the hedonism of self discovery.

but know there is a truth to rejecting the path of least resistance.

resistance is the only reason man has muscle.

"Never go to art school. Never go to New York. Never rent a loft. Dump your font folder. Forget symmetry and colour coordination. Stop taking text from editorial you don't read and packaging it in eye catching ways. Walk away from your computer. Then take off, go to India, rural China, Rio, Caracas, and Belize. Mingle with the filthy rich and the dirt poor. Dig up all the roots of terror. Make hunger, disease, cruelty, lust, greed, self preservation and genocide your roommates. Then when your run out of money and can't take it anymore, fly back home. Look in the mirror. Face your fears, your weaknesses, strengths, your imminent demise. Then when all of this begins to gel into a master narrative in front of your eyes, go get a job."

- Kalle Lasn