My response to the proposal to adopt voting in my P&J group

I do not understand how the functioning of MPP would be improved by resorting to majority vote.  I have no problems with strenuous disagreement among our people, indeed I rely upon various perspectives to educate myself.  I am unhappy to see the departure or diminished participation of people who have been active with us at one time.  I do not know what prompted those people to leave.  I am certain however that adopting procedures that silence and sideline members will produce more departures.

For as long as I have been a part of MPP, we have deployed an informal kind of consensus.  I can support a decision, oppose a decision, or choose to not oppose a decision.  Our CD3 MPP group has made decisions I have disagreed with, but I have chosen to be silent.  I have done that for one or more of three reasons.  1) Sometimes I have respect for the person with whom I am disagreeing and I defer to that person.  I decide to trust them and go along, even if I continue to disagree.  2)  I have decided at times that the cohesiveness of the group is more important to me than getting my way.  3)  And sometimes I have decided that the issue is simply not consequential enough for me to say or do anything.  I let it pass.  I support continuing this decision method.

I am not willing to make decisions by vote.  Often issues are simply too important to do that.  The organization can adopt that method, but I will not cast a vote.  I will not cast a vote even if my "side" would win.  I am not even willing to abstain or vote "present."  Deciding that way seems to me to be a kind of violence.  If a vote is called for, I will observe until that process is complete and then see where we stand.  That kind of participation may not be sustainable, but I have respect and affection for the people in this group.  I am confident.

Why is the war against Ukraine any different from most issues discussed in MPP meetings?  Every body of passionate and informed people will produce various responses.  We have disagreed about other important issues but have come to agreement about how to proceed.

It has been asserted that the conflict within MPP presently is between those who support a diplomatic approach to the invasion of Ukraine and those who support military aid.  I support both.  The US government, much less MPP, does not have to choose between those options.  I emphatically support diplomacy and am certain that our government has been always engaged in diplomacy.  Refusing to aid Ukraine with whatever they need to defend themselves is not diplomacy.  It is choosing to reward violent aggression.

My attitude toward Russia is exactly my attitude toward a shooter killing children in a school.  I would find it reprehensible and cowardly to stand around and converse about gun control, what brought the shooter to his murderous rampage, or how we might or might not prevent massacres in the future while the killing continues, as it did in Uvalde.  I expect the police to kill the shooter as quickly as possible.  Russia’s behavior is not like a school shooter.  It is in fact a school shooter.  And a mall shooter.  And a theater shooter.  And a maternity ward shooter.

Regardless of what led to the invasion, Russia attacked Ukraine.  Since then, Russia has continued a policy of genocide in Ukraine.  They have randomly executed civilians encountered on the streets.  They have deployed rape as a weapon.  They have kidnapped as many as 150,000 children and shipped them into the interior of Russia.  They are attempting to destroy Ukrainian culture in the conquered territories.  They have deliberately attacked hospitals, schools, theaters, malls, train stations and other locations filled with civilians.  They have used starvation as a weapon.  They have targeted the infrastructure of Ukraine.  They have specifically destroyed the utilities that provide electricity, water, and heat to destroy the morale of the Ukrainian people.  These are crimes against humanity.  (These facts have been reported in a broad variety of credible news sources.)  I find it morally repulsive to render any kind of aid to Russia, including a decision to stand by and do nothing. 

Jay said that he has no answer to requests for the MPP policy on the invasion.  It is not only perfectly legitimate to say members of our group disagree and continue to discuss what our policy is, but that accurately represents how many other peace and justice groups are responding.  Conceding that the issue is complex and evolving is an honest response.  Furthermore, saying so is consistent with the overall strategy of MPP.  Admitting that the issues are complex is an excellent starting point for conversations with senators or representatives.

If, however, MPP somehow formally adopts voting as our method of decision making and MPP adopts a policy that I believe is morally corrupt, as, for example, abandoning Ukraine to the predations of the war criminals in the Kremlin is, then I will be obliged to suspend or end my participation in MPP, which would be a sad outcome for me.

The problems with making decisions by majority vote are brought into full relief by the issue of Russia’s immoral war on Ukraine.  Majority vote is an acceptable way to make decisions to select a letterhead design, say, or where we will have the next meeting, but not for important matters.

Not Dreamt of in your philosophy

How does this happen? I put this headset into my pocket untangled and took it out about five minutes later in this condition. I would have to work hard to get it that tangled up even if I tried on purpose. My theory is that a force is operative in the cosmos that has not been dreamt of in my philosophy. I further conjecture that the same force contributes to other phenomenon including:

1. Finding five slot screw drivers when I seek a Phillips-head screw driver.
2. Guessing wrong nine times in ten when inserting a USB jack or any polarized plug.
3. Finding four lefthand winter gloves before I find a matching righthand glove.
4. Putting on a t-shirt in the dark backwards nine times in ten.
5. Looking for a lost something all over the house and then finding it in the first place I looked, usually after making an ass of myself by being publicly frustrated.
6. An accidentally dropped piece of toast landing on the floor butter or jam side down pretty much alway.
7. Putting two socks in the dryer and finding only one when I open the dryer again.
8. Waiting at a T intersection and having the stream of cars coming from the left, a gap finally arriving, and then one car comes from the right at exactly the right moment to prevent me exploiting the gap.
9. Digging into one pocket for my keys and being wrong nine times in ten about which pocket my keys are in, usually when I am carrying several packages in my hands.
10. There always being only one piece of the puzzle missing at the end rather than, say, four or five.
11. The only missing drill bit in a set of them is the one size I need.
12. My phone ringing at exactly the moment I leave my desk to retrieve something in another room.
13. Needing a black pen and finding red, green, pink, and yellow pens first.
14. Seeing the customer in front of me at the store taking the last one of the item I wanted to buy and knowing that item probably sat on the shelf for a month before the customer in front of me took it.
15. Walking to the mailbox and finding nothing and then seeing the mail carrier delivering the mail the moment I am back inside.

So, yeah...

For guinea pigs, for Christ's sake.

I relearned two lessons today while walking my dogs. (Forgive me, please. Some of us are slow learners.) Near my temporary winter residence, there is a business that transports large animals by whatever conveyance works. That business maintains a couple acres of fenced in grassy area and they invite dog owners to walk their dogs there. When I arrived today, a tall man was on his knees carefully searching, selecting, and collecting greenery. I told him that I was curious about what he was doing. He told me, seeming slightly embarrassed, that he was gathering greens for his guinea pigs. He added that they are very particular about what they will eat. We wished each other well and separated. Relearned lesson #1: There are many good people out there. Here is a man taking time off his lunch hour, presumably, to collect grass, not just any grass, mind you, for his pets, which at a distance of twenty feet are indistinguishable from potatoes. Not only does he love them enough to do that, but he knows them well enough to see that they eat only specific kinds of grass. He spends sufficient time and energy to know that and provide them what they need. Relearned lesson #2: I may be one of fewer than five human beings in the cosmos who knows what he does for the furry little potatoes. It's not on his résumé. He is probably a little too embarrassed to tell many of his friends. I am sure that many people know that he is a splendid, caring human being, but I bet I am one of the only people who know this about him. I would also wager that there are innumerable humans - and probably animals too - whose love and compassion are invisible. And they would have it no other way. Man, oh, man, do I love people.

Nothing but grief

As I write these words while sitting in my comfy chair in my warm house with my dogs at my feet, I remember that I am on land forcibly taken from the Dakota people.  The computer, the chair, the dogs, the house, and the land I bought from white people.  I am a white, middle-aged, cisgender man living at the center of the empire.

Below find two pictures.  The first one shows a Ukrainian family fleeing from an unprovoked Russian assault on the people of Kyiv.  The second picture is of the same family thirty seconds later, dead from Russian bombardment.  The pictures were taken probably on Friday while I slept.  Those are Ukrainian soldiers doing what they can for the two survivors, the father and the dog.  The father is probably dead now.  And the dog?  It feels fear, loss, and grief as much as any of us.  Who will care for it?  Probably no one and that little tragedy is a drop in the flood of grief that is modern Ukraine.  My guess is that the memorial visible on the left side is for the Ukrainian soldiers who died in World War II defending Russia against the Nazis.

This is not the first time Russia has attacked Ukraine.  Using exactly the same rationalizations and lies as Putin did this week, Stalin assaulted the Ukrainians in 1928.  Their intentions were identical: acquisition of land and the destruction of people who might one day pose a problem.  Nor is this the first time a violent, fearful, aggressive mob in charge of a government chewed up a neighbor to take their land and kill them by denying them the means to survive.  The Germans did it to Russia.  The Japanese did it to China.  The English did it to Ireland and India.  The US did it to the Cherokee and the Dakota nations among others.  Brazil is doing it to its indigenous people today.  The gamebook is wearisomely familiar.

I reject the easy and cynical response of throwing up my hands and despairing that this is simply how people treat each other.  It’s not.  Almost always people find ways of living peacefully side by side.  Minnesota and Wisconsin.  Norway and Sweden.  Uzbekistan and Tajikistan.  Costa Rica and Panama.  There is, however, a limited set of definable values that prohibit people from living peacefully with their neighbors.  They include: Ideas are more important than people.  Nationality, race, property, and honor are meaningful concepts.  Identity is possible only in the context others.  Wealth and violence deliver security.  Resources are a zero-sum game.  Otherness is a threat.  One person’s, one community’s, or one nation’s needs, aspirations, and ways are somehow unique, righter, or more noble than any others.  They’re not.  These values are arbitrary, acquired, and malleable.  There is nothing natural or inevitable about a Russian man somewhere pressing a button and killing everybody in this family but the dog.

I was about to write that the anguish of the dog was more fierce than the anguish felt by the people of Kyiv who have lost loved ones because the dog has no way of understanding what has befallen it.  But those people also probably do not understand what has befallen them.  I sure don’t.  I think that is because there is nothing to understand.  There is only grief.  And fury at the perpetrators of these crimes.

Waiting... for What

About fifteen years ago, I read about a man I’ll call Jim who worked in a salvage shop. If your truck fell through the ice, you called Jim. He wondered what else might be at the bottom of the lake so between jobs he dove into it to see what he could find. Once he found what turned out to be a 1939 Japanese machine gun that didn’t appear to have been in the lake for very long. Because he knew how to salvage things lost in lakes, he kept it under water until he devised a way to refurbish it. When he was done, the gun looked nearly new. The question now was what to do with it. He called a gun dealer and told him that he had a working 1939 Japanese machine gun. The dealer said, “No you don’t.” Jim learned that it was illegal to buy, sell, or even own such a gun. He could hire a lawyer and through that lawyer negotiate with the Bureau of Tobacco, Alcohol, Firearms and Explosives. They might confiscate it and put it in deep storage until... what?. They might seek a licensed dealer who could do… what? Or Jim could put it in a closet until… what? In the meantime, he was committing a felony. He solved his problem in the simplest way: he threw it back into the lake.

Questions come into my mind. I wondered how many times it has been disposed of that way. How did it wend its way from Japan, over seventy-five years, to the bottom of Lake Minnetonka? Probably a soldier from Minnesota took it from a Japanese soldier and brought it home with him. If so, it’s reasonable to guess that the Japanese man died in the exchange since angry, scared young men armed with machine guns aren’t normally cooperative. Had he killed friends of the American soldier before being killed himself? Had the grim-faced American boy, wiped Japanese blood off the gun before lugging it and the dog tags of his friends back to camp? Had the lake finally removed the last particles of blood from the gun, or did Jim do that? My guess is that the man who threw it into the lake was also the one who took it from the dead Japanese soldier. He may have been twenty when he fought in the Pacific and would have been near the end of his life when he let it slip into the dark waters. What prompted him to do that? Had he hoped to finally bury the ghosts of his long-lost friends that lingered with the gun? Maybe he was cleaning out the house he had raised a family in and was confronted with the same problems Jim would be a few years later. There can’t be many ways of ridding oneself of an illegal and haunted machine gun. Maybe he didn’t want to burden any of his children with it. Had giving it to the lake brought him peace? Who knows? All people with stories to tell about it will probably be dead soon if they aren’t already. In the meantime, a 1939 Japanese machine gun waits at the bottom of Lake Minnetonka for… what?

Truth matters

In the first week of August every year the Star Tribune publishes letters to the editor about the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Usually those letters, including the three that appeared on Tuesday, claim that the nuclear assault on Japan ended the war in the Pacific. This rewrite of history asserts that the destruction of those cities rendered the invasion of the Japanese homeland unnecessary thus sparing the lives of hundreds of thousands of American and Japanese soldiers and civilians. Even if that was the logic driving the choice to use nuclear weapons, killing at least 200,000 noncombatants constitutes a war crime as it was an indiscriminate attack on civilians. But those cities were not bombed to bring an end to the war. Both General Eisenhower and Admiral Halsey said that the war would have ended soon without an invasion of the homeland and without deploying nuclear weapons. During the summer of 1945, Japan had been seeking a face-saving way to end the war. The air war against the people, housing resources, and industrial capacity with incendiary weapons had greatly reduced the ability of Japan to continue the war. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not bombed to hasten the end of the war. They were bombed to send a message to Russia. President Truman was saying, "Behold, Russia, the power of the USA to destroy its enemies." The nuclear attacks on two days in August of 1945 consumed as many as a quarter million Japanese people in an attempt to influence the strategic planning in Moscow. Little value is served assessing blame, but getting the facts straight and understanding our own history is critical to the health and integrity of American culture. In the letters to the editor about the use of nuclear weapons and the effort by the conservative media to reframe the insurrection on January 6 as the actions of patriots rather than violent criminals, we continue to tell each other stories to conceal the truth of who we are and how we make decisions. We reduce our ability to solve real problems by doing so. Denial of climate change and the reality of the pandemic are other examples of how choosing to feel good about ourselves degrades our ability to survive. Truth matters.

A theological mess

On not being a good fit for Sunday school, even though I taught Sunday school in the nineties:

I do not consider myself to be an atheist while I am willing to claim being a Christian. There are concepts and words many Christians seem willing to use casually but have no meaning for me. The following words, among others, seem to me to be so problematic that I cannot use them with integrity: God, sin, atonement, transcendence, soul, prayer, afterlife, God's love, faith, and others. Bill Chadwick was beginning to challenge people at St. Luke just before he left. He said that we at St. Luke are great about what we do not believe, but not so good at saying what we do believe. He asserted that a person has to earn the right to call themselves a Christian. My first response - the less we believe the righter we probably are - was intended to be glib, but once said it has not turned out to be a vacuous a statement as I first intended. And I still have not worked out the conflict I create for myself when I say, on the one hand, that truth resides only in statements in English (in my case) that describe experiences I have and, on the other hand, believing that truth/comprehension/insight/whatever is available to the extent that I can shed words and cultural conventions by narrowing my experience to the present moment. I do not know yet whether either metaphysics or theology are legal propositions. While I tend to be academic and intellectual, people and lived experiences are more important to me than ideas.

The previous paragraph contains thoughts and evolutions accumulated over decades of study. There is a whole lot there. It is the beginning of a long conversation that might suggest answers to how I am not a very good fit for teaching Sunday school. I have learned much from conversations with one of my favorite people, Karen Larson, who I met at St. Luke. Since, sad to say (again for me), she has moved on to other churches after becoming ordained. She's as good as I am at being a complicated theological mess - my characterization of us, not hers - but she seems less disabled by the intellectual landmines, sand traps, and fog banks than I am.

Anyway, that's my first answer.

That's what you would do.

For intentionally spreading the virus, Republicans have committed crimes against humanity. You don't think they intentionally spread it? Ask yourself how you would maximize the number of deaths if your weapon was the corona virus. First you would deny that it is even real. Then, once you could no longer deny its reality, you would minimize its virulence and lethality. You would say you have it all under control. You would say that it would be gone by Easter. You would say that it will vanish magically. You would suppress information about the disease. You would attack authorities. You would politicize and degrade the credibility of the CDC. You would blame it on the media. You would withhold supplies and funds to fight it. You would intentionally allow the disease to spread in blue states and among minorities. You would promote preposterous treatments. You would mock methods such as mask wearing and social distancing. You would hold super-spreader events, at which you would oblige attendees to sign waivers to protect yourself against lawsuits. You would promote silly conspiracy theories such as claiming that Bill Gates or Anthony Fauci had created the virus. You would blame everybody you could, including China. All the while you would distract people with scary stories, such as reporting hoards of brown people breaking into our country. You would get the vaccine yourself and then not tell anybody that you had had yourself vaccinated. You would degrade confidence in the vaccine. Republicans did all of these things and that's what you would do to if your objective was to kill as many people as you could. The only reason the leaders of the T**** gang have not been hanged is that they have put so many officers in places of authority, such as the senate and the Supreme Court, that they can act with immunity.

Oh, the humanity

I was raking the pine needles out of the spring sprouts of the hosta in my yard this morning when a guy drove by and gave me the middle finger salute. To assure himself that his message had been received, he flipped me off again through his back window. At first, I thought, boy, that guy really doesn’t want me raking the pine needles from around my hosta. Then, that doesn’t make any sense. He must be objecting to my cultivation of hosta, which is an invasive species. I was momentarily pleased that here was another advocate for protecting native flora and fauna of Minnesota. I want that too, even if I plant hosta. But the rage puzzled me.

 To what was this fellow objecting? He didn’t stop to elaborate on his concerns. Hold on, I thought. Pickup truck. Angry, rude, white man. He must be responding to my Black Lives Matter sign in my yard. (Please forgive me my own stereotypes.). But that didn’t make sense either. I understand being upset that someone is importing invasive species, even if they are the handsome variegated kind. (I attach a picture.) Maybe it was the pine needles. The western capercaillie, for example, feeds solely on conifer needles during the winter months. Maybe this guy was an advocate for western capercaillie. (I also attach an image of western capercaillie, for those unfamiliar with the bird.). That’s cool, I thought. How many passionate advocates for western capercaillie are there?

 But, alas, no, I accept that he was unhappy that I valued Black lives. What was he hoping to accomplish with his gesture? When I do something, I usually have an objective. For example, I remove the pine needles from among my hosta because I want to lay down fresh brown cedar chips so that the front of my house is pleasing to look at. (Could he have objected to houses looking nice? Nay, evil hasn’t ravished anyone’s heart to that degree.) Was he hopeful that I would take down my BLM sign? Did he aspire to removing from my soul the value I place on the lives of Black people? Was he eager to see me advocate for the removal of the last lines of the Pledge of Allegiance, “with liberty and justice for all”? Or did he dare seek the Holy Grail of all white supremacists: that I would vote Republican? I will never know because he drove on, perhaps on another mission of mercy and justice. How I wish he had pulled over and shared the wisdom and desires of his heart. I fear we have missed an opportunity, as Robert Kennedy said, “to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world“. Oh, the humanity.