Carey Rowland's blog

What Mr. Lincoln said

. . .at Gettysburg battlefield in Pennsylvania:

. . .we can not dedicate, we can not consecrate--we can not hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they have, thus far, so nobly carried on. 

It is better for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us--that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here gave the last full measure of devotion--that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation shall have a new birth of freedom, and that this government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

President Abraham Lincoln, November 19, 1863

The Conspiracy thing

Ok so I met this guy who's convinced that this whole big mess is a conspiracy, most especially the 911 thing. And he had me convinced for a few milliseconds that maybe he's onto something, what with mysterious fluctuations in airline stock prices the day before the towers went down, and that its all oil but I knew that anyway and that cheney knew what was going on and it was all a big plan because you know the govment is out to get us and to get us all constricted into a police state, and now we are in a police state and that explains a lot and theres plenty of proof on the internet that it wasn't passenger planes that did the damage on 911, that it was missiles that hit the pentagon and that there were some asbestos problems in the towers that nobody wanted to fix because it would be too expensive and so the conspiracy arranged to have the towers destroyed and that there is no record in history of a steel structure going down without being calculatedly imploded and that the #7 building was imploded because of incriminating evidence that needed to be disposed of so as not to implicate the mayor and there was a puff of smoke at the grassy knoll and so forth and none of this is really new but you know what? it doesn't worry me because Jesus said:

"You will be hearing of wars and rumors of wars. See that you are not frightened, for those things must take place, but that is not yet the end." Mt 24.

So in a way I already knew about this because we can see and sort of feel that there's something rotten in danmark or somewhere or maybe everywhere you go on earth and we know this because Paul said:

"For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the powers, against the world forces of this darkness, against the spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavenly places." Eph 6.

So it is not new and this conspiracy thing is really very old and there's nothing new under the sun because its pretty obvious that humans are fairly well messed up maybe even rotten to the core and actually ridden through like bullet holes with depravity which is the old term for the sin nature before sin became in the popular way of thinking just an old freudian repression instead of the undeniable reality that it really is which is plain to see if you look around among the rubble and detritus of our civilization's underpinnings and yes I have discovered this sin nature in my very own damn self but Jesus saved me, back in 1978. That doesn't release me from any responsibility to try and do right in this life, but it does release me from the burdens of trying to correct everybody else's messes, or even try to figure it all out and protest, a la quintessential existential dilemma.

And so maybe you're a marxist and you think that I'm imbibing the opiate of the people by accepting religion and Jesus and so forth but hey its a free country or at least it used to be but I'm free no matter how you slice the rumor mill because Jesus has set me free now put that in your pipe and smoke it. Or maybe you're a fascist and you think my religion is irrelevant and based on old mythologies and legends and is therefore no defense against your will to power. We shall see, you damned bully. 

Well there is no denying there is some bad shit going down in this world and maybe there's very little we can do about it because we're all tied down to just makin a livin', doin' the 9 to 5 if were lucky enough to still have a job, and we know they're cooking the unemployment numbers so as to manipulate us and its probably closer to 20% if you include all the people who would still like to be employed but the statisticians think they've given up. (Don't ever give up.) and like I said before what else is new?, and so forth, cuz we don't any of us have time to correct all the bad stuff. But its not your fault anyway. Just take care of your own bad self and do what you need to do. Remember Jesus said:

"…but whoever causes one of these little ones to stumble, it would be better for him to have a heavy millstone hung around his neck, and to be drowned in the depth of the sea. Woe to the world because of its stumbling blocks! For it is inevitable that stumbling blocks come; but woe to that man through whom the stumbling block comes."

So if you are a conspiracy buff you would do better just to put your faith in Jesus instead of trying to figure out all the bad stuff in this world. And if you are one of the Conspirators, then you better get right with God before its too late, and end your wicked ways.

CR, with new novel, Smoke, in progress.

 

Dr. King and me

In my sixty years, I remember no fellow-American whose courage and true patriotism surpasses that of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.  I grew up in Mississippi and Louisiana, two states of the deep south, where the legacy of Dr. King's work--his love of mankind, his tireless work for freedom, and his ultimate sacrifice--made its most enduring impact.

In the constant struggle for human justice in this nation and in our world, he was a vigilant prophet and laborer. As a fallen soldier in that cause, Dr. King was one of those whom Lincoln had presciently memorialized at Gettysburg a hundred years prior, with this assessment: he paid the "last full measure of devotion," by giving his life so that others could live free from slavery and oppression.

I will never forget the effect of his prophetic life on me and the generation I grew up with. The people of our United States should not forget. 

In 1978, the year that I joined the ranks of Christian faith, a faith that Dr. King openly proclaimed and by which he was forever inspired, I wrote this song about him and Moses, after climbing Mt. Pisgah near my home in North Carolina. Perhaps you will be inspired by this great legacy, as I was: 

Mountaintop

 

a little Czech wisdom

"The real test of a man is not how well he plays the role he has invented for himself, but how well he plays the role that destiny assigned to him."

                                                      Jan Patocka, spoken to Vaclav Havel, both of whom were spokesmen for 

                                                      Charter '77, in Czechoslovakia

Glass half-Full

Equality, divinely inspired

About 27 centuries ago, a prophet named Isaiah lived in the Jewish home-city, Jerusalem. He spoke presciently to his  countrymen about the dire condition and future direction of their waning theocracy. Among the many figurative utterances that Isaiah spoke to his people during those turbulent times was this cataclysmic declaration:
 
"Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill made low, the crooked straight, and the rough places plain."

Two and a half millenia later, the composer George Frideric Handel appropriated this mountainous prophecy for the the introductory elements of his classic musical oratorio, The Messiah.

In any venue where the piece is performed, Handel's masterpiece of Messianic fervor begins with a dynamic, stringed baroque overture. Then, in clear, declarative recitative, the bold tenor voice announces that Jerusalem's warfare is done, divine absolution is on the way, and now is the time to "make straight in the desert a highway for our God."

Since a highway requires some earth-moving preparatory work, the tenor's exposition continues with Isaiah's earth-shaking analogy that I mentioned above:

"Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill made low, the crooked straight, and the rough places plain."

But there is much more going on here in the scriptural proclamation than a proposal for highway construction. Isaiah was enunciating a foundational principle of Jewish identity, and later Christian hope: Justice. And not just any old legal notion of justice, but a divinely-appointed equality among God's people that is achieved when their societal field is providentially leveled and everyone has opportunity to live bountifully.

Now, what I'm wondering is: Will this God-sanctioned hope for justice on earth be accomplished through the Almighty's soverign mandate upon his people,  or do we, as God's people (if you count yourself among that group as I do) need to get busy and make the righteous vision happen?

If Isaiah's echoing, metaphorical call to level the playing field resonates in your soul-- if you can glean from his prophetic vision a possibility that someday the lowly will be raised up, and the high and mighty humbled--if you can catch a glimpse of a coming kingdom in which  mercy and grace obliterates oppression and injustice--then you may someday be singing that Hallelujah chorus with Isaiah and Handel in the Messiah's  grand finale.

 I Hope to see you there.

The Working Principle of Jubilee

In ancient Israel, the land was understood to be a posession of God, with its owners being stewards, or caretakers. When a parcel was sold by one Israelite to another, its transferrance was considered a lease of the land's use--that is to say, a sale of future crops therein--not an absolute ownership, since that domain was reserved to the Creator alone.
 
In order that the people of God might establish a manageable economy, their Creator mandated a fifty year cycle--a system of seven revolving seven-year periods, plus one extra year, later called the (50th) year of "jubilee." By this revolving arrangement the natural inclination of human productivity toward inflation would be neutralized with a built-in systematic deflation. A sale of land in year 1 of the cycle would obstensibly be worth 49 times its value in year 49, since 49 prospective crops were understood to be the virtual substance of the transaction.

Furthermore, the working out of this economy also required that existing debts among Israelites be cancelled every seven years, and also that indentured servants or slaves be freed in that same seventh (sabbath) year. In the 50th year, at the end of the cycle, the land itself was returned to its original family of ownership of fifty years ago.

By this means, incentives for upward mobility of productive people were woven into the economy, and periodic debt forgiveness eliminated accruals of huge, unsurmountable debt among the working people. Accumulations of vast landed estates and monopolistic entities were also prevented, if the system was working as the Creator had designed it.

In this way, the followers of God were set up to prosper, both individually, familially, and collectively, according to the respective levels of their own chosen productivity and stewardship. And a constant deliverance of the poverty-stricken (unemployed) persons from a poorhouse fate would preclude a permanant underclass.

In real time, it didn't exactly work out that way, but the theoretical principles of Sabbaths, Jubilee, systematic deflation (not as bad as it sounds), and debt forgiveness might be worth considering in light of our presently hyper-leveraged circumstances.

The principle of regular sabbath renewals goes back to God's original creative work as it is figuratively documented in Genesis. God revealed himself to humans as a Creator. A definitive part of that creative process included rest and introspective recovery for the sake of developmentally corrective alignment.

If you care to learn more about this divine economy, and perhaps to consider its applications to modern existence, read Leviticus 25 and Deutoronomy 15, in the Bible.

Glass half-Full

The Ghost

That Occupying spirit face, it hauntifies my mind--
a smirky mask with painted smile upon its face of ghastly white.
Oh! what a ghostly site.
With black-lined clownish bizarrity
it mocks authority,
and conjures up signs of somethin happnin here;
what it is aint exactly clear.
Now fhe windmills of my mind  crank out shadowy spectres from long ago:
the port huron statement and
four dead in ohio.
I see the ghost of  My Lai massacre;
it stalks my g-generation like a smear--
blood on our hands from the tip of an agent-orange-spiked spear.
Out damned spot!
Have you come to splotch us again?
Out, I say, with the dire trespass of dow jones culpability
and exploding napalm fire like some howling banshee.
As puff the magic dragon who used to frolic in autimn mists
so our innocence has spiraled up in smoky days,
with unwelcome images from a Gulf of Tonkin haze.
Deja vu
I feel this wallstreet visitation is a spectre of impending trouble:
calling into question all the blood guilt ever known by man, double
and all the carnage ever splattered on to span
upon a waste and wanton land;
Who's responsible for this?
And my mind misgives some consequence yet hanging in the stars
shall bitterly begin
with these Occupying rebels
whose consensual zeal would snuff out the wallstreet conniption fit
of capitalism's big collateralized debt obligation zit,
as if the heart of depraved man could be improved upon a bit.
Oh shit!
This protest, in its collective sensibility,
is presumed more pristine
than corporate culpability,
with its globalized guile and leveraged guilt.
Does their urgent cry for egalité
cloak some fateful guillotine strategé?
A reign of terror from the tyrrany of the ninety-nine
to thrash out the fattened one-percent piggy kine?
Will this produce a future gulag or a forced labor camp,
a cultural revolution led by a raging tramp?
Who's responsible for this?
this fermenting mobbish contagion
transgression upon our convulsing nation.
It renders ashen white our neo-wallstreet mask
and calls us to blot out the bloody task
of human business.
Out! damned spot, we cry unto the whispering wind.
lay on us no more collateral damage to offend.
And ask not for whom that damned bell  tolls;
now it peels again and again unto our restless souls.

Our ancestral refugees left ghoulish tales from long ago and far away
of the dachau and  the auschwitz and the hitlerian birkenau.
And we hear ghastly tales from the so-called other side
of how they perished in stalin's gulag, and in the mao's "cultural revolution" millions died.
By their calculated rearrangements of the classified human chain,
they bound our bloody attempts to declassify into some ghoulish arbitrary game,
where the shedding of guilty blood, for the intent to make everything right
became an instant reply of human cruelty, sprinkled with bloody fright.

Now we the piggy capitalists, have we crossed that same damned line?
Have our reckless swapping one-percent cast unbearable load upon the ninety-nine?
Do you Occupyers now propose to judge their fatcat games
with social restructurings to expunge their selfish shames?
Good luck with that;
it'll be a cold day in hell
when we know for whom that bell
tolls.
Our capitalist souls?

Organizing the 9%

As much as the Occupy movement would aspire to represent  99% of the  people, they can claim to persuasively echo the opinions and active strategies of...maybe 9%.

Although far more than nine percent of people have become disgruntled because Congress bails out the corporate cronies, and although far more than nine percent of folks are frustrated with ecological disasters and abuses that have been mismanaged through gov/corp collusion, and although far more than 9.1% of the people feel as if their labor and resources are  being jerked around by the soulless machinations of greedy, outsourcing corporations, there are really only about nine percent of  We the People who are willing to be associated with and directed by Occupation activists.

However, if the Occupyers could manage somehow to effectively represent, say, a mere 9% of the people, that is nine times as many  as the 1% whose bank accounts they are trying to siphon. But their first major hurdle in that wealth redistribution quasi-socialist quest would be to get organized. That is no simple task, as I recently witnessed firsthand. In fact this whole movement will be a marathon of dedicated organizing if it is ever going to amount to anything besides a series of sign-wielding collective walks in the park.
 
At the stone staircase of the Vancouver Art Museum on Saturday and Sunday, I watched as a core group of intense activists initiated in their city what has become the Occupy movement's "achieving consensus" process. It is a tedious sequence of speaker/crowd interactivity that appears, from my observer perspective, laboious and perhaps somewhat self-defeating.

Nevertheless,  the agenda-writing nucleus of organizers seemed quite intent on building consensus from their small activist cadre outward amongst the gathering legion of discontents. They wanted it done a certain way, at the risk of appearing, to an instant-breakfast world, disorganized.

The use of amplified sound through use of a microphone was a point of subtle contention among two factions of the the leader group. It took a few hours on Saturday morning as well as Sunday to work out the kinks. A speaker-call / crowd-repeat procedure that must have originated with the wallstreet cadre had already become dogma for some of the agenda-setting core, while other initiators among them obviously preferred the pragmatically loud use of the microphone. Technological enhancement uncovers undesirable bourgeois luxuries. Such subtle concessions to capitalist convenience can easily lead to domination of the gathered crowd by gifted orators, or "showboaters" as one humble speaker referred to them. Amplified rhetoric can enable, theoretically, opportunitstic demogogs to  manipulate the assembled masses. Thus can the ideal of egalitarian democracy be undermined by silver-tongued soapboxers. Not good.

I observed with interest as a purist group within the agenda-setting core labored tediously to lay a foundation of simple unamplified call/response democratic consensus building. It was, let's face it, primitive, although I could surmise the solid ideologic basis for it. Over the course of two disjointed hours, however, the pragmatic faction was able to procedurally insert selective use of the microphone into the nascent consensus process. This distant listener thought the microphone use lent a definite improvement to their presentations.

By and by, the Vancouver Occupy agenda-setters were able to establish a sequence of procedures by which  their two-hundred-or-so core of gathered faithful (while hundreds more of curious bystanders watched) could voice some procedural decisions about where this thing was headed.  Past mid-afternoon on Sunday, I don't know what Occupy Vancouver did, but their inception was fascination for this detached observer.

I departed the scene several hours later, thinking it would be a long time before this movement accomplishes anything substantial. Leaderless democracy, which appears to be the gold standard among this movement's initiators,  initially produces apparent chaos. At least that's the way it seemed to me as I witnessed the Occupy Vancouver public inception. What fundamental organization may have been established beneath that irresolute exterior, only time will tell.

After a dusky train ride with wife and son back to Seattle, I returned on nippy Monday morning, with journalistic curiosity, to the Occupy site in Westlake Park, downtown. Previously, I had witnessed parts of the Wednesday and Thursday daytime sessions there. The Seattle crowd seemed, to me, much scruffier and streetish than the intense Vancouverites. A rag-tag band of pierced, tattood occupyers hung out where the podium had been last week. They were  meagerly holding on to this public square, insofar as it was possible amidst the gently ominous peripheral police presence. While most lingerers were milling around in apparent aimless expectation, an ameobic bundle of them languished near the low stone platform that had been the focal site of last week's rallying excitement. A pervasive attitude of don't let this magic moment slip away hung in the air like contraband smoke.

A plethora of handmade signs was constant, hundreds of them, in both Vancouver and Seattle, many of them quite clever. By mid-afternoon on Monday, I saw from my Starbucks perch a bearded Seattle protester  with a large, neatly lettered green on white that read: PROSECUTE BANKSTERS. It was a distilled message that indicated what might become an actual judgemental plank of the emerging Occupy platform. This was the goal that I had heard a week or two ago, spoken by Michael Moore in an NPR interview.

Such an indictment would materialize only through a very long, drawn out campaign by the Occupyers.

Canadian columnist Conrad Black wrote insightfully in last Saturday's National Post:
"Assessing blame is complicated. This (the wallstreet meltdown of '08 and its economic fallout) was not a case where an easily identifiable group committed monstrously illegal acts in the manner of Bernard Madoff....financiers cannot be prosecuted for mere acts of stupidity. There have been prosecutions, most of them unsuccessful, and the whole retrubitive effort has been mired in the name-calling between the financial and political communities."  

My present uptake from all this observation is that the derivatives-wielding wallstreet 1% better clean up their act before the radical rabble 9%, claiming to speak for the 99, decides to ditch the consensus process and take matters into their own revolutionary hands.

CR, with new novel, Smoke, in progress

Wealth Distribution

Karl Marx said religion is the opiate of the people. He must have noticed that its believers were generally more prone to forgive the wicked than to overthrow them. But Marx had formed his theories long before the narcoticizing power of the televesion age, which neutralizes the masses with affordable luxury and meaningless pop culture . You can't organize a dictatorship of the proletariat among a herd of virtual contented cows.

What the revolutionaries really need to redistribute bourgeois wealth is a herd of boshevik bulls who can throw their weight around in the delicately stratified china shop of societal order. But the problem for revolutionaries in north America has always been that the bulls--the real movers and shakers-- sided early on with the capitalists, and they all ended up on wallstreet building productive companies and  prosperous portfolios, instead of revolutions. 

Although the revolutionaries are loath to admit it, the capitalist system has actually distributed wealth quite broadly and plentifully during the last hundred and twenty years or so.

That wave of growing prosperity, unprecedented in world history, has not been distributed equally. Broadly and plentifully, yes, but not equally. This is nothing new; wealth accumulation has never in human history been egalitarian. And it never will be, no matter what the professor says, no matter what the Occupy speaker in the public square says.

While the bulls have been kicking up gold dust on wall street for a couple of centuries, mom and pop were setting up shop down on main street catching a piece of the action. That's how it has been in north America.

The fact that the system now fails to deliver goods and services at levels previously enjoyed is undeniable. Suddenly, in the space of a few years, there doesn't seem to be enough wealth to go around. But we the people are not powerless. I prefer to believe we can act, individually and collectively, in love and kindness, and yes--in peace and self-control-- toward every person, and every group of persons we meet.

Many millenia ago, a fearless speaker spoke about a coming Messiah. Isaiah prophecied that the promised one would "judge the needy with righteousness. With justice he will give decisions for the poor of the earth. He will strike the earth with the rod of his mouth; with the breath of his mouth he will slay the wicked."

I, a Christian believer, am willing to await Messiah's decision on these matters of justice, instead of taking matters into my own sinfully selfish hands. That position renders me as "religious" in the eyes of a secularly evolving world.

Now I've keyed up enough here for one Sunday morning session at Starbucks. I'll take a walk, one block along Georgia Street to the art museum, where the Occupy Vancouver crowd gathers. Let's see what those who claim to speak for the 99 have to say about the one.

Glass Chimera

Faithful Presence

To change the world-- a noble challenge to which we Christians have always aspired-- now becomes a new call to service issued by James Davison Hunter, in his book by the same name: To Change the World.

Dr. Hunter's clarion call is preceded in the book by an analysis of historical and contemporary manifestations, among the people who call themselves servants of God, of that God-inspired inclination to make the world a better place. Hunter's analysis identifies three strategic camps within  American Christianity today:
~Christians whose dominant cultural identity is found in defending themselves and their institutions (especially the family) from encroaching secularism; (the "defensive against" camp, as defined by Prof. Hunter)
~Christians whose motivation for divine fulfillment is centered on working toward justice, and toward institutional and individual benevolence to help poor and oppressed people; (the "relevance to" camp as defined by Prof. Hunter)
~Christians whose purpose is to maintain and advocate a pure manifestation of Christ's work and teachings, with emphasis on peace and non-violence; (the "purity from" camp, as defined by Prof. Hunter)

After a cogent description of each, and consideration of their various impacts upon society as a whole, James David Hunter concludes his book's message with a new (although its as old as the prophet Jeremiah!) paradigm for Christian involvement in our secularized world. "Faithful presence" is the strategy by which we authenticate God's love for all people by adopting societal well-being as our own. This requires us to accept worldly responsibilities for the welfare of the communities and nation in which we live. Rather than despising worldly society we take our places, prepared and enabled by God, within it.

Our biblical example and precedent for this collaboration is found in the exhortation that Jeremiah issued to the Jewish exiles in Babylon, two and a half millenia ago. The prophet told them:

"Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, to all the exiles whom I have sent into exile form Jerusalem to Babylon: build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat their produce. Take wives and have sons and daughters; take wives for your sons, and give your daughters in marriage, that they may bear sons and daughters; multiply there and do not decrease. But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare." (Jer. 29:4-7)

I emphasize that last sentence because I think it summarizes well the essence of Professor Hunter's point. Even more importantly, though-- it is a biblically sound, potent call to service for our generation of Christians and all those who follow us--"faithful presence" in the community and nation in which we each live. Responsible presence, caring presence, contributing presence, and hey--presents! at Christmas and other appropriate times.

The "welfare" of which Jeremiah speaks above is not the governmental dole system which in some cases enables laziness and lethargy to overtake people who are down and out. Nevertheless, our welfare system--woefully deficient as it is-- is not beyond the capacity of our great God, through his son Jesus, to redeem and sanctify those unfortunate citizens (Christian and otherwise) who partake of it.
So do not judge those who find themselves stuck in that dolish "welfare" predicament. But rather, work as God's productive people, saved by the blood of the Lamb, to lift the levels of living water in God's sea of humanity so that all boats will rise within it.

Glass half-Full