What Occupies My Heart

Laurie:  Thanks in part to my Los Angeles upbringing, my mother's determined stance against racism, the wonders of the internet age, and my Christian faith, I have had the pleasure of developing warm relationships with people of various races, nationalities, professions, education levels, socioeconomic levels, religions (or lack thereof), sexual orientations, lifestyles, and political persuasions. So I speak from my own experience when I say that there are challenges to be faced and rich benefits to be gained in maintaining relationships with lots of different kinds of people.... 

I wrote the paragraph above some weeks ago, with the intention of entering into a discussion with Paul about the "Occupy Wall Street" movement.  As it so often happens, Paul had his own take on it and was ready to publish long before I was able to gather my own thoughts.  I was initially reacting to a graphic posted by more than one of my politically conservative Christian friends on Facebook mocking the Occupy Wall Street protestors, pointing out the supposed irony of people crying out against corporations when these same people rely upon and make use of the products these corporations produce.

It had brought to mind immediately a graphic and article I'd seen some months before, posted by some of my more progressive leaning friends pointing out ironies they see in the complaints of protesting Tea Partiers, who rely upon and benefit from the very services of the government they don't want to pay taxes to.

Though I am decidedly more sympathetic to one of these movements than the other, I'm not involved in either, and as one standing on the outside  I see them as similar in many ways:  the Tea Party, simplistically speaking, is afraid America is falling apart because of various liberal government policies, and because a Democrat president was elected into office for the first time in eight years, leaving them with the terrifying feeling that the nation's liberals would now have free rein. Because of what they see as bad government, they are reacting by raging against government.  The Tea Party doesn't want government having control over their lives.

The Occupy movement, on the other hand, in so far as I've seen it represented, sees America falling apart as the result of the unfettered greed and political influence of many corporations, particularly banks and financial institutions, who have run roughshod over the economy and been given greater influence over elections via the recent Supreme Court ruling on election funding. These are concerns I can certainly sympathize with, especially after my husband lost his job weeks into the crash of '08 and could not find work for a full 19 months after.  I find it hard to be to hostile to my government when it's policies, namely unemployment insurance, were among the means God used to keep us in our home and out of foreclosure during those months.  We are truly thankful.  

Another Great Depression was averted, thanks in great measure to our admittedly imperfect government,  thanks to governmental safety nets put in place after the Great Depression: unemployment benefits to tide people over and keep them housed and fed while looking for new work, federal deposit insurance to prevent panicked runs on banks, social security helping the elderly and disabled stay afloat when other supports crumbled, to name the first that come to mind.  A lot of people lost a lot, to be sure.  Paul and I are still catching up from what we lost, and from the investments we would not have made had we known the housing market would crash.  But it was not another Great Depression.

As I said, I started this post weeks ago with an agenda I no longer feel is worth pursuing.  Since that time the Occupy Movement has expanded and finally gotten the attention of the mainstream news media.  As a result, I have had even more time to watch the reactions and read the rhetoric of both sides, frequently through the lens of my diverse group of friends on Facebook. Some people are frightened,  some frustrated, some angry, some even hateful.  So many people are struggling. Unfortunately, however, we have chosen not to be concerned for one another, to listen, to work together.  Instead we've taken adversarial positions of blame, finger-pointing, sarcasm, scorn, and mocking.  In my daydreams people pull together in the face of adversity, but the sad reality  is that these hard times are not uniting us but dividing us. 

The situation is deteriorating...America is disintegrating, and my points in the end, keep seeming pointless.

There are so many things I could say, but are they worth saying?  Will they make any difference?  Will they help even one person know what to do or how to survive times like these?  Will they add a single drop of peace into the ocean of turmoil America is becoming?

Paul, I meant to write this post on my own, a response of sorts to yours, but I'm at loose ends.  Perhaps you can help find my way to what matters most?

Paul:  I may be of some assistance here.  I shan't waste anymore time expressing my own feelings on the subject, although, possibly steering the conversation in the right direction, I find myself thinking of what Mr. Daniel Handler (under his well known nom de plume Lemony Snickett) recently observed about the unfolding, and I think all sides can agree on the employment of the adjective "unfortunate" events,

"Historically, a story about people inside impressive buildings ignoring or even taunting people standing outside shouting at them turns out to be a story with an unhappy ending."

What, then, would be the wisdom I would give to an audience with the parties involved?  What would I wish to express to the angry person on the street, the corrupt capitalist, and the arguably even more corrupt politician who has systematically removed all fetters from the corrupt capitalist over the past 20ish years?

There is this wonderful recorded speech from antiquity, perhaps you've heard of it, called The Sermon on the Mount.  Jesus Christ got up before a group of people and gave them a fairly succinct outline on how one ought to live, a pragmatic philosophy for those who would follow His worldview.  It is full of phrases like "Give us this day our daily bread" and "Forgive us our debts as we also have forgiven our debtors" and "Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal, but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven" and "Look to the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them" and "whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them."

la Liberté guidant le peuple - Delacroix, image via Wikipedia

I think that a shift in consciousness is occurring in this country, but I fear that it is not shifting in the direction that would be most beneficial to all.  I think that in order to achieve a world in which each give according to their abilities to meet each according to their needs, there must a shift toward focusing on service.  I fear that the bully will not give the people their lunch money back and la Liberté guidant le peuple will have the blood of the martyrs watering the flowers of Central Park.  The fat will grow fatter on the backs of the lean.  The great rigged game will continue.  The poor we will always have with us.  We seem to be in one such cycle where the rich get particularly greedy, the poor get particularly angry, the middle class get even angrier than anyone else because the rich getting particularly greedy has now made them among the poor, the rich make themselves scarce when the heads start rolling, and then the insurgents behave just as badly, if not worse, than the rulers they ousted.  Being a global community, it is happening all over the world right now.  The birds and lilies don't seem to notice.

If you would be perfect, sell what you possess and give to the poor.  Waste no time arguing what a good man should be, be one.


Laurie:  And I think you lead me exactly to my point.  How can any man, or any nation of men, be truly good? People have been trying since people have been people.  We've tried it through government and law, experimenting for as long as we've been in existence with various forms, with varying degrees of success for various periods of time. Yet none has stood the test of time, because not one has ultimately managed to govern the human heart. Human nature itself is the force that both drives and destroys human government.

Paul:  If I may interject again and reiterate something I said at lunch today.  History is full of the hairy- chinned manifesto author with a thousand faces who sit in a café and thinks about the problems of the modern world, where they come from, how to solve them.  They scribble on napkins and publish leaflets, manifestos, poems, songs.  People follow them, revolutions happen, then the people who replace the people in power are as bad as or worse than the people they deposed.

Aside from raging sociopaths, we all know what being good looks like.  The Neo-Atheist movement beats this drum all of the time.  They are good and moral.  They give blood, call their mothers, and donate liberally.  We know that good generally revolves around loving one another and focusing outward instead of focusing on one's self.  We all know that if there are six people in the room and six slices of cake, it's bad form to eat more than one slice.  But history will also back me up in the fact that we, humans, don't do what we ought to.

Laurie:  Oops....it never occurred to me to count the people in the room and compare it the the number of slices.  My apologies to everyone whose piece of cake I mindlessly devoured.  I will certainly try to pay attention to this in the future.

Interestingly, the two strongest idealistic threads I've seen running through conservative Christian politics recently happen to be diametrically opposed to one another.  The first is the belief that in order to save America we must subject her, as nearly as possible, to the Law of God as spelled out in the Old Testament. This notion is preached with all the confidence of people who are convinced that they will have no problem keeping this law.

As you know, Paul, last week, I ran into a former neighbor of ours who insisted that subjecting America to the Law of Moses would restore God's blessing to her.  This man, like the Jews, had missed the lesson of the Law entirely.  No man, apart from Jesus Christ, God's own Son, has ever obeyed the Law of Moses perfectly.  The point of the Law, and the necessity of the sacrifices it required day after day and year after year was to teach men that they are sinners and that sacrifice was necessary to atone for sin. (This was meant to point the way to the ultimate sacrifice, that of Jesus Christ Himself.) As the Apostle Paul put it:  "For by works of the law no human being will be justified in his sight, since through the law comes knowledge of sin." (Rom. 3:10)  God wanted the people to recognize and be honest with themselves about the condition of their hearts and to look to Him for the mercy that only His perfect sacrifice  could provide. What was never intended was for people to use His laws as ways to curry His favor, as if by their own efforts they could be good enough, or to promote a political agenda for the United States of America.

The second of these threads is exactly opposite.  It is the cry from which America was born, the cry for freedom.  Here we are, in the "Land of the Free", but it will never be free enough for some, and, for those being trampled by the freedoms of those more powerful than themselves it may feel far too free. In truth, our hearts cry for freedom, yet our hearts cannot be trusted with it, because our hearts are sinful.

In truth, we all want government, we just don't think we are the ones who need it.  Law is for the ones who do, the other guy.

Paul:  Funny you should mention that because you also ran into another bedlamite this past week who was trying to convince you of his own sinless perfection.  It's an aberrant doctrine which I've heard a few dozen times over the past few years which, like George MacDonald upon learning of predestination, almost makes me want to burst into tears.  Sin is the first thing that ever made sense to me in theology.  My own imperfection and the imperfection of everyone else was my ingress to Christianity.  It made sense of observable reality on micro (self) and macro (everyone else in the world) levels.  Try as I may, I've never been able to shake that essential truth.  And the only hope is of a benevolent and perfect God providing atonement for said sinfulness.  To me, the suggestion of sinless perfection in this lifetime is about as abhorrent a suggestion as a human can suggest.

I notice a common thread in the two awful ideologies presented to you over this past week.  Both are focused on self-righteousness.  Both are focused on you being, as I say, the King of Right Mountain.  It's a subtle shift which happens too often in ideology which leads down the road to brutality.  It's the shift from being focused on Truth to being focused on Being Right. 

 Laurie:  Yes. I think you are right (wink). We set up our camps;, we dig in our heels; we solidify our hearts against our rivals.  We forget the words of Christ when He said, "Love your neighbor as yourself,"and "Love your enemies. Do good to those who mistreat you," and "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you," and "Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth."  

We forget what we Christians have no right to ever forget: no matter who we are talking to, no matter  their political party, no matter their race or religion, no matter their educational level, profession, or sexual orientation, the sinful human heart cannot be managed from the outside.  The hope God offers to mankind does not come through law or government, it comes through faith in Jesus Christ, in his teachings, in His sacrifice for sin, and in His victory over death. Only in and through Him are lasting peace, unity, freedom, and love to be found.

So my hope is that we Christians, both on the right and the left of the political spectrum (yes, I know of a certainty there true Christians on both sides) will turn our hope away from politics, that we will stop mocking and insulting those we see as our enemies and start doing them good. My prayer is that we will return our focus and energies to Christ and His gospel, to making disciples, to seeing people set free in the way that matters most: free from the death clutch sin has on their lives.

Occupational Hazards

Paul:  I did not mean to or intend to attend the Occupy Chico protests.  I was doing something I often do on days off, which is to walk out my front door, walk around, and take pictures of things that I find interesting, beautiful, or inspiring.  Today, by a totally capricious turn of the foot, I made my way toward the downtown city plaza which, as it turns out, is the transient home for the Occupy Chico protestors.

When I was in college and deeply into my Quaker path, I went to several preemptive protests of the two abiding wars that my country are still involved in.  I had a sign I would take to the protests which read "Another Quaker for Peace."  I remember one march in which a man who was loud and vocal in his disagreement with our protest came up the line in the opposite direction from our march.  He stopped at me, read my sign, and said, "Well, I'll say one thing about you Quakers.  At least you're consistent."

I became disillusioned with protest movements when what were the largest global anti-war protests in history made absolutely no difference whatsoever.   Instead I focused my attention towards beauty, peace, and truth in hopes of being one vote towards a world inclined more in that direction.

This morning, before my walk, I read a bit about the Occupy Boston protest which is already sounding like this generation's Chicago 1968 Democratic Convention.  Chico's manifestation bore little resemblance to those news stories, and let me say right off the bat that nothing I say is intended to mock anyone by any means.  I am simply speaking from my own point of view.

I walked by the plaza and there were people sitting beneath tents.  There were signs, but no one was holding them and the slogans were, I thought, a bit uninspired.  Phrases like "The banks took our bailout money.  We want it back."  As someone apt to take photographs, I was disappointed.  I didn't see anything that made me want to photograph it.

Now, I have to emphasize that it was 1:00 pm on a Tuesday.  This was not exactly the peak time.  However, there were only 13 people.  It looked like this.

The caution tape was not a result of any concern on the part of the police or the city over the protests, but rather because the Parks department is redoing the sod around the trees.

I sat by the fountain about 25 feet away from the tents and a man stood up and began yelling.  He held pieces of paper.  At first I thought he was angry at the protestors until I caught little pieces of what he was saying over the gentle gurglings of the fountain.  "And corporations (gurgle gurgle) EVERY SINGLE DAY (gurgle gurgle) But the Consititution (gurgle.)"  Actually, I don't know why I'm trying to describe the sensation of sitting there.  I filmed a piece of it.

Eventually I moved closer.  As soon as the man started listing off dates of laws changing in America, I lost interest and left.  He looked like this:

I felt like you could change the outfit and setting and it could be a union organizer in the 1930s or an Ancient Greek philosopher or Lenin or Ezra Pound or Tristan Tzara or one of those Age of Reason French revolutionaries.  He is holding a manifesto and pacing as he reads it loudly.

What I feel about this current protest movement is complex.  I've read some good points being made.  I felt in almost complete agreement with this assessment from The Motley Fool, especially the three points which seem entirely reasonable and workable to me.

This may be my inherent misthanthropy or anti-social streak speaking or possibly the vestigial remains of my regrettable Calvinistic period, but I do feel that history will back me up in asserting that the major stumbling block to any Utopian movement is human beings.  I was recently revisiting studies in the works of Karl Marx and found, once again, that aside from throwing the baby of religion out with the bathwater, I am inclined to agree with him.  However, there is that awful grim spectre of all previous applications of his ideals in roughly 1/2 of human civilization in the previous century.  It did not go well.  One could make a very strong argument that those movements were not pure Marxist in spite of their claims.  Be that as it may, the practical applications of Marxism have been fairly ugly.  I think there may be those present in the movement in question who would point out equal atrocities as a result of unfettered Capitalism.  In short, I feel that checks and balances, opposing sides having equal power, are some of the best forms of regulating a society.  I am a fervent believer in democracy (in all of its clunkiness) because of the compromise and slow decisions such a system demands.

Laurie and I were discussing this and she said, "We have a complex government with a simple populus."  However, a simple populus, historically speaking, tends more toward the fascist/dictator models. 

One of the major problems of this sort of nascent movement is its undetermined direction.  On the opposite corner from the tents, completely diagonal and out of the sight line of the camp, was a lone man with a sign which read "End the Fed", and when I approached him from behind in order to cross the street, I could read something on the other side about Ron Paul.  Something enthusiastic I gathered.  But I felt fairly confident that the frustrations voiced on the opposite side of the park were of a more progressive nature, frustrated at the lack of restrictions on the market, indeed, the lack of government regulation to prevent the current economic collapse.  While I can sympathize with that mindset in a lot of ways, I feel like there is a real danger of a movement like this becoming The Tea Party, just with the opposite point of view.   

So, I'm left wondering what's really going on.  I suppose the fount from which this baker's dozen has flowed chose their place of gathering because of what they assume Wall Street represents.  There seems to me to be some panic and desperation in that choice.  I recall my late friend New York Rob telling me once that he wished there was a building somewhere that was "The Establishment Building."  It is probably worth stressing that this was before the buildings fell.

I can get right into the part of my brain that is still 20 year old Paul.  20 year old Paul would have been hopelessly devoted to a movement like this.  He would probably accuse 34 year old Paul of compromise (with the connotation that that is a bad thing.)  I can hear him say, "First they came for the Jews..." and things like that.  Faced with 20 year old Paul, I feel a niggling need to defend myself.

I do feel as though human beings need to be governed and most likely governed heavily.  I think that a complex system is probably a very good thing and that opposing forces are healthy.  I think that protests are healthy as well.  I think that people ought to hold one another accountable, which probably puts me more toward the Left end of the spectrum, probably closer to the people in the 13 person side of the park than the Objectivist corner.  But I also feel that tides can be turned in more quiet, monastic, contemplative, and wise ways.  You can take the Quaker out of the Meeting house, but you can't take the Meeting house out of the Quaker.

When Allen Ginsberg would go to protests, he would find a little corner and read poetry, sing songs, but mainly lead meditations.  And there would be Abbie Hoffman on the stage yelling about offing pigs while over in the corner there would be Ginsberg chanting "Om."  Sometimes the police would come and club them and they would keep saying "Om."  He felt that one should be the kind of change one wants to see in the world.  In spite of our different chosen traditions, I feel very much the same.

I feel as if I should be more of a contemplative.  I am so often immersed in the cares of this world and so often lose focus on what is truly important.  I feel like if I were to focus my attention on the "real work" that a great deal of my other problems (gluttony, stress, despair over the state of humankind, inactivity) would melt away.  Almost as if I were to seek first the kingdom of God, all of these things would be added unto me.  I just said that to Laurie and she said, "You know that passage comes from the part where Christ teaches to be anxious for nothing, right?"

I feel as if I am surrounded with a lot of very anxious people and their anxiety is seeping into my own.  I think the lesson I take from today is to be the man I ought to be.  A man standing around yelling in a park, regardless of whether or not I agree with what he is yelling, is still a man standing in a park yelling.  Eight billion people living within their means, providing for one another each to their needs to each to their abilities (which I believe Marx stole outright from Acts of the Apostles), treating one another as equals, understanding and admitting to the extent of our own shortcomings, loving one another as they love themselves... see what I mean?