Some of you may have noted that I have been a bit scarce around these parts of late.  The regulars here mostly know that I have been working on a project.  In short, I exhibited my art (jewelry) to the public for the first time last weekend.  This is something I have been wanting to do, or perhaps even been driven / lead toward for nearly 35 years now.  The path has been long for good reason and there is much I have learned along the way.

George Fox is reputed to have said: "There is no time but this present."  For better than 350 years now, Friends have held that there is no special sacred time or sacred place, all is sacred equally.  Carl Jung, after spending time among Friends commented that we consistently "find the sacred among the mundane", a practice he found commendable.  Voltaire also commented in his letters about the simplicity of this Friends approach.

In preparation to run our adult study today, I encountered some interesting articles in Quaker Life on the subject of Living Sacramentally.  Much as I did earlier today, I would like to share a few bits to ponder.

Or so states Senator Reid.  Many on the right are now accusing the Honorable Senator of giving aid and comfort to the enemy.  Our friends on the right are truly lost in this conclusion. There is nothing Senator Reid could say about this war that has even slightest value to the insurgents (or whatever name you prefer today).  At least nothing of value, when you compare it to the actual on the ground experience they have gained.  They already know what they are doing to us and Iraq, and they know it first hand.  Senator Reid has told them nothing that they do not know already in full measure.  There is no secret being revealed.

Of course, one could fuss about the semantics here.  Since there was never a truly clear definition of what "victory" would look like, "defeat", being the opposite state, equally suffers from a lack of definitive criteria.  One could even argue that since removing Saddam and his WMD were the major announced goals, "victory" has been achieved.  The daily car bombings unfortunately impinge rather heavily on such a conclusion.

I think we are simply asking the wrong question.  A better question might be why, in the richest society on the planet, is the news of a pregnancy greeted so frequently with fear and trepidation?  I would suggest that there are very real and concrete reasons for this and that the answer to this problem lies far closer to the core of "cherishing life" than the myriad questions so frequently asked and answered on this topic.

Author Jeff Cohen at Common Dreams recently pled with antiwar voters to elect Democrats to office this year: "A Democratic win in 2006 would be similar to 1998: a rejection of right-wing extremism and hypocrisy."

I fail to see the rationale. If we usher the Democrats into office on Nov. 7, we'll just be electing military extremism under a substitute banner - it won't be called Republican, but it'll still be wicked as all hell. Even Cohen admits that the Democratic leadership doesn't have a coherent agenda for Iraq, but still feels that an antiwar push inside the party could change that. What Cohen and others have embraced is a blatant call for lesser-evilism: ignore alternatives and vote for what you don't believe in, because it's strategic.

The whole plan: "take back Congress and then pull the Democrats in our direction." When has that ever worked? And why would the warmongering Democrats give their antiwar wing any credence? If the Democratic Party continues to receive our votes regardless of its positions, there is absolutely no reason for it to change.
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I hold out no hope that the Democratic Party can ever be reformed, but let's say by some divine intervention it can. If so, the only way that will ever happen will be when its antiwar constituents leave the party and challenge it from the outside.

I have seen this line of logic bandied about ever since the 2000 Nader Campaign.  There are a number of thought process errors built into this argument and substantive moral issues are involved.  More on the flip:

For most of us here, the answer would seem fairly obvious  The consensus definition might well be illustrated by some of those infamous photos from Abu-Ghraib.  Were I to put together a powerpoint presentation on this subject for the man, it might also include a few images from "Shock and Awe", a few slides from the Superdome after Katrina, and perhaps one or two of the floating remains in the streets of New Orleans after the storm.

Here is the broader question: Why is it that the President needs this concept defined with such great specificity?  The President contends that he needs this definition to protect our troops from war crimes prosecution.  He attempts to make this quest sound altogether normal and noble, I however, as apparently many others, even some within his own party, don't find this question asked with nearly so noble an intent.

In THE ENEMY AT HOME, bestselling author Dinesh D'Souza makes the startling claim that the 9/11 attacks and other terrorist acts around the world can be directly traced to the ideas and attitudes perpetrated by America's cultural left.

D'Souza shows that liberals--people like Hillary Clinton, Ted Kennedy, Barney Frank, Bill Moyers, and Michael Moore--are responsible for fostering a culture that angers and repulses not just Muslim countries but also traditional and religious societies around the world. Their outspoken opposition to American foreign policy--including the way the Bush administration is conducting the war on terror--contributes to the growing hostility, encouraging people both at home and abroad to blame America for the problems of the world. He argues that it is not our exercise of freedom that enrages our enemies, but our abuse of that freedom--from the sexual liberty of women to the support of gay marriage, birth control, and no-fault divorce, to the aggressive exportation of our vulgar, licentious popular culture.

The cultural wars at home and the global war on terror are usually viewed as separate problems. In this groundbreaking book, D'Souza shows that they are one and the same. It is only by curtailing the left's attacks on religion, family, and traditional values that we can persuade moderate Muslims and others around the world to cooperate with us and begin to shun the extremists in their own countries.

Rather than stick with the fairly obvious notion that the terrorists dislike us because we arm and support regimes that repress them and occasionally show up and start bombing their people, he apparently posits that they actually hate us because we let our women use birth control.  Insanity looms large my friends.

Apparently there simply has to be a reason why Bush's well laid Neo-Conservative plans did not work.  Clearly, the conclusion that cannot be mentioned is also the obvious: that the plans were catastrophically flawed in concept and executed with inestimable incompetence.  However, while this conclusion is increasingly obvious to almost anyone with discernable activity in the cerebral cortex, D'Souza heads off a completely different direction.  Since "they hate us for our freedoms" if the tome follows through on this description, the best thing we can do to secure the homeland is surrender our freedoms.  Only when we become equal companions in repression can alliances be formed.

This simply has to be one of the most insane premises for a piece of literature I have come across in many a year.  Now it is true that I read very little right wing stuff, so perhaps there is even more bizarre stuff out there.  It seems unlikely, but perhaps true.

Just for the record, I am politically on the left, religious, attend worship services weekly, am happily married with two fine kids, employed, obey the law, and have values with a 350 year tradition.

Ideas die hard.  As badly as this Neo-Con concept has failed and continues to flounder, it is now clear that denial will increasingly become more strident and off the wall.

"If there is to be a religious solution to the social problem there must also be renewed in a disintegrating society the sense of community, of mutuality, of
responsible brotherhood for all..."
American Friends Service Committee, `Speak Truth to Power," 1955

Friends have long held a testimony to blessed community.  It arose from many places in the Bible.  This could well be one:

1 Thessalonians 5
 9For God did not appoint us to suffer wrath but to receive salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ. 10He died for us so that, whether we are awake or asleep, we may live together with him . 11Therefore encourage one another and build each other up, just as in fact you are doing.

 12Now we ask you, brothers, to respect those who work hard among you, who are over you in the Lord and who admonish you. 13Hold them in the highest regard in love because of their work. Live in peace with each other. 14And we urge you, brothers, warn those who are idle, encourage the timid, help the weak, be patient with everyone. 15Make sure that nobody pays back wrong for wrong, but always try to be kind to each other and to everyone else.

How Friends find this to walk and more on the flip.

The Pew Hispanic Center, a non-partisan organization, has conducted and released a study that dismantles this myth.  In brief, they attempted to find a correlation between levels of documented and undocumented immigrants and employment outcomes for native workers.  In summary, they found no correlation.

Now, it is true that real wages and benefits have been falling for working Americans.  It is also true that the level of documented and undocumented immigration has been increasing at the same time. However, as any devotee of Pastafarianism is aware, the fact that two things occur at the same time does not create a causal relationship:

Pirates and global warming:

According to the Pastafarian belief system, pirates are "absolute divine beings" and the original Pastafarians. Their image as "thieves and outcasts" is all misinformation spread by Christian theologians of the Middle Ages. In reality, Pastafarianism says that they were "peace-loving explorers and spreaders of good will" who would distribute candy to children.

The inclusion of pirates into Flying Spaghetti Monsterism was part of Henderson's original letter to the Kansas School Board, as a way of illustrating that correlation does not equal causation. In it, Henderson puts forth the argument that "global warming, earthquakes, hurricanes, and other natural disasters are a direct effect of the shrinking numbers of pirates since the 1800s."[3] A chart accompanying the letter shows that as the number of pirates decreased, global temperatures increased, bringing attention to the fact that things with statistically significant correlations are nevertheless not necessarily related.

from Wikipedia

Further myths below:

Israel, with U.S. support, intends to resist calls for a cease-fire and continue a longer-term strategy of punishing Hezbollah, which is likely to include several weeks of precision bombing in Lebanon, according to senior Israeli and U.S. officials.

For Israel, the goal is to eliminate Hezbollah as a security threat -- or altogether, the sources said. A senior Israeli official confirmed that Hezbollah leader Hasan Nasrallah is a target, on the calculation that the Shiite movement would be far less dynamic without him.

For the United States, the broader goal is to strangle the axis of Hezbollah, Hamas, Syria and Iran, which the Bush administration believes is pooling resources to change the strategic playing field in the Middle East, U.S. officials say.

Former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich says America is in World War III and President Bush should say so. In an interview in Bellevue this morning Gingrich said Bush should call a joint session of Congress the first week of September and talk about global military conflicts in much starker terms than have been heard from the president.

"We need to have the militancy that says 'We're not going to lose a city,' " Gingrich said. He talks about the need to recognize World War III as important for military strategy and political strategy.
...

"This is World War III," Gingrich said. And once that's accepted, he said calls for restraint would fall away:

"Israel wouldn't leave southern Lebanon as long as there was a single missile there. I would go in and clean them all out and I would announce that any Iranian airplane trying to bring missiles to re-supply them would be shot down. This idea that we have this one-sided war where the other team gets to plan how to kill us and we get to talk, is nuts."

There is a public relations value, too. Gingrich said that public opinion can change "the minute you use the language" of World War III. The message then, he said, is "'OK, if we're in the third world war, which side do you think should win?"

To enhance my sense of grave concern, we have Army Chief of Staff, Gen. Peter Schoomaker quoted this morning stating that "I believe that we are closer to the beginning . . . than we are to the end," of the war on terror.

Added together, it seems that the overall concept is coalescing.  It seems that a new and much broader war on terrorism is in the offing. The plan seems to include a geopolitical restructuring of the middle east to favor parties more amendable to US / Israeli policies. Indeed, if this truly is the vision, then the General is correct, we have only just begun.

More news and comment on the flip:

I find the most compelling description of a "Leading" to be as the works of God as immanent and present in the lives of those prepared to listen in this time and place.  It is similar to a "calling" or "vocation" in a sense, but radically different in another.  Similar to a Vocation, Leadings can be the work of a lifetime, however Leadings can also be immediate and short term.  I find Quakerism, at its core to include mysticism, but to be based in a prophetic stream.  It is our conviction that through prayerful listening one can become atoned to the will of God and act in concert with it.

For example, we only speak when "led" at worship.  In the unprogrammed tradition, it is distinctly inappropriate to prepare a message in advance of worship.  It is highly appropriate to study and make time for daily worship.  However, one is to approach worship in community in expectant silence waiting to be "Led".  I have been Led to speak at Meeting and, on occasion, to act on Leadings.  The experience can only be described poorly, but it can be like a wave takes that hold of you and suddenly you are just along for the ride.  If able, one customarily stands when speaking, and I have heard the sense of a Leading from others described as "being unable to sit any longer".

Other Friends of my acquaintance have also experienced Leadings that bore more resemblance to a Calling or Vocation that led to decades of concerted work for social justice.  Then there are those I have met that seem truly Led to a different sort of ministry.  Mary, a now passed Friend of long acquaintance, seemed simply Led to bring the most exquisite pies to Meeting and could always be counted on for words of comfort.

More discussion and a couple of questions on the flip:

What if Al-Queda blew up the levees
Would New Orleans have been safer that way
Sheltered by our Government's protection
Or was someone just not home that day?

Signs of the failure of the covenant to community are all around us.  I think it is pretty clear that if this President had been given three days warning that Al-Queda was heading to New Orleans to blow up the levees, something much more substantial would indeed have been done.  It might not have been effective, but it certainly would not have lacked for fireworks.  All hands would have been on deck and there would have been a second and third shift.

Today the Washington Post reports that 1.3 Billion dollars have been given away in farm subsidies to folks who not only are not farmers, but have no intention to ever farm anything.  More telling is this snippet:

The payments now account for nearly half of the nation's expanding agricultural subsidy system, a complex web that has little basis in fairness or efficiency. What began in the 1930s as a limited safety net for working farmers has swollen into a far-flung infrastructure of entitlements that has cost $172 billion over the past decade. In 2005 alone, when pretax farm profits were at a near-record $72 billion, the federal government handed out more than $25 billion in aid, almost 50 percent more than the amount it pays to families receiving welfare.

In short, under the system as "reformed" by conservative republican governance, we now pay more for people not to grow crops, including to those who never had any intent to grow them in the first place, than we pay to feed the hungry.  The money that has simply gone missing in Iraq may well exceed what we spend bringing relief to the "least among us".  Our conservative leaders stand by and watch this happen, and on occasion, facilitate it.  

As a further example consider the "Florida A+" program.  As originally instituted, the concept ran that testing would be used to identify failing public schools, take the money and students out of them and spend it on vouchers for private and largely religious schools.  This flew in the face of an amendment to our states constitution, passed by the voters in the same election that made JEB Governor, which required the government to provide a free high quality public education to all of its children.  The program has since been modified through a combination of citizen initiative and the State Supreme Court tossing out vouchers as unconstitutional. The point being, rather than seeing the fact that any public schools were failing as a failure of the government to shoulder it's responsibility, it was seen as a natural and acceptable consequence of government run institutions to have failing schools, and of course, a potential business opportunity.

Each year these leaders spend hundreds of billions of dollars of our children's and grandchildren's money.  The "fiscal conservatives" are in charge and best they can muster is a "stop us before we spend again" line item veto proposal.

There is a logical thread that hangs all of this together.  It arises from a philosophy of governance which believes at depth that government cannot work and generally serves only to interfere with individual success and prosperity.  Specifically, it is held that governmental efforts to provide assistance only serve to enable failure as opposed to empowering success.

That this conclusion stands completely at odds with American history somehow all but escapes notice.  Look around you, the evidence is everywhere.  The Interstate highway system, built largely by the government of our parents, facilitates commerce at levels heretofore unseen.  Remember when Gorbachev came to visit G.H.W. Bush?  At some point they went to a grocery store.  You might recall G.H.W. Bush's curious fascination with the checkout scanner, but Gorbachev's comment was far more telling.  It went something like "You have so many things!".  Consider our free system of public education, yes, it is no longer the very best in the world, but it has stood as a shining example to the rest of the world for most of it's 200+ year history.  Indeed, even today, much of the world still lacks such a system. This philosophy of governance denies reality and clearly stands as one of the most massive and horribly failed social engineering projects ever undertaken.