dannyogden

Words of wisdom from a drag queen:

“Most of our lives is spent trying to figure out how to get to this next place. What we need to do is figure out how to receive each other as we sit here looking at each other. How to listen. How to get. Once we figure out how to do that, you can give me your gift. I get to turn to you and give it to you. You give it to someone else. That way, no one ever dies. No one ever goes away. Everything is circular. The end of something is always the beginning of something else. So, we’ve got to start being present in our own lives.” –Alexandra Billings

I really think trans people are the philosophers of our era.

Monday morning you will be hearing all about how at the 'eleventh hour' the Government shutdown was averted by a compromise. Indeed, to the extent that you are paying attention to the news over the weekend, you will see this narrative already being propagated. What you will not hear is that the Government HAS shut down. The cuts capitulated to in this 'compromise' would have happened at midnight anyway if the capitulation had not been made, but they would have been very temporary. Now, these cuts will be semi-permanent, at least, until the next budget is passed. That isn't the worst of this. What you saw if you had eyes were the two parties in our two-party system being completely ineffectual. What really happened here was an ideological war waged by one party and forfeited by the other. One party in the guise of balancing the budget waged a war on the health and welfare of average Americans after having given huge tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans. The other party failed to defend rhetorically Planned Parenthood, which provides healthcare to millions of Americans, the unemployed, who no longer have a voice, and other Americans who receive benefits they are entitled to, benefits their grandparents paid into, their parents paid into, their children pay into, and that their grandchildren will pay into. They allowed the narrative to be all about debts, deficits, budgets, and 'evil' health care providers, rather than about taxes for the wealthy and stimulus for the unemployed. There may not have been a government shutdown, but our system of government no longer functions anyway. If you have any doubts, just ask Bradley Manning.

We tend to shun the sick & the dying. We feel that when we are around them the dark cloud hangs over our head as well. We feel that the less time we spend around them, the more time we will have sunshine in our lives. But, I think some of us may just be blinded by the light and do not truly appreciate its warmth.

President Obama wants you to stock up on blankets, but you may want to stock up on canned goods, too. After giving away hundreds of billions of dollars to Wallstreet and tax cuts to the folks who make about three-hundred times as much as you do, Obama wants to implement austerity. What's austerity you ask? While you won't hear the word used by those calling for it, austerity is a fancy word for 'tightening your belt'. Obama wants you, the poor, the middle class, those who have been hit hardest by the Great Recession to tighten your belts, while the stock market is booming, corporate profits are up, and corporate cash on hand is at its highest levels...ever. Yes, Obama wants to cut energy subsidies for the poor, increase school loan interest, and cut community service grants, which increase the quality of life in poor communities. Unemployment is still near ten percent. Real unemployment is still near twenty percent. Obama wants poor people, unemployed middle class Americans on the verge of foreclosure, and underemployed middle class Americans on the verge of bankruptcy to tighten their belts, while the top two percent banks one hundred percent of their mommies' and daddies' multi-million dollar inheritances, tax-free.

I have been saying for a while that Obama may as well change the 'D' from the end of his name to an 'R'. He has capitulated, not compromised, on every demand made by conservatives. I have pondered what psychology is driving the man behind the agenda, but while it is interesting to think about, it makes little difference in the impact his agenda has on average Americans. Does he want everyone to like him? Is it all just about getting re-elected? Does he feel like his only obligation is to be the first African-American President regardless of performance? Is it really all just about crossing the aisle, bridging the divide, and building consensus, damn the consequences? Still, I hear people saying Obama is 'playing chess, not checkers'. The endgame of Obama's agenda, which is accommodating the agenda of conservatives, is to destroy the republic. Is Obama really giving the conservatives enough rope to hang themselves with? Is Obama allowing these failed policies to reach their ultimate failure so that there can be no doubt of their fallacy in the minds of average Americans? If this is the game Obama is playing, it is the most dangerous game, far worse than Richard Connell's. I would rather be hunted by a rifleman on a jungle island than play Obama's game, because on the path to demonstrating the failures of conservative ideology is death and destruction. The poor get poorer until they are so poor they can no longer live. To live is to resort to criminality and violence. In such conditions, insurrection is the patriotic duty of the people. The sick get sicker and die. Families are broken, bankrupt, and homeless, forced to freeze in the streets, while they starve. Poverty is sin and America may pay the price of revolution for this sin. We don't want revolution. Their outcomes are uncertain, and no revolution, even those beginning with peaceful protests, can be won without bloodshed. We don't want a revolution in the United States. We can never stray too far from the path to find our way back to it. We can still turn things around here.

I don't think Obama is the devil. I don't even think he is a bad President, but at best, he is a mediocre President at a very bad time in our history, a time when we need a lion. And, I don't want to play games at such a dangerous time in our history. I know he may in his time select several Supreme Court Justices, and the stakes are high. But, as it stands, now, I cannot in good conscience cast my ballot for him. I would have to abstain. I believe others would feel the same moral obligation to abstain. Obama needs to change course quickly and radically. He needs to roar like a lion and push a progressive agenda that will heal the poverty, homelessness, and joblessness that is ravaging this land. He needs to talk about a new New Deal. He needs to talk about a new WPA. He needs to champion major, not minuscule, infrastructure spending. He needs to push tariffs and sane fair trade policies. He needs to implement first-ever manufacturing policies. He needs to become a guardian against those who would attack Social Security, labor unions, and pension funds. He need to put asunder the Bush Doctrine and bring our troops home to rebuild this country. He needs to restore Habeas Corpus and end extraordinary rendition. If he does these things, not only will he have my vote, but he will have brought this country back from the brink, not just of a depression, but a violent revolution and uprising.

Thom Hartmann said that Obama's candidacy was a rorschach test for the country. We each saw what we wanted to see in him, and we voted for what we believed he was. I pushed his candidacy. I campaigned for him and donated to his campaign. Now, it is apparent that Obama is not the President we thought he would be during the campaign. Just two years later, I find myself calling for a Democratic challenger.

The punditry has said that Obama is a consensus-builder, but apparently, he does not know the difference between compromise and capitulation. Before he's asked to give up anything in negotiations, before any debate has begun, he has surrendered the high ground.

What we really need is for the Dems to prop up someone who could be a contender and insinuate that he or she is being groomed for a primary challenge. Hopefully, Obama being the capitulator that he is, he would announce that he is not running for reelection. Then, with a dyed-in-the-wool progressive candidate, we could have a real chance against whatever piece of flotsam the Republicans throw up on their stage.

Do not be mistaken. If Obama is on the ticket in 2012, I will vote for him. Two or three more Supreme Court justices will be appointed in the next five or six years. We need someone in office who will appoint genuine moderate judges as opposed to some conservative labeled as moderate or an outright corporate shill. However, at this point, and only at this point, we have an opportunity to replace Obama with a genuine progressive candidate, someone who will stand for progressive values and not back down. If only, I knew who that would be.

Those who are waiting to be rescued by a white horseman are going to be waiting a while, because chivalry is dead, greed is good, and self-interest governs all. We each must the author and architect of our own destiny.

I found myself in an odd place recently, unapologetic atheist that I am, defending the clergy and the Catholic Church. It was in the weeks following the revelations that the Catholic clergy had been concealing the crimes of their fellow clergy. I was listening to progressive talk radio to show hosts who are ironically theistic, in fact, one of them a life-long Catholic. The show was a non-stop Catholic-bashing. The hosts were downright giddy about the public-relations hit the Church had taken.

I should take a moment to say that I am not actually defending the Catholic Church, and there is nothing I would love to see more than for the Faithful to realize the dubiousness of their beliefs and hypocrisy of the community they belong to, the Faith community. I'm certainly not defending the Catholic clergy for concealing felonies or the clergy who committed them.

What occurred to me when I was listing to the radio show is something that has actually been weighing on my mind for some time. Part of the American Zeitgeist, indeed part of the Zeitgeist of the Western industrialized world, is the Crime & Punishment model. We have a thirst for reciprocity. We have a self-righteous sense of justice. Indeed, I have always had a heightened sense of reciprocity. I realize, now, that I was wrong about that and Christian philosophy is right about it.

Crime & Punishment is a euphemism for an-eye-for-an-eye. Indeed an-eye-for-an-eye is the backbone of our criminal justice system, vengeance its beating heart. We think we have come so far and that our justice system is so enlightened, but it really hasn't come very far since Hammurabi. The Christian philosophy that we are all flawed and should forgive truly is light years ahead of Hammurabi, Roman Law, or the Framers. For hundreds of thousands of years, men lived in small tribes as hunter-gatherers. We have evolved biology and psychology hundreds of millions of years old that has nothing to do with a global civilized society. We are monkeys that drive cars. We have modern medicine, nuclear physics, nanotechnology, stem cells, and rockets for flying into space, but at the end of the day, our brains and our bodies are suited for gathering food on the savannas and evading predators like tigers. This is what anthropologists call mismatch. We are all, each of us, mismatched for living in a modern world by modern laws. Indeed there is no objective right or wrong way to live. We know this by those who live in tribes and believe it is morally justifiable to kill the one who dishonors you, what is called an 'honor killing'. We know that cultures have believed it was not only morally justifiable, but morally required for one person to rape another person. We are working out our millions year old psychology in a modern world. Our laws are not for punishing those who behave immorally; our laws are for those who break with cultural norms.

Indeed, I am arguing that our criminal justice system is not for punishing those who break our laws, but it is for exercising our own demons. Someone once told me about a man in a native american tribe who had raped a woman in the tribe. The tribal council sentenced the man to serve the family, basically as an indentured servant, for the term of a year, as I recall. The man had to face the mother, the father, and the brother of the girl he had raped, not to mention the girl he raped herself. Every day, he slept in their home, ate with them, and saw the pain he had caused. He was overcome with feelings of guilt, remorse, and regret. Every day, the family had to see this man who had raped their daughter. They had to face and overcome their feelings of anger and vengeance. In the end, the family and the community were healed and the man was reminded that he was a part of the community and was responsible to it. In this way, the community and the family were able to bring this man back into the fold. Imagine if this man had been subject to our criminal justice system. He would have spent eight years in prison, being hardened by inhuman conditions, embittered towards his accusers. He would have thought every day about how angry he is that this was done to him, how none of this would have happened if he had never been caught. It would have been made clear to him that he is outside the community and must continue to live on the outside. The family would not have been healed of their feelings of vengeance, indeed they may have started some 501c to whip up the vengeance of other victims to make our laws even more strict and to assuage their own feelings of guilt. Because, every time we send a killer or a rapist away, we are sending away our own feelings of regret and guilt; we are foisting upon the accused our own demons. If an-eye-for-an-eye is the backbone of our criminal justice system and vengeance its beating heart, then guilt and shame are its sinewy muscles.

There is a lie that has been perpetuated that who we are is all we will ever be, but people change; people grow. We are never the same today as we were yesterday. Intuitively we know this. Welling within the American gestalt, within the gestalt of the Western industrialized world we are crying out for forgiveness. We are crying out that we are all flawed, and we don't want to live with shame anymore. We want to forgive those that have wronged us or society, so that we too can be absolved of our guilt. We are crying out for amnesty. We are crying out for healing and rehabilitation. We may shout out for justice, but we crave forgiveness.

We have the science. We know what causes criminality. We know that the most important reason people commit crimes is because of need. Every time someone commits a murder or a rape, it says more about us than them. We have failed as a society. We have failed the sacred mandate to provide for least of these, to be our brother's keeper, to care for the sick, to visit the prisoners, to defend the meek. Every time we indict the accused, we are indicting our own guilt and shame, our own failings. We carry this guilt with us, and we exercise this guilt when we put another 'criminal' in prison. It is time we invent a better way, it's time we were more thoughtful and creative about how we deal with criminals in our society. It is time for amnesty. It is time for forgiveness. It is time to recognize that a crime with no victim is no crime at all, and that those who have victims need to be brought back into the fold. It is time that we as victims be healed of our vengeance, not satisfied of it.