In Defense of Death

A good hearted rebuttle to Nate over at The Jesus Paradigm:

I am alone in an empty house. It is quiet, except for the sound of my typing. It is snowing outside my window. Each of the snowflakes I see is different to a degree that I cannot fully understand. I am enjoying watching this for several reasons. It is the first real snowfall of the year, and I have not seen one like it in a long time. I will never in truth see this particular snowfall again, and though it reminds me of so many others, of people walking down the street shrouded in wool coats, of hot chocolate, of making snow angels and snowmen, and many other snowfalls from now may remind me of this one, I will never see this snowfall again. I will never be in this moment again. I must watch and appreciate it now, and so much of my appreciation for it is rooted in the fact that is will soon pass away. This moment, right now, will never, ever come again. People who are afraid of death decide to do so many things based on their fear, things which dull their senses, dull their emotions. We think, as you astutely point out, that we can store up permanence in our possessions to somehow make us believe that we are not going to die. In one of the most horrendous errors of the human condition, we think that things that last forever are somehow of greater value than things that are fleeting. Yet you are right when you say that nothing we gain does last forever. But it is wrong to say that this makes it less valuable. It is only less valuable when we use it to delude ourselves that we will last forever. And it seems to me that the description you lay out here of the heart of Christianity is in this sense completely in accord with the rest of what you call “The World” on this one (“The world” by the way is a gross overgeneralization in that the actual words could refer to absolutely everything, though I know you did not originate the term). You’ve just replaced all of the possessions that other people use with Jesus, yet both are operating on the same basic assumption. That things which are permanent are more valuable. It is the idea which tells us we can possess permanence: a home, a car, a family, possessions, collecting things from far and near in an effort to convince ourselves by the solidity of these things we ourselves will in some way endure. It is only the same to say that because Jesus will endure, we will also. It is no wonder that health and wealth gospels are so rampant, because in this essence, consumerism and Christianity are the same. They both provide us with illusions of permanence, of invulnerability, and of freedom which is somehow separate from the ebb and flow of the universe; the delusion that we are not wholly a part of “The World.” (How would your perception of Jesus change if you had no designs on him? If you had no quantifiable prize to be won? If you could see him for exactly who he is?) It is an arrogance for one, but moreover, it is the foolhardy assumption that things which endure are of greater value, and yet those things we accumulate, while they are for the most part good things, when we look at them in this light lose all value as what they are, because we see them only as a means to our own glorification. You may have loved ones who have died. You may never see them again. You will never be in this moment again. Thoughts of them will become memory and memory will become part of the way in which you see, the way in which you think, and are grounded to that which you hold dear. But still, they will never return. Is it not enough to say, “This is good. This thing I am in right now, life, the world, my own mind and heart, right now, with all that has come before, shaping what will be, is good” and appreciate it as it is? Appreciate it as the material of our existence, and know that because one day we ourselves will cease, we will not endure in our element, not our identity as we know it, but will leave only an imprint of who we were on the world, that we must fully appreciate this moment now, in all our vulnerability and impermanence? This, above all things should give us cause to value what we witness here and now, should give us a foundation of morality, but more importantly, a basic understanding of what it is which makes our lives and the lives of others worth living. All of what we find valuable in this life, all of it, is ephemeral. Beauty, love, connection, emotion, thought, truth, freedom, life; all of these will pass away as well. Is this not enough? It seems to me that Christianity in the sense you describe it here is only a shaky and vain extension of consumerism, and the desire to possess more and more. If we realize that even all the things we buy, and try to possess, are also going to vanish someday, must we then go farther down a rabbit hole of fear and presume with a perfect and historic arrogance that we ourselves are eternal things? Is this not self serving and at the same time self destructive? Is it not enough to see the world as it is, in front of us, both perfect and flawed at the same time, and accept it? If we go to such great lengths to deny our own death, what do we have left over when we have paid the price of believing in this immortality? If we cannot see and accept that we will die, cannot accept our own vulnerability, cannot accept our mortality, and cannot accept our fallibility, then what can possibly lay ahead save apathy towards all else that is real, all else that defines our lives, and all that can be appreciated about them? And if we put so much stock in any being or thing beyond ourselves, presuming that that being, that person, has already done it all, said it all, and we only need to accept it, then what does that do to our sense of responsibility? To those around us? To ourselves and to this moment in the universe? If I only have a few moments on this earth, then I am impelled, not frantically but with resignation, to do the best I can here. And the best I can do is very often to see it, to appreciate it, to interact with it in every unique moment. I cannot help but wonder why anyone could ever want more than this. It may be a flawed world, and a difficult life, but it is still perfect in that it is what it is, it is exactly the world. We must drink this cup which is put in front of us. Do not rob yourself by thinking you are better than it, will last longer than it, or are not a part of it in every fiber of your body, mind and soul. Do not devalue yourself in this way. You are more valuable, more beautiful, more perfect than eternal life. I have no idea what comes after this. But people you love will die. Things that you love will end. This is how things are. You will die. Is who you are less wonderful because of this? I hardly think so. (Please see “Wings of Desire,” one of the greatest movies ever made, which has the added bonus of showcasing Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds early on.)

The Paddy Plunge

Hey

I haven't put anything here in a while, which is ridiculous, because I started this in order to write every day. But not ridiculous, because I still do write every day, but most of those days I don't put it here, though some days I do, and then I take it down the next day, and then some days I think about putting something here, but don't because I have no internet at my house, which is really a philosophical issue when you boil it down...

Here is an article I just scribbled which will come out in the March issue of Be! Magazine. It's not very interesting and I recommend not reading it at all. I briefly considered calling it "Chilly Charity for Charred Children" but thought it in bad taste.

The Paddy Plunge:
Polar Dipping to Lend a Hand

For some people, charity is a way of giving to those who have less. For others, it is an unqualified love of all mankind. But for the participants of RiRa's annual "Paddy Plunge," charity is bee lining it down the strand, and charging headlong into the frigid North Atlantic water on St. Patrick's Day.
If you go out to east End beach this March 17th, you may catch seventy to a hundred of them sprinting their way towards the water --- you may even feel inclined to join in. Now I know what you're thinking. Words like hypothermia and trove of bally lunatics, and no doubt a few others are jumping quickly into your head. Add to that the fact that the ocean is even colder in early spring than in mid January, and the fact that they dove in last year in the midst of a raging Nor'Easter. But to them, there's no other good time quite like it. John Seymore, who has taken the plunge for the past four years, told me, "It's absolutely fun," Naomi Neville, general manager of RiRa added, "When you're running down the beach, you take off all your clothes and your adrenaline is carrying you through, and you feel warm. Afterwards, when the cold sets in you have to have people there who aren't jumping to help out, because your toes and your hands don't really work very well."
Naomi recalls the birth of the event. "The first year we were open, we were just looking for something to kick off Paddy's Day. It was five o'clock in the morning and we all had to be at work in an hour, so we just did it to get riled up for work on St. Paddy's Day. Afterwards, we were all like, 'Why did we just do that?' and so we figured we might as well find a good reason for doing it."
As you've guessed, the Paddy Plunge transcends simple thrill seeking. For the past four years, RiRa Irish Pub and the Shipyard Brewing Company have organized the event around raising thousands to finance a camp for children burn victims. The camp buses teens from all around the north eastern United States to Maine in the winter for a week of skiing, sledding, skating and general kid fun. Naomi remembers how this all began. "There have always been a lot of firemen who come to the pub, so we started talking about it with them. We just figured that jumping in the freezing ocean was the total opposite of the burn victims. I suppose it just came about that way." Since then, the Paddy Plunge has become the yearly event that raises the most money for the Burn Camp.
Dave Petrocelli, who runs the camp, says it's just a place for them to have a normal childhood experience. "Here, every kid there is facing the same challenge. So that means that at that camp, they're not facing those challenges, they're just kids. It's just being a kid, being at summer camp, and not having it be about the burns. It's about being a kid."
And the kids really are just like any other kids. "There was two or three kids that had been there for a couple of years, they were rooming with a couple of kids who hadn't, typical kids, there was the bullying thing going on. Two of us counselors went into the room, and we said, 'If you wanna pick on anybody, you need to pick on us. They're with you, and you need to teach them how to pick on the counselors, and how to stand up to the firemen, and how to cause problems and hopefully not get caught."
You can't work in that kind of environment and not be touched by it. Dave's experience working with the camps has had a deep impact on his whole life. "By getting involved with burn camps and burn survivors, I've met the woman of my dreams, and now we're raising two kids."
It's not just the polar dippers that are helping out either. Everywhere Dave Petrocelli goes, people seem to want to contribute what they can. From free lift tickets and ski rentals for the kids at the Camden snow bowl, to the Rockland fire department serving them lunch. All of this means that the kids families pay nothing to send them to the camp. Not even for the transportation to get them there. The divers each year are well aware, also, that they are doing this all to help someone out. "Knowing that there's a good cause makes me want to bring other people." But make no bones about it --- it's cold. Really, really cold. That's part of the excitement for the divers. "It's like you're being stuck by a billion tiny needles." But it won't deter them one bit. This year is expected to have the largest turnout yet. "Ultimately it's for charity. Jump in the ocean one day a year, it could be a world of difference for a child. It's absolutely fun. If you don't think it is, try it." And it doesn't hurt that the divers can go to RiRa afterwards for a full on, all day St. Paddy's celebration. As Seymore told me, and the other divers would no doubt agree, "The best Irish breakfast is a free Irish breakfast." When I asked Naomi what she would say to someone who might be a little queasy at the idea running down an ice coated beach into near freezing water, she just said, "Just try it, you know, it's helping out the kids. It takes five minutes to help them out, and it's really exciting." John Seymore agreed: "I recommend it to everybody. It's something everyone should do once. Or, once a year."

There is also and auction afterwards at RiRa to raise money for the charity as well. If you'd like to Plunge, you can contact RiRa Irish Pub. For more information, or to get in contact with the Burn Survivors Winter camp, you can visit www.MaineBurnSurvivors.org.

Growing Up as the Enemy in America

Dear reader,

This post is to notify you about something every self respecting decent person in our country should be acutely aware of. I remember my high school years clearly. I remember being yelled at for various breached and misdeeds. Things such as walking through the halls, eating my lunch on the lawn. Leaving class before the bell rang, when everyone was standing around waiting for the bell to ring. I was continually made aware of how little respect the authorities of the school had for any of the children going there. But this post is not to tell you about me. It is to talk about an attitude in America that treats children, as a recent article in Mother Jones Magazine puts it, as enemy combatants, reminiscent of Abu Graihb or Guantanamo Bay. It is not incidental that the United States public school system is based directly on the prison system, nor that for-profit prisons are now one of the most lucrative businesses in the world.

A School in Eastern Massachusetts called the Judge Rottenberg Center is the most extreme case of this idea. The 'school' boasts itself as a radical behavior modification program for children with extreme problems. Initially, the school was tailored to severely autistic and mentally retarded children. In recent years, it has expanded its program to include poorly behaved and violent teens who are not accepted anywhere else. These teens are usually from the inner cities, and thought the actual racial breakdown is unknown to me, the students I have heard referred to all have names like Luigi, Rolando, etc. This also, has never been incidental iwhen we look at mistreated people, people who get the brunt of the 'education system.'

The Rottenberg Center's methods are based generally on the idea of Pavlov's Dogs. Combinations of positive reinforcement and negative, (usually negative in Rottenberg's case) are used to modify inappropriate behaviors. The school uses varied methods to turn children away from bad behaviors: electric shocks, 'white noise helmets', pinching, muscle squeezing, strapping them face down on a bed, spread eagle for hours, and in extreme cases, days at a time, depriving them of proper meals, and forcing them to inhale ammonia fumes when they act inappropriately. The definition of inappropriate action is loose at Rottenberg. It can range anywhere from violent outbursts, to asking for a tissue. Mentally retarded students are inflicted with acute pain for chewing on themselves, banging their heads against the floor, etc. Nagging and complaining often result in acute electrocutions that leave former students with Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome. Not uncommonly, the school's graduates wake up in the middle of the night in cold sweats, dreaming about electricity coursing through their bodies. While the school bills itself as a place for psychological treatment, yet to this day, none to the Rottenberg school's treatments have been proven by science to work at all. No psychotherapy is administered to it's students. They are not allowed to speak about their experience, express their emotions, or socialize with other students.

The same tactics are applied to their staff, who can be fired for failing to electrocute a student when the school's mastermind, Matthew Israel, has deemed it necessary. Staff are prohibited from socializing at work or expressing concern to one another about the treatment, and are monitored at all times by video camera to ensure their compliance. At times, one staff member will be forced to ask another about misgivings, in front of a video camera, and if the confronted employee does not respond as they should, they are immediately fired.

There have been several incidents which have led to the school being embroiled in lawsuits; in one case, a student who was strapped face down on a bed for days, while wearing a 'white noise helmet' and being repeatedly electrocuted, died after having a seizure. In another case, a student began screaming and complaining, and as a result was repeatedly pinched on the soles of her feet and forced to inhale ammonia to stop her negative outbursts. They later found that the students outbursts were caused by pain she was suffering from a perforated stomach, which she died of later that evening. In one case, a student was ordered to place his hands on a paddle, and when he removed his hands was automatically electrocuted once every second that his hands were not in contact with the paddle. He was shocked a total of about 5000 times that day. The school's founder and director, Dr. Matthew Israel, noted that "in that case, the treatment didn't seem to be working."

These lawsuits against the school have brought not litigation against the use of painful and inhumane punishments. Possibly coinciding with the school's tremendous profitability (it costs the state $220,000.00 a year per student) the school's lawyers have each time had charges thrown out, and in one case, the Chair of the Massachusetts board of Special Education lost his job for bringing the charges at all.

The Rottenberg school, while advertising itself to parents as place to treat their children psychologically, has no Therapy program for the students. Beyond this, there is no investigation into the specific causes of each students misbehavior, into the events in their past which might trigger them to act out violently, and all in all the schools therapy program is one-size fits all. One graduate later found himself in jail for drug abuse, and noted that jail was a walk in the park by comparison to the Rottenberg School. Yet Matthew Israel maintains that a part of his interest is to create a Utopian society. In my view, it would not be to rash to say that someone should modify Matthew Israel's beavior with a radical new treatment: life deprivation.

For more information
http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2007/09/school_of_shock.html

Death and Babysitters

This is a few excerpts from Pema Chodron's writing. I wrote a lengthy analysis on how this relates to Jesus, and I believe it does on a deeper level than most things I've heard, but I had a great deal of difficulty putting it into clear and meaningful language for you, so I'll leave you to draw your own conclusions instead:

“Nontheism [as opposed to atheism] is finally realizing that there’s no babysitter that you can count on. You just get a good one and then he or she is gone. Nontheism is realizing that it’s not just babysitters that come and go. The whole of life is like that. This is the truth, and the truth is inconvenient.

This is where renunciation enters the picture—renunciation of the hope that our experience could be different, renunciation of the hope that we could be better. The Buddhist monastic rules that advise renouncing liquor, renouncing sex, and so on, are not pointing out that those things are inherently bad or immoral, but that we use them as babysitters. We use them as a way to escape; we use them to try to get comfort and distract ourselves. The real thing that we renounce is the tenacious hope that we could be saved from being who we are.

What happens with you when you begin to feel uneasy, unsettled, queasy? Notice the panic, notice when you instantly grab for something.

Renunciation is a teaching to inspire us to investigate what’s happening every time we grab something because we can’t stand to face what’s coming.

All anxiety, all dissatisfaction, all the reasons for hoping that our experience could be different are rooted in our fear of death. Fear of death is always in the background. As the Zen master Shunryu Suzuki Roshi said, life is like getting into a boat that’s just about to sail out to sea and sink. Bu it’s very hard—no matter how much we hear about it—to believe in our own death. We don’t go so far as to say, “No way, I’m not going to die,” because of course we know that we are. But it definitely will be later. That’s the biggest hope.

Trungpa Rinposhe once delivered a lecture entitled “Death in Everyday Life.” We are raised in a culture which fears death and hides it from us. Nevertheless, we experience it all the time. We experience it in the form of dissapointment, of things not always working out. We experience it in the form of things always being in a process of change. When the day ends, when the second ends, when we breathe out, that’s death in everyday life.

Having a relationship with death in everyday life means that we begin to be able to wait, to relax with insecurity, with panic, with embarrassment, with things not working out. As the years go on, we don’t call the babysitter quite so fast.”

The New American Empire

President George W. Bush maintains that we're 'kickin' ass' in Iraq while thousands of other people die for an idea he can't admit was wrong, and won't stick his own neck out for. Why don't we send the suits to war? They're the ones who want it so bad. Regardless of General Patreus's testimony that we are seeing military success and moving closer to reaching coalition military goals, these are just that, military goals, and do not speak largely to the overall situation in Iraq. It was stated, among a slew of other half truths by the crooked smirks of our country's administration, that our overall goal was a self governing and free Iraq. This implies that the Iraqis would be free to choose their own government, and that the Iraqi people would be autonomous over their own country, without the rule of despots or occupying foreign nations. Yet today, seventy nine percent of Iraqis disapprove of the presence of American troops, while fifty seven percent call attacks on American soldiers 'acceptible.' And still we hear the languid cries of 'stick with it' emanating from the whitehouse. It seems to me that this absolute lack of responsiveness to the wishes of Iraqi civilians flies entirely in the face of the idea that we were ever there to create a free and independent Iraq. It exposes yet another lie by a group of people who have created a situation to which there is no good way out, and have done so with repeated lies and slanders in the name of the American people. George W. Bush is a textbook war criminal, and a menace to the national security of the United States.

This from 'The Carpetbagger Report' as of September 10, 2007:

"Seventy-nine percent of Iraqis oppose the presence of coalition forces in the country, essentially unchanged from last winter — including more than eight in 10 Shiites and nearly all Sunni Arabs. (Seven in 10 Kurds, by contrast, still support the presence of these forces.)

Similarly, 80 percent of Iraqis disapprove of the way U.S. and other coalition forces have performed in Iraq; the only change has been an increase in negative ratings of the U.S. performance among Kurds. And 86 percent of Iraqis express little or no confidence in U.S. and U.K. forces, similar to last winter and again up among Kurds.

Accusations of mistreatment continue: Forty-one percent of Iraqis in this poll (vs. 44 percent in March) report unnecessary violence against Iraqi citizens by U.S. or coalition forces. That peaks at 63 percent among Sunni Arabs, and 66 percent in Sunni-dominated Anbar.

This disapproval rises to an endorsement of violence: Fifty-seven percent of Iraqis now call attacks on coalition forces “acceptable,” up six points from last winter and more than three times its level (17 percent) in February 2004. Since March, acceptability of such attacks has risen by 15 points among Shiites (from 35 percent to 50 percent), while remaining near-unanimous among Sunnis (93 percent)."

Over the Pond

Hey, all

I realize I posted a 'more to come' at the end of the last post, and there will be, but it will take a while, because I will be perambulating the gorsebushes of Caledonia for the next three weeks. I'm going to Scotland for the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the largest theater festival in the world. I designed the set for "A Thousand Cranes" which will be going up on Sunday. Check it out at www.edfringe.com or at www.psfilms.org! Have a good three weeks. I will!

Why Iraq? Why Iran?

American Mideast relations in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries:

A country song blares over the radio in the year two thousand and six, sung by a man who undoubtedly has little more ‘country’ in him than an oil baron sucking a stoagie in downtown Dallas. “Have you forgotten how you felt that day?” he sings. He refers to the fateful day of 9/11, and refrains, “You can bet the soldiers in Iraq know what they’re fighting for.” And this is a typical understanding of the American intervention in the Middle East. That we are there to prevent further terrorism and defend freedom. That we are there to establish democratic governments and aid the Arab peoples in becoming free, peaceful sustainable societies. It is an unfortunate misunderstanding that so many Americans believe that our invasion of Iraq was a response to 9/11, or that the two were even closely related. This idea is false. Robert Kagan, director for the “Project for a New American Century wrote in 1998 that “Any sustained bombing and missile campaign should be part of an overall political-military strategy aimed at removing Saddam from power.” General Colin Powell stated some time after Saddam Hussein had been deposed that Saddam had no clear ties to terrorism. But to retort the overconfidence of the country singer I heard on the radio the other day, and more importantly this commonly held and incorrect idea, I would like to address the question of why the American military currently occupies Iraq. What are we fighting for? Some would say oil, but even this is to simplistic and singular a reason, though it may contribute to the fact. The real reason that the American military’s presence in the Middle East tops the front of newspapers dates much farther back.

This follows the recent discovery of oil in western Persia (Iran) in 1908. Around this discovery, Anglo-Persian Oil Company was formed but soon ran into financial difficulty around the problem of transporting oil from the site to the west. In 1914, just before the start of the First World War, Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill proposed a bill to the British Parliament to buy 51 percent of the floundering Anglo-Persian Oil Company. Anglo-Persian Oil was owned by the British government. In 1916, two diplomats, from Britain and France met and formed the Sykes Picot Agreement, stating that the former Ottoman Empire which had reigned since the sixteen hundreds, and which had been allied with Kaiser Wilhelm, should be divided as spoils among the victors. Modern day Iraq belonged to Britain, and the boundaries set up by them remain more or less the same to this day. The Sykes Picot Agreement states:

"That Great Britain has the right to build, administer, and be sole owner of a railway connecting Haifa with area (B) ... this railway is to facilitate the connexion of Baghdad with Haifa by rail ... There shall be no interior customs barriers between any of the above-mentioned areas."

Now there was a was to get it out, free of Tarriffs, no less. They could supply their battleships and transport vehicles with as much oil as they needed.

However, the Sykes Picot Agreement went against the promise that Britain had made to the Arab peoples for a free and independent Arabia in return for fighting alongside them in the war. Following this agreement, the land which had once been seated at the head of the world for hundreds of year in math, science, government, equality, humanitarian issues and even basic cleanliness was now once again in the hands of foreign colonialists.

In 1917, Anglo-Persian Oil began trading under the name British Petroleum; the name it still holds to this day. During this period following the war, Britain made several attempts to turn Persia into a weak protectorate, or even a territory of the UK. Throughout, it held soul ownership of the Iranian oilfields. Compounding the difficulties of the Iranian people, they were under the brutal dictatorship of the western supported Shahs, who used Savak secret police to kill and torture dissenters. By 1951, the government of Iran had lost so much credence due to allowing the British to take such liberties with their oil, the a coup occurred and Dr. Mohammad Mossadegh was elected as Prime Minister. He immediately nationalized Iran’s oil fields and dissolved the agreement held since 1908 with Brittish Petroleum. Under his government, free press began to emerge, and the tactics of crushing dissent during the former regime ceased. In 1953, however, responding to the nationalizing of Iran’s oil fields, the British government and the CIA under Eisenhower staged a coup d’etat to overthrow the democracy in Iran (Operation AJAX) and reinstate the inhumane but western friendly Shah and regain control of the oil fields. The Iranian people did not respond well. Having already tasted freedom, they did not take well to a brutal United States imposed dictator.

"The monarchy was toppled in Iran on February 11th, 1979 (22nd day of Bahman 1357, Persian calendar). Savak dissolved and the Iranian people, along with the political prisoners, tasted the blossoms of freedom (Bahar-e Azadi) for a few months. The banned and forbidden newspapers, magazines, and books started re-publishing until the religious dictatorship took place and then Savama was created that resembled Savak in different forms of oppression."

More to come.