Category Archives: US History

Boulder, Colorado, Family, Judaism, Politics, US History, World History

It’s Personal

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Beltane and the Greenhouse Moon

Monday gratefuls: Buphati. MRI results. The Ancient Brothers. Shadow. Water. Food. Natalie. Tom. The Happy Camper. Driving, painful. Ruth in Alaska. Mary in Seoul. Guru in K.L. Me on Shadow Mountain. Great Sol. The bird of morning. BJ. Pammy. Gabe. Family, flung far.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Books

Week Kavannah: Wholeness and Peacefulness. Shleimut. Integrating pain into my daily life.

One brief shining: The greenhouse has more than plants and memories; it will be therapy and prayer, too, an everyday exercise in tactile spirituality, joining with the evolved life of plants in an act of co-creating abundance: Lettuce in a bowl with dark red Brandywine heirloom Tomatoes, rings of Red Onion, a diced orange Nantes Carrot, not yet, no, but soon.

 

Judaism in trouble:

Front page news from Boulder. A fiery assault on demonstrators bringing attention to hostages still held by Hamas. This apparently not Nazi nostalgia, but Palestinian weariness with the long, long war and its murderous execution.

Not only Boulder, but the home of UC-Boulder, Ruth’s university.

You may recall that my conversion was to have taken place in Jerusalem, October 31st if I recall correctly. That pleased me because it married my pagan observance of Samain with my immersion in an ancient mikveh in the holy city.

You do recall, I’m sure, why it didn’t happen. On October 7th, Hamas attacked kibbutzim near the border with Gaza, killing and raping as they went. A horrific act of terror. Really, a brazen pull on the nose-ring of militant Israelis.

For many dark reasons, Israel stepped into the trap Hamas had made. Netanyahu needed to avoid corruption charges. A never-to-be-realized war aim of eliminating Hamas. Frustration with continued anti-semitic activity by Iranian supported actors like Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis. The out of proportion political influence of the Jewish ultra-right in Israel that wants genocide. The perilous location of Israel.

The Israeli Defense Force (IDF) continues to pound Gaza, killing civilians, civilians, because Hamas hides among them. Many (most?) of us who love Israel as a needed safe place for Jews long ago stepped away from support of this “war.”

The immorality of bombing starving women and children. Using up whatever goodwill Israel had accumulated. Being tone deaf to the world’s critique. Bad, sad days for all.

No wonder the anger and frustration has spilled over into the U.S. No wonder, too, that this same anger and frustration has served as fuel for the alt-right with its white supremacist views, its Hitlerian hagiographies, and not only them, but American Muslims, college students who see an asymmetrical war, politicians who want any lever they can find to bring the East Coast elites to heel.

In the same ugly way that testosterone feeds prostate cancer, the war over Gaza feeds hatred and bigotry all over the world. We will all be poorer when it ends.

Boulder is an hour from Shadow Mountain. I’ve been there many times over the last year plus for breakfast or lunch with Ruth. She’s a Jewish student in a time when Jews, again, are persona non grata.

This attack was not something I read about. It’s personal.

 

Asia, Dogs, Family, Fourth Phase, Politics, US History, Weather +Climate, World History

Ruth at the DMZ

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Beltane and the Greenhouse Moon

Memorial Day gratefuls: Again, Shadow leaping into my arms as I sat on the edge of the bed. Rain. A soaking Rain. Needed. Big R. Dog treats. Ativan at Safeway. A pickup order. Gas at Stinkers. Pushing myself. P.T. exercises. Back pain. My Ancient brothers: Paul, Tom, Bill, Ode. Thyroid meds. Lifealert.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Rain

Week Kavannah: Zerizut. for p.t. and resistance.

One brief shining: Went to Big R for the first time in years, past the bronze Elk front porch bench, into the store, past the weapons and ammo, past the huge fans for animal stalls, past the 50 pound bags of Chicken feed, toward the aisles of Dog beds, Dog food, Dog treats, nursing my gimpy left leg as I walked, found the bag of treats Natalie recommended, treats of Cattle spleen, lungs, trachea, realizing in that moment, again, the awful cruelty of eating red meat.

 

Had a crashing, booming, hailing afternoon while I slept with the window open, Rain spraying in, my electric blanket on against the 38 degree chill. Such a perfect feeling of comfort. Brought back memories of Memorial Days past when I would go out into the family car, turn on the radio, eat popcorn, and listen to the broadcast of the Indy 500.

I can imagine death as slipping over the edge of living while wrapped in similar comfort, a moment then of peace. Of lost physicality. Of drifting away into the next adventure. I neither wish it soon nor do I fear it.

 

Dog journal: Shadow jumped up onto my legs, into my arms. Again. Wriggling and happy. We hugged each other. The feeling sublime. I know that’s a slippery, maybe treacly, word, sublime, but when you combine love and eagerness what word would you use?

We’re not all the way there, Shadow and I, but we have had a few break through moments. Natalie comes today at 10.

 

Just a moment: Trump Tarrific wants retailers to “eat” the tariffs. Guess we could call that a value negated tax or VNT. The mirror of VAT.

Not sure you’d feel Great quite yet if your profit margins dipped in order to prop up red tie guy’s simulacrum of economic policy. But, hey, we’ve all got to take one for the team now and then. Eh?

 

Ruth at the DMZ

 

 

 

Dogs, Health, Politics, US History

Halle and Shadow

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Beltane and the Wu Wei Moon II

Wednesday gratefuls: Natalie. Halle. Physical therapy. Back and leg pain. Natalie’s husband. Ginny and Janice. Annie and Luna. Art Green. Cool night. Good sleeping. New exercises. Our spinning Planet. Great Sol revealed again. From the east. His light on the Lodgepoles. Grass green. Aspen Catkins yellow against blue Sky. Lodgepole Anthers. Fawns and Calves and Kits and Cubs. Spring in the Rockies.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Shadow

Week Kavannah: Zerizut. Enthusiasm. For working out, doing p.t.

One brief shining: Sitting down on the mobile table, talking with Halle, a bit later face down with her massaging my lower back, after that dropping my knees to the side, controlled, does it hurt, oh yes, but not too bad. See you next week.

 

Back pain: Halle from Madisonville, Kentucky. What brought you to Colorado, Halle? Oh, didn’t I tell you last time? I’m a traveling physical therapist, like a traveling nurse.

She goes for a year or so, or longer, then picks up and moves. Last year she was in Albuquerque.

What a great way to see the country, new places. She imagines she’ll end up back in Kentucky, but, she says, she could do this her whole life if she wanted.

Halle has a great table side manner. Encouraging. Thoughtful. Challenging. I like her.

 

Dog journal: Natalie of Friends for Life. Came by to assess Shadow for her two week training program. Older than Amy, maybe 50. Lavender tinted hair. Amethyst earrings. Purple t-shirt. Deep dog knowledge, especially of fearful dogs.

Her husband, a retired long haul truck driver, had a stroke last year. Is in a long recovery. We talked about caregiving and care giver fatigue.

We also talked about having a buffer dog for Shadow, a dog who could take some of my attention off her, ease the pressure on both of us. A good idea. Not sure I’m up for two dogs though.

We also talked about Shadow as a fearful, shy dog. How to tell if she’s ready for interaction.

Natalie suggested a game of follow me. I put a treat down. When Shadow comes to get it, I turn and walk away. She follows, comes around the front. I drop a treat in back, then turn and walk away. Repeat. Repeat. This leaves her in control.

Also, I’m to feed Shadow by hand, about half of her meal. All about building trust. Natalie’s not big on obedience training. As I am not. What we both want is a relationship of trust and affection with our dogs. That’s how Kate and I always lived with our dogs.

The big difference with Shadow is her fearfulness, her trauma. And, her age. Natalie will teach us how to gently enter each other’s lives. I’m confident with Natalie’s help we can get to a mature relationship in time. A relief.

Natalie’s coming back today. A blitz for a couple of weeks, then weekly sessions.

 

Just a moment: “In a White House meeting, the U.S. president is expected to point to alleged discrimination against white South Africans, a week after welcoming a group of them as refugees.” NYT article, 5/21/25

Oh. My. God.

Art and Culture, Cinema and Television, Commentary on the news, Family, Humanities, Travel, US History, World History

The Maker and the Made

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Beltane and the Wu Wei Moon II

Tuesday gratefuls: Ginny and Janice. Annie and Luna. Luke and Leo. Shadow. Happy to be with Leo. Cool night. The last for a while. Tom and Rascal. That Lodgepole leaning. Rain. Possible Monsoons. Traveler’s Insurance. Ruby.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Art Green

Week Kavannah: Zerizut. Enthusiasm. ?How do I reignite my enthusiasm for working out?

One brief shining: I went and got coffee; it’s cool to be independent in a place that is completely new says American Ruth on the streets of Songtan, Korea;  a spot I knew well from my time with my son and Seoah.

 

Ruth’s on day 2 of her Korean trip. Sleeping in the same bed I slept in two years ago. Probably jet lagged, but leaning way in to the new world, Asia, so different, yet fully human.

Travel expands the range of the possible. Nope, knives and forks and spoons? Not everyone uses them. The language. The way of writing it. The gene pool. Sloping tiled roofs in the Asian manner. Food with all the sides typical in Korea. A world of difference. What the MAGA folks miss in their cultural chauvinism.

Here’s to Ruth. Adventuress.

 

A conundrum. Me, too, and art. And thought. And friendships. Do you still watch Woody Allen films? How about Roman Polanski? Attend Catholic mass? Do you admire Bill Clinton? How about Picasso? Art Green? Believe Anita Hill? Weinstein? Kevin Spacey? Bill Cosby?

Here’s the conundrum. Do bad acts taint everything a person has done? Is Kevin Spacey less good in American Beauty because he’s a sexual predator? Is the Catholic church defiled in toto by its wayward priests? Does Picasso’s notorious philandering make his painting less than?

I come down with confidence on all sides of this issue. Woody Allen slept with, then married the adopted daughter of his former wife, Mia Farrow. Does this make his films less funny?

Can we separate the maker from the made? Yes. No. First of all, look at the long history of art now represented in museums. Most of the works in any museum come with little information about the artist’s private life. Especially those works from antiquity.

Since we admire these works without knowing the peccadillos of the sculptor of the Doryphoros  or the carver of the Jade Mountain, the potter who made the roku tea cups, it is possible, probably likely that some of them were miserable human beings.

Is that Greek athlete, a spear-bearer, any less magnificent if we would find his maker was a pedophile? Or, the potter a wife beater? Would the graceful and beautiful scenes on the Jade Mountain be less so if the maker were a thief?

In other words in cases where we have no idea about this information we find no impediment to our appreciation of the work on its own, distinct from the hands and the heart that created it.

This suggests to me that the work is independent of the maker, of the maker’s biography, whatever it includes.

On the other hand. Bill Cosby. I can’t see anything he’s made without carrying to it his drugging women for sexual predation. Even Woody Allen. Though less so for some reason. Picasso? I don’t consider his private life at all when I see his art.

What are the criteria we use? Do we condemn the bad act(s) and draw a clean line between, say, Polanski and The Fearless Vampire Killers, a favorite comedy?

I guess I come down on separating the made from the maker. Yet a taint on it, a principled revulsion, a pulling away from the work made also makes sense to me.

I do know this for sure. I would not want my work judged by the worst mistakes I’ve made in my life.

Dogs, Family, Feelings, Politics, Torah, US History

Lives on a Runway

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Beltane and the Wu Wei Moon II

Monday gratefuls: Understanding Shadow. Prison trained Dogs. Friends Forever holistic Dog training. Morning darkness. Shadow inside and up at 5:15. Me, too. Ruth and Gabe. Ruth, now a sophomore. Dean’s list again. Gabe, not finished until May 31. Then, a senior in high school. Cookunity. Sue Bradshaw. Dr. Buphati. Rich.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Dog training

Week Kavannah: Zerizut. Enthusiasm

One brief shining: Ruth and Gabe announced their imminent arrival by text and phone, arriving soon after through the front door, with Ruth’s familiar high-pitched, Hi!, and Gabe’s, Hey, Grandpop, coming downstairs to see Shadow and me.

 

Songtan

Ruth has begun to levitate about her upcoming trip to Korea. Her first foreign travel. And, on her own. The Godfather, that’s my son, gets elevated at last to command of his squadron on May 27.

Do I have to go through customs in Denver? No. What do I do in Korea? Go through Nothing to Declare. Any other tips? Get out, walk around, see the city at eye level. Go to that fried fish place near their apartment in Songtan. Have fun.

Ruth moved out of her dorm room last Thursday, all her finals finished. She’ll be at Jen’s until her flight on Sunday at 7 am. One day after she returns from Korea, she boards another flight for Anchorage, Alaska. She’s going to be a camp counselor.

Gabe’s mom got him a four day creative writing course at CU-Denver for a birthday present. June. Then he goes to his last hemophilia camp in July. Something he’s been doing since he was five or six. At 17 he’s in his last year of eligibility.

Their lives are on the runway, engines beginning to rev, trying to gain enough altitude to break free from the surly bonds of home and childhood.

Exciting to see. And gratifying that they still want to spend time with their grandpop. This little family, Ruth and Gabe, my son and Seoah, and me has begun to grow closer as we all age. A wonderful, amazing moment for me.

 

Dog journal: Figured out one part of Shadow’s desire. She wants the back door open so she can come in and go out as she wants. I’ve decided for the moment to grant her wish and deal with any invasive creatures. She did come in last night.

When I mentioned the board and train option at Friends Forever yesterday, Ruth said a lot of folks in her neighborhood use the Women’s Prison on Havanna, near their house. Turns out the Colorado prison system offers several sites for a similar board and train option of four weeks, compared to Friends Forever two week program. At almost half the cost. So. Options.

 

Just a moment: Some MAGA folks already talking about the woke Pope. Beginning to reveal their true allegiance to the Golden God of Pennsylvania Avenue and Mar-a-Lago.

Time to start smashing idols as midrash say Abram did in his father’s idol shop. In the midrash he left one, large idol standing. When his father came back and found his inventory but one all broken, he asked Abram what had happened.

Oh, he did it, Abram said. What? His father said, they’re just idols!

AI, Denver, Friends, GeekWorld, Politics, US History, World History

Precursor Chemicals for a World War

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Beltane and the Wu Wei Moon II

Shabbat gratefuls: A day of teshuvah. Returning to the land of my soul. To the me as I was thrown into the post-war world. Pain. Oh. My. Leo XIV. Rerum Natura of Pope Leo XIII. A world that cries out for justice. Love, compassion, and justice = leadership. Eh, Paul? Shadow. A good night’s sleep.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Standing upright in the world

Week Kavannah: Zerizut. Enthusiasm.

One brief shining: Walking in to the bathroom, the shiny new restaurant, a Cheese Cake Factory, had no customers, only anxious waiters, greeters, cooks, runners dressed in black like faux monastics waiting to go into service, anticipation rolling through them like slow waves of prayer.

 

Alan got a free invite to the soft opening of a new Cheescake Factory at Colorado Mills. Free food. A chance to enter a birthing, another mostly identical sibling for other Cheesecake Factories came out of its construction womb into the full light of a new business day.

First, the manager of the Colorado Mills, Kirma, came to our table and greeted Alan. She’s in Evergreen Rotary with him. A big get for her, this well-known anchor level restaurant.

Over the course of our meal, the service manager who had recently hired 305 people to work in the new restaurant, stopped by. Alan chatted her up. After she left, he said, “This is where I live. Corporate training.” He managed all the sales training for Centurylink before he retired.

Earlier in the morning I had breakfast with Marilyn and Irv at Primo’s, the small cafe near their home in King’s Valley. Marilyn and Salam left this morning for Jacksonville, Florida to visit Marilyn and Irv’s son. From Jacksonville they fly on to Cozumel for another Grandmother-Granddaughter trip.

By the time I got home. Whew.

 

Just a moment: I listen like a fanboy to Hardfork, the NYT podcast on high tech, mostly AI. This latest entry casts a very interesting light on the personas of AI’s. Hosts Kevin Roose and Casey Newton point to a trend in AI responses that are overly congratulatory, That’s a great business plan!, or biased toward positive responses, Your attitude toward vaccines makes you special!

They associate this turn toward the obsequious with the likes of social media.  Whatever keeps the user in front of the screen longest. Hallucinations and objectivity be damned. This level of customer pleasing could wreck a key feature of AI: its reputation for honesty. Yes, it has hallucinations, but they are not intentional. This is.

 

Trump Tarrific has begun attempts to unravel the mess he’s made of the world economy. Some sorta deal with Britain. Talks of talks with China. Let’s make a deal!

America First, of course, has the unintended consequence of sullying the reputation of our once hegemonic nation. Or, perhaps I’m wrong, perhaps that lowering of the flag is exactly the point. Disentangle us from world shaping responsibilities. A casual attitude toward the plight of others, a laser focus on the perceived solutions to problems at home. This is blood and soil nationalism, the precursor chemicals for world wars.

Great Work, Jefferson County, Mountains, Quotes, Seed Keepers, Shadow Mountain, US History, Weather +Climate

The Great Work

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Beltane and the Wu Wei Moon II

Monday gratefuls: Stevinson’s Toyota. Snow and rain. Now 8 or 9″. All moisture accepted and appreciated. My son. Shadow, the regresser. Her 15 minutes on the treat (shh. Leash.). Common Ground. Heal the soil. The Great Work: create a sustainable presence for humans on Mother Earth.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Rain and Snow

Week Kavannah: Enthusiasm. Zerizut.

One brief shining: A cold rain has fallen; on its cool breath came a good night’s sleep, up at 5 am with a lick of Shadow’s tongue, a deep whine, unusual for her, so I moved as creaky quick as possible to get her outside.

 

The coming Snow. Leaving her Snow shoes on. Ruby will still get her 60,000 mile service with all fluids replaced. Means I will sit. Wait. Not easy, but necessary. Keep Ruby on the road. She’s already been built. I’ve gotten at least 250,000 miles on the Toyota’s I’ve driven. Probably my last car. Now seven years old.

A devil’s bargain I didn’t know I made back in 1963 when I got my first driver’s license. A carbon footprint, cabrón. All those years on the road. Helping send carbon up, up, up. Insulate Mother Earth.

The freedom of driving carrying such a high cost, higher even than Dead Man’s Curve or Teen Angel. Back then car wrecks were the worst we could imagine. Now: each car a tiny Chicxulub meteor. Death by a thousand infernal combustion engines.

 

Kate used to talk about an adrenal squeeze. Saw in my USPS advance notice I had a letter from Traveler’s Insurance, carrier for my home, auto, and personal liability. Stamped on the outside of the envelope: IMPORTANT INSURANCE INFORMATION.

Was it my turn to scramble for another carrier? The envelope didn’t show up that day. I checked online. Found nothing. It came the next day.

Conditional renewal. I have to accept a $5,000 deductible for Hail and Wind damage. Well, all right. I can do that. I’d read that insurers for Colorado homes see our hail threat as much more dire than Wildfire. Here’s proof.

 

Just a moment: Do all people deserve due process? I don’t know, said our President. It might mean, he went on, one million, two million, three million trials. What was that oath again?

Perhaps he thought then, right at that moment. What if I could be Pope? Hey, let’s get AI to see how I’d look. Tone deaf doesn’t even begin to describe that. It’s the religious equivalent of saying if you’re famous you can grab them by the pussy.

 

On a more upbeat note. I watched, at Tom’s suggestion, Common Ground. A documentary on Prime Video. I felt tears well up often at the savage rending of our most important resource: top soil.

Joy with the clips of regenerative farmers growing corn in fields with legume cover crops. With the 7,000 acre farm in Williamsport, Indiana. Disturbing the soil with cattle grazing, mimicking the buffalo. Turning a profit by not feeding Monsanto, Bayer, John Deere. Lower input costs. Higher return on investment. This is the way.

Feelings, Fourth Phase, Health, Politics, US History

Oh What a Trumbling Mess It Is

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Spring and the Wu Wei Moon II

Wednesday gratefuls: Radical roots of religion. Rabbi Jamie. Shadow, gnawer of Nyla bones. Tom and Roxann, their spiritual involvement with the North Shore, Lake Superior. Bill and his AI excitement. The Jangs coming now in August. Back pain and its lessons. Rich and Doncye. That 529.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Ancientrails

Kavannah: Persistence. Grit. Netzach.

One brief shining: Treat held between my thumb and my palm, touch, a soft nose comes to take the treat, good touch, good Shadow, good girl, touch, soft nose, good Shadow, then sit and she does, down and she gets all four knees on the ground, good Shadow, good sit, good down. Our early morning.

 

Chronic pain. How to tell you about it if you don’t experience it? Yes, pain. Of course. Going up and down the scale and from glissando to crescendo. Never fully leaves though certain positions like sitting and lying down have benefits. Goal. Reduce the pain to manageable levels.

Aversive and episodic. So intermittent reinforcement, the strongest kind, ask any behaviorist. Chronic pain shapes the day. Awful in the morning for me. Beyond horrible. Better after movement, but never resolved. Even after the needles. Even after tramadol and two acetaminophens. Result. Mental and physical energy always turned on, active.

This leaves less of both for daily chores so some get done only in part. Finished later. Loading and unloading the dishwasher. Making meals. Laundry. Even reading and thinking.

A shortness, an abbreviated way of attention especially for detailed tasks like taxes, dealing with the 529. Managing my multiple medical appointments and medications. This I find hard to describe. My capacity for these tasks often starts from a 3 or 4 out of ten. If I encounter difficulty of any kind, too much phone time, a cranky person, a complicated situation requiring shifts to multiple people, my capacity shrinks to zero or below.

Part of this is because I have no backup. I’m a one man show. Maddie helps, of course. Sue as well. But they’re not here when things get sideways. Then for the rest of the day little energy left, physical or mental.

Sometimes I fall over into a stinkin’ way of thinkin’. From AA. I was there all the time for Kate, but now… Of course I’m grateful I could care for her. More than grateful. Glad. Yet her death and my family’s long distances away leaves me on my own. Stinkin’ thinkin’.

Why? Because I’m 98% comfortable on my own and the alternatives all seem worse, a lot worse.

That’s why even with the pain, which now ironically occupies more of my attention than cancer does, I want to be here, on Shadow Mountain with Shadow and my CBE friends.

 

Just a moment: That first hundred days. Those first horrid days. Trump Tarrific. What a Trumpster fire. Trumpeting for political armageddon. Muskie’s rising in the swamp. Hegsteth’s fumbling. Oh what a Trumbling mess it is.

AI, Humanities, Judaism, Politics, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., US History, World History

Reconstruction

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Spring and the Wu Wei Moon II

Tuesday gratefuls: My furry alarm clock and her Velociraptor teeth. Seeing Shadow’s shadow cast by the nightlight. Maddie. From da region. Hammond, Indiana. New palliative care nurse. Also wanting to convert to Judaism. Reconstruction. Her trick with the tramadol. Darkness of early Morning. The Night Sky. Orion. The Southern Cross. The Teapot. Ursa Major. Polaris. North Star.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: AI and Ancientrails

Week Kavannah: Persistence and grit. Netzach.

One brief shining: Using AI, right now, to organize Ancientrails by thematic sections with chapters related to the themes, an exciting idea which came to me last night before sleep.

 

My AI monk has begun its oh so rapid read of Ancientrails. I’ve asked it to fill the chapters with content and images from the last four years. For now. Once I see how this works I’ll go for the whole megillah. Try different organizational schemes. Will take some while to get something interesting, I imagine.

What fun.

 

With the aid of chatgpt yesterday I uncovered something I’d wondered about for a while, the origin of the idea of reconstruction. Reconstructionist Judaism is the brain child (an interesting cliche, if you stop to think about it.) of Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan.

Kaplan’s thought was and is radical relative especially to the three thousand year plus history of Jewish life and thought. No supernaturalism. No God behind the Ozian curtain. No chosenness. Jews and Judaism have no special spot in God’s heart. Kaplan’s daughter was the first ever bat mitzvah, a practice now commonplace among all branches of Judaism except Orthodoxy. And much, much more.

What I got to wondering about was the idea of reconstruction itself. Why that word to describe his approach? My hunch was that it had something to with the post-WWI world still reeling from the war and the Spanish Flu epidemic.

That idea came to me because I had a small volume by the pragmatist reformer, educator, and philosopher John Dewey titled simply: Reconstruction in Philosophy. Dewey and pragmatism influenced Kaplan. I knew that.

The idea of reconstruction after the despair and disillusionment of WWI became wide spread after the publication of Dewey’s book, a collection of his lectures in Tokyo. “Intellectuals and policy-makers on both sides of the Atlantic began to speak of reconstructing society, institutions and even thought itself—an active, rational process of rebuilding what the war had laid bare.” chatgpt excerpt.

Reconstructionist sentiments soon motivated education reformers like the Frontier Thinkers who wanted to use schools for social reconstruction. It showed up in governments, too. The U.K. had a Ministry of Reconstruction with the responsibility to: “Oversee the task of rebuilding ‘the national life on a better and more durable foundation’ once the Great War was over.” And the U.S created a Reconstruction Finance Corporation which gave “emergency credit to banks, railroads and states to restore confidence amid the Great Depression.”

There were, too, applications in Christianity and broader social circles as this chatgpt excerpt shows:  “Reconstruction also surfaced in liberal Protestant circles (e.g., Henry C. King’s Reconstruction in Theology, re-read after 1918) and in secular planning debates about housing, labour relations and women’s roles. The common thread was the conviction that the old order—political, moral, intellectual—had failed, and that conscious, expert-led rebuilding was both possible and necessary.”

Reconstructionist Judaism is, then, living out a pattern of reform and innovation created by global horror at WWI and its root causes. Since the world proceeded rapidly to WWII, the Korean War, Vietnam, and the multiple conflicts in the Middle East as well as the sinkhole of the Ukraine, I’d say we still have work to do.

 

 

Fourth Phase, Men, Politics, US History

A Masculinism for the 21st century?

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Spring and the 2% Wu Wei Moon

Shabbat gratefuls: Shadow. Rain. Donyce. Ruth. Gabe. Tom. Pain. Talmud Torah. Mussar. Men’s group. CBE. Marilyn and Irv. Primo’s. Aspen Perks. Conifer Cafe. Dandelion. Bread Lounge. Golden Stix. My son. Seoah. The Jangs. Coming to America.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Toys for Shadow

Week Kavannah: Persistence and grit. Netzach.

One brief shining: Sat here yesterday with two good friends, Tom and Shadow, Shadow circling, coming up to Tom’s arm, then moving away, yes, I want to know you, but slowly, maybe next time a bit more, I don’t know you, not sure about you, sniff, sniff, sniff, maybe next time a bit more.

 

Shadow has wounds. Trauma. Probably inflicted by a man. Deep voice. Tall. (to her). She cowers sometimes when I put out my hand. Not always now, a big advance. Like many of us H. Sapiens she wants, needs connection, yet fears it, too. A sadness on my part. As Tom said, don’t you love belonging to the gender and race guilty of so much abuse? Oh, yeah.

Wondering again. About the material I read about boys in American schools. About the young college men my granddaughter describes as infected with toxic masculinity. Not worth giving a try. About men like the Proud Boys, the Promise Keepers, the red-hatted flush-faced American flag waving believers in replacement theory and the strange ideas of the incels.

My gut tells me its time, past time, to focus on men and boys the same energy Simone de Beauvoir and Gloria Steinem and Betty Freidan and Angela Davis and Michelle Obama gave to women and girls.

But how. Men. Stoic. Loyal. Competitive. Strong physically. Crippled emotionally. Fearful. Often cowardly. Bert Lahr lions and/or tin men.

I suppose that’s not a bad a way to think about it. American men fell asleep among the poppies on the yellow brick road. They never got a heart or a brain. Instead they use dominance and aggression where empathy and camaraderie would better serve. They pledge allegiance to false idols like conservative Christianity, MAGA, white supremacy rather than using reason leavened with compassion.

How can we wake them up? Shake them up? Not as Republicans or MAGA-men, but first as men. As fathers, brothers, sons, friends, lovers.

I have a hunch that woke men would defeat the red-hat menace all on their own. Would realize the damage being done not only to their mothers, wives, sisters, and daughters but to themselves. Let alone our suffering nation once a shining city on a hill now a landfill for the refuse of buried tenderness and thwarted love.

I know I’m complicit. Raised a white man in mid-last century Indiana, subject to all the ills available to young boys and men back then.

That is, of course, the huge issue when thinking about a masculinist movement, a masculinism for our time. We are not oppressed, rather we are repressed. We do not need empowerment, rather we need softening, gentling. No marches for men’s rights. We have more than our share.

The men’s movement, in which I have a small role, has failed to become widespread. It has failed to change the trajectory of masculinity in any appreciable way.

My granddaughter won’t date the men we’ve raised. As many young women will not. Can you blame them?

Perhaps even more than defeating our own Mussolini we need to learn how to become human. How to wake our brothers asleep among the poppies. Get them back on the yellow brick road to see the wizard.