Daily Archives: May 27, 2011

Asia, Commentary on Religion, Humanities, Politics, US History

How Might We Lose Our Freedoms?

Leave a comment

Beltane                                                                            Waning Last Frost Moon

“America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.” – Abraham Lincoln

The tea-party folks and all those ronpaulites must love this quote from Lincoln.  I just did a quick search trying (unsuccessfully) to find its source.  The line came up  on such webpages as:  Patriot Watch, The RightWing News, Gunforum, Overkill, Professional Soldiers, SpearFishingPlanet and ChristianSoldiersCross.com among many others.  Until this search, I hadn’t realized a pernicious part of the search technology; that is, it’s capacity to put quotes out of context into everyone’s hands.  I’m sure most, all?, of these folks are confident Lincoln said this.  I don’t know for sure and couldn’t find the source in a quick search.  Context matters.  He may well have meant the apparent plain meaning of these words; he may well not have said them at all; or, he may have said them, but their meaning is different from the apparent meaning due to context.

This is just a specific instance of a general phenomena the web unfortunately promotes, an uncritical acceptance of information and attributions.  If you do not have training in critical thinking, it does not come naturally, you will not consider the possibility of false or inaccurate information; neither will you consider the possibility of attributions made in error, out of wishful thinking, out of malice, out of mistaken information.

Having said that.  Lincoln.  Well, of course, this quote represents nationalistic thinking on the level of the three year old.  Why?  It’s magical thinking.  (like Ayn Rand, see below)  It should read, “I hope America will never be destroyed from the outside.”  Forever is a really long time.  Who knows?  Canada and Mexico may form a Norte Americano Hockey league and decide to invade.  OK, that one’s easy.

With the next sentence I agree.  Please note, all right wing admirers of Lincoln, he did not say, “If we raise taxes, we will destroy ourselves.”

Hell, I’m not even sure he said this in the first place.  But let’s pretend he did until we know one way or the other.

How might we falter?  By restricting the freedom of others.  Who?  Gay and lesbian citizens, who pay taxes, vote, fight, raise children come to mind.  The people here first, now often consigned to the least desirable plots of land  on land once their sole possession, come to mind. All the Mexicans fighting to get across the border onto land that was once under their nations sovereign control come to mind.  Who are the true illegals here?

How might we falter?  By refusing to honor the compassionate wisdom of our primary faith tradition, Christianity. Here are few quotes from the New Testament that show what I mean. Feed my sheep.  Let the little ones come unto me.  Again, I tell you it is easier for a rich man to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven.  “The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free, 19 to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

If you have a country where the rich get rich, richer, richest and the poor recede from economic sight, is that just?  If we are to feed Jesus’s sheep, don’t food stamps and aid to families with dependent children put our culture on His side?  What might be good news to the poor?  A job.  Affordable housing.  Decent medical care.  Food.

Do you see where I’m going here?  It’s possible, even probable, that Lincoln, who hated slavery and loved the nation would, if he had lived, have created a number of government programs to assure the reconstruction of the south.  Instead thanks to Booth we got Andrew Johnson, friend to the south and enemy of reconstruction.

We will lose our freedoms when we lose the compassion that has made us great, the compassion that opens our borders, feeds the starving and gives people a hand up and a handout when necessary.  We will lose our freedoms when a spirit of meanness triumphs and generosity withers.  We will lose our freedoms when we become the money grubbing, power hungry country many in the world already believe we are.

We will lose our freedoms if the narrow vision of the far right wing comes to dominate our land.  It is not taxes that is the issue, or the nature of the constitution, but the character of our country.  Much that is good here has its roots in New Testament Christianity.  That’s the same New Testament read by right wing religious folk.

Aging, Art and Culture, Bees, Garden, Humanities

Anco Impari (I’m Still Learning. Goya)

Leave a comment

Beltane                                                                 Waning Last Frost Moon

We continue sliding toward summer, a cool, moist descent, not at all like the sudden, blazing ascension we often see, usually full on in place by now, with sun screen and hats and pitchers of lemonade set out on patios.  At some point it will warm up, at least I think it will.  There have been years without summer, years when the weather remains much like what we have now, days cool in the morning, warming in the afternoon and falling off to cool nights.  Could be this will be one of those summers.

I’ve worked this morning on Pentheus, the first few verses proving difficult for me, almost as if I’d entered a different text altogether though it’s only 300 verses away from Diana and Actaeon and in the same Book, III of XV.

Something captivates me as I get into the Latin flow, the world tunes out; the text and I begin this tug of war, me digging, using dictionaries and online aids, the text resisting, remaining stubborn, not allowing its meaning to emerge without a struggle.  The tension between the text and me lies in the language of an ancient people and my learning, a tension requiring both, learning and the language.  Without some knowledge, there would be no tension.  If I had no learning, the words in Latin would sit immutable as stone, as strong a barrier to me.  If my learning were to the level of fluency, the text would not be a barrier at all, I would read as I do in English.  Instead, I’m in a middle place, knowing and learning at the same time, so the text became enticing, pulling me further into the journey, not only of Ovid’s texts, but of the others:  Cicero, Caesar, Livy, Martial, Tacitus, Horace, Seneca.

The feeling reminds me of how I reacted to serious study of art history.  At first there was so much information, so many different aspects that I felt overwhelmed, as if I could never get my head above the surface of this great ocean of learning.  As time passed, as I walked the halls of the museum, read texts and looked at more and more art, a shaky gestalt began to form.  There was a rough chronology, even a global chronology.  There were styles and forms and methods and instances of all three.  At some point the Song Dynasty became separate from the Tang and the Han, just as the early Buddha images became distinct from the later ones of Tibet, Thailand, China.  Neoclassicism and impressionism began to tease themselves apart and appear as separate, thought related movements.  Beckman and Kandinsky and Monet and Barye and Poussin and Church and the master of the embroidered foliage sorted out into times and influences and basic tenets.

(of course, like most of us, I’m a combination of autodidact and schooling, but since college, the autodidact part has definitely taken precedence.)

Now I have a scaffolding on which I can hang new learning, it fits in a large gestalt, which, while far from comprehensive, at least describes the outlines, the places where there are gaps and the places where some new learning easily fits.

Right now Ovid and his Metamorphoses are my teachers, aided by my tutor Greg Mambres and my own reading, learning.  My scaffolding is up, but it’s very shaky.  I have verb forms, conjugations, nouns, declensions, adverbs, participles, clauses, imperatives, word meanings, poetic forms but often I revisit and revisit the same learning, still not seeing with clarity where on the scaffold something belongs.

It was the same with the garden, first flowers and then vegetables and is still now with the bees.  Large tracts of unknowing papered over by fragments of knowledge.  In bee-keeping for example I look at cells.  Hmmm. Those look like drone cells but maybe they’re queen cells.  Or maybe not.  Is it time to put on the second hive box?  Or, is it too early?  Should I use full-sized hive boxes or should I switch to honey supers to keep things lighter?  In gardening.  Just try planting garlic in the spring some year.  Won’t work.  It needs to over winter for a late June harvest.  Want a colorful spring and early summer?  Plant in the fall.  In the orchard I’m practicing IPM, integrated pest management, which means at this point, killing bugs by hand.

What I’ve learned is that knowledge accumulates.  New knowledge needs a scaffolding, a chest of drawers, a memory palace so that it can become integrated.