• Tag Archives Politics

  • Is It a Time to Advance or Retreat?

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    27  66%  18%  1mph ENE bar29.95 falls windchill26  Imbolc

                Waning Crescent of the Winter Moon

    A strange, sometimes troubling struggle has broken out in the responsible section of my Self.  The sometimes subtle, sometimes hammer blow obvious skirmishes have me puzzled about what actions to take, if any.  The formal study of Daoism I began a couple of weeks ago has begun to push me in a way that I hope will resolve this matter, or at least give me a way to handle it.

    The struggle is over politics.  As I’ve written elsewhere politics defined my life during my late teens, 20’s, 30’s and early 40’s.  That is to say, by my junior year in high school I was a political animal, a politician and an activist.  President of my high school class for my freshman, junior and senior years, a favorite teacher pushed the Little United Nations Assembly of Indiana to accept me as the presiding officer for the 1965 Little United Nations.  The year before I represented the Republic of Chad.  In the fall of 1965 we protested the CIA recruiters on the campus of Wabash and I never looked back. 

    Draft eligible and permanently active from that point forward I got involved in civil rights, student rights and anti-war politics. I was a student senator for three years at Ball State, then ran an unsuccessful campaign for president of the student body.  I helped organize and lead anti-draft and anti-war rallies, marches and teach-ins. 

    In seminary I pushed the seminary on anti-war politics, became an early feminist and began a ten year involvement with anti-racism training.

    While working at Community Involvement Programs as their janitor and weekend counselor, I lived in the Stevens Square Neighborhood.  There I got involved in neighborhood level politics, leading an effort to push General Mills out of the community and organizing the Stevens Square Neighborhood Association.  Made a lot of friends and few enemies.  It was fun.  This was the 1970’s. 

    In 1978 the Presbytery of the Twin Cities Area hired me to work on the West Bank as a community minister.  I got involved in community based economic development, building affordable housing, organizing against unemployment and for broader community involvement in the management of philanthropy. 

    In 1984 I left the West Bank and took over urban missions for the Presbytery which expanded the arena of action.  In various ways I was still at it when I met Kate in 1988. 

    Over all this time I had a very active hand in DFL politics working at the precinct, congressional and state levels.  Then I left the Presbytery in  1991.  Not long after that Kate and I moved to Andover.

    Since then my political work has shrunk to near nothing.  I send the occasional e-mail, make a phone call, show up (sometimes) at the precinct caucus, but I’m part of no ongoing, organized effort to make or change policy.  The whole climate change issue is fraught with political issues of real import, many of them.  I’m interested, especially in water related issues and Lake Superior.   Yet I do almost nothing.

    The 1960’s was a “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.” era.  My political superego came into maturity in those times and this notion became a benchmark for my own assessment of responsible behavior. 

    Thus, the struggle.  I wonder, sometimes, where this guy went, this political guy. It’s like he crawled under a rock, but that’s not so.  No, this is a struggle that has moved back and forth in my mind since the move to Andover.

    Now the Daoist studies I’ve engaged propose a way of addressing it.  Daoism suggests that there are times to retreat and times to advance, times which call for more yang, times which call for more yin.  The wise man, Daoism says, adjusts his inner life to what it calls the temporary conditions, the way the Tao manifests itself.  This area of Daoist studies has my attention right now.  I’ll keep you informed because this struggle is not productive and it’s not over.

              


    📂This entry was posted in Great Work Memories Politics 📎and tagged

  • Bared Roots and All

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    38  73% 23% 0mph SSW bar29.12 steady  windchill39  Winter

                           Last Quarter of the Winter Moon

    Think I lost a post somewhere in cyber space, one from this morning. 

    A miscellaneous day so far.  Kate and I decided on the kinds of vegetables we want to grow.  Next I’ll look at her choices for varieties and the seeds we bought at Seed Saver’s Exchange outside Decorah, Iowa.  With those in mind I’ll put together a planting plan which will include when to plant or start seeds indoors, companion plants, a plan for optimum soil rotation over the years and the amount of vegetables we plan to consume over the summer and fall, plus those we want to put away in the root cellar-to-be or through canning or freezing.  If I have to order some new seeds or plants, I’ll get those orders in early.  I’ll also put together a tree and shrub order for the bare root plants that the Anoka County Conservation folk sell in early May.

    Later I edited my sermon for March 23rd, a sort of where I am now in my own theological/ge-ological thinking.  Decided to wait until March to put together the one page digest on Transcendentalism so I’ll be familiar with it as the day arrives.

    Ordered some meds.  Lipitor this time.  Took a nap that included another dog filled dream. 

    I also finished all the material I printed out from the Real Politics website on the Democratic race.  It’s a real nubby matter right now with conflicting data, streaks rather than whole waves of momentum.  So far Clinton remains ahead in national polls, but the electorate is tricky when they sense someone fading in the stretch.  They’ll bale and move toward someone they believe can win.  How white men and Latinos vote may decide the race.

    Doesn’t seem like much, but it took all day.  time for a workout.


    📂This entry was posted in Garden Politics 📎and tagged

  • OMG! Bush Lied!

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    -1  72%  18% 0mph W bar30.10  steady windchill-1  winter

                           Full Winter Moon

    I now have sound going from the DVR/Cable box to the receiver and the 5 speakers.  I also have sound going from the new Blu-Ray DVD player to the 5 speakers.  This is close to total success, but I still have two hurdles remaining.  I have not been able to get any radio signals yet, in spite of connecting the antennas and I have not run the test microphone which will balance the speakers.  Still, I feel largely done with this project.

    In order to get Blu-Ray quality movies you have to get Blu-Ray discs.  Not cheap.  I watched one this evening, Beowulf and Grendel.  This movie takes a spare approach to the story and gives a backstory for Grendel.  It is gorgeous, shot in Iceland by an Icelandic director.  I liked it a good deal, though I’d not heard of it.

    The big screen, HD TV setup came from my love for movies.  This is a stunning way to watch movies at home and, with the surround sound, surprisingly close to the cinema experience.  Movies are as important to me as literature, music and the fine arts.  I’m glad to have this way to view them.

    Now:  It can finally be said.

    “WASHINGTON (AP) – A study by two nonprofit journalism organizations found that President Bush and top administration officials issued hundreds of false statements about the national security threat from Iraq in the two years following the 2001 terrorist attacks. The study concluded that the statements “were part of an orchestrated campaign that effectively galvanized public opinion and, in the process, led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses.”

    The study was posted Tuesday on the Web site of the Center for Public Integrity, which worked with the Fund for Independence in Journalism.”

    The life and times of celebrities must be difficult.  Heath Ledger’s death today, whether suicide or accident (and I would wonder if accident isn’t suicide by another name), puts another name in the column of this felled by fame.  To those in the limelight all the time there must be a moment when you either choose life or choose self-destruction, a decision many of us face only obliquely, perhaps at the dinner table.


    📂This entry was posted in Cinema and Television GeekWorld Politics 📎and tagged

  • Cows With Guns

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    4  65%  20%  0mph SWS bar30.06  steep fall windchll2  winter

                        Full Winter Moon

    Here is a wonderful movie from the BLF, the Bovine Liberation Front:   Cows With Guns.  Thanks to Paul Strickland (and a Golden Plump Warrior Chicken Tip o’ the Hat to the Helgeson’s: Beware of the chickens with choppers.)

    The Woollies met last night.  We discussed our memories of the Civil Rights movement and the time before it which we can remember well.  Paul remembered white’s only drinking fountains, segregated movie theatres and a grandmother who said of a man beating a dog, “I wouldn’t treat a nigger like that.”  Scott Simpson told of two and a half years as a member of an African-American Pentecostal church in north Minneapolis.  When he brought a lady friend home one evening, his mother quietly asked him, “You don’t plan to marry her, do you?”  I recalled the bitter and often painful days when white radicals like myself marched and acted in solidarity with Blacks.  We were all struggling to find our identity and we accomplished some of that in angry confrontations with each other. 

    We debated how far the culture had come since those days.   Some of us thought we’d come a long ways, others (myself, for instance) thought not as far as it seems.  I cited this incident from that went to trial in September of  last year:

    “Al Hixon installed some carpeting for his residential construction business one Saturday morning. Then he took his Jaguar out of winter storage and stopped for some fresh oil at a Sinclair station near his Golden Valley home back on April 2, 2005.

    The next thing he knew, police officers were throwing him face down on the pavement, jumping on his back, handcuffing him, placing a boot on his neck and shooting pepper spray in his eyes and nostrils, according to his testimony at a federal excessive-force trial Friday in St. Paul.”

    Warren told of an African-American friend who found an Eveleth restaurant accepting and a Virginia bar, only a few miles away, hostile and threatening.  It’s the randomness of these experiences, the not knowing when racism will rise up, that makes life still stressful and unpleasant, at the least for most African-Americans.

    Oh, and we set up our calendar for next retreat, decided on a theme for the retreat and the next year:  All Themes Considered.   This is astonishing productivity for a group of usually slow to come to a decision men, but we liked it anyhow.


    📂This entry was posted in Faith and Spirituality Woolly Mammoths 📎and tagged

  • A Root Cellar in Andover

    Posted on by Charles 1 Comment

    19  65%  26%  1mph W  bar30.10 rises  windchill19  Winter

                    Waxing Crescent of the Winter Moon

    I like Sundays.  My workout schedule is 6 days a week and Sunday is a day off.   Much of my life Sunday, especially Sunday morning  was a work day, so to have the day off is a special treat in my world. 

    Of course, like most Sundays, I will write today and spend some more time on the garden plan.  Might even watch a play-off game.  How ’bout them Packers?  Winning in the snow.  Northern football.  Brett Favre comes from Mississippi; must have been a shock when he first started in Green Bay.

    Yesterday I looked over plans for root cellars.  Kate and I plan to put one in this next growing season.  I’m not sure where quite yet.  One book recommends digging into a hill, which makes sense, and I have a hill right outside the window here.  The problem is, if I dig it by hand, there are difficulties.  First order of business is to kill and remove the poison ivy.  Then, since this hill has seven oaks trees on its crest and a few stubby ash and oak there will be woody roots to remove.  Not to mention the actual digging.  That could be a good workout, though.

    None of this is impossible, of course.  The question is whether I’m willing to do all the work by hand.  If we put the root cellar in the back, we could have a backhoe come in and do the heavy lifting, then all we’d have to do is frame it out, make steps and a floor, put in a roof and call it a cellar.  To get to the hill area I’d like to use, any heavy equipment would have to come over lawn and I’m not sure I want to do that.

     Noticed in the paper today that the election has world attention.  As well it might.  Having spent the last presidential election in Singapore, however, I can report that even then taxi drivers gave a damn about whom we elect as President.  Many foreign nationals are eager to see the Bush era come to an end.  I’m with them. 


    📂This entry was posted in Great Work Our Land and Home 📎and tagged

  • Coming Down off a Techno High

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    30  96%  30%  omph WSW bar 29.85 rises windchill30  Winter

                         New Moon

    Watched an HD movie tonight:  An American Haunting. Sissy Spacek, Donald Sutherland and James D’Arcy provided the core of a good ensemble cast.  This movie tells of the Bell Witch, an early 19th century century haunting in Adams, Tennessee. There is a cottage industry of folks who believe, including debunkers of other believers.  A bit like a snake biting its own tale.  The book An American Haunting: The Bell Witch recounts the supposedly true events which ended in 1821 with the death of John Bell.  The movie suggests incest, but fails, at least to my satisfaction, to link it to the strange occurrences at the Bell House.  Here is a website with further information.

    Feel like I’m coming down off a techno high, a sort of cyber electric dream occasioned by optical cables, coaxial cables, HDMI cables, speaker wire, subwoofers and high definition televison.  Alice could tumble through an HDMI cable into a virtual wonderland, I have.  This is an enchantment of sorts, and as such it must be encountered with awareness, not naivete.

    Hey, how about that Hilary, huh?  Coulda fooled me.  Looked like Obama was a shoe-in in New Hampshire.  Just what this means for the race is anybodies guess right now.  I love it.  Real candidates in a real horse race.  Jockeying for position, fighting over the issues and over how to organize campaigns for types of candidates who’ve never run before in this serious a manner.  This is (to use a much abused phrase) a historic moment for American democracy.  It can be a time when we win back the world’s admiration if we allow ourselves to enter the process without cynicism.  Hard, I admit, but possible and desirable.  Imagine a campaign about real politics and not weirdo ideologies.


    📂This entry was posted in Cinema and Television GeekWorld Politics 📎and tagged

  • Is Obama the Liberal Reagan?

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    33 90%  31%  1mph  NNW  bar29.75  falls windchill31  Winter

                         New Moon

    The speakers first, then the short story.  Then my Asia tour.  May take until Tuesday with the Woollies tonight at the Istanbul Cafe and my workout.  Made a decision last night to shift the resistance and flexibility work to T/Th/Sat which will put aerobics only on Monday and Friday, the days I have the most conflicts with working out.  The aerobics are easier to time.

    This chilly, humid weather I left Indiana to avoid.  I feel about this in-between weather the same as Martin Luther did about sin.  He said, “If you’re going to sin, sin boldly.”  I say, “If it’s going to be cold, let it be cold.  And snowy.  And all the other appropriate winter stuff, not this melty coldish yuck.”

    Tomorrow New Hampshire.  A Gallup poll release yesterday showed Obama out in front of Clinton 41% to 29%.  He will probably do well in South Carolina, the next primary.  I can feel the optimism of the African-American community viscerally.  The analysis I’ve read, however, says even wins in all 3 races may not be enough.  The SuperTuesday primaries are states where the Clinton organization has built solid leads, according to reporters on the ground.  We’ll see. 

    David Brooks, of all people, suggested what might happen.  If enough independents find Obama to be the liberal Reagan, an optimistic voice helping to redefine America in a time of shattered national confidence, and African-Americans and young people do, too, then it will become Obama with the sense of inevitability, knocking the dull, hack-type politics of Hilary out of the race.  As far as issues go, I’m a Kucinich guy, and in the three way race, Edwards gives voice to what I believe, but the prospect of electing an African-American or a woman moves me, too.  Feels good to have legitimate choices for a change.

    Speaker wire here I come, awake and opposable thumbs in the right places. 


    📂This entry was posted in General Politics 📎and tagged

  • Obama and Huckabee

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    16  85%  26%  omph S  bar 30.07 falls windchill 16  Yuletide

                   Waning Crescent of the Cold Moon

                             Iowa Caucus Night

    Oh, the political junkie in me is humming tonight.  Obama takes Iowa.  Huckabee takes Iowa.  Who knew all these folks wanted Iowa in the first place?  It would have been fun to be in Iowa tonight. 

    If you’ve never submitted yourself to the pleasures of an Iowa subcaucus evening, you haven’t lived politically.  The DFL here in Minnesota adopted the Iowa subcaucus process.  In three hotly contested elections I subcaucused in Minneapolis.  It’s sort of the political version of how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.  How many gender neutral, pro-labor, anti-gun McCarthy voters are there?  If there are a few left over for a viable caucus, who can we cut a deal with to get  more for our issue?  It’s wild and if there are a lot of people it’s exciting.  Horse trading and dickering at a fast clip.

    It also makes tallying up winners an interesting process as Wolf Blitzer kept saying all evening.  In the end CNN counted the total of Iowa state delegates each candidate got, created percentages and called their winners.  The more sedate Iowa Republicans took straw votes and went home.  Much easier, but not nearly as much fun.

    What does this mean for the race as a whole?  Well, Hilary doesn’t look inevitable anymore.  Obama is far from having it locked it up, but, as a commentator on CNN said (not poor bewildered Wolf Blitzer), if he carries two predominantly white states, Iowa and New Hampshire, black voters will flock to him and quite possibly away from Hilary.  They won’t want to stand in the way of the first black president.  By February 5th, a quick time in politics, it may done since AL, AK, AZ, AR, CA, CO, CT, DE, GA, IL, MN, MO, NJ, NY, ND, OK, TN & UT primaries plus New Mexico, Idaho and Kansas Democratic primaries are on Tuesday, February 5th.

    That would mean the general election race would begin that night and last until November.  What does that mean for an election process usually compressed in the days following Labor Day?  Don’t know.  Anyhow, lots to keep us junkies up nights until then.


    📂This entry was posted in News of the Strange Politics 📎and tagged

  • Tomorrow, In a Cornfield Near You

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    1 77%  22%  0mph WSW bar 30.73 falls  Yuletide

               Waning Crescent of the Cold Moon

    Today is the day I devote to marketing my work, an idea suggested by Scott Edelstein.  A day a month on it, then put it away, he said.  That way it has time set aside and does not weigh on the work.  I’ve done just that since September and I have finished all my short story edits.  Next month I will have some to submit.

    I heard from my brother, Mark, who told me a while ago he was afraid the political unrest in Thailand might set off violence.  He was right, as he says, regrettably.  

    United States democracy, and democracies in most of the developed world, are a reasoned trade-off between the power of violence and the assertion of authoritarian government.  The nation’s focus on Iowa tomorrow has such edge because the result in that agricultural state might change foreign and domestic policy in the world’s strongest economy backed up by the world’s most expensive military.   That is, we expect a peaceful transition of power between one government and the other, in fact, we insist upon it.  Not all countries can harbor such expectations.

    It is just this peaceful transition that Al Gore protected when he refused a public challenge to the Supreme Court’s ruling on the Florida voting discrepancies.   His graciousness was necessary, I think, in spite of the horrors that resulted directly from it.

    Some people call it the silly season.  Others turn off their TV sets and stop reading newspapers.  I call it the best show on earth with the exception of the greatest spectacle in racing, the Indianapolis 500.  A presidential election year.  What a year it is.  The first time in 80 years that no incumbent president or vice-president is on the ballot.  Think of that.  This is the first time in two generations, my whole life.

    The first chapter opens tomorrow in a corn field near you.


    📂This entry was posted in Politics 📎and tagged

  • What Rough Beast Comes?

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    26 83%  28% 2mph NNW  bar 30.15 rises windchill25   Yuletide

                              Waning Gibbous Cold Moon

    The assassination of Benazir Bhutto chilled me, chilled me more than the air temperature outside.  My reaction surprised me since I have no Pakistani friends, feel no special affiliation with the Pakistani people and know only a little about Ms. Bhutto.  Yeats comes to mind:  The center will not hold.  This targeted political violence is the rough beast that slouches toward the Bethlehems in every country and toward the calm in our souls.

    There is no place on the globe any longer that does not affect us, no matter how remote from our understanding or apparent sympathies.  This is good in a general sense and perhaps bodes well for the long term future when these kind of strong links bind us together even more strongly; but now, in the short term, the ripples will have unexpected consequences.

    The material below is interesting.

    From Scientific American Online: 

    People who describe themselves as being politically liberal can better suppress a habitual response when faced with situations in which that response is incorrect, according to research that used a simple cognitive test to compare liberal and conservative thinkers. Tasks that require such “conflict monitoring” also triggered more activity in the liberals’ anterior cingulate cortex, a brain region geared to detect and respond to conflicting information.

    Past research has shown that liberals and conservatives exhibit differing cognitive styles, with liberals being more tolerant of ambiguity and conservatives preferring more structure. The new paper “is exciting because it suggests a specific mechanism” for that pattern, com­ments psychologist Wil Cunningham of Ohio State University, who was not involved with the study. In the experiment, subjects saw a series of letters flash quickly on a screen and were told to press a button when they saw M, but not W. Because M appeared about 80 percent of the time, hitting the button became a reflex—and the more liberal-minded volunteers were better able to avoid the knee-jerk reaction.

    The study’s lead author, psychologist David Amodio of New York University, emphasizes that the findings do not mean that political views are predetermined. “There are a lot of steps be­tween conflict monitoring and political ideology, and we don’t know what those steps are,” he says. Although the neurocognitive process his group measured is so basic that it is most likely in place in early childhood, he notes that “the whole brain is very malleable.” Social relation­ships and other environmental factors also shape one’s political leanings.


    📂This entry was posted in Politics 📎and tagged