chres·tom·a·thy (kr-stm-th)
n. pl. chres·tom·a·thies
1. A selection of literary passages, usually by one
author.
2. An anthology used in studying a language.
3. Another damn stupid liberal blog
If you, if you could return, don't let it burn, don't let it fade.
I'm sure I'm not being rude, but it's just your attitude,
It's tearing me apart, It's ruining everything.
I swore, I swore I would be true, and honey, so did you.
So why were you holding her hand? Is that the way we stand?
Were you lying all the time? Was it just a game to you?
But I'm in so deep. You know I'm such a fool for you.
You got me wrapped around your finger, ah, ha, ha.
Do you have to let it linger? Do you have to, do you have to,
Do you have to let it linger?
Oh, I thought the world of you.
I thought nothing could go wrong,
But I was wrong. I was wrong.
If you, if you could get by, trying not to lie,
Things wouldn't be so confused and I wouldn't feel so used,
But you always really knew, I just wanna be with you.
But I'm in so deep. You know I'm such a fool for you.
You got me wrapped around your finger, ah, ha, ha.
Do you have to let it linger? Do you have to, do you have to,
Do you have to let it linger?
And I'm in so deep. You know I'm such a fool for you.
You got me wrapped around your finger, ah, ha, ha.
Do you have to let it linger? Do you have to, do you have to,
Do you have to let it linger?
You know I'm such a fool for you.
You got me wrapped around your finger, ah, ha, ha.
Do you have to let it linger? Do you have to, do you have to,
Do you have to let it linger?
Monday we will celebrate anew the birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr, which always provides us a fresh opportunity to look at race relations. I write today in anticipation of the federal holiday to avoid the pile-on of blog posts and columns set to be submitted in a couple of days. It's a struggle to come up with original content in the forty-eight years since MLK's tragic assassination in Memphis. As I often do, I'll write about my personal experiences close to the source.
I'd like to pursue a different angle, that being the city of my birth and primary upbringing. The demographics of Birmingham, Alabama, have changed considerably since the days of Civil Rights. Though the city has recently showed a few tentative beginning stages of gentrification, that development is currently isolated to a few blocks in downtown. On a drive back from the airport over the holidays, I observed how much of the city is still blighted by years of poverty and gloom. Birmingham proper grows poorer and blacker by the day.
Shortly before the merging of several highways ignobly referred to by natives as malfunction junction lies the heart of downtown. The multi-purpose arena known as the Birmingham-Jefferson Civic Center is showing its age. Built in 1976, four years before my birth, a look from the interstate shows what forty years of wear and tear will do. In my childhood, I was taken there on field trips to see the Alabama Symphony Orchestra. This was at the dawn of the suburbs, where white wealth and population continued to stream over Red Mountain in a torrent.
Dr. King spoke quite a bit about a very real War on Poverty towards the end of his life. If he had lived, what would he have said about white flight? In his time, white liberals were beginning to flood out of the District of Columbia into Northern Virginia. That retreat would only continue over the decades. Census data shows that the population of the District sharply declined until very recently. Washington, DC, is not Birmingham (nor can the two be fairly compared), but there are observable trends in place between them.
Though we may be uniform in our belief that integration and Civil Rights was a success, dissenting voices did exist. It may be instructive to know what Malcolm X said about King's Birmingham Campaign, fifty-three years in our past. In his 1963 message to the Grassroots, the Nation of Islam leader goes aggressively after King and King's strategy.
As soon as King failed in Birmingham, Negroes took to the streets. King got out and went out to California to a big rally and raised about -- I don't know how many thousands of dollars.
And as Negroes of national stature began to attack each other, they began to lose their control of the Negro masses. And Negroes was [sic] out there in the streets. They was [sic] talking about [how] we was [sic] going to march on Washington. By the way, right at that time Birmingham had exploded, and the Negroes in Birmingham -- remember, they also exploded. They began to stab the crackers in the back and bust them up 'side their head -- yes, they did.
The critique here is harsh and unrepentant. King is showed to be counterfeit, a mere fundraiser. Malcolm's "Negroes of national stature" continued the lamentable trend. Birmingham's history post Civil Rights is a Greek tragedy of the highest stature. Corruption, wasteful spending, and mutual race baiting have left the city paralyzed. It has only been in the past several years that something akin to a revitalization has broken ground and kept moving forward. In building a new stadium, the city has attracted the return of the local minor league baseball team and has modernized the airport after years of neglect.
This is real progress, but arrives too late. The southern suburbs now hold most of the revenue and the power. African-American families are now the ones leaving Birmingham for whiter pastures. If only this sad story were relegated to one city with a troubled past, but it is woefully commonplace. This is the story of America in the late 20th and early 21st Century. We should rightly pause to reflect the flurry of organization and activity designed to establish equality among the races.
Dr. King told us that the hard work isn't done. Here's the rub. It likely never will be.
In 1814 we took a little trip
Along with Colonel Jackson down the mighty Mississip.
Took a little bacon and we took a little beans
And we met the bloody British in the town of New Orleans.
We fired our guns and the British kept a'comin'.
There wasn't as many as there was a while ago.
We fired once more and they began to runnin'
Down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico.
We looked down the river and we see'd the British come.
And there must have been a hundred of 'em beatin' on the drum.
They stepped so high and they made the bugles ring.
We stood by our cotton bales and didn't say a thing.
Old Hickory said we could take 'em by surprise
If we didn't fire our muskets 'til we looked 'em in the eye
Held our fire 'til we see'd their faces well.
Then we opened up with squirrel guns and really gave 'em ...well
Yeah, they ran through the briers and they ran through the brambles
And they ran through the bushes where a rabbit couldn't go.
Ran so fast that the hounds couldn't catch 'em
Down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico.
We fired our cannon 'til the barrel melted down.
So we grabbed an alligator and we fought another round.
We filled his head with cannon balls, powdered his behind
And when we touched the powder off, the gator lost his mind.
Yeah, they ran through the briers and they ran through the brambles
And they ran through the bushes where a rabbit couldn't go.
Ran so fast that the hounds couldn't catch 'em
Down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico.
The cynic rejects organized religion because of the perceived damage it creates to the believer. The atheist believes in no higher power, no higher authority. The atheist may observe nothing, but the cynic observes everything.
Certain biblical narratives in the life of Jesus could be said to invoke guilt to enforce belief. Matthew 23 speaks harshly to the keeper of God’s word, the scribes and the Pharisees. In modern parlance, we might deem the entire chapter and all forty verses as one extended rant. It is unclear whether this message should apply to the common person, but its inclusion in the text has been variously applied to everyone over the centuries.
Jesus’ anger builds to a fiery crescendo, a warning of apocalypse and eternal damnation. Like Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, the punishment is vocal and descriptive.
“You snakes! You brood of vipers! How will you escape being condemned to hell? Therefore I am sending you prophets and sages and teachers. Some of them you will kill and crucify; others you will flog in your synagogues and pursue from town to town. And so upon you will come all the righteous blood that has been shed on earth, from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah son of Berekiah, whom you murdered between the temple and the altar. Truly I tell you, all this will come on this generation.
Should we fall to our knees in terror? Some of us will take these words as an admonishment to avoid hypocrisy in their own lives, but others will think the punishment too harsh. How we take the message depends on our conception of obedience to God. More individualistic faiths downplay this passage. The response of Liberal Friends and self-identified liberals might well be: Who are you to tell me what to believe?
A healthy skepticism is often a good thing. Converts to Quakerism are routinely attracted to a faith where no person speaks for everyone. Yet, I find many more have never quite gotten over their childhood scoldings by frustrated parents. Some have never outgrown their rebellious adolescence and early adult life.
The definition of guilt depends, of course, on context and on the individual. The words of Jesus or any authoritative voice can be by turns threatening, gently admonishing, and even constructive. Where we are along life’s journey and our internal responses to external stimulus dictate what we hear and what we ignore. For me, there are times where I don’t want to be reminded of the times I let my basic selfishness overtake my best intentions. I’m doing the best I can, I might protest.
Is it guilt that makes me claim I am being falsely accused or unjustly persecuted? I better get right with God, or I know where I’m going. Or, at least, that’s what some believe. I never was much of a believer in the benefit of hellfire and damnation. Liberal faiths discard the above scriptural passage altogether or downplay the venom.
In Luke, harsh Jesus appears again.
One day Jesus said to his disciples, "There will always be temptations to sin, but what sorrow awaits the person who does the tempting! It would be better to be thrown into the sea with a millstone hung around your neck than to cause one of these little ones to fall into sin.”
As I’ve noted before a time or two, Abraham Lincoln used this passage to great effect in his second Inaugural Address. In that context, he was addressing a destructive fratricidal war that tore not only a country apart, but the Religious Society of Friends. We may not have recovered from the strife and discord yet.
Guilt has its place, but not when it exists only to make someone else miserable. That approach isn’t corrective. It’s childish. If we consider ourselves Christians, we seek to be made in Jesus’ image, not to be chronically unhappy. Everyone knows a person who has been wounded by faith perverted, by the pettiness of human failure. Quakerism promises a freedom from the unhelpful and unnecessary, not the end of life lessons for right living. This is where some go wrong, very wrong.
Living the life requires that we keep our spiritual muscles supple. We only gain strength through exertion and constant focus. Protesting unfair treatment or largely imagined grievances weakens us. As we are forgiven, so we should forgive ourselves and begin again. The idealist in us wants to believe in the concept of adulthood as a goal to be reached, an apex to be scaled. In reality, maturity is often what people run from, not run towards.
I write to you today with no guilty conscience. My demons are inside me, not in a smoldering cauldron or, as we are taught, cast into a herd of pigs. Who am I to tell you what to do? May you be in a receptive mindframe, neither defensive nor reactive, ready to practice active listening. If a little healthy guilt trip now and again works for you, so be it. I wouldn’t live my life in fear of always doing something wrong. Doesn’t that interfere with our freedom of choice?
I’ve written numerous times about my disability. Some have encouraged me to be less open about it, some have applauded my courage. I’m often ambivalent upon which side to favor. Plainly put, I have bipolar disorder, draw a small monthly payment, and above all, have guaranteed government health insurance. As I read the legal language of President Obama’s executive order, it appears to me that everyone on federal Social Security disability for mental illness will be flagged as potentially dangerous. We are not the same, but to the unknowing, it is easy to stigmatize.
What has been put in force overreaches a little, but not in the way conservative commentators have said. It effectively disqualifies me from purchasing a sawed-off shotgun or a semi-automatic weapon, not that I ever would. It, in fact, disqualifies me from owning any gun. I believe in gun control, but to treat all people with mental illness the same is not fair. Most of us are not violent and will never be violent. Our own worst enemy is usually ourselves, and those of us who grab deadly weapons to address invisible grievances are in the minority.
Former U.S. Representative Patrick Kennedy has spoken about his own bipolar disorder and history of addiction. Occasionally erratic behavior aside, when he stepped down from the House, a prominent voice for our cause was lost. I wonder how he feels about being summarily disqualified in a very different way based on the worst fears of society. Before I stoke the fires of righteous indignation, the oldest trope in the book, I want to entertain a very different reality. It is not a stretch to go a step further. Effectively, everyone who has mental illness is now prohibited for owning and possessing any gun or guns. They are now treated like convicted felons, who lose their right to gun ownership and to vote upon conviction.
Whether this is right or wrong is something that we as a country have to decide. I’m not a gun owner, nor do I feel any need to be. Earlier in my life, like so many men, I learned to shoot and hunt. I never really took to the pastime, to be honest. If I even owned a handgun for personal protection, I want to stress that I'd give it up now and not complain too loudly. That proves how committed I am to a non-violent world, not that I don’t trust myself and my illness. If we take away guns, unlike the NRA slogan, the only people who might own them are violent, thoroughly insane offenders with a death wish and a desire to kill.
History is full of assassins with substantial mental health issues. But most of us suffer in private, feeling no desire to engage with the outside world, afraid to be lumped in with the ultra-violent or pitied for all the wrong reasons. A distinction needs to be made and constantly reinforced. It is fashionable to talk about the obsession and compulsion of America, the acts of the delusional and psychotic. In truth, the issue is much more nuanced.
Our real problem is a lack of adequate doctors and a lack of robust mental health treatment. The stigma of mental illness has subsided, but a lack of access to care and medications is part of the problem. Another part of the problem is a failure to intercede in the lives of the suffering. It may not be a popular sentiment, but I pity the workplace shooter while condemning his or her acts. That may be a stretch for us, because our primary tendency might be to bury our heads in the sand and play pretend.
An assault weapons ban and a closing of loopholes is a good first step, but it doesn’t go far enough. If we were committed to stopping random acts of violence, we would do the hard work of identifying every individual with homicidal tendencies. That’s not so easy, is it? Or maybe it is. I say again, as I have said many times before, this is why we can’t be hands-off and live without fear.
Mental illness runs in families and dysfunction is more common than we would like to admit. We can’t just leave it up to laws and government, we have to step in ourselves. That’s the only way to make this new order work. If we thought of each other as part of the same family, we wouldn’t need government to be our keeper.
"I am not a Labor Leader; I do not want you to follow me or anyone else; if you are looking for a Moses to lead you out of this capitalist wilderness, you will stay right where you are.
I would not lead you into the promised land if I could, because if I lead you in, some one else would lead you out.
You must use your heads as well as your hands, and get yourself out of your present condition."
