Middle East

I am a regular reader of Andrew Sullivan's blog (andrewsullivan.com). He is a gay conservative who takes issue with the Republican (and, he accuses, the gay left when it suits them) attacks on gay unions. I have usually disagreed with his strong support for our Iraq adventure, and still do. But today he lists an array of hopeful signs in the mid-east, Mubarak feeling the need to sound like a democrat. Abbas' leadership of the Palestinians, Lebanon's chafing under Syrian oppression, Syrian giving over Saddam's half-brother, as signs that there is a significant shift taking place in the middle east, and that none of it would be happening without Bush having invaded Iraq.

It will be a long time before we know whether all this will result in something significantly new that makes life better, not only for people in that region, but for us in our efforts to combat terrorism. But I have to admit that, if they do, it will be welcome and will certainly have been significantly influenced by our Iraq policy.

I don't feel as optimistic as Sullivan, but as an unrepentant liberal Democrat who bitterly opposed going into Iraq, I will be thrilled if it turns out that it helps the world, rather than adds to the world's (and our) woes as I have feared.

Nto quite ready to eat crow yet, but I'm plucking feathers.

Dick Trelease

My mentor, the man who not only taught me how to be a priest but made me glad to be one, died last night. His wife, Carol, called and said the cancer that was plaguing him had finally persuaded him he wasn't going to win this one, and he slid rapidly out of life in 12 hours. He met his end, which he worked hard to postpone, calmly and with class.

Dick Trelease was an old style liberal, figured any battle about justice, equality or the power of love was worth fighting. He was passionate, so passionate he blew out of his final job, Bisop of the Epsicopal Dioces of the Rio Grande (New Mexico and SW Texas) in a sexual scandal that would have caused lesser men to spend the rest of his life hiding. Not Dick. He married again, a wonderful woman, took jobs that others would have found menial, working in men's accessories in a department store in Albuquerque, and claimed his life with the style and passion he always had.

He asked me to preach at his funeral and this is a sort of warm up. He taught me to pick my fights and make sure they were worth dying for. His were racial justice, anti-war and the daring to love the way he believed Jesus had, with the clutch out.

Like most passionate fighters for justice, he has his enemies. But he was such an elegant man, handsome, afficianado of fine music and food, wine, that he kept his detractors off balance. Dick really liked people, even those who opposed him, and he never passed up a chance to connect with anyone who was willing to engage him with honest energy.

Hard to imagine this world without him.

Making Up

The photos of President Bush shaking hands with Chirac have been ridiculed in the tabloids. "Count your fingers" read the caption under a picture in the Boston Herald, showing the two men gripping each other's hand. Makes you wonder whether it is different for people with such high stakes in the international scene, from those of us who get into disputes with our neighbors over fences and trees that need trimming. Much like the question of whether Bush truly believes in "intelligent design". It used to worry me that Ronald Reagan seemed relly to hold to the rapture notion, that true believers would soon be lifted out of their shoes and clothes and taken to heaven in the sky.

I suppose we have long since passed the point at which any national figure can be expected to speak with candor about matters on which there is so much controversy. And likely that is a good thing.

I hope those leaders in Europe lift a few glasses together when the doors have been closed, and become friends.

Good News

There is word (from Time magazine) today that some of the so-called insurgents in Iraq are sitting down to talk with some American military and civilian people about what they want and what it would take to cause them to stop their attacks. The reports are odd because the American military person identified is a Lt. Col, not exactly the highest ranking person, and the Iraqis are not said to represent a very wide group.

Nonetheless, despite the tendency of people like me, who have bitterly opposed our Iraq adventure, to decry any news from that country, I am heartened by this news and fervently hope it signals the beginning of serious talks.

I am not a pacifist, mainly because I am neither brave nor disciplined enough. But it seems clear to me that attempting to resolve problems and differences through force always results in unintended consequences, never the results envisioned by those who initiate the violence.

And that is because one always imagines eliminating those who stand between you and your goal, will result in your reaching your goal.

The first civil rights demonstration I joined, in 1963 in Boston, we were trained by the Fellowship of Reconciliation. They taught us to picture where the people we perceived as the enemy, fit into what we pictured as the solution to the problem. If there is no place in your solution for your enemy, then it's not a solution. It's a revolution which means replacing their power brokers with ours, which will lead to yet another similar confrontation down the road.

It remains the hardest discipline for me. To picture where John Ashcroft and Saddam Hussein, Osama bi Laden, Michael Jackson and Snoopy Dog Dog all fit into the world I am working toward, is a major challenge. Iraq has persuaded me, again, that trying to eliminate those who stand in the way, is futile.

Run & Hide

You can run but you can't hide. Southern California has had over 16" of rain since the beginning of the year, several inches more than the normal amount for an entire year. I came to Vermont for a few days of checking on our old farm house and to ski in a cross country race a neighbor holds each year on his land. I finished the race, nearly last, and today feel as if I have gone ten rounds with Sugar Ray Robinson, my old hero. And it is snowing. 8" so far and continuing.

I am cooking a Zone Note about all this, I think, but a preliminary note to say I think we humans have too high a regard for our ability to transcend the conditions that pretty much determine the fate of our fellow creatures.

Chief among them the weather. I always find myself tentatively watching weather when I migrate between San Diego and Vermont. Makes me anxious. I feel more vulnerable than I like. Because, I think, when I have been either place for more than a week, the weather is whatever it is and I adjust. But initially, it feels as if I have wandered into an alien place, a place I neither know nor understand.

It is, I suspect, what keeps me alert. I love it almost as much as I hate it.

David Brooks

I usually find David Brooks a muelling apologist for the knee jerk Republican right, so today, fidning his NY Times column about something real and important, may I commend it to you.

He basically says there is a revolution waiting to happen that will overturn the agenda of both political parties; that is the revolution against turning over the nation's economy to old people, supported by the sweat of young people. Since I am an old person, I can agree without being accused of serving my own self-interest.

In 1990 29% of federal spending went to seniors; in 2015 50% (Brooks' figures) is projected for seniors.

Any number of ways of redressing this insanity. A means test for receiving Social Security? A means test for receiving subsidies for drugs?

Richard Nixon was the last president to seriously propose a guaranteed annual income, and that was an attempt to overhaul the welfare system. The most merciful, effective and economic way to solve the problem of poverty, among young and old, is to establish a poverty level below which anyone receives a federal subsidy.

The rap on such a program is that it creates disincentive for people to work and succeed. The poverty level would be a basic subsistence level. People would, I think, rather work and live better. Some can't, some won't. But I would bet that such a system would be less expensive and easier to manage than all the programs now in place.

Draft?

Truthout, one of the blogs I read, has a piece today suggesting that, things being what they now are, it is nearly inevitable that the invluntary draft will have to be reinstituted in order to carry out the administration's wish to push its agenda around the world.

A military man I know tells me that, following Viet Nam, Congress changed the structure of the army so that medics and essential non-combatant support troops would be moved mostly into the reserves. The purpose was to require people who were not career military to have to be called up in the event of shooting war, so that the nation as a whole would have to both sacrifice and decide whether it supported the war.

I have been against our Iraq adventure from the start. Four of my five childre are draft age (18-35).

And something in me believes that we ought to require every person to share the burden of the nation at war. My fervernt hope is that such a move would make it much more difficult, politically and practically, to wage war unless we had been threatened as clearly as we were by Pearl Harbor, and unless we could identify the enemy as clearly as we could Japan.

Presidents from George Washington to Dwight Eisnehower warned against the federal government gaining the power to make war without the consent of the nation.

Amazing

My first airplane trip was in 1949 when there was a polio epidemic in Charlotte and my father flew us all to New York in fear. The trip took six hours. When I was a teenager I flew from the Philippines to NYC in the old Pan Am stratoclippers, a trip requiring stops at Guam, Waked, Honolulu and Los Angeles for a total of 45 hours. Today I flew out of San Diego at 7AM, landed in Dallas a lttle over two hours later, caught another flight for Hartford and landed before sundown. Now I am writing from rural Vermont at 11pm.

We may not last long, in geological time, as a species, but in just my lifetime, 65 years, amazing changes. I'm glad to have been here for them. Now the trick is to watch with detached fascination and not deplore the changes yet to come, for me and for the world.

Vermont

Who can ever get used to flying out over the Pacific in the morning (when you fly east from San Diego, you take off to the west, then swing around) and up the east coast to land in Hartford, all before the sun goes down? I just did it, again. Snow in Vermont. Someone has called this blog a pc site. Guess it depends on whose ox isn't being gored? Interesting that the person chose to remain anonymous. This could get to be fun. I'm not sure why everyone is still responding to the original message I left on the blog rather than the ones, like this, I posted later.

Nothing & Something

In a review of a book about the three British scientists who first solved the riddle of the atom in the 1930s, it said that an atom is mostly space, nothing. It is made up of a nucleus and electrons whirring around the nucleus. The nucleus is one trillionth of the volume of the atom, meaning most of the atom is space, what we sometimes describe as nothing. Now most of everything is nothing. We get hooked on the something because that supports our illusion of substance we can know and count on.

The miracle we hardly ever stop to consider is that we are instead of aren't. Yes, we once weren't, and soon enough we won't be again. But in the meantime we are a huge odds against part of this unlikely wonder. Even your body is mostly nothing, but the tiny somethings that we experience are pretty thrilling, huh?

Day Two...

Amazing how one's world can collapse into a tiny focus when sickness or fear or sadness visits. I am preparing to fly to Vermont for ten days to look after things at the house and maybe ski in a neighbor's cross country race (in Vermont one never knows about how the snow will be), and I am nursing a nasty cold that has plugged my sinues and I am now coughing up colorful sputum. So do you think I am thinking about Iraq or the possible demise of social security? No, I am clinging to my fragile hold on life and health. No wonder religion stays at a primitive level for most of us most of the time.

First posting

Welcome to Blayney's Blog. I will continue to send out Zone Notes to any who ask to receive them. This site will be used to put up brief, perhaps more provocative notes to which I invite you to respond. I am just building the blog site, so be patient.

Blayney