Global Warming

From what I read, though perhaps a wise energy policy might slow down global warming (and might not), we are headed for a climate change significant enough to alter if not end our tenure on the planet. No one seems able to measure whether the change will come over the next thousand or more years, or in the next few decades. The big surprise among climatologists is the discovery that huge climate changes oner the geologic hisotry of the earth have taken place very rapidly, in years, not centuries. The Greenland icepack has changed so much in the past generation that there are towns that will soon be underwater. The change in the salinity of the seas can divert currents whch in turn could turn northern Europe into an iceberg in a brief period. The climate history, determined by boring into the icepack, is very accurate, and shows that the normal cycle is 150,000 years of ice followed by 10,000 years of the sort of life supporting climate we have enjoyed for a little more than the past 10,000 years (with one brief return to a cold period when the glaciers last extended deep into the North Smerican continent, as far south as Connecticut.)

If the coming ice age doesn't get us, meteor watchers tell us we're likely overdue for a major collision that could stir up a dust storm so large and for so long it would cut off our sunlight and make life as we know it untenable.

So, if this is inevitable, nothing we can do, what might our stance be?

I confess to having little to nothing to suggest. Eat, drink and be merry comes to mind. But that has always left us a little flat. I am most drawn to a sort of Buddhist stance of acting as if we still could work out ways to make life here work, by cooperating and extending our probing into more subtle dimensions of being. And always being ready to surrender, trusting that this existence is a gift for which we can be grateful and on which we can count, in some way, no matter how it unfolds, for eternity.

Energy

Any of you old enough to remember the first Arab oil boycott, in the 1970s? I do. Standing for hours in line to get a ration of gas, then only being allowed to buy gas on alternate days, we all resolved to do what we must to keep from getting ourselves into a situation like that every again.

And for a brief time, we had a serious seeming run at it.

We bought smaller, more gas efficient cars. Turned down our thermostats. Looked into wind and solar power. We talked about public transportation rather than every American getting into a personal car every time we had to go somewhere, about making cities more hospitable to walking.

Then OPEC got smart and began portioning out gas in sufficient quantities to seduce us into thinking the issue had gone away. And we took the bait. Who could have imagined highways full of SUVs or military type Hummers navigating the narrow streets of our cities? Or 10,000 square foot houses for families of three?

Human hubris outstrips any human survival instinct. Today the news is that President Bush is begging the Saudis to increase their oil production. Nothing about conservation or alternate energy. Only about how to speed up the draining of the earth's dwindling supply of fossil fuel.

If you were a cynic, you might think the fact that our President and Vice President got rich in the oil business, blinded them. In the past ten years the Greenland ice cap has, because of warming climate, lost a volume of ice equal to the size of the states of Texas and Wyoming. Hear that, Mr. President and Mr. Vice President?

More on Money

Today Alan Greenspan, who has always looked to me like the Republicans' lackey on fiscal matters, weighs in on the impending dangers of growing deficits and trade imbalances. He says that, at present tax rates, and with no sign of anyone's even remote interest in addressing budget deficits or balancing trade numbers, we are headed for finacial disaster. This, along with continued spiking of oil prices and some disappointing earnings, took some of the bloom off yesterday's seemingly rosy spike in the financial markets.

Who likes paying taxes? Who doesn't hope so-called "market forces" will work all this out?

Reality trumps ideology and wishful thinking. Alan Greenspan must be beginning to worry that his cheerleading of administration efforts to enact the ideology of the right wing as national policy may cast him as one of the co-conspirators when history records how the burgeoning American economy was squandered.

Is it too early to suggest that we need a Democrat back in the White House and in a majority in Congress before this free market crowd spends and trades us into a third world country?

Sex

Yesterday's post was money; today it's sex.

There is a resport in today's news that Microsoft withdrew its historic support for a bill in the Washington State legislature that would prohibit discrimination against people because of their sexual preference. Microsoft has long been a supporter of gay rights, and some believe a fundamentalist church in Redmond, where Microsoft's headquarters is, pressured the company to change its position. The church's pastor seemed to confirm that when he said he warned Microsoft in a recent meeting that he was considering calling for a nationwide boycott of their products if they continued their support for gay rights. He said, "I decided we'd givem them a reason to be afraid of Christians."

Imagine. I am a Christian who is afraid of some who claim an exclusive to the title. And imagine a corproation with such power.

No wonder we are fighting a war against Islamist extremism. It is our shadow. How does that pastor's behavior differ from an Imam who warns infidels who vote in Iraq they may be killed? Only in degree.

I was caught flat footed by the uproar in the Episcopal Church over the ordination of Gene Robinson as Bishop of New Hampshire. He was hardly the first gay bishop, not even the first to be in a gay relationship. He was the first to be open and honest about it. I figured the issue was over. I was wrong.

In yesterday's NY Times David Brooks suggested that unless Roe Vs. Wade is overturned, there is no chance we will be able to return to civil political life in this country. Although I hope he is wrong, I see his point. That the Court's decision took the matter out of the hands of voters and legislatures where imprtant social issues can be debated. But the same could be said for civil rights. No legislature had the courage to change our racist habits until Brown Vs. Board of Education required change. Does Brooks think we should put abortion back in back alleys until people decide the matter? Or equal rights for people of color?

I hated the Supreme Court decision that made George W. Bush President in 2000. It was based on the flimsiest law and broke precedent that I fear will haunt us for decades. But I understood the Court's pragmatic sense that the matter had to be decided as best it could in the moment. Although one hopes the Court will make decisions based on the Constitution and precedent whenever possible, the reason we have a Supreme Court is to break the logjam caused when the country is divided and action is required.

Although there is little about the composition of the present Court to give us such hope, I still hope the justices will see that, unless they find a way to make diverse sexual identity and practice permissible in this country, we may be headed for something like what we deplore in much of the Islamist world.

Roller Coaster

Although I have worked for a salary my entire adult life, and inherited a modest stock portfolio from my mother, I have never been able to get myself to really focus on money. Not that I don't like money, or wish, like every red blooded American that I had more, it's just that I don't understand money beyond the basic issue of whether I have enough to live my life.

As a parish pastor I used to panic at having to chair meetings having to do with church finances, particularly the meetings at which we discussed investments. All the serious conversation about the relative merits of equities versus fixed income instruments would take place around the table and, try as I would, my mind would wander into irrelevancies like the problems I was having with my backhand or the argument my wife and I had that morning.

Since I retired I have taken a greater interest in the stock market, largely because I became convinced my ability to stay solvent until I die depends on it. But I quickly found myself flopping madly between boredom and terror. And I invented a game in which I counted the Mercedes on my walk home from my writing station, deciding the number would correspond to the fortunes of the market. Problem was I started to believe my own game, sort of like the kid who really is afraid if he steps on a crack he's going to break his mother's back.

So I have given it a rest. Sort of. I remember our neighbor in Vermont, Tracey the dairy farmer, saying in his best year he cleared $20K and in his worst year he made nothing. And the two years seem pretty much the same as he looks back.

I think being poor, so poor you have to worry about food and shelter, must be horrible. I have always felt we ought to figure out a way to have a national program that subsidizes the income of those who fall below a certain level. It is an outrage that, in a nation as rich as ours, anyone should go without the basics.

I suspect it is also a burden, a very different one, to be filthy rich. I know, we all think we'd like to try bearing that burden. I doubt we'd like it for long.

After hitting lows for the year yesterday, the financial markets had their biggest gain in three years today. Must be somebody's law.

Money is right up there with sex as a powerful matter that we have yet to figure out.

Michael Novak

In today's NY Times Michael Novak makes the case for a kindler, gentler view of Benedict XVI than I did in yesterday's posting. Novak was once a radical leftists and, as so often happens, made the shift rightward decades ago and has become the darling of the theological right. He is bright and articulate. He says the portrayal of Cardinal Ratzinger as rigid and authoritarian is unfair, a creation of the sensation loving media.

He speaks of his personal encounters with the new Pope, telling of his shyness and gentle manner. Though he makes no predictions, his Times piece triggers memories of the surprise move Richard Nixon made to open relations with China, a move many thought only a proven conservative could make without drawing the ire of his fellow conservatives.

I devoutly hope so. In his first public statement as Pope he has tried to reassure his critics by saying he wanted to open the Roman Catholic Church to other churches. And to the world.

Early in George W. Bush's first term, and again at the beginning of his second term, I let myself listen to his promises to tone down the strident voice of his administration and the radical right. In both cases he soon, with his appointments and policies, belied his promises.

My hope rests largely in the reality that no Pope or President is as powerful as the reality he hopes to shape.

Pope Benedict

I am not Roman Catholic. I admired much about the late Pope, but deplored much more about his reign. I regarded his tenure as having set back the cause of Christianity in the world in much the same way I regard George W. Bush's presidency as having set back the hope that out nation might be a force for peace and human hope.

I had allowed myself to hope, much as I hoped vainly for an end to the strident policies of Bush's first term as he began his second term, that the Cardinals might elect a Pope who would speak the passionate love of God that overturns the world's lust for power.

I had only one Cardinal inmind who would be the worst choice.

He was just elected Pope. He has chosen the name Benedict. Cardinal Ratzinger, the German who has been most associated with guarding the church against an dissent or even difference, has been chosen Pope.

I feel as downcast as I did when President Bush named his new appointments to the UN and the World Bank, and renominated to the Federal Bench the judges rejected last term as too radically right wing.

I will be sustained by the hope that events will require all these ideologues to adapt to reality. It is a meager hope.

Reflecting

Recently I emailed some high school classmates, they would be 65 now, asking this unusually reflective group of men (no girls in our school in those days) how they see our Iraq invasion now, two years later. I learned two things, both unexpected. And I learned them from the silence. Only one of the forty men responded.

He said he didn't want me to misunderstand his silence. He was eager to reflect on what to make now of our invasion of Iraq, having lost nearly 2000 young Americans, well over 10,000 wounded, and estimates of Iraqi dead running between 100,000 and 200,000.

But he frankly felt intellectually and morally paralyzed.

I think it will take a monumental exercise of American will to reengage in the debate about our place in the world, or, for that matter, in a debate about life in our own country. The reasons for this are a tribute to the effectiveness of this administration, in collusion with the instruments of mental and moral numbing, in diverting us from serious engagement with questions about events. The means are no secret.

Next week is turn off your TV week. If a significant number of us would actually turn off our TV for a week, learn what it is like to engage reality in the flesh rather than as it is presented by the manipulators of images, it would, I suspect, change not only the way we understand the world and our place in it, but the way we engage events.

And that is why our leaders, liberal and conservative, Republican and Democratic, will do all in their power to keep us entertained and distracted. Were we to begin to look around, to talk with each other, to take on significant pieces of our day unflitered by anything other than our own nervous system. God knows what the outcome might be.

A revolution, no doubt, even more profound than the one TV produced among us two generations ago.

Breasts and Us

Yesterday the congressional hearings on breast implants concluded with a recommendation that they be permiited again under certain circumstances. This morning Ellen Goodman has a syndicated column about the matter that raises the most important question that was never brought up in the hearings.

Why do women want breast implants?

I know the answer is obvious; it makes them more attractive, more desireable to men and thus, one assumes, happier with themselves. But that still doesn't answer the question; why? I suspect the real answer is both too subtle and complex to be within reach of our conscious minds, and perhaps too embarrassing for us to give an honest answer. Is it that none of us has been adequately mothered, fed, when we were infants? One witness compared breast implants to men taking Viagra. And while there are a host of questions about the boom in potentcy drugs, the comparison seems flawed. Women don't need large breasts in order to have good sex.

Or do they?

If so, we are a more infantile culture, totally molded by TV and the mind wasting commercials than we even have thought. If so, it is going to take more than perky breasts and aging men's erections to restore our place in the thoughtful arenas of humanist society.

Paradox

I follow the stock market because I am living on what is generally called a "fixed" income, meaning I don't earn money from working. (I do earn a little from my writing), and the stock market has a bearing on my fortunes. My father, who never earned a big salary, invested beginning in the early days of the Great Depression and saw his portfolio grow nicely, so he retired comfortably and lived a long life as a water color artist. He followed companies and decided where to put his money. It is a big mystery to me and I depend on an investment advisor to help me with my modest holdings. Or is it that I don't have the courage to decide?

Basically I have decided to agree to have my money invested broadly, in diverse instruments, believing that, although the U.S. is moving from sole super power to a player in the world economy among many others, we will remain a player longer than my lifetime. So I try not to fret through weeks like this one. I am glad my children don't ask my counsel about their own investing. I don't know how I would invest if I were their age. Life is the world economy is paradoxical for Americans.

At last we are seeing some honest debate over the legacy of Pope John Paul II. No one questions his character. Brave, smart, tough, honest. But the results of some of his insistence on holding the old line of authority lent to terrible results. Notably his refusal to take seriously the sex abuse scandals in the church, or reconsider condom use in the age of AIDS.

Yes, he was consistent. That was the problem. Many who say they disagreed with him and admired him need to look again at how admirable character can lead to tragedy. Paradox.

Assessing

I recently sent an email to a group of my high school classmates asking them what they think now about our invasion of Iraq. We email about all sorts of things, have members who were UN weapons inspectors in Iraq (who believe they did their job well) and at least one who was high up in the CIA. Two years after our invasion it is worth stopping, taking a step back and assessing whether the high cost, thousands of American and hundreds of thousand Iraqi casualties, huge expenditures of money, a realignment of international relations, was worth what has been accomplished.

Mostly, if anyone tries to ask this question, the response is, "Support our troops." The refuge of scoundrels.

So what do you think? I have had a knee jerk opposition to the use of force to gain national goals. No doubt there are times when it is the only course possible. Was this one of them?

Probably the first question is whether we can have a debate about this without wanting to annihilate each other. Could be that the answer to that question has everything to do with what we claim we invaded Iraq to protect.

Religion & Power

I am 65 years old and have been following politics closely since I was a boy, since at least the Eisenhower-Stevenson election of 1952. I can't remember whether partisan differences were so bitter then, but I'm inclined not to think so. This morning I heard Bob Dole, when asked what he thought about the Republican threat to use its Senate majority to kill the ability of the minority to filibuster, say he thought the Republicans ought to go slowly and not forget that the Senate will one day, likely sooner than the leaders think, be back in the hands of a Democratic majority. He said, "The members of the other Party are your opponents, not your enemy."

I don't know if it is a fool's errand to try to return us to a day in which we respect those who are on the other side. I hope not. My sense is that those least likely to do so are those who believe they are right and that they must hold fast to their position rather than make a compromise that might settle for less than the absolute righteous outcome.

The issue seems more about personality types than about policy differences. A friend once said it is never a fair fight between a liberal and a conservative because a big piece of the liberal agenda is that there is room for many opinions, while the conservative believes the fight for truth requires him to throw over the side those who disagree unless they convert to his view.

Having spent my working life in the church, I fear nothing more than religion joining hands with power. To the extent that I colluded in that unholy alliance during the civil rights days and the Viet Nam anti-war days, I repent. Not of speaking the prophet's conviction that justice will not be denied forever, but of claiming an exclusive understanding of God's mysterious ways.

Compassion

I am no anglophile and do not follow the British Royal family, but I am sorry to see even the NY Times piling on in poor Charles and Camilla's seeming inability to get a break. Those who read tea leaves would have seen something other than bad luck in Charles' being the only European at the Pope's funeral to be tricked into shaking hands with Zimbabwe's dreadful Dictator/President. But now Charles and Camilla are married. Can we not hope this 35 year odyssey may at last provide them some comfort?

Having done my share of stumbling through life, taking some lumps I deserved, I am grateful that advancing age has provided me with some wisdom and happiness that in my earlier days seemed beyond reach. Life can be tough even for the rich and well born, and only the most mean spirited would not wish the aging newly weds well. I understand the anger of those who feel Diana was sacrificed to the appetites of British royalty. That may be a just sense.

But the sorrow that both Camilla and Charles have known, some certainly self-inflicted, some not, can perhaps now, at least in part, be countered by having a companion as they grow old together.

At least I hope that for them.

Private Social Security Accounts?

So I am considering changing my mind about whether we should support some form of private accounts for social security. My objections have been that the stock market is too uncertain, especially for the likes of me, too risky, and could leave those privately invested destitute when they retire.

What has me rethinking that objection?

A conversation with a stock broker and an article I read about Chile having privatized their social security system.

The broker pointed out that the stock market has, over the past 200 years, delivered an average 7% return, net of inflation, a number far exceeding what the government run social security pays out to retirees. That includes the terrible years of the Great Depression, far worse years than the tough investing years we have experienced since the dot com collapse. And he also pointed out that if the country and its economy falls into a ditch so deep and from which it is unable to emerge, so the private accounts fail, then it is more than likely that the government would not be able to meet its committments through the social security system. So, if there is to be any viable system, the markets hold the greatest promise.

The article on Chile said that workers were offered a wide variety of choices for investing, from volatile and risky to CD type investments. And that, in the event that at the time of retirement a person's income from her account fell below the agreed upon poverty level, the government would pay a subsidy.

President Bush has yet to propose a system, so we don't know if his system would be like Chile's. But if it is, perhaps we liberals ought to take another loo.

Pope John Paul

A friend described the articles about the Pope's legacy as rewriting history. While he is right, I think, in the details, the outpouring of grief and affection are not about what he did but about the odd role he played in our odd era.

In fact he was a tough leader who brooked little disagreement among the faithful.

But he had charisma. His popemobile appeared all over the world and people, most of whom likely had no idea what he thought or did, flocked to him they way we do to rock stars. Because that is what he was. His persona, the image he projected, standing tall and taking a would be asassain's bullet, surviving it and then going to the prison were the shooter was held to embrace and forgive him. Who cared what such a man did or believed?

In our media age we might want to be more cautious about whom we embrace. I, too, have been caught up in the world's grief over the death of the Pope. And while that unites me with others of my species, it does not change my wanting to hold out for leaders who trust ordinary people even when they challenge the authority of ancient institutions. We have expressed excitement at the way popular uprisings have overturned governments in countries of the former Soviet Union who have remained under the iron fist of today's Russia. The human spirit cries out for religious freedom as well.

While joining the sorrow for the loss of a familiar face on the world scene, I pray for a new Pope who believes the breath of God's holy Spirit will lead us from institutional rigidity to a new day of openness and freedom.

Grief

The world is engulfed in grief. Public grief is powerful, and different from private, personal grief. I thought I was coping well, in a Buddha sort of way, with the Pope's death, the death of Stephen Plummer, Episcopal Bishop of the Navajo Nation and a sometime friend, and the serious illness of a couple of friends.

Then this morning came a phone call telling of the death in a car crash of Kayla, the nine year old daughter of our next door neighbor in Vermont.

And the grief flowed over me like a torrential storm.

The only way to cope with grief is to grieve. No ducking it. We all hate it. It is triggered by the stark evidence of our being unwitting players in this drama we love to pretend we are authoring. Grief is hard, physical work, draining energy, demanding our full attention.

I had let myself believe Kayla would always be there, playing with our terrier, slamming our mud room door on her way to find him, bringing a snake to tease Lacey. One day I would die, but long before Kayla moved from next door.

Grief is reality demanding more than we can provide.

Death & Dying

With the Pope dying quite a different death from Terri Schaivo, the issue come to the front of public concsciousness again. He seems, as an old, sick man who has accomplished a full life of achievement, to have succumbed willingly. God love him. It is daunting enough to have to live 26 years in the public eye. To have to die in the same way is more than any of us should have to bear. He seems to have, so far as we can know, done so as we wish we might.

The right to die is sometimes challenged, not on the basis of whether one should be permitted a merciful rather than a painful death, but much more fundamentally, on the question of whether anyone has a right to take life. Anyone's life, including one's own. I think it is a good question and perhaps the only question once one reaches the bottom of this quandry. Some have said living wills and expressions of one's wishes to friends, doctors and lawyers are inappropriate, both because none of us can really know what we will want when the time comes, and because even I do not have the right to determine when my life will end.

In fact it is a dicey matter, all right, and the public debate tends to diminish the gravity of the question. Having tended the deaths of many people over the years, I can say that it is true that people often see the matter differently when they face death imminently than when it is in the abstract future.

And it is also true that some people choose to die and find ways to do so which inspire awe in me. The Oregon assisted suicide law has resulted in the death of very few people. But the reports of physicians who have assisted those people report that they have been as one would hope.

How to settle the matter is an impossible dilemma. Therefore, like abortion, which is, as the Episcopal Church has described it, a necessary tragedy, hastening a death ought to require elaborate procedure and safeguard. But it ought to be possible.