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11.01.2003
November 2, 2003
One of my favorites:
"I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community and as long as I live it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can. This is the true joy in life, being used for a purpose recognized as a mighty one; being a force of nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no "brief candle" to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment; and I want to make it burn brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations." - George Bernard Shaw
November 1, 2003
I read yesterday in the paper that they give a $12,000 "death payment" to families of the American soldiers that are killed in Iraq. There's a website called military.com where they have all these charts on the death benefits and then on the right hand side they flash these Madison Avenue-designed U.S. Army recruitment ads that say, "find your calling in the U.S. Army." Yes, let's tell poor young high-school drop-outs from the ghetto that it is their calling to go get killed in the army, and then their families will get $12,000, which is more than they'll ever be abe to send their families while they're alive.
War uses the lives of the poor to protect the wealth of the rich. Does it ever occur to you as strange that most human beings seem to want world peace but we are unable to acive it? Yet, at the same time, most human beings also want Diet Coke and we are able to get that right to them in greater supply than they can keep up with. Maybe not everyone wants world peace. Perhaps the welathy and the military fear world peace, and sub-consciously or consciously try to keep the current system intact. Those who are wealthy cling to their wealth under the false belief that it makes them secure. Yet the fact that they have to hold on to it reveals a basic insecurity. Nothing is permanent and nothing is secure in this life. "Security is mostly a superstition - it does not exist in nature," Helen Keller observed. That is the truth that could set the whole world free. It is this clinging to everything that creates the fear that creates the hording that creates the need for the military that pays out death benefits to those who have nothing to cling to in the first place.
10.30.2003
October 31, 2003
Happy Halloween. Every year I buy a bunch of bags of candy for Hallowwen but almost no kids ever come. Last year around 9:00 two kids came and that was it. So I froze the bag of candy and I still have some of it in the freezer. Hmmm. Naaah.
Speaking of candy, the average American consumes 125 pounds of sugar annually. That sugar weighs more than the total weight of all food that the average child in a developing country consumes. Some of them won't need a costume to look frightnening tomorrow.
We need bold visions on every front. But perhaps no issue begs for the courage of a daring and unreasonable vision more than the persistence of hunger and malnutrition in the world. We should have ended hunger as a basic ssue for humanity by now. We could, if we set our minds to it. Can you imagine what a transformation would occur on the earth if every nation committed to an audacious goal to end hunger on earth within the next ten years? Can you imagine what it would be like when we verified that we had actually achieved it? Don't you think the world would begin to lose interest in fighting against one another and would be inspired by that to begin fighting together - fighting disease, fighting pollution, fighting for a better world? It would be much more interesting than fighting one another. Achievements at that level become contagious. I have seen it on a smaller scale and I have observed that the contagion gets larger the bigger the achievement.
Our children would be much better served by a great vision like that - a vision that seeks to lift up other children - their peers in the shadowlands of the earth - than they will be by a bag full of candy. There's no reason they can't have both, but surely the vision should come first.
October 30, 2003
Internet connection went down last night. Yikes! back up now. Something I wrote last March that is still unanswered for me:
"A radical thought for this Tuesday morning. We are being told that the reason for this war is that our safety and our survival is at stake. That may well be true. The debate, in my mind, should not be over whether or not our survival is at stake. The debate should be about how highly we should prioritize our own survival. It is important to notice that we still live in a mindset where our own survival is regarded as more important than the future of humanity. We idolize our own survival. Our survival is our God, which means, really, that we regard ourselves as God - that nothing is more important than ourselves and our survival - not, perhaps, even God. This idolization is a form of selfishness, don’t you think? It is radical to consider that perhaps we should begin to put our own survival second to the future of humanity. This requires a kind of love and humility that is off the charts for most of us, myself included. But I am haunted by these words of Gandhi, which to me, were some of the most important words he ever uttered:
"If blood be shed, let it be our blood. Cultivate the quiet courage of dying without killing. For man lives freely only by his readiness to die, if need be, at the hands of his brother, never by killing him." - Gandhi
What do we do with this? I don’t know. I fear I would lack the courage to embrace it when the moment called for me to do so. Is it possible to develop that courage ? Is it advisable?
10.28.2003
October 29, 2003
"All the happiness there is in this world comes from thinking about others, and all the suffering comes from precoocupation with yourself." Shantideva
Enough said for today.
10.27.2003
October 28, 2003
Over 1,100 homes have been lost in the fires here in Southern California. Most of these families will be able to get insurance checks to replace their structures. I think about the little children in Africa - the twelve million AIDS orphans who they say literally roam the dusty roads and sleep together in slums - both parents dead - no home and no insurance check and certainly no new parents on the way. No new structure for their lives. It's a sad evening for everyone who lost their home in the fires, and every evening is a sad evening for the little AIDS orphans. Tonight as we think about and pray for the people who lost their homes in the fires, let us think too of the AIDS orphans - let us make our hearts big enough to say a prayer for both, and next month, after the insurance checks have arrived in Southern California, let that not be a reason to forget about the children in the land where the checks never come - a hell that needs no fire.
"Through me is the way to the sorrowful city. Through me is the way to join the lost people. - Inscription at the entrance to Hell"
"There sighs, lamentations and loud wailings resounded through the starless air, so that from the beginning it made me weep."
- Dante Alighieri, Inferno
10.26.2003
October 27, 2003
The 2002 salaries of the New York Yankees baseball team totaled $180 million. The salaries of the ten highest paid CEOs of human services charities in the United States totaled $1.9 million last year, ninety times less than the baseball players. If you had a baseball team made up of public high school teachers their salaries would total about $800,000 - two hundred and twenty times less than the baseball players. If you had a team made up of Bangladeshi seamstresses, like the ones who make our Levis for eighteen cents an hour, their salaries for the year would amount to about $7,500 - about 24,000 times less than the baseball players, but you probably wouldn't win the World Series.
Then again, neither did the New York Yankees.
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