Dan Pallotta

Saturday, December 06, 2003

Sunday, December 7, 2003

"Note how often in this century we have been surprised. By the sudden emergence of a people's movement, the sudden overthrow of a tyranny, the sudden coming to life of a flame we thought extinguished. We are surprised because we have not taken notice of the quiet simmerings of indignation, of the first faint sounds of protest, of the scattered signs of resistance that, in the midst of our despair, portend the excitement of change. The isolated acts begin to join, the individual thrusts blend into organized actions, and one day, often when the situation seems most hopeless, there bursts onto the scene a movement.

We are surprised because we don't see that beneath the surface of the present there is always the human material for change: the suppressed indignation, the common sense, the need for community, the love of children, the patience to wait for the right moment to act in concert with others. These are the elements that spring to the surface when a movement appears in history.

People are practical. They want change but feel powerless, alone, do not want to be the blade of grass that sticks up above the others and is cut down. They wait for a signal from someone else who will make the first move, or the second. And at certain times in history, there are intrepid people who take the risk that if they make that first move others will follow quickly enough to prevent their being cut down. And if we understand this, we might make that first move." - Howard Zinn, "You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train"

Two nights ago I saw Simon and Garfunkel at Madison Square Garden. I sat directly behind Caroline Kennedy, as luck would have it. The whole evening made me think of the excitement of the sixties. "A time of innocence, a time of confidence." "All come to look for America." "Where have you gone Joe DiMaggio, a nation turns its lonely eyes to you..." These old songs, now 30 years old or older, came back to life and reminded everyone, in the most powerful way, of the forgotten hopes and dreams of the 40-somethings and 50-somethings and 60-somethings in the crowd, and even the teenagers that were there too. You could feel in the energy in the Garden that this is what people want. People want a new dream. People want a new world. They are hungry for it. They are so beaten down by the mindless consumersm of this world, and by the hatred and violence un-met by a larger vision. They are so beaten down by watching nothing change, decade after decade. They are so beaten down by excuses and practicality in the face of problems that require the opposite of reason and practicality.

It is not yet time. But it will be. One day, it will be. Victor Hugo said that, "nothing is as powerful as an idea whose time has come." It's time has not yet come. But when it does, nothing will be able to stop it. I thought the Howard Zinn passage summed up my own reasons for hope - more than that, they helped explain to me why I have hope, because I often, intellectually, cannot explain to myself why I have any, yet the feeling is always there - hope - and I have a strange confidence about it. Somehwere on a spiritual level, I have a knowing that this world we live in will one day blossom into something much more beautiful than we can imagine. I just don't know when, or how. And that is OK. We will know it when it comes. And we will be swept into action without even having to think about it. All the frustration we feel now will be gone, and we will ask ourselves how we could ever have doubted that our time would come.

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Friday, December 05, 2003

Saturday, December 6, 2003

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Friday, December 5, 2003

I read yesterday that President Bush has been quietly investigating a new space initiative, in the spirit of President Kennedy's vision to go to the moon. CNN reported that the plan must meet two requirements - first, it must be achievable within a reasonable period of time, and second, it must not increase the federal budget. These two things would necessarily make it the opposite of President Kennedy's vision. What characterized his vision was, first, that he set an unreasonable time period for accomplishing it, and second, that he was willing to put his reputation on the line with a huge risk of the taxpayers' dollars.

When it comes to real dreams, we no longer want to take any risks and we no longer want to make any investments. We want to be reasonable and practical and call it courageous and visionary. We are unwilling to make any sacrifice in the name of vision and we wonder why we live in a lackluster world.

President Kennedy's goal was ridiculous - a man on the moon within seven years, when we had not yet even put a spacecraft into earth orbit. But the audacity of it lit the world's soul on fire. The Chinese are now talking about a man on the moon by the year 2020 - 16 years from now. So it is not just an American problem. The entire world lacks the ability to set impossible, absurd, unrealistic, visionary goals. Yet this is the only way we will ever really end hunger or disease or violence or poverty - by human beings making unrealistic demands of a rigid and rusted and entrenched psychology of limitation.

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Thursday, December 04, 2003

Thursday, December 4, 2003, Second Post

"I am against war, against violence, against violent revolution, for peaceful settlement of differences, for nonviolent but nevertheless radical changes. Change is needed, and violence will not really change anything: at most it will only transfer power from one set of bull-headed authorities to another." - Thomas Merton

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Wednesday, December 03, 2003

Thursday, December 4, 2003, First Post

I just watched "The Grinch Who Stole Christmas." As a kid, I don't think I got the message that the Whos down in Whoville were teaching - that Christmas doesn't come from a store but rather from the heart. I think as far as I got in terms of the message was that Christmas was saved when the Grinch brought all the presents back to Whoville, which, of course, was the opposite of what they were trying to say. I know if I didn't get my G.I. Joes on Christmas morning I wasn't about to go out and sing "Dah-hoo-doorays," as if it didn't matter because I, at the age of six, knew that Christmas was about a lot more than G.I. Joes. No, by the age of six I was sufficiently brain-washed by Hasbro and the Sears catalogue as to the real meaning of Christmas. Christmas was about plastic, and it was a real pain in the ass to have to leave my toys and get dressed up on Christmas morning to go to Mass. I resented it.

Substitute my Christian references with the religion of your choice here.

It is heretical in this culture to talk about the real meaning of Christmas - to talk about saviors and such. If not heresy it is perceived at least as lunacy or some kind of psychological development problem. Granted, this is in large part because the religious right has used the idea of Jesus Christ the savior to spread so much hatred and derision He's become downright dangerous. But that's not a good enough excuse. We are intelligent enough not to have to throw the baby out with the religious right.

Christmas is so commercialized that its real meaning has been obscured even to those who are interested in it. The best most people can do is talk about the birth of the baby Jesus. But its mystery is so much richer than that. It is about the idea of God manifesting itself in human form to breathe as a human and walk as a human and suffer as a human and to give its life to take away the "sins" of the world. To take away the things that obscure our experience of the presence of God. To take away our hatred of our neighbor. To take away our hatred of ourselves. To tell us that it is OK for us to love ourselves, and that if we will do that, it will be easier for us to love our neighbor. How on earth can we love our neighbor if we hate ourselves? Jesus did not come into the world to say, "shame on you for hating your neighbor." He came to say, "stop hating yourself." "I have come to take that burden away from you." "That is your only sin." "I want you to love yourself as I do."

The epitome of our arrogance is that we will not allow even God Itself to stop us from hating ourselves, from judging ourselves, from calling ourselves names. "Stupid." "Fat." "Ugly." "Lazy." No, we know better than God. We know that we are stupid and fat and ugly and lazy, even though God tells us we are not, and even though God created us. And so the problem of self hatred is not one of low self esteem. It is actually one of arrogance. We are too full of our own judgments about ourselves to let in the love and kindness of God.

The real meaning of Christmas is that God sent us a savior to teach us to be humble enough to stop hating ourselves. And God did that because It saw that we were not capable of doing it on our own.

And now, 2,000 years later, we refuse to talk about Jesus as a savior. Why? Because we cannot fathom the idea that we ever deserved one. Why? Because in our arrogance we forget that we were created by God and believe instead that we created ourselves. If we could accept the fact that we were created by God we could accept the profound gift of Its love that is Christmas.

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Tuesday, December 02, 2003

Wednesday, December 3, 2003

Every year about 30,000 people commit suicide in the United States. About 17 times that number, or half a million people, make a suicide attempt. Most people who commit suicide suffer from some form of depression. And one of the most startling statistics is that in half of the cases, the period of premeditation is less than five minutes. It's not that these people have not thought of it before, or that they have not actually come up with a plan some time before. It's just that on the day it actually happens, it can be completely impulsive. The person may have felt fine leaving for work that morning, and then at some point, something triggers an impulse, and with little or no forethought they kill themselves.

It was four years ago last night that I was waiting for my partner to come home from work for dinner. Six o'clock came and went, then seven, then seven-thirty, then eight. I started to get nervous. I thought maybe he had a car accident. I started calling his office repeatedly. No answer. I knew he didn't have a late meeting. It was completely unlike him not to call. We had just come back from a wonderful Thanksgiving weekend with my family. But he had been gloomy the night before. He had mentioned that he thought he was depressed. For a moment I let myself ask the question, "would he ever kill himself?" "No, no, he's such a strong man - a long-distance runner - he would never do anything like that." Within an hour I learned that he would, and that he did, and that he was gone.

People who commit suicide die the loneliest kind of death. There are no loved ones at their side. There are no nurses to see them through their final hours. No 'round the clock care. There is no one to talk to. They die in unbearable pain and suffering, completely isolated, stigmatized by themselves and by this society that expects everyone to be upbeat, and that doesn't seem to want to know what is really going on inside people.

So many people suffer from depression in silence. They are afraid to tell people that they're on anti-depressants. They are afraid to bring people down with their troubles. I have to say that I would much rather listen to the honest downbeat tale of someone who suffers from depression than the superficial upbeat cocktail talk that passes for conversation in most of our culture. If we could all get real with one another we'd start to learn just how lonely and inadequate almost everyone feels. People who suffer from depression often have chemical imbalances. But they also tend just to have a lower threshold for the bullshit that most of us seem to be able to put up with in society. After my partner died, so many people opened up to me about their own depression. They were among the most real and fulfilling conversations I have ever had.

What kind of a society is too busy to listen to peoples' troubles? What kind of society has no time for the lonely people? What kind of society anesthetizes itself with falsification and illusion? What kind of society prefers meaningless cliche to honest insight about one's neighbors and family and friends? What kind of society prefers cold to warmth, indifference to love?

People who suffer from depression are not the only ones who are chemically imbalanced. The whole culture is chemically imbalanced. Unable to sit still and be quiet. Unable to breathe. Unable to sleep right. The people who commit suicide are just the messengers of a society gone horribly awry.

Some will say this message is too depressing.

And that is exactly the problem.

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Monday, December 01, 2003

Tuesday, December 2, 2003

Yesterday I sat at the ocean for a while. The waves were big and beautiful - about the biggest I've seen in years. Big, round, smooth, glassy curls. Dolphins were swimming along the shore, and one even body-surfed on a wave, and you could see its tail fly up in the air. One of those little beach birds with the really long beaks was digging around for food, and every once in a while it actually came up with some little clam or whatever little beach birds dig out of the sand. The waves coming in made a big low bassy sound, and the water retreating back made a high whistle.

Sometime many thousands of years ago some human beings decided that it would be better to start making progress instead of making due with just the serenity of the waves and the birds and the trees and the mountains. I suppose if I were there, being human, I would have done the same thing.

Was that the wrong choice? Should they have stayed put, content with the beauty of nature? Never tried to find cures for diseases? Never tried to cook their food? Never tried an easier method for hauling wood around? No, I don't think so. Just as the ocean does its wave thing the human mind does its curiosity and creativity thing, and that is as much a part of nature as the sea.

But just as it would have been unnatural for humankind to deny its creativity and curiosity, so too is it unnatural for humankind to deny its appreciation for beauty and its need for serenity. We have gone too far in the direction of technology and activity. There is a crisis of imbalance in our world. We have lost the moment to the moment to come. We have lost the ocean to a sea of anxiety and expectations.

This is news to none of us. I am hardly being original. Today I am just being sad. That the shopping malls have more visitors than the oceans. And the dolphins have more fun than we.

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Sunday, November 30, 2003

Monday, December 1, 2003

"One of the first things to learn if you want to be a contemplative is to mind your own business. Nothing is more suspicious, in a person who seems holy, than an impatient desire to reform other people."

Father Thomas Merton

To learn more about Thomas Merton, click here.

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Sunday, November 30, 2003

Big news. I discovered the spell check feature today. So now you don't have to deal with all my sloppy typos anymore.

I read today where Kofi Annan said that the world is losing the global battle against AIDS. He said it was inexplicable that "in certain parts of the world AIDS is a disease that can be treated and one can live with and function," while in others it is a death sentence. (CNN) "Where is our common humanity?," he asked.

We can have two expectations of human evolution. One is that it will be crude and the other is that it will be graceful. A crude expectation of human evolution would be that it is much like a horse race, with some horses way out front and others lagging way behind. Competition is the system. Eventually, the system moves everyone along. Everyone is individualistic. Everyone crosses the finish line, but at different times, with winners and losers. There is victory. There is loss. There is a crude kind of evolution. The destination is the priority. Getting there is what is most important.

A graceful expectation would be that we all walk through it together, arm in arm, all at the same pace. Those who have great resources share with those who do not. The system is cooperation. Everyone is helpful, and everyone crosses the finish line at about the same time. There is compassion. There is joy. There is a graceful kind of evolution. The journey is the priority. How we get there is what is most important.

We are not animals. It is not somewhere ordered that the horse race is our destiny. Those of us in the developed world treat the crude model as the only model - as the inevitable model - perhaps because it is the model that is most convenient and most friendly to us, or so we think. But the price of it is that we live in a crude world, not a graceful one. We live in a competitive world, not a cooperative one. So we live with stress instead of joy, with fear instead of compassion.

Maybe if everyone stopped trying so hard to get ahead, no one would get left behind. The crude system is self-perpetuating. We see the homeless on the street, abandoned, and it registers with us that if you fall behind you will be abandoned, so we run even faster, and the gap between rich and poor grows wider, and that intensifies our fear, so we run faster still. It is a mad world we have chosen. We literally act with the intelligence of horses. We react to the bell and we run.

God gave us more to work with than a horse's brain and a horse's choices. It is our own humanity from which we run. Why? Is it because we are afraid of joy? Because fear seems to be the only real thing we are getting out of all of this, and joy seems to be the only real thing we are losing. We have to confront the absurd possibility that the joy that God intends for us is the very thing we are running from. Why would we run from joy? Perhaps because it is unknown to us.

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