I have never been a member of an organized religion. Not to say I don't consider myself a spiritual person, but I have found that people within organized church groups or religions tend to develop self-righteousness, and they mistrust and judge people on the outside. I was interested in one group at one time, until I happened upon their bomb shelter, which they had built for the end-of-the world based on apocryphal predictions of their leader, and that made me rethink things. This is not to say that there aren't individuals within these groups who have universal compassion and understanding. Father Bede Griffiths comes to mind; a Catholic bishop who spent most of his life in India, and was developing an interesting fusion of Hinduism, Buddhism and Christianity. And there are scores of others, of course.
I am a spiritual person, however my friends who are atheist or agnostic often make the most sense. I think this is because of their tendency to think thoroughly through the information they receive and put everything in context, rather than to accept things based only on faith. I have swung into that realm many times. Religion and spirituality are a bit of a moving target for me, and I will discuss this more later.
I bring this all up because of the huge attempt by the right to legislate their religious beliefs. My concern about this is that they have epitomized all that is bad with religion. They have developed a mechanized system whereby they can be hateful and mistrusting of gays, science, liberals, non-Christians (Muslims in particular), people who have divorced or had abortions, education and educational institutions, and the list goes on. These people, who have somehow gained tremendous power, are those who are the worst of non-thinking, judgmental conformists that radical acceptance of faith brings. We have seen this in the Muslim world, with the Mullahs and Ayatollahs who have entered the political system in the Middle East, and now we are seeing it here. (Ironically, the similarities between Sharia law, which the Tea Partiers in particular are frightened of, and they feel are taking hold in towns in the US, even towns that have very few Muslims in their population; and the breeches of personal freedoms they wish upon us are almost identical.)
I think the problem with fundamentalism of any kind is that it looks, blindly, at the few passages from the religious books with which they agree, and leaves out the very basic foundation of all world religions, which is compassion.
"My religion is kindness," commented the Dalai Lama many years ago, and I have taken this to be the center of my spirituality as well. As I continue to express my concerns about the religious views of the politicians with whom I disagree, I also would never wish harm on any of them, and I also completely accept their right to practice the things they believe, whatever they may be. I wish only that they would go about their spiritual lives without trying to impose their beliefs on me or others who disagree. I think our Constitution affords people these rights, but also protects me from their wrath in the political realm.
I am not a Christian, but I agree with many of the things Jesus taught. Among them when he said that the most important commandment was to love your neighbor as you love yourself. I don't have any idea what passage or book or verse this came from, I just remember I read it and thought that it made complete sense.
This act of loving your neighbor as you would yourself is what I implore those religious fanatics in congress to do. When they read passages from the bible on the senate floor about how God promised to never destroy the world again after the whole Noah thing in order to justify that there is no climate change, they are not doing that. They are justifying the destruction of the world in their own, twisted way. And besides, God is not destroying the world, humans who don't love the earth as much as themselves are.
Today I was in the parking lot at the store, and as I was backing out, a guy walked up behind my car and stood there, reading my liberal bumper-stickers and frowning. This, I thought, was very symbolic of the individuals I am discussing in many ways. He was adamant about voicing his disapproval of my beliefs, but forgot to consider the point that he was behind a moving car coming straight toward him. My bumper stickers, by the way read "God wants spiritual fruits, not religious nuts," "Obama-Biden 2008," "Free Tibet," and "I lived the leisure life at Spider Rock Campground, Chinle Arizona."
I have no gripes with Christians or Christianity, or any other faith. I only have gripes with people who insist I have to believe as they do and judge me for being different than they are.
I also have gripes with this practice of the radical right to justify the ends by using tactics that are in direct violation of the things they believe. I have seen how many of these politicians lie, cheat and steal to lead the county in the direction they want. I know that "Thou shalt not lie," and "Thou shalt not steal," are two of the things they say they believe. I know that because of the situation a few years ago in a courthouse in Louisiana where a federal judge lied, cheated and stole in order to get a marble statue that was engraved with the Ten Commandments put in the courthouse and that was written there. I also know it because many of the lying and cheating politicians in congress are quick to point it out when they perceive someone else has lied or stolen or committed adultery. These are the types of things Woody Allen was talking about when he uttered the immortal words "If Jesus were to come back now and see what was being done in his name, he just would not be able to stop throwing up." Hannah And Her Sisters; Act III, Scene V, Paragraph XXVI (I don't really know the act or scene or anything.)
Compassion. I believe the single most important attribute we have have is compassion. I have seen what cruelty can do. I work with children who are severely, emotionally disturbed, mostly because of the things cruel people have done to them. I have also seen what compassion can do: I have seen many of these same children come alive again as compassionate people show them love and understanding.
I do not believe it is compassionate to take things away from the sick, elderly or poor. This is what is most upsetting about the new breed of Republicans, and the Democrats who empower them. I do not see compassion in people who have everything wanting to keep more for themselves and refusing to made minimal sacrifices to help people in need. I do not see compassion in forcing a rape victim to carry a baby to term. I don't see compassion in seeing that people who do not have health insurance don't get treatment. I don't see compassion in removing laws that impede people with great wealth and power from stealing more. I don't see compassion in trying to remove basic rights extended to those in careers based on compassion, such as teaching, nursing, fire protection and so forth.
I do not begrudge anyone their beliefs. I support all these systems. Perhaps my own inability to settle on a singular spiritual path is that there are far too many wonderful ones out there. I am of the Voltarian idea that "I may not agree with what you have to say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it." I am perplexed by the faithful who behave as those described in the bible who lived in the seething, hateful city of Babylon. Isn't that what they are doing?
So if people are going to bring their religions into politics, I beg you, bring the compassionate side in, and leave your mechanized, hateful, judgmental stuff at home. After all, that is not what Jesus believed, or taught.
Showing posts with label Politics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Politics. Show all posts
Monday, August 8, 2011
Thursday, August 4, 2011
My Response to the Statement "Obama is a Muslim and a Communist Trying to Kill America" Scrawled on a Bathroom Wall
Hello, I am Richard Ball. I wasn't going to start a blog, even though my wife has at least 8, but I have been rambling quite a lot in short sentences on Twitter and Facebook a lot lately, and the scrawling I saw on the wall of the men's room in Home Depot made me want to share quite a bit, so I started one.
I'll reveal more about myself as I rant.
So, on the wall of the men's room at Home Depot, someone had written "Obama is a muslim and a communist who wants to destroy America get a clue people." (The lack of capitalization is the way they wrote it.) And in the same handwriting was "Investigate the Fed." This has the obvious fingerprints of a Tea Partier.
Now as far as the Tea Party, I have been struggling with them since their inception a few years ago, and have continuously attacked and apologized to the right. I will publish my apologies later. I apologized for getting so bent out of shape about them, and raising my blood pressure. The reality is that they have been very damaging, and so my apologies did not allow me to rethink my position very long.
"Obama is a Muslim..." has been sort of a rallying cry for Tea Party members. I have two problems with this: the first is that it is a total lie made only to discredit him, and is used in a hateful way probably as a way to really try to say "Obama is a n..." (insert n-word.) He is not Muslim. My second problem with this statement is so what if he was a Muslim? Islam is for many people an admirable and peaceful faith shared by a billion people, some of whom are radicals and terrorists; the same way some Christians are radicals and terrorists.
When people resort to such name-calling, the message I get really is that a person does not agree with someone else's point-of-view, but rather than put any effort into trying to understand either the other person's view or their own point-of-view, they will just use and name or tell a lie.
This, very sadly, seems to be the very basis of the Tea Party - lies and hatred. They have shown a strong tendency to pull ideas, statistics, anything out of thin air, and then say it enough times that people who are too lazy to think for themselves believe them. They are reinforced by the fact that there are an awful lot of people who are unable to think for themselves.
If anyone would like to have a discussion with me about Mr. Obama's (or anyone else's) views. I would gladly engage in that discussion if the person can tell me, specifically, what views, ideas, or actions they dislike. I support President Obama, but do not agree with everything. I am much father left than he is, and I also realize that a person who is as far on either extreme has no business serving in public office. That should be the realm of moderates and compromisers. The Tea Party are far too extreme to have a position that affects other people's lives.
I know a few things about politics. I grew up in a very political family. My mother is a political scientist and Social Studies Teacher by training. I worked in the embassy in Moscow (when it was the USSR) for two years. I studied politics and history in college. My degrees are actually in Music, Art and Education, but as part of the restructuring of education by No Child Left Behind (a law I have a lot more to say about later,) I took an exam in a few areas:
No Child Left Behind in legislation rooted in the idea that teachers and educational institutions are not trustworthy. As restructuring, teachers had to be "highly qualified" in all the areas they teach - that not a bad idea - but they did not believe that degrees were proof enough, so, like the students, teachers had to take high stakes tests. I took the Social Studies test to prove I had the equivalent of a college degree's understanding of the Social Studies, and I scored almost 100% in the areas of Government, Economics and Geography. I scored very well in all the other areas, too. I am "highly qualified" in 9 academic areas, which is almost mandatory to be a Special Education Teacher these days, and that is fine. I get paid the same as people highly qualified in one area, but that is OK. Anyway, just to demonstrate that I have an understanding of what I am saying, and that my criticisms of the right wing are rooted in some sort of reality.
The Tea Party has put forth the simplified idea that the government budget is like a family's checkbook, and that citizens can't overspend, so why can the government?
A better analogy is: The government is like a company that in order to keep moving has to periodically spend money to retrain, retool and expand. Companies call this "investment," and any of the huge corporations being defended by the nearly brain-dead Tea Partiers have been through this process. The old saying in business is "you have to spend money to make money." That is a simplified analogy, too, but is more closely related to the government than a family - although families also borrow money to get educate their members, buy houses, work on their houses and start businesses, too. Furthermore, our entire economic system is based on the idea of borrowing money and paying interest. (I do have some problems with this, since the end result is to slowly funnel the money from the bottom to the top... but it is the basis of our economy.)
The author of the scrawl also referred to Mr. Obama as a Communist. Prior to this, the Republicans used the term "Socialist" toward him as a slander. Obama is a centrist. he is a blue-dog conserva-dem, who is closely aligned to the Republican view, although he supports revenues to actually pay for things.
So, what is wrong with Socialism? I would consider myself a Socialist. The member of congress I most closely agree with on a regular basis is Bernie Sanders, a self-proclaimed Socialist. Karl Marx, on whose ideas socialism is based, is the most influential economist in the world. I have spent a lot of time in Europe, and have experienced the standard of living they have in the wealthy, heavily Socialist countries there. I have also lived under the Soviet version of Communism, and saw what a catrastrophe that was. But in countries like England and France and the Scandinavian countries, people pay large amounts of their salaries in taxes, and are rewarded with health care, retirement, vacation time, child care, some subsidies for housing, and so on. These are the things that bankrupt American citizens. Should American families really live one accident away from bankruptcy?
I have also lived in Capitalist America, where children go to bed hungry at night, seniors can't pay the bills and people live paycheck to paycheck, hoping they don't have to go to the hospital. (Hear my bleeding heart?)
I saw a show on CNN last week, where they were complaining that the poor aren't really so poor, and 98% of the poor have luxury items like refrigerators, and that it's really only about 2% of children who go to bed hungry, and that's hardly any! Gulp! Since when is having fresh food a luxury, and why is there even one child going hungry in the US? And 2% of 380,000,000 is almost 8,000,000!!!
Al Gore said on Keith Olbermann's show (and I realize Olbermann is about as left as me, and that that is not representative of the wishes of most Americans...) that people needed to organize against the radical right. I read a print version of the article, and the comments at the bottom were horrifying: Most people completely disregarded the message of the article, and wrote a bunch of insults, basically teasing him about claiming to create the internet, and creating the myth of "global warming." Again, Tea Party tactics - name calling, reacting to the person and not the message (by the way, thoroughly research the history of the internet, and see how involved the Vice President was in getting funding for and pushing forth the idea of computer communication for citizens, based on the military model - and anyone who isn't noticing that about 80% of what is on Twitter and Facebook are complaints about the strange weather - OK, I admit to pulling that statistic out of my rear end, but it is a lot...) So the people criticizing the former VP were not reacting at all to his idea, but were just personally attacking him (I also have some criticisms of him, but approach them as issues.) There were no comments reading things like "Mr. Gore, I believe the US is on a better economic track than it was prior to the Tea Party takeover," and so forth. Just personal assaults.
I carry a copy of The Constitution with me. It is now on my phone, as my tattered, paper copy is hardly readable. I consult it whenever people make reference to it, as is frequently done by the Tea Party. I do not ascribe to a fundamentalist, literal interpretation of it, and realize it was written over 200 years ago, and is subject to the changing times and to amendment. The Tea Partiers are fond of saying that The Constitution says that it is illegal to tax - but it actually does, in four separate places, give the government the charge of collecting taxes. They love the Second Amendment, but cite only the first clause, leaving off the part about the well regulated militia. They have strange interpretations about how it does not call for a separation of church and state, although "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof" clearly means that to anyone with any intellect. Michele Bachmann was fond of telling people not to comply with the US Census, because it was not in the Constitution. It is. They love to wrap themselves in a document they misquote and do not understand.
So, in finally closing, I do not necessarily agree with very many of the things I read on the wall of the men's room, but this comment pushed some buttons. People need to think for themselves. Without thoughtful people, a Democracy can simply not work. The Tea Partiers don't mention, probably because they don't know, that the founding fathers they love so much were leary about the idea of Democracy, because they were concerned that the general public would not be smart enough to make good decisions. (This, infact, a main reason for the public education system, that the Tea Partiers so despise...) They are showing this assertion to be true.
As much as I may sound angry at them, I realize that they are merely ignorant and misguided, but to allow the country to suffer because we have handed the reigns to the ignorant and misguided is a serious error.
The country must be run by the tolerant, who can embrace all of us, despite our differences, and where the debate is about substance, not name-calling, and where the scrawling on bathroom walls is not as intelligent as the rantings of our "leaders."
(Oh, and furthermore, in the future I will likely write about how I view politics as a sport, and nothing is real anyway...)
I'll reveal more about myself as I rant.
So, on the wall of the men's room at Home Depot, someone had written "Obama is a muslim and a communist who wants to destroy America get a clue people." (The lack of capitalization is the way they wrote it.) And in the same handwriting was "Investigate the Fed." This has the obvious fingerprints of a Tea Partier.
Now as far as the Tea Party, I have been struggling with them since their inception a few years ago, and have continuously attacked and apologized to the right. I will publish my apologies later. I apologized for getting so bent out of shape about them, and raising my blood pressure. The reality is that they have been very damaging, and so my apologies did not allow me to rethink my position very long.
"Obama is a Muslim..." has been sort of a rallying cry for Tea Party members. I have two problems with this: the first is that it is a total lie made only to discredit him, and is used in a hateful way probably as a way to really try to say "Obama is a n..." (insert n-word.) He is not Muslim. My second problem with this statement is so what if he was a Muslim? Islam is for many people an admirable and peaceful faith shared by a billion people, some of whom are radicals and terrorists; the same way some Christians are radicals and terrorists.
When people resort to such name-calling, the message I get really is that a person does not agree with someone else's point-of-view, but rather than put any effort into trying to understand either the other person's view or their own point-of-view, they will just use and name or tell a lie.
This, very sadly, seems to be the very basis of the Tea Party - lies and hatred. They have shown a strong tendency to pull ideas, statistics, anything out of thin air, and then say it enough times that people who are too lazy to think for themselves believe them. They are reinforced by the fact that there are an awful lot of people who are unable to think for themselves.
If anyone would like to have a discussion with me about Mr. Obama's (or anyone else's) views. I would gladly engage in that discussion if the person can tell me, specifically, what views, ideas, or actions they dislike. I support President Obama, but do not agree with everything. I am much father left than he is, and I also realize that a person who is as far on either extreme has no business serving in public office. That should be the realm of moderates and compromisers. The Tea Party are far too extreme to have a position that affects other people's lives.
I know a few things about politics. I grew up in a very political family. My mother is a political scientist and Social Studies Teacher by training. I worked in the embassy in Moscow (when it was the USSR) for two years. I studied politics and history in college. My degrees are actually in Music, Art and Education, but as part of the restructuring of education by No Child Left Behind (a law I have a lot more to say about later,) I took an exam in a few areas:
No Child Left Behind in legislation rooted in the idea that teachers and educational institutions are not trustworthy. As restructuring, teachers had to be "highly qualified" in all the areas they teach - that not a bad idea - but they did not believe that degrees were proof enough, so, like the students, teachers had to take high stakes tests. I took the Social Studies test to prove I had the equivalent of a college degree's understanding of the Social Studies, and I scored almost 100% in the areas of Government, Economics and Geography. I scored very well in all the other areas, too. I am "highly qualified" in 9 academic areas, which is almost mandatory to be a Special Education Teacher these days, and that is fine. I get paid the same as people highly qualified in one area, but that is OK. Anyway, just to demonstrate that I have an understanding of what I am saying, and that my criticisms of the right wing are rooted in some sort of reality.
The Tea Party has put forth the simplified idea that the government budget is like a family's checkbook, and that citizens can't overspend, so why can the government?
A better analogy is: The government is like a company that in order to keep moving has to periodically spend money to retrain, retool and expand. Companies call this "investment," and any of the huge corporations being defended by the nearly brain-dead Tea Partiers have been through this process. The old saying in business is "you have to spend money to make money." That is a simplified analogy, too, but is more closely related to the government than a family - although families also borrow money to get educate their members, buy houses, work on their houses and start businesses, too. Furthermore, our entire economic system is based on the idea of borrowing money and paying interest. (I do have some problems with this, since the end result is to slowly funnel the money from the bottom to the top... but it is the basis of our economy.)
The author of the scrawl also referred to Mr. Obama as a Communist. Prior to this, the Republicans used the term "Socialist" toward him as a slander. Obama is a centrist. he is a blue-dog conserva-dem, who is closely aligned to the Republican view, although he supports revenues to actually pay for things.
So, what is wrong with Socialism? I would consider myself a Socialist. The member of congress I most closely agree with on a regular basis is Bernie Sanders, a self-proclaimed Socialist. Karl Marx, on whose ideas socialism is based, is the most influential economist in the world. I have spent a lot of time in Europe, and have experienced the standard of living they have in the wealthy, heavily Socialist countries there. I have also lived under the Soviet version of Communism, and saw what a catrastrophe that was. But in countries like England and France and the Scandinavian countries, people pay large amounts of their salaries in taxes, and are rewarded with health care, retirement, vacation time, child care, some subsidies for housing, and so on. These are the things that bankrupt American citizens. Should American families really live one accident away from bankruptcy?
I have also lived in Capitalist America, where children go to bed hungry at night, seniors can't pay the bills and people live paycheck to paycheck, hoping they don't have to go to the hospital. (Hear my bleeding heart?)
I saw a show on CNN last week, where they were complaining that the poor aren't really so poor, and 98% of the poor have luxury items like refrigerators, and that it's really only about 2% of children who go to bed hungry, and that's hardly any! Gulp! Since when is having fresh food a luxury, and why is there even one child going hungry in the US? And 2% of 380,000,000 is almost 8,000,000!!!
Al Gore said on Keith Olbermann's show (and I realize Olbermann is about as left as me, and that that is not representative of the wishes of most Americans...) that people needed to organize against the radical right. I read a print version of the article, and the comments at the bottom were horrifying: Most people completely disregarded the message of the article, and wrote a bunch of insults, basically teasing him about claiming to create the internet, and creating the myth of "global warming." Again, Tea Party tactics - name calling, reacting to the person and not the message (by the way, thoroughly research the history of the internet, and see how involved the Vice President was in getting funding for and pushing forth the idea of computer communication for citizens, based on the military model - and anyone who isn't noticing that about 80% of what is on Twitter and Facebook are complaints about the strange weather - OK, I admit to pulling that statistic out of my rear end, but it is a lot...) So the people criticizing the former VP were not reacting at all to his idea, but were just personally attacking him (I also have some criticisms of him, but approach them as issues.) There were no comments reading things like "Mr. Gore, I believe the US is on a better economic track than it was prior to the Tea Party takeover," and so forth. Just personal assaults.
I carry a copy of The Constitution with me. It is now on my phone, as my tattered, paper copy is hardly readable. I consult it whenever people make reference to it, as is frequently done by the Tea Party. I do not ascribe to a fundamentalist, literal interpretation of it, and realize it was written over 200 years ago, and is subject to the changing times and to amendment. The Tea Partiers are fond of saying that The Constitution says that it is illegal to tax - but it actually does, in four separate places, give the government the charge of collecting taxes. They love the Second Amendment, but cite only the first clause, leaving off the part about the well regulated militia. They have strange interpretations about how it does not call for a separation of church and state, although "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof" clearly means that to anyone with any intellect. Michele Bachmann was fond of telling people not to comply with the US Census, because it was not in the Constitution. It is. They love to wrap themselves in a document they misquote and do not understand.
So, in finally closing, I do not necessarily agree with very many of the things I read on the wall of the men's room, but this comment pushed some buttons. People need to think for themselves. Without thoughtful people, a Democracy can simply not work. The Tea Partiers don't mention, probably because they don't know, that the founding fathers they love so much were leary about the idea of Democracy, because they were concerned that the general public would not be smart enough to make good decisions. (This, infact, a main reason for the public education system, that the Tea Partiers so despise...) They are showing this assertion to be true.
As much as I may sound angry at them, I realize that they are merely ignorant and misguided, but to allow the country to suffer because we have handed the reigns to the ignorant and misguided is a serious error.
The country must be run by the tolerant, who can embrace all of us, despite our differences, and where the debate is about substance, not name-calling, and where the scrawling on bathroom walls is not as intelligent as the rantings of our "leaders."
(Oh, and furthermore, in the future I will likely write about how I view politics as a sport, and nothing is real anyway...)
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