I Shouldn't, But...

Oh, I do have opinions, and strong feelings, convictions and dogma. I have a son who teaches on a college campus. I have another son who is a U.S. Infantryman and National Guardsman. I have a granddaughter in a public school.

Because I’ve promised myself this blog would not take the easy path of political commentary, I’m only going to say this: I am sickened by the loss of lives in these senseless, unrelenting mass shootings. Can you imagine what the families of victims are feeling today? I can’t.

“They’s times when how you feel got to be kep’ to yourself.”

— John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

Lost In A Masquerade

Did we, like the Emporer, assume that we were grandly dressed in our new clothes? And now, somehow, an ugliness has been exposed as we’ve seen ourselves in the mirror of South Carolina and Birmingham before that. Now social media is lit up like Vegas over a Supreme Court decision. Loaded words and vitriol.

I’ve been trying to find my own words, but are they needed? It seems like there are too many out there already. So maybe this is just for my own peace of mind and soul.

Early this morning I was out for my walk. My earbuds were in and my playlist reached the letter T. The list was:

• Take Five by Dave Brubeck
• Teach Your Children by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young
• That Spirit of Christmas by Chuck Brown and Eva Cassidy
• Things Have Changed by Bob Dylan
• This Land Is Your Land by Woody Guthrie
• This Masquerade by Leon Russell
• Tight Rope by Leon Russell
• The Times They Are a-Changin’ by Bob Dylan
• Try A Little Tenderness by Florence and The Machine
• Turn! Turn! Turn! by The Byrds
• Turpentine by Brandi Carlile

As I listened and walked and thought and cursed the neighbor’s yippin’ little dog, I was struck by the poetry of each of those songs, and each held words that helped me find mine, making some sense of all this. Especially the first few lines of Leon’s masquerade song:

Are we really happy with this lonely game we play
Looking for words to say

Searching but not finding, understanding anyway
We’re lost in a masquerade

Both afraid to say we’re just too far away
From being close together from the start

We tried to talk it over, but the words got in the way
We’re lost inside this lonely game we play

Are we “just too far away”, too polarized? Does it seem like when we do try to talk it over the words get in the way.

Not to point out the obvious but polarization leads to isloation, and isolation to aloneness, and Leon is right: “We’re lost inside this lonely game we play.”

So I’m an old guy with a blog; which is just more words. Most of my words come out of me feeble attempt to accept growing old with some style and grace. Sometimes though I see the telltale signs of geezerhood. Like the other day, I think I actually said out loud, “Looks like we’re all going to hell in a handbasket.” Another of those signs of senior adulthood is to blame it all on the next generation, i.e.: they keep changing everything and screwing everything up.

As I’ve recorded here on this blog, our youngest son just finished infantry training. As we visited Fort Benning for his graduation, I asked him if everyone he started training with finished. Unfortunately, no. Some were injured, some dropped out. “You can do that?” I asked. “Yes, their ‘less than honorable discharge’ is called ‘Failure to Adapt.’”

Maybe that’s my state: “failure to adapt”. Dylan’s song is still right: the times are a-changin’. The pace of the change is such that it is hard to adapt. But adapt we must. All of us. We live together. All of us. On this big ball.

Several years ago, a guy named Robert Fulghum wrote a book he called, All I Need To Know I Learned In Kindergarten. [Spoiler Alert] Here’s his list:

These are the things I learned (in Kindergarten):

1. Share everything.
2. Play fair.
3. Don’t hit people.
4. Put thngs back where you found them.
5. CLEAN UP YOUR OWN MESS.
6. Don’t take things that aren’t yours.
7. Say you’re SORRY when you HURT somebody.
8. Wash your hands before you eat.
9. Flush.
10. Warm cookies and cold milk are good for you.
11. Live a balanced life - learn some and drink some and draw some and paint some and sing and dance and play and work everyday some.
12. Take a nap every afternoon.
13. When you go out into the world, watch out for traffic, hold hands, and stick together.
14. Be aware of wonder. Remember the little seed in the Stryrofoam cup: The roots go down and the plant goes up and nobody really knows how or why, but we are all like that.
15. Goldfish and hamsters and white mice and even the little seed in the Styrofoam cup - they all die. So do we.
16. And then remember the Dick-and-Jane books and the first word you learned - the biggest word of all - LOOK.” 
― Robert Fulghum, All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten

Maybe we could put that on a monument in front of the Oklahoma State Capital. (Get real Pops. Even that would piss off at least a few people.)

Sometimes I think I learned all the theology I will ever need in Sunbeams. For those unfamiliar with southern baptist tradition, Sunbeams was a community for little baptists, where we learned that “Jesus LOVES the little children! ALL the children of the World! Red and Yellow, Black and White, they are precious in His sight. Jesus LOVES the little children of the World.”

See this picture? The one of the beautiful little African-American girl holding her homemade poster? A few days ago, I stood in a museum in Memphis, inside the Lorraine Motel, where Martin Luther King, JR, was shot. This photo was on the wall there and I stood and stared at it for a long time, pondering her question. The answer is blindingly obvious—isn’t?! The answer is an unequivocal “NO!” Right? If there is any doubt about that; then I have a failure to adapt.

If Jesus didn’t really mean it when he said, he greatest commandment is this: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind; and, Love your neighbor as yourself,” then I have a failure to adapt.

If we’re going to reduce everything to black and white to the point where someone can’t fly a rainbow flag, where African-American churches are being burned, where Righteousness for some means inhumanity for other… Are we “lost in a masquerade”?

That's it. I’m out of words.

So, let me leave you with someone else’s. This is from an interview with Mallory Ortberg and Carvell Wallace following the slayings at the church in Charleston:

These folks were praying for peace and expressing forgiveness by letting this dude into their church when they were slain. Their pants were pulled up and they weren’t “challenging authority.” And they still got killed.
 

It Has A Face

"How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?” 
― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces

Normally I wouldn’t be overly attentive to news of an uprising in Burkina Faso. And, while I shouldn’t admit it, the concern about the spread of ebola wouldn’t have mattered much until it reached as close as Dallas; that is until I realized that Burkina Faso is near the heart of the outbreak in Liberia, Guinea, and Sierra Leone.

That’s the way it is, you know?  We don’t care a whole lot about anything until it has a face. For example, we understand the horrors of cancer once it has a face. By that, I mean, someone we personally know gets THE diagnosis. For me the first time cancer really had a face was my mother-in-law, Betty. It took her life at 49.

Why am I concerned about disease and political uprising in Burkina Faso? Because it has a face for me now. For several years, I have “supported” a little girl there. We send a little money to her each month and on special occasions through a wonderful organization called “Compassion” www.compassion.com.

Maimouna

She is a beautiful little girl named Maimouna. She is just a bit older than our oldest grandchild Karlee. In her last letter to me she drew pictures of her favorite things: her friend, a doll and a ball. Just a few days ago I put a letter in the mail to her. It included a picture that Karlee drew for her. I hope she gets it. The parliament building of her town is burning to the ground; today.

Several years ago I became involved with a group called the International Arts Movement based in New York City, and had the privilege of serving on their board of directors. The movement was founded by an artist named Mako Fujimura. Mako and IAM helped me with a language for a dilemma in our culture that was troubling to me. Mako had an epiphany of sorts following the events of 9/11, which impacted his community in NYC directly. He made a plea for artists and other culture-shapers to “re-humanize” the world. One way to look at what that means is for us to really see real faces.

For me, for today, when I heard Burkina Faso in the news, I immediately saw the face of my little friend Maimouna. My heart breaks for her and her family and the on-going de-humanization that comes with disease, and strife, and so; in Burkina Faso and in Oklahoma City.

“No man can be an exile if he remembers that all the world is one city.” 
― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces

Circus Monkeys

Nie moj cyrk, Nie moje malpy.

I don't speak Polish, but I'm a sucker for a good Polish proverb. I ran this one through the Google® Translator and got this: "Not my circus, not my monkey."

So, I'm guessing the take-away in this proverb is: sometimes it's just not my problem. Or maybe the wisdom here is to quit trying to fix everything for everybody; accept your boundaries and limitations.

You have to be careful here though. You could easily become like one of those ugly, narcissistic characters in the Good Samaritan story, or one of those who think "denial is just a river in Egypt."

I bet I could print up a bunch of t-shirts with the "Not My Circus, Not My Monkey" proverb and sell them like hotcakes. I'll admit it--sometimes, too many times, I might as well be wearing one, because that's my attitude sometimes; too many times.

You've seen it, right? It looks kind of like this:

"It's their mess, let them clean it up."
"She made her bed, she can lie in it."
"I've got to look out for Number One."

I heard a guy say this one time and I wanted to reply, "You'd better look out for Number Two too, because if you step in it you're going to spell like, well, $#1T whether your dog's the one who dropped it or not.

Billy Joel wrote a song back in the 80s (yes, it was a low decade for music) where the lyrics were a litany of the famous, the infamous, and a sample of mankind's collective messes and milestones through the years. The chorus (and title) of the song is the equivalent of "not my circus, not my monkey".

It goes like this:

We Didn't Start The Fire

Harry Truman, Doris Day, Red China, Johnnie Ray,
South Pacific, Walter Winchell, Joe DiMaggio,
Joe McCarthy, Richard Nixon, Studebaker, Television,
North Korea, South Korea, Marilyn Monroe,

Chorus:
We didn't start the fire
It was always burning
Since the world's been turning

Rosenbergs, H-Bomb, Sugar Ray, Panmunjom,
Brando, The King And I, and The Catcher In The Rye,
Eisenhower, Vaccine, England's got a new queen,
Marciano, Liberace, Santayana goodbye,

Joseph Stalin, Malenkov, Nasser and Prokofiev,
Rockefeller, Campanella, Communist Bloc,
Roy Cohn, Juan Peron, Toscanini, Dacron,
Dien Bien Phu Falls, Rock Around the Clock,
Einstein, James Dean, Brooklyn's got a winning team,
Davy Crockett, Peter Pan, Elvis Presley, Disneyland,
Bardot, Budapest, Alabama, Khrushchev,
Princess Grace, Peyton Place, Trouble in the Suez,

Little Rock, Pasternak, Mickey Mantle, Kerouac,
Sputnik, Chou En-Lai, Bridge On The River Kwai,
Lebanon, Charles de Gaulle, California baseball,
Starkweather, Homicide, Children of Thalidomide,

Buddy Holly, Ben-Hur, Space Monkey, Mafia,
Hula Hoops, Castro, Edsel is a no-go,
U-2, Syngman Rhee, payola and Kennedy,
Chubby Checker, Psycho, Belgians in the Congo,

Hemingway, Eichmann, Stranger in a Strange Land,
Dylan, Berlin, Bay of Pigs invasion,
Lawrence of Arabia, British Beatlemania,
Ole Miss, John Glenn, Liston beats Patterson,

Pope Paul, Malcolm X, British Politician Sex,
J.F.K. blown away, what else do I have to say,

Birth control, Ho Chi Minh, Richard Nixon back again,
Moonshot, Woodstock, Watergate, punk rock,
Begin, Reagan, Palestine, Terror on the airline,
Ayatollah's in Iran, Russians in Afghanistan,
Wheel of Fortune, Sally Ride, heavy metal, suicide,
Foreign debts, homeless Vets, AIDS, Crack, Bernie Goetz,
Hypodermics on the shores, China's under martial law,
Rock and Roller Cola wars, I can't take it anymore.

We didn't start the fire
It was always burning
Since the world's been turning
We didn't start the fire
But when we are gone
It will still burn on and on and on and on
And on and on and on and on...

Maybe this is our Circus and these are our Monkeys