zealotry

umar farouk abdulmutallab was lonely and depressed. he was an adolescent and a religious zealot. his posts to an islamic message board reveal a zealous child who is ill-equipped to reconcile the mixed messages of the world. on christmas he set out from amsterdam on a flight bound for detroit intent on killing hundreds of people and himself.

here is something we should all agree on. a child with fundamentalist beliefs is dangerous.

i was a fundamentalist child once upon a time. i feel lucky to have emerged from that time with my sanity.

i accepted jesus into my heart on february 23rd of 1976. i was 10. it was a sunday evening and i was visiting bethany baptist church in west covina to see an end times preacher who my aunt and uncle (guardians,) were excited to see. (dr howard estep's organization lives on.) i had attended calvary baptist church in la puente at that time but when my family moved to covina we switched to what i would call a more actively fundamentalist denomination of crazy which was the assemblies of god.

in the covina assembly of god church i was exposed to, (and embraced,) not only the literal interpretation of the bible, (contradictions be damned,) but also the practices of speaking in and interpretation of tongues and anointing with oil. yes, we believed the literal words of the bible. jesus really was the son of god. along with the holy spirit the three comprised the holy trinity, an entity separate but apart, wholly beyond human understanding, (yet expounded on often on sunday mornings,) and god. yes miracles happened. yes, jesus rose from the dead after being crucified. yes, gay was evil and worthy of damnation. yes, women were weaker vessels.

in addition to 1-3 visits to church weekly and the camps and outings and all that, i attended a christian high school my junior and senior years and i attended an assemblies of god college for a year, too. i was a young zealot. i led peers of mine to the lord even kneeling with a friend on his porch to lead him through the sinners prayer at the tender age of 11 or 12.

i had no need of literature that was not the bible or not somehow related to the bible. i needed little policing in those days. in my mid-20s my girlfriend worked for the wycliffe bible translators-we went to church weekly and practiced abstinence. (for both of the years we were together!?!) i suppose that relationship ended because she was attuned to the fact that i was questioning my faith, which of course is anathema to fundamentalism, and thus ended those years for me even if it was gradual.

the point is; i was in those days of such severe belief in something so utterly devoid of any proof or basis in reality, i was dangerous. i truly was dangerous. in those days, when i was a young republican, when ronald reagan's dishonesty was pointed out to me, i thought the end justified the means. that is dangerous.

i read an article today in which a columnist pointed out the absurdity of some people believing in god sans any proof or evidence while also denying global warming in the face of melting glaciers of evidence. isn't that poignant?

i can relate to abdulmutallab's zealotry too, because i was critical of those less zealous or less committed than myself. when i started drinking beer, (or wine coolers more likely,) i woke up on saturday or sunday mornings with major guilt. when on the following friday night my friends suggested we drink alcohol again, something inside of me raged. it was this hypocrisy that ultimately drove me from christianity. my best friend rationalized his drunkeness by conjuring the hebrew word for sin and saying that it was essentially an archery term meaning, 'missing the mark.' the idea was that i should not be so bothered, god hated the sin but no the sinner. for my part i went into the act, (in this case of drinking,) knowing full well what i was doing and even how i would feel the next morning. in short, i felt like i had no excuse and the rationale that god was cool with it because hey, i was merely missing the mark. no big deal. my arrow was still on the board-it just wasn't a bullseye. well, that did not work for me. in retrospect, it is kind of funny how hypercritical i was of myself considering how opposite i am to that now and how forgiving i am of humanity at large.

this is where my ascent from christianity began. at some point i realized how wrong-headed it was to decry my nature, or more precisely to feel guilty based simply on my nature. it was not wrong of me to want to seek an altered state of being through alcohol. that was as natural as growing up. i could go on and on about how and why i got out, (and i certainly have in my own journals,) but i won't bore you with all those details right now.

the thing is society needs to get together on this idea. we need to recognize that fundamentalists of all stripes are certainly crazy, if only temporarily. (in fact i question the veracity of any fundamentalist over 40. anyone over 40 has lived long enough to where they should have enough life experience to have recognized the foolishness of their youth and turned from it. my friends who adhere to their fundamentalism post 40 seem to me to be in denial, choosing a life ensconced in the comfort of a familiarity they have built up and nurtured for so many years. it may even be they are mentally ill in as much as they are incapable of turning from their belief system.)

"if in the last few years you haven't discarded a major opinion or acquired a new one, check your pulse. you may be dead."

-gelett burgess

Happy 3rd Birthday, Mark Dylan James!

this is mark's pre-school class singing happy birthday to him first in english then in mandarin. terra skipped over from her kindergarten class and joined in the singing and can be seen right behind mark.

happy birthday little guy. december 18th.

conyers vs. obama

i get it that a lot of people do not want to criticize barack obama. i think it is yet another byproduct of the bush administration. (bush was so bad, so abhorrent really, such an affront to common decency and the values of most americans and our founding fathers, that the ascendancy of obama brought hope in messianic proportions.) that said, the president's actions deserve serious scrutiny and john conyers has been delivering.

for those who may not be familiar with john conyers, he is one of the longest tenured members of the house of representatives. (22 terms. democrat, 4th district-michigan.) more importantly, he was in selma, alabama on freedom day. conyers was on nixon's enemies list. rosa parks served on his staff. he voted on the articles of impeachment against nixon. he appealed to the bush administration to answer to the accusations of the downing street memo. he authored 'what went wrong in ohio: the conyers report on the 2004 presidential election.' the list goes on and on and the point is, john conyers is a patriot, a friend of the common man and a national treasure, and if he is critical of the president, his accusations deserve real consideration.

the article, (which is linked in the header,) appeared on thehill.com two days ago and details obama's call to conyers to ask him to stop publicly demeaning him. based not only on the details of an article and a disagreement between political heavyweights but on the political facts and circumstances of late, obama is appearing more and more to be a politician. (perhaps a very good politician but a politician all the same.) conyers, for his part, seems principled.

it is worth mentioning that conyers played a key role in getting barack obama elected. for that obama expects loyalty. for that, conyers expects justice. he expects obama to be the president of "yes we can," and all the rhetoric of his campaign.

don't get me wrong. in 2012 i fully expect to vote for obama. but he is who he is and while i have had an idea for some time about who and what he is, it is time for all of those who fell in love with him in 2007 and 2008 to wake up, (and get back to work if they want "real change we can believe in.")

this is barack obama. he made a number of campaign promises on health care most notably that all of the debates and negotiations on reform would be televised so the american people could see the process. obama clearly broke that promise. (it was a good idea too. seeing it would have been educational and it would have created accountability.)

on health care, obama, like all of the democrats who have chosen to compromise, are simply wrong. (either that or they are in cahoots with the health insurance industry.) so many of these democrats are running around these days singing the praises of this new, public option-less plan because they see how many people, primarily between 55-65, will now have coverage and they think it is a boon. they are, however, missing the point. the idea behind single payer and the public option was to create a public, accountable entity to compete against the health insurance corporations of today. it is a simple fact that this new option would effectively kill health insurance as we know it today. instead of paying a ceo $700 million for five years of work, (as united healthcare did,) they would have to compete or die and competing would mean an epic paradigm shift.

including those who will be included by this new expansion of medicare is not a bad thing but it does nothing to address the real problem and obama as well as all those democrats should know that. i think they must think that by actually getting affordable coverage to more people than would have likely been affected by a public option they are doing the better good but that is just not the case. the better good would be to get a public option in place that could and would operate so efficiently the masses would clamor for inclusion. instead, by merely creating a larger welfare program they are playing into the hands of the same people who will call this plan a horrible mistake a few years hence. the calls to trim this new plan will be loud and shrill.

instead of showing government at its most efficient, this program will merely be a tax burden. the health care industry will have made millions upon millions of dollars in the time it takes us to figure this out and then, when we do figure it out, they will blame government for trying to interfere in the marketplace. they will paint the health care companies as efficient, and medicare with its couple of million new includees as a burdensome bureaucracy and yet another example of welfare incentivizing people to freeload on the backs of the hard-working americans. it’s the same old story.

this pbs frontline special on health care in five major democracies around the world, by showing how these other countries handle health care and some of their motives for arriving at their current systems, is the most damning thing i have witnessed as it concerns our system here in the united states. at one point in this program an official in taiwan talks about how as that emerging economy faced the decision of how to set up their health care they decided to study some of the best systems from around the world. the american reporter asks him if our system was one of the ones they studied to which he responded, no-we considered that the model of everything we did not want. (taiwan has great health care, by the way.)

so, obama and so many democrats are now selling us all short, allowing the healthcare conglomerates to go on gouging us for who knows how much longer because of a belief that getting health care to a number of people who do not currently have it somehow makes losing to the millions upon millions of dollars healthcare companies have thrown into this battle all worth it. american below the age of 55 are screwed. we will have things in this new system just as they are today. there will be no difference for this large class of people whatsoever.

this is barack obama. he seemed to believe at one point that the aclu lawsuit demanding the release of photos of guantanamo detainees was important but he changed his mind. (it bugs the hell out of me when government officials suggest that i cannot handle truth.)

this is barack obama, (accepting the nobel peace prize.) i was in favor of him receiving it even if i recognized that this too was a reaction to the departure of the previous administration from the world stage. did obama deserve the award? no. was it nice the nobel committee chose him to receive it? absolutely. the sad irony is that receipt came just about a week after he announced a military buildup in afghanistan. perhaps in an attempt to justify the united states' war effort in afghanistan, obama said:

the concept of a "just war" emerged, suggesting that war is justified only when
it meets certain preconditions: if it is waged as a last resort or in self
defense; if the force used is proportional; and if, whenever possible, civilians
are spared from violence.

by these standards our war in afghanistan is certainly not just. it is not a last resort nor is it self defense. our stated mission is to root out a terrorist organization that has been known to seek refuge in parts of afghanistan. in fact we are not at war with afghanistan. al qaeda, as some number of terrorist individuals, may or may not be in afghanistan but it is not as if there is a front line in this war from which we can see footage of the firefight on television. the mission is actually kind of a joke, as if every malcontent in the arab world can be rooted out. the question of proportion will be compared to 9/11 but in terms of firepower and training, (to say nothing of the idea of uniformed soldiers aligned and amassed against an enemy hiding out in homes at dinner tables amidst family or in caves in remote mountains.) i think our soldiers do their best to spare civilian casualties but i also know that it doesn't always work out that way. more than 1,000 civilian deaths occurred in afghanistan just in the first six months of 2009.

while obama's rhetoric was typically moving and succinct, the fact this war he inherited and has since escalated does not meet any of the criteria he mentioned above, seems lost on him.

so why would i expect to vote for him? i guess it is because i am a realist. i know that no democratic challenger is actually going to win the nomination over him and so, supporting one of those candidates merely serves to weaken obama's candidacy when he faces a republican challenger in the general election. am i opposed to even considering a republican candidate? mostly. i mean, the republican party is made up of a wealthy class who sees government as the enemy and the people as so many ne'er do wells like ayn rand's masses in 'atlas shrugged.' the policies this group brings to the party are harmful to the masses. there is also a large, fundamentalist religious element in that party. they believe jesus is about to return to rapture his adherents into the clouds and damn everyone else to hell. why would i trust someone like that to run my government? no, the republican party is a bad, ugly joke.

and those are my choices. that is the american two-party system. it is that bleak. my candidates: ralph nader, dennis kucinich, bernie sanders, hell, john conyers, these men are unelectable. they could not raise the amount of corporate money to actually compete in an american presidential election. it is a simple as that.

so be reasonable, fall out of love with barack obama as john conyers has. agitate against his bad decisions and laud his good ones but recognize that barack obama represents a great deal of good but that at the same time, he is compromised. he is beholden to the corporations who lined the pockets of his campaign. if you think that does not drive at least some of his decisions, you are foolish.

jb

in the nearly 12 years i worked with him jb always worked early hours, typically arriving well before the sun. he had a massive chest and large biceps and he was always in great shape. at 16 years my senior, jb was prolly 45 when i met him and 57 when i moved on from the work place we shared.

i admired john. he was a lady's man-chicks flocked to him. he had that strong, silent thing going for him. he was beloved at work. he was an institution of a man. he worked hard to fulfill his duties and do a good job.

i used to imagine john's life away from our office. he lived in inglewood, i think. i believe his dad lived with him or if that was not the case, he was nearby and john saw him often. john had kids who were adults, a daughter who made jb a grandfather and a son who was a basketball star.

john must have woke around 3am every day. i know he lifted weights every morning. maybe that was 3:30-4:30am. Then he got ready for work, drove across la to pasadena and began giving customer service at 6am. he got to leave the office around 2:45pm and probably raced back down the 110 past the coliseum and towards hollywood park to his home.

from time to time john would mention little details about dates he had. there was a woman at work, (not one of the lookers on john's dance card,) who got so angry with john at one point she made a big scene in the call center and held a grudge for a long time. i think she was unstable and harbored some false notions about her relationship with john. for his part i guess john was kind of a love-'em-and-leave-'em type of man.

he wrote poetry and had books upon books filled with love poems. strictly speaking, i did not love his poetry, what i read of it, but i loved the fact that he wrote poetry. john was a gentle giant. (only a fool would have messed with him though.)

ultimately, what impressed me the most about john, (and i think this must be true of most everyone who knows or knew john,) was his dignity.

john was a quiet and proud man. he always walked tall, made eye contact with others, offered a friendly handshake or even a hug to his friends and acquaintances, shared in their joy and travails, laughed easily, consoled those who suffered, personified warmth and maintained his post amidst the people.

john is very much alive today, lest you get the wrong idea. it's just that i haven't seen him in a long time. i used to see jb about 250 days every year. he was like family to me, (you know?) it is not hyperbole to say i loved this man. i remember seeing him away from the office once at a little party in rosemead one of our cute, little 20-something girls was having. i was so plussed to see john away from the office-he was the first person i walked up to.

here's the thing. you see someone, like john, five days per week, 250-odd days per year, and at some point you can't help but take the relationship for granted. i mean, you have a genuine affinity, a real friendship, but if it is of the ilk where it seems to exist only at work, (this is to say you do not communicate away from the office,) when you walk away from the job you seem to walk away from john. it's never intentional but it is similarly unavoidable. the names of people i adored but walked away from over the years because life happens, because nothing is static, because we are all bodies in motion after all, because our nature of complexity demands that we move and move and move and in the movement is absence. in the movement is all that lays ahead and all that is left behind. in the movement are connections, near-misses and the abyss. and the names of those people are legion.

the names of those people are tubs and victor and sid and matt and oscar and eric and sully and kenneth and rudy and kim and kathryn and rosa and alla and yeah, so many more.

i miss john, just like i miss the others, only more because john and i were together a long time. whatever was going on at work in those days there was always something comforting about having big john sitting back there in the corner of the call center. he was like the protector of the entire joint. and i am curious of who i work with today will be my enduring, everyday friends, (because we have enough common ground to propel us into a real and active friendship,) and who, by contrast will be like john to me, perfect in their distance and inability to draw the ire that visits those who are most familiar.

john is and always was a dignified man. what better thing can be said about a man? i carry him with me everywhere i go. i am proud to have known him and wish him well always.