Ft. Hood...

Thirteen individuals died and thirty-one were wounded at the shooting at Fort Hood. That means thirteen families have had the ultimate wound inflicted upon them. Thirteen mothers had their children torn from them. Thirteen fathers will watch their sons and daughters being lowered into the ground. And thirty-one families will be effected in ways they never could have imagined.

I want this to be kept in mind when we talk about Fort Hood. This idea should be in the foreground, on the tips of everyone's tongues at all times during this discussion. These were real people with real families who are experiencing real, inescapable, undeniable grief.

In the past week or so, I've heard different news organizations talk about this incident in different ways. Some of them haven't gotten past the idea I just mentioned. We're hearing news flashes about what Obama wants to do about it, about what Lieberman wants to do about it, about what the people want done about it. The BBC is reporting on it, and the world mourns with us over the deaths of soldiers on our own ground.

Perhaps we could have prevented it. The guy who committed the crime showed warning signs; he apparently talked to al Qaeda members via telephone and email. We knew about it. Maybe we can talk about how to prevent these kinds of things in the future. Maybe we can talk about what went wrong in this particular incident that made us do nothing in response to the warning signs he gave us. That might be an appropriate place to go with this discussion, and we're seeing it shift in that direction a bit.

What I've seen a lot of, sadly, is news organization using this terrible incident as fuel for their base. It's sensationalized, yes, like all other news stories are; however, I'm seeing that sensationalism turn into ignorance and fear-mongering like what we saw after 9/11. People are starting to blindly attack Islam again, talking about how violent and dangerous it is. They're beginning to turn this incident, one that thirteen families are going to be mourning for years to come, into another log on the fire of the crusade that we've been participating in for decades. It's become politicized, strategized, and mobilized to suddenly be some means to an end.

"It's Obama's fault!" I hear from Hannity and Limbaugh.

"Blame the Islamic extremists!" I hear from Beck.

I suppose this is my point: How does it reflect us as Americans if all we do with tragedies like this is turn them into propaganda for a party or a cause? We're all scrambling over how to use this event to drum up support for our presence in Afghanistan or attack our liberal "victim-loving" president, but thirteen families just want their children back. I see these actions as vulgar. It's repulsive. When are we going to stop being pundits and spinsters and start being human?

My two cents: Things like this are going to continue to happen across the globe until we can stop placing blame, stop going on crusades, stop marginalizing and ignoring people for our "causes" and start being compassionate, empathetic human beings towards each other.

History...

My African American Lit class has gotten me thinking a lot about history and the way it impacts our lives on an everyday level. Personally, I'm somewhat confused as to my own relationship to history, so I'd like to use this as a forum to work that struggle out.

The way I see it, we have two histories to relate to. The first is our personal history, which all of us have and cannot avoid. I am the youngest of three. My dad is a pastor and my mother is a nurse. There have been lots of different events and circumstances in my life that have shaped me to be the particular Mark that I am today. I've personally experience this kind of history and can reflect upon it and my relationship to it. For me, this is a fairly simple and unproblematic concept.

The second relationship to history is what really interests and perplexes me, however. I'm part of a culture. I live in a certain society at a certain time in history. While I understand the ramifications of how this effects my day-to-day life and has a PROFOUND impact on who I am, I fail to identify myself with it. It's a strange thought, but maybe I can illuminate it better by describing people who do identify with their cultural history.

African American writers, for example, spend a good deal of time focusing on how their cultural history shapes who they are. I'm reading Toni Morrison right now, and she seems to think that you cannot simply be an individual living in a society. You are a member of that society, and that society's history is your history which you must learn to deal with. Her characters have to learn what it means to be black, to have an oppressed and checkered history. I guess for a group who's history is a little more tangible in their daily life, I understand how this is relevant. Still, for me, I don't know.

My history is white-washed. George Washington cutting down the apple tree kinda stuff. It's a bunch of tall tales, myths, that never really happened but that we tell ourselves in order to justify our modern selves. Aside from that, I don't even know which history to look for. Am I an American? Am I European? Should I associate myself with the history of Great Britain as an Irish descendant? Exactly who I am is a little muddled and confusing, so exactly which history is "my" history is confusing as well.

I suppose on one level, people could say that it's important to understand how your history shapes you, but you don't have to personally identify with it. Currently, for example, if I were to personally identify myself as an American I'd feel nothing but ashamed of our actions. That's just me though. Thoughts? Comments? Reflections? I'd love to hear them!

Judgment...

I've been thinking about judgment a lot lately, about our rights to judge others and such. It makes me want to tell a story.

When I was in grade school, I got picked on a whole lot. I was tormented pretty mercilessly (grade school kids learn to torture long before they learn to be merciful, sadly) by what felt like every kid in the school for every reason they could find. I'm just starting to analyze and see how deeply these years have effected my personal growth as an adult and how much of that pain I still carry with me, but that's another post for another day.

What I want to convey first is how horrible this was to me as a child. I remember how much I hated everything about myself. I remember going shopping for clothes with my mom one day and crying in the dressing room because no matter what I tried on, I never looked cool enough. I remember the day after I got beat up on the playground by a kid begging my parents to not make me go back to school and face the ridicule of the moribund masses of my peers. There were lots of experiences like that. It was a hellish few years for me.

One of the kids who came after me the most was a little blond kid named Keith Baldwin. Keith was meaner to me than the rest which made me hate him the most. When he finally moved away my sixth grade year, I was completely relieved. "One less jerk to worry about," I thought. He moved to Jefferson City and I didn't hear a thing about him for a few years aside from the occasional line or two about how people missed him (which infuriated me) or about when people would go visit him. Then, one day in eighth grade, an email was circulated through my school. The teachers informed all of us that Keith and his little sister came home from school one day and the two of them were murdered by their mother. Their mother went insane and shot them to death and promptly turned the weapon on herself.

"Good," I thought. "One less jerk to worry about." When I thought that, it became apparent to me that I had some issues to work through.

Slowly, stories about how Keith's mom had literally tortured him leaked out. Friends would tell about how Keith's mom poured salt in Keith's eyes and stuff like that. It was demented. It took me years to think about it fully, but I began to realize that Keith probably didn't have the easiest time with life. He took that out on me. The older I get the more okay with it I am. As I think about it, most of the kids who made fun of me came from broken homes, single parent situations, abuse fathers, etc. Not that their actions against me are justified, but they're certainly more understandable and forgivable in that light.

The point is this, my friends: We're all products of our environments. Keith made fun of me because it's how he expressed his anguish. His friends followed suit. I'm a product of those actions too. Again, this doesn't make all of our actions acceptable or exempt us from responsibility, but it seems to lighten the load a bit.

I was talking to one of my friends about judgment in a Christian setting the other day while we were riding in the car. I ended up telling her my story about Keith and then asking her, "Was Keith a sinner? When Keith picked on me, can he be held responsible and judged for it?" You know, I don't know the answer to that question, but for me it illuminates something about the way a lot of us Christian people think and a lot about why people don't like us. We're quick to judge. We don't think a lot before we pass judgment. We don't realize that the evil deeds don't just crop up in this world. They're conditioned and created by other evil deeds. That makes me question a lot about what's traditionally thought of as "God's judgment," which inevitably is a euphemism for our judgment in God's name. I just want to put that out there. Maybe we'll all think a bit more before we pass judgment. Maybe we'll be a bit quicker to forgive next time.

Two Things...

First, I'd like a bit of discussion and hopefully some thoughtful replies. Second, some awesome entertainment.

So firstly, I've been pondering in my head the extent to which difference breeds hatred. Particularly in the political realm, I find myself having a very difficult time learning that those who are different than me have validity. I'm not sure if it's the fact that I've thought out my arguments or that I'm just an egotistical jerk (as I often can be without my knowledge), but when it comes to people who have different political opinions, specifically to people who are staunch conservatives, I find myself having a difficult time not letting that get difference get in the way I view them as humans.

Example.

I have a friend whom I love deeply. She's a beautiful person who cares about the same things that I do in praxis, but she recently confessed to me that she's an intense conservative. She thinks laissez faire capitalism is the best possible system, socialist nations are filled with unhappy and unhealthy people (she also equated socialism with communism), and that Regan's economic policies were the best thing this country has ever seen. As much as I love her, this is a pretty glaring difference in our perspectives and I just don't know how to 1) communicate with her at all about it and 2) not let it get in the way of how I see her as a human being. For me, these issues touch on my faith in God, my love of my neighbor, and everything I think is wrong with humanity today. How do you do it, guys? How do you not let difference breed hatred? I'm assuming it starts with a strong and healthy dose of humility, though I'm wary of getting to the point that I delegitimize myself in the process, but then what? Yikes!

Okay, now for some promised entertainment. To my friend who is Blogging Incognito, I think your son might particularly enjoy these videos.

Lovers of the Poor...

Lovers of the Poor
By Gwendolyn Brooks

arrive. The Ladies from the Ladies' Betterment
League
Arrive in the afternoon, the late light slanting
In diluted gold bars across the boulevard brag
Of proud, seamed faces with mercy and murder hinting
Here, there, interrupting, all deep and debonair,
The pink paint on the innocence of fear;
Walk in a gingerly manner up the hall.
Cutting with knives served by their softest care,
Served by their love, so barbarously fair.
Whose mothers taught: You'd better not be cruel!
You had better not throw stones upon the wrens!
Herein they kiss and coddle and assault
Anew and dearly in the innocence
With which they baffle nature. Who are full,
Sleek, tender-clad, fit, fiftyish, a-glow, all
Sweetly abortive, hinting at fat fruit,
Judge it high time that fiftyish fingers felt
Beneath the lovelier planes of enterprise.
To resurrect. To moisten with milky chill.
To be a random hitching post or plush.
To be, for wet eyes, random and handy hem.
Their guild is giving money to the poor.
The worthy poor. The very very worthy
And beautiful poor. Perhaps just not too swarthy?
Perhaps just not too dirty nor too dim
Nor--passionate. In truth, what they could wish
Is--something less than derelict or dull.
Not staunch enough to stab, though, gaze for gaze!
God shield them sharply from the beggar-bold!
The noxious needy ones whose battle's bald
Nonetheless for being voiceless, hits one down.
But it's all so bad! and entirely too much for them.
The stench; the urine, cabbage, and dead beans,
Dead porridges of assorted dusty grains,
The old smoke, heavy diapers, and, they're told,
Something called chitterlings. The darkness. Drawn
Darkness, or dirty light. The soil that stirs.
The soil that looks the soil of centuries.
And for that matter the general oldness. Old
Wood. Old marble. Old tile. Old old old.
Note homekind Oldness! Not Lake Forest, Glencoe.
Nothing is sturdy, nothing is majestic,
There is no quiet drama, no rubbed glaze, no
Unkillable infirmity of such
A tasteful turn as lately they have left,
Glencoe, Lake Forest, and to which their cars
Must presently restore them. When they're done
With dullards and distortions of this fistic
Patience of the poor and put-upon.
They've never seen such a make-do-ness as
Newspaper rugs before! In this, this "flat,"
Their hostess is gathering up the oozed, the rich
Rugs of the morning (tattered! the bespattered . . . ),
Readies to spread clean rugs for afternoon.
Here is a scene for you. The Ladies look,
In horror, behind a substantial citizeness
Whose trains clank out across her swollen heart.
Who, arms akimbo, almost fills a door.
All tumbling children, quilts dragged to the floor
And tortured thereover, potato peelings, soft-
Eyed kitten, hunched-up, haggard, to-be-hurt.
Their League is allotting largesse to the Lost.
But to put their clean, their pretty money, to put
Their money collected from delicate rose-fingers
Tipped with their hundred flawless rose-nails seems . . .
They own Spode, Lowestoft, candelabra,
Mantels, and hostess gowns, and sunburst clocks,
Turtle soup, Chippendale, red satin "hangings,"
Aubussons and Hattie Carnegie. They Winter
In Palm Beach; cross the Water in June; attend,
When suitable, the nice Art Institute;
Buy the right books in the best bindings; saunter
On Michigan, Easter mornings, in sun or wind.
Oh Squalor! This sick four-story hulk, this fibre
With fissures everywhere! Why, what are bringings
Of loathe-love largesse? What shall peril hungers
So old old, what shall flatter the desolate?
Tin can, blocked fire escape and chitterling
And swaggering seeking youth and the puzzled wreckage
Of the middle passage, and urine and stale shames
And, again, the porridges of the underslung
And children children children. Heavens! That
Was a rat, surely, off there, in the shadows? Long
And long-tailed? Gray? The Ladies from the Ladies'
Betterment League agree it will be better
To achieve the outer air that rights and steadies,
To hie to a house that does not holler, to ring
Bells elsetime, better presently to cater
To no more Possibilities, to get
Away. Perhaps the money can be posted.
Perhaps they two may choose another Slum!
Some serious sooty half-unhappy home!--
Where loathe-lover likelier may be invested.
Keeping their scented bodies in the center
Of the hall as they walk down the hysterical hall,
They allow their lovely skirts to graze no wall,
Are off at what they manage of a canter,
And, resuming all the clues of what they were,
Try to avoid inhaling the laden air.

-1960

The more things change, the more they stay the same, no?

This poem makes me angry. I find myself very flustered with the self-righteous; those who want to help, but only "the worthy poor. The very very worthy and beautiful poor." Really, all that I see in most instances of people wanting to help the poor is that people want to feel better about themselves for having helped the poor but get disgusted by the barbarity of the problem, by how much it actually requires of you to interject and make a difference (myself included). So I suppose I'm upset not only because I see this kind of self-righteousness happening all the time, but because it touches on something in myself that I find loathsome.

I think we tell ourselves lots of things to avoid reaching out and helping people. "I'm far too busy right now," or "the problem's just too big for one person to make a difference in," or - the most insidious lie, "If they could just pull themselves up from their bootstraps!" How can you pull yourself up from your bootstraps if you don't have any boots? I'm just so frustrated by the poverty issue in the world, and particularly by our own egotistical perspective on it.

Life Without God...

There have been several posts by my friends over at Every Square Inch which have stated, both explicitly and implicitly, that without God (and I'm assuming that they mean also without Christ) life can have no meaning. I'm not entirely sure what they mean by this as there are several different possibilities for application of that statement, but in any case I strongly disagree. I've been debating with them on their blog, but I wanted to take some time to really explicate myself and state my case in hopes that 1) I'll create some good dialogue, and 2) they'll understand me a bit better than they do currently.

So...

If you want to say that life has no meaning without God, I think there are two basic ways you can apply that statement. First, there is the ontological argument that without God, life as a phenomena cannot be meaningful (or, from a Christian perspective, that life cannot even exist). In this case, people who are living without God in their lives CAN have meaning, but they're in a sense "borrowing" it from God and not recognizing it. They're taking meaning from God's creation meant for them and not giving God the credit. I'm okay with this argument (I think it's the most tenable in an argument for sure), but I'm not entirely sure this is what most Christians mean when they say things like, "Without God, life can have no meaning."

The second way this phrase can be applied is on the personal, everyday level. Thus, when you're saying that without God life is meaningless, you're saying that without a personal relationship with God (and Christ implicitly) a person cannot be fulfilled. The argument here as I understand it is that we all have a "God shaped hole" and that we are not realizing ourselves as fully human unless we put God back in our lives where He belongs. I think this position is on some level convincing, but here's what you've got to do to hold it:

1) You have to show how people without God (and without Christ specifically) don't have meaning in their lives. More specifically, you have to find people without a relationship with God and Christ who are perfectly happy and successful in the "meaning making department," if you will, and convince them that they actually DON'T have meaning somehow. To me, this either makes the person who is trying to argue that life without God is meaning look either inhumane in some way (they're trying to make people feel guilty or unhappy without cause), silly (they're out of touch with reality), or you'll find yourself deflating the term "meaning" to something...well...meaningless that nobody really cares about or wants in their lives.

What's even more compelling for me in this case is that you've got to make this argument for not only extreme secularists (Dawkins et. al) but also for those who are active participants in other religions. Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, etc. cannot have meaning under this framework. I don't know about you, but I have a hard time looking at people like Gandhi and the Dalai Lama and telling them that their lives aren't meaningful. As humanitarian and compassionate as they are, I think again we run the risk of devaluing the term "meaningful" to be something no one really cares about or wants in their lives.

2) You have to argue against post-modern existentialist philosophy. Wow. That's tough, especially seeing as it's unnecessary. There are lots of fantastic Christian existential philosophers who have already done the leg-work that these guys are wanting to do (Kierkegaard and Tillich specifically come to mind) and they do it in a post-modern and therefore more currently understandable, accessible, and acceptable by the everyday thinking person. Anyway, what you've got to do, in my mind, is argue somehow that there is no relativity in human experience and the power of human agency to decide what is meaningful and what is not is a misguided notion. I'm not entirely sure how to do this without looking either archaic or fideistic.

So there are my thoughts, for what they're worth, and I'd LOVE to get some feedback. As it stands, I think the onus is on a believer in the statement "Life can have no meaning without God" and want to hold that position on an everyday level to explain how 1) people who seem to have meaning without God DON'T have it, and 2) rebut existentialism. I'd really like to see that argument.

As an addendum, I think that we're better off leaving accepting the fact that life can have meaning without God. I don't want to say that all meanings are the same and that having any meaning at all means that you're completely fulfilled and happy. I'd argue that a personal relationship with the Divine makes you more fully human, more realized, and more fulfilled than you could otherwise be (i.e. that having a relationship with the Divine is part of our nature and we should embrace it), but there are lots of negative things about rejecting meaning without God. It in some sense dehumanizes us and rejects the notions of free will that the Bible says we're created with, mainly, and I don't think I can accept that consequence. When we're totally free, when we can freely choose to accept God over and against the other things in the world, our choice is MORE meaningful than it would be without meaning in other departments. I think that saying life can have meaning without God actually makes the choice to worship God a more valuable and laudable choice than it would be otherwise. What do you all think?

Some Recent Thoughts...

You know, I'm not really upset that I don't post often anymore. It's not that I'm not posting because I don't have things to say or I don't want to be part of this online community I've worked years to cultivate and be a member of. I'm not posting because I'm out doing things. I'm living my life. I'm dancing, or studying, or hanging out with my friends, or at church, or something like that. I'm completely okay with that.

That being said, there have been some incredible things going on in my life recently.

Last weekend, for example, I was in Kansas City to watch my first ever professional ballet (strange, I know). My friend Valerie and I wanted to go ever since we found out about it at the beginning of the year and we discovered we could get student rush tickets for $12 the day of the show, so we drove up together and spent the night with her sister and brother-in-law. The show was fantastic even with my critical eye pouring all over them.

Strangely, my favorite part wasn't even the mainstage production, Carmen, but the shows which were supposed to build up to it. There was one piece, Splendid Isolations III, which was simply breathtaking. I teared up in the middle. It was a ten minute contemporary piece about a man and a woman who were deeply in love but they couldn't seem to reach each other. This distance between them was symbolized in the dance by a parachute-like dress which extended ten feet in either direction. They used the dress in some, well, splendid ways to represent the issue and how the couple was dealing with it and she finally took it off at the end for a gorgeous finalle pas de deux. Amazing. And a great intro into the foyer of professional dance productions for me.

Yesterday in dance class my instructor was trying to explain a concept using analogies from old children's tv shows.
"You guys have to be like Gumby," she said.
"Who's Gumby?" responded the eight tiny dancer girls in the room as I smacked my forehead, confounded.
"Okay, be like Stretch Armstrong. You guys know who that is, right?"
"No." Another forehead smack.
"Alright," she said in a moment of I-swear-I'm-not-this-old frustration. "Who do you guys know from movies or tv shows that is really stretchy?"
"How about Elastagirl from The Incredibles?" tweeted the audience of what I was now seeing as babies.
"Elastagirl it is." One more forehead smack on my part, just because I'm starting to really understand one more part of growing up, and I'm only 21. Yikes. This is only going to get worse, isn't it?

Yesterday I deleted over 300 friends from my Facebook. It was a strange experience. I'm not sure if people who grew up without the internet as part of their upbringing appreciate how central to our identities some of these websites can become. I've had a Facebook page since I was 17. I've had the same email and instant messenger since I was 11. These things grew up with me. I think on some level, they disperse our personal identity to be something online as well as something we carry with us. At the very least, these things are a symbol of our material selves; they're something we understand our material selves and our relations to other material selves through, which has some pretty profound implications.

Anyway, I was going through my list of what was then 894 friends. *Click* Another high school mate is dismissed from being associated with me. *Click* There goes that girl I had a crush on for a few weeks but haven't talked to in two years. *Click, click, click* An old professor, a fellow blogger I never talk to, someone I met at my sister's wedding. It's really strange, but every click is a decision to let go of a part of myself in some way or other. Each person dismissed from the status of Facebook "friend" is something I have to reflect upon and ask myself, "Is this person still representative of myself as I am today?" It was a nice experience ultimately. I do feel lighter now, more clarified, more solidified.

That's really all for now. More later! For now, I have to finish up my fall break, which includes three papers, a test to study for, and two books to finish. Fall break, indeed!