Legacies of Violence

I just finished reading Tracy Kidder's book, Strength in What Remains. I devoured it as if it were a novel, transfixed and often horrified, anxious about its charming protagonist with the improbable name of Deogracias. It brought into sharp relief the problem of what happens to people who have been through large-scale violence, because it is in part the story of Deogracias' survival of genocide in the African country of Burundi.

We know what happens on a small scale from research and stories about the lives of returned veterans, rape victims, and survivors of other violent experiences. The people are forever changed. They often suffer from disordered ways of perceiving and responding to what's going on in the world. They need to talk and talk about what they survived, and to do that talking with people who can hear and care and not be made crazy themselves. They need to find a new way of being in the world. Not a few of them find that some kind of return to the event is part of the story of their new life -- advocacy for other victims, promotion of legislation or social change to prevent what happened to them from happening to others, running support groups, and much else. And some never find a way to be part of "normal" society again.

But what happens when whole communities have been subjected to large scale and ongoing violence?

We look at the way Israel and Palestine deal with each other in the world. Both sides look just plain crazy to the outside observer. I am deeply certain that large scale and ongoing violence against the people of both sides has created this.

In Tracy Kidder's book, the protagonist returns to Burundi after being away in the United States for years. During that time he has not been subjected to the ongoing violence. He has had a chance to do a number of things that have helped him begin to heal. When he goes back, the people seem very strange to him compared to the way they were before. Kidder quotes Deogracias as saying "you know what it is? They are all crazy." (p. 214).

What can a country do when everyone is crazy?

And, shouldn't we as a country be thinking about this as we proceed with military options in Afghanistan and Pakistan? Shouldn't we be thinking about this as we get ready to leave Iraq? The aftermath of large scale ongoing violence has to be that everyone is crazy, and someone needs to help them pick up the pieces, begin to heal, and find a wholesome way to live -- maybe to find it again, maybe to find it for the first time.

If I Were Serious...

If I were serious about a smaller carbon footprint, there is so much more I could do -- and yet, some of it really feels beside the point.

I could stop using paper towels, change from plastic to glass for food storage and abandon plastic bags; I could combine projects that use the oven, and I could maintain the thermostat at a lower level in winter. I could dry more clothes in air. I could be more careful to buy things that come from nearer rather than farther. But how good is that?

Already I live in a small, well-insulated space that's really close to where I work. I use the lightbulbs. I do run a computer, but not a television set. I don't have to drive to work, to the laundromat, or to the grocery store. I even don't have to drive to the movies, the hardware store, the doctor's, etc., etc. I do have to drive to see my friends, but I'm starting to have friends here, too, my home since August of this year. I do have to drive to professional meetings, because we are not thick on the ground in this part of the world -- that could change, but it won't be soon!

Mainly, I could stop riding on airplanes. When I took a couple of on-line carbon footprint inventories, it was sobering to realize how much that adds to the weight of CO2 I contribute. That's because I live really far away from my family, and if I want to see them, I pretty much have to fly. Maybe there's another way to handle this, but that will take time.

So it comes down to this: it's time for me to pay attention to the systems that spout carbon on my behalf. Electricity. Transportation systems. Urban design. The economy itself, based as it is on "consumer spending," which basically means moving materials from one place to another, using energy to convert materials from one form to another, packaging stuff and packaging the packages

Not just my own personal choices, but the bigger choices we all make together or someone makes for us. I'm sure of it: we can have a really nice life and use a whole lot less stuff, move a whole lot less of it from place to place, the whole nine yards. It's time to start imagining it, and I feel really old to be starting. But let's. Now is the time we have.

Saving for Change

Maybe what we need is a bank. Or, a bunch of banks. We activists are often so focused on policy and legislation that we forget the creation of new institutions that could start to make the changes we want. We in our private lives (I'm thinking I don't like to call us "consumers") are saving more, spending less of the money we are still receiving. This is not surprising, since so many are boomers who just saw the market blow away their prospects of retirement. It makes sense.

So we are saving our money into a system that should be putting it back into circulation as investment, which would be spending that both creates jobs and income and creates additional productivity for the economy. Developing capacity to produce solar panels, insulation, products from recycled materials, maybe. Improving agriculture in places closer to markets, maybe. But it doesn't seem to be quite getting there.

"They" in the financial institutions seem to be waiting for the market for debt-financed consumption to firm up so they can make loans back to us. If we don't want to go there so much any more, maybe there need to be some new lending institutions that are focused on investment in the traditional sense. I'm thinking of investment in capacity-building that's close to the ground. I'm thinking of the a bunch of new New Hampshire Community Loan Funds, or a whole lot of credit unions for community economic development. The money we save could be recycled into the community in ways that would get us going on the lower-carbon way of life we are needing to achieve.

If we turned our attention, not completely, but partly, away from trying to persuade other people to do things to shrink our carbon footprint, and toward building communities that actually have smaller footprints, wouldn't that be a good use of both our passion and our newfound thrift?

The Consumer Spending Revolution

Almost every day there is yet another report of sluggish consumer spending. On the one hand, it's something that seems good. We're saving for the future, saving up in order to buy things, holding back on using those credit cards. We're feeling insecure because of the rocky employment picture, we're feeling poor because of the reduction in value of all our assets, so we're holding back.

According to the commentators, our greater thrift is holding back the economy. They sound as if they wish we would just plunge into that high-spending way of life that went before the financial meltdown that led to this Great Recession.

I say it's not consumer thrift that's the problem. I say the shift is an opportunity. Greater thrift creates an opportunity for the people and institutions who make loans to think anew about what they are doing. This is a time for investment in a new way of life, and the savings creates a funding source. Invest in green technologies, in farms closer to places where people live, in neighborhoods where people can get what they want by walking or riding a bike, in railroads that move things more cheaply, in all those things that will make real a different way of life. Invest in ways to recycle materials and reclaim waste for profitable use.

Let's not go back. Let's make art and put on plays, read poetry and do sports, go walking just for fun, hang out in coffee shops and go to church. Let's fix the equipment we already have so we won't be throwing so much away. Let's build a society where consumer goods are not the be-all and the end-all, but rather tools to enrich our relationships with one another or tools to our enjoyment of our own minds and bodies. Let's go on saving and letting the saving turn into investments that can undo some of the damage we have done to the planetary ecology on which our lives depend. We can have a nice life without so much stuff. A nicer life, even, if we open our eyes and look around at the possibilities.

From Another Planet?

I've been holding this post for a long time, a bad thing since it is about interplanetary exploration!

Actually, Rev. Mark is not from another planet, he's from Uganda. I met him at the International Council of Unitarians and Universalists gathering a couple of years ago, and here he was again this summer, attending the General Assembly of the Unitarian Universalist Association in Salt Lake City. He has many great connections, but somehow in the course of planning his itinerary, the International Office has routed him through Manchester, New Hampshire, where nothing was happening. I volunteered to help, so I met him at the plane, took him to his hotel, and spent some time sharing sights and food with him. The next day, I took him to South Station in Boston to meet the bus to Cape Cod and his next assignment.

He came to Unitarian Universalism the same way a lot of Americans do, by finding that another church tradition did not work for him. He believed in himself, he said, and in the inner guidance that came to him, rather than in submission to the authority of someone in a higher position in the church. He had found us online, then met us at the International Council of Unitarians and Universalists meeting, which led on to his making this trip to the U.S. to make connections here. Many things he found strange -- he marveled at how heavy so many Americans are, he was uncomfortable in air conditioned buildings -- and it was all very interesting. He liked the highways.

We spent a space of time on the highway from New Hampshire to Boston, and in his company I found myself thinking that if a country were to begin a plan of development right now, they would do well to do it without highways. It is not at all clear how we will transform our highway-based way of life, the one where so many people get up in the morning, get into cars, and drive to work, as the price of fuel rises and its availability shrinks. For how long will this continue to make sense?

I spoke of my feeling that a country could have a nice life without so many of them, without so many cars. Having thought of a country that still had a choice, I began to see my own country in a different way. What will we do with them as we move into the fuel-scarce future? How will we have a nice life without so much driving?

Courage to Love a Troubled Country

I remember the Fourth of July of my childhood, a time when our whole neighborhood packed up their picnics and their softball equipment and headed out to a park by the Potomac River, a place of green grass with a nice grove of trees, where there could be running and playing in the sunshine and sitting later in the shade. I remember there were home-grown fireworks after it finally got dark, but before that, there were ceremonial talk and song and food.

The flag was displayed. One of the men, an actual radio newscaster, would read the Declaration of Independence in a strong, confident voice. The adults would murmur their assent in key places, but I had no idea what was so important about all that. We did sing the Star Spangled Banner and America the Beautiful and My Country 'tis of Thee, and it was from that singing that I came to learn all the verses of all those songs. Then of course there were things to eat, of which I only remember the Flag Cake, something my mother made, a normal rectangular cake frosted with stars and stripes. I got to help with the frosting when I was old enough.

We were patriotic, and determinedly so, for it was the time of McCarthyism, which was testing the strength of our little community. The radio newsman moved away to get out of the political heat of the DC area. One of the fathers of kids I knew went to jail. My own father lost his job. And still we read the Declaration and sang the songs and made the flag cake. But in the end, we were not the same. I certainly was scarred by the experience of those times, and I think others were too.

By working diligently in that small community and in the larger one surrounding us, my parents and their friends were able to build an island of good values in a sea of intolerance and selfishness. That island still exists, lo these many years since they did their work. Leaders of my generation are passing the work along to younger ones.

So it was worthwhile. And this most recent spell of McCarthy-like political climate was mostly not so bad as that one, though it had its moments. I'm hoping that little by little our country becomes civilized. Maybe it's really true that reaching out, having conversations on many levels, sharing words and song and food, maybe that's how the world is really changed. We remember the moments of courage, the moments of challenge, victory and defeat, but in a sense what's really important is the work in between, the daily building of the way of peace and freedom within ourselves and among our neighbors.

I don't have a flag cake to share this year. Maybe next year it would be good to do that. Whether I do or not, I will continue to love my troubled country with all its flaws, love it enough to speak truthfully and work diligently to make it better.

Meeting Thoreau in the 21st Century

After he helped his father build an "arrived" house in town, Henry David Thoreau borrowed some land from his friend Emerson and built that cabin where he lived for two and a half years. There he wrote the only two books he ever completed: A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers and Walden. He had the privacy there to observe, remember, reflect, and write. He was living at the cabin when he made that protest against the war on Mexico that landed him in jail and became the germ of his lecture and essay on Civil Disobedience. The cabin was a good place for him just then, furnished with just the barest necessities, and not too far from town.

My own new place, in keeping with the exigencies of having accepted part-time work as an interim minister with a wonderful congregation in Belfast, Maine, is reminding me of Thoreau's cabin. It's better: I don't have to build it myself. The rent is right. It has all the necessities. And even I, who pride myself on a fairly simple lifestyle, will have to pack a storage unit full of all the things I won't be taking to my Walden on the shores of Penobscot Bay. There will be enough chairs to entertain a very few people, and the place is but a few steps from the local food coop, where a larger group could sit for hours and talk. And it's very close to church, indeed. There will be privacy in the evenings to play my flute. I will be able to park my car except for trips to the hospital or people's homes or other suchlike excursions.

Will I write? I will surely keep my diaries, which will not have a record of anything like surveying the contours of the bottom of Walden pond, nor curmudgeonly commentary on other people's habits and beliefs. But what will present itself to be written besides that? I'll wait and find out. I do know there will be good spaces of time that can be devoted to the work of writing or to the mindless moodling that is such a necessary part of the creative process. Still, the temptation to look for other paid work is very real... for the right opportunity, I could surrender to the temptation to get paid for something more than the half-time ministry. Will I have the courage to drive life into this corner and experience the very marrow of it? This remains to be seen!