Monthly Archives: November 2024

Wrapping My Head Around the Election

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I’ve been unsuccessful in trying to formulate how to write about the election. But my son Bix did a good a good job of it, so I quote his blogpost on the subject here, as follows:

Fuck The Unenlightened Self-Interest Of Trump Voters
Nov 11, 2024

In the end, after the past week of watching this take and that take, but mostly just avoiding any real bothering with any takes at all, about how the election went the way it did, I’ve settled in the only place that makes any sense to me.

Whatever the perceived self-interest of any given Mine Furor voter—be it caste allegiance or aspiration, simple racism or sexism, some claim to an economic concern, or even (somehow) abortion rights—the only thing that matters actually is pretty simple:

They were willing to sell out the safety, dignity, and humanity of their neighbors to fascism in order to get what they wanted.

None of the other chatter, be it considered opinion or hyperventilated bloviating, amounts to anything but noise, and anyone who covers the angle of “what happened” without this focus is a distraction.

I’ve already mentioned it, but if you still haven’t done so, go watch this debate-ender, or from here if that link insists you download TikTok.)

Whether a Mine Furor voter engaged in selfish indifference or willful ignorance amounts to the same thing, and after three election cycles now it’s pretty evident that they are stubbornly unreachable. They should still get to benefit like anyone else from progressive policies, but it’s past time to let them go.

If the Democratic Party decides the road to victory runs through mega-donors, high-class consultants, and yet another rightward shift, they’ll be a lost cause, too. This country’s path to correcting itself lies at the bottom and to the left, which just so happens also to be the symbol of antifascism.

Bix is selling Everyday Antifascist t-shirts, so I went and bought one today. I hope you had a chance to watch the video. It says it all.

Dancing in the “Zone”

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I learned to Polka soon after I learned to walk, and by the time I was in the middle grades, I was performing in a Polish dance troupe.

In high school, I never missed a “sock hop”, and my girlfriends and I used to practice dancing the Lindy Hop and Cha Cha with each other.

In college, we (both guys and gals) gathered in the Student Union after classes every day to dance to all of the popular songs. On Friday’s, it was TGIF, dancing at a bar before the regulars took over. I also danced in college musicals.

I married someone who didn’t dance (except brilliantly with words), and that should have been a clue that it might not last. And so after we divorced, I went back to dancing.

In my late 30s-early 40s, it was Round and Square and Western dancing.

In my 40s it became Disco partner dancing. With partner dancing, I learned to let myself flow into the “zone” — going where I was led, without having the think about it. (My favorite line about myself is that the only place I enjoy following a man is on the dance floor.)

In my 50s Latin and Ballroom. Again, dancing with partners who could lead me into the “zone”. My dancing then ended in my 60s when I retired to spend a decade taking care of my other, who had severe dementia.

In my 70s, after I moved to East Longmeadow in Massachusetts, I found a dance studio over the border in Connecticut that had open dances on weekends. But because they were at night and my knees and back were giving out, I had to stop going there.

And so that was the end of my dancing. Except with my hands.

Now I take lessons in African drumming, giving myself over to the enticing rhythms of the African and Caribbean cultures, feeling and internalizing the rhythms throughout my body, letting my hands to the dancing that the rest of my body can longer enjoy. I’m still learning, but my soul embraces those mesmerizing rhythms, and I look forward to the time when I get good enough to again, enter the rhythmical “zone”.

Judaism vs Zionism; Religion/Culture vs Politics/Apartheid

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You can be Jewish without being a Zionist, but you can’t be a Zionist without being Jewish.

According to the Conversation:

As the Israel-Hamas war continues, there’s been a lot of discussion around Zionism.

Put simply, Zionism is a nationalist movement that advocates for a homeland for the Jewish people in the Biblical Land of Israel. It is the organisation of ideas that actively sought and achieved the existence of the Israeli state in 1948.

Basically, political Zionism underpins the country we today call Israel.

It’s a movement that encompasses a broad spectrum of political beliefs with common objectives at its centre. But perhaps more than other political movements, Zionism has evolved over time.

There is more on that site about the role of Zionism in today’s Israeli government.

According to Wikipedia,

Fundamental to Zionism is the belief that Jews constitute a nation and have a moral and historic right and need for self-determination in Palestine. [snip]

The Zionist claim to Palestine was based on the notion that Jews had a historical right to the land which outweighed the rights of the Arabs, which were “of no moral or historical significance.” According to Israeli historian Simha Flapan, the view expressed by the proclamation “there was no such thing as Palestinians” was a cornerstone of Zionist policy initiated by Ben-Gurion, Weizmann and continued by their successors. [snip]

In order to achieve a Jewish demographic majority, the Zionist movement was faced with a problem, namely the presence of the local Arab (and primarily non-Jewish) population. The practical issue of establishing a Jewish state in a majority non-Jewish region was an issue of fundamental practical importance for the Zionist movement. Zionists used the term “transfer” as a euphemism for the removal, or ethnic cleansing, of the Arab Palestinian population. [snip]

The early Zionist thinkers saw the integration of Jews into non-Jewish society as both unrealistic (or insufficient to address the deficiencies associated with the demographic minority status of the Jews in Europe) and undesirable, since assimilation was accompanied by the dilution of Jewish cultural distinctiveness.

The Wikipedia article goes on to explain how the Zionists rationalized establishing Israel’s apartheid against Palestinians. Apartheid refers to the implementation and maintenance of a system of legalized racial segregation in which one racial group is deprived of political and civil rights. Apartheid is a crime against humanity punishable under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.

Amnesty international’s website provides extensive coverage of the way Israel, under Zionist influence, has instituted apartheid against the Palestinians, including:

In May 2021, Palestinian families in Sheikh Jarrah, a neighbourhood in occupied East Jerusalem, began protesting against Israel’s plan to forcibly evict them from their homes to make way for Jewish settlers. Many of the families are refugees, who settled in Sheikh Jarrah after being forcibly displaced around the time of Israel’s establishment as a state in 1948. Since Israel occupied East Jerusalem and the rest of the West Bank in 1967, Palestinians in Sheikh Jarrah have been continuously targeted by Israeli authorities, who use discriminatory laws to systematically dispossess Palestinians of their land and homes for the benefit of Jewish Israelis.

In response to the demonstrations in Sheikh Jarrah, thousands of Palestinians across Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) held their own protests in support of the families, and against their shared experience of fragmentation, dispossession, and segregation. These were met with excessive and deadly force by Israeli authorities with thousands injured, arrested and detained.

The events of May 2021 were emblematic of the oppression which Palestinians have faced every day, for decades. The discrimination, the dispossession, the repression of dissent, the killings and injuries – all are part of a system which is designed to privilege Jewish Israelis at the expense of Palestinians.

This is apartheid.

Amnesty International’s new investigation shows that Israel imposes a system of oppression and domination against Palestinians across all areas under its control: in Israel and the OPT, and against Palestinian refugees, in order to benefit Jewish Israelis. This amounts to apartheid as prohibited in international law.

Laws, policies and practices which are intended to maintain a cruel system of control over Palestinians, have left them fragmented geographically and politically, frequently impoverished, and in a constant state of fear and insecurity.

According to Wikipedia, Judaism is a

religion that comprises the collective spiritual, cultural, and legal traditions of the Jewish people. Religious Jews regard Judaism as their means of observing the Mosaic covenant, which was established between God and the Israelites, their ancestors. The religion is considered one of the earliest monotheistic religions in the world.

Also

Jewish culture is the culture of the Jewish people, from its formation in ancient times until the current age. Judaism itself is not simply a faith-based religion, but an orthoprax and ethnoreligion, pertaining to deed, practice, and identity. Jewish culture covers many aspects, including religion and worldviews, literature, media, and cinema, art and architecture, cuisine and traditional dress, attitudes to gender, marriage, family, social customs and lifestyles, music and dance. Some elements of Jewish culture come from within Judaism, others from the interaction of Jews with host populations, and others still from the inner social and cultural dynamics of the community. Before the 18th century, religion dominated virtually all aspects of Jewish life, and infused culture. Since the advent of secularization, wholly secular Jewish culture emerged likewise.

Israel’s political foundation in Zionism is not the same as the Jewish religion or culture.

According to an article in the Jewish Voice for Peace:

Before October, 2023 was already the deadliest year ever for Palestinian children. Israeli soldiers and settlers were rampaging through the Occupied West Bank setting fire to villages, supported by the most far-right government in Israeli history. They forced entire Palestinian villages to flee, to abandon the homes and land in their family for generations. Palestinian children were regularly dragged from their beds in pre-dawn raids by Israeli soldiers and held without charge in Israeli military prisons. The Israeli government was tightening its 16 year illegal blockade of land, air and water – suffocating the lives of the 2.4 million Palestinians in Gaza. Ten-year-olds in Gaza had already been traumatized by seven major bombing campaigns in their short lives. As news broke on October 7th, we immediately understood that Israel would exploit the tragic deaths of its Jewish citizens to justify the mass slaughter of Palestinians.

For decades, the Israeli government, and the U.S., and other western governments have shut down any attempts to hold the Israeli government accountable for these violations of Palestinian rights. I have seen Palestinian resistance to oppression ruthlessly repressed, from the criminalization of boycotts to Israeli snipers murdering protestors at nonviolent Palestinian marches in Gaza. The Israeli government has jailed Palestinian poets for posting poems to Facebook, and criminalized prominent human rights organizations.

In the U.S., Israel’s largest supplier of military funding and weapons, every new atrocity has been met with impunity. This has been true for decades, as it was this year.

How much different it would be today if the Zionists had not won, and Palestine remained a country open to both Jews and Palestinians, and anyone else who wanted to live there. Now, Israel exists as a country rooted in apartheid, and religious/cultural Jews who are citizens of other countries are being targeted because people don’t know the history of Israel’s foundation in the bigotry of Zionism, which most cultural and religious Jews do not support.

As a non-Jew, I can be against the government of the country of Israel and not be anti-Semitic; I can support the right of Jewish people to be respected, supported, and safe, and still despise what the powerful Zionist Israeli government has done to the disempowered Palestinians over the decades. If I were I Jew living in America today, I would voice my distance from the policies of the Israeli government, and educate the public via every media possible, that there is a difference between supporting the government of today’s Israel and being committed to my religious and cultural Jewish heritage.

The Israel vs Gaza Conflict Hits Home

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(Edited for accuracy and sensitivity.)

Last night, my family and I had a lengthy discussion about the crisis in Gaza until 1:30 a.m. They adamantly supported Israel (rightfully concerned about the frightfully escalating world-wide anti-Semitism,); we all also recognized that the Palestinians of Gaza have been the victims of history, location, poverty, and lack of astute leadership for decades. And so many of the Palestinians fell under the influence of a soul-less terrorist group that offered a solution, even though it was a devastating, violent, and inhumane solution. Many of them, hopeless, elected Hamas as their leader. I expressed my belief that Israel also has some significant culpability in impeding the ability of the Palestinians to forge a destiny of their own.

I realized that I probably was not familiar enough with the evolution of the crisis in Gaza, so I found a Reuters‘ piece helpful. For those who might be as unfamiliar as I, I quote it below exactly how it was published in Reuters:

Gaza is a coastal strip of land that lay on ancient trading and maritime routes along the Mediterranean shore. Held by the Ottoman Empire until 1917, it passed from British to Egyptian to Israeli military rule over the last century and is now a fenced-in enclave, inhabited by over 2 million Palestinians.

Here are some of the major milestones in its recent history.

1948 – End of British rule
As British colonial rule came to an end in Palestine in the late 1940s, violence intensified between Jews and Arabs, culminating in war between the newly created State of Israel and its Arab neighbors in May 1948. Tens of thousands of Palestinians took refuge in Gaza after fleeing or being driven from their homes. The invading Egyptian army had seized a narrow coastal strip 25 miles (40 km) long, which ran from the Sinai to just south of Ashkelon. The influx of refugees saw Gaza’s population triple to around 200,000.

1950s & 1960s – Egyptian military rule
Egypt held the Gaza Strip for two decades under a military governor, allowing Palestinians to work and study in Egypt. Armed Palestinian “fedayeen,” many of them refugees, mounted attacks into Israel, drawing reprisals. The United Nations set up a refugee agency, UNRWA, which today provides services for 1.6 million registered Palestine refugees in Gaza, as well as for Palestinians in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and the West Bank.

1967 – War and Israeli military occupation
Israel captured the Gaza Strip in the 1967 Middle East war. An Israeli census that year put Gaza’s population at 394,000, at least 60% of them refugees. With the Egyptians gone, many Gazan workers took jobs in the agriculture, construction and services industries inside Israel, to which they could gain easy access at that time. Israeli troops remained to administer the territory and to guard the settlements that Israel built in the following decades. These became a source of growing Palestinian resentment.

1987 – First Palestinian uprising. Hamas formed
Twenty years after the 1967 war, Palestinians launched their first intifada, or uprising. It began in December 1987 after a traffic accident in which an Israeli truck crashed into a vehicle carrying Palestinian workers in Gaza’s Jabalya refugee camp, killing four. Stone-throwing protests, strikes and shutdowns followed. Seizing the angry mood, the Egypt-based Muslim Brotherhood created an armed Palestinian branch, Hamas, with its power base in Gaza. Hamas, dedicated to Israel’s destruction and restoration of Islamic rule in what it saw as occupied Palestine, became a rival to Yasser Arafat’s secular Fatah party that led the Palestine Liberation Organization.

1993 – The Oslo Accords, and Palestinian semi-autonomy
Israel and the Palestinians signed an historic peace accord in 1993 that led to the creation of the Palestinian Authority. Under the interim deal, Palestinians were first given limited control in Gaza, and Jericho in the West Bank. Arafat returned to Gaza after decades in exile.

The Oslo process gave the newly created Palestinian Authority some autonomy, and envisaged statehood after five years. But that never happened. Israel accused the Palestinians of reneging on security agreements, and Palestinians were angered by continued Israeli settlement building. Hamas and Islamic Jihad carried out bombings to try to derail the peace process, leading Israel to impose more restrictions on movement of Palestinians out of Gaza. Hamas also picked up on growing Palestinian criticisms of corruption, nepotism and economic mismanagement by Arafat’s inner circle.

2000 – Second Palestinian intifada
In 2000, Israeli-Palestinian relations sank to a new low with the outbreak of the second Palestinian intifada. It ushered in a period of suicide bombings and shooting attacks by Palestinians, and Israeli air strikes, demolitions, no-go zones and curfews. One casualty was Gaza International Airport, a symbol of thwarted Palestinian hopes for economic independence and the Palestinians’ only direct link to the outside world that was not controlled by Israel or Egypt. Opened in 1998, Israel deemed it a security threat and destroyed its radar antenna and runway a few months after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the United States.

Another casualty was Gaza’s fishing industry, a source of income for tens of thousands. Gaza’s fishing zone was reduced by Israel, a restriction it said was necessary to stop boats smuggling weapons.

2005 – Israel evacuates its Gaza settlements
In August 2005 Israel evacuated all its troops and settlers from Gaza, which was by then completely fenced off from the outside world by Israel. Palestinians tore down the abandoned buildings and infrastructure for scrap. The settlements’ removal led to greater freedom of movement within Gaza, and a “tunnel economy” boomed as armed groups, smugglers and entrepreneurs quickly dug scores of tunnels into Egypt. But the pullout also removed settlement factories, greenhouses and workshops that had employed some Gazans.

2006 – Isolation under Hamas
In 2006, Hamas scored a surprise victory in Palestinian parliamentary elections and then seized full control of Gaza, overthrowing forces loyal to Arafat’s successor, President Mahmoud Abbas.
Much of the international community cut aid to the Palestinians in Hamas-controlled areas because they regarded Hamas as a terrorist organization.

Israel stopped tens of thousands of Palestinian workers from entering the country, cutting off an important source of income. Israeli air strikes crippled Gaza’s only electrical power plant, causing widespread blackouts. Citing security concerns, Israel and Egypt also imposed tighter restrictions on the movement of people and goods through the Gaza crossings. Ambitious Hamas plans to refocus Gaza’s economy east, away from Israel, foundered before they even started. Viewing Hamas as a threat, Egypt’s military-backed leader Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, who took power in 2014, closed the border with Gaza and blew up most of the tunnels. Once again isolated, Gaza’s economy went into reverse.

Conflict cycle
Gaza’s economy has suffered repeatedly in the cycle of conflict, attack and retaliation between Israel and Palestinian militant groups.
Before 2023, some of the worst fighting was in 2014, when Hamas and other groups launched rockets at heartland cities in Israel. Israel carried out air strikes and artillery bombardment that devastated neighborhoods in Gaza. More than 2,100 Palestinians were killed, mostly civilians. Israel put the number of its dead at 67 soldiers and six civilians.

2023 – Surprise attack
While Israel was led to believe it was containing a war-weary Hamas by providing economic incentives to Gazan workers, the group’s fighters were being trained and drilled in secret.

On Oct.7, Hamas gunmen launched a surprise attack on Israel, rampaging through towns, killing hundreds, and taking dozens of hostages back to Gaza. Israel took revenge, hammering Gaza with air strikes and razing entire districts in some of the worst blood-letting in the 75 years of conflict.

And so now Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, is faced with the challenge of protecting Israel from Hamas’ pledge to destroy the country of Israel and its citizens. To do that, he must destroy Hamas. But to destroy Hamas (the members of which are scattered throughout Gaza, hiding in tunnels and in plain sight}, means the destruction of Gaza. The destruction of Gaza would pretty much mean the annihilation of the Palestinians who live there, which would mean an unintended “ethnic cleansing”.

But that is the inhumanity and insanity of war.

In 1945, we participated, with the British, in the bombing of Dresden in Germany, killing up to 25,000 people.

Critics of the bombing argue that Dresden was a cultural landmark with little strategic significance, and that the attacks were indiscriminate area bombing and were not proportionate to military gains. Some claim that the raid was a war crime.

That is the inhumanity and insanity of war.

You can’t not notice that all of the decision makers in all of these wars are men. I wonder how different things might be if there were women in charge of developing the decision about warring. I wonder how Golda Meir would have handled the issues of the Palestinians in Gaza.

I Concur with Judith Viorst

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I just picked up from the library, two humor books by Judith Viorst, who is 93 years old. The two books are Unexpectedly Eighty and Nearing Ninety. Since she has had a long marriage to her husband, is financially affluent, and has a slew of grandkids, I don’t resonate with many of her pieces. But there are two that caught my attention.

From Unexpectedly Eighty, “Been There, Done That”:

When I see a young woman strolling down the street
With her gleaming hair, glowing skin, and impeccable thighs,
Evoking from the passing male population
Some appreciative glances, some longing sighs,
Some politically incorrect but rave reviews,
And when I notice that none of these fellows is taking notice of me
In my elasticized-waistband pants and my comfortable shoes,
I mobilize the wisdom of a lifetime
And tell my envious heart, Been there, done that,
Calling upon my memory’s rich store,
To which my envious heart replies,
Recalcitrantly, unreasonably,
But I want to be there again
And do that some more.

And, from Nearing Ninety, “Answers”:

I do not believe in God,
But if I did,
I might be thinking he’s not such a lovely person,
Considering all of the misery and injustice in this world,
Some of which (volcanoes and earthquakes, for instance),
Cannot, in spite of free will including
Our freedom to screw things up,
Be blamed on us.
Furthermore, I do not believe in an Afterlife,
With an upstairs and downstairs for the naughty and nice,
Our room arrangements made by a Higher Authority
Whose job it has been to scare us into behaving ourselves.
On the other hand, I do believe in Mystery,
And in my inability to fathom
How the world came into being,
How life began,
And, if there is a point,
To the point of it all.
So, if you are looking for answers from this old lady,
You won’t find them here.

My Secular America

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As I sit here grieving the results of the 2024 presidential election, I am also both angry and fearful that with this new regime, we we lose the very soul of our democracy. I fear that Mein Fuhrer (liar, hypocrite, felon, misogynist), among other fascist efforts, will try to “protect” women by trying to keep us (not me) barefoot and pregnant, catering to the pressures of his bases of “obsessive” Christians and Evangelicals. But the truth is, America was constructed to have a secular base, and once I did a great deal of research, documenting that fact.

Almost 20 years ago, I posted a piece on this blog about the roots of American democracy — a piece that now seems to be lost somewhere in cyberspace. I am reposting what I can glean, using a “Part 2” that I posted 6 years later and a response from a doctoral student at the University of Chicago, who (because she found on my post the information for which she was searching) said about me:

At the risk of offending the self-proclaimed Crone of Blogdom, I must admit what first came to mind: “Well, I’ll be damned,” I thought, “it’s just a little old retired grandma sitting there raising hell at the keyboard!” That wouldn’t be an altogether fair assessment of a rather accomplished career woman and crafty writer who truly has earned her Crone-Coronation, so I invite the reader to read her site for the rest of the story.

So, here (again) is the reminder that we need to keep fighting for the truth of what America stands for and was originally created to be: A Secular America.

Most folks do not remember (or perhaps never were taught) that our Founding Fathers used the structure of the Iroquois Confederacy to inform the creation of our Constitutional form of government:

The people of the Six Nations, also known by the French term, Iroquois Confederacy, call themselves the Hau de no sau nee (ho dee noe sho nee) meaning People Building a Long House. Located in the northeastern region of North America, originally the Six Nations was five and included the Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, and Senecas. The sixth nation, the Tuscaroras, migrated into Iroquois country in the early eighteenth century. Together these peoples comprise the oldest living participatory democracy on earth. Their story, and governance truly based on the consent of the governed, contains a great deal of life-promoting intelligence for those of us not familiar with this area of American history. The original United States representative democracy, fashioned by such central authors as Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, drew much inspiration from this confederacy of nations. In our present day, we can benefit immensely, in our quest to establish anew a government truly dedicated to all life’s liberty and happiness much as has been practiced by the Six Nations for over 800 hundred years

Now, speaking of our Founding Fathers:

The Framers derived an independent government out of Enlightenment thinking against the grievances caused by Great Britain. Our Founders paid little heed to political beliefs about Christianity. The 1st Amendment stands as the bulkhead against an establishment of religion and at the same time insures the free expression of any belief. The Treaty of Tripoli, an instrument of the Constitution, clearly stated our non-Christian foundation. We inherited common law from Great Britain which derived from pre-Christian Saxons rather than from Biblical scripture.

[snip]

Although, indeed, many of America’s colonial statesmen practiced Christianity, our most influential Founding Fathers broke away from traditional religious thinking. The ideas of the Great Enlightenment that began in Europe had begun to sever the chains of monarchical theocracy. These heretical European ideas spread throughout early America. Instead of relying on faith, people began to use reason and science as their guide. The humanistic philosophical writers of the Enlightenment, such as Locke, Rousseau, and Voltaire, had greatly influenced our Founding Fathers and Isaac Newton’s mechanical and mathematical foundations served as a grounding post for their scientific reasoning.
A few Christian fundamentalists attempt to convince us to return to the Christianity of early America, yet according to the historian, Robert T. Handy,”No more than 10 percent– probably less– of Americans in 1800 were members of congregations.”

The Founding Fathers, also, rarely practiced Christian orthodoxy. Although they supported the free exercise of any religion, they understood the dangers of imposing religion. Most of them believed in deism and attended Freemasonry lodges. According to John J. Robinson, “Freemasonry had been a powerful force for religious freedom.” Freemasons took seriously the principle that men should worship according to their own conscience….

The Constitution reflects our founders views of a secular government, protecting the freedom of any belief or unbelief. The historian, Robert Middlekauff, observed, “the idea that the Constitution expressed a moral view seems absurd. There were no genuine evangelicals in the Convention, and there were no heated declarations of Christian piety.”

How about we let those Founding Fathers of ours speak for themselves about how they feel regarding mixing religion and government:

JOHN ADAMS:
→ I almost shudder at the thought of alluding to the most fatal example of the abuses of grief which the history of mankind has preserved–the Cross. Consider what calamities that engine of grief has produced! …in a letter to Thomas Jefferson.

→ But how has it happened that millions of fables, tales, legends, have been blended with both Jewish and Christian revelation that have made them the most bloody religion that ever existed. …in a letter to F.A. Van der Kamp, Dec. 27, 1816, 2000 Years of Disbelief, John A. Haught

→ The divinity of Jesus is made a convenient cover for absurdity. Nowhere in the Gospels do we find a precept for Creeds, Confessions, Oaths, Doctrines, and whole carloads of other foolish trumpery that we find in Christianity.

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
→ Lighthouses are more helpful than churches. ….Poor Richard, 1758

→ The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason . ….Poor Richard, 1758

→ When a religion is good, I conceive it will support itself; and when it does not support itself, and God does not take care to support it so that its professors are obliged to call for help of the civil power, ’tis a sign, I apprehend, of its being a bad one. …. 2000 Years of Disbelief, by James A. Haught

→ Religion I found to be without any tendency to inspire, promote, or confirm morality, serves principally to divide us and make us unfriendly to one another.

THOMAS JEFFERSON
→ Shake off all the fears of servile prejudices, under which weak minds are serviley crouched. Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call on her tribunal for every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God, because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason than that of blind faith. …to the Danbury Baptist Association on Jan. 1, 1802;

→ Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legislative powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, thus building a wall of separation between church and State. ….The Writing of Thoma Jefferson Memorial Edition, edited by Lipscomb and Bergh, 1903-04, 16:281

→…the legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg. ….Notes on Virginia, Jefferson the President: First Term 1801-1805, Dumas Malon, Boston: Little Brown and Company, 1970, p. 191

→ …no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship ministry or shall otherwise suffer on account of his religious opinions or belief, but all men shall be free to profess and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of religion, and that the same shall in no wise..affect their civil capacities. ….”Statute for Religious Freedom”, 1779, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, edited by Julron P. Boyd, 1950, 2:546

I could go on and on. But I’m not about to try to teach historical facts to those people who obviously never got educated beyond what they’ve been told is in the Bible. Actually, the Bible doesn’t really mention abortion. “Of course, Christians can develop their own faith-based arguments about modern political issues, whether or not the Bible speaks directly to them. But it is important to recognize that although the Bible was written at a time when abortion was practiced, it never directly addresses the issue.” Full disclosure: There was a time when I was scheduled to get an abortion, but I miscarried the day before.

My Secular America doesn’t require that everyone believe that the Ten Commandments of the Old Testament are the rule of law of the land. My Secular America requires that every citizen abide by the Constitution and Bill of Rights. In addition to that responsibility, they have the right to embrace the Old Testament and its Ten Commandments, and/or the New Testament teachings of Jesus, or the teachings of Upanishads, or the Koran, or the Tao Te Ching.

As the PBS series The Meaning of America explained:

Beyond the symbolism of flag-waving and patriotic cliches lies the heart of American Democracy: our system of personal rights and human dignity. Conceived in rebellion against the absolute right of monarchs, the American revolution asserted that the people are sovereign, that they must be free to speak, to choose their leaders, to pray — or not to pray — as they wish. Messy, highly imperfect and in need of constant maintenance, it is a system that confers on us the priceless gift of human freedom.

Amen, amen, I say to that. As Vice-President Harris reminded us today, we need to keep fighting to keep America free of tyrannical rule.

The Truth About Aging

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My thoughts on the challenges of aging bubble up after having read two pieces on the subject: the book Turning: The Magic and Mystery of More Days, written by a woman in her early 60s, and an article in The New Yorker, “Why We Can’t Tell the Truth About Aging”.

The book Turnings is a well-written conversation about how to prepare to enjoy getting older. It’s a great book to use as a stimulus for discussion, since it offers engaging exercises to examine what aging might have to offer you. But it is written by someone who has not yet experienced the realities of being truly “old”.

The New Yorker article, however, confronts the realities of aging with disturbing but necessary forthrightness.

There is, of course, a chance that you may be happier at eighty than you were at twenty or forty, but you’re going to feel much worse. I know this because two recent books provide a sobering look at what happens to the human body as the years pile up. Elizabeth Blackburn and Elissa Epel’s “The Telomere Effect: Living Younger, Healthier, Longer” and Sue Armstrong’s “Borrowed Time: The Science of How and Why We Age” describe what is essentially a messy business.

The so-called epigenetic clock shows our DNA getting gummed up, age-related mitochondrial mutations reducing the cells’ ability to generate energy, and our immune system slowly growing less efficient. Bones weaken, eyes strain, hearts flag. Bladders empty too often, bowels not often enough, and toxic proteins build up in the brain to form the plaque and the spaghetti-like tangles that are associated with Alzheimer’s disease. Not surprisingly, sixty-eight per cent of Medicare beneficiaries today have multiple chronic conditions. Not a lot of grace, force, or fascination in that.

A contented old age probably depends on what we were like before we became old. Vain, self-centered people will likely find aging less tolerable than those who seek meaning in life by helping others. And those fortunate enough to have lived a full and productive life may exit without undue regret. But if you’re someone who—oh, for the sake of argument—is unpleasantly surprised that people in their forties or fifties give you a seat on the bus, or that your doctors are forty years younger than you are, you just might resent time’s insistent drumbeat. Sure, there’s life in the old boy yet, but certain restrictions apply. The body—tired, aching, shrinking—now quite often embarrasses us. Many older men have to pee right after they pee, and many older women pee whenever they sneeze. Pipher and company might simply say “Gesundheit” and urge us on. Life, they insist, doesn’t necessarily get worse after seventy or eighty. But it does, you know.

When Socrates declared that philosophy is the practice of dying, he was saying that thought itself is shaped by mortality, and it’s because our existence is limited that we’re able to think past those limits. Time has us in its grip, and so we devise stories of an afterlife in which we exist unshackled by days and years and the decay they represent. But where does that get us, beyond the vague suspicion that immortality—at least in the shape of the vengeful Yahweh or the spiteful Greek and Roman gods—is no guarantee of wisdom? Then again, if you’re the sort of person who sees the glass as one-eighth full rather than seven-eighths empty, you might not worry about such matters. Instead, you’ll greet each new day with gratitude, despite coughing up phlegm and tossing down a dozen pills.

The one way to prepare for the challenges of being old is to develop a sense of humor that can help take the edge off stark reality. Judith Viorst’s book Unexpectedly Eighty seems to do just that. I haven’t read it yet, but I plan to. As I prepare for another gastroenterology test, I could use a good laugh.