I am the stuff of happy endings

Arches National Park, Utah

Goblin Valley State Park, Utah

Quite a few years ago, my family and I visited Moab, Utah. Possibly more than once, for probably more than a week- I don't remember exactly. I've been thinking, though, that it would be neat to go there again. The past couple of weeks we've been packing up stuff in this house so that we can have a giant garage sale, clearing things out so the house can be sold. Grandma is finally accepting that she needs to live in assisted living care, so the house is going to pay for that, which means Michael and I are out a place to live.

Things are kind of dissolving into chaos at the moment, but I'm oddly OK with it. Its occurred to me that not actually having a place to live might be just the excuse I need to take the roadtrip of all roadtrips. Not that gas prices this summer are conducive to roadtripping, but the idea of just taking off and seeing where I end up is incredibly enticing. And if I were to do this, I would go to Utah first I think. I could sleep in the back of my car, and spend days slowly creeping about these gorgeous canyons, maybe bring a sketchbook and work on pretending I'm an artist.

The practical, responsible me thinks that this is a very bad idea for any number of reasons, but on the other hand, it's not like I have a job or anything holding me to a specific place. I am interested in seeing the world, and although I am sick and poor these days, I don't have any particular reason to think that I will be less sick or poor five years from now, so if I'm going to travel anytime, why not now?

I wish it was the sixties

Its one of those days where everything seems wrong, and since I can't do a thing about the real problems I have, I try to concentrate on the small, ordinary tasks in front of me. I find that the best therapy for helplessness is to reach out and touch something real: plants in the garden or dirty dishes or yarn on a needle. Physical objects are both more solid and more malleable than fears about the future, more solid than pain or fatigue or worries about money.

Whenever a doctor reads my medical records and sees that I've been diagnosed with depression, they try to refer me to counseling, and I have a hard time explaining why I have no desire to go. Talking about things does make you feel better, but it can only help so much when your problems are genuinely unchangeable. No one can take away the pain I feel, and no one can make the VA give me the benefits to which I'm entitled; talking about things won't change that a bit, but talking is all the help that doctors ever offer.

Completing tasks that decrease the amount of entropy in my immediate environment is my primary method of coping. What I mean is, I plant seeds and knit sweaters because changing some small thing so that its different than it was before is a way of affirming my connection to the world, to life, to happiness. I put my world in order to prove that some things are improvable. I hate to assume that anyone is reading this, but if you see this and have a particular coping mechanism that you've more or less invented on your own, it would be neat to hear about it.

I completed the finishing on two sweaters in the past couple of days, and filled the tires of my bicycle this morning. I'm going to teach myself a new knitting pattern here in a bit, and things are growing in my garden. For now, the sun is shining, and I took some pictures.

Living with Darwin

Christian resistance to Darwin rests on the genuine insight that life without God, in the sense of a Darwinian account of the natural world, really does mean life without God in a far more literal and unnerving sense. Even those who understand, and contribute to, the enlightenment case can find the resultant picture of the world, and our place in it, unbearable.

...For many Americans, their churches, overwhelmingly supernaturalist, providentialist churches, not only provide a sense of hope, illusory to be sure, but also offer other mechanisms of comfort. They are places in which hearts can be opened, serious issues can be discussed, common ground with others can be explored, places in which there is real community, places in which people come to matter to one another- and thus come to matter to themselves. Without such places, what is left?

…There is truth in Marx's dictum that religion, more precisely supernaturalist and providentialist religion, is the opium of the people, but the consumption should be seen as medical rather than recreational. The most ardent apostles of science and reason recommend immediate withdrawal of the drug- but they do not acknowledge the pain that would be left unpaliated, pain too intense for their stark atheism to be a viable solution. Genuine medicine is needed, and the proper treatment consists of showing how lives can matter.

- Living with Darwin: Evolution, Design, and the Future of Faith,
Philip Kitcher

Kitcher’s Living with Darwin is as elegant a defense of evolution against Intelligent Design as any I’ve read, and I recommend reading it if you’re interested in the subject. The part of the book that I most valued, however, was his conclusions about the place of religion in a society that accepts scientific reality. Kitcher describes two variations of religion; the first is “providentialist” religion, which is based on the idea “that the universe has been created by a Being who has a great design, a Being who cares for his creatures, who observes the fall of every sparrow and who is especially concerned with humanity.” The second variation is what he calls “spiritual” religion, which doesn’t rely on any description of the supernatural, but is solely concerned with the state of one’s mind and one’s relationship with others.

Kitcher, who, by the way, is a professor of philosophy, makes a strong case for the incompatibility of providentialist religion and current scientific knowledge, but, unlike a lot of what I’ve been reading lately on the subject of science, he doesn’t take that to mean that people should resign themselves to being without the comfort of religion. His entire essay is a wonderful argument for reinventing religion as a primarily social phenomenon, concerned with the present, not stories about the past or future.

His final few paragraphs, about the idea that “religion is the opium of the people,” got me thinking. There is actually quite a bit of similarity between the way I face physical pain and the way I think about religion. A lot of people with chronic pain try to keep positive by telling stories about the possibility that in the future they will recover; doctors recommend techniques to distract the mind from focusing on pain. Avoidance is a common coping technique, and when it comes to pain, it’s a perfectly healthy one, but I find that it does nothing to make me feel better about being in pain.

The best way I’ve found to stay positive is actually to spend a little time focusing on the pain, feeling exactly how and where it hurts, falling into it to see if, this time, I will be overwhelmed. I do this, and I find that, as bad as it gets, I can endure it. I may moan and cry, but when it comes down to it, I am able to make the choice to live in pain, and I find that strength an incredibly positive thing.

I think this is very similar to the way I refuse stories about the world that offer a more comforting version of reality. I want the world as it is, no matter how much it hurts. And its kind of funny that I can see how odd I am when it comes to my pain coping techniques, but I’m inclined to expect that everyone will react the same way I do to the conflict between religion and science. Reading Kitcher makes me think that it may be more important to carve a place for the religious impulse in science than is obvious to me.

I'll be here quite a while

Some days it just seems like everything I can think of to say has already been said better by someone else, and I find that it feels more rewarding to sit on my ass and watch bootlegged episodes of grim crime shows.

Some things that people have said about how stupid our political process is getting: the funny, by publius at Obsidian Wings, and the angry, by Brad at Sadly, No!

Suzie at Echidne of the Snakes proves that I'm actually a man, because I'm argumentative and I don't like shoes.

I'm kind of in love with Wheelchair Dancer. Also with Cuttlefish.

And in the best news I've had in a long time, my physical therapist today had me try a paraffin bath for my hands, because heat sometimes decreases the amount of pain I feel. These things are absolutely wonderful, and not only do I get to look forward to episodes of the absence of pain in my hands once a week when I go to physical therapy, but she may be able to help me get the VA to buy me my very own paraffin warmer, like this one. If all this positivity keeps up, I may have to abandon my belief that the VA is run by a demon overlord straight out of Buffy who feeds on human suffering.

Just a better way to fall

So my brother wants to know why I’m an atheist.

Short answer is, I’m an atheist because I haven’t encountered a persuasive reason to believe that a God, or anything else supernatural, exists.

Long answer is, I was raised to believe that there is a God- the God of the Apostle’s Creed:

I believe in God, the Father Almighty,
the Creator of heaven and earth,
and in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord:
Who was conceived of the Holy Spirit,
born of the Virgin Mary,
suffered under Pontius Pilate,
was crucified, died, and was buried.
He descended into hell.
The third day He arose again from the dead.
He ascended into heaven
and sits at the right hand of God the Father Almighty,
whence He shall come to judge the living and the dead.
I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy catholic church,
the communion of saints,
the forgiveness of sins,
the resurrection of the body,
and life everlasting.
Amen.

And I fell away from various aspects of this faith one at a time. The first to go was belief in ‘the holy catholic church' and 'the communion of saints.’ Frankly, Christians aren’t better people than anyone else, and their actions show it. There are good and bad Christians just like there are good and bad people of all faith; there is nothing about the church that is holy or even unusual in any way.

The second belief to go was the belief that Jesus is the son of God, and all that follows from that. C. S. Lewis wrote on various occasions versions of the idea that there are two options: either Jesus was who he said he was, i.e. God, or he was a madman; he can’t possibly have been just an above-average, wise man. I was raised in the middle of all kinds of “proof” that Jesus was God and that he really did rise from the dead, and my rejection of this belief didn’t actually deal with the factual veracity of any of these claims. What I realized was that Lewis’ imagination was too limited. There is in fact a third option: Jesus was an ordinary man, manipulated by God because God views human history as a work of art that is more interesting when covered in blood. History makes ever so much more sense if you don’t try to wedge it into a worldview that includes a good and loving God.

Along with the idea that Jesus is God, I abandoned the idea that there is a God who is interested in me personally. There have been times in my life where the smallest intervention would have made the difference between hope and despair; and I don’t mean “small” miracles, I mean the little coincidences that are so often used in churches to support the idea that God loves each of us personally. A smile, a kind word, a hopeful dream, the sort of thing that people often claim God does all the time. The year I was 17, I spent a lot of time praying for some small sign that there was a God who cared, but nothing ever came. When you go to church on a regular basis, you're told all the time that you have to pray and read your Bible consistently because you have to have a relationship with God and relationships take persistent work, but it was like trying to have a relationship with a rock… or an imaginary friend. Eventually I gave up.

I guess what it comes down to is that this is just the way my mind works. I am not capable of faith. I am not able to subscribe to an ideology that I know isn’t supported by any kind of evidence. Things have to make logical sense to me; I think things through and reject my emotional reactions in favor of ideas that I can support with evidence (not just in the religious arena, either: sometime I should write about my hopeless fondness for anarchist political philosophy). I’m not always right; my logical reasoning is sometimes flawed, but I still have to try. Its just the way I am.

And honestly, I think its a good way to be. Life doesn’t consist of the world the way we want it to be, it consists of the world as it is. Emotion is an important part of being human, and intuition and faith and all that are an important part of the way the human mind works, but in order to be a successful person, you have to be able to deal with the world as it is. That means dealing with facts, facing fear and pain, and, when you tell stories about the world to make it seem a more hospitable place, you have to understand what is story and what is real.

I think this also answers, at least partially, the question of what exactly I mean when I say I am an atheist. I believe that the world can be discovered. I believe in reason and science and a way of looking at the world that requires facts before conclusions. There really isn't an atheist orthodoxy that I follow, but a better writer than I put it this way:

An atheist's creed

I believe in time,
matter, and energy,
which make up the whole of the world.

I believe in reason, evidence and the human mind,
the only tools we have;
they are the product of natural forces
in a majestic but impersonal universe,
grander and richer than we can imagine,
a source of endless opportunities for discovery.

I believe in the power of doubt;
I do not seek out reassurances,
but embrace the question,
and strive to challenge my own beliefs.

I accept human mortality.

We have but one life,
brief and full of struggle,
leavened with love and community,
learning and exploration,
beauty and the creation of
new life, new art, and new ideas.

I rejoice in this life that I have,
and in the grandeur of a world that preceded me,
and an earth that will abide without me.

The days get longer and the nights smell green

We're finally getting weather that is consistently warm enough to go out in, although we've also been getting a rather large amount of rain. Today the sky is clear, though, so I went out to the park.
The world is a beautiful place.

The Problem of Pain: The Celestial Abuser

Until the evil man finds evil unmistakably present in his existence, in the form of pain, he is enclosed in illusion.

If the first and lowest operation of pain shatters the illusion that all is well, the second shatters the illusion that what we have, whether good or bad in itself, is our own and enough for us. Everyone has noticed how hard it is to turn our thoughts to God when everything is going well with us. ... Now God, who has made us, knows what we are and that our happiness lies in Him. Yet we will not seek it in Him as long as He leaves us any other resort where it can even plausibly be looked for. ... The creature's illusion of self-sufficiency must, for the creature's sake, be shattered; and by trouble or fear of trouble on earth, by crude fear of the eternal flames, God shatters it "unmindful of His glory's diminution". Those who would like the God of scripture to be more purely ethical, do not know what they ask. If God were Kantian, who would not have us until we came to Him from the purest and best motives, who could be saved? And this illusion of self-sufficiency may be at its strongest in some very honest, kindly, and temperate people, and on such people, therefore, misfortune must fall.

-C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

Everyone knows that God prefers the weak to the strong, the humble to the proud, the poor to the rich, the child to the philosopher. I was always under the impression that this was because God was egalitarian in a way that human society can never be, and judged people solely on their merits and not their social status, but C. S. Lewis would have his readers believe that this isn't the case. God loves broken people for the same reason that an abuser prefers to form relationships with people who have little education or life experience and don't have social support systems: they're easier to manipulate into a position of complete dependency.

When humans exhibit this kind of behavior, it is condemned as despicable and creepy and unhealthy; I'm not entirely sure why Lewis describes the same kind of behavior as one of the nobler characteristics of God. He goes on at length about how perfect God is, and how ugly and mean humans are, but even if you grant that humans benefit from a relationship with God no matter the circumstances of that relationship, I don't really see how it follows that we should accept that God causes us pain because he loves us. If there were a rich guy who took in poor kids, bought them clothes and tutors and vacations in Spain and improved their lives in a multitude of ways, but at the same time cut them off from their family so that they would be completely dependent on him, the good he did wouldn't outweigh the creepy abusiveness of demanding complete dependence.

Lewis is very clear that this suffering is sent by God with a purpose. Its not the direct result of sin, or the action of some other near-omnipotent godlike being like Satan or anything. This suffering is inflicted on good, "honest, kindly, and temperate people," so its not meant as punishment to direct people away from sinful ways. Lewis is clear that God's purpose in allowing suffering is to strip away every good thing in life so that people will have no sense of self-sufficiency, no sense of control, no sense that there is any hope of joy in anything but Him. I guess whether or not you see this as psychopathic behavior depends on whether or not you think that its true, that there is no hope of anything positive apart from God. Clearly Lewis thinks that this kind of behavior is admirable and holy. I can't help but think, though, that even if its true that there is an almighty God who knows that humans can only be happy when they're with him, that doesn't make manipulating people with all the horror the world holds into something pure and holy.

The Problem of Pain: The Goodness of God

Previous posts on this topic here and here.

"Love and kindness are not coterminous... Kindness, merely as such, cares not whether its object becomes good or bad, provided only that it escapes suffering. As Scripture points out, it is bastards who are spoiled: the legitimate sons, who are to carry on the family tradition, are punished. It is for people whom we care nothing about that we demand happiness on any terms: with our friends, our lovers, our children, we are exacting and would rather see them suffer much than be happy in contemptible and estranging modes."

"You asked for a loving God: you have one. ... not a senile benevolence that drowsily wishes you to be happy in your own way, not the cold philanthropy of a conscientious magistrate, nor the care of a host who feels responsible for the comfort of his guests, but the consuming fire Himself... persistent as the artist's love for his work and despotic as a man's love for a dog, provident and venerable as a father's love for a child, jealous, inexorable, exacting as love between the sexes."

"It is good for us to know love; and best for us to know the love of the best object, God. But to know it as a love in which we were primarily the wooers and God the wooed, in which we sought and He was found, in which His conformity to our needs, not ours to His, came first, would be to know it in a form false to the very nature of things. For we are only creatures: our role must always be that of patient to agent, female to male, mirror to light, echo to voice. Our highest activity must be response, not initiative."

"When we want to be something other than the thing God wants us to be, we must be wanting what, in fact, will not make us happy. Those Divine demands which sound to our natural ears most like those of a despot and least like those of a lover, in fact marshal us where we should want to go if we knew what we wanted... whether we like it or not, God intends to give us what we need, not what we now think we want. "

-C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

C. S. Lewis clearly was a product of some of the worst cultural prejudices of his time, and its difficult for me to type out these quotes without ranting about the years I spent convinced by my religion that my very nature was abhorrent. However, the damage this version of Christianity does to impressionable young girls is not the point today. The point is how Lewis defines the love and goodness of God in order to get around the problem of pain in a world ruled by a loving God. Like I said in the previous post, Lewis admits that if God is loving as we generally think of the term, then there is no way to reconcile the reality of suffering people experience with the power of God. He solves this problem by redefining "loving" as "abusive."

I realize this is a bold claim, so to illustrate my point, here's a picture:
This is an infant with smallpox. According to Wikipedia, during (the first 3/4s of) the 20th century between 300 and 500 million people died of smallpox; 80% of children infected with the virus that causes smallpox died. Smallpox is not caused by any kind of human sin. Its not even sexually transmitted- you can get it simply from breathing near someone who is infected. Or you could, anyway, until it was eradicated with the use of vaccinations in a worldwide effort.

Since we measly humans were able to erase smallpox from the face of the earth, I have to assume that even Lewis' not-quite-omnipotent God had the power to do something about it, but didn't; therefore, either smallpox was created for some purpose or God just didn't care. Its clear from the selections above that Lewis believes the same thing I was taught growing up: God cares, and does have a purpose: any misfortune that can't be prayed away is actually a lesson from God specially designed to make one a better, more holy person. Its all for the best, see. God hurts you because he loves you.

I think Lewis' upbringing and cultural blindness influenced his philosophy of love. Influenced really isn't a strong enough word. Dictated, maybe- although maybe I'm being harsh on his culture and the deviance here is all Lewis'. The "love" Lewis describes is the blindly jealous obsession of the stalker who would kill the object of his affection rather than see her love another, the stubborn stupid pride of the father who disowns his son for choosing a career of which he doesn't approve. People who love do beautiful things, and they do horrible things, but I think that most people at least wish that their love would produce only things that are beautiful, and not horrible. Lewis doesn't seem to agree. For him, the horrible things done in the name of love are a more true sign of love than anything else. He patterns his God after the most twisted and evil side of human nature, and calls Him good.

The Problem of Pain: Omnipotence

Today C.S. Lewis' The Problem of Pain finally made it through the queue at the library. I've read the first few chapters and already have about a million things I want to say about it, which I guess is as good a criteria for a good book as any. This whole internal debate process started with a post I wrote a while back about creationism and the problem of pain, here.

Lewis defines the problem of pain like this: "If God were good, He would wish to make His creatures perfectly happy, and if God were almighty He would be able to do what He wished. But the creatures are not happy. Therefore God lacks either goodness, or power, or both." I think that Lewis believed that he had a solution to this problem, but he admits further on in the same paragraph that "if the popular meanings attached to these words (speaking of 'good', 'almighty' and 'happy') are the best, or the only possible, meanings, then the argument is unanswerable." Normally an attempt to define away the terms of an argument as a means of defeating the argument would annoy the hell out of me, but the way Lewis defines things is interesting, so I'm going to write about it like this isn't a cheap and cowardly tactic.

The first term he addresses is 'almighty;' if I'm reading this right, what he's saying is that an almighty God can't in fact do anything he wishes, but instead has limits. He claims to believe in miracles- I guess he didn't particularly want to be a heretic- but maintains that a physical universe must have certain natural laws that produce a certain amount of suffering, and God is not able to create a universe that doesn't work this way.

"The inexorable "laws of Nature" which operate in defiance of human suffering or desert, which are not turned aside by prayer, seem, at first sight to furnish a strong argument against the goodness and power of God. I am going to submit that not even Omnipotence could create a society of free souls without at the same time creating a relatively independent and "inexorable" Nature."

The proof of this, I think, is supposed to be free will, which requires things to choose among, which requires a physical world, which requires laws of nature, which means the exact laws of nature which we have now and which cause so much suffering.

This approach is very interesting to me. I've heard a lot of people talk about the problem of pain from the angle of goodness, and from the angle of happiness, but I don't think I've ever actually encountered someone who seriously argued that part of the solution to the problem is the idea that God is not actually omnipotent as we understand the word, but rather is constrained by the laws of the universe (but can somehow do miracles anyway, as long as he limits them enough to not actually prove or disprove his existence). It makes sense, but it's not an argument I expect from a Christian, much less C. S. Lewis. If God is subject to scientific laws of nature, you'd expect science to be a big deal, but Lewis is much fonder of weird magical thinking, which he shows in his chapter on the Fall of Man, where he spins a tale that accepts evolution but posits a 'missing link' between pre-humans and modern humans that is essentially super-human: in control of every cell in the body, never dying or ill or in pain, fully one with God and the animals around him and at peace. Like I said, weird and fantastical.

Lewis makes it clear that he believes both that God is limited in power, and that God is something beyond human comprehension beside which humans are vermin. In his chapters on the goodness of God and the wickedness of men, he actually goes into quite a bit of detail about how horrible humans are and how unfortunate it is that modern culture doesn't condemn everything human as utterly worthless and disgusting. These two beliefs don't seem very compatible to me, and if you had asked me before I read this if claiming the omnipotence of God was limited was allowed in orthodox Christianity I would have said it absolutely was not. However, this book is supposed to be one of the best modern works on the problem of pain, so I guess I must be wrong about that. Anyway, Lewis' positions on omnipotence aren't nearly as interesting as his positions on goodness and love, but I think I'm going to write a separate post for that.

I have this daydream. One day, when no one else is around, I stuff some clothes in a bag, grab CDs and toiletries and some empty notebooks, and just take off. Get in the car without a map and just drive south until I hit desert. Mexico maybe, someplace hot and dry and empty, where I can clear my head.

I feel like I'm swamped in stories that other people tell. My head is full of other people's words, other people's feelings, and I daydream about just leaving all this behind and setting off to try to find out what would be in my head if I didn't have my books and tv shows and blogs filling me up with the things other people think about.

Its not practical, I know that. I'm ill and broke, and living alone drives me completely around the bend. Living alone out of a car in a foreign country is a really bad idea. But I still find myself mentally assembling packing lists and contemplating brushing up on my Spanish. I'm starting some plants for a garden this summer, and when I was at the garden store a couple weekends ago, I contemplated getting some cacti for an indoor pot, but decided I couldn't. The more I contemplate being somewhere else, the more I feel trapped. I don't know what it is about the desert that makes me think its calling me, but something has to change or my heart is going to burst.

Pacifism and Genocide

My sister and I have both been reading War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning, by Chris Hedges. I'm not done with it yet, and I'm not usually ready to write about a book before I've finished it, but I thought I would post this here, basically because I would put it on Facebook for my sister, but I talk way too much for that to be practical. Here's what my sister said that got me thinking about this:

S., Mom, and I actually had a little debate/discussion about war and pacifism the other night. S. is a straight up pacifist, because he doesn't think Jesus would ever have killed someone. Idealistically I would be a pacifist, but the world's not that perfect, you know? Sometimes you have to intervene, or choose a lesser evil, so to speak. In the book, and in some of my econ stuff this quarter, it talked about all the times peacekeeping troops could have intervened and didn't, and how they could have saved lives and all.

My view on the morality of war has changed a bit since I joined the Army. I used to think that fighting a war after another country attacks your country is fine; wars of aggression are generally immoral, but the one exception would be when you start a war in order to prevent a greater atrocity, for example if a country had intervened in early Nazi Germany, or Rwanda.

From a utilitarian moral viewpoint (which, while we might disagree on its applicability to ‘victimless’ crimes, I think is uncontroversial here), in a situation where war might break out, one ought to act in a way that will minimize human suffering. Generally this means doing what you can to see that a war isn’t begun, but if you know that the alternative to war will produce more suffering than the war would, then you ought to choose war as the most moral thing to do.

In theory I still agree with this view. War is a horrible thing, but it’s not the only horrible thing. However, one of the lessons I’ve learned from the fiasco in Iraq is that, as an outsider looking into a foreign situation, I know a great deal less about what’s going on than I think I do. A situation might look like the beginnings of a genocide, or like a mad dictator loose with nuclear weapons, or like the end of the world in fire, and then turn out to be something completely different. Even as an insider in a volatile situation, I don’t think it’s possible to have the kind of complete information that the utilitarian choice for war requires. No one can tell the future, or read the minds of the other people involved. Theoretically, I could see a situation where choosing to start a war, or intervene militarily in a conflict, would be the moral choice, but practically it’s wiser to just not start wars.

A good metaphor would be my view on capital punishment. I have no problem in theory with executing a murderer. I think there are crimes for which the only truly just punishment is death. However, I don’t have faith that our judicial system is able to determine guilt or innocence with perfect accuracy, so I think it’s wiser to only impose punishments that are more or less reversible. It’s a problem of information.

That doesn’t mean accepting no action at all in the face of genocide, though. If you take Rwanda as an example, one of the major factors that led to the genocide was the radio stations that broadcast racist programs urging people to kill their neighbors. The United States could have exerted political and economic pressure to shut down those radio stations, and replaced them with different programs. There are often political and economic steps that can be taken to improve a situation.

In Iraq, over the past couple of years, there has been a slow ethnic cleansing in some areas, so that neighborhoods that used to be mixed Sunni-Shi’a are now only Sunni or only Shi’a. The US military presence hasn’t been able to stop this. From what I know (although again, as an outsider looking in my knowledge is incomplete) it would probably be more effective if the US withdrew our military forces while at the same time offering refuge to anyone who would be the victim of ethnic cleansing or genocide. So if you’re wanting to prevent genocide, which is a good goal, military intervention may not even be the most effective way to do that.

I guess what I would advocate is practical pacifism, through the adoption of a different paradigm for international intervention. Here in the US, we tend to think of our options as either a) do nothing and pretend that everything is fine, or b) storm in with guns blazing. We see our role in the international community as that of a police officer. I think what we ought to do is acknowledge our inability to be effective police officers, and instead take on the role of the battered women's shelter: we can't arrest the abusers and put them in prison, we can't put them up against a wall and shoot them for their crimes, but we can shelter their victims and do our best to mitigate the damage that has been done. This is a lot more complicated, and time-consuming, and requires a greater commitment to long-term, practical action that isn't flashy and doesn't get the adrenaline pumping, but I think it's more moral.

Apology for Want

I am an exceptionally negative person: misanthropic, the quintessential pessimist, I always expect the world to prove right my view that shit happens for no good reason and with no cure. I don't think this view of the world is unrealistic; actually, I think karmic, teleological views of the world are the epitome of magical thinking, which I detest.

However, there are days when the world surprises me with how sweet life is. Yesterday, I went to the library and while browsing the shelves stumbled on a thin book of poetry by someone I had never heard of. Here's one:


Apology for Want
by Mary Jo Bang

I've worried far too much about the eye
of the other: the shopkeeper and his lackey clerks
who think I steal.
I know I stand far too long, gazing

with wistful face at the muted tints of objects
on shelves. How smart we are all getting.
Soon we will understand everything:
why our first breath, when our last.

Why a rat, even though shocked
every time it eats, never stops knowing hunger.
How hollow-boned birds and gilled fish
estimate the size of a bounty, remember

where they stored food. There are few ways
to free the body from desire, all end in anarchy.
Tomorrow, I'll go back to the shop- the story
where it left off-

focus on those items that have bits of lavender
hidden within: gimmaled broccoli tips,
overwrought asparagus. Survival lies in resistance,
in the undersides of the leafed and delicate.

Among animals, we're the aberration:
want appropriates us,
sends us out dressed in ragged tulle, but won't tell
where it last buried the acorn or bone.

What the Water Gave Me

Emotional pain is often the inspiration for great works of art, but physical pain doesn't act the same way on the mind. Physical pain does not inspire, it grinds. It pares the soul down to the barest essentials of survival, so that there is only a bright spark of self in a sea of agony. Pain is not in any way beautiful. It is shit and piss and vomit; it is mean and common, and most of all it is boring.

Frida Kahlo's art is not about pain, not directly. She painted the fear of pain, the love of death, political upset, tension between modern life and historical roots, the distress of being a woman. But she painted all this while in pain, and her work is subtly disturbing because of it. The amazing thing about her is that instead of allowing her pain to deaden what she felt and how she expressed herself, she somehow transmuted dust into gold.

the ghosts in the radio are singing along

I was going through my old CDs today, and I realized something. I've been thinking lately that my tendency toward feminism is something newish; I don't remember thinking about feminism in much depth before I got ill and found myself with all this time to sit around and read. Logically I can deduce that I must have had opinions on the matter, what with me driving myself as hard as I used to, to be academically successful and hip and tough and all that, and then I did join the Army. But I don't remember what I thought. The past is a blur. I can reconstruct what must have happened from things I know about myself, but I have no real memory of a lot of it.

My old CDs, though, tell a different story. I never used to purchase music. When I lived in my parents' house, I wasn't allowed to listen to music that wasn't explicitly Christian, so in order to listen to the things I wanted to listen to, I had to obtain CDs either from friends or from the library, burn copies onto blank CDs and label them something misleading, and then never listen to them unless I was using headphones and no one else was around. Telling it like that makes it sound like I was horribly oppressed, but I ended up listening to exactly what I wanted anyway, so I guess it was alright. The point is that I never bought music.

Today I found three old CDs that I actually purchased: Le Tigre's self-titled album, and Pretty Girls Make Graves' "Good Health" and "The New Romance." Way back in the day, back when I had the energy to follow music and find things that were exciting and new, it was important to me to listen to feminist music, written and sung by women. I'm glad to know this about myself, and I'm glad to have this music again. I've been inspired, actually, and now I have six CDs on order at the library to expand my feminist playlist.

Not that I think it's important to inhabit a feminist ghetto, where all media I consume is appropriately female oriented; that would be too similar to the Christian bubble I was raised in, and I don't want to be the kind of person who shelters themselves from the world. But the music I listen to, which is mostly alternative/indie rock, is heavily male-dominated. Listening to an all male choir is valuable- many of these men are incredibly talented- but it feels incomplete.

Jericho's second season

The first season of Jericho was OK. I sat down and watched it at one point a few months ago when I was bored and ill and up all night and it was the only TV show I could find that had a whole season's worth of episodes available online for free. I really liked some aspects of it, particularly the post-apocalyptic themes and the secret agent storyline, and I could listen to the guy who plays Hawkins talk all day and not get bored; he has the most wonderful voice. Other aspects were kind of annoying, like how none of the women were good for anything, and how the town kept "running out" of gasoline and then the next episode people were driving all over the place, and the resemblance some of the plot points had to a 9/11 Truther conspiracy theory.

The first few episodes of the second season have been pretty stellar, though. Apparently the show isn't that popular, but I think it's great. Popularity isn't necessarily the defining factor when you're telling a good story, and like Kung Fu Monkey says, this show has become radically subversive. I just watched Episode Five, and it reminded me of nothing so much as a composite of certain incidents from the Iraq war. The incident in Fallujah, before we burned it to the ground, where those contractors went into the city and were killed, and their bodies were mutilated and strung up by a mob. Numerous incidents of corruption during the reconstruction. Arbitrary imprisonment of occupied citizens without trial, and "misunderstandings" that resulted in the death of innocent children in their homes. The major difference is that the victims of corporate-government oppression here aren't Iraqis, they're Americans. The pretty little girl who gets shot is blond, and the men who string up the contractor are American farm boys, doing what anyone would do in their situation.

The most dangerous threat to the impulse to war is sympathizing with the enemy. Empathy, I am convinced, is the root of morality. If you can imagine yourself as the person you oppose, if you can feel what they feel , if you can truly know them, war becomes impossible. When it comes to people who live halfway across the world, who speak a different language and pray to a different God, empathy isn't that easy. Stories like this help bridge the gap, and we need more like it.

You can watch all of season two of Jericho here, on CBS' page, free and completely legit.

we shall all someday part the veil

Some disconnected thoughts:

---

By Emily Dickinson:

Pain has an element of blank;
It cannot recollect
When it began, or if there were
A day when it was not.

It has no future but itself,
Its infinite realms contain
Its past, enlightened to perceive
New periods of pain.

---
Rodin's "The Fallen Caryatid"

---

I went for a walk today at the Catholic cemetery down the road. It's interesting to see the stories we tell, or fail to tell, about our dead. There's not a whole lot of room on a gravestone, even the extravagantly large ones, and most of the graves I saw today included name, dates, and one other piece of information, usually a family relationship: mother, daughter, wife. Some had military ranks, units and wars in which the deceased served, and a fair number had Masonic symbols. The most common, of course, was religious symbols: crosses, the gates of heaven, angels, references to passages in the Bible.

I don't really feel like I understand the attraction of most stories about death. Fear of death I get; every successful living creature must fear death, and humans are no exception. Intellectually, I understand that a way of coping with fear is inventing reasons to explain why the fear is unfounded, but emotionally it just doesn't connect with me. Once you admit that beliefs about an afterlife are impossible to verify in any way, that we have zero information about what death is like, it seems to me that the stories lose their comfort. I have this problem with religious faith as well, obviously: I am aware that choosing to believe would mean adopting an idea that I don't think is true in order to make myself feel better, and that very awareness means that adopting it wouldn't even make me feel better, because I know that I don't actually believe.

When I feel like flattering myself, I pretend that I think this way because I am unusually un-susceptible to doublethink, but perhaps that isn't true. Maybe it's just that I have an abnormally large amount of time to sit and examine the things I believe in, entire mornings that I can take to walk around a cemetery by myself.

An atheist's creed

Now, since I don't like to only whine about the things I see on the internet, I thought I would post a link to something PZ Meyers put up at Pharyngula today. He wrote this in response to a particularly ugly manifestation of the idea that atheism is synonymous with nihilism and despair, and I thought it was rather beautiful. I don't have the scientific background to give the correct explanations of the world that others can, but still this resonates with me. Something that I've begun to learn to accept as part of coping with chronic illness is this idea that my existence is contingent on a billion coincidences, that my life is not inevitable in any way, that things change whether I want them to or not. This is a scary idea, and I remember being taught as a child that believing it would leave you with nothing worth living for.

The truth is, acknowledging the vastness and complexity of the universe is no more nihilistic than contemplating the night sky. The refusal to believe in a universe that isn't centered around one's particular subsection of a tribe of a species on this little planet is a pathetic agoraphobia of the soul, and it is this state of mind that is to be pitied.

An atheist's creed

I believe in time,
matter, and energy,
which make up the whole of the world.

I believe in reason, evidence and the human mind,
the only tools we have;
they are the product of natural forces
in a majestic but impersonal universe,
grander and richer than we can imagine,
a source of endless opportunities for discovery.

I believe in the power of doubt;
I do not seek out reassurances,
but embrace the question,
and strive to challenge my own beliefs.

I accept human mortality.

We have but one life,
brief and full of struggle,
leavened with love and community,
learning and exploration,
beauty and the creation of
new life, new art, and new ideas.

I rejoice in this life that I have,
and in the grandeur of a world that preceded me,
and an earth that will abide without me.

When I am king

Sitting in my email inbox right now is a letter from a caseworker at the VA Regional Office of Vocational Rehabilitation and Employment, St Louis (Voc Rehab). This is the office that works with veterans who are disabled by a condition caused by their military service in order to retrain them for the workplace and help them find employment by providing things like assistive devices: voice recognition software, specialized wheelchairs or whatever you need in order to get back to work. They also do things like paying for college if they think that's what you need to be a productive member of society, or small business planning advice and loans. Voc Rehab interviewed me in January to see if there was anything they could do for me, a disabled veteran.

The letter in my inbox confirms that a paper copy of my official rejection letter will be sent to me as soon as possible so I can add it to my medical and employment history. The VA office here has found that I am unemployable, not rehabable, not worth spending tax dollars on, so I am not eligible for their program at this time. Incidentally, they made this decision in January, told me they sent me the letter in January, and are only now getting around to resending it.

There is another VA office in town, Disability Compensation and Pension (Comp & Pen). This office is tasked with taking care of veterans who have been disabled by their service; and by 'taking care of' I mean 'giving money to.' This is the branch that gives out disability payments, which are scaled based on the severity of disability from almost negligible, something like $110/month, to completely disabling, over $2k/month. If your disability is so severe that you can't find any kind of employment, you are officially entitled to the full 100% disability payments, which gives you about $25k a year to live on. It's not money that anyone would call riches, but at least it's above the poverty line.

You would think, that since the branch of the VA responsible for helping veterans find employment has found that I am unemployable- and this particular office is the fourth in two states, on the state, federal, and nonprofit levels, to find this- the Comp & Pen branch of the VA would be obligated to also find me unemployable, and therefore give me disability payments that I can live on. Well, you would think that IF you don't know the way the VA works. So here I am, poking at my library account online, bored because someone else has all the Buffy DVDs checked out and I can't afford to buy them so I must wait, contemplating the day when I am no longer able to access the internet from my home because my savings will have run out and I will no longer be able to afford internet access. In my bleaker moments, I contemplate a day when I will no longer have a home from which to not access the internet; but I know that this will probably never happen, because I have family. But if I didn't have family... it already would have. The VA provides me with enough to have a nice car to live out of.

All of which leads me to comment on this article that's been floating around, from the Christian Science Monitor: "Homeless: Can you build a life from $25?" Basically some former athlete white boy with a college degree and rich parents went out to prove that it's possible to go from being homeless to renting a place, even if you're ... a young, healthy, rich white boy with a college degree. Some choice quotes:

To make his quest even more challenging, he decided not to use any of his previous contacts.

Ten months into the experiment, he decided to quit after learning of an illness in his family.

"I was getting by on chicken and Rice-A-Roni dinner and was happy."

"I had a credit card in my back pocket in case of an emergency. The rule was if I used the credit card then, "The project's over, I'm going home.""

[In response to a question about whether his game would have been more difficult if he had child support payments or was on probation] "The question isn't whether I would have been able to succeed. I think it's the attitude that I take in."

"This isn't a "rags-to-riches million-dollar" story. This is very realistic. I truly believe, based on what I saw at the shelter ...that anyone can do that."

Speaking as someone who doesn't have the luxury of "quitting" my life when someone gets sick, who doesn't have an emergency credit card or any "previous contacts" that would do me any good, I just have to say that eating chicken and Rice-a-Roni for dinner sounds like the lap of luxury to me (meat is expensive, even chicken), and I deeply resent the implication that the reason I'm in the situation I'm in is because my attitude isn't focused enough on tugging at my own bootstraps. Yeah, I made some stupid decisions. I joined the Army- that was, in hindsight, blindingly stupid. But I'm not sick and unemployed because I'm lazy, and this kid's condescension makes me want to punch him in the face. Knowing that in the future people are going to point to the book he wrote as "proof!" that poverty is a choice that the government shouldn't subsidize with things like food stamps makes me want to puke.

There's a more eloquent takedown of this at Resist Racism: Playing at poverty.

If heaven is on the way

So I was talking with my mother-in-law the other day, and the conversation went like our conversations usually do, where she talks about 95% of the time, and I say "mmhmm" and "oh really?" and "yeah" a lot. She was telling stories about how she got into trouble in high school, but then got diverted onto the subject of how inconvenient it was for everyone she knew when the school district policy started to require forced integration of the school districts, which meant that the bus rides for some people took longer. She honestly couldn't see any need at all for integration of schools, because after all, the people she knew would never harass black students, and if the black students all sat at one table at lunch it was just because they wanted to. All integration was to her was a pointless hassle, and at that point I really didn't have anything to say.

My in-laws and the people I've met here in St Louis since moving here last summer are not bad people. They are intelligent, educated, middle class white folks who insist that St Louis is not, in fact, in the South, but is in the Midwest and so must be untainted with horrible horrible racism. It puzzles me, that they don't see it. St Louis is about half white and half black, I think, although I don't know the current statistics; we are currently living in my grandmother-in-law's house, which is in a neighborhood with exactly zero people who aren't lily white. I go to the grocery store around the corner and it's no more diverse than the stores in rural Washington state where I grew up. On the other hand, if you go up to the northern part of St Louis county, communities there are almost 100% nonwhite. My in-laws' social circle does not include a single person who isn't white.

The way money is spent by the local governments here reflects this segregation to a degree that makes my skin itch. The neighborhood here, which is white and upper middle class, is perfectly safe. You can leave your doors unlocked when you run to the store and you can walk alone at night. I get the impression that the nonwhite neighborhoods are rather dangerous; the principle advice I got when I moved here about how to get around the city was to not go north of downtown or across the river, because doing so means you're going to get shot. It's not just dangerous crime, either. The VA hospital downtown is in a part of town that is right on the edge between a university campus and, to the north of it, a patch of urban poverty recognizable by ancient, poorly maintained, or abandoned buildings: it's a 'black' part of town.

Some of the history of the area is outlined in these posts by The Infamous Brad, which I found via Orcinus. The shooting he talks about occurred in Kirkwood, which is a suburb of St Louis that is only about ten minutes from where I'm living now. Orcinus also gives a link to a previous discussion of sundown towns that mentions Seattle and the Pacific Northwest, which I thought was very interesting. It's easy for a white kid from a white town like me to grow up almost completely ignorant of the complexities of race in our society, but it seems to me like it ought to be more difficult to stay ignorant when your white town is right next to a black town and the difference is so stark. My in-laws do manage to be ignorant, though.

It makes me wonder if the difference between us really is just that I read so much science fiction at such an impressionable age, or if there actually is less racism in the Pacific Northwest like I used to assume. Or maybe the type of racism in Washington- the kind people don't talk about- just doesn't pass along to the next generation as reliably.

if you go straight long enough

I keep trying to write a post and every time it turns into a rant about how much I hate the VA. So instead of a real post, here's some links to things I've been reading.

driftglass writes about Orwell's 1984 and the modern Republican Party's doctrine of endless war.

John McCain apparently is an alternative medicine sucker: according to this article, "McCain said, per ABC News' Bret Hovell, that "It’s indisputable that (autism) is on the rise amongst children, the question is what’s causing it. And we go back and forth and there’s strong evidence that indicates that it’s got to do with a preservative in vaccines."" The 'mercury in vaccines' theory of autism origin has been pretty thoroughly debunked, but I guess being a Republican means you just have to be against scientific evidence no matter what.

Also, here's some awesome leopard cubs.