The Evil of Praying for Evil

Anyone who has never been treated unfairly lives a very charmed life. Can such a person exist? Perhaps. But most of us have encountered, numerous times, situations or people that caused us pain or injury unnecessarily, unfairly, or deliberately meanly. So we can sympathize with those who wish bad things to happen to venal people who initiate, nudge, or incite the harm that befalls others. Been there, done that, here's the souvenir. But we also suspect that such wishing does not emerge from our better nature; it crawls up from the primordial mud with the animal that snarls "kill or be killed." Our more deliberative pre-frontal cortex puts on the brakes and "gather[s] a more judicious 'big picture'. . . .  and thereby exert[s] executive control over behavior." The primitive brain has its place and its uses, but we usually realize, after some reflection, that wishing for evil to befall others is fraught with more danger to ourselves than to the one whom we think deserves the curse. We all know people who fall into the pit of bitterness and blame and learn to love the smell of their own excrement.

And that's the stench I catch a whiff of when I read about people praying for the death of President Obama.  These people aren't primitives raised by wolves and thus taught to tear at the flesh of their victims; they're leaders of Christian churches. Southern Baptist pastor Wiley Drake is just such a leader, and a former vice-president of the Southern Baptist Convention. He invokes Psalm 109 in his prayers that God kill President Obama: "May his children be fatherless and his wife a widow. May his children be wandering beggars; may they be driven from their homes."

Okay, this goes beyond wanting mean people to get their comeuppance. The fact that the verses appear in the Bible is no excuse to be muttering them like curses toward the President of the United States--or anyone, for that matter. What kind of person prays for evil to happen to the children of political opponents? Someone listening to his basal ganglia and not his pre-frontal cortex. The thing about religious texts is that they're something like the human brain; they contain all that's human in us, from the first howling of the wronged that wants revenge to the ecstatic poetry of the mystic who realizes the connectedness of all things and the frailty of all humans.  To read the texts as if they are recipes is to court disaster. Once these haters pray for the death of one enemy, will they stop there, especially if that prayer seems to be successful? Won't they think, "hey, this is better than pulling the trigger myself, getting God to do it for me" (albeit through some nutcase like the abortion opponent who shot and killed Dr. Tiller)?  And then they'll go on to the next person they've labeled the "enemy." (And anyone want to guess what really drives this hatred of Barack Obama?)

So for all those people with bumper stickers that say "Pray for Obama: Psalm 109:8"--Evolve, People!

"Because He Cannot Cry"

This morning I read an article about a young man who was injured in an automobile accident when he was twenty years old. He has been immobilized for twenty-three years and, for twenty of those years, in what doctors thought was a "vegetative state. But doctors discovered three years ago that the man was actually conscious during those years, just unable to communicate that consciousness. What hell that must have been--to have your relatives visit and not be able to communicate your love for them; to have doctors diagnose your condition and not be able to refute them; to hear of a loved one's death and not be able to cry. And, of course, the story will make many people question the "vegetative" diagnosis of other paralyzed patients. However, a PET scan finally revealed that this man's brain was "almost normal," and doctors were finally able to make contact when the man was able to respond by slightly pressing a computer device with his foot.  When the patient later visited his father's grave, he closed his eyes for half an hour because he could not cry.   His physical condition may never improve, but his consciousness is no longer "locked in," unable to communciate.

While many of us have never experienced this kind of physical horror, we may have experienced that "locked-in" feeling when people on the outside label us and, through that labeling, think they understand us. (And people, like those doctors, who label us may also have the power to convince others of their "diagnosis." ) We may be unable to communicate our real feelings because that communication might have negative consequences on us or people we love. We remain stoic and silent for ethical reasons, because the situation that has created the "locked-in" feeling must be contained for the sake of others. Or  perhaps we just feel that to give way to our feelings would be to make us vulnerable in a way we are unable to face. How does one escape such a locked-in situation? Just as this young man did: with the help of someone who loves us or believes in us and with the help of people willing to listen to that person and to re-examine their own pre-conceived ideas. This man's mother continued to believe that her son was conscious, and she continued to press doctors to re-examine the diagnosis and to free her son.  Somehow she knew that her son was locked-in, fully aware but unable to communicate.

Most people can only hope for such a friend.

Being Thankful

In my previous post, I noted a news article that revealed the huge increase in the number of Americans who are going hungry and those who often do not have quite enough food to put on the table. Many other people are without jobs and have little expectation of being hired before holiday decorations are lit in downtowns across America (especially since some of those lights came on right after Halloween). Many of us have circumstances that cause us sleepless nights and that bubbly, anxious feeling in one's chest that seems to seep from one's pores and to fill the air one breathes. It's a hard time of the year for many people. Oh, yes, some seem immune from life's vicissitudes, but most have had that feeling at one or another time in their lives. And it's here, in the middle of that breath-catching moment, that it seems to me to be the most important time to be thankful. That's when it counts the most--not when one is sitting on top of the world, satiated, but when one is confronted with situations that seem to suck the air right out of the room. For I believe that thankfulness can help inflate one's lungs for that next, more hopeful breath.

I've been in such situations several times during my fifty-two-next-week years of living. Sometimes those situations were of my own blundering; at other times they were caused by the simple unfairness of life--the luck of the draw--or the callousness of others.  While I was never in great danger of starving, I do recall tough times in the first years of our marriage while my husband and I were struggling students.  During one particular rough spot, we sold my gold high-school ring to buy groceries. What we could have been thankful for then, however, is that if we hadn't had the money from that sale, we could have turned to family and friends, hands out, and had those hands filled--or an invitation to belly up to a full table.

And if family or friends aren't available--for whatever reason, death, disease, abandonment, distance--there is always the sunrise or the sunset or the smile on a stranger's face for which we can be thankful. That moment of thankfulness can be enough to produce the first oxygen-laden breath after disaster, a breath that just might allow us to think more clearly in order to navigate the maze of despair.

It's not easy.

But it's easier if you have a friend to show you the way. Here is a poem by Wendell Berry that seems to do just that, sent to me by my friend Christine (Chris): Listen to and read Berry's poem "XI," here.


My friend likes best these lines:
"They came eager
to their feed, and he who felt
their hunger was by their feeding
eased."

I love those, too, as well as these, which speak especially to me:
"Was this his stubbornness or bravado?
No. Only an ordinary act
of profoundest intimacy in a day
that might have been better."

"The South still lags" and Other Fun Facts

Note: I have rewritten this first paragraph since I first published this post. Saturday, Nov. 21, 2009
This post is not about me. It's about what's sorry about the South, where more than six generations of my ancestors have lived. I've found myself defending the South lately, first in a conversation while on vacation, with a woman in northern California; then in response to a blog post by Kevin Drum, whose blog I read often; then to a friend who was describing what some of her friends in California say or wonder about the South. But today I'm complaining, too, about the inequities of the South.

Take salaries, for example. Over ten years ago, I taught part-time at a community college in Duluth, Minnesota. My pay? $3500 per course per quarter. Fifteen years later, adjuncts at the community college here in Georgia where I tutor part-time make $2100 per course per semester. Adjuncts at the community college in Killeen, Texas, made $1550 per course per semester when I was teaching there in 2004-2007. I have taught full-time at universities, and when I was full-time, I was a voice for adjuncts and their pay. But my voice didn't make a difference.

And now, just a few minutes ago, I read that the United Health Foundation has published its results on the healthiest and unhealthiest states in the United States. Big surprise what states are the unhealthiest. The bottom 12?

• Texas
• Arkansas
• Kentucky
• West Virginia
• Georgia
• Tennesee
• Nevada
• South Carolina
• Louisiana
• Alabama
• Oklahoma
• Mississippi

The healthiest state in the country? Vermont. Oh, and guess what, health care has something to do with that:

[E]very pediatrician in Vermont accepts Medicaid and the benefits extend to families who earn up to 300% of the poverty line.

The New England states evidently should be the role model for slacker states:

New England in general sets a benchmark for the country, the report found. All six New England states are in the top 10. These states have favorable demographics and an excellent public health infrastructure, including a large number of doctors per capita.

Eight of the ten states on the bottom of the rankings list are in the South:

In general, residents of these states are more likely to be smokers or to be obese, the report found. They also have worse health insurance coverage, fewer physicians per capita and live in areas with high violent crime and more child poverty.

Oh, and the article does report that 96% of Vermonters are Caucasian and "that health outcomes can be worse for racial and ethnic populations as well as those with lower incomes and education levels."

I read this article and couldn't help but make connections with this book I'm reading now: Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II.  Why does the South lag? Because the rest of the country tends to give up on the South--or what might stand in as a signifier of today's South. After the Civil War, the intransigent racism of the South led to laws that essentially re-enslaved African-Americans. How did the North respond? Well, eventually by giving up on the South until the South rose up again in the form of--no, not Johnny Reb, but the likes of Martin Luther King, Jr. and all those other heroes of the Civil Rights Movement. In 1896, Plessy v. Ferguson  "legitimized the contemptuous attitudes of whites," especially those whites who held power in the South, and that "new consensus

marked an extraordinary turning point in the political evolution of the nation. Thousands of northern whites had fought not because of their fondness or empathy for African Americans but because the principles of the Declaration of Independence coupled with American compulsion with honesty demanded it. The abandonment of that principle, and embrace of an obviously false mythology of citizenship for black Americans, brought an end to the concept that abstract notions of governance by law and morality could always be reconciled with reality. It marked a new level of unvarnished modern cynicism in American political dialogue. And it established a pattern over the ensuing years in which almost any rationalization was sufficient to excuse the most severe abuses of African Americans. (Blackmon, p. 110-111)

I see this same betrayal today in our political discourse--oh, please, don't think I'm equating health care with the enslavement of millions of African-Americans. This is a comparison, not an equation. But just note the many politicians--not all of whom are from the South!-- who claim that we have the best healthcare system in the world. Who claim that every citizen has adequate health care. These are the voices of today's metaphorical South--it's not necessarily a region but a state of mind, a state of mind that condemns a vast portion of the nation's citizens to poor resources because of its slavish faithfulness to an ideology.

Other findings that represent this "separate but equal" myth? How about how uninsured and insured people are treated when seeking emergency care?

Uninsured patients with traumatic injuries, such as car crashes, falls and gunshot wounds, were almost twice as likely to die in the hospital as similarly injured patients with health insurance, according to a troubling new study.
The findings by Harvard University researchers surprised doctors and health experts who have believed emergency room care was equitable. ("Uninsured ER patients twice as likely to die", Associated Press, 16 Nov., 2009; posted on MSNBC.com)

Or how about this fun fact, that there are more hungry Americans today than there have been "since the government has been keeping track," as reported in The Washington Post :

The data show that dependable access to adequate food has especially deteriorated among families with children. In 2008, nearly 17 million children, or 22.5 percent, lived in households in which food at times was scarce -- 4 million children more than the year before. And the number of youngsters who sometimes were outright hungry rose from nearly 700,000 to almost 1.1 million. ("American's Economic Pains Bring Hunger Pains," Amy Goldstein, The Washington Post, 17 November 2009.

And earlier this week I read how,  in "its analysis of health care legislation,"  Goldman Sachs "concluded that, as far as the bottom line for insurance companies is concerned, the best thing to do is nothing." Do nothing, and stocks rise for stockholders in insurance companies: "The study's authors advise that if no reform is passed, earnings per share would grow an estimated ten percent from 2010 through 2019, and the value of the stock would rise an estimated 59 percent during that time period."  Hurray for rich bastard stockholders! Tough shit for all those millions of Americans who can't get adequate healthcare.

Something is seriously wrong in this country when over a million of Americans go hungry, many millions can't get adequate healthcare, many other millions can't change jobs because they are afraid of losing health care, and millions of workers do not receive pay commensurate with their skills and abilities.

Fun quiz: How many Southern politicians are supporting health care reform and sponsoring bills to decrease hunger and to provide workers with more rights? How do those numbers compare with politicians from other regions of the country?

Where I Am

I began this blog when we moved to metro-Atlanta in mid-2007, as a way to discipline myself to write about what I think, observe, and experience (the writing goes out into cyberspace, and who knows who will be reading--if anyone) and as a disinterested way to keep in touch with folks I love who live elsewhere. By disinterested, I mean impartial, not directed personally toward particular people, but with those people in mind as well as any anonymous reader who might stumble across my blog. (I also write letters, personal, private, non-blog-like, with a little stamp in the upper right-hand corner of the envelope.) My faithful readers are my best friend in California, my husband, my son, and perhaps a niece in Texas who has logged on as one of my "followers"; local readers appear occasionally in comments. Others are lagniappe and I welcome them, though I rarely am aware of their presence beyond the counter on my profile page. But, mainly, my audience is myself, or, as Emily Dickinson wrote, "This is my letter to the world....."

I am a faithful reader of other blogs, blogs written by friends and by more publicly recognized people whose judgments I've come to trust. Occasionally I read the comments on those blogs, and most recently I was struck by a snarky comment left on one blog: Hey, congratulations! [this person wrote] You made Mark Steyn’s “Reader of the Day” portal. Enjoy your 15 minutes of fame before sinking back into the realm of those of whom it is said, 'Never have so many had so much to say to so few.' Oh, yeah, the sneering about having a small audience. Well, what writer has never had a small audience? And, really, who cares. Some of us write because writing helps us organize our thoughts, review our assumptions and conclusions, analyze our interpretation of events. If someone reads what we write--and responds appreciately--wow, cool. Otherwise, we know we're bound for oblivion, but until we go there, we're going to squeak a little along the way.

I have been writing less lately on this blog because I'm in the middle of a huge personal project that I'm recording on my second blog, Left for Texas. Also, I've gotten a little discouraged with what passes as political intelligence (Joe Wilson, Jon Voight, Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, Glenn Beck, that stupid plumber guy--Joe something or other, ugh) in this country and have been content to read other people's posts on health care and the war in Afghanistan, etc. Yes, I want a robust public option in the health care plan; yes, I think Bush dropped the ball in Afghanistan years ago, and now we're reaping the fallout from that [sorry for the mixed metaphor]. Ummmm.... think Global Warming is NOT a hoax and that Barack Obama is NOT a socialist or Hitler or whatever latest moniker the fear-mongers have tried to hang around his neck. Okay, believe that, said that, signed the petition, move on.

What I really want is happiness, happiness for my children, for myself, for my friends, for the world, really. And if I can't have that.....well, a little squeaking before oblivion. That's what I do here. Thank God.

Twice the Size of Texas

I have read several articles over the past several months about the huge gyre of trash in the Pacific Ocean that turns in upon itself, pulling in more and more detritus from our throw-away lives. Today's New York Times had another story on the Pacific garbage patch, "an area of widely dispersed trash that doubles in size every decade and is now believed to be roughly twice the size of Texas." The idea that not one but several such tremendous toxic turds of human waste exist is really rather difficult to comprehend. And so the smaller evidences of our indifference seem to capture more clearly the monstrous consequences of the myth of convenience: the anecdote of the rainbow runner caught by researchers that had 84 pieces of plastic in its body and the picture in The New York Review of Books of the baby albatross, dead and eviscerated on a beach, revealing the many pieces of plastic its parents had fed it, thinking the colored bits to be food. The picture of that baby bird is more horribly eloquent than anything more that I could write here.

Oh, and this is depressing, too.

Chickens in the City

Today my husband and I attended a two-hour class sponsored by a local community garden project. The subject was on raising chickens in the city, and the teacher was a man who keeps five or so hens in his backyard. Evidently, there are a number of such backyard chicken enterprises throughout our community here on the east side of Atlanta. And the city has ordinances to provide some kind of control on backyard chickens while also not discouraging the practice. The Chickens-in-the-City class is so popular that it usually fills very quickly each time it is offered. One attendee at this morning's class said that she had tried many times to sign up for the class and had been put on a waiting list. On Friday, I received an e-mail from the community garden supervisor advertising that five slots were still available for this class from 10 A.M. to noon, so I quickly signed up online.
 

It was actually quite a lovely way to spend a Saturday morning; temperatures were in the mid-fifties at the beginning of the class, warming to mid-sixties, maybe, by noon. The sky was clear, and beautiful fall leaves stood out brightly against the blue. The teacher had set out a semi-circle of metal folding chairs in his backyard, and his talk was punctuated by the contented clucking of the chickens in the hen yard behind him. (My pleasure in the rather quirky gathering would have been much increased, however, had I not been suffering from a migraine that lingered well into the afternoon and early evening hours.)

I spent my childhood in the country in East Texas, and both my grandmothers raised chickens, as well as my father. My grandmother Margaret Cole Dugat mainly raised leghorns; she had a white henhouse of about one hundred chickens for a while, after she retired from teaching English to middle school children in Barbers Hill (also known as Mont Belvieu), Texas. My grandmother Ruby Scott Benton had a smaller, motley flock of red and brown chickens. And my father chose his chickens by their unique characteristics: Turkens with their featherless necks, Frizzle chickens with upturned feathers, Araucanas that lay blue or green eggs. He chose those chickens just for the delight of his children. But because I grew up in the country, I also knew the downside of raising chickens: snakes and possums in the henhouse, dogs chasing a flock and killing indiscriminately, and first-hand experience with processing chickens for Sunday dinner. I have smelled chicken death and plucked the feathers from many slaughtered chickens. (I never could eat chicken right after participating in processing those chickens for food; it would take about two weeks for me to get that raw, bloody meat smell--as well as the acrid smell of singed feathers--out of my mind.)

When our Chickens-in-the-City teacher turned to the more earthy topics associated with raising chickens, people began shifting a bit uncomfortably in their chairs. He described the raccoon he caught in his henhouse two months ago which he dispatched with a shovel. His Ameraucana hen was so traumatized by the raccoon invasion that she hadn't lain an egg since then; most of the time she crouches under bush cover at the edge of the henyard. The raccoon had killed one hen and left another near death. The chicken owner had to dispatch the second hen in order to diminish her misery, and he described the various ways to kill a chicken. "Can we call you to dispatch our chickens when something like that happens?" one Chickens-in-the-City student asked, plaintively.

I know that I could kill a chicken if I had to, but over the years, I've left the butchering to other people. My husband followed the policy of my grandmother Margaret Cole Dugat: a chopping block and an ax. My grandmother Benton would take a chicken and break its neck by whirling it around and then snapping the neck with a flick of her wrist. I was the chicken-plucker. Most people in the class, however, seemed to be interested mainly in egg production and in the counter-culture act of owning chickens in the back of their very suburban yards.

While standing in the chicken yard looking at the construction of the teacher's henhouse, my husband and I heard the call of a white-throated sparrow, one of my favorite bird songs, perhaps because the song reminds me of the times we hiked in the cool coniferous forests of Minnesota and heard that bird calling from deep within the woods. Despite the migraine, I felt that the Chickens-in-the-City class had exceeded my expectations.

We're #1! (Unfortunately)

Years ago we lived near Baton Rouge, Louisiana; I taught on the LSU campus while my husband was in graduate school. The area along the Mississippi River from Baton Rouge to New Orleans was known as "Cancer Alley," called that because of all the industrial plants along the river and anecdotal evidence of high rates of cancer (unsubstantiated scientifically). Well, now it seems we're in another toxic place: Forbes just named Atlanta the most toxic city in the United States. Forbes based its calculations on 

the number of facilities that reported releasing toxins into the environment, the total pounds of certain toxic chemicals released into the air, water and earth, the days per year that air pollution was above healthy levels, and the total number of Superfund sites.

Actually, by "Atlanta," Forbes means "metro-Atlanta," including Marietta and Sandy Springs. Interestingly enough, cities such as New York don't make the top-ten of Environmentally Toxic Cities in the U.S. A. because of fine subway systems that encourage people to leave their cars at home. Here in Atlanta, we have MARTA, a system in financial difficulties and, according to Wikipedia, "by far the largest United States transit agency not to receive state operational funding." (Yay, Georgia! so progressive!)  The other states in the top ten ETCUSA:

2. Detroit
3. Houston
4. Chicago
5. Philadelphia
6. Cleveland
7. Los Angeles
8. Jacksonville, Florida
9. Baltimore
10. Portland

Oh, and in my home state of Texas-- "Houston, we have a problem," an air problem, that is, according to Jim Lester, vice president of the Houston Advanced Research Center.

Facilities in Houston released 88.7 million pounds of toxic chemicals in the environment in 2007, and the former site of a methanol fire and chemical explosion number among the city's 50 Superfund locations. Factories that serve the local petrochemical industry emit benzene and 1-3 butabeine, toxins proven to be particularly harmful, that the area's intense sunlight and lack of wind keep trapped in the local area's atmosphere.

Fortunately, I wasn't planning to return to the Houston area to live, even though five generations of my family preceded me in making the Houston-Baytown-Beaumont area their home. But where to go if Atlanta gets too toxic for my tastes? Well, according to Forbes, here are the top ten LEAST toxic cities (among "the  country's 40 largest metropolitan statistical areas") in which to live:

1. Las Vegas, NV
2. Sacramento, CA
3. Riverside, CA
4. Austin, TX
5. Seattle, WA
6. San Diego, CA
7. Virginia Beach, VA
8. San Jose, CA
9. New York
10. Phoenix, AZ

Oh, well....none of these cities is on my list of dream places to which to retire. So I guess I can still keep dreaming......