Saturday, November 3, 2012

The Case for Being Better Humans - Part 2


I believe that the color of your skin and the accent in your voice do not matter.  If you do not speak the same language as I do, that is just as much my fault as yours.

I believe that you do not get to choose the person you fall in love with. 

I believe that to deny someone legal status or rights based on the point directly above (marriage, for those who don’t get my point) is wrong, immoral, unethical, and goes against the fabric of our society’s progress towards equality.  Either we claim equality, or we do not.

I believe that a two-celled zygote is not yet a human being.  I don’t know what point the zygote goes from being a mass of cells to something that we choose to call human life, but I would bet it is someplace around viability outside the womb.  Until that point, it is not two lives we are debating but one.  And in either case, no one can stake a claim to knowing something that is a moral decision.

I don’t care whether you believe in the God of Christ, the God of Moses, the word of Allah, or the word of Buddha.  I don’t care if you call yourself a Sikh, a Hindu, a Catholic or a Lutheran.  I only care about one thing – do you treat the people you come into contact with on a daily basis with love, respect, kindness and fairness?  If so, you have my love, respect, kindness and fairness.  If you do not, or if you seek to deny anyone those four things, then you have not earned mine.

America is the greatest nation on earth.  But America is not the greatest nation it can be.  I do not believe in the notion of American exceptionalism.  In my short lifetime, I have witnessed Vietnam, Watergate, bussing and segregation, Iran-Contra, Grenada, the failed “War on Drugs”, Whitewater, impeachment for a blowjob, 9/11, the invasion of Iraq, torture and Guantanamo, Katrina (and now Sandy), mortgage-backed securities and textbooks for children designed by creationists.  No nation that wants to be seriously considered the greatest nation on earth can claim that mantle without looking critically at those things and ensuring they never happen again.

America is the greatest nation on earth.  I know this when I see us sending a rover to Mars, dropping a man in freefall from low orbit, watch what Apple creates, think about Apollo 11, listen to jazz, play bluegrass, see the response to 9/11, hear the support for our troops, walk the beach in Cambria, fly over the plains of Kansas, see the love that is shared between friends and neighbors. 

I believe these two views are not exclusive; I can love my country and be critical of it at the same time.

I believe that it is possible to disagree about the basics of politics, religion or culture, but only if you and I have a respectful one-on-one discussion about it to find the sticking point.  If you feel that scripture is inerrant and that leads to our disagreement about gay marriage or abortion, that’s fine.  But let’s then have the discussion about the inerrancy of scripture instead of the one about the other two things.  Then we can have a productive discussion.

I believe that anything can be corrupted by greed or power.  Exhibits A through G: Barry Bonds, Karl Rove, Anthony Weiner, Lance Armstrong, Ted Haggard, the Catholic Church hierarchy and Richard Nixon.  I believe we should stop acting surprised when someone behaves this way.

I believe that people can act in very magnanimous and beautiful ways.  I believe we need to reward those people, especially the ones who do it for no recognition.

I believe that there is a way to be a faithful doubting Christian, but I believe most “Christians” don’t understand this.  I believe this is becoming the undoing of the Christian church.

I believe that music has the power to heal, transform and transport, and opens up the largest window we have in our lives to the eternal, to the spiritual, to God.  I don’t care how you define it, but I truly believe music is what keeps us alive.

And finally, I believe that only one thing really matters in our lives, and that is love.  Who did you love, what did you love, how deeply did you love, how freely did you give yourself to unconditional love, no matter how much it may have hurt.  The acts you committed in the service of safety, fear, your own comfort, power, avarice or greed will leave you empty at the end of your life.  The acts you committed in the name of love will leave you full.

My friends, I will not post about politics anymore on Facebook.  This is a medium that has lost its luster for me, and revealed itself to be shallow and depraving.  As I said above, if you and I can have a deep conversation about any of this, I am all ears.  I live for these conversations.

But posting photos of what Einstein said, or saying “Like if you love Jesus” or recycling the latest meme from Moveon.org or the GOP goes against the grain for me, and I can’t stomach it anymore.  I am mortified by some of the things I have seen human beings say in some of these threads, and I can’t be part of it anymore. 

I’m voting for Obama on Tuesday.  I don’t care who you vote for; just vote.  But I don’t expect my vote or an Obama win will do anything to change our country.  Only we can do that.  So I will look for other, more productive avenues to do so.

Open your hearts.  Put on some music.  Let love rule.  Because on November 7, after this is all over, nothing will have changed unless we decide it is time for it to change and do it.

Friday, November 2, 2012

The Case for Being Better Humans - Part 1


Tonight I re-watched “The Dish”, an Australian movie about the true tale of the satellite dish operators who were responsible for making sure the images from Apollo 11 were broadcast around the globe, so that everyone could see Neil Armstrong taking his first steps on the moon.

I found myself profoundly moved by the re-watching, probably more so than I had been the first time.  (I honestly can’t even remember when I first watched it, although I think it was on a plane; it may have been on a flight to London in 2001.)  What moved me was very clear, though, and I can lay it out in three main points:

  • ·      First, we lost Neil Armstrong this year.  It was easy to forget how consciousness altering that first moonwalk was to everyone who lived on the planet at the time.  I remember watching the TV as the event unfolded and stepping outside to look at the moon, and trying to reconcile what I saw on the TV with what I saw in my own eyes.  I was 5 at the time – I can’t imagine what my grandparents (who I watched it with and who lived through WWI, the Great Depression and WWII) were thinking.

  • ·      Second, I have been reading a great deal lately about the scientific approach to music, and specifically the debates that have raged through the centuries about temperament, or how to tune instruments.  What struck me most in the reading is how many great scientific minds in human history have weighed in on the topic of musical temperament: Pythagoras, Euclid, Aristotle, da Vinci, Galileo, Kepler, Descartes and Newton (to name just a few) all wrote treatises on music.

  • ·      Third, we are days away from an election in this country where one half of the electorate believes in things that fly in the face of scientific inquiry, logical reasoning and empirical data.  For them, global warming is a hoax, evolution is debatable, Jesus appeared in the Western Hemisphere, rape is “a gift from God” if it leads to pregnancy, and in all of the above cases it is perfectly suitable for Government intervention to ensure that viewpoint.


The people who have been reading my posts over the last years will not be surprised that I find the situation we face going into this election to be against the grain of everything that our greatest human minds have strived for.  I asked myself during “The Dish” if our great country could even be capable of mounting something like a moonwalk again.  To our credit, we have in the last year witnessed incredible images from Mars, and seen a man freefall from the highest point ever and live to tell the tale. 

But I ask, are we, in 2012, a species that believes in the scientific and logical processes that got us where we are today?  Or are we a species that succumbs to our greatest fears and superstitions?