Be the Change

Hold Tight! Coming Soon!

2011-04-28T23:56:00.001-05:00

A brand spankin' NEW version of this blog! I'll be changing over a bunch of hosting stuff so this blog will appear on its own domain! The changes will be happening this weekend, and I aim to make them go smoothly, but I can't guarantee that. I'll get everything up and going and announce (via twitter, here, FB, etc) when the new blog goes live.

So, hold your horses!

Reflections On Owning a Uterus

2011-04-21T12:58:00.005-05:00

It seems in recent years, the fact that I am female has become both less and more important to me. Less because I have realized I am not necessarily defined by the set of reproductive organs I happen to posses, and more because other people choose to define me in that manner only.

As I sit in my local coffee shop (where they've gotten to know my order, by the way), I am immensely and intensely aware of the amount of privilege I have just to be here in this spot.

The fact that I am wearing jeans and a hipster v-tee (complete with old man cardigan) is entirely the result of the work of women who came before me.

The very fact that I can choose to have a (hopeful) career as a writer rather than stay at home to take care of kids is the direct result of people who came before me - Virginia Woolf. Emily Dickinson. George Eliot (yes, a pseudonym). Jane Austen. The Brontes. Any number of voiceless, nameless female poets and authors who never got the chance to take credit for their work.

At the same time, I cannot help but feel that my fight is not over. Though I have, for the most part, had numerous opportunities, I have still experienced and lived in a culture in which I feel like my every contribution is evaluated on the basis that I am a woman. There are many, especially in theology, who will not even listen to me because I am a career-oriented female. I have been told on numerous occasions that I need to take care in planning my future around possible children - even directly after I have told said person that I have absolutely zero desire to have children or even to be pregnant.

The most searing of these memories was a kind of watershed moment in my feminism, and it's high time I discuss it openly. I may have mentioned it in passing on the blog, and there's not a liberal friend of mine who does not know this story. But I fear that not everyone in my audience does.

I have a very conservative extended family. As in, so far right that they made me uncomfortable even when I was a conservative (yes, there was a time). As in, when I was a junior in high school and mentioned "My friend Chris, who is a Democrat-" my uncle from this family interrupted and said to my dad, "You let her be friends with Democrats?" Yes, that type of conservative.

Needless to say, I love this family, but I don't always enjoy time spent around them - I feel like I have to bite my tongue a lot to keep the peace, and have only recently become more open and more brave about "coming out" as a feminist. Maybe, the reasoning goes, my actions can shake up their worldview.

This particular moment came just over a month after I returned from my study abroad in Oxford, England. I was all kinds of jazzed on academia - I'd just spent four months in a city that revels in it, after all. The smell of old library books, the feel of bricks older than my home country, and the click of cobblestone under my feet were still very fresh memories and elements of my life that I missed dearly.

In June of 2007, I was in a strange spot, in between worlds, as it were. I was looking ahead to post-graduation - plans for the future and so on - and looking longingly backward at my favorite place on Earth. At the time, I was considering a few different options, and all of them involved more school, and all of these schools were far, far away from my hometown of Sioux Falls, SD.

That month, I also took a trip with a friend so that he could visit his girlfriend and so that I could get out of the city. My conservative family lives up there, and so I stayed in their basement guestroom. It was, overall, a fun weekend - I got to reconnect with a friend from my Oxford time and see family whom I rarely get to see.

On my last day there, my uncle was getting ready to leave for work and we were talking in the kitchen. Naturally, the question of what I was planning on after graduation came up and I told him my genuine thoughts at the time - that I was considering graduate school back in England. He asked me if I had the opportunity to live there long term if I would. High on the sadness of having just returned from the best four months of my life, I replied honestly and succinctly: "Oh absolutely, no question."

"Well, what are you going to do when you get married and start having kids?"

"I don't know if that's in my plan. I want to work for a long time yet."

And then the bomb dropped: "What? You know, Dianna, that's something you should do. You need to have a bunch of Christian kids because the Muslims are reproducing at a faster rate than the Christians are, so we need good Christian families."

While in the four years since the exact wording has been lost, the sentiment was exactly as reported. It is my duty - nay, my calling - as a Christian with ovaries to have Christian children. Because of "the Muslims."

To my uncle, this was probably just another conversation, one that he probably doesn't even remember.

For me, it was a watershed. I have thought about it over and over again in the years since, especially whenever someone challenges something I do because I am a woman (and as a theology major in undergraduate and an English major in graduate, both at a conservative Christian schools, this happened far more than I would like to think). And each year and each new rethinking of the situation has brought a new level of horror upon that statement.

As I became more progressively liberal, I realized the completely ridiculous idea that just because I am Christian that my kids would also turn out to be Christian. Indeed, in my experience, those in my life with parents who were the most militantly fundamentalists are the ones who turned out to be the most militant atheists in adult life. And my own experience: my parents are a pretty conservative bunch.

As I became more aware of the foster care and adoption problems in the US of A and elsewhere, I realized how entirely selfish it would be for me to produce lots of children when millions of kids are going hungry and need a loving home.

As I got to know some Muslim friends in graduate school, I became much more aware of how entirely stupid it is to think that Christians and Muslims are somehow at odds, especially so much so that we have to worry about their population.

Each subsequent reflection on this statement has only served to reinforce how much I don't want to follow that preset path, that "You have a uterus, so you should have children" mindset.

Having the ability to shove a watermelon out from between my legs does not mean I have a godly duty to do so.

And mindsets like this are why my job as a feminist is not finished. And why I come across as a "feminazi" - a term that denigrates not only the legitimate protests and complaints of feminists but also the suffering of millions upon millions of people...the only people who should ever be called "Nazis" are Nazis.

And this, in a nutshell, is what the modern feminist discussion is all about: The desire and ability to be recognized not merely for our ability to produce children, but for our ability to be great contributors to society in of ourselves. Pinning a woman's worth onto the children she may or may not have (which, despite protestations to the contrary, is what that mindset does) turns her into an incubator for her progeny, makes her worthless as a human being, and fails to recognize her as an independent person with thoughts, goals, hopes and dreams all her own.

And that is what our fight is about: to be recognized as human, to be known for what we can contribute - to math, to science, to literature, to theology, to art, to ... life - not for what we can reproduce. My fight, my fellow woman's fight, is to be known for who we are, not for the little runts we might possibly take care of.

And we do so by telling our stories, by changing the narrative with our lives, by living in a way that contradicts and tells everyone in the past who has told us no: "No, you are wrong."

Join me.

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Disclaimer: This post is in no way meant to downplay or negate the great contribution of mothers to the world. Encapsulated, my thought is this: Being a mother is a wonderful thing. Being forced or expected to be a mother, simply because I have a uterus, is not. There is a distinction.

Extreme Couponing: A Discussion

2011-04-13T15:24:00.004-05:00

A couple of weeks ago, on NPR's "Wait Wait Don't Tell Me..." one of the panelists was shocked to learn that there was an upcoming show on TLC about "extreme couponing." She thought it sounded rather boring - "how can you make a show out of something like that?" For the moment, on the radio show, it was a source of great humor and laughter.

At the time of this NPR broadcast, I'd been seeing commercials for Extreme Couponing almost every single day and was thinking I might watch the premiere. Being currently unemployed, I unfortunately have a lot of time to watch TV - which has the added benefit of allowing me to hone critical thinking skills in terms of the media (example: I adore the portrayal of a career woman who actually is living a balanced and respectable life in TNT's The Closer). But I digress.

Extreme Couponing follows the lives of a select group of people as they spend most of their free time searching through newspaper ads, websites and even, yes, going door to door in the their neighborhood, looking for coupons. They are all about the deal, the chase, the success story. And in a way, it's stunning to see someone get $1200 worth of products for $51 and change.

But then you realize that the "haul" is 200 boxes of pasta, 186 bottles of Gatorade, and a 175 candy bars.

And you begin to think that there is something very, very wrong with this picture.

The way the show works is that they follow these "extreme couponers" on a shopping trip - everything from the preparation for the trip, which can take up to three days of clipping and calculating, to the shopping itself to the trip home. It's obvious that they are pros at this task - frequently, the pre-trip interviews are posed against a backdrop of their previous hauls. One lady, who is married with one young boy, has shelves built into her garage for all the stuff that she buys...and yet she still goes shopping for more. She has enough pasta, pop, treats, and canned goods to survive the Second Coming and then some.

And yet she still wants more.

The thing that I find most disturbing about the show is not the act of saving money, but the idea of saving money unnecessarily. These people are so good at what they do that they don't even need to do it anymore. I mean, what are you going to do with 200 boxes of different kinds of pasta? What are you going to do with 186 bottles of Gatorade, especially when you yourself say that you don't exercise (sidenote: Gatorade, in large quantities, is dangerous for you if you're not exercising)?

Only one of the five people on the show donate their goods to a local charity/food bank.

And this highlights a disturbing trend in American society: We are way too concerned about STUFF. We are way too concerned about the narrative we can tell others, the feeling of awe that saving 99% on groceries inspires in others. But saving that 99% is worthless in practicality if the food simply expires before you ever have a chance to use it - you're actually throwing money away, money that would be perfectly good and useful in many other areas.

And TLC celebrates it.

My friend Kirby referred to the show as the precursor to Hoarding, another TLC show in which people have literally filled their houses with stuff and need therapy to clean out their lives. But the mood in that show is far different from the mood in Extreme Couponing. They are both about the acquisition of THINGS, but one is celebrated while the other is pitied, but they are different parts of the same disorder.

Let's get a conversation going:

What are your thoughts on the prevalence of shows that, on the one hand, celebrate the acquisition of things while ignoring the possible disorder that underlies them? Do you find these to be bad or good examples? Is there redemption here?

Feel free to wax poetic in the comments - I'll be reading and responding.

Love Wins: God is Bigger than the Boogeyman.

2011-03-27T10:18:00.018-05:00

There's a song by David Crowder Band that inexplicably makes me like them again, despite only really having a mild affection for them in college, and a sort of hometown affection for them while I was living in Waco. From their Church Music album, the song "Oh, Happiness!" bursts out, loud and celebratory, proclaiming loudly and happily about the grace of God.

The chorus is one that would make a lot of Calvinists balk, however: "Oh happiness! There's grace enough for us and the whole human race."

The verses get worse. The only nod to the exclusivity of the Gospel message - an exclusivity which the American church holds onto with a death grip - is the line "all who come." The rest of the song refers to "something that mends all of it," and the sounds of church bells ringing, celebrating the fact that "everything can be redeemed, we can be redeemed, oh, all of us."

But let's think for a minute what we're singing there when we sing along with this song in the car, on KLOVE or (if you're in South Dakota), KNWBC.

"Oh happiness! There's grace enough for us and the whole human race."

Grace enough. For the whole human race, including us.

Crowder's message in this short, sweet, simple song is one, ultimately, of inclusion. Very few theologians would deny that Crowder is correct when he sings that "everything will be redeemed," and that this is a reason to rejoice. It's straight out of the letters of Paul and the mouth of Jesus - all this world will eventually pass away to reveal a new heaven and new earth, a phrase likely meaning simply new world altogether. It will be a world in which, as the Lord's Prayer hopes for and solicits, God's will is done on earth as it is in heaven. The two will be joined as one and the kingdom of heaven will reign over all - a world of perfect community, perfect love, perfect relationships, a world without murder, rape, greed, robbery, or Wall Street.

But things get better than that! Grace is extended to ALL.

Crowder is not alone in his assertion that redemption is extended to all of us. This is a notion passed down from the Biblical fathers to the Church fathers throughout the Christian Church for centuries upon centuries. Jesus' blood on the cross is redemptive, for any and all.

Full stop.
Period.

How many of you mentally added an "if" to that sentence?

Come on, raise your hand.

Many of us been trained so hard and so long in that particular doctrine of the church that to question it, to cut off the "if" statement at the end of the sentence is like hitting the brakes right after getting the car up to 60mph. It's jarring. I bet, even now, some of you readers are scrolling back up, looking for some wiggle room, some place where I don't propose what you're thinking.

But hitting the brakes on that sentences is precisely what Rob Bell does in his latest book, Love Wins. Even before the book was released, it caused a massive stir, based mostly on pre-release materials about the book, and not actual analysis of the book itself. In it, critics say, Bell proposes a theology that borders on univeralism, if it is not outright univeralist. He proposes a new way of looking at heaven and hell and proposes that hell may not be eternal.

Now, I need to clarify a few things before we go on: This book is not a theological treatise. You'll probably read, if you look around the internet enough at enough blogging sites with reviews of the book, commentary that makes this mistake. Bell is not attempting to create a new version of the Institutes. Or Luther's Theses. Or Karl Barth's Church Dogmatics.

It simply cannot be read that way. If you go into the book looking for precisely laid out Biblical proof that gives you a definitive answer, you're going to find what appear to be gaps, holes, leaps, and misreadings. And that's purposeful. Because Bell isn't concerned about giving us "the answer." He isn't giving us a volume on "Why I Am Not a Believer in 'X' Doctrine" to use as a clobber book when we get in late night arguments with friends in the dorm. He's giving us thoughts on a topic.

Toward the end of the first chapter of the book, Bell has asked a series of Socratic questions, questions that are, in a sense, rhetorical. He's going to try to give us some sort of response. This is precisely what he tells us, and the word he uses - response. And that word choice is important - he doesn't ever claim to be giving the answer, he doesn't even really claim that what we think right now is totally and completely wrong. What he does want us to do is be open to the possibility. Be receptive to the idea that there are alternative interpretations, and nothing, especially Hell, is as set in stone as we have made it in the modern day evangelical church.

Second, and related to the first, the genre of the book is "sermon." It is what it is. It reads like a sermon (when you get a copy, read a couple of pages out loud - certainly sounds like a public speaker, eh?). As such, it doesn't end on the last page, just as a sermon doesn't end at the benediction. You are supposed to take it home with you and discuss it. You are supposed to pull out your Bible and examine it. You are supposed to go "oh, I didn't think of it that way before," and sit and digest it for the rest of the week or month or year or however long it takes to pass from your brain to your heart. That is, quite obviously, the type of writing Bell has always done. This genre is especially evident in how he cites Bible verses - he doesn't give us chapter and verse as though he's providing evidence in a court case. No, he references book and chapter, indicating that he wants his reader to go take a look at it for herself, to examine the whole verse in context. It is important that he does this, because he is saying: "Feel free to do your own research. Go on, challenge it, but you'd better have done the reading."

He isn't lazy. He knows what he's doing, and it has been done purposefully. We need to look at the book as a starting point for discussion, not the ending point.

Alright, clarifications are out of the way: let's get down into the nitty-gritty.

If you've paid any attention to this whole debacle surrounding his book, you'll have heard, well, any number of things about the content. But let me clarify what Bell is not proposing: he is not proposing that Hell does not exist. He is not proposing that everyone will just "go to heaven" after they die and therefore Christianity is useless. He is not saying the work of the church doesn't matter.

What he is saying is that God is way bigger than the box we've put on him with our concept of Hell - a place of neverending torment and suffering, all because you didn't respond the right way in the few short years you had here on earth.

What he is saying is that the Bible talks a whole lot more about loving your neighbor than it does about how that neighbor's going to end up in Hell.

What he is saying is that the work of the Kingdom is vastly more important than the fire insurance we've turned it into. And that God is way bigger and more loving than Hell allows Him to be.

And he's also saying: Didn't Jesus, like, defeat Hell? So why are we all sorts of worried about whether or not we're doing it right? As Bell says in the promo and in the book, our current concept of Hell does plant the notion that Jesus and the Father are in opposition, that Jesus saved us from the Father. When, really, didn't Jesus save us from, like y'know, ourselves?

Now, it would be silly of me to go back and rehash everything Bell has to say. You need to read the book to do that.

But I do want to point a few things out: Bell is not groundbreaking. In fact, not a whole lot of what he says is all that new - he just brought the argument into the open in the 21st century. And I'd like to take the rest of this post to examine one of Bell's major influences, CS Lewis, as the ideas presented in Bell are so similar that an examination of one is an examination of the other (indeed, in reading Love Wins, I was writing the titles of Lewis' works in the margins, referencing where these ideas had probably originated for Bell).

CS Lewis, a writer revered by many in the American church, a writer whom many of us read to our kids before bed, a writer whose work has challenged and worked on many of us and brought us to a new life in Jesus, had a very, very similar conception of Heaven and Hell. For Lewis, Hell was not a place of permanent suffering. In The Great Divorce, his major work on Heaven and Hell, he writes of a dream in which he wakes up in a grey town and takes a bus up, up, up in the sky into a green countryside. Upon leaving the bus, he discovers that he is a ghost in this country - the blades of grass are sharp and hard, and everything is immensely more real than he ever could imagine. He and his fellow ghosts from the bus encounter solid people who are residents of this green country. Lewis meets with his childhood hero and the man likely most responsible for making Lewis the man he is: George MacDonald. He and George walk about and discuss the nature of this new, green countryside. Eventually, it becomes clear that, in this green field, they are standing basically at the entrance to heaven.

Lewis asks: "But I don't understand. Is judgment not final? Is there really a way out of Hell into Heaven?"

MacDonald replies:

It depends on the way ye're using the words. If they leave that grey town behind it will not have been Hell. To any that leaves it, it is Purgatory. And perhaps ye had better not call this country Heaven. Not Deep Heaven, ye understand. ... Ye can call it the Valley of the Shadow of Life. And yet to those who stay here it will have been heaven from the first. And ye can call those sad streets in the town yonder the Valley of the Shadow of Death: but to those who remain there they will have been Hell even from the beginning.

After a puzzled look, MacDonald goes on to explain that in our present state, there's no possible way humans can understand eternity. Eternity begins before death, he says, and the glory of Heaven and the torment of Hell both work backward, turning agony into glory, and pleasure into pain, even for our earthly life, in retrospect.

And when, after a discussion about the reality of Heaven versus the mental state of Hell ("Every state of mind, left to itself, every shutting up of the creature within the dungeon of its own mind--is, in the end, Hell. But Heaven is not a state of mind. Heaven is reality itself."), Lewis questions whether or not there is a real choice after death, MacDonald cuts him off, tells him not to bother himself with such questions because he cannot really know and understand the relationship between choice and Time "till you are beyond both."

So, Lewis' answer to the Heaven and Hell question in The Great Divorce is, "Maybe there is grace after death. We don't know. And it's not really our place to speculate, in either direction."

Now, The Great Divorce is a work probably not many are familiar with.

So let's look at one which many people know and love: Narnia.

In The Last Battle, the end of the earth and Narnia tale that closes out Lewis' seven book series, the last two chapters are probably my favorite of any book series - even over and above Harry Potter. Lewis paints a picture of Heaven that is full of grace, beauty and glory. And here, he proposes two things that have made readers over the years scratch their heads, things that only make sense in light of how Lewis views Hell as expounded upon in his other works.

The first is the fate of the dwarves. The children and Aslan bound into that New Narnia, the Heaven like area where you can go running and running and running and never get tired, and where it is impossible to feel frightened, and it's bigger on the inside, so you just keep running further up and further in to this glorious countryside, bounding alongside Aslan and the rest of the happy citizens of that far green country under a swift sunrise. They have discovered that this place is Narnia, but is more real than any Narnia they had ever experienced before.

And as they are running around and rejoicing, they realize that, through the stable they have just come through, the dwarves who had entered with them, are not enjoying the beauty of the land, are not jumping and celebrating with them. They are sitting, huddled together, by themselves in the same spot where they had first entered.

They are still in the stable. They are, as Rob Bell puts it, at the party but not experiencing it. When the girls try to force the dwarves to see the world around them, the dwarves reply obstinately, "The dwarfs are for the dwarfs" and insist that they are still trapped in the stable.

Hell is being at the party and not knowing it. Hell is a state of mind, a separation that YOU have put up between yourself and God, not a place that God sent you because "you didn't live right."

The second thing that happens is very unusual, and is probably the one thing people point to if they want to call Lewis a heretic. There is a Calormene, a separate race in the world of Narnia which is often believed to be either Muslims or Hindus. And he is there, in Heaven. He had served his god, Tash, in good faith and had lived out a life that resembled more closely that of Narnians than Calormenes. Aslan tells him upon finding him in that heavenly countryside: "I take to me the services which thou hast done to him. For he and I are of such different kinds that no service which is vile can be done to me, and none which is not vile can be done to him."

There's not really a way around it. This theme shows up over and over again in Lewis' works, reflected in Till We Have Faces, A Grief Observed, Mere Christianity, That Hideous Strength, and Surprised by Joy. Lewis' view of Hell as a mentality, and his view that people would be given a chance at redemption after death, a chance to see that far green countryside should they choose to have it, permeate all his works.

If we're going to call Rob Bell a heretic, we have to put down Narnia as well. And I know far fewer Christians willing to do that.

Luke 20:38 tells us that God is not the God of the dead, but instead the God of the living.

Instead of emphasizing a theology of Hell which turns God into a bastard of a dictator, commanding that you arbitrarily say the right words in the right order in order to be saved from something, we have a God of the living, a God concerned about how you "drag the future into the present," concerned about how you are treating your neighbor and about how you love in community.

We are not saved from Hell. We are saved to Heaven. We are saved to living a life of grace, beauty and love. Jesus' atoning sacrifice was not about saving us from Hell, which, despite lip service to the contrary, is the main thrust of theology in the American church (I blame John Edwards' "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," frankly). Our theology has become sin-focused and Hell-focused, when it was never meant to be. We are concentrating more on the fate we are saved from than what we are saved to.

That, my friends, makes all the difference.

How we think about Heaven and Hell does affect our life here and now. If we place Heaven and Hell as far off, far away things, we separate ourselves from them. We put them far in the future. And we devalue our life now - our lives merely become pit stops on the way to eternity, a mere 70 years or so (or less) in which we have to choose what we're going to spend all of eternity doing. When we put the emphasis on being saved from Hell, by acting through a magic prayer or what have you, or even by living your life in a certain way, we place the emphasis wrongly. We are to work on bringing the love of God to our neighbor, not by telling our neighbor he is going to Hell if he doesn't respond correctly, but by telling him of the infinite, unrelenting, all forgiving, all loving and all good God who is working right now to bring more good and more life and more joy into the world. We do not tell our neighbor of the fate that awaits him if he decides that his pleasure is more important than some far off, far away eternal torment. We tell him of what God is doing, right here and right now. Of a God who died not to save us from Hell, but to take us to a further up and further in community with Him. Of a God who knows him, who created him, and who knows, understands, and wants to be a part of his story.

That is the God I speak of. My God doesn't "test me" to see if I'm getting it right and, if I'm not, sits back and wags his eternal finger over the button that sends me to a fate worse than death. My God calls me to participate in a loving, graceful, beautiful world with him, one which will be a fuller experience of a more real world, regardless of whether or not a Hell exists eternally.

Isn't that, ultimately, a better story?

In closing, CS Lewis writes in a little known sermon called "The Weight of Glory" about this mental status of Hell - emphasizing that the choices we make every day are steps that we take into creating our own Hell, into building that wall between us and God that will be harder (but not insurmountable), after death. He writes, in what is often quoted by not always understood:

There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilisations--these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit--immortal horrors or everlasting splendours. This does not mean that we are to be perpetually solemn. We must play. But our merriment must be of that kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously--no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption. And our charity must be a real and costly love, with deep feeling for the sins in spite of which we love the sinner--no mere tolerance, or indulgence which parodies love as flippancy parodies merriment. Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbor is the holiest object presented to your senses. If he is your Christian neighbor, he is holy in almost the same way, for in him also Christ vere latitat--the glorifier and the glorified, Glory himself, is truly hidden.

Every choice we make creates a Hell or calls Heaven into our lives. In my choices, I choose, ultimately, to err on the side of Love. And it is in that truth that we can sing along with David Crowder: "There's grace enough. For us. And the whole human race." And we know we can experience that grace right here, right now. Grace that is about so much more than avoiding Hell. Or even about whether or not Hell is eternal. A grace that defeats death. That goes beyond death. That maybe, just maybe, bypasses death altogether and says that you have a chance. Dead or alive, you have a chance because my love is infinite, and extensive, and unfolding in numerous different ways and numerous different places all over the world.

It is, ultimately, a grace we can't understand, but we can celebrate and not fear.

And it is bigger and better than anything we can imagine, even bigger than Hell.

And isn't that, in the end, the Gospel story?

For the Men: Woman Like Me

2011-03-13T11:08:00.006-05:00

When I first registered for college, I was a political science and communications major. Shortly after I graduated from high school, things changed and I felt called to ministry in the church. I wasn't sure what it would look like, but I thought seminary and ordination would be in my future. I was incredibly excited about this possibility, and I knew that at the very least, I had been called to study theology. When I told one of my friends who happens the son of a Southern Baptist minister, he quoted the Bible at me and told me I couldn't do it because I'm a woman.

When my mother was starting college, she received a full ride scholarship to the college in her town. Her high school guidance counselor told her she shouldn't take it because she'd be taking the place of a man. She went anyway, but has frequently looked back on that moment and wondered about her abilities, especially when it came to traditionally male disciplines like math and science.

There is no way I can make those who are not women understand the discrimination that a woman faces day in and day out. I wish it was possible for men to do a "Black Like Me" sort of investigative journalism story, but it would only scratch the surface of the misogyny (internal and external) women face every single day.

Every time I discuss the pay gap, the lack of female CEOs in Fortune 500 companies, the fact that only 17% of national political offices are held by women, I get rebuffed. I get told that I don't understand the statistics (despite having done my research and read article after articles that breaks down the statistics and take a look at the actual studies). I get told that the perception of discrimination is not the same as intentional discrimination - as though hiring managers must wake up in the morning thinking "I'm going to discriminate against women today" in order for the statistic to be legitimately reflective of discrimination. I get told that these things can be explained because "women just don't want to go into those fields." I get told that I don't understand it.

But I do, far more than they know.

So I issue this challenge to the men in my life.

For one week, I want you to consider how others would perceive you if you made that decision as a woman.

Before you speak up and disagree with an authority figure in class, think: are you merely being assertive, or could you be painted as a "bitch"? Would being called a bitch stop you from speaking up?

Before you go out dancing, consider what message your clothes may be sending about you - should you cover up so you don't accidentally "advertise" to an unscrupulous person and risk sexual assault?

When you do go out and get a drink in a bar, consider how carefully you have to watch your drink so that someone doesn't slip a drug in (this actually happens - a friend of mine was roofied just last night and woke up in the ER).

If you're applying for jobs, consider whether or not being a woman could get in the way of you being hired - is this a position of power over others? Statistically, you're less likely to get the job. And if it's an entry level one with opportunity for advancement, consider how easy it'll be for you to move up. Again, assertiveness for a man is often perceived as bitchiness for a female.

Think about what it'd be like if you decided to run for office. Would you have a better chance of winning? What would the media say about you? How would it be perceived if you showed emotion - like crying - in a setting with constituents, talking about something important to you?

These are the things women must consider day in and day out. When considering jobs, it is important for women to see other women in those same positions of power - it's much harder to be the pioneer in a position of power than it is to follow someone else's already blazed trail. If I know a woman can do it, I'm more likely to try.

When going out, we have to keep a careful eye on our surroundings for our own safety - 1 in 6 women will be the victim of either an attempted or completed rape in her lifetime. When deciding on clothing, we have to think about whether or not it would give men the wrong perception that we are their property and that we're "advertising."

Women still have a long way to go - we do have a lot more opportunities and possibilities than our mothers before us or their mothers before them - but until we stop seeing "What designer are you wearing?" as a legitimate question for the female Secretary of State, we still have lots of work to do. And it would help if we had empathetic men on our side, men who recognized the privilege that being male affords them.

So take a few minutes this week, strap on a pair of pumps, and walk a few miles in my shoes. You might just be surprised.

Japan: A Response to Suffering

2011-03-12T18:04:00.003-06:00

Over the past couple of days, I've gotten a lot of phone calls, facebook messages and general expressions of concern over my well being. If you didn't know, however, I'm back in the USA and was not affected (at least not physically) by the earthquake. Where I was living in Japan is okay as well, though this event has forever changed the Japanese people as it is one of the largest natural disasters to ever hit the island nation.

Where I was living in Japan is a good 600 miles from where the earthquake hit - a good six hours by the fastest bullet train. Even with the tsunami, Shimonoseki was unaffected. Which is good. Oddly enough, if I had kept my original plans to go to Australia during the summer break, I would have been in Tokyo at the time of the quake. So there's that.

The photos coming out of Japan are stunning and scary. Over 600 people are already confirmed dead, thousands are missing, and millions have been displaced from their homes.

So the question is: What the hell do I do? What do you do in disasters such as this? And I don't mean physically - survival techniques and all that. I mean how do you, as a person not directly involved, respond?

You could make terrible jokes like a CNN anchor apparently did.

You could blame the victims.

You could bring up Bible verses about how it's the end of the world.

But none of these things are forms of comfort. None of these things actually provide any sort of help - emotionally, physically OR spiritually (especially not the last one - the whole end times thing sort of turns God into a manipulative bastard in these situations).

What you can do is be there for the people of the area affected. If you can't travel to help (and you shouldn't if you're not qualified for these situations), then help fund those organizations who do (list below). Pray for the people there. Offer your comfort in any way you can, even if it's just the word equivalent of a pat on the back.

And for God's sake, don't diminish their pain. This goes for any type of suffering, in any situation. The worst thing we can do to people is to tell them their pain is somehow non-existent or imagined or somehow deserved. To deal with another person's suffering is to take their pain upon ourselves, to ease the burden a little by taking some of it upon ourselves. Each time we empathize, each time we take another person's pain and make it our own, we do a tiny, tiny bit, a little reflection of what Christ did when he died on the cross.

If you want to help the people of Japan, my friend Hitomi from Shimonoseki said on Facebook this morning that they need people to donate blood. One of the ways you can help with that is to donate to the American Red Cross. The Red Cross is a very trustworthy organization, and donating directly online is a good way to make sure the money gets used quickly - all those phone text donations can take up to 90 days to process.

Another organization I can recommend is Shelterbox. Shelterbox provides food, shelter and medical supplies for people in disaster areas, including tents, tools and water cleaning supplies. They're a good organization, and can do some good in Japan.

Those are two that I recommend who I know have responses going on in Japan right now. If you have another organization in mind, feel free to leave it in the comments.

Guest Posting!

2011-02-22T17:08:00.002-06:00

Sometime between me finding out that I was stuck in Atlanta for two days and me actually checking in for my new flight to Omaha (hopefully finally making my way home), my guest post over at Jesus Needs New PR was posted. It's an off-the-cuff personal examination of the violent rhetoric that we find in Jesus' cleansing of the Temple, and my discomfort with this somewhat violent image of Jesus.

I'll be participating in the comments section shortly, so head on over, give it a read, and see if you can add to the discussion!

It's that time of year again!

2011-02-10T23:35:00.008-06:00

It almost goes without saying: I'm a big time movie buff. I love watching movies, I love going to movies, and I love talking about movies. Or, if I wanted to be pretentious: Films. I love films. If I could have done film study in college, I would have (among many other interests). So every so often, I take advantage of my blogspace and deviate from discussing social justice and issues in the church to discuss something frivolous and fancy free: movies.

As the Oscars are just over two weeks away, I thought it may be time to announce my picks for this year's Oscars, for what it's worth. While I haven't seen all ten best picture nominees, I've seen the big names, and feel pretty confident in my picks. I'll save Best Picture for last, to drum up anticipation (I'm sure you're just dying to hear my selections!).

Here we are, most of the major categories, excluding those I'm not particularly qualified to comment on.

Best Visual Effects: Inception will win this hands down. Though this is a great selection of choices, ranging from Tim Burton's insane Alice in Wonderland to the fun romp that was Iron Man 2, Christopher Nolan's blockbuster piece has enough pull and respect within the Academy to pull an easy win.

Best Cinematography: The Coen brothers' cinematographer Roger Deakins has been nominated for the cinematography category nine times, but something tells me he's still not going to get it. I think Black Swan will eke out a win here, as it is a truly beautiful film, though I wouldn't be surprised if this is Deakins' year. It's a toss up.

Best Editing: I think David Fincher's The Social Network is going to clean up in a lot of "smaller" categories here, and film editing will be one of them.

Best Documentary: Banksy could pull out a win for Exit Through the Gift Shop here, but I highly doubt the Academy will go with the "controversial" pick, especially if the winner can't show his face on TV. The Academy tends to be a bit, shall we say, "fuddy-duddy" when it comes to novelty things unless there's a large undeniable popular movement behind them (see Eminem winning an Oscar), and I don't think Banksy has quite enough pull to reach the more easily offended parts of the Academy. I'm going to go with Restrepo on this one - a doc about one year with a platoon in the deadliest valley in Afghanistan. As "liberal" as Hollywood can be, they like depictions of war (see Saving Private Ryan, The Hurt Locker, Band of Brothers, etc).

Best Original Score: Trent Reznor's score for The Social Network will pull out a well deserved win here - there is not a moviegoer on the planet who doesn't hear this and know IMMEDIATELY what it's from.

Best Original Song: This one's a toss up. I honestly didn't like Tangled all that much, but since it's Disney and people have been raving about it, it might have a chance to win. I doubt Gwenyth Paltrow's Crazy Heart-lite will be able to win in this category, and Toy Story already won a ton of song awards back when the first one came out. I'm going to go ahead and say Toy Story 3 on this one, just for nostalgia's sake.

Best Costume Design: The King's Speech has some brilliant and amazingly well done costumes. The same could easily be said for True Grit, but since the former seems to have more pull this year, I'm going to go with that.

Best Art Direction: Inception. Hands down.

Best Adapted Screenplay: Here we're getting into the larger categories that will take up most of the column inches in newspapers the Monday after. This one's a tough one considering there are a number of fantastic contenders for the little gold man. In my opinion, though, nothing beats Aaron Sorkin's adaptation that was The Social Network, though the Coens' True Grit comes close.

Best Original Screenplay: The King's Speech, no question. David Siedler started it something like 40 years ago, and basically had to wait for the Queen Mother to die until he could finish it, and that's the type of story the Academy salivates over. Not that it doesn't deserve it, but in this case, the odds are clearly weighted in its favor simply because of the obstacles in bringing the film to the screen.

Best Foreign Film: I was amazed to see Tilda Swinton's I Am Love shafted in this category, and as that's the only foreign film I've seen this year, I don't really feel qualified to pick one in this category. I'm thinking, though, with Javier Bardem getting a best actor nod for Biutiful, that it may have more pull with the Academy.

Best Animated Feature: Come on, do I even have to say it? Toy Story 3 will win.

Best Supporting Actress: This is the one acting category I'm most unsure about. Young newcomer Haliee Steinfeld really deserves to be in the best actress category, but apparently the Academy wouldn't know what a leading female role would look like if it stood in front of them with a shotgun - which it did in True Grit. There's a lot of talk surrounding Amy Adams and Melissa Leo from The Fighter, but I, along with Roger Ebert, think this will result in a split in the vote, allowing Steinfeld to take home a statue, albeit one that reads the wrong category name.

Best Supporting Actor: Christian Bale has been shafted by the Academy a number of times, and this will finally be his year. The one that could beat him is Australian Geoffrey Rush for The King's Speech. Jeremy Renner is really fantastic in The Town (and he is that movie's only nomination) but it would be a miracle for him to pull out a win. As much affection as I have for Jeremy Renner, I think Bale will win.

Best Actress: Natalie Portman. No. Question. This role had Oscar written all over it, and she lived up to the hype. And it's well-deserved. Despite having this scene on her acting resume, Portman has proved herself to be a brilliant young actress, and Black Swan is a masterpiece performance from her.

Best Actor: It's his year. And if you have to ask who "he" is, you must be living under a rock. I'm talking about the man who can really wear a sweater, the man who is finally breaking out of the typecast romantic comedy roles he's had for ages, the man who should have won last year for A Single Man, the man whose British accent makes women melt even when he's talking about the most banal of things. Yes, Colin Firth. As much as I love and adore Jesse Eisenberg's performance in The Social Network, as much as Jeff Bridge's was enjoyable as The Dude Redux in True Grit, as much as I like looking at James Franco, I believe Colin Firth rightfully deserves this Oscar. If you haven't seen The King's Speech yet, you must do so just to watch how he puts every little bit of his facial muscle together into accurately portraying a man struggling with a stutter. The gulps and the twitches and the terrified look in his eyes are so believable that when you hear him speak normally, you have to remind yourself that he doesn't actually have a stammer and is a very fluid speaker. I can't praise his performance enough, really.

Best Director: This award could easily go one of two ways. Tom Hooper won the Director's Guild Award for The King's Speech, and 90% of the time, the winner of the DGA goes on to win Best Director. But, Darren Afronosky or David Fincher could slide in for an upset, but the possibility of that is highly unlikely. I want Fincher to win for The Social Network, just as I want Afronosky to win for Black Swan. But realistically, Hooper will take it home for managing to churn out a film that fits everything the Academy adores.

And finally! Best Picture: This one's a hard one. I want Black Swan to win, but I don't think it'll happen. It is, truly, a masterpiece of film and one of those that you think about for weeks after you leave the theater. The same thing goes for The Social Network - as soon as I finished watching it, I wanted to go back to the beginning and watch it again - I've seen it multiple times since, and Sorkin's writing combined with Fincher's direction and the performances of everyone on the cast makes it like West Wing on steroids with college students. It's profoundly engaging, exciting and interesting, and does a great job of capturing the zeitgeist of this generation.

But, that's not what the Academy's always about doing. So while I think The Social Network has a chance to pull out an upset, and while I would love for Black Swan to take home the gold, I have to, begrudgingly, hand this one to The King's Speech. I say begrudgingly because while I loved the film, it was also very much Oscar bait, and very typical safe fare for the Academy. It's brilliant and moving and engaging, but at the end, I want to say it's just a film. It's a good film, but it's like Titanic 14 years ago: It's good, sure, but I don't feel like I learned anything from it that I couldn't have predicted learning just from seeing a trailer. It's missing that extra oomph that I believe both Black Swan and The Social Network have. That said, the climate is against me, and it'll be The King's Speech that takes home the win.

So there you have it: My official predictions and ideas about The 2011 Academy Awards. They air at 7:30PM (CST) on ABC, so be sure to tune it. And feel free to tell me how wrong I am in the comments.

Come, my friends, 'tis not too late to seek a newer world.

2011-02-08T23:15:00.006-06:00

Sometimes I feel like a broken record on this blog. I get going on the ideas of not mis-imagining people, and remember that your neighbor is fundamentally and completely human, just like you and just like me. Often, I feel like I'm just repeating myself over and over in different ways because that is what my fundamental philosophy comes down to: recognizing that when Jesus said to "love your neighbor as yourself," he meant that your neighbor was not just the person whose dwelling was next to you, but that your neighbor is every single person you meet on every single day, and loving them means remembering that they are human beings. But I've slowly been realizing that this means, even so, much much more.

The "as yourself" has always been a little confusing, because "loving oneself" is usually interpreted as a narcissistic "me me me" sentiment. We don't want to say that we "love ourselves" because that gets interpreted in weird and twisted ways - the picture I get is a tan jock in a sport coat with perfectly white straight teeth and perfect hair smiling as he puts on sunglasses and says to himself in the mirror: "Hello, you sexy beast." Or, y'know, Jack Donaghy.

And I think, to some extent, that's the picture Western culture has ingrained in my generation - loving yourself means indulging. It means looking your best at every moment. It means getting Starbuck's, watching Snooki on TV, and basically being a self-indulgent jerk because "If you don't love yourself, who will?"

And I think that's infected our rhetoric in the church. It's all about what you can do to draw closer to Christ, how you can go to that poor country and help the brown people, how you can improve yourself by reading the Bible everyday, how you can grow in understanding.

And those are, in some respect, good things, in moderation. It is important to make selfish decisions once in awhile.

But I think we've also inserted a few words between the "as yourself" in Jesus' statement. He is not, contrary to popular reading, saying "as you love yourself." No, he's saying "as yourself."

Here's how I like to read it: "Love others as though they are a part of you."

We focus too much on parsing the statement into the two separate bits, which I think is a failed interpretation. Separating the sentence into "Love your neighbor" and "as yourself" makes it far too easy to focus on one instead of the other - how can I love my neighbor if I don't love myself first? And then we end up back at square one, concentrating on our own lives and improving our own lot, and putting loving our neighbor in the secondary position because if we don't know how to love ourselves, then how can we love our neighbor in any meaningful way?

But if we're putting ourselves first, we're not loving our neighbor. We're loving ourselves, and our neighbors are an afterthought. They are still this "other" being that is worthy to receive our love once we have our stuff figured out.

But let's put it a different way: Our neighbors are us - by loving them, we love ourselves.

I never feel as alive as I do when I forget who I am.

Everyone knows those moments - when something totally earth shattering happens that causes you to redefine how you see the world around you. It could be something as simple as realizing that you like a food you previously thought inedible. It could be as big as your brother and his wife having a baby. It could be sitting down on the train in India and realizing that "they" are just as concerned about the things you're concerned about - that "they" like to play cards, or "they" enjoy reading Sherlock Holmes as much as you do.

And then you realize, slowly but surely, that the divide between us and them is being chipped away. We can never, really, live life as another person. I am the sum of my experiences to a great extent - South Dakotan, highly educated, unable to remember a time when I couldn't read and write, a world traveler, someone who gets an incredible, inexplicable joy out of being able to put words together in a meaningful manner - and therefore can never be another person than what I am.

The same goes for every single person we encounter in life - they are the sum of everything they've experienced and lived.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson writes in his famous poem about Homer's Ulysses: "I am a part of all I have met; / Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough / gleams that untravelled world, whose margin fades / for ever and for ever when I move."

I am a part of all I have met.

In this poem, Ulysses is an old man reflecting on his life, his past, and deciding to go out for one last big adventure - leaving his young son in charge of his kingdom, and basically abandoning his wife and family. It's at the same time inspiring and disheartening, but every time I read it, I find myself more inspired than saddened. It seems that Ulysses knows exactly what's up when it comes to The Other - when it comes to realizing who you are in relation to others.

Who I am and who you are is a fluid, ever changing, vastly diverse complexity that defies simple explanation. When we say to people "you are the poor and I am the rich, and I will help you out of your situation," we deny their complexity, and subsequently, shoot ourselves in the foot when it comes to loving our neighbor.

We are not separated into neat little boxes of us and them. There is not "the poor" and there is not "the rich," though these categories may make political discourse easier to digest in soundbyte mode (unless you're Rand Paul - then the idea just gets confusing).

There is only us. There is only a vast community of people, intertwined and working together to somehow become better, as a community. As a people. As an "us."

I've never been much for individualism and independence, at least not in the sense that it means I put myself and my career above other people. My niece may only be a few months old, but she is already a part of me, and even more so a part of her parents. And I would be doing her a disservice if I chose to see the world as little separate units of people grouped into particular areas - here we have the poorest of the poor, here we have the somewhat developed world, here we have developed nations who have major problems, here we have the Europeans, the Americans, the Canadians, the Japanese, the Indians.

Forget who you are as an individual, and love your neighbor as you should - as though she is a part of you. Because she is a part of you, just as you, if you drop the pretense of "helping" and begin being a friend, will be a part of her.

"That which we are, we are
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield."

Misimagining People: Revisiting the Concept

2011-01-31T04:04:00.004-06:00

I've written before about the concept of imagining and mis-imagining people - namely, making them fit into the narrative that we think they should fit into - but I'd like to touch on it briefly here again, in discussion of something that came up in talks with a friend tonight.

There are many of you who know me and know my story involving my family, but there are still quite a few of you who don't. For that purpose, I'd like to give you a little background.

This is my brother (in the green shirt):

It should be fairly obvious, but in case you can't tell - he's disabled. Specifically, he has, in technical terms, Trisomy 21, or Down Syndrome. Down's affects development physically and mentally - long story short: he's handicapped.

MJ (short for Matthew Joseph) is 28 years old, and plans to go to Disney World for his 30th birthday in 2 years. He has a part time job doing housekeeping at a hotel in Sioux Falls, and his own apartment that is incredibly messy. He goes to South Dakota Achieve - a post high school center for disabled people in Sioux Falls - in the afternoons, and in the evenings and on weekends, he is active in Special Olympics.

He's also a pretty normal human being. He gets angry - particularly at me - and he can understand when he's being insulted. He worries about things, especially when plans are going to deviate from his normal routine. He'll call my parents just to ask about how their cat is doing in the evening, and then call back again a few minutes later to make sure that Mom knows to pick him up in the morning. He makes incredibly lame jokes, and laughs at the funny things my Dad does. He's a pretty average man.

Growing up, people would ask me "What's it like to have a disabled sibling?" I never knew really how to respond to that question. Being the youngest of three, with MJ as the oldest, my other brother and I have never known anything different. MJ has always been there - it's almost like having a twin. I can't tell you about my experience with him because I don't know what it would be like to have two "normal" siblings.

But what I can tell you is what I've already said: He is a normal human being. He is capable, he understands, and he knows when he's done something wrong or right. He does not spend his entire life uncorrupted from the world in this little hazy bliss of ignorance. He even votes, though I myself had doubts about whether or not he was casting a vote just to please dad. But that may be a place where even I have underestimated him.

There's a pervasive tendency in society to expect total strangers to conform to our preconceived narratives of who people are - as wrong as they may be, we expect certain things when we see certain looks or behaviors, and part of the beauty of human experience is letting people surprise us.

But there seems to be one group that is consistently left out of that recognition and changing of the narrative is that of disabled people. There's a particularly insidious narrative that disabled people are "innocent," they are "angels," they are these "gifts from God who are able to speak clearly to a situation because they don't have a filter." They're our "little buddies," and "like the younger sister we never had." If there's one group we consistently fail to treat as human beings, it's the handicapped.

Even as the sister of a disabled person, it's been a long period of me making the conscious decision to change my attitudes to see MJ as a capable adult. I'm still a little afraid to let him wander about on his own in public, even though he walks to the bus stop and takes the bus by himself almost everyday.

And I have noticed that my coddling him, my refusing to see him as capable, has had a negative effect. When he is around those who see him as this innocent, incorruptible angel who needs help on every little step, he will ask for help on every little step. But left to his own devices, he knows how to do everything we thought him incapable of.

Our narratives about others are not just mental blocks to ourselves and personal hurdles we need to get over in relating to others, but they are narratives that can shape how others perceive themselves.

When MJ is told that he is a capable person and can do what he's trying to do just fine, then he will do it. If I come in and insist that I help him, or that he can't do it, he will internalize that message. It's remarkably clear to see in my own brother, and it's been a remarkable process to work on helping to undo some of that.

When we tell people that they are incapable because of the narratives we see them fitting into, we do them a major disservice of not allowing them to discover on their own whether or not they are capable.

This doesn't just apply to the disabled. This applies to every single person we meet. The narratives we choose to tell ourselves every day can have negative effects on those surrounding us.

When we mis-imagine a person, we also encourage them to mis-imagine themselves. And that is a great tragedy.

The one place where competition is good.

2011-01-22T01:47:00.005-06:00

There are days when the goodness of people makes my eyes well with tears. There are days when I am reminded that the world doesn't truly suck as long as there are good people in it living their lives with goodness. I try, quite often, to be one of those good people, but I see myself constantly outstripped by others in terms of goodness and generosity.

And that's a good thing.

Being the sister of two older brothers, competition is in my blood. There are definitely points when competition is welcome and beneficial, and the race to "do good" is one of those things.

I'd like to share, if I can, a couple of those stories of communities coming together to support those suffering in their midst.

We'll start with something that happened today.

I've talked a lot on this blog about John Green, one of my favorite Young Adult authors, and one half of the vlogbrothers, a Youtube "sensation," as it were.

The other half is his younger brother, Hank Green, who lives in Missoula Montana, is a computer-y guy, and runs a website called "Ecogeek" (I believe).

We also know, from this video, that Hank is dealing with a chronic illness, and has to take daily medication to deal with it. We also know that, already, this medication can get pretty expensive. Up until today, one of Hank's medications cost him $50/month.

Until today.

This morning (well, for me, it was this morning), Hank tweeted: "I very nearly fainted just now at the pharmacy when they told me my script cost is going from $50 a month to $620."

And it got worse: "I am seriously depressed and scared and angry. There's a scheduled increase to $670 in April. That's $8000 a year."

Now, Hank is lucky enough that he has a large following of supporters and fans who were immediately sympathetic to his plight. But, as most of his fans are teenagers or poor English teachers like me, there's not a lot that we could do except on an extremely short term basis. We felt bad, but we honestly didn't know how to even begin to approach the problem. Thankfully, Hank is also a responsible adult, and was discussing alternatives with his doctor.

And then tonight (for me), Hank tweeted this: "Un-credited, mysterious tweet, to unnamed savior who is helping me in a huge way that I cannot discuss. Thank you thank thank you."

Now, as vague as that is, the only real assumption we can make from it is that someone, somewhere, is helping Hank out with his sudden $8,000/year expense, and that is a wonderful thing. That is something that, as the Green brothers would say, is truly made of awesome.

Another story is one that unfortunately involves one of the places that is a scar on the Christian faith in America: Westboro Baptist. This church, for those of you unaware, likes to blame every dead soldier on America's pro-gay policies (to which I go, "what policies?" but that's another matter). They carry signs saying "God Hates Fags" and the like and protest at the FUNERALS of dead soldiers. They're pretty despicable.

And they make their money to travel to all these different places by suing people who protest against them, who infringe on their rights. As a result, there have been a number of creative and awesome protests against WBC.

But none of them beats the human wall.

In Weston, MO, WBC showed up to protest and found that the corner their permit allowed them to protest on was already taken up by literally hundreds of people. The people from the town and from surrounding communities came out in full force, and formed a barrier to keep the WBC protesters from getting anywhere near the funeral, blocking the view with giant American flags and forming a literal human wall.

If that's not the goodness of community coming together, I don't know what is.

True goodness shows up in communities coming together, in helping out a person you've never actually met, in being willing to reach out to help just one person. And it's those ideas that when others see them, they are spurned on to further goodness.

Being good, being someone who loves others and takes care of their neighbor doesn't have to wait until you have that right job or that right living situation. It can start today. It can start now. We hear a lot of those heroes, those people who went running toward the gunshots, those who wrestle the gunman to the ground, but there are people who everyday help the mother in the grocery line behind them pay for their groceries, who give up having a warm dinner so they can help the person next to them, who take the bus instead of a car so they can afford to help others. There are good people all around, and we can use the stories of others doing good to push ourselves on to doing more.

What good are you going to do today?

Soapbox: "Those who can't do, teach."

2010-11-30T23:33:00.004-06:00

Every so often on the internet...Okay, ALL THE TIME, when I'm online and I read an article, I'll scroll down and read some of the comments. Most of the time, the comments thread (especially on sites like Huffington Post, CNN, and MSNBC) gets derailed off into left-right political bickering, even if the article is about a relative innocuous, bipartisan topic (it's amazing what people will bring into the discussion when it's completely irrelevant).

I suppose I do this partly out of habit, and partly to keep an eye on what certain discourse is happening. Occasionally, an astute commenter will point out something I hadn't noticed that changes the meaning of the piece. Sometimes, comments will reinforce my initial reaction to the piece, affirming that I hadn't read it incorrectly and that I am not alone in my opinion. Most of the time, debates are just really, really fun to read.

Today, however, I made the mistake of reading the comments on a Media Matters article about Glenn Beck's stance on the Food Safety Modernization Act that just passed Congress (and how he's misrepresented the debate, but that's old news). Media Matters debates usually end up being kind of fun, so I scrolled down and wasted ten minutes reading comments.

I became extremely upset and frustrated when one person began attacking one of the sources used in the article on the basis that he is a professor. This was seriously the person's argument: " An expert in macroeconomics is an expert in macroeconomics. When I get advice on running companies and profits I will get it from someone who is in that business. Not some professor." Later on, this same poster claimed that "A university professor ... has no real world experience."

Now, that's outrageous enough, but I don't ordinarily get so frustrated at random commenters on the internet that I want to write a blog entry about their argument. No, that desire came a few comments later, when this same person (who was arguing back and forth with some other commenters) commented, in defense of their argument, "Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach."

There is a large portion of people who have a propensity to whip out a cliched saying as though that satisfies the burden of proof, then sit back and watch their "wisdom" sink in. More often than not, it is greeted with a facepalm (see above). That poor argument style is nothing new. In fact, this is not the first time I have seen precisely this aphorism used in a debate (the first time was when it was used against me in a discussion of plagiarism in the classroom, of all things).

My problem is with the complete and utter falsehood of the statement itself.

To imply that a person's argument or professional opinion should be discounted because they are currently employed as a professor, and therefore aren't good at the "real world experience" of the thing they are teaching is to perpetuate an anti-intellectual, anti-education, and anti-elitist attitude.

Let's just look at the complete and utter inanity of such a statement: If you're being taught writing, for example, wouldn't you want to take a class from someone who knows how to write? If you're being taught research-oriented science, wouldn't you want information from someone who's actually got experience developing and testing various experiments? If you're learning to play guitar, wouldn't you want to be taught by someone who knows what they're doing? For goodness sake, if you're going to be taught theology, wouldn't you want someone who has experience as a pastor?

Fundamentally, in order to be good teachers, most teachers (especially at advanced level) have experience in that field, not just in the area of teaching. People have this misinformed conception of teaching that all it consists of is walking into a classroom, picking up a textbook, and reading from it, expecting the students to absorb information.

And maybe that is what many people experienced with teachers growing up. But that is not a good teacher.

A good teacher is someone who not only knows how to do the activity at hand, but someone who can explain it in the simplest terms possible.

A good teacher is someone who not only can do the goal of the class (whether it be writing, guitar, science, what have you) well, but knows enough to connect with a student when he or she is not understanding the concept, and be willing to go over it again and again.

A good teacher is someone who not only can tolerate shoddy workmanship, but is able to tell the student how to improve, and have that advice actually work.

A good teacher is someone who gives their time, their money, their sanity in order not to perfect their own craft, but to give others the skills they need to pursue that same craft.

A teacher is someone who takes it upon herself to lead others into the skills she enjoys, to put their improvement ahead of anything else, and to make sure that they leave her class better at the task than before they came in.

In short: "Those who can do well, and can pass on that skill to others should teach."

Being a professor does not discount a person's opinion about an issue, simply because they have chosen to teach about it. Indeed, being a professor reinforces the authority of that opinion because it usually means that they know their topic well, they have worked within that field in "the real world" and they are now passing on that experience to others.

Teaching is so often degraded, especially in American society, where teaching is one of the lowest paid professions. There's an anti-education strain in society that comes out virulently in debates about expert witnesses and expert knowledge. Let's face it: We've all met teachers who are fantastic doers, but terrible at passing on the wisdom that they have. But I have yet to meet a teacher who couldn't actually DO what they were teaching me - whether it be writing, pastoral ministry, shop class, journalism, historical study, debate...whatever.

Teachers don't teach if they can't do. On behalf of teachers everywhere, let's drop that stereotype once and for all, shall we? Those who can say that teachers can't do were never teachers (and probably shouldn't be).

New Projects and Other Stuff

2010-11-24T03:03:00.007-06:00

I have a lot of new and exciting stuff going on, so I apologize for the lack of posts, and I apologize for the lack of cohesion in this one. This post is a sort of catch-all of things going on.

1. I have a new writing gig (thus my most recent absence from this blog). I am working with my friend Travis and his friend Justin on a theology and church culture online magazine, The BlackBird Press. I find the discussion that goes on in those comments to be stimulating, insightful, and interesting. The conversations that spring up are not ones that are easy to walk away from, and frequently challenge me, which is something every one needs once in a while. I have most recently written an article on John and Stasi Eldredge's Captivating, the female companion to John's quite famous Wild At Heart. It's an exegetical and gender-biased nightmare, and I am incredibly excited to have had the opportunity to write this article on it. Would you look at that: HERE IT IS.

2. I'm going home in a month! I will be flying into Sioux Falls at 10:20PM on December 20th, after 15 hours of traveling from Tokyo (not to mention the five hours it's going to take me to get up there by shinkansen [bullet train]). I am STOKED to see Sioux Falls again, and stoked to meet my niece for the first time! If you live in Sioux Falls, and want to get some coffee while I'm in town (from the 21st to the 2nd of January), shoot me an email or leave me a comment.

3. I have a lot of disordered thoughts about the TSA, the Korean conflict, the NZ mine explosion, DADT, Afghanistan policy...etc. Needless to say, a lot of different things concerning world politics have been pinging around in my head of late, but my mind hasn't settled on one singular thing to talk about, so, I apologize for lack of commentary on specifics. The TSA has, of course, been on the minds of most Americans, and I'd be lying if I said I wasn't hoping to have some sort of TSA story after my international traveling next month. But that's neither here nor there.

4. I've been reading a lot. Besides Captivating, I have a book on Arminian theology by Roger E. Olson (of Truett Seminary fame) headed my way, and I'm stoked about it. I'm also picking up All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy again, and hoping I can get past the first few pages this time.

5. Harry Potter VII Part 1 is out. I went to see it Friday night with a friend, and loved it. It was very faithful to the book, but still made me jump out of my skin at points, which is always a good thing. Very well done, and I'm glad I got to see it opening day (in fact, mine was just starting as midnight showings in America were finishing. How's that for cool?) Sioux Falls friends, I am definitely up for another viewing!

6. I have an absolutely adorable niece, and she has really awesome parents. I'll close today's post with a picture of my dear Vera and her tuckered out daddy. And no, not that Vera (fast forward to :41).

I hope this finds you well!

10 Reasons I'm a Terrible Evangelical

2010-11-10T06:32:00.006-06:00

I discovered a new blogger tonight, Rachel Held Evans. Evans is a "liberal" Christian, an Arminian, and a social justice advocate. Needless to say, we have a lot in common. I was glad to discover her because she is writing as I would want to write. In that vein, one of her posts inspired me to do a similar thing over here.

10 Things That Make Me a Terrible Evangelical*:

1. I tend to swear a lot. In fact, I had to restrain myself from including in the title of this list the generally unacceptable synonym for poop. My mother would be shocked, but I'll be honest, I've got a bit of a potty mouth sometimes.

2. I have a love/hate relationship with Paul. I love what he did for starting Christianity off, but some of the things he says are just mind-blowingly strange and frustrating. Sometimes I even wonder if he might have been wrong about some stuff.

3. John Piper makes me violent. Maybe that's just a personal issue and not evangelicalism as a whole, but he is at the forefront of a lot of these things. When he blamed the tornado in Minneapolis last year on the ECLA meeting to discuss ordination for homosexual pastors, he kind of went in my "you're crazy and I will flip off the computer every time I read something you write just to relieve my frustration at the wrongness" box.

4. I really hate "Christian" movies and most of the movies I own are R-rated. It really sucks that "Christian art" is synonymous with kitsch, Thomas Kinkade, and just plain out terrible work. I much prefer the Coens, Danny Boyle Wes Anderson, and Christopher Nolan (all of which are notable in part for their frequently dark and twisted themes and humor) to say...Kirk Cameron, or that movie Rebecca St. James was in.

5. I cheered when Neil Patrick Harris and his partner adopted twins. Maybe it's the fact that I have several bisexual friends. Maybe it's just that I know a lot of gay people. Maybe it's my pro-adoption happiness outweighing any qualms about homosexual parents. Maybe it's the influence of MTV. Whatever it is, I really don't have a problem with you being allowed to marry and adopt kids if you want.

6. I read Harry Potter and other fantasy novels voraciously. I'm also against banning books. Then again, I read Stephen King's It when I was 13, so...

7. I really, really hate Contemporary Christian Radio. There was a time when it was all I would listen to. My music library on my computer, my CD player in my car, the music on my iPod were all tuned to contemporary Christian music - the likes of the Newsboys, Leeland, Audio Adrenaline, Everyday Sunday, Relient K, etc. Then I discovered Radiohead, and now CCM leaves a bad taste in my mouth, metaphorically speaking.

8. I like President Obama and will vote for him in 2012, especially if Palin or Gingrich are running against him. 'Nuff said.

9. I don't believe in the concept of Biblical inerrancy. I'm fine with Scripture being the Word of God and authoritative at that, but without error? Not so much. The four gospels are enough to show us the major problems with that.

10. John Green put it best: "There is no them. There are only facets of us." If anything is at odds with modern evangelical Christianity (see explanatory note below) it is this: the idea that there can be no us vs. them. That there is no them - there is no Other, at least not insofar as it is encapsulated in our fellow human beings. The things that we see in them that we like or dislike are reflections of what makes all of us human, and to set up any sort of us vs. them dichotomy is to tell a lie about what the group you are talking about is as human beings.

*This list is meant to respond to the general characterization of Evangelicalism in society, which tends to consist of conservative Republicans, Calvinists, and rigid fundamentalists. I realize that not all who self-identify as "evangelical" would agree with such a characterization, but, in my experience and impression, and I think in the impression of America in general, these sorts of things listed here tend to be litmus tests for belonging to the evangelical church as currently characterized. That said, this list is hyperbole for humorous effect, all except for point #10. That is, indeed, one major problem I have with both conservative evangelicalism in America and the neo-Calvinists (coughJohnPipercough) who are so influential in it. And I realize that some of you would argue that in attacking Evangelical America, I am myself setting up an us vs. them dichotomy, but I don't believe this is the case, as I am responding both to a caricature in the group and the general attitude I have encounter. My theology is not based on an us vs. them dichotomy - I still see "them" as fellow Christians, though "they" may not see me the same way. And therein lies the difference.

This is going to surprise some of you, but...

2010-11-06T23:19:00.004-05:00

I didn't vote this year.

And I didn't vote in 2008, though that was more laziness than anything.

This year, it was a combination of laziness (I had no idea where to find a notary public necessary for the absentee ballot) and being upset with the choices my state was giving me. Were I registered to vote in Delaware, Nevada, Texas, Michigan, or maybe even Wisconsin (Russ Feingold!), I very likely would have voted. In South Dakota, however, the choices were somewhat dismal, and the ballot measures even less so (I will get to this later). So, I didn't bother voting.

Let me establish something first: Derek Webb writes that a Christian is called to do one thing only when it comes to performing civic duty, and that is to approach it in a way that is in line with one's conscience. "No party can co-opt a vote that isn't cast," he says. "Voting is a legal right, like carrying a gun or having an abortion. And I can abstain from doing anything I have a legal right to if it violates my conscience." Our conscience is the guide God gave us for following things not explicitly laid out in Biblical law (as Paul outlines in Romans 14). We talk a lot of having a "conviction" about certain issues, and even within the church, we are flabbergasted when people have different convictions about issues than what we ourselves feel. For example, I feel a conviction to help the poor, so much to the point that it would go against my conscience to vote for someone who does not have the same attitude. I feel a similar conviction about war - I cannot put my vote behind a candidate who wants to send an 18 year old to die in a self perpetuating cycle of violence. And I will be honest: I do not feel the same conviction about typically Evangelical issues like abortion, gay marriage or guns.

So I didn't vote. In fact, I haven't voted since I turned 18, and, frankly, I wish I hadn't voted then (in case the math is hard, I turned 18 in 2004, and cast a vote for George W. Bush, and, in the state of South Dakota, for John Thune, both of which are votes I wish I could take back).

Now, I do a lot of discussion of politics, as regular readers of this blog will note. Which is why I know that some of you are a bit surprised to hear that I didn't vote. Having had this discussion several times with different friends (thus the motivation for writing this particular blog entry), I can hear the response now: "But if you don't vote, you don't have a right to complain about the results of that election."

Let's examine that particular objection. It comes, quite specifically, from my Australian friend Justin. In Australia, they have two main parties, but they also have several smaller parties one could vote for if so inclined, which is somewhat similar to the US, but that's where the similarity stops. Australia has compulsory voting, which means that you get fined if you don't vote, and they vote for parties and party platforms in the major elections rather than the leaders, which is, understandably, similar to the UK system.

I'll be honest: I do have a bit of a problem with compulsory voting - I want the right to abstain as much as I want the right to vote if so inclined; so sue me, I like having choices. But, if I was functioning within a system that gave me the choice to vote for the party that most closely aligns to my issues, and not necessarily the person, I might have less of a problem. As it is, though, such an argument is merely academic, as the US has neither compulsory voting nor party elections.

If we take a look at the State of South Dakota, my home state and the place I am registered to vote (as an independent), we see that compulsory voting would be a terrible idea. This year, our junior Senator, John Thune, ran uncontested. There were two major ballot measures: medical marijuana, and banning smoking in bars and other places. The race for our singular representative in the federal House of Representatives was either an incumbent Democrat who voted against the health care reform in a solely political move (in other words, voted against her own conscience on the issue) and voted to put us in Iraq. Or, we had a newbie Republican with very little political experience, but who is anti-abortion, pro-war, pro-guns, anti-gay marriage, and pro-repealing the health care reform (tea party lite, in other words).

Those races and ballot measures are the ones I cared about the most, and I wasn't given very good choices. I always pay attention to South Dakota's ballot measures because there's usually some sort of anti-abortion law. Apparently this year there was almost a measure similar to those taken in Colorado and Arizona, which dictated basically that the health care reform law did not apply to that state. Had that measure been on the South Dakota ballot, you bet I'd have made a greater effort to vote, because that is something I feel a conviction on. However, as it is, I don't really care about medical marijuana, and I don't really care about smoking in businesses.

I would have loved the opportunity to vote John Thune out of office and undo some of what I did when I helped to vote him in. But, he was unchallenged, so voting wouldn't have mattered.

In the house race, I had the choice between voting for someone who shares some of my personal convictions but won't vote for them in office, and someone who is basically antithetical to a number of my convictions. It would mean casting a vote for someone who wasn't going to perform as I want them to, or voting for someone who doesn't share my convictions at all.

That's not really a choice. And I like having choices.

So, instead, I choose to abstain rather than vote in a way which would not honor my conscience, or be in line with my convictions.

Does this mean I now lack the right to complain about the vote?

To quote Sarah Palin, "HELL NO."

I have other means of "performing my civic duty." I can write letters to the Congressmen and women in order to alert them to issues I care about. I can participate in protests and lobby Washington. I can, as I am planning on doing, get a job at a non-profit and participate in the political process that way. And I can still complain, comment, and wax poetic about the results of the political process because by abstaining, I am still voicing an opinion.

How?

I am saying that I refuse to participate in a system that only offers me paltry choices that are not really choices, and doesn't allow me to participate in the choosing of those people representing each party (South Dakota has closed primaries).

I am saying that I will not vote for candidates who I know violate my conscience. The lesser of two evils is still an evil and we need to give up on the stupid idea that voting for the lesser of two evils is somehow committing a good just because you voted.

I am saying that my duties extend beyond the voting booth, and that I can still participate in the political process even without doing this "civic duty." As a citizen of the "Christian nation,"* I am not obligated to vote, but I am still obligated to love my neighbor, which I can do by not voting.

I am saying that I refuse to do a "duty" solely because I am an American and I have a right to do it. I am approaching my choices with the conviction and knowledge and understanding that every American should carry into the voting booth, but rarely happens because we emphasize duty over knowledge.

Think of it this way: When I purchase food for lunch, I am putting my body behind what I buy. I am, with my dollars and my stomach, trusting that food to work for my body, and to hopefully benefit it. In a good system, I will be able to choose for something that, while not perfect, will still be somewhat in line with what I want to eat that day and will be good for my diet - saying, I have the choice of eating a Caeser salad with all the dressing, fried chicken or macaroni and cheese. They may not be the best choices for my body, but at least they'll give me some nutrition. This would be an ideal political system - candidates who align with some of my views but maybe not all of them, available for me to vote for.

What our current system gives me, however, is the choice between a poisoned sandwich, and a poop-filled piece of cake. Sure, the poop cake might not kill me, and it's definitely better than a poisoned sandwich, but I'm still eating poop. This is what happens when we "vote for the lesser of two evils."

And I should have the choice not to eat poop if I don't want to. This doesn't mean I don't get to complain about it when all my friends start throwing up around me.

Grisly image aside: In the midst of elections and campaigns, we hear "VOTE VOTE VOTE DO YOUR DUTY." We gasp at infringements on peoples' rights to vote (think of the controversial Sharron Angle Univision ad which was telling Hispanics, in Spanish, not to vote). We become so concerned about participating in the political process that we never stop to step back and think about whether or not we should. Maybe, just maybe, there are times when abstaining is the right choice. In this midterm election, my choices were terrible, and I refuse to vote for something that goes against my conscience, something that would poison the system more. Sure, I may be hungry for a little while waiting for something better, but in the meantime, I can talk to the chef, and I can hope to motivate change in other areas.
________
*By Christian nation, I mean God's Kingdom, not 'Murrica.
^Picture stolen from my friend David Kosmak.

Another Reason to Love Harry Potter

2010-11-02T07:37:00.003-05:00

The Harry Potter Alliance, a non-profit that grew out of the love for all things awesome and Harry Potter-y, has started a campaign that runs from November 2010 to June 2011, the time span between the release of Deathly Hallows Parts 1 and 2. The approximately 7 months will be spent attempting to effect some change for good in seven Horcruxes (bad things, for the non Harry Potter folk) in the world.

This month's is the Starvation Wage Horcrux. At that link, you'll find a petition that adds your name and comments to emails to Warner Brothers studios, asking them to make a change in the chocolate sold as Harry Potter trademarks. That change? To make it completely fair trade.

How awesome is that?

I urge to surf on over, check it out, and sign away! You can also found out about Lumos Parties, which are being held in the time leading up to the release - a Mary Kay sort of Harry Potter to promote the cause of fairly traded chocolate.

The fact that people are using Harry's name to change the world for the better is a testament to how awesomely good and important these books are. I mean, there aren't many books that could be said to spawn a movement that's about doing GOOD, are there?

"Sometimes it's just New Jersey."

2010-10-30T20:35:00.004-05:00

Now, I had every intention of repeating what I did with the Glenn Beck rally and staying up until 4AM to watch the livestream of "Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert's Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear" as it happened live in Washington, DC, this past Saturday. I set my alarm for one AM, full intending to go to sleep for a couple of hours, wake up, watch the rally, and then go back to bed until noon.

That didn't happen. I fell asleep around 10:30, and sometime around 12:30, I shut off my alarm and fell asleep until 7:30AM.

Oops.

But I feel okay about that. I knew this was a rally I would much rather have attended than watched live through my computer. And I knew that if Jon Stewart was going to say something meaningful, it would not be an hour long speech detailing a plan for America, but rather something short, sweet, and probably funny. And it turns out I was pretty darn right.

Closing out the rally, Stewart gave a ten minute speech in which he extolled the virtues of working together, and realizing that the person the next car over on your commute to work is probably someone with radically different views, but that doesn't make them any less human. Basically, Stewart said things I've been saying for months. To reiterate what he said would be to simply repeat myself.

And then he closed with an interesting sentiment.

"Because you know, instinctively, as a people, that if we are to get through the darkness and back into the light, we have to work together. And the truth is there will always be darkness, and sometimes the light at the end of the tunnel isn't the promised land. Sometimes, it's just New Jersey."

Now yes, he's making a joke at the expense of his home state, New Jersey, following through rather brilliantly on an illustration he had used throughout the speech. But, at the risk of sounding like an academic who reads far too much into simple jokes and one-liners, New Jersey here is not just New Jersey. Or rather, it is and it isn't.

In politics, the rhetoric is grandiose, verbose, bombastic, and lofty. "Yes We Can!" "Country First." "Yes, America Can!" "Prosperity and Progress." "Don't Stop Thinking About Tomorrow." "It's Morning Again in America." "For the Future!" "Peace and Prosperity!" "A chicken in every pot and a car in every garage!" "Vote yourself a farm!" (All of these are genuine campaign slogans from presidents ranging all the way back to Lincoln).

We talk often of "restoring honor," of America being the "greatest best country," of idealism and progress, of helping people and saving the world, of hope and change. And then we're sorely disappointed when we don't get it. One of the reasons Obama's approval rating dropped when he came into office was not necessarily Republican backlash (though that was part of it). It was that whatever he did, it would not live up to his own rhetoric.

He, as a politician, can only do so much.

Congress, as men and women, as elected representatives, can only do so much.

Our governors, schools boards, military, and regulations can only do so much.

There comes a point when we realize that putting our hope in the government to make things completely entirely right is mere foolishness. Now, this is not to say that we cannot work within the government to attempt to make things better - it is almost always better to be actively fighting oppression and helping people through what means we have available (which I would contend includes the government) than to sit back and let oppression, poverty and pain run free.

But pinning all our hope and change on a man who is just like us - a man who, though he wields considerable power, is still just a man - is just as foolish as thinking that imposing a theocracy would be somehow better.

And that's what Jon Stewart is exactly right about. Politicians and the media who serve them promise us the world on a platter, promise us hope, change, and a savior on capitol hill.

They promise us a light at the end of the tunnel, when really, it's just New Jersey.

And that's okay. I've been to New Jersey. Most of it's pretty nice. I just wouldn't confuse it with heaven.

storytime: a medical check up.

2010-10-27T02:49:00.005-05:00

Last week when I received a note in my mailbox that I would need to be at school at 8:30 for a medical check up for insurance the next Wednesday, I was a little nervous. I haven't been to a doctor in about three years, unless you count going to the free clinic to get shots for my India trip, which was hardly a physical examination. I haven't had an actual physical in about 5 years, either, because my activities in college didn't require medical check ups.

Needless to say, I was nervous. Moreso when the note dictated that I not eat or drink anything after 9:00PM the day before. I'd never had a physical that required something like that, and I didn't know exactly what to expect. My experience with physicals in the US was that a check up meant checking height, weight, blood pressure and other things. I don't think I've ever had a cholesterol check or anything of that sort.

Walking into school this morning, then, I wasn't sure what to expect. I dutifully had not eaten or drunk anything but water since 9PM, which was pretty okay since I went to bed at 10. Skipping breakfast, though, I thought could turn into a problem, so I packed an emergency juice box in my purse, just in case. After some messing about with forms in which I desperately tried to figure out whether or not I'd gained 10kilograms since being 20 years old (having no idea what kilograms is in pounds [I know now, of course]), I was led through a series of tests that made me feel like an astronaut in training.

Besides the typical height, weight, and blood pressure tests, they also drew blood, took a urine sample (which, this might be too much information, but I had to drink an entire bottled water to get myself through), a chest x ray, and this weird electric test where they attached suction cups to the area around my heart and these odd clips to both my wrists and one ankle. I still have no idea what that test was, and I hope I don't have to repeat it any time soon.

The most terrifying moment for me was when they drew blood. For those of you who don't know, I'm hypoglycemic, which means I naturally have low blood sugar (which the doctors will probably discover when they examine my blood). When I was about 2 years old, I was hospitalized because I was having seizures, which were caused by severe drops in my blood sugar. Since then, it's been largely self regulated, with only one or two major incidents. When I was a freshman in college, I was getting some warts on my hands removed, and I hadn't eaten a thing all day. The combination of seeing my hands all bloody, not having food, and being in a closed space of the doctor's office with the elevated stress level that naturally brings caused me to pass out and seizure.*

It almost goes without saying, but I'll say it anyway: The prospect of having blood drawn terrified me. It's not that I'm scared of needles (I mean, I have one tattoo and plans for at least one more), but rather I was terrified of losing blood and having the same result as I had my freshman year. I looked away and concentrated on a box on the table while the nurse stuck the syringe in the crook of my elbow, and was pretty okay until I made the mistake of looking. Now, the amount of blood drawn probably wasn't actually that much, but I rarely see that much blood at once, much less coming out my own arm.

I had to take a few breaths to steady myself, and I think I must have gone pale or something, because the English-speaking nurse they had assigned to help me out asked me if I was okay. I managed to pull myself together and made it through the rest of the battery of tests, buoyed partially by my sheer confusion at the thoroughness of each test.

It was a strange experience. I don't know what Japanese health care is like, and I don't wish to be in a situation where I have to learn. But if this first experience is anything to judge, the doctors are just like any doctor anywhere - professional, kind, and concerned about doing their job well.

Yet another way in which people are people, no matter what country they happen to be living in. A seemingly empty sentiment in this world, (especially America), where things like health care, food, and shelter are commodified and sold, right along with the people who bring them to us, but each new experience reminds me that those around me are not commodities, and though they may be nameless, they are not worthless.

_________
*Friends of mine will also remember about 7 months later when I passed out after breaking my toe - I don't consider that blood sugar related, as I'm just a weakling and that was the first bone I'd ever broken. Also, many of you are familiar with my time in the emergency room in India, which was a combination of dehydration, low blood sugar, and a bad reaction to some food. Again, not solely caused by low blood sugar.

Sometimes I post stupid videos.

2010-10-22T07:58:00.002-05:00

Re-discovered these tonight. Too good not to repost. I cannot believe I didn't find a way to incorporate this into my thesis.

A New Definition

2010-10-13T07:00:00.002-05:00

Yesterday (CST, today for me), I took on a new and different role within my family. Having grown up with almost no change in the roles I played in the lives of my immediate family (I have always been sister, daughter, cousin), the first major change to that structure came when my brother fell in love with and married a wonderful girl named Carrie, during my freshman year of college. I suddenly had a new label - "sister in law" - which I suddenly had to learn to adjust to. Having grown up with only brothers, I had to learn how to be a sister to a sister, but I love having Carrie in the family.

Last February (a few days before my birthday, in fact), Marc and Carrie informed me of a new label I'd soon be taking on, this one a bit scarier: Aunt. That label took hold yesterday/this morning with the birth of Vera Elizabeth, a tiny little 7 pound 5 oz baby girl.

I'll be the first to tell you that children scare me a little - I'm always afraid of doing something wrong around them, and I think it would just be better if they had the sense to timewarp from womb to fully grown 19 or 20 year old people right away. But unfortunately, life doesn't work that way. And I have to emphasize: while being an aunt does scare me a little as dealing with small children is not something I do often, I am incredibly excited to be an aunt. Marc, Carrie and I have already agreed on certain roles I will play in their kid's life. For example, in a few years, I'm going to start a savings account in her name so that when she turns 18 (and graduates from high school), my graduation present to her will be a trip anywhere she wants to go in the world. And if she, for some odd reason, is not a traveler (pshaw, MY NIECE? Perish the thought!), then the money will go toward her college funds.

Even though it's 18 years off, this is something I feel I can do for her right now - I can set down the goal of instilling a sense of the fullness of the world she lives in within this new life. I want her to be aware, unlike so many, of the world beyond the borders of her country, to see that there are people everywhere, stories to be told, friends to make, adventures to have. I want her to be encouraged to break out of the mold and take challenges as they come and to adventure whenever and where ever she can. I feel like that is a good legacy I can give her.

Because, let's face it, with my travel history, the chances that I'm going to be the aunt who lives across the street are probably going to be very slim. And I'm pretty okay with that - she will know me as the aunt who's living in Japan. The aunt who is off studying for a story in Russia, or helping people recover from the sex trade in Cambodia, or working to promote fairly traded products in Australia. The aunt who sends her presents after hiking around Ayers Rock, after drinking a beer at Oktoberfest, after sitting in the sun in a park in England. While I may not be there for her physically (right now, I'm looking at pictures from 9,000 miles away, having trouble believing that all this is real), I can be an example, a person she can look up to and say "Now that's the type of embracing the world and experiencing life that I want to see in my own life."

Granted, it'll be years before she gets to that level of self reflection, but in the meantime, she can still get some awesome presents.

How to Combat Modern Day Slavery

2010-10-10T00:48:00.002-05:00

This video is well worth the 20 minutes it takes to watch it. Please do.

an economy of mercy.

2010-10-06T02:16:00.004-05:00

Classes have started again, and I have been busy planning, preparing, writing and going. I try to blog about once a week, but lately the words have not been coming.

Or rather, I should say, the words have been all the wrong ones. I wanted to do a blog about Glenn Beck's flagrant linguistic cheapening of the concept of slavery, which he compares it to government regulation of the insurance companies (meaning this regulation is metaphorical slavery of the middle class), and states that slavery actually ended with the Civil War, perpetuating a myth. I wanted to write that blog, but even thinking about it just makes me angry; the words would have been wrong.

I wanted to write about Jon Stewart's Rally To Restore Sanity, and how it is weird that one of the most level voices in American media today is a comedian who is not even a journalist. This may have included musings on how television news itself tends to be a bad format as it moves so quickly and runs only in soundbites, so it shouldn't be a surprise that stuff gets edited, cut, and twisted to fit a narrative. But that just made me tired.

I wanted to write about the concept of gender and contemporary literature, and why boys aren't reading, but that took me too far afield of what I feel at least a large part of the narrative of this blog is.

And that got me thinking: What is the narrative of this blog? What is, by and large, the narrative I run my life by? I like to hope that this blog has become a space for a Christian response to the world at large, particularly America and American politics, because those are the things that can affect how I love my neighbor. But as much as it is about the big things, it is about the small things as well. We need to be thinking about how we love our neighbor in our own daily lives, as much if not more than we think about how to create a system that keeps our neighbor from oppression. We need to look not just at the narrative of the bigger picture, but of the individual blocks that create the quilt. And vice versa - if we concentrate on too many individual blocks, we lose sight of the entire picture, and importantly, what the other blocks are showing us.

For example, this video has been making the rounds on Facebook and various social networking platforms. I was pointed to it by a pro-choice friend who wanted to know my thoughts. As my position on abortion is heavily nuanced (as I believe it should be), watching this video was hard. Not because I was moved emotionally or anything, or because of any particular effect of the speaker, but because there is so much of the narrative left out. For those of you not inclined to watch the video, it is a 16 minute speech by Gianna Jessen, a woman who was born alive from a third trimester saline abortion in 1977, given in Australia on the eve of a vote about abortion. Her position is clearly pro-life, as is understandable for a woman in her position.

But I cannot help but think that there is a lot of the narrative that is left out. A little research will tell you that her parents were 17 at the time of her birth, and they gave her up for adoption because of cerebral palsy and various other complications Jessen had developed (likely as a result of the attempted abortion, but there's no real way to tell and I don't have enough information here). Jessen tells us that "she was hated from conception," but apparently not enough not to be carried through 7 and 1/2 months of pregnancy. She claims that neither the doctor nor her parents understood or knew the love of Jesus Christ (implying, by proxy, that all pro-choicers are atheist, a narrative not borne out by the statistics, or even, the demographics of women who get abortions every year).

There are many holes in the story and many questions left for the skeptical listener. Jessen has created a narrative in which she is the hero and her birth parents, the doctors, and even most of the nurses are the villains, because every good story needs a villain.

But what if? What if we saw those villains as the real people they are? What if we widened the lens of our story, the lens of the narrator, to include the backgrounds of all the characters? Do we find a scared, confused 17 year old mother in 1977 who wanted this baby but was possibly told bad information by her doctor, leading her to seek out a likely illegal 3rd trimester abortion? Do we find a doctor who listens, empathizes, and keeps young woman from doing such a procedure themselves (illegal at home abortions killed thousands of woman in the years before Roe v. Wade, and this birth happened just four short years after the legalization)?

Do we find human beings, sinners, flawed and trying to live their lives as best they can? Do we find real people?

When we skew the narrative, when we allow certain people, races, religions, classes, or, indeed, sexual orientations, to become either villain or hero, we do a disservice to all the humans involved in the story. We do a disservice to our neighbor.

In the recent rash of suicides as a result of anti-gay bullying, bullies have been skewered, vilified, and all but roasted on a spit above a fire lit from their schoolbooks. Now, before this gets taken wrong - I am not defending the actions of the bullies. I think they are wrong, despicable, cowardly, and very much culpable in the deaths of their classmates. They have committed an injustice against people who are just like them. Believe me, these past weeks have found me thinking "Lord, save us from your followers" more than once. But before we get too rabid-foaming-at-the-mouth-persecute-the-religious-right liberal here, we also must remember that they are people. The bullies are people inasmuch as their victims are people.

The narrative that the evangelical right has developed, in which the nonsensical "love the sinner, hate the sin" reigns, [a concept I am afraid is espoused even by my beloved CS Lewis (but he's a dualist too, so I actually disagree with him on a number of levels)], has created a world of inequality, a world in which children bully children for even the perception of being different, and these same children feel so much despair that they feel the need to take their own life.

But in the same vein, we cannot let the pendulum swing too far the other way - the religious right is a frequently vilified, scorned, and outright abused group of people. While I feel that the religious right (exhibited especially in the abortion and gay marriage debates) tends to skew the narrative so that liberals are quite literally conspiratorial villains hellbent on taking our "hard earned" money and jobs, the left tends to do similar work in skewering the religious right. Too often the narrative is filled with the Fred Phelps', Terry Jones's, and anti-gay bullies of the world, while ignoring the Jim Wallis's, the Mother Teresas, the Jon Foremans, Stephen Christians who are so prevalent in giving Jesus a good name again.

The narrative on both sides of the aisle fails to see the forest for the trees.

One of my favorite songs right now is "The General" by The Dispatch. While I was visiting the Korean War Memorial in Seoul, I walked amongst the tanks, planes, battleships and guns that stood as reminders of a war that tore brother from brother, and thought of reunification, and I listened to this song. The song tells the story of a decorated general in combat, who wakes up on the morning of battle and announces to his troops that he does not ask his troops to follow him into battle, saying, "I have seen the others, and I have discovered that this fight is not worth fighting. I have seen their mothers, and I will no other to follow me where I'm going. ... Go now, you are forgiven."

The General in that song has filled in his narrative. He has finally personalized the Other in his story - he gave his villains a face, a name, a story. He filled in those mis-imagined people, and realized that he could not ask others to walk into such a fight without allowing them the same benefit of knowing who it is that they are fighting. He refuses to allow young men to sacrifice themselves without having the full story. He knows that the only fight worth fighting occurs only after all the gaps in the narrative have been filled in, after the Other has been given a name, a face, and a voice, and it is then that a fight seems downright ridiculous.

It is only when we consider our enemies as human beings - with a story of their own to tell - that we can learn what it means to love our neighbor. Because your neighbor is the gay kid who hanged himself in his own backyard. Because your neighbor is the bully who harassed him every day in English class because he feared what was different. Your neighbor is the abortion survivor, the woman who tried to abort her, and the doctor who helped her do it. Your neighbor is both the man who wants to burn the Koran, and the man who sees the Koran as the holiest of books. Your neighbor is also the man holding a [ironically] rainbow striped "God Hates Fags" sign, and the grieving father of a soldier killed in Iraq whose funeral is being picketed. They are all human, all people with a past, a present and a future. And they are all your neighbor.

At the risk of a potentially blasphemous statement, committed in the name of poetic license:

"Go now. You are forgiven."

Dear 15-year-old Self:

2010-09-25T00:52:00.003-05:00

Put down the Tolkien book right now and listen up.

You're not going to be a lawyer. You're probably never going to be rich and you probably won't marry rich either. You may or may not get published and a lot of things in your life are going to change by the time you're 25. For one thing, Crossfire is going to get canceled in favor of more political coverage that is just yelling back and forth. Quit that pipe dream right now because you don't want to be one of those yelling crazies featured over and over in videos on the Internet (and yeah, videos on the Internet will become a really big deal).

Participating in debate is going to give you a lot of good research and logical skill, but don't let it go to your head. There will always be people smarter than you, and there will always be people dumber than you. The trick is to realize where you fit on the spectrum and listen to those on both sides and then decide for yourself where your ideas fit and what those ideas are. You'll do yourself a big favor if you stop parroting your elders' positions now and learn how to think for yourself.

9/11 just happened. Remind yourself: the taking of a life to avenge a life stolen is never a good idea. A lot of people will use this tragedy to justify a lot of politics in the future - this is your generation's Pearl Harbor. Mourn the lost, but remember to let reason speak in areas emotion can't.

You probably haven't heard this term yet, but "megachurches" aren't all they're cracked up to be. Find a church, now, that challenges you to be a better follower of Jesus, not just a better "you." This church will likely be small and unassuming, and that's okay - you'll like knowing everyone's names and being able to react to the sermon right then and there. It'll be okay.

Also: There are some times you should just stop talking. Learn to identify those times as quickly as you can and you'll save yourself a lot of trouble.

Your friends are not mini-yous. Stop trying to make them that way and let them be themselves. You may not like anime, but you'll be living in Japan someday (I know!) and you'll wish you'd paid closer attention when they tried to introduce you to things like Fruits Basket and Dragonball Z.

You're never going to be as "cool" as you want to be, and the sooner you learn to embrace your nerdiness (hint: Are you wearing your Lord of the Rings "One Ring" replica on a chain around your neck yet? You're a nerd), the better. You'll be a lot happier if you just be the nerd you are and quit trying to like things you don't like just to be "cool." The "popular" kids aren't going to give a rat's patoot where you end up. Be concerned about where you, yourself, are going, and only you should have input on that. You'll end up with an awesome life anyway.

Doubt is okay. It happens. Roll with it. Showing doubt about things shows that you're thinking about your life and not accepting things at face value. Be afraid of the moments you stop asking questions.

Sincerely,
Your 24 year old self.

PS: Oh yeah, and Harry Potter? Yeah, it's not as bad as you think. Just read it already.

-----
Inspired by Vlogbrothers

listen to this.

2010-09-20T01:44:00.002-05:00

"Lover" - Derek Webb (starts at 3:00).

This song came up on shuffle today.

I have nothing more to add except the lyrics. Take a few minutes, listen, and appreciate everything that God - the Great Lover - has done for all of us, and will continue to do.

Like a man comes to an altar, I came into this town
With the world upon my shoulders, and promises passed down.
And I went into the water, my Father, he was pleased.
And I built it and I'll tear it down, so you will be set free.

Yes, and I found thieves and salesmen livin' in my Father's house,
And I know how they got in here, and I know how to get 'em out.
I'm turning this place over from floor to balcony,
Men, just like these doves and sheep, oh, you will be set free

'Cause I have always been a lover, from before I drew a breath
Well some things I loved easy, and some I loved to death.
See love's no politician, cause it listens carefully.
So of those who come, I can't lose one,
So you will be set free, oh, you will be set free.

Go on and take my picture, go on and make me up
I'll still be your defender, and you'll be my missing son
And I'll send out an army just to bring you back to me.
Cause regardless of your brother's lies, oh, you will be set free.

Cause I am my beloved's, and my beloved's mine
So you bring all your history; I'll bring my bread and wine
And we'll have a set party, where all the drinks are on me
And as surely as the rising sun, you will be set free.

Hope and the DMZ

2010-09-17T05:52:00.007-05:00

Last Friday, I woke up absurdly early, ate a quick breakfast of pre-packaged Danish donuts I bought at 7/11 the night before, and hopped on the subway in Seoul, and rode two stops over to the Samgakji station near the Army base. I had to be there by 7:00AM so that I could ride on a tour bus for an hour and a half up to the De-Militarized Zone between North and South Korea.

A little background:

Shortly after WWII, war broke out on the Korean peninsula between North and South Korea. This war, which the US got heavily involved in, in the attempt to beat back the march of communism in Asia, is often referred to as "The Forgotten War," overshadowed by its cousin, the Vietnam War, which occurred about 15 years later and was also about beating back communism. However, in this war, 33,000 American soldiers and 152,000 South Korean soldiers were killed in action - not a small war by any means.

I became interested in Korea about a year ago when my internet friend, Kelley, came through Waco on a tour she was doing with a charity, and needed a couch to sleep on. I was able to give her a place to stay, and I attended the movie that she was there to show. The nonprofit - LiNK (Liberty in North Korea) - is about 1. Political action for the US to pressure China to recognize defectors from North Korea as political refugees, and 2. Aiding these refugees when they come to the United States. The film that they showed was incredibly eye-opening as to the situation happening in North Korea right now - political prisoner and labor camps, nationwide famine, and an oppressive regime run by what can only be called a crazy person.

Looking on a map, you can see that North Koreans only have a few places to go: down into South Korea, a journey which would take one through the heavily guarded and somewhat harsh 2.5 mile wide zone known as the DMZ. The other options are up into freezing cold Siberia, or over into communist China, which is sympathetic to the regime, and therefore, if you're found out without the proper papers, you get deported right back to North Korea, where, if you're not executed immediately, you get put in a political prison camp.

The situation is not good for the North Koreans, especially not for those who wish to leave.

So, it's almost needless to say that the DMZ was something I absolutely had to see when I visited Korea. When I asked a couple of friends who had lived there before, one who had been in the military, stationed at Seoul, told me not to muck around with hotel tours, but instead to sign up to go with the USO. Because it's associated with the US military, the USO tour allows you to go further into the DMZ than most hotel tours - those will just take you to the spots you could visit anyway: the 3rd tunnel and the lookout points.

Instead, with the USO, you get to visit the Joint Security Area, or JSA, which is an area that was a previously neutral zone on the Military Demarcation Line (MDL) plop in the middle of the DMZ. Yes, that's a lot of acronyms.

Back when it was first established, the JSA acted as a neutral zone between two technically still warring countries (North and South Korea only signed a cease fire - they never actually ended the war). Because the neutral zone spread over the MDL (the line marking the border between North and South), buildings belonging to each side were built all over the compound. Part of the problem arose when North Korea built checkpoints on the South Korean side - particularly three checkpoints surrounding just one South Korean one - checkpoint three. One day in 1976, near checkpoint three, some South Korean (ROK) and US soldiers and officers were working to cut down a giant Yew tree that was blocking the view from checkpoint three to checkpoint four. They were ambushed by North Korean soldiers and two US officers were killed.

As a result of the incident, the zone, while still "neutral" reverted back to country borders - the MDL now became of extreme importance, and so the line was, quite literally, marked through the camp. Part of the issue here was that there were several buildings sitting directly on the line. Therefore, concrete slabs were positioned along the MDL, between the buildings, to mark out where the border is. You can see just such a slab in this picture:

So, by being able to visit the JSA, I was able to get as close to North Korea as I could without having to go through the troublesome visa and screening process (which I doubt I'd ever pass, considering my views about oppression). For a few minutes, I got to actually stand in North Korea, and for several more, I got to stare across the way at North Korea soldiers who were staring back at me. For me, it was quite sobering - to think that 20 feet away from me is a regime known for oppression, terror, and propaganda filled with lies. We were specifically told not to wave, smile or do anything that could be used in North Korean propaganda.

Coming to Korea as an, I'll admit, somewhat ignorant American, I was surprised by how much South Korea actually knows about North Korea and the conditions there. In the War Memorial, there was an exhibit marking the 60th Anniversary of the establishment of the DMZ, and a large part of the exhibit was about the current conditions in North Korea. There was a lot about the history of the Korean War, and then a section that was simply "North Korea since the war." There were charts pointing out where each of the political prisoner and labor camps are. Pictures depicting how far the nuclear range of North Korea actually is (for my US readers - they would be lucky to hit Alaska), and others talking about the famine and food problems. Displays showed conditions in the political prisoner camps and what the cells are like if you're sentenced to death (they are so small that you can't even sit properly). It is, all in all, remarkable how much information is available, and was just sitting on display in the museum - for only the admission price of 5,000won (about $4.50US).

To go to that exhibit, learn about the DMZ, and then to go visit the actual DMZ - seeing not only North Korea, but the Bridge of No Return, the two towns that exist inside the borders, the site of the Yew Tree that was the catalyst for the axe murder incident, and the living statues that are the ROK soldiers who are the front line against North Korea - made the conflict very real. There is no doubt that things are very tense between the two countries and that it will take a lot of work for things to cool down.

But, however, as one walks through the war museum, and looks at things at the more "touristy" areas of the DMZ, there can be no doubt that there is a hope for reconciliation. South Korea exudes this hope of ending the war, of being able to embrace the North Koreans as brothers and of seeing freedom for their neighbors to the North.

After a tense morning at the JSA and staring across at North Korea, and an interesting hike down into a tunnel which North Korea had been digging in the 1970s in the hopes of ambushing Seoul, and visiting a lookout point where, were it a clear day, we would have been able to see the treeless mountains of the borderlands of North Korea - treeless because they don't want to give defectors any cover - we went to Dorasan Train Station, which is the last possible stop on the South Korean train line - Gyeongui - going North.

Here, in an almost deserted train station basically in the middle of nowhere (this station is, indeed, at the very edge of the DMZ), the sense of hope is almost palpable. There are reminders everywhere of what should be a bustling train station, but instead one that sits nearly empty except for those who happen to go through for work up in the Industrial City just inside the border of North Korea, which means mostly freight trains - there is no passenger service, if I remember correctly. There is a large, billboard sized poster that confronts the visitor when they enter the train station. This poster shows train tracks disappearing toward the horizon amongst green fields, with lettering in the blue sky above it, first in Korean and then in English: "Not the last station from the South, But the first station toward the North."

There is a sign lit up above doors leading to the tracks that says "To Pyeongyang," which is the North Korean capital. Another large poster on the wall displays the eventual map of an intercontinental railroad crossing through Europe, Russia, China and North Korea to connect Portugal and South Korea.

These are big dreams, big plans. And they all depend on the reunification and reconciliation of two nations divided. Despite the fact that it has been 60 years since the war and the separation was solidified between North and South, despite continually bristling tensions between the two countries as North Korea looks for excuses and threatens and tests their nuclear weapons, despite the propaganda and the lies, fighting and the strain exhibited so obviously at the JSA ... despite all this, there is hope.

And that, my friends, is a beautiful, beautiful thing.

small moment in korea

2010-09-12T06:06:00.002-05:00

For those of you who didn't know, I just now returned from a 10 day vacation in Korea. It's the first time I've taken a vacation really for just myself, by myself. Since we are so close to Korea, I decided to simply take the ferry over to Busan, and then have a train ride up to Seoul. All in all, the trip took 12 days, and it was a fantastic time. Rather than give you a big ol' update that would be the equivalent of trapping you in my living room to show you slide after slide of photos of the same thing, I'm just going to bullet point favorite moments. I will do a post later this week on the DMZ/JSA/North Korea and reunification later this week.

So here goes, some brief highlights:

-When I got to Busan, it was raining, and I had to walk across a parking lot (a BIG parking lot) to get to the metro. When I was still about 20 yards from the metro, this complete stranger - a Korean lady - came up and held her umbrella over my head. It was completely unexpected and kind.

-I met a Buddhist priest in a coffee shop and he showed me the temple where he works and we talked about New York, which is a place in the US he has been.

-I discovered that my hotel in Busan was, quite literally, across the street from the beach, and that said beach is much less populated in September than in August.

-I found out that Dunkin' Donuts is nearly as popular in Korea as it is in Boston. I think I had it almost every day for breakfast.

-I went on a long hike that ended at a large Buddhist Temple, where I drank water from a mountain stream (and no, I didn't get sick - it was over a week ago and I'm still fine).

-I listened to every single "Wait Wait Don't Tell Me..." and "This American Life" podcast (both GREAT NPR shows) on my train rides around town - I seriously spent that much time on trains. It's actually a good thing because I love riding trains.

-I found a cute little bakery by Haeundae Market that had the most delicious Gateau chocolate cake I have ever tasted. Also in said market, I found socks with Obama's face on them. They made me laugh, so I bought them.

-I saw dolphins - real, live, in the wild dolphins - surfacing in the ocean, while I was riding on a ferry ride just off the beach in Busan.

-I rode on a high speed train through the countryside, going 300km/hr.

-There's a Taco Bell in Seoul. Enough said.

-I got to see the World Cup Stadium (and the field) where the 2002 final was played. It. Was. AWESOME.

-I had delicious Katsu-Don (battered and fried pork served over rice) in a random restaurant I just walked into and sat down.

-I found Harry Potter in Korean and discovered that the books are split up into volumes, so I had to buy two - volume I and volume II of book I.

-I walked in on a private function in the Seoul Art Museum, only because no one bothered to stop me. The museum was actually closed, but I couldn't see that right away (because of the event going on, there were a bunch of people around).

-I discovered that the Korean National Assembly Building is NOT like US Capitol buildings where you can just wander in. Oops.

-I found an English language bookshop called "What the Book?" that played Wilco. It was awesome.

-My taxi driver in Seoul was extremely kind when he realized he didn't know where the hotel was, and pointed me in a direction where I could maybe find it (and I did). We did well for as little English as he knew and the complete nonexistence in my knowledge of Korean.

-At the Korean War Memorial, I met a very nice security guard who took my picture for me.

-I found a cat cafe in Seoul. Yes, it's a cafe where you pay ten bucks to sit around playing with cats and drinking coffee. Uh-mazing.

-I stepped foot in North Korea.

Most importantly, on this trip, I learned how to travel alone, and how to love it. I pushed myself to do more things than I might have done if I was with someone else. I took some risks, and they paid off. It was, all in all, a fantastic trip. I learned a ton about Korea and the Korean war, and the De-Militarized Zone between the two Koreas. It's a very interesting story, one which I hope to tell later this week.

What are some of YOUR favorite vacation moments?

hey, megalomanaic

2010-08-28T22:41:00.006-05:00

I'm very sleepy today. It's afternoon; I'm still not entirely dressed. I woke up just before noon. I have my reasons though, and though it wasn't an exciting match of England vs. the United States that kept me up until all hours, nor watching a movie with friends, I'm rather glad I stayed up.

Last night, I was up watching a stream of Glenn Beck's "Restoring Honor" Rally on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

Now, frequent readers of this blog space will know that I do not like Glenn Beck. Or rather, I don't like his philosophy and influence: his rejection of social justice in the church as a front for communism and Marxism is a ridiculous stance I have discussed at length (above).

That said, I also believe in giving those I disagree with a voice, as long as it contributes to productive discussion. So with that in mind, I settled into bed last night, computer on my lap, snarky twitter on full blast, ready to listen and think. (For the record, I tend to respond better to people I disagree with, at least on a political level, if I get all the snark out of the way while I'm listening to them - that way it doesn't color my eventual analysis. This sounds weird, I know, but it seems to work for Glenn Beck and O'Reilly - I'm a Jon Stewart kind of gal).

And what Beck had to say scared me. Beck's "Restoring Honor" Rally is an entity that no one is really sure what it was about, other than possibly Beck himself. It's supposedly a non-partisan, non-political, rally to raise money for a charity benefiting ... I think war veterans? But Beck's discussion of it leading up to it confuses things - there is much talk of "reclaiming" the civil rights movement, whatever that means, and "restoring honor" to America, again an unclear term. Many of its attendees clearly thought it was a tea party rally, and the blogosphere often referred to it as such. I'm still not entirely sure what it accomplished, other than giving Beck an enormous platform from which to lay out his entire political philosophy.

However, if there was any doubt of Beck's stance on the line between church and state, no one can wonder anymore after his sermon yesterday. That sermon - one of the longest and vaguest arguments for an American theocracy I've ever heard - should have scared every single one of Glenn Beck's viewers who identifies with the Judeo-Christian tradition, and with Jesus Christ as the Son of God. In short, the man is a heretic.

Here's why.

Beck began the lead up to the rally 40 days ago when he asked his audience to get on their knees and pray - to pray for America, to pray for our government, to pray that we get back on "the right track." Before he took the stage, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr's niece, Alveda King (who is not, as she calls herself, a doctor - she has an honorary doctorate, but has not earned the title she uses), spoke about accepting prayer back into the public square and back into schools. There was no doubt that what was meant by prayer is prayer in the Judeo-Christian tradition, not any other sort. This is one of the first signs we have of the "America turn back to God" thesis of the rally.

Then Beck stepped up to the plate. No transcript has been posted yet, so I am having to go based on quotes I have culled from other online (reliable) sources, and my own notes. But what he had to say should cause every Christian viewer of his to rethink their lockstep march to his drum.

In the first section of the speech, Beck told us the story of Moses and his fight for the people of Israel against Pharaoh. He repeated several times that we Americans need to "pick up our stick," ostensibly to show the honor of God/America, as Moses did. We need to stand up and listen to what the founding fathers/the burning bush told us to do - it was unclear what exactly was meant as he jumped from burning bush to founding fathers so rapidly I didn't quite catch the connection.

Beck also believes that America is the world's savior. There is no doubt about this, as he said so in his speech. He also commented at several separate points to the extent that "America has set man free," saying so directly at one point. Within the first few minutes, he referred to the Constitution and the founding documents as "American Scripture." He told us in the rally yesterday that we all need to go to "God Boot Camp," so that we can be the Americans who "rush in at the last second to save the world."

It's all beautiful rhetoric - take back the country for God, God wants us to be this and that, America is specially blessed.

But it's all wrong.

Beck would like to imagine us (Americans) as the Hebrews and himself as Moses, pick up the staff that God had touched and rallying his people, shouting at the scary big government, "LET MY PEOPLE GO." Beck's exegesis here, however, is severely lacking. Moses was not reclaiming the people of Israel so that they could get out from under the thumb of big government. He was reclaiming his people so that they could know who they are as God's chosen. It's a subtle difference, but a difference nonetheless.

Moses's gathering of the people resulted in them being nomads, wandering government-less in the desert for a whole generation. Even after that, the Jewish people have rarely had a time when they had a free country to themselves to rule. Jesus was born into the regime of Herod, after the Jewish people - God's chosen, and the only people who have EVER been identified as God's chosen - were scattered in the Diaspora. Granted, my Jewish history is a little fuzzy (it has been 4 years since my last class on the subject), but I do know that the Jews never really got their promised land - they're STILL waiting, still waiting for that promise of God's chosen to be fulfilled completely.

And let's not forget: we have to keep in mind that when the Jews did have a government, it was a big one - one that dictated taking care of the poor, that used money taken in the form of taxes to help the less fortunate, that, every fifty years, made all private property revert back to the original owners, and celebrated the idea that private ownership is a figment of the imagination - if everything is God's, then I cannot possibly own it.

What Beck has done, then, is ignore all that Jewish history, look at the Moses story, and supplant "Americans" for every mention of "Hebrews." It's some quick sleight of hand, but it's important to note for the rest of his heresy.

With Americans taking the place of the Hebrews, and the Exodus now turned around into the story of getting out from under the thumb of government rather than being reclaimed as God's people under God's law, a dangerous idea begins to take hold. If Americans - true Americans being those who follow an undefined, but probably Judeo-Christian God - then we must reclaim the country for God. America is clearly blessed by God, and our lives show his enriching. Government becomes the evil in the story, rather than the hardness of one man's heart. Government becomes the whipping boy for all that is bad, conveniently forgetting that the Jews then set up a vastly complicated and invasive theocracy in which they were the ruling class. Government is evil, and therefore we must take back the government for God.

America, then, is painted as this divine being that has been shoved off track by those who want to expand the government, by those who want to use the tax money for helping the people on whom this government depends. America becomes both victim and savior.

That's a scary thought.

What Beck has created and espoused here is no less than a civic religion, a nation worship, in which America playing the part of God. The idea that we could possibly have God on our side specially blessing our country, and guiding us to be the savior of all is a megalomaniacal, ethnocentric complex of extensive proportions.

America is just over 200 years old, a baby in western civilization's terms, even if you take the extremely conservative estimate that the Earth itself is only 6,000 years old. Who was saving the world before now?

Oh right. Jesus.

And here is where everyone should have bristled: By painting America as the savior of the world, Beck causes us to forget that kingdoms of this world are transient things, wiped away as so much dust. Massive empires have come before and fallen before, and many will come and fall after us. None of those - many of which were declared to be eternal and live eternally - are still standing. The Babylonians? Gone. The Romans? Gone. The Turks? Gone. The Brits? Failed. The Mongols? Gone. Napolean? Dead and rotting. Alexander the Great? Long turned to dust. Constantine? Dead, ages ago, right along with his government.

Every single Emperor and Empire that has existed before us, and who will come after us, has thought they had God on their side. In Ancient Rome, Caesar is a God.

Each and every single one of those empires is now gone, barely remembered by the high school students who are taught about them, relegated to the study of PhD's as academic interest.

America will be no different. Now, whether we fall in a 100 years or a 1000, there is the one thing that is certain: We will fall. We will become a relic of the empire we once had.

We are not God's kingdom.

We never were. The founding fathers knew that when they were writing - they were smart men - and that is why they attempted to give us plenty of freedoms and to give citizens a voice. They did not seek to install a theocracy, as that was what they just left. And they were just men - they were not the divine hand of God giving us a means to save the rest of the world. Beck's own faith (Mormonism) came after the separation of church and state, a faith that was only allowed to develop because of the separation Beck's beloved founding fathers so carefully set up. Having America be pictured as "the savior of the universe," then, supplants the founding fathers careful declarations with a theocracy of Beck's own choosing.

Jesus tells us quite clearly in John 18:36: "My kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would have been fighting, that I might not be delivered over to the Jews. But my kingdom is not from the world” (ESV).

If we were fighting for an earthly kingdom, as Christians, we could willingly take up arms, install an oppressive theocracy, and invent our own definition of justice, which involves private ownership, prayer in schools, and no abortion.

But that is precisely what Christ cautions against: He does not want us fighting for that which will pass away, as every earthly kingdom does. He does not want us viewing government as anything more than a means to an end, and He certainly doesn't want us to view anything but Him as savior of the universe. He did not come to install a civic religion. Instead, He came to teach us how to love one another, to be peaceable people, and to live for eternity, not for a quickly passing empire.

Glenn Beck: you are not my Jesus, and America is not my God. I will not stand for this civic religion that supplants my all loving, all sacrificing, communal, Trinitarian, personal, timeless, all knowing, and all powerful Lord of the Universe with a piddly government that was created by men and is run by men. My God is so much bigger than your America, and his justice is not yours.

As was oft-quoted by people in your rally yesterday, Mr. Beck, I repeat the words of the big government supporting, freedom shouting, everyone loving, possibly socialist man who would have ended up on your blackboard if he was alive today: "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." Freedom from government means nothing if you're starving in the street. And in helping that person, whether it be through transforming oppressive institutions that harm their rights, even if it means rejecting private ownership, I will do it. Gladly.

That, Mr. Beck, is where my honor lies. Where is yours?

cabbage and community.

2010-08-23T05:43:00.005-05:00

Alex Day, a vlogger on Youtube I follow and find absolutely hilarious [click here for some hilarious stuff on Twilight (language warning in some of the videos)], is being more awesome this week by taking a trip to Zambia with World Vision. The above is his first real update on the trip, and the particularly important part is at the end.

Alex makes the point in the above video that helping out one person ended up helping out an entire community. By changing the life of just one, you end up creating a ripple effect that changes the entire world surrounding that one. Because one child got sponsored, a father was able to start a local business selling cabbage, the community is able to get cabbage from someone they know and trust and are able to feed their families, and an entire area - small as it might be - improves.

Kiva.org works on this same principle - using the ideals of capitalism to create ways to help the less fortunate. Kiva does microloans to people in impoverished countries to help them start their own small businesses. This helps in so many ways: 1. The people are able to be independent and learn not only a trade, but a business, 2. The local economy is helped because it's locals producing goods for locals, allowing the money to stay in the area rather than going off to some random CEO, 3. It cuts into one of the cycles that creates trafficking - poverty and not being able to make money on your own, and 4. It's more dignified than a handout.

Seeing Alex's videos and thinking about these sorts of issues reminds me that there are positive people making positive changes in the world, and that gives me hope. It all comes down to the choices we make every day and the way we decide how to use the resources we've been given. In the internet age, we are more connected, and more in tune with what is going on in our world than ever before. And it's easy - incredibly easy - to focus on the terrible things: the racist comments being flung around by pundits, the oppression of peoples by the very people who are supposed to protect them, the nearly impossible task of finding a company that isn't doing something unethical somewhere, the mindsets of those around you that just say 'haha whatever' when you show them pictures and videos of factory workers living in slums, the rage and yelling of protesters comparing an elected official to Hitler when all he wants to do is make sure that people have access to a doctor.

It can get frustrating and oppressive and sometimes I look at the world and wonder why the hell I fight. Why in the world do I even try? I'm obviously not changing people's minds, and discussion just goes in circles a lot of the time, and sometimes I feel so alone in the fight.

And then I see videos like Alex's, and I'm reminded, yet again, that the community of people working for positive change might be small, it might be quiet, but by God, it's doing some good. And that's the side I choose to be on. That's the side I choose to fight for: The one that says I don't care if you're Muslim, black, white, Jew, Palestinian, Hindu or Shinto. I don't care if you are the very definition of a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant. You are human, and are therefore deserving of my love and respect. You have dignity. You deserve a voice.

And I choose to be a part of a community that will give you that voice. That will give you the choices to be educated, to not spend your days doing the same tasks over and over again in a factory if you don't want to. That will help you when you get sick. That will give you the chance to live and learn what a healthy sexuality looks like, rather than being forced into a trade that rips that away from you. That will stand and support your rights when everyone else screams that you're a terrorist. A community that will choose to love you when it seems like no one else will.

And goldarnit, that gives me hope that things can turn out alright.

To close, John Green, another vlogger and author I really enjoy, said in a video a couple weeks ago:

I know it doesn’t feel this way all the time, but we get to choose what we care about and what we spend our resources on. We choose what (or ideally, whom) to lust after. We choose what to watch, what to write, what to build, how to spend to the breaths that we’ve been allotted. And the fact that many of our choices are unconscious - get that handbag, get that Starbuck’s, look at that Snooki - does not in any way make us less responsible for those choices. I’m happiest when I feel like I’m part of a community that makes me choose more intelligently and with greater empathy.

Let's go and be that community, guys.

The "Ground Zero Mosque" or The Right to Be Offended

2010-08-20T01:12:00.002-05:00

Note: This blog entry is full of snark.

I cannot stop laughing.

I have to keep laughing at this whole situation, otherwise I will go insane.

There are a number of reasons I think it's perfectly okay to build the "GZM" (for short), most important of which is that objections have absolutely no basis in law. There is no legal reason that can keep them from building that mosque, mainly because of a pesky little thing called the First Amendment.
You see, the beauty of America so many Patriots (with a capital P) celebrate is our freedoms - I have the RIGHT to read that book. I have the RIGHT to play that guitar. I have the RIGHT to use that word.

You do. Within reason. Just like the landmark Supreme Court Case Schenck vs. United States of 1919 determined, you are allowed freedom of speech insofar as it does not bring harm to another person or infringe upon their rights. The famous metaphor used to describe this ruling is not shouting "fire" in a crowded theater, when there is no fire. This puts your fellow citizens at risk.

What appears to be happening now, though, is that we take freedom of speech and freedom of religion to mean freedom from offense. "You can't build that mosque there! It offends me!" "You can't say that! It offends me!" I admit, I may be guilty of the latter (I frequently request that friends don't say "retarded" around me because of the offense), but I'm not going to sue them over it.

Members of both parties seem to misinterpret the idea of freedom of speech to mean either of two extremes: 1. You can't say anything that might offend another human being, or 2. I have the absolute and total right to say whatever the hell I want, and screw you if you get offended.

Finding a balance between the two is damn hard, but I think it becomes easier when we consider it from a "love your neighbor" point of view. While I may not like the racist characterization of Muslims that I find being flung back and forth during the discussion of the misnamed Ground Zero Mosque (more aptly, "the Islamic Community Center [a YMMA, of sorts] that happens to be near ground zero but still a few blocks a way and not at all visible from the site"...but that doesn't quite roll off the tongue), I fully support your right to say them if that is how you truly feel.

Will I encourage you to examine the issue and think about it more closely? (adopting a Palin voice): YOU BETCHA!

Will I attempt to show you in what ways you are wrong? (repeat Palinism).

Will I tell you to shut up because you've "offended me"? No. No I won't. I might stop listening, but I won't tell you to shut up.

And see that's what's ironic about this whole thing: People all over the United States are making the point of how important these first amendment rights like speech, religion, assembly and petition by exercising them in a way that is offensive to others, as they are attempting to block one of the freedoms from a group that is potentially offensive to a much smaller group of people.

After all, the thoughts and very loud opinions of the majority trumps the rights of the minority, right?

Worked for Civil Rights in the South.

Worked for Women's Suffrage in NYC.

Worked for freeing the slaves after the Civil War.

Oh wait.

No, my bad. In each one of those instances, the voice of the minority was shown to be just as valuable, and just as protected as the majority. It seems to me that we're all on equal footing when it comes to these practices of our freedoms and liberties.

Huh. So I suppose this is the America I was born in - one where, hopefully, the voice that is loudest (corporations with deep pockets, the richest 2%, the one with a cable channel with the highest amount of viewers) isn't the one who gets to dictate policy all the time. It's an America where the little man, hopefully, has the same right to state his opinion into the din that is our political discourse. It's an America where the rights of the minority aren't always trampled by an oppressive majority. It's an America where even the people who offend and whom you offend are on equal footing, and each get to have their say.

We are so lucky to have a voice, even if it does produce that awful, awful inexplicably stupid song I posted above.

"I disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - Evelyn Beatrice Hall, writing about Voltaire

Help Needed

2010-08-16T07:11:00.002-05:00

6 months ago, an earthquake rocked the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, killing thousands, and displacing even more. Relief efforts are still ongoing; millions upon millions were donated, and Haiti was all one heard about for weeks.

Now, a similar terror is raging its way through Pakistan, and I don't know about you, but I haven't heard a whole lot about it. Relief seems to be slow in trickling in, but the death toll is already above 1,400, and expected to grow higher. In the meantime, literally MILLIONS have been displaced from their homes, lost their livelihoods, and are stranded waiting on relief supplies and rescue.

The Huffington Post put together a helpful list of non-profits working in the area you can donate to, and what they are doing to specifically help relief efforts. Please, if you have some spare money, donate. If you have some spare time and are so inclined, pray.

Photo: AP/BK Bangash

riding the subway, strange things happen.

2010-08-12T21:06:00.003-05:00

Growing up in South Dakota, transportation was either by car or your own two feet. None of these newfangled "trains" or "subways." My first time ever taking a subway that was of substantial size was in London, at 20 years old. I got somewhat used to working the subways and metro systems while in Europe, but not by much.

I got a little bit better when I went to Boston and NYC with Kim in Spring of 2009 - in those larger cities, subway was the only way to get around.

I like to think I got a little more used to it being in NYC on my own in December, but I would hardly call myself "experienced" at working public transit.

So it's a bit nerve wracking for my first major, every day uses of public transit to come when I'm living in a place where I don't speak the language and can't read the signs. My first time taking the bus was an accomplishment. Taking the subway on my own two weeks ago to go see Inception in theaters was major for me - I got there and back with only one missed train.

As I'm getting more and more experienced about how to get to places via bus and train, I'm beginning to pay more attention to my fellow passengers. I've noticed a few things that tend to happen on Japanese public transport that really don't happen anywhere else, mainly: sleep.

In NYC or Boston, you fall asleep on public transit to your own peril - you probably should have a good grip on whatever personal belongings you have if you want them to make the trip with you.

In Yamaguchi-ken in Japan? Not so much.

I don't know what makes Japan so safe. Maybe it's a cultural thing - being a crook is so looked down upon that it makes it hard for anyone to be one. Maybe it's just that this is a very traditional area and people are more trusting of each other - kind of like small town South Dakota. Regardless, I feel incredibly safe on public transit, though I think it'll be ages before I fall asleep on it.

Now, I tell you this first part so that I may tell you the second:

As the foreigner, I tend to get some weird looks on the trains. People notice when a tall white person walks in. But I've been discovering that that won't preclude them from sitting themselves or their children near me.

Yesterday, I took a trip to Kokura to go shopping for a new travel backpack (and was successful, by the by), and a man boarded the train with two small children. One was probably around 5 and the other around 3 or 4 (I'm terribly about estimating ages though). The smaller of the two took a seat next to me, set his shoes on the floor and sat back. It was the cute little kid sort of sitting where the feet don't quite reach the floor so they're just left dangling over the side.

I smiled at the kids and at the old lady seated across from us, and proceeded to alternate between playing games on my iPod and looking out the window. About halfway to Kokura (a 15 minute ride), I felt something hit my shoulder. I turned slightly to see what it was, and the little boy had fallen asleep and slumped over against my shoulder. I stared at him for a minute, unsure of what to do. The father wasn't paying all that close of attention, and the boy seemed to be fine, so I decided to let it be. Heck, if I can be a temporary pillow for a Japanese three year old, why not?

I looked up to see the old woman across the way smiling. Soon after, the father noticed that something was up, and looked down at his kid. He then tried to wake the boy up and looked apologetically at me. I signaled, as best I could, that it was fine and he could sleep. Our stop was coming up though, so the father persisted in trying to wake up his son.

Have you ever baby sat a little kid and when they don't want to do something, they just go limp?

That's what this kid did. When his dad tried to wake him, he faked being still asleep and just went limp in the seat. At this point, the old lady and I burst out laughing and the father smiled. He eventually managed to get his son cooperative enough to hoist him up piggy back style and carry him off the train.

Even though we didn't speak any of the same language, we were all able to laugh together and understand the humor of the situation. It was one of my favorite moments so far in Japan.

what a beautiful God there must be.

2010-08-10T00:35:00.006-05:00

My thoughts right now are a jumbled mess of things.

I was going to go shopping, but then I started doing some reading about sweatshops and production, and figured I didn't need to spend that money today. And then I started watching interviews and reading about evangelical responses to abortion, and that got me going thinking about orphans and adoptions. And then I read a very well written blog about fundamentalism and women in the home, and that got me going off in another related direction. And then I read some in a new book recommended to me by a friend - The Purity Myth, and tried to sort out where I sit between extreme feminism, and the conservative church's stance on modesty.

Sorting out where I stand is a hard thing. I am 24 years and 5 months old, and I'm still trying on identities, figuring out what labels to use for myself. I am pretty comfortable with my "liberal" label, often comfortable with the "Christian" label - except when it connotes in the minds of others a foaming at the mouth rabid fundamentalist. I'm pretty okay with the academic label, perfectly happy to be called a nerd (those are two separate things), and I'm proud when convenient of my "Midwestern" label, though most of the time not proud of the "American" label. Labeling oneself is part of what gives us identity because it associates us with a community, claims other parts of a community as part of our identity, and tells people a general idea of how we think and feel. The problem with labels comes when people only pay attention to the label and don't look below the surface, a mistake I myself have made more than once.

There are the even more controversial labels: "feminist," for one. "Activist" for another. "Liberal Democrat" third, even though this last is not one I would even pin on myself, but instead have been called by others.

These are the labels that have preconceived notions others use to vilify. "Feminism" was created so that "unattractive women [could have] easier access to mainstream society," Rush Limbaugh is so famous for saying. "Social Justice Activists" are a danger to America and society in general, Gloom and Doom commentator Glenn Beck is fond of repeating. "Liberal Democrats" are also at fault.

And then there are the labels I pin on others, and use to vilify them: "conservative," "fundamentalist," "anti-women," etc.

In going through life, I'll try on a lot of different labels. Today has been one step in that process as I try to think through what communities I want to identify with, which communities I think Jesus would identify with. And while I don't have a conclusion yet, I do know this: He wouldn't let labels define him. Even at his worst moment, hanging on the Cross, people were trying to pin labels on him, and none of them fit: "King of the Jews," "Criminal," "weak." And what I do know is that, despite whatever labels people identify with for themselves, Jesus accepts them as they are. The tax collectors, the Samaritans, the poor and the oppressed. Those are the types of labeled people Jesus hung out with. And I hope I can learn to ignore those labels as he did.

So I guess the most fitting label for me right now would be "work in progress."

100 Things - My list

2010-08-07T07:05:00.011-05:00

Click to embiggen.
comment on #80: Edit to read: VISIT Alexandria, Egypt, where the library was.

Is This Right?

2010-07-30T07:09:00.002-05:00

Take the next 5 minutes and 32 seconds to yourself. Put on headphones, get yourself to a quiet place, whatever. Put the above video on full screen and just watch. Don't put it on, and click back to it occasionally while also checking your facebook, IM'ing with your friend, doing whatever kind of multi-tasking that you do while you're reading my blog (it's okay, I click around a lot too, possibly more than you).

Today, though, I want you to be quiet and listen and watch and think and pray and cry and understand.

Victoria Rae, of UNICEF UK, says of the above video, "We want people to think about their own childhood and see what everyday life is like for so many children around the world. This film is a window into a different day-to-day world - it's a childhood where there is no school summer holidays because children don't go to school. These are children who are missing out their basic rights - to learn, to clean water, to be healthy, to be looked after and just to be a child. ... The question is simple - is this right?"

I think we all know the answer to that one.

Living in Japan, I have to be honest and admit that I've sort of lost a little steam in the movement against human trafficking, against child exploitation. Being caught up in moving to a new country, being unable to read labels and unable to ask questions about production, being surrounded by a concentration on style and fashion and a society that is so incredibly private that you can't even see gardens from the road...all this has distracted me from what I believe is my real purpose in this life - to help better the lives of those around me.

Flying into Japan, on the customs form and again at the airport, I had to declare that I was bringing no child pornography into the country. The exploitation of children for one's own benefit is a very real problem to the Japanese government, one they are slowly cracking down on. Granted, making people check yes or no on a customs form is probably one of the most ridiculous ways to enforce such a code, but it's a step in the right direction, even if it is just a baby step.

I'm going to see a lot more of this world in the coming years. I will be in South Korea in less than 5 weeks. I will be in Australia in February. I still plan on traveling to Taiwan, China, and possibly Cambodia/Thailand (the university chaplain here leads missions to Cambodia). I am sure I will see more of the suffering of this world, just as I saw in India. But I will also see a lot of the beauty, grace and mercy that we can offer to our fellow human beings.

Today, take a few minutes to realize your impact in the world. To realize how connected you are not only to those in your immediate neighborhood, but to the children of poverty in India, Cambodia, North Korea, Thailand, Cameroon, South Africa, Bangladesh...all over the world.

Ask yourself: Is this right?

moot points about free speech

2010-07-23T20:35:00.006-05:00

-We interrupt your regularly scheduled blog to bring you these thoughts-

EDIT: This post is not going to make any sense to my older audience, at least not at first. Rest assured, I do get to a larger point about free speech later on.

I consider myself to be a pretty savvy internet user. I know where to find movies and TV shows streaming within hours of their airing, which is a huge benefit considering the free streaming sites in the US that are legal do not work outside the states (I would be using Hulu ALL THE TIME if this was the case). I am pretty familiar with internet memes, and know how to spot a RickRoll. I have a Facebook, a Twitter, a Tumblr, a blog, and am a regular presence on a message board and several other blogs. The double rainbow meme was already annoying me before it broke on the internet at large.

It sort of goes without saying - I know my way around.

It also goes without saying though that there are also several areas of the internet I know nothing of, and it's of one of these that I would like to spew some thoughts today.

I'm almost frightened to mention it, because the first two rules of this certain imageboard (a board created for posting jpegs and gifs) are, in classic Fight Club style, "Do not talk about /b/." and "You do NOT talk about /b/."

But today, I am going to talk about it. "/b/" (pronounced "bee") is the well known section of a certain notorious website known as 4chan. 4chan was developed in 2003 by a 15 year old kid, as an English copy of a Japanese web format. There's a whole lot more background than that, but for the sake of discussion, I'm going to skip to the important points.

The important things to know about 4chan is that it 1. Has 700,000 posts a day, and 2. Is almost completely anonymous. It's anonymity is part of the massive draw - you can say virtually anything, with almost no repercussions (though I must say there have been cases where someone threatening to blow up an airport or something as a joke was caught and prosecuted by the FBI, so there are some limits). /b/ is by far the more popular section of the site - it is the "random" board and the one where pretty much anything goes.

"Anything goes," in the internet age, translates to virulent racism, lots and lots of porn, and lots and lots of gore. "moot," the now 22 year old who founded the site, refers to this corner of the internet as "unbridled free speech," a last bastion of sorts in an era where everyone knows everything about everyone else. In the safety of 4chan's anonymity, you can spew angry thoughts about your coworkers or boss, rant about the gay/black/latino/pick your poison groups at your school, and, yes, caption cat pictures.

(Yes, that's right, 4chan invented the LOLcat).

Here's the problem, if you haven't spotted it already: the issue with completely "unbridled free speech" is that it only functions positively when it happens among mature adults who realize that what they say has consequences. The anonymity and lack of policing on /b/, combined with a massive amount of teenagers who lie about their age to get around the board's supposed 18+ restriction results, often, in actions being taken too far, in harassing people and shutting down whole websites. Part of the reason I was afraid to post my thoughts about /b/ was the idea of a 4chan member picking up on it and running with it.

When we encourage free speech and anonymity at the same time, we get this weird, non-real world vortex where what you say has no consequence, and you can spew whatever. Most of the time that's pretty harmless, and I'd be willing to bet most people on /b/ are pretty normal people with a weird sense of humor. But, anonymity and an overly emphasized concern for my "free speech" is what results in riots, is what results in hate speech and hate crimes, is something that is a dangerous combination.

Free speech only really works if you understand what it means to say something and have it mean something. The anonymity and lack of consequences on 4chan also is a double edged sword: while it has led to some awesome expression and some pretty damn hilarious stuff, it also means that what you say never means anything real. When it comes down to it, you're an anonymous person in his mom's basement trolling an 11 year old girl. Those who hide behind the veil of both free speech and anonymity are cowards unable to face the consequences for their actions.

Is that really what we want to use free speech for?

Blog inspired by this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_1UEAGCo30

-back to your regularly scheduled blog now-

2010-07-23T01:50:00.002-05:00

I admit it: For the first few weeks here, I thought the Japanese for "excuse me," which is sumimasen (sue-me-ma-sen) was actually "sushimasen," which I think would mean something along the lines of "I am sushi" (Do not quote me on that; I know very little of Japanese sentence structure at the moment).

I admit that I actually used "sushimasen" a few times before realizing my mistake.

And I admit that I was very embarrassed that I did so in crowded areas, getting some very strange looks from the Japanese around me.

And I am telling you this because I think one thing that anyone, not just those living in foreign countries, not just those traveling outside of their home - anyone and everyone - has to be willing to do is make mistakes. You have to be willing to step out there and make a foible, to make a fool of yourself, to be on the receiving end of some strange looks, if you want to get anywhere.

And it's one of the hardest damn things to do.

One thing that is terrifying for any new teacher is making mistakes. Because you are entrusted with these students' education, you have the inexorably heavy burden of making sure you don't screw them up permanently. That is, if you choose to think about it like that. If you choose to think of teaching as passing on this medicine ball burden of knowledge and how to do things correctly, you're going to collapse by the end of the second week.

But, if you choose to look on it as a learning curve - not everyone is going to be Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society, and not everyone should be. One thing that I've learned, especially through my time here in Japan (a mere seven weeks at this point), is that if you're afraid to make mistakes in your teaching, then you will end up not passing on knowledge, but rather solidifying in the kids' minds that school is boring, routine, and not worth spending time on.

And sometimes that means a day wasted in the classroom because a lesson plan didn't pan out. That might mean having to repeat yourself. That might mean being willing to try out a different approach, and failing.

The point is: You never know until you try.

You never know if you can fly if you don't try to jump every once in a while.

Tired, cliche, and probably confusing post finished.

Sumimasen. Arigato.

hangman

2010-07-16T04:24:00.002-05:00

As I'm teaching here, I'm having to try out new techniques to get the students interested in the lessons and learning. I decided this week to try out a new method of teaching vocabulary: Playing games. The week before, playing a game from the book proved to be pretty helpful on the review for the test, I figured playing a game this week couldn't hurt.

The game I chose is one familiar to many American schoolchildren - Hangman. You put blanks up on the board for letters, and the students have to guess the letters, and if they don't guess correctly, you fill in the figure of a little stick man on a cartoon gallows.

As I explained the concept, I saw comprehension dawn on my students' faces, followed by horror. The look said it all: "You mean, if we lose, that guys...dies!?"

I hadn't realized it before, but I guess the game is pretty grim. But then again, so are a lot of Western games - cowboys and indians, ring around the rosie (it's about the plague), cops and robbers, Risk, Red Rover. A lot of our games are violent and frankly a bit scary when you step back and think about it.

I was going to do a whole post comparing Japanese and Western attitudes toward violence, but I frankly don't know enough about Japanese culture yet to make an informed decision. All I have is the reaction of my students in the class, and a funny story. I wish I could have captured their faces on camera, because it was hilarious and embarrassing at the same time.

Once the game got underway, however, the students were learning and participating. When I offered them the chance to be "the hangman" - ie, the one writing on the board - the student who had been most horrified was one of the first to volunteer.

It's amazing how we can adjust to anything.

I'm sure I'll do a more coherent blog post later this weekend. Thanks for reading.

a moment, a love, a dream aloud

2010-07-11T05:24:00.004-05:00

Music for today: "Sweet Disposition" by the Temper Trap
----------

I took the bus by myself yesterday.

I spent 45 minutes waiting at the wrong bus stop before I figured it out and walked over to the right one.

I got on the wrong bus coming back, and ended up having to walk fifteen minutes in the rain.

But y'know what?

It was still a good day.

I did something.

One of the hardest things I've discovered about living in a foreign country, especially one where you don't speak the language, is to get out of your comfort zone. For the past month, it's been very comfortable for me to stay in my apartment, watch Doctor Who, Modern Family, Community, or one of the many television shows I enjoy. That is the comfortable thing.

It also would have been comfortable for me to just stay in the United States, find a simple job back in Sioux Falls or somewhere else, and stayed doing that. It also would have been more comfortable for me to just stay in education as a student and go on to a PhD program somewhere.

Instead, I left all that behind. I left. I went somewhere that doesn't even speak my language, to teach students raised in an educational system far different than the one I'm used to, and to live by myself.

I'd be lying if I said I absolutely loved this 100%. I often long for my own car again, a city that I know well, and especially when I'm not feeling well, food that I'm used to. It is so easy to go back to those comfortable things. It is so much easier to stay within our comfort zone.

But I would also stagnate if I did that.

A few months ago, I had a discussion with Mom about moving back to Sioux Falls. In the midst of a job hunt, I told Mom I was looking at jobs in Seattle, San Fransisco, Washington, D.C., and Houston. Originally, I had thought of moving back to Sioux Falls after I did my Master's, because I knew I could easily get a job there, and frankly, I missed it.

But as I got used to living in Waco, to living so far from home, I realized that moving back home would be the entirely wrong move. It would, as Mom and I discussed, kill my soul. It would be a decision focused solely on getting money to pay back student loans, a decision that I knew I would regret. While paying back student loans is important (and something I fully intend to do), making a job decision based on money is not a good idea (I have more to say on the student loan debt crisis in America and why it hurts us, but that's another blog post for another day). Making decisions based on money is not necessarily a good idea.

I was reading today about how you become a writer - essentially advice put out by established writers of whom I am a fan. Basically, "write what you know," doesn't cover everything. It doesn't help if what you know is only the inside of a classroom for the first 24 years of your life. (By the way, I calculated the other day, and I have spent 20 years of my life as a student). You not only should write what you know, but you should KNOW THINGS. You should major in something other than writing. You should travel the world. You should have conversations about religion, education, and the world around you. You should LIVE. If you want to write about life, you need to have a life.

Newly inspired, I take new heart in my decision to move 9,000 miles away from everything I know, to live in a country I had never considered visiting, much less moving to. Who knows? All of this may be fodder for a book some day. Or not.

And if not, this does not make the experience worth any less.

Either way, I am living. I am getting on the wrong bus. I am walking in the rain. I am taking about the sizes of baby kimonos with a lady who only knows a few words in English. I am miming holding a newborn to tell the saleslady about my niece. I am experiencing the humility that comes with not being able to read the labels on the food you're eating. And I am learning how to leave my comfort zone and create new ones.

I expanded my horizons yesterday by taking a bus trip. What have you done to step outside your comfort zone today?

the drums of war.

2010-07-08T02:20:00.004-05:00

I am at war.

Yes, war.

Not in a metaphor, metaphysical, metanarrative sense - "I am at war with myself, roar."

No, I am at literal, "I want to bomb the crap out of this and defeat you entirely," war.

With the school copier.

Oh, excuse me, "risograph."

My officemate and I joke frequently about how long it takes to do copies at school because they always take so long. Granted, the copier at Baylor was no picnic either, but at least I knew what to do with that thing. With a Risograph, I don't have the slightest clue what to do when something goes wrong.

And something will, inevitably, go wrong. Every. Single. Time.

Two days ago, I had to copy a test for my students. The machine paused when I was attempting to make a sample copy of page two (of a three page test). The machine jammed, so I opened it up where it told me and removed the papers. I pushed it shut again (no easy task, mind!), only to discover the display still blinking at me and pointing at a certain part. So I opened it up again, saw no papers, checked inside, underneath, everywhere. And so no papers.

After about 5 minutes of staring at it and wondering what the heck was wrong, I went and got someone from the office to help me out. Apparently, risographs have this big roll of inked paper in them rather than just toner, and that needed to be replaced. It's a fairly simple process, but one I had never seen before.

Today, it jammed on me again while I was making more copies. Ooh, fun. This time it was a different part of the machine. So I opened it up and saw a sheet of paper hopelessly trapped in the bowels of the copier. After several failed attempts to pulled it out (during which course I got ink all over my hands - evidence in picture), a fellow teacher came over and pushed a button. WHOOSH. Out came the paper.

But then, was my problem fixed? Nope! Evidently, when a roll of ink is being used up, it gets wrapped up around a rod on the other side of the machine, which needs to be cleaned off periodically. After another few minutes of trying to figure it out, the same teacher from before came over and showed me what to do. I thanked him profusely, and finished my printing without a problem.

These machines are incredibly frustrating simply because of what appears to be a highly inefficient design. As someone so used to copiers that give warnings - "Out of paper," "Toner Low," etc - a machine that simply jams when there's a problem just doesn't make sense. But that seems to be the standard operating procedure - jam up, and then tell the user about the problem. It's highly inefficient, especially since several sheets of paper get destroyed in the process.

Maybe I'm just doing things wrong. Maybe I'm just not giving it the grace it needs, or talking to it nicely enough. "Goldarnit you stupid machine!" is probably not the kindest thing to exclaim when it jams on me for the third time in 10 pages.

All I know is that this machine makes me want to beat my head against a wall, and that's never good.

________

That said, I have exciting news. I received a letter (or rather, my parents received a letter addressed to me) from the estate of one JK Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series. I had sent her publishers a bound copy of my thesis, which they evidently passed on to her. The letter is from her personal assistant, Fiddy Henderson, thanking me for sending along the bound copy, and saying that Ms Rowling wanted to pass along her appreciation. It's a form letter of sorts, but it does not preclude further communication from the woman herself, and it means that my MA thesis actually made it to JKR's vicinity. Exciting news indeed!!!

On Freedom

2010-07-04T09:43:00.002-05:00

A few weeks ago, I read this speech by David Foster Wallace, and I felt today (the fourth of July, in the states - it's almost the fifth here) an appropriate time for a repost.

But if you've really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know you have other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, loud, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars -- compassion, love, the sub-surface unity of all things. Not that that mystical stuff's necessarily true: The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're going to try to see it. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship... ... And the world will not discourage you from operating on your default-settings, because the world of men and money and power hums along quite nicely on the fuel of fear and contempt and frustration and craving and the worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom to be lords of our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default-setting, the "rat race" -- the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.

everything's gonna be fine fine fine

2010-07-02T04:18:00.003-05:00

The most common question I have heard from friends back home since being here (a month already!) is "How's the language barrier?" I've been here a month, and I've adjusted to some things, but I still can't understand 99% of what is said in Japanese, and I still can't (and probably won't ever) read much Kanji. I do know the symbol for "shaved ice" though.

Living in a culture where you don't know the language is an immensely humbling experience. I have to have help with everything I was able to do independently at home - the first time I withdrew money from the ATM, I had to get one of the Japanese people in the office to help me with the buttons because I couldn't read them. Even if I wanted to drive a car here, I probably wouldn't be able to because I cannot read half the road signs. Getting dinner is often a guessing game, and I am beyond grateful for picture menus. Several conversations have devolved into purely miming what I needed, which is slightly embarrassing.

I love the English language, but I'll be the first to admit that I'm not a linguist. I have a decent grasp on German, so it's not like I can't learn other languages...I'm just not very good at it. It takes a lot of work for me to get a grasp on basic sayings in a language and get them to stick in my head - I have to be told multiple times how to say something before I will actually be able to say it.

Today I walked down the hall to class practicing how to say "Good morning" in Japanese. Part of my hesitation in learning a new language is the fear that I'll bumble it and come out sounding like some sort of caveman: "Me go to mosquito Kokura?" Or that I'll say something completely unknown to them.

I've had the reverse happen several times in class already - if a student doesn't know how to pronounce a word in English, he'll do his best to say it, but often it comes out sounding nothing like the actual English word. Frequently this happens with English words that are pronounced in ways vastly different from their spelling. I imagine similar things will happen in Japanese, and it is hard to humble yourself to knowingly go into a situation where you don't know all the answers, where you've got a 99.9% possibility of screwing things up, into a culture where no means no and yes also means no (something strange with the way they structure their questions, a bit like the "do you mind" construction in English).

I have to rethink how I teach some things. In debate class today, I could tell in the middle of the lesson that I'd lost them entirely. I had to backpedal and go to a lesson from two weeks ago in order to catch them back up to speed. This was simply because I had talked too fast in English, and now had to explain myself over again. I have to be extremely patient, and extremely forgiving, and realize certain limitations. As much fun as it might be to discuss the Big Issues with my students, it's a little hard if they still don't know the word "corner" or "wrench."

I get to see a different part of the teaching spectrum, and it's one that is interesting, humbling, and I think will ultimately make me a better teacher. And a better learner - willing to take risks, to make a fool of myself on the bus, and to get lost a couple of times. After all, isn't that what adventure is made of?

jump start.

2010-06-29T04:40:00.003-05:00

I've had a busy few days, and have been thinking that I need to blog, but haven't really felt like I have a lot to say lately. So we'll have another list post.

--Today, I saw some of the strangest stuff I've seen since coming to Japan. Upon leaving campus (seriously, stepping down the staircase off campus onto public sidewalk), I was greeted with people handing out fliers and a large furry mascot like thing that appeared to be in the process of being consumed by a giant blowfish (or fugu, as it is called here). It was bright yellow, and the blow fish on its head was a bright blue. I presume it had something to do with the city, but as I can't read the advertisement, I will remain confused.

--I also saw this oddly painted bus that appeared to be a field trip vehicle for little kids. All the kids inside were wearing straw hats and blue uniforms, and the outside of the bus had this animal scene (I think lions) painted on it. Cutest thing ever? Heck yes.

--Of course, all this happened when I *didn't* have my camera.

--I now know how to work both the trains and the buses and can safely get myself to Kokura and back. It only costs about $6 round trip, and I've been told that the movie theater in Kokura has a women's night on Wednesdays, where tickets are only TEN US dollars instead of EIGHTEEN. YAY. I will definitely be seeing Inception when it comes to Japan - evidently they do English movies with Japanese subtitles. AWESOME.

--I am in desperate need of fair trade coffee. Email me (dianna_anderson at baylor dot edu) if you want my address to send me some FT Certified (unfortunately instant) coffee. There are virtually no good coffee shops here, and I don't feel exactly comfortable buying the coffee stuff at the grocery store (though I have been getting it out of desperation). If I had some coffee I could make at home, it would make a huge difference.

--I now own Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone in Japanese. Yes.

--I learned how to cook chicken in a couple of different ways recently. That combined with yakisoba noodles makes for a great evening meal.

--I haven't had many more unusual foods, though I did discover that the McDonald's here has a teriyaki burger, which I may have to try.

--I am planning three trips in the future, which I may have already mentioned: South Korea in September, home to Sioux Falls in December (to meet little Vera, my niece!!!), and Australia/NZ in February for my 25th birthday. I've figured out that I can survive on just about 500USD/month for food/entertainment, leaving my budget wide open for paying back student loans, saving up money, and taking awesome trips. I'm kind of stoked about this.

--In the English Education Center on campus (read: English Lounge), we have a mix CD that plays English songs. It changes once a month, and I've finally made my selections on submissions. The students tend to like pop Top 40 stuff, which I abhor, so I think I found a happy medium. The selections? "Here (In Your Arms)" by hellogoodbye, "Dance Tonight" by Sir Paul McCartney, "Use Somebody" by Kings of Leon, "I'm Not Going To Teach Your Boyfriend How to Dance With You" by Black Kids, "Phantom Punch" by Sondre Lerche (he will be making frequent appearances throughout the year), and finally, "Crushcrushcrush" by Paramore.

--Um, what else...I've been watching a lot of Doctor Who in my free time, and highly recommend it. Most of you, my dear readers, are fans of Sci-Fi, and I think you should know this series. I know of some places to stream it online, so if you want, pop me an email or a comment.

I haven't experienced a whole lot of homesickness yet, but I've been having some strange dreams. Oddly enough, one of the things I miss most is my pets - it kind of sucks not having a cute dog cuddling up next to me as I type, or begging for food as I cook. I don't know a whole lot about social code considering other people's pets here, so I've been really careful when I see adorable dogs on the street and only approach them if they approach me. But I saw a cute little doggie that looked a lot like my dear Lizzie this afternoon and it made me really sad. :(

I didn't mean to leave things on a kind of melancholy note. Um. To cheer you up, the trailer for Part 1 of the final Harry Potter movie released today!

YAY!!!!!

in a future age.

2010-06-20T02:39:00.003-05:00

When you think of Japan, what do you think of? It's probably a mess of things: anime cartoons with gigantic eyes, robot technology just shorting of a flying car, cherry blossoms, and Godzilla are just a few, am I right? Huge technology, big cities, fast trains, and men in suits.

What you're thinking of is Tokyo, but as friends have commented, thinking of Tokyo when you think of Japan is like thinking of Times Square when you think of the USA. It's such a small, although visible, chunk of the country that seems to serve to give a distorted impression of the country.

What I'd like to introduce you to is the Japan I am getting acquainted with.

This Japan has mountains covered in dark green forests extending up to meet the sky.

This Japan has old temples made of stone and graveyards that have aging flower on the thin tombstones.

This Japan has no wireless internet.

This Japan has the smell of the ocean when you step out of your apartment.

This Japan air-dried laundry, and barbershops with red and white rotating barber poles.

This Japan has no subway beneath the streets.

This Japan has no Apple stores and one Starbuck's.

This Japan has large orange crabs scuttling in the middle of the street.

This Japan bugs the size of your hand.

This Japan is rural, slightly wild, and beautiful. It has jellyfish stuck in the sand on the beach awaiting the tide coming back in. It has gas stoves and no oven. It has old ladies who will stare at your tattoo and get amazed at the bold American.

But it is also beautiful. As I told a friend the other day, while Shimonoseki is huge, it still feels like a small town. I feel like I am living in Oxford again to some extent - I can and have to walk everywhere, up and down sidewalks and hills, past fields and through tunnels. I shop at the dollar stores, and feel the burn in my arms when I walk the twenty minutes from the grocery store to my house with two plastic bags of foodstuffs. I have the confusion of figuring out the bus system and knowing that I will get lost at some point. But I also have the feeling of safety, of security, of this being my home now.

Japan is not nearly as efficient, technological and "advanced" as most people think that it is. Where I live is much more akin to South Dakota than to NYC - it is a conservative area, very resistant to change, and very family oriented. It has taken the rural and made it a part of the city, something I am well at home with. It has maintained traditions, both good and bad, and its people are friendly and forgiving of errors.

And for the next two years, it is my home. It's hard to believe this is my fourth week here already. I've settled into a routine of teaching, grading and cooking my own food. I'm learning how to get around, and I've made a few friends. My alien registration has come through and I'm officially a foreign resident. I'm planning vacations, setting up student loan repayments and bank accounts, and making a life for myself.

Never in a million years did I picture myself here, but now that I am, it's good to be home.

Mom, Dad, I have something to tell you...

2010-06-13T02:01:00.006-05:00

I'm an, uh, an...I'm an Internationalist. There, I said it. Whew. That's a relief.

Wait, no, no, it's not what you think. No, it wasn't anything you did. You were great, fine parents, and I love you deeply. This is just...who I am, who I feel God created me to be.

I have to admit, those missions trips I went on in high school and college...all that getting out into the world and sort of, I guess, experimenting...well, it made me see some things differently. It made me see myself differently. I suppose you could say that it's an urge I've been suppressing for a long time, but when it comes down to it...why fight it anymore? I mean, it's what I love. It's who I love. That's what changed me. I realized that love wasn't just restricted to Americans or British or developed countries. I guess my perspective on Love just...shifted...I hope you can accept that. I love who I love, regardless of where they're from or how much money they have in their pocket or their country's relationship to my country. That's my love, and I hope you can see that.

...

One of the many blogs I follow recently posted this lovely series of clips from Christian Conservative Radio in Minnesota. It contains much of the common anti-homosexual talk so common nowadays, the type of talk that is so unloving that, when I hear it, I tend to just shake my head in sadness and walk away. I still listen, so that I can put things into some context and understand what is being said on the other side (and I'm getting better at listening without getting angry), so I was surprised when the thing that jumped out at me was not their praise of Malawi's imprisonment of a gay couple, nor the discussion of how Muslim nations handle homosexuality. Instead, it was the imprecations against a member of Amnesty International's take on the prevalence of anti-gay laws.

Before they even quoted what she had to say, they commented (with a tone of derision and disgust in their voices), that this was someone from Amnesty International, "so you know already that she's an Internationalist."

Not being a regular listener of the show, the comment intrigued me. "Internationalist" - what does that even mean? From the tone in which it was said, and the offhand way this comment was thrown out, I had to assume that it was something discussed on the show before, and something that was conceivably quite negative.

The implications behind "Internationalist" being an insult and an imprecation of character strike me as more disheartening and frightening than all the anti-gay talk that surrounds it. To be an Internationalist (and I am having to make an assumption here, but I think it is reasonably supported by tone and context), seems to mean someone who looks beyond the borders of America and works for people regardless of national origin. Judging from the context, I don't doubt it might also mean someone who doesn't see national boundaries at all - one of those silly "We Are the World" types, who believes that America is no more blessed by God than say, India or Iraq or Japan.

That seems to be dangerous thinking for these particular radio hosts - an implication that America is not God's chosen people, that the American way is not the only way, that the principles of our Constitution may not be the end all be all of values, life, and government, is dangerous to their position. If America is not everything they say it is - if America is not chosen and blessed by God and therefore the paragon of liberty, if other nations are just as important - then their hardline stances on many issues need to be rethought and challenged.

It might mean (God forbid!) that America's government and Constitution are just as flawed and problematic as anyone other nation's and therefore some things may have to actually change in order to become better.

It might mean opening their eyes to the idea that, despite being the nation of liberty and freedom, we have created a situation in which our liberty and freedom are costing others their lives. Our desire to "live as we want without intrusion," to "live as God commands" (in their interpretation, not mine), might be taking a toll on the rest of the world. But surely, if we're the best nation on earth and the only one that matters, then those foolish "Internationalists" have to be wrong...right?

This conflation of God and State worries me. And no, I'm not talking about separation of Church and State - that's another matter entirely. I'm talking about seeing the State as God, which seems to be precisely the error that these particular radio talk show hosts are making. Because America is the Christian nation founded on Biblical principles by Christian men (a claim disputed by many a learned historian), then the State is simply another arm of God. This leads to comments like Glenn Beck's inflammatory comments that the Constitution is divinely inspired, this leads to the blindness that seems to occupy both sides of the homosexual marriage issue, leads to the uplifting and praising of rather arbitrary political boundaries that are a post-Enlightenment development.

It seems to be a refusal to see the bigger picture - that America, though young and powerful, is a teenager on the world stage, and frequently acts as such.

Being an Internationalist, then, seems to be the only way to survive. To realize that people are people no matter where they come from is incredibly important. When we complain about Obama bowing to the leader of another nation, we cut ourselves off from the idea of actually understanding another person. When we say that "we don't negotiate with terrorists" and use it as an excuse not to be diplomatic in situations that call for diplomacy, we fail to actually be God's nation in the world, the kind that loves its neighbor and tries to make the decision that would be best for all.

I've been thinking about this sort of thing a lot since coming to Japan. As much as I try not to be the Ugly American, I do have trouble with some things, and am probably unintentionally rude quite often. But, making an effort to learn and grasp Japanese culture also means that I am making an effort to see the Japanese as people, and not just some foreign group. There are numerous things that are immensely confusing in Japanese culture, at least to the American mindset. But, I wouldn't get very far if I just said, "Well that's not how we do it in America," and left it at that.

That might make me an Internationalist. If that's the case, then so be it. I'm fine with a label that means I'm making an effort to make the world a better place, rather than just sitting back and yelling "HELL NO" out of one side of my mouth and saying praises to God out of the other.

So, American Nation, I hope you understand. I hope you can bring yourself to look at America more critically in the future, and maybe get into the 21st century with the rest of us. It's 2010, baby, why are we even having this discussion?!

"Where do you come from?"

2010-06-11T04:37:00.000-05:00

"South Dakota."

"Um, where is that?"

I turn to the large world map behind me, find the United States, and point to the middle, up close to Canada.

"Ohhh! Is that city or country?"

"I live in the city, but it's mostly country."

"OH! You are city girl then!"

"Kind of."

I had this conversation at lunch today in the EEC, or English Education Center, on the University's campus. It is a replica of conversations I've had with my students, fellow professors, and other English-speaking Japanese. Explaining where I come from is hard - "South Dakota by way of Texas" doesn't make a lot of sense to the Japanese students at my school. Frequently, they recognize Texas, but then explaining that I'm not actually from Texas, but somewhere else entirely gets a little complicated.

Not a whole lot of people in the United States could find South Dakota on a map, so it's no surprise that I have to keep spelling out S-I-O-U-X and D-A-K-O-T-A for official forms and stuff.

I've been doing a lot of thinking lately about where I come from. If "coming from" some place was as simple as "this is where I spent my childhood," then South Dakota is my answer, no question. I spent the first 22 years of my life there. But if "coming from" means "Where were you directly prior to coming to Japan?" then my answer has to change. Reluctant to claim Texas as my own, the "South Dakota by way of Texas" was born.

But what if "coming from" means where I grew up, where I became the person I am? Then Texas, England and South Dakota all have a claim, and to a lesser extent, India, France, and Italy all do as well. Rarely have I visited another country without it becoming a part of me in some way. Having been here only two weeks, I can already tell that Japan is going to have a great effect in my life - I am living alone for the first time, living in a country that does not speak my native tongue, and basically having to relearn everything I know about feeding myself (I mean, cooking, not the actual eating process itself, though chopsticks are a fun addition to the arsenal of utensils). I will do a lot of growing up here - my teaching philosophy will have to change in many respects, and while I hope to keep the essence of who I am, I think my perspective on many issues will broaden out.

Being from South Dakota means a lot of things. I pronounce "wagon" like "wegon," for a start. But I also tend to view things through a much more practical lens. Being the daughter of a man who grew up in the country, in a family of seven, I tend to see things very practically - if an object doesn't have an immediately obvious purpose, I tend to regard it with skepticism. I have cushions on my couch not to look pretty, but to serve a function. I also know how to drive in snow, with a manual transmission, and know what sort of things to do in severe weather. I also have a healthy respect for nature, knowing that a storm can kill you in seconds, and you shouldn't really muck around with it.

Having lived far away from home though, I also see a lot of beauty in "seizing the moment." Living in England developed a lot of my independence and confidence, teaching me not to see my country as the end-all be-all of nations, teaching me how to make and treasure friends, and teaching me to adventure as long as I am able. England gave me a lot of the life philosophy that landed me in Japan.

In Texas, I came face to face with the concept of poverty. Waco, as the 16th poorest city in the nation, held more encounters with the homeless and the poor than I'd had before, even in England, where there were some beggars I saw every single day. The Christian bubble which Baylor is surprised and disconcerted me, and I grew out of previous prejudices and ideas about the poor. I learned to simplify my life, learning to let go of things I didn't need, and learning how to love those around me even more. That is a large part of who I am now.

India brought me face to face with the other side of the world. I saw beauty, grace, love and God there in some of the worst situations. I learned to see the beauty in another person, even if it was not on the surface obvious. I confronted a lot of different questions about my American lifestyle and how I wish to live.

In two years, when I'm finished with my tenure here at Baiko, how then will I answer this question?

Where do I come from?

Where do you come from?

This is where I live now.

2010-06-08T05:05:00.001-05:00

Yup.

down the rabbit hole

2010-06-07T01:57:00.000-05:00

I apologize in advance that this has nothing to do with a Japan update. It's something that's been on my mind a lot lately, and I wanted to get my thoughts out where my friends could read them. Regular updates will continue later.

Last summer, I went up to Dallas with a friend to see Coldplay live. It was my first time going up to the D/FW area without having the airport as my goal, so naturally, my friend Amber and I took some time and wandered about. We went to the West End of Dallas, and realized we were blocks from JFK's assassination site. Being naturally curious and interested in history, Amber and I walked over to Elm Street and discovered a number of people milling about and taking pictures. Realizing that this had to be the spot, Amber and I walked over to a low wall and looked around.

It was then that a homeless man (I think his name was Steve) came over and stood next to us. Steve pointed out to us the "x" in the middle of the road that signifies the exact spot where JFK got shot, and to the grassy knoll where there was supposedly a second gunman. He knew his history, and his also knew his own spin on it - he proceeded to tell us about how the parade had gotten rerouted the day before, putting the Kennedys in prime position for assassination, and how certain things about the day didn't add up. While he told me a lot of ostensibly true things, these kernels of truth were couched in an immensely complex story about how it was the Russian mob who wanted JFK dead, and that's why Lee Harvey was shot too on his route from the jail to the courthouse. This conspiracy theory stretched far and wide, to the highest levels of government. While Steve didn't provide a plausible reason for the Russian mob wanting JFK dead - something that seems to be lacking in a lot of JFK-centric theories - he was adamant that his version of the truth was the right one.

Since that moment, I've been hearing a lot of conspiracy theories about all sorts of different subjects. When one becomes involved in the social justice movement, one unfortunately encounters a lot of...well, odd...people who have their own pet theories to support, and reasons behind causes. I like to think that I will support a cause that leads to justice happening even if it comes from the mouth of someone spouting conspiracy as the cause for injustice, but lately, my patience has been stretching thin.

Conspiracy theories tend to fail a simple test of reason, and seem to function on a plane all their own - the less facts there are to support it, the more some will willingly believe it. Sure, I'm pretty fine with it if you want to believe that we didn't walk on the moon. I can't prove it to you (though, the Mythbusters made a darn good attempt recently) and it doesn't really strike me as something super important to living one's life. My problem comes in when you begin to base your actions, your way of looking at the world, through a filter of conspiracy.

Conspiracy theories are everywhere, from Illuminati symbolism in Lady Gaga's work, to the Catholic Church wanting to hide a sado-masochistic feminist sexual cult, to fluoride in the public water, to aliens. Each of these theories has their own supporters and some of them are harmless - like walking on the moon - but some have serious consequences if believed without independent research or, well, thought.

For example, there's a popular theory out there dealing with medicine and vaccines. The idea is that vaccines are actually pretty well useless, and some are even harmful, but the government and medical companies make money off of them, so they've hushed up the Truth. Based on one article published in the 1990s and then retracted by not only the scientific journal that published it but by nine of the ten authors who wrote it (the last we will get to later) and discredited by the scientific community at large [and most often by independent researchers who have nothing to gain], many contend that the vaccines - specifically an additive necessary to many vaccines called thimerosal - is linked to the recent uptick in the diagnoses of Autism in young children. As a result, those who support this theory do not vaccinate their children, resulting in 1. the child not being able to attend school because of the lack of vaccination, 2. the child being exposed to and vulnerable to several diseases that would otherwise have been harmless - indeed, without vaccines, a child is much more likely to die young.

Counter-arguments are multifarious and multifaceted. My basic question to answer conspiracy theory is "what's the end goal?" Who has something to gain by imparting an incurable condition on hundreds of children? The answer is usually: pharmaceutical companies who stand to make money off of vaccination, the government, which is in the pocket of Big Pharma, and doctors, who are often persuaded to test new drugs via incentive from the pharmaceutical companies.

I don't deny that there is a connection between pharmaceutical companies and the government. There are numerous Senators who are likely in the pocket of Big Medicine, just as an equal amount are in the pocket of Big Agriculture or Big Business. That is simply how things work in our system, and I agree immensely that this is a broken system - lobbyists and their ilk cause as many problems and road blocks to the way our government runs as the government does to itself through infighting, elections, etc. But, could Big Pharma and Big Government, so nestled in each other's pockets, have such far-reaching forethought as to knowingly put out a theory of vaccination, continue it for years and years, teach it to every biology teacher out there, fabricate studies saying vaccines work, and then quash a lone theory that claims there might be a causal relationship between vaccines and autism?

I honestly don't think our government's that smart. I mean, c'mon, Congressmen aren't even that good at hiding their extra-marital affairs. You think a conspiracy that would have to stretch over literally thousands, if not millions, of people, could be orchestrated by men who frequently can't remember to delete incriminating texts from their phones? And what would be the purpose of the hundreds of millions of vaccines donated to third world causes, Doctors Without Borders, disaster relief and free clinics?

Besides that, there are the mounds of proof against such a relationship between thimerosal and autism: remember that article I mentioned earlier? The one man who still says those results are valid lost his medical license in the United Kingdom after he used his son's birthday party as a medical study, giving the small children a test drug without asking for consent or even informing the parents what he was doing. He has now moved to the USA, and is making money off of selling his anti-vaccine conspiracy. There's also the argument that there really hasn't been an uptick in autism - we're just able to catch cases and symptoms earlier, and more kids are being diagnosed as a result. Because autism appears on a spectrum, we're ending up with diagnoses from mild to severe. Because of advancements in diagnostics, it seems like there are more than predicted in the 1990s, but that's only because the prediction was wrong, not that we have seen any actual increase.

The problem with conspiracy theories is that humans like stories. We liked complicated explanations because the simplest solution is often the most boring. It's much more fun to say that Lady Gaga is a mind-controlled robot who references this subtly in her work for those "in the know" than, maybe, just maybe, admitting that she's making some sort of artistic statement that only makes sense to her. Or an even simpler explanation: she just wants to make money by being as outrageous as humanly possible - shock value = monetary value in artistry as of late. But that, of course, doesn't make for a good story. It's much more fun to create the idea that there's this whole sector of elite that want to brainwash the public in order to...to...what now?

And here's where I run up against a brick wall with most conspiracy theories. What purpose do they serve? To what end would this conspiracy aim? Take the Russian mob-JFK assassination: What purpose did the Russian mob have in taking out JFK? Can you point me to tangible changes in policy with LBJ as president that would have served to aid the Russian mob? Is there some reason that taking out a well-liked, good liberal president and replacing him with another well-liked liberal president achieved any conspiratorial end? Or the vaccines - it would seem that knowingly causing autism would raise more costs for the government because, now that the kid is in the school system, they end up spending more of that vaccine cash on getting the kid in special education. It costs thousands more - to the taxpayer, to the government and to the pharmaceutical company - to educate a special needs student than it does an average, not handicapped child. The cost-benefit doesn't seem to work out.

Most conspiracy theories, to me, seem purposeless. While it's fun to tell the story, I have to question why in the world the government would benefit from having a dumber public (fluoride in the water) or why a giant oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is somehow benefiting...well, anyone?

What it comes down to me is paranoia versus hope. With conspiracy theories, what you most often find is a general distrust of authority, to the extent that anyone speaking from an authoritative standpoint on an issue is not to be trusted. What action does this lead to? You don't vaccinate your kid. You don't attend church. You are an independent thinker! Huzzah? So what? You question absolutely everything, to the point where you don't know if you can even trust your own mind because it could be influenced by the entertainment you consume. You go so far down the rabbit hole that you don't know whether or not to trust anyone. You can't enjoy the music you're listening to because of the potential symbolism in it. You can't work at that place because they support mind control. To me, itt seems like a pretty paranoid existence if you take it too far.

To me, the problem is taking oneself out of the system. If the entire world is webbed in conspiracy and mind control and Illuminati and what not, then how in the world do I get out of this? Everything I touch - the couch I sit on, the computer I type on, the grape juice I drink - is tied into conspiracy. I can't even turn on my water faucet for fear of mind control. Who do I trust? No one. Who do I love? No one.

In the end, I can't take that sort of existence. That's where I see conspiracy theory headed - it doesn't teach critical thinking, but rather, paranoid excess of thought and mistrust. Conspiracy theories tend to be more destructive than edifying and less critical thinking than hypocritical "lack of proof proves my point."

Instead, I hope. I choose, instead, to see the better of people. Rather than always looking at the seedy underbelly, mistrusting my superiors or deflecting the blame for a bad occurrence off onto this unnamed conspiratorial force, I instead choose to think that most people are going through this world as I am - bumbling along, hoping to make the right choice, unable to see the future but hoping the decision I make is the right one.

It is much easier to argue for justice and love from a standpoint of hope than paranoia.

It is much easier to create a movement toward justice and hope if you are able to trust that education is the way to open minds to Truth and not a form of indoctrination of evil.

It is much easier to love others if I have the hope of Jesus Christ and the backing of the community of the Church, than if I see the Church as a mass of conspirators.

Basically, I tend to agree with Occam's Razor: the simplest solution is usually the right one.

Why do we have vaccines? Because it is the scientific community's consensus that this is the best way to prevent deadly diseases.

Why was JFK shot? Because Lee Harvey Oswald had some sort of grudge against him.

Why was Lee Harvey shot? Because he shot the President and pissed off a good number of people.

Why does the Catholic church have pagan imagery? Because, at the time it was founded, taking on symbols of the culture it was attempting to evangelize was a good way to get through to people - think St. Patrick and the bringing of the Gospel to Ireland.

Why does Lady Gaga have references to the all-seeing eye? Because these are potent artistic and literary symbols that afford an artistic expression, NOT literal expressions of mind-control (just think, if she was a mind-controlled robot, would she be able to give us little hints toward it?...I doubt it)...

So while it may be fun to go down the rabbit hole occasionally, and while it is usually good to take information with a grain of salt and do one's own fact-checking, we also need to be careful not to misread the text and remember the nature of the characters we're dealing with. Conspiracy may make for a good convoluted story, but in the end, it's usually the Butler who did it, with a simple smoking gun.

____

For more information on why, specifically, The Da Vinci Code is complete bull (from someone who has both read the book [twice] and studied the issue), leave a comment, or shoot me a message elsewhere. I'd be happy to give you some info.

konnichiwa!

2010-06-05T05:32:00.000-05:00

If anyone had a time lapse camera trained at my desk in my living room, they would think I am a raging alcoholic. Every night, I have three or four wine glasses filled near to the brim with dark purple liquid.

But fear not! I am just a Baptist, drinking grape juice out of what happens to be the largest glass in my house - a large round wine glass.

I am still adjusting to this whole "having an entire apartment to myself" thing. In some respects, it still feels a bit like I'm just living in someone else's house for a little while before I get moved to a more permanent location, like in witness protection or something. On the other hand, I have decorated a bunch and have adjusted to sleeping in a bed that is just ever so slightly too small for my tall frame.

It's been a busy first week in Shimonoseki. I started teaching right from the get go on Tuesday, and have been enjoying my classes. The lower level English Oral Communication courses can be frustrating at times, especially as I have no way of talking to the students in any language but the one they are in that class to learn. I'm sure it will get more comfortable eventually, but for the time being, it's a bit frustrating. However, my writing class, composed of top level English students, is a breath of fresh air - the students can express themselves decently well and the language barrier is more of a low wall than an insurmountable fortress.

I've gotten to speak with my parents a couple of times, which is nice, and I'm slowly developing the ability to stay up past 10, which means I'm overcoming the jet-lag.

Sorry this is kind of a scatter-brained post, but I figured I should get something up so that you know I'm not dead.

Other adventures I've been having:

-I used the onsen for the first time yesterday. Discovered it doesn't drain into a pipe, but onto the floor of my bathroom (which has a drain). Unfortunately, said drain must be a bit clogged as it...well, took FOREVER to drain so I had to watch it carefully to make sure it didn't flood the whole room.

-I had fugu today. Yep, that's right: blowfish or pufferfish, depending on what you want to call it. It was deep-fried in some sort of batter, and was actually really, really delicious. Squid was also available at this lunch, but I didn't want to go too far into the exotic realm. ;)

-Today is my last day without a couch. My lovely neighbor, Linda, offered to buy me some furniture as a housewarming present. We found a nice, white leather with red trim, 50s Art Deco style couch for a pretty reasonable price, with free delivery. So tomorrow between 2 and 4, I will have a couch! (Which also means I now have a place for people to crash when they come to visit! Hint hint.)

-Linda and I also took the ferry across the strait to Mojiko today, and explored the town a bit. Shimonoseki, for those who don't know, sits on a strait between Japan's main Island and it's southernmost [large] island. Mojiko is a port town across the strait from Shimonoseki, and it takes 5 minutes by ferry to get there. They have stores that sell American goods, and a 31-foot tower where you can see for miles (see above). There's also a house there where Einstein stayed for a little while when he was in Japan in 1922.

-I am slowly conquering the grocery store - thus the presence of grape juice in my fridge. I have discovered (I think) a way to make Yakisoba noodles at home, so I've been having those a lot. I also discovered that peanut butter is very expensive here, so I need to be careful how much I eat at once (a fact I forget when it comes to the actual making of a sandwich). Bread here is about twice as thick as that in the states, which makes for interesting eating.

I'm settling in nicely and enjoying my time here. Next week, I'll be getting up at 3AM my time to hopefully watch England trounce the US, so if you're watching that game, you're watching it with me. And here's a parting gift, a video of my walk to work:

"rebolution in my mind"

2010-05-31T06:02:00.000-05:00

I have no real idea what time it is.

It may be 8:00PM Japan time, but when I try to figure out what time it would be okay to call my parents back home, my clock gets all fuzzy. I think it's about 5AM there? But I have no real idea.

I have been in Japan for a total of two days now. Each day so far, around 2:00, when I am away from the computer and unable to write things down, I have great ideas for how I am going to approach this first blog - different approaches, ideas, stories to tell, already in just two days. Should I focus on the things that have been frustrating? Should I talk about the way Ted Tsutsumi, one of my bosses, limps everywhere he goes but still takes the stairs instead of the elevator? Should I discuss how weird it is to be thrown into teaching still jet lagged and feeling a bit ill? Should I discuss my night in Narita at all, or should I leave that for another time?

There are a lot of things I could cover. And a lot I don't have time for right now. See, it's 8PM, and I'm already sleepy. At about 4PM, I was having trouble writing my name. I had to fill out the same form three times: the first, my writing was neat enough for the Japanese man to decipher. The second, I put the wrong address down for my home address in the states. The third was thankfully done closely enough to right that they let me go on.

Forms. I think that's what most of my life for the past 48 hours has consisted of. Forms forms forms. There are forms for the bank, forms for alien registration, forms for customs, forms for getting my stamp, forms for taxes, forms for getting my rebates. Forms that I don't even know the purpose of but had to fill out anyway.

One interesting thing in Japan might just be their proclivity for signs, forms, and warnings. On the highway, there are mile markers (or kilometer markers, as the case is here) like you would find in the US...only between these mile markers are denotations of decreasing 10 point decimals. For example, between mile markers 7 and 8, you would see 7.9, 7.8, 7.7, every few yards. A bit unnecessary, if you ask me.

And then there's the stamp. Apparently, for official documents, a signature is not enough. Instead, each person (or most people, I guess), carry around a small stamp, as in an ink stamp. This stamp has the lettering for their name on it, and after a signature or in lieu of one, they put the stamp in red ink. I, too, now have a stamp, with the katama (Japanese script for foreign words) for "Anderson" on it. It's a cute little wooden piece, and I received a complementary case from the lady at the stamp shop with a little red ink pad in it.

However, as awesomely cool as it may be to have a stamp with the katama for my name on it...this process doesn't make much sense to me. What if someone steals my stamp? Or, more likely, what's to differentiate people with the same last name?

As one of my fellow Americans told me today, eventually you just stop asking why. And to some extent, I already have. I'm not asking why in the world they think that paper sticking to and covering the windows is somehow better at blocking daylight than a curtain (it's not). I'm not asking why they sort the trash into color coded bags. I'm not asking why their tubs wouldn't fit a 10 year old, much less a 5'8" 24 year old American. I'm not asking why they repeat times and dates, but don't tell me why I need to know them.

What I am asking is: Where the heck is my office?

___
PS: Blog post taking from a tshirt I found in the local department store. And no, the "b" is not a typo.

How Glenn Beck Convinced Me to Change

2010-05-19T14:27:00.000-05:00

A few weeks ago, I was driving back from Austin in my roommate's car by myself. I was scanning through radio stations, trying to find something that wouldn't bore me, when I happened across one of the many conservative talk radio shows that populates this area (my normal choice is NPR, but it was in the middle of one of those ridiculous jazz improv/elevator muzak shows). This particular radio show was discussing the new AZ Immigration Bill, and within the five minutes of listening, I had heard more than enough denigration of illegal immigrants and maligning of character to last me a week. In anger, I looked down at the radio and gave it a mighty one-finger salute before changing the station.

I don't like myself when I get angry.

Though the story about the radio might be kind of funny (I mean, who flips off an inanimate object?), the lesson I've been slow to learn is that this reactive anger is not loving. No matter how right I may feel my argument is, it means nothing if I am unable to speak so in love and grace.

One thing I tend to forget in arguing is my positions were not arrived at easily. I was not convinced by comments on a blog, or by someone yelling at a TV screen. I believe my currently liberal leaning politics are the result of years of change, starting with friendships I had in high school, and things I learned in college and graduate school. There has been a good nine years worth of change behind what I write, and a good couple of years of research, living, and experience.

However, when I react to others, I tend not to afford them the same sort of benefit of doubt. When I write emails to my parents about Glenn Beck's latest "dangerous" statement, I forget that they have 36 years on me, and have probably spent similar amounts of time thinking about their issues.

Recently, I did what I do in my downtime: I got involved in an internet debate over SB 1070, Arizona's immigration bill. Having spent the last year developing a my own unique viewpoint on nationalism, borders, America, and immigration, I, of course, jumped into the debate with fury. "How could people hold such a view of Hispanics?" "Wow, that's a really ignorant statement!" "That's just so wrong!"

Of course, my arguments were much more fleshed out, and much more supported than those statements, but they are certainly things I said to myself as I put together my arguments. Bolstered by my smart friends who I love and respect joining in and saying that I was right, I continued the debate probably past the point it was doing any good. While I did achieve some concessions, I didn't convince anyone.

I've been realizing lately that my style of argument may need to change. Having been a debater in high school, and a naturally good writer, I tend to approach my arguments in a way that I'll lay out my case, attempt to respond to counter arguments in a way that bolsters my own point, and I rarely make concessions. This type of argument comes naturally to me because it allows me to be selfish: I don't have to actually listen to what the other side is saying. I just have to look for holes in their argument.

It's really hard to change this when we genuinely believe the other side is wrong.

It's darn near impossible to change a mode of thinking when it's an issue really close to one's heart, such as faith or politics.

But, as I've been slowly realizing, the only way to true community is not through divisive political arguments, but through genuinely listening and hearing out the other side.

This past weekend, my parents were in town for my graduation with my MA. On the way down to Austin, as is inevitable when my parents and I get together, politics came up. As it is common nowadays, the topic was the AZ immigration bill. I explained to my father that part of my objection to the bill is that it offers no provision for victims of trafficking - an illegal is an illegal is an illegal, regardless of their means of entrance into the country. My father listened to this explanation, and I could tell that he was thinking about it. He told me he hadn't thought of that angle, and it troubled him, because he knows it's an issue close to my heart.

This is the type of reaction I would like to model. Rather than just saying the words "I hear what you're saying," I want to actually hear people. I want to listen; I want to think about why they believe what they believe. I want to consider the whole of the person, not just the argument made. And maybe, just maybe, if I do this, I will eventually be able to listen to conservative radio and Glenn Beck without wanting to give the one-finger salute.

On Banksy and Street Art

2010-05-10T20:34:00.001-05:00

I've spoken a bit before on this blog about my philosophy considering art in terms of how a Christian should consume it, but I don't know that I've spoken about what specific kinds of art I like.

I like art that challenges, that provokes, that pokes a little humor at things we take seriously, and that presents a perspective different from one's own. Modern art is some of my favorite stuff - Andy Warhol is fascinating, Gustav Klimt is great, and Annie Lebovitz is a great photographer. One of my favorite days was when Chase and I were in New York before leaving for India, and we went to the Museum of Modern Art. It was fantastic seeing what products older artists felt were important to their time - Warhol expressed his distaste for commercials by creating pop art. Annie Lebovitz sought to portray the world as she saw it through her camera lens. Klimt used color and romantic images to redefine humanity.

Each new piece of art gives us a different way of looking at life, and a lot of the time, the vision put forth by the artists is frequently one of hope, of looking beyond the pale into that green country under a swift sunrise that our world could become (that's a Lord of the Rings reference, for those of you who didn't catch it).

In this vein, I've recently become a fan of what you might call street art or anarchic art. It's art that is produced in unconventional venue and by unconventional means. Rather than oil paints, paintbrushes and a canvas, the artist uses a blank wall and spray paint cans. British artist, Banksy, is remarkable in this manner.

The above is Banksy's "One Nation" work. I'm not sure on the history, but the term CCTV is British, and refers to Closed Circuit Television Cameras - security cameras. They are all over the place in England - one of my favorite movies has a line that Britain is "the most watched nation on Earth." Banksy's work is a comment on that fact, pulling in the idea of Orwell's Big Brother, and of course, "One Nation Under ___" is a comment most are familiar with because of the repeated phrase from the American Pledge of Allegiance. It's an interesting commentary on the tension between security and privacy in both England and America.

In this vein, tonight I discovered what is supposed to be a humor site called Hacked IRL (In Real Life), which catalogs graffiti done in various spots. I was surprised that many of the posts actually contained what could be considered art, if not on the same level as Banksy, at least clearly influenced by him.

This art exhibits a different way of looking at the world, a way to make a statement and a way to give me some hope that there are some creative people still left in the world.

Basically, I'm bringing this up because I'd like to challenge you to look at the world in different ways this week. What new ways can you find hope? What new ways can you challenge people? Do you choose to speak in a way that brings people into conversation?

"now that I have seen, I am responsible"

2010-05-05T14:29:00.000-05:00

A fellow blogger/author who is in the Dominican Republic right now working with Haitian Refugees posted that he can't get this song (below) out of his head.

In this interconnected, globally smaller world, all of us have seen, and all are held responsible. This artist, New Zealander Brooke Fraser, commented once in an article that "I'd rather be seen as a fool for trying to change the world then not do anything at all."

Lord, never let me forget India. Never let me forget what I have seen, the people I have met, and the things I know of your love.

Related.

Pray For Tennessee

2010-05-03T17:06:00.000-05:00

The pictures and video coming out of Tennessee this past week have been horrifying and beautiful in their own ways. For those of you who don't know, Nashville received record rainfall over the weekend, causing flooding throughout the city. The below video has some images from the floods, and gives you a small glimpse of how truly bad it is.

Disasters like this remind me of how truly fragile everything we have is. I think that's why I like storms so much - it's a terrifyingly beautiful reminder of how brief and tenuous our grasp on life is. When things like this come, what matters is not whether or not my stuff is alright, or that my house is destroyed - all of that is just stuff. What matters is whether or not my family and friends are okay, have a good meal to eat and a warm place to sleep.

You can donate to help relief efforts at the Red Cross' website. This is a place right on our home turf, and many friends and family are in the area - Faceless International is headquartered in Franklin, just outside of Nashville. We must help.

oh i have been to heaven.

2010-04-26T17:22:00.000-05:00

In church on Sunday, my pastor preached from Revelation.

When I was little, it was a sermon on the end times that made me have the whole "come to Jesus" time that most children of Christian homes experience. I remember asking Dad if jesus would come back to the USA, too - despite not knowing much about Jesus, I knew that he had lived in a foreign land.

When I was in middle school (and I'm not ashamed to admit this), I read the whole of the Left Behind series, and temporarily became a dispensationalist. I was also terrified that I'd get "left behind," so I probably recommitted my life to the Lord about once a week to make sure everything was okay and I'd still get to go to heaven.

When I got to college and learned about the various eschatological theories in my theology classes, I didn't know what to make of them. The brief discussions of Revelation didn't seem to make much sense to me, and the book has remained an incomprehensible and impenetrable mess of metaphor to me.

The American Church's relationship with Revelation is much the same way. If pressed, a lot of evangelicals would probably espouse a literalist belief in Revelation, not dissimilar to that espoused by LaHaye and Jenkins in their popular series. As a Church, we tend to be heaven-focused, waiting for that end time when Christ will come back and everything will be restored.

My pastor pointed out, however, that this focus can be disastrous. Sure, having a heaven-focused mentality reminds one that this world is finite, that the problems we have day in and day out will pale in comparison to the joy that we'll experience in the future. That can be emotionally reassuring, and faith building.

However, when our focus becomes solely the afterlife, we forget that life here really matters too. A saying that is repeated but never truly understood is that "eternal life starts now." What that really means is that what you do in this life, here on earth, actually matters. Heaven, as far as we know, is pretty far off, but we can begin to work the kingdom of God here, now, on Earth, rather than just blissfully staring forth into the clouds waiting for Jesus' return.

When the desire of heaven begins to trump our life on Earth, we have a backwards faith. Part of the beauty of being a Christian is being restored in right relationship to God, and to our fellow humans. And that second part means working against injustices, it means righting things that God despises, it means being his kingdom here on earth. Even as we pray, "Your will be done, your kingdom come," we are bringing the kingdom of heaven back down to earth and applying God's restoration plan.

The particular example that my pastor pointed out - one that is appropriate for the South - is the idea of racial injustices. The passage he was preaching from was Revelation 7:9-12. In that passage, John, the author, discusses his vision of people of every tribe, nation and tongue coming together to praise the Lord.

Let me repeat: EVERY tribe. EVERY nation. EVERY tongue.

God's kingdom is not just open to white American evangelicals, though to hear some talk, you might think that. God's kingdom and grace is available to all of us.

That is truly a beautiful picture. When we arrive at heaven, there will be Indians and Pakistanis, Palestinians and Israelis, German and French people, North and South Koreans, Irishmen and women, Scots, Englishmen and women, Canadians, Americans, Venezuelans, Cubans, Mexicans, Chinese, Japanese. People from all over the globe will be represented in a cacophony of praises! What a glorious picture!

Not so much if you don't believe that any of those other races are as privileged as the white race. Or otherwise. It won't be so fun then if you harbor a belief that some humans are somehow less than you.

This extends beyond mere racism. This picture of heaven covers all injustices - I believe that I will come face to face with the child who made my clothes, and picked my coffee. I believe that the warmongers will come face to face with the women and children damaged by violence. I believe that the Church will get see all the people hurt, abused, and damaged by good theology spoken poorly.

But I believe also in restoration. This picture of heaven is a happy one - everything restored to its right order, grace abounding and mercy renewed. This glimpse gives us some hope that God's justice will be wrought.

So, what, then, is our call for justice here on earth? Our job as Christians, dictated to us by the Lord's Prayer that Jesus gives us, tells us to pray for "[God's] Kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven." If eternal life starts now, immediately, then our call is one to justice. If we are called to pray for God's kingdom now, immediately and in immeasurable power, then we are called to work in God's restoration. Prayer is not an inactive process - by praying thus, we are contracting with God to live in accordance with his restoration plan, to let Him work in our lives, and to restore his justice to the world, not sit back and wait for it to happen.
If we truly desire heaven, we must participate in the restoration of God's kingdom on earth.

If we truly want grace, mercy and justice, we must work in God's name to restore his justice to the earth.

If we truly look forward to time with the Church, we'd better start learning how to live in community now.

There's a great new song by the David Crowder Band that's been lifting my spirit lately. It's called "Oh Happiness!" and while I normally cringe at any implication that faith = happiness, I have to recognize the vision within this particular song. The repeated line is "Oh happiness! There's grace enough for us and the whole human race."

That is truly a fantastic thought.

Grace enough.

Mercy enough.

A restoration that will be enough.

Even as we fight injustice, even as we get frustrated at the lack of movement, even as we experience new travesties everyday - in the form of racist laws, people ignoring the hurting, and ethnic cleansing and violence - we can still rejoice that there is grace enough, there is love enough, there is mercy enough for the whole human race.

And we are instruments of that grace.

Do you believe that today?

Mattering

2010-04-16T16:05:00.000-05:00

"Even if it's a dumb story, telling it changes other people just the slightest little bit, just as living the story changes me. An infinitesimal change. And that infinitesimal change ripples outward--ever smaller but everlasting. I will get forgotten, but the stories will last. And so we all matter--maybe less than a lot, but always more than none." - Colin Singleton, in An Abundance of Katherines by John Green

Through the past few weeks, I've been thinking a lot about the direction of this blog. Right now, I'm sitting in sort of a limbo between having relevant-to-my-readership Japan updates (I leave in about a month) and this odd dull period where all I'm doing is grading and reading leisure work (and applying for my visa).

So where does that leave this blog? Without spending all my time commenting on politics, I feel like I end up repeating myself a bunch of times on the same subject (hmm, sounds an awful lot like teaching...). Inspiration seems to have eluded me of late, and I just haven't been in the mood to write.

But then I read some more John Green, and thought again about why I write.

First, a story.

When I was little, I had a dream of getting a typewriter (I'm old school) and writing the next great American novel (like so many of my current fellows in the English lit world, I imagine, but not necessarily the dream of a typical five year old). In middle school, I met one of my best friends, Karen, who wrote short stories and novellas that were enchanting, all about wolves and magic and different worlds. When I couldn't write like that, I decided my future career was clearly not to be a writer. After all, if I couldn't write fiction fantasy novels like those I enjoyed reading, what worth would I be as a writer? Every attempt I had at writing didn't turn out immediately like I imagined it to be - it was often a clearly plagiarized version of whatever novel I happened to be reading that week.

Despite not thinking of myself as a good writer, I was always a voracious reader. I remember walking down the halls of my elementary school in first grade, looking at the third grade dioramas of the Boxcar Children series and thinking, "Oh I loved that book! That one was good!" Most of what I picked up I devoured. I remember reading Jack London's Call of the Wild and White Fang in fifth grade. In sixth grade, I read tons of fantasy novels, branching into Anne McCaffery, Stephen King, John Grisham and K.A. Applegate by the time I hit 8th grade. When I found a series I liked, I immersed myself in it. In the reading pages contests in 8th grade, no one was even close (it didn't hurt that I read the 1090 page book It by Stephen King that semester).

What I didn't realize was that all this reading was affecting my ability to write. Being a good reader encouraged me to be a good writer.

During my sophomore year of high school, Mrs. Votaw, my advanced English teacher, sat me down and explained to me that I was immensely enjoyable to read. I could say things in quick, concise ways, and for the first time I heard: "You are a good writer."

That compliment was like a talisman that I carried through the rest of high school. Even suffering through AP Lit and Comp junior year where discussions consisted of "Okay class, what happened in this chapter?" I knew that I could string together words in ways that could were fun to read. Senior year, I struggled under the harsh comments of my AP English teacher, who frequently made us write our bad sentences on the board and then criticized them in front of the class (I realize now what a good teaching technique that is, but I always took the criticisms much more personally than my classmates). I was proud of my writing, and definitely thought I had reason to be.

For once in my life, I felt like I mattered.

Somewhere between senior year and freshman year of college, though, I lost some of that confidence. I decided English wasn't my thing, and God had called me to religious studies, rather than writing. I was going to be a pastor! Or a motivational speaker! Or something! I hadn't even registered for freshman comp because I figured I'd pass the AP test and not have to do it.

I was wrong, of course. I only got a 3 on the AP test, meaning by USF standards that I would, indeed, have to take LAR 111, or "Western Heritages," a kind of morphed reading/writing English-y class required for all freshmen. I dropped the math class I'd registered for, and got into the last section of comp that I could...two days before the start of school.

That class changed my life.

If I could pinpoint any singular college class that changed the direction of what I knew I could do, and how I could "matter" to the world, it was probably that class. Dr. Greg Dyer, a gregarious man who sat on the desk and called himself a cyborg (seriously, he said "I'm a cyborg. Can anyone tell me why?" in class one day), encouraged me to write and made me recall that encouragement I'd received from Mrs. Votaw way back during sophomore year. While I shudder to think back on some of those papers I turned in, Dr. Dyer consistently complimented me on my writing, all the while critiquing it (I had a bad habit of starting every paper with a quote. You can imagine how boring that got after awhile).

I remember one paper in particular. This paper was supposed to be "persuasive," so I wrote on the idea of evangelism - at the time I was getting heavily involved in Campus Crusade for Christ and was convinced that evangelism (as in, street evangelism, meeting strangers and telling them about the Lord) was one of the foremost duties of a Christian, so I wrote a paper about how even if you don't have a "gift" of evangelism, you're still called to do it.

Dr. Dyer commented on that paper that not only was it well-written, but it was "deceptively simple and convicting."

Wow.

Not only had I written something that fulfilled the assignment completely, but I had actually persuaded the teacher on something. That's not something you do everyday. It was then, in that moment, that everything clicked. Writing was "it" all along. Writing is my gift, my skill, the thing I'm good at. Mom had been telling me that for years, but now I finally, really, truly believed it.

That realization prompted me to take more English classes, and though I never switched my major, I exercised my chance to write and to write persuasively at any given opportunity. I went to Oxford University on a study abroad because I wanted not only to experience a different world but to write more. An essay or two a week challenged me to write more and to do so quickly.

Writing was and is my way of "mattering" to the world.

I discovered that my words could move and convince people and change things. Though most of what I'm trained in is academic, I often expanded my audience beyond purely academics and talked to a broader demographic. My papers on No Country For Old Men, or John Locke expounded upon human ideals and how these things apply to one's life. The perception of evil in McCarthy changes how one can live their life, even if it's just in infinitesimal ways.

Writing and reading and, more importantly, narrative, changes lives.

But again, as I've stated before, it's a struggle for me with the desire to be famous for my writing. My writing is, ultimately, not an ability I have produced myself, but rather a natural talent I have taken the steps to hone. I owe my ability to persuade to all those who have gone before me, to the Spirit which guides my words and inspires, and to those situations around me which prompt my thinking. Writing is no longer my own personal way of "mattering" to the rest of the world, but merely the lens through which infinitesimal change is effected. My happiest moments with this blog are when it gets re-tweeted, shared, and passed on, because it means that there is potential change.

...

So, long way round, this blog initially started as a fund-raising tool for India, and now has become a platform through which I try to affect change. It is how I remind people of what matters, and how I remind myself. "Why I Write" is just as important as "what I write" and if you will continue to allow me a platform, I pray that my story will continue to be that of the crucified Lord, the Jesus who sacrificed himself for those who don't deserve it, and thus began (or finished?) the truest narrative in history: The story of Love.

And I hope you all are able to join me in telling that story.

Playful Things On the Interwebz

2010-04-14T21:36:00.000-05:00

After a series of serious posts, I feel the need to bring some funniness and lightness into your life. Or maybe just into mine. So the following is a compendium of some of my favorite websites around the internet, many hilarious, some thought-provoking, all good. (Warning: Some of these contain swears. If you're not comfortable with that...well, don't click).

Hyperbole and A Half

It Made My Day

Married to the Sea

Cute Overload

Vlogbrothers

McSweeney's

Not Always Right

The Oatmeal

That should be good enough to keep you occupied for a little while. Enjoy. I'm in the midst of preparing for Japan, packing things together and finishing up teaching/grading/answering student (first time I typed that, it came out "stupid") questions/writing the final. Whew.

PS: Maureen Johnson's twitter is well worth following, twitterers.

What Matters More

2010-04-13T17:55:00.000-05:00

Large parts of who I am as a writer, as a Christian, as an academic, and as a person were developed growing up. And I would be in complete denial if I said that I was finished, that I was completely done, that I know who I am and how I fit into the large scheme of things.

I most certainly don't have a clue, and realizing that has been one of the most liberating things ever. There are things I hold dear, things I know for sure, and things I unsure of. All of these, wrapped up together, create who I am. Nothing more, nothing less. It would be rash and, well, stupid, of me to proclaim that who I am exists only in certainties, and only in the things I know I hold dear, when so much of myself is also wrapped up in the not knowing, the not seeing, the not having an answer.

I am as much what I know as what I don't know.

One of those things I haven't known what to do with for years, at least not with certainty, are the church's teachings on homosexuality.

And no, for the record, I'm not about to drop a big bombshell or anything. I am very much a heterosexual female, and that is one of the things I know with certainty.

But the way the church reacts to the issue of homosexuality is one that has created a struggle for me. The church's typical stance on the issue is strongly anti-gay. Homosexuality is a sin, and therefore homosexuals themselves are some of the worst of sinners. I remember keeping the knowledge that Ian McKellan is gay from my dad for months, because I thought it would keep him from wanting to see Lord of the Rings.

In high school, I knew several gay/bisexual people - one of which was my best friend. I found out that she was bisexual via the internet during my freshman year of college, and how I reacted is one of my biggest regrets. She was afraid to tell me because she knew the church's stance on homosexuality, which, at the time, I parroted, and so when I confronted her about it, I didn't do so in a loving manner. I am not proud of that moment in my life. It was one of the things that made our friendship rocky (but I'm happy to report it has been somewhat repaired).

As another one of my best friends struggled with the possibility that he was homosexual, instead of being there for him and listening, I grew uncomfortable, told him that the Bible speaks against homosexuality and I'd pray that God would put him back on the right path. Again, another friendship essentially ruined by my own lack of critical thinking about the issue.

In college, as I lived in the little bubble that is private Christian college, I encountered very few gay people, decided not to study the issue, and therefore, never really reached a theological stance on the topic.

Moving to Waco brought the issue back, somewhat, to the forefront. One of my good friends here did his senior thesis in college on homosexuality in the church, and had come to the conclusion that homosexuality itself is okay, and that our first response as Christians needs to be not condemnation but loving. The rise of Westboro Baptist Church also brought forth the question of whether or not I could, theologically, agree with at least part of their stance: Do I still consider homosexuality a sin?

To answer honestly: I don't know.

What I do know is this: Homosexuality is unique in that it is something that it becomes such a part of the person that to say "love the sinner and hate the sin" becomes completely absurd. To say "I am going to love you without accepting/acknowledging the fact that you're gay" is like saying to a Hindu holy man "I'm going to love you, but I'm going to ignore the fact that you're in this hugely important religious position." It is such a large part of a person's life that to ignore it is to ignore who they are, something I cannot agree with.

So is there a middle ground? Is it possible to still hold on to a supposedly Biblical stance on homosexuality (one that I do not know whether it is necessarily supported, but that is an entirely different issue) and still exhibit the love of Jesus?

I don't have an answer.

I can't tell you whether homosexuality is a sin or not. I can't tell you whether or not condemning homosexuality is Biblically supported. I cannot tell you a Biblical case for or against homosexuality, whether it is a matter of orientation or choice, whether or not one can "outgrow" it (though, therapy to "cure" homosexuals has been notoriously condemned by psychiatric and psychological study as being much more harmful than good in terms of a person's mental health), and I cannot tell you what stance the church should take on it.

Despite my years of theological study, this is one (of many) that I have never been able to settle upon.

What I do know, though, is that, whatever we reaction we have, if we do so in the true, kind, loving grace of Jesus Christ, then we do the right thing. The tradition of condemnation, of turning away, of reacting with disgust and fear to homosexuals fails to show them the love of Jesus.

Jesus did not come to die for those already righteous. He did not hang on the cross so that we could condemn others in his name. He did not drink vinegar and have his side pierced so that we may picket soldier's funerals. The church needs to step up, say, "Okay, let's drop the debate, and just love people the way Jesus taught us to."

Simply, it is a matter of what matters more. Does it matter more to me that there are millions of people working in sweatshops to produce my clothing than the fact that the person next to me on the airplane may be a homosexual? Does it matter more to me that I show everyone around me - drunkards, rapists, gays, the homeless, even the slave-owners - the same love, mercy and grace that Jesus first showed me than whether or not said person should be condemned?

I sure hope that they would show the same mercy and compassion to me.

_________
This blog post inspired by thoughts raised in Derek Webb's Stockholm Syndrome and Jennifer Knapp's announcement in Christianity Today that she is gay and has been in a same-sex relationship for eight years. The interview is well worth a read.

Margo Roth Spiegelman and Other Paper Things

2010-04-07T16:31:00.000-05:00

Two years ago, I needed an extra course to take during January term at my undergraduate university, the University of Sioux Falls. J-Term courses are month long courses that are essentially free rides - tuition is included in the fall semester, and the courses are often fun electives not offered at other times throughout the year. For example, this past year I would have loved to return to USF for J-Term, just for the chance to take Dr. Hitchcock's class on the theology of Harry Potter. Harry Potter!

Uh. Anyway.

My senior year, I decided to take a course on banned books in young adult literature, which turned out to be a great decision. My teaching and discussions have returned to the idea of censorship and young adult literature time and again. But that's not been the most lasting effect.

Through the course of the class, I was introduced to young adult author John Green. Green writes young adult literature, and is famous on Youtube for vlogbrothers, a channel he and his brother started after deciding to do text-less communication for a year. I have been following this channel for over a year now, and was excited to hear that John Green himself would be speaking at a bookstore in Austin this Friday (naturally, I'm going).

But here's the catch.

I've never read one of his books.

I knew about his writing through the class because a classmate did a presentation on him. I knew about vlogbrothers because I have awesome friends. But I'd never thought to pick up one of his books and read it. I always thought I should...y'know...later.

But later became now. I thought, if I am going to see this author speak, I might as well start one of his books. Paper Towns came highly recommended and seemed to be his most popular, so, while at the Sioux Falls Barnes and Noble (shortly after I did that blog entry about being home, in fact), I picked up my very own copy of Paper Towns.

And last night, at about midnight, I finished my very own copy of Paper Towns.

Other than breaking through that mental block I've had for the past few weeks that hasn't allowed me to read anything longer than 50 pages, Paper Towns reminded me of why I like books. Authors can get across an interesting, meaningful and important point using metaphors, using narrative - in other words, using techniques that break down barriers we have in our minds.

We are narrative creatures.

We like being able to tell the story of an event, and we make fun of others when they are unable to tell a good story ("And then I found five dollars," anyone?). We interpret things through narrative and metaphor. Like it or not, we interpret everything through the idea of metaphor and simile. It is at the heart of how we talk about God, of how we talk about each other, and how we talk to and about ourselves. John Green himself comments in a video about Catcher in the Rye: "One of the reasons metaphor and simile are so important to books is that they are also important to life."

I could write endless pages of arguments for why you should help the poor (and I do) and to some extent, they are persuasive. But they are not nearly as persuasive as the parables Jesus told to his own disciples and followers in the first century: the Good Samaritan, the rich man and his servants, the Prodigal Son. There's a reason we refer to Christ's time on Earth as "The Gospel Story." The use of the word "story" doesn't mean that it is a fictional account, or that it is purely metaphorical, but merely that it is a narrative (a true one) by which we understand our faith and salvation. C.S. Lewis often referred to the Gospel story as "the one true myth."

Clearly, narrative is important for our lives. One of the reasons I love literature is that it gives us an opportunity to experience that story and see, in a brand new light, the metaphors which guide our lives.

Paper Towns is no exception to that rule. In telling the story of Margo Roth Spiegelman, Green takes us on a journey through understanding and narrative of other people's lives. "Paper towns" refers to, on the surface, a town that exists only on paper - a copyright trap for cartographers used in the beginnings of the 20th century. Such towns still appear on maps today, as Green's author note suggests, considering he found just such a place in my home state of South Dakota. But "Paper Towns" is also a metaphor for the places in which we build our lives: we are fake people, presenting ourselves as others want to see us, putting up this paper front that is solely concerned about the story we are going to tell with our lives, and not about how we truly see each other. As Margo Roth Spiegelman comments when she is explaining the concept of a paper town to our main character and narrator, Quentin: "All the things paper-thin and paper-frail. And the people, too. I've lived here for eighteen years and I have never once in my life come across anyone who cares about anything that matters."

As the book unfolds, we're taken further and further into the metaphor of these paper people in their paper towns, "burning the future to stay warm." We soon realize that Quentin is himself an unreliable narrator (at about the same moment that Quentin himself realizes this). He has been telling stories about himself and about his friends for his whole life, and he realizes that he has misrepresented and mis-imagined a large part of his own narrative, namely in the person of Margo Roth Spiegelman: "Like a metaphor rendered incomprehensible by its ubiquity, there was room enough in what she had left me for endless imaginings, for an infinite set of Margos."

Namely, we create people in the image we want them to be, instead of as they actually are.

A dear friend once told me that a relationship of his ended when he realized he was more in love with the story of the relationship than with the actual person involved. He was, in essence, "burning the future to stay warm;" he was more concerned with the narrative that they were telling than what was actually happening.

The movie (500) Days of Summer picks up on this same theme: Summer is supposed to be an annoying blank canvas of a character because that is how Tom sees her, as our humble narrator. There is no depth to her because he only sees her as he wants to, never as she actually is, and therefore we don't get to experience the real "summer," but instead merely a byproduct of Tom's longing for a narrative to order his life around.

Toward the end of the novel, Quentin goes on a road trip with several of his high school friends, and they play a game in which they create back-stories about the people on the road around them - a metaphor for the novel's major theme of creating people in our own image. Quentin comments: "There are so many people. It is easy to forget how full the world is of people, full to bursting, and each of them imaginable and consistently misimagined."

Think on that last phrase: people imaginable and consistently misimagined.

It is easy to create a narrative for someone you don't know very well, and we are very good at keeping people at a far enough distance that they can create a narrative about us and we about them.

It is easy to love your girl- or boyfriend when you imagine them to be the fulfillment of that longing you've had for a long time.

It is easy to hate your boss when you imagine that they are just a bad person.

It is easy to be indifferent when the person on the street is imagined to be lazy, evil, or fitting into some other narrative.

It is harder when you allow that person to be who they are, and you don't imagine them in a different narrative, but instead in the narrative they live.

Green doesn't stop there, however. Rather than merely misimagining other people, we must take it a step further and literally imagine ourselves into them. It is, as the cliche puts it, walking a mile in another person's shoes. Quentin writes, "But imagining being someone else, or the world being something else, is the only way in. It is the machine that kills fascists."

That last metaphor is not a mistake and not merely a Woody Guthrie reference. Imagining one's self into another person means that we understand them, we make an effort to see them as people with mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters. They become real, and we can no longer desire to control them. We can no longer manipulate them into the narrative of our own lives; instead, they have a narrative, a life of their own, of the kind which we must respect and value, merely because it is a life so like our own.

Once we understand that those around us are people - which is the ongoing struggle throughout Paper Towns - once we get that people are people, children are children and we all have our own narratives, our own stories to tell, and that each of these stories intertwines beautifully to grow into many leaves of grass, all interconnected below the surface by the mere fact of being of the same ilk, of the same root...once we grasp that, we can truly love one another. Violence suddenly becomes absurd. War becomes meaningless. Dictatorships fail. Fascism collapses.

And love reigns over all.

______

You can find Paper Towns online, in book stores, or at your local library (assuming they haven't banned it).

He is Risen!

2010-04-04T10:05:00.000-05:00

On the first day of the week, very early in the morning, the women took the spices they had prepared and went to the tomb. They found the stone rolled away from the tomb, but when they entered, they did not find the body of the Lord Jesus. While they were wondering about this, suddenly two men in clothes that gleamed like lightning stood beside them. In their fright the women bowed down with their faces to the ground, but the men said to them, "Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here; he has risen! Remember how he told you, while he was still with you in Galilee: 'The Son of Man must be delivered into the hands of sinful men, be crucified and on the third day be raised again.' " Then they remembered his words. - Luke 24: 1-8

all these places feel like home.

2010-04-03T11:23:00.001-05:00

As I write, I'm sitting at my parents' rather large dining room table, watching my dad wrap old dishes in newspaper and put them in a box. I have seen more old things from my childhood in this brief stay at home than I ever recall seeing during my college years. My parents are in the process of packing to move from the small apartment they've lived in for the past 10 years to a new house on the south side of town, farther into Lincoln County than they were before.

This is weird.

Though I spent most of the last 10 years not living at home - dorms on campus, a house in Oxford, England, and most recently, an apartment in Waco, TX - it still feels as though this apartment is home. I lived here all through high school. This is where I came home to during college to do laundry. That couch in the corner is where I was first informed that I was getting a car for Christmas, and I came running down that hallway to tell my parents that Baylor had accepted me into their graduate program. For the longest time, this has been home.

"Home" is a strange concept for me, and probably for any 20-something in America today. Most of us leave the place that has been home for a long time at 18, and rarely return. Many of us live in the same houses from birth to age 18. Even with the increase in divorces and single parent households, many of us have a good conception of what it means to be home: family, friends, a familiar area, and not having to pay to do laundry.

By this definition (excepting the last qualification), I find myself having homes everywhere.

When I came back from Oxford, I wrote of this same phenomenon: My home had recreated itself on Crick Road in Oxford, England, and everything that had been familiar now had to be re-learned.

With each trip home, I find myself relearning the city I spent the first 22 years of my life in. Sioux Falls has changed in many ways, adding more businesses, more people, and more diversity. My "home," in some respects, no longer looks like the home I knew and loved (and occasionally hated).

People move. People migrate. People create new homes.

This is one thing I've learned growing up. Whenever I pictured my future, I usually saw myself settled down somewhere, probably still in Sioux Falls, owning a house, with a grill on the back porch, and a steady job teaching somewhere. In that thought, I had two kids, a loving husband, and a house I'd decorated myself. Oh yeah, and this was usually what I pictured when I thought of age 25.

Obviously, this is not the case. Instead, 25 will find me making a new home, 9,000 from the dream one, in a one bedroom apartment on the coast of Japan.

And I couldn't be happier.

Home, for me, now extends beyond that building on 57th street, that apartment on fifth, or that house on Crick. Home is instead, as cliche as it is, where the heart is. And moreso, home is where, while things may not be comfortable, things are right.

In India, I felt comfortable and at home for a good part of the journey because I knew it was right.

In Sioux Falls, though everything is familiar, there is enough uncanniness that I don't feel right. I am no longer comfortable here. And that is because I have outgrown my home. I am now much more comfortable walking the streets of downtown Austin than I am sitting in the cafe of a Barnes and Noble in Sioux Falls. I feel like an alien, a visitor, someone who no longer belongs.

Once a person realizes that their home is elsewhere from where they grew up, one must also fight the urge to think of those in their hometown as provincial, as narrow minded, as small. Forcing oneself into uncomfortable situations - like moving to Waco for graduate school, or moving to Japan to teach - can give a person a growing experience that other people have not had the opportunity to do. Every time I come home - and this is a bit of a confession - I have to fight the urge to be supercilious, to see myself as somehow better because I have had different experiences, I have moved away, and I have made a name for myself elsewhere.

I'm reminded (embarrassingly) of a chick flick by the name of "Sweet Home Alabama." Reese Witherspoon plays a young lady who moves from small town Alabama to the big city of NY. She has to return shortly before her wedding to the mayor's son in order to finalize her divorce from her high school sweetheart. The attitude she returns to town with is one that I must fight: the urge to see yourself as having outgrown the hometown, as having somehow a better life than those who have stayed here their entire lives.

This sort of attitude is one that I must fight if I want to be a good light for the word of Christ in the worlds I inhabit. Once you begin ranking people, thinking, "I'm better than that," you begin to not care about them as human beings, but rather as elements to be defeated, ignored, and ostracized. If I think, "I am better than you because I have been to India, and your idea of a vacation is going to Omaha," I have already lost the battle against myself.

Part of me wants to take pride in my new self that I develop when I go to new places, and part of me should be proud of the person I am becoming. But that same part also has to realize that any notion of being better than others immediately highlights my inability to improve myself. When I take my self back into my own hands, I undo years of work that God has wrought in my life in terms of trying to love others.

I take credit for work that I have no right to.

While I am not the prototypical Midwesterner anymore, though I still pronounce words funny, I am not better than those who choose to live their lives here. I am no better than the young woman browsing the Christian Inspiration section at Barnes and Noble, or the people turning into WalMart, or my father reading Glenn Beck's Arguing With Idiots. If I allow myself to think of myself as better than my fellow human beings, I no longer allow them an identity. They are no longer human.

I am getting repetitive, so I will leave you with Paul's words to the Philippians:

Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus:
Who, being in very nature God,
did not consider equality with God something to be grasped,
but made himself nothing,
taking the very nature of a servant,
being made in human likeness.

______________
I apologize for the scattered nature of this post. In the process of writing, I was interrupted, and I am now at our local Barnes and Noble, people watching and typing away. Also, the above picture is of an unknown origin, but is one of my favorite pictures of the Falls in Sioux Falls' famous Falls Park.

Giving Jesus New PR

2010-03-24T19:54:00.000-05:00

Last week, after finding out I passed my thesis defense, and finishing lesson plans, I excitedly rented a red Nissan Versa from Hertz Rent-A-Car on Saturday morning, and headed down to downtown Austin.

When I first moved to Waco, I was incredibly excited to realize how close I am to Austin, TX, and consequently, two fantastic music fesitvals: South by Southwest (SxSW) and Austin City Limits (ACL). Without a good monetary justification (ie, I was raising money for India) in September, I was unable to attend ACL, but, I found myself well funded and with enough free time, to make it down for the second to last day of SxSW.

What is SxSW, you ask? Basically, it is one of the largest indie music and film festivals in the world. Lasting about a week, hundreds of bands from all over the country (and world) converge on Austin to meet with record labels, showcase new music, and, well, party. Films are also premiered during this week - this year MacGruber, the newest SNL based movie, was the big premier, last year was (500) Days of Summer (one of my favorite movies, ever). Basically, it's a big festival, meant to create conversations on what is happening in the business of entertainment.

My only previous experience with major music festivals is Life Light, the largest free Christian music festival in the United States. Life Light is squeaky clean, polished evangelical Christianity. No smoking. No swearing. The teenagers there are often respectful, and the merchandise tent was chock full of Jesus memorabilia, what a lot of "insiders" in Christian pop culture would call "Jesus junk." Like I said, squeaky clean, packaged, safe, Christianity.

A large part of my life for 8 years, Life Light shaped a lot of my views toward art and music in general. Unfortunately, I have spent much of my higher education life reworking a lot of that view. A book I began reading today, Rapture Ready! by Daniel Radosh, examines Christian pop culture from an outsider (in fact, Jewish) perspective. He states that a lot of Christian rock musicians are considered primarily ministers first and musicians second, which creates an odd tension between how much they evangelize, and, sometimes, how many times they mention Jesus in a song, and whether or not they're producing worthwhile music. For a very long time, it didn't matter what the quality of music was - it just matter whether or not they were "praising Jesus!"

I feel like I have been in musical therapy in erasing that mindset.

I still feel a little cringe of guilt when I skip over KLOVE when scanning through the radio, though I no longer have a problem listening to David Bazan, who is known for such lyrics as "God bless the man who stumbles, God bless the man who fails, God bless the man who yields to temptation" and "...you were too busy steering the conversation toward the Lord to hear the voice of the Spirit, begging you to shut the f--- up."

Going to SxSW, it seems, was another part of that therapy.

Now, I don't want you to get the wrong message here. I am not saying that I am any more enlightened than my more conservative counterparts who attend Life Light and listen to KLOVE. What I am (let's put a name on it) testifying to here is a change in my personal spiritual life, not something that is necessarily true for all people, though I believe it is reflected in a large part of my generation.

Some people are fine and happy listening to music that is all worship, all the time.

I am not. And it has taken me years to realize that.

For years, I listened to what I was told was good because, frankly, I didn't know any better. I couldn't make myself listen to music with curses in it - during a particularly righteous phase my freshman year of college, I deleted all the Green Day off of my computer because some of the songs had swearing. If the song wasn't immediately about Jesus - or wasn't a peppy clean song I could dance to, like something from The Beach Boys - I didn't listen.

6 years later (my goodness, it's been that long?!), I find myself standing at the back of a bar in Austin, TX, dancing along as Frightened Rabbit performs "Keep Yourself Warm," surrounded by drunk or getting there people, and not caring.

Is this enlightenment? No, not necessarily. Is it an improvement? I think so.

I texted a friend from back home on Saturday, telling him that SxSW was like Life Light, only 4 times big, and with copious amounts of alcohol, smoking and cursing. And free food. SxSW is, for the most part, unabashedly unChristian. Bands swear from stage, smoke and drink backstage, and as the movie A Knight's Tale put it quite nicely, "committing all the oldest sins in the newest ways."

While I was frequently surprised by what I saw - Austin is a really weird town, truth be told - I appreciated it as well. I actually really enjoyed myself because not only was I seeing some bands I happened to admire (She & Him, for one), but there was a sense of realness about a lot of the bands and people. People walked around basically unashamed of themselves and their own personalities, not afraid to let opinions fly (especially from the stage) regardless of whether they offended or not. They were often original, real, and strikingly unique.

Part of what enrages me about Christian popular culture is the number of things that I find that are simply co-opts of secular culture, often done in poorer quality. A few examples of this include "All the Holy Ladies," "Christians in da Club," and "I Can't Believe It" (now with autotune!). We are so concerned with creating something squeaky clean that we have forgotten about making something genuinely good.

Now, I'm not writing this blog to simply poke fun at all the "Christian" versions of secular culture because, as Radosh points out, imitators appear in secular culture as well (think of the way similar bands tend to come out at the same time: Britney and Christina, Good Charlotte and Simple Plan, John Mayer and Jason Mraz, Vanessa Carlton and Michelle Branch). It would be far too easy to just spend my time poking fun at these imitations, and not look at the outlying ramifications from Christianizing an already existing form of art.

Think about a painting.

Let's take, for example, one of my favorites: Van Gogh's Golden Wheat Field:

It's a beautiful, original work of art, beautiful in part, because of the way the Creator knows his work, knows his art, and sought to do something original. Van Gogh sought to portray his own image of this particular field, at this particular time, and as a result, we have a beautiful, bright, enchanting piece of art.

Now think of what an imitation would look like. It would be someone trying to make Van Gogh's style, but something would be missing. It wouldn't have that originality, that panache, that original sense of beauty that the first one has. It might be, technically speaking, a very good replica. But there is something intangible missing in the masterpiece.

It is merely a replica, and not the real thing.

This is how I feel about a lot of Christian art. A lot of it feels like someone took an original idea from secular culture, dipped it in a vat of Jesus cleanser, and came up with their own version. And that is how a lot of non-believers see it as well. When a band comes out that is marketed as "the Christian version of Linkin Park," they end up creating a name for themselves as an imitator, not as an artist in their own right.

As I walked from party to party on Saturday, trailing my friends Althea and Will - both fellow India travelers, and both, incidentally, non-believers - I realized that what we in Christian culture need to do is not to sanitize secular culture so that it is "Positive and Safe for the Whole Family!" but create something so wholly compelling that it expresses to the non-believer a realness about ourselves.

Blogger and author, Matthew Paul Turner, writes of this in the opening chapter to his newest book, Hear No Evil. He overhears a conversation in a coffee shop in Nashville between a new Christian musician and a record executive, discussing an upcoming showcase. In the course of the conversation, the musician - with spiked hair, punk rock clothing, and a distinctly fake aura - comments about how they need to create something real and honest in their stage show, so that they can be appear vulnerable to the audience. Turner writes: "So many of us Christians are all about being vulnerable, especially when we're on stage, dressed up in a costume and wearing makeup, putting on a performance we consider 'a means to an end.'"

Bingo.

We have let our desire to convert, our desire to sanitize, Christianize, and Jesus-ify everything we do that we have forgotten the most important part of the Gospel: heart. We have forgotten to be real about ourselves, about our struggles, about our problems, about the times that we don't believe, because, for some reason, we think we'll be judged by not only outside culture, but by our own brothers and sisters as well.

Throughout the day at SxSW, I was hanging out with Althea, Will and Althea's boss, Chris. Chris didn't know me from Eve, but was still kind and friendly toward me, offering to buy me a drink to celebrate my thesis, and giving me his coat when he noticed I was cold. After about 3 or 4 hours of hanging out, the topic of faith finally came up, and Althea told Chris that I am a professing Christian. Instead of saying, "Oh, I never would have guessed!" or "Wow, what are you doing in a place like this?" Chris opened up about where he's sitting in his faith - he openly and honestly told me that he attends church for his children, and doesn't really have a faith of his own.

My 18 year old self (one who probably would have ditched SxSW three hours before), would have taken that opportunity to rattle off the gospel, tell him he needs a personal relationship with Jesus and that's what he needs to do to save his soul.

My 24 year old self...listened. As we walked down the street, I nodded in agreement and told him I understood, and that everyone is at different places in their faith walk, and sometimes, doing it for someone else is, well, what we do.

Because I didn't try to take his culture and subvert it into my own, because I was willing to come to his area and love what he loves and experience what he experiences, I feel like I was more real. I didn't come away from that conversation wondering whether I should have evangelized, beating myself up for not having a tract on me. I just came away hoping that I had given him a little slice of a Christian who's not a ranting and rambling evangelical who cringes at every swear word and yells at anti-abortion rallies. A Christian who is, surprisingly, like him. Just with a different outlook.

I believe that we all need to strive for authenticity. And I am not holding myself up as a paragon of this - I fail a lot in being real, but I believe I'm getting better. If we drop the idea that there are separate worlds, and that we somehow need to create a safe culture for ourselves, we'll find ourselves marketed differently - as real, authentic, loving people, not just caricatures in the media. We can be a real Jesus to a real hurting world, simply by stepping back from our own sanitizing cleanser and getting our hands dirty once in a while.

We can give Jesus new PR.
________________

The following are some examples of bands I feel are doing a good job of giving Jesus new PR. This is by no means a comprehensive list, but merely a starting point if you want to get some new ears for original, authentic music.

mewithoutYou
Derek Webb
The Civil Wars
David Bazan
Switchfoot
Sufjan Stevens

And I must give credit: Matthew Paul Turner is where I hijacked the whole giving Jesus new PR idea. Follow him on Twitter @JesusNeedsNewPR.

Obamacare: An Attempted Christian Response

2010-03-22T17:59:00.000-05:00

I said I don’t comment on politics very often, and I try not to, mainly because I lean liberal and don’t want to put any one off with my political views. I have had both conservatives and liberals agree with things I’ve said on this blog, and I want to keep it bipartisan in an effort to bring people together under the banner of Jesus’ love and for learning ways we can act as a church community and individuals in the here and now, rather than devolving into party line bickering. As a result, I’ve refrained from direct political commentary in a lot of respects, though, after reading several of my blogs, one would probably get the sense of some of my political stances.

There is one debate that is on the lips of every (even remotely politically active) person as of late, as a result of the House of Reps’ actions on Sunday night. At this point, since 1. A few people have asked me my opinion and this is the best format to create and display my argument, and 2. I feel like I cannot refrain from commentary on this issue, especially since Christians on both sides are heavily and emotionally divided, I have decided to post. Therefore, consider this my comprehensive post on what is colloquially called “Obamacare.” I have tried to cover every aspect of the debate that I have encountered, and therefore this entry is extremely long. I trust, however, that you will take the time to read and consider what I have to say on each of the issues (the specific ones of which I have put into headings).

Brew yourself a cup of fair trade tea, sit back, and try to have an open mind to what I have to say.

What Do We Want in a Debate

There has been a lot of mud and poop flung by people on both sides of the health care debate, along party lines, along the rich-poor gap, along age and gender lines as well. This morning, as I sat down to my devotions, I thought about my goals in debating. Having been a debater in high school, and a naturally competitive youngest child – the only sister to two older brothers – my goals in debate are not usually to find the truth. I will be honest about that. In the shower this morning, I turned the health care debate over and over in my head, thinking of different ways I could win, different arguments I could put down on page that were, prima facie, logically sound and hard to beat. Rather than searching for truth, I found myself wanting to win.

And it is something many of our representatives in Congress need to realize as well. I think we have stopped looking at this issue as “how to make this better” and instead started looking at it as “how I can win this debate. Both sides seem to have forgotten the common ground that this debate began with: That the health care system needs reform. There are 30 million (that’s 1 in 10) Americans uninsured, which results, often, in preventable and unnecessary death, rising health care costs, and what is generally agreed to be a broken system. Believe it or not, both sides agreed on this, in the beginning.

What the true disagreement is about is one of philosophy: how involved should the government be in fixing the problem? Essentially, if I may water down the debate to simple terms, conservatives tend to be in favor of a free market system which doesn’t have government infringement on company policies and balks at governmental regulation of industry. Liberals, on the other hand, see the government involvement as necessary in order to protect the people from being trampled on by big business.

As a result, one side sees government regulation/involvement in the health care industry as a necessary solution, and the other as an unnecessary infringement on basic human rights.

I have struggled for a long time about where a Christian, especially a social justice advocating Christian, fits into this spectrum of belief. In recent months, I’ve heard tossed around the saying: “When I feed the poor and help them, you call me a saint. When I ask why they are poor, you call me a communist.” While trite, I think what this statement does is sums up a lot of the feeling on the liberal social justice end of things, and happens to be where I fall.

A Kingdom Orientation

Let me explain for a moment. Jesus, when he came to earth as the Incarnation of the one true God, did not merely heal the poor, though it was a large part of his ministry. He also spent much of his time calling out church authorities that helped create the poor in the first place. He questioned the structure, which, at that time, was heavily integrated with the government. Keep in mind that when the Jewish authorities wanted to get rid of him, the issue did not merely remain as part of the church, but went to the governmental authorities of the area. While Jesus said, “Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s,” he also spoke up against oppression by particularly church authorities, and reigning governmental authorities.

Jesus spoke continually of the “kingdom of God” or the “kingdom of Heaven,” using phrasing that called into the minds of his followers not a violent overthrow of the government that posits Jesus as the bloody Caesar ruling over all, but a following of peacemakers that has kingdom of heaven priorities for the oppressed and the poor. That doesn’t mean entirely separating oneself from the government as a Christian, but instead, acting not to oppress others with one’s theology, but speaking out against those strictures that create oppression in the first place.

This is how I try to view politics. I question those structures which create oppression – in this case, the current insurance system, which allows the child born with asthma to not get coverage – and do what I can to reform them, or, if need be, peacefully fight against them. Martin Luther King, Jr., writes in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail:You deplore the demonstrations taking place in Birmingham. But your statement, I am sorry to say, fails to express a similar concern for the conditions that brought about the demonstrations. I am sure that none of you would want to rest content with the superficial kind of social analysis that deals merely with effects and does not grapple with underlying causes. It is unfortunate that demonstrations are taking place in Birmingham, but it is even more unfortunate that the city's white power structure left the Negro community with no alternative.” He saw, at the heart of his mission, the need to question the overall structure that oppressed his people.

As a follower of Jesus, the poor are my people, and I have to question a structure – whether it be government or Big Insurance – that oppresses the people.

Hopefully the preceding clarifies some of my view. I see it as perfectly within (and eventually an obligation of) the rights of a Christian to question government tactics, and to question the systems in which we live, especially if they are systems that create oppression. This is something I hope Christians on both ends of the political system can agree with – we have a right and obligation as Christian to respond to oppressive authorities, whether that be governments or insurance companies.

Health Care Reform Itself (Click for a brief summary of what is actually in the bill!)

In a vote late Sunday night, the House of Representatives passed one of the largest and most gigantic pieces of reform legislation of recent years. Obama and his staff/Congress have been debating heavily about this issue essentially since the day Obama was sworn into office (and before, during election season).

In the course of the debate, Republicans made a singularly disastrous move: They refused, from the beginning, to compromise, to deal with the Obama administration on what should go into Health Care Reform. It was a decision made strictly along party lines, and essentially destroyed any possibility that this would be a [relatively] smooth process. Instead, the debate became embroiled in slurs, name calling, poor characterization of opponents on both sides, and imprecations of character.

The debate divided along party lines and became much more about winning than finding a solution.

In that sense, this was the wrong time to attempt health care legislation, or at least a package so large. With the amount of misinformation, internet rumors, and yelling and crying pundits, this would have been a battle at any time, but to have it be the first major piece of legislation for a president, in war time, during a recession, was a poor decision. In my opinion, Obama should have made moves to end the war in Iraq, and establish himself as a peaceful president, rather than embroiling himself in a health care battle right out of the gate.

That said, I don’t have a lot of problems with the legislation itself. The current system of privatized health insurance leaves millions uninsured, unable to pay for necessary medications, and often suffering unnecessarily. “Pre-existing conditions” result in health care costs being hiked up, or people unable to find good coverage because they are already sick. Pharma companies make people pay $600/month for medication that costs $10 to make.

The current system is built around making money, around the profit margin, and not around serving people or helping them in their illness.

This is a problem. When a system becomes more concerned about a material object – making a profit – than it is about human life, there is a problem. As Christians, this is a fundamental flaw in our capitalistic system I believe we need to question: It’s all well and good to exercise your inventiveness, your cunning, and your skills as a businessman. I’m fine with that part of capitalism – I think it’s great and right to encourage people to be the best that they can be. But, as a Christian, I have a problem with a system that naturally oppresses those who are not good enough. Those with skill should turn around and help those without. Instead, American capitalism has become about whether or not I can make a dime off of your suffering, to put it bluntly. At least, that’s how it is in the insurance industry works (and numerous insider testimonies corroborate this idea).

In this sense, the health care reform recently passed by the House is a good idea. It will eventually (by 2014) eliminate the problems of pre-existing conditions, put caps on what insurance companies can charge, and stops insurance companies from dropping you from their coverage when you get sick.

Now, is all this government involvement a bad thing? Again, this brings us back to a debate on philosophy: Should the government get involved in the regulation of the free market? Well…the American health insurance industry is one of the few industries NOT regulated by the government. Think of it this way: the insurance company puts out a product – insurance coverage for medical care – and the government is seeking to make sure that is safe for the American consumer. In the same way, there are government regulations on our food, on the cars we drive, on the toys we give our children, and on public education. Government involvement, then, is nothing new. This is simply regulation of a business that has, in many respects, gotten out of control.

BUT IT TAKES AWAY MY FREEDOM!

This is where (if it hasn’t already), this debate is going to turn heated. I’ve heard a lot of yelling and crying about how “this legislation is going to take away my freedom!” “We’re going to be no better than those socialist countries over in Europe!” and “It’s positively un-American!”

First, I want you to walk away for a moment, take out a sheet of paper and write down all the things you think America is about. This is a big question, but it needs to be asked: What, precisely, do we mean when we say that something is un-American? What, exactly, is an American way of doing things?

Have you done that? Do you have a good idea in your head about what is or is not American? Can you picture that in your head, with a red, white and blue flag waving behind it, stars and stripes forever, etc.

Now think about America as it is.

Does your picture include executives lining their pockets with money from soaring insurance premiums?

Does it include the mother who has to take her asthmatic child to the ER because they couldn’t afford a simple inhaler?

Does it include the 23 year old involved in an accident with a drunk driver who is now going to be in debt for years to come because of medical bills?

Regardless of what we want America to be, this is what America is. We have let insurance companies who are concerned mostly about profit take our money and hold us in a tight grip of worry about our prescription coverage, our ER visits, and our preventative care.

Does this fit with your picture of a free America?

Now, I know the counter argument: Governmental health care is no better – it takes away my freedom of which doctor I can visit and when, etc. It’s on a slippery slope to socialism.

I’d like you to scroll back up and read through the Reuters summary of the HC legislation again. If there is a point where it requires you to leave your private insurance plan (probably provided by your employer) in order to take the so-dubbed governmental Obamacare?

It’s not in the bill.

As much as Glenn Beck, et al, would like us to believe, this plan, while large, is far from a socialist take over of the government. The major tax hikes come on the optional service of tanning beds (because they up peoples’ chances of getting skin cancer immensely), on people who earn $200,000 or more a year, and redistributes tax dollars to subsidize a governmental health care plan for those who are fall under 400% of the poverty line (for information on the federal poverty line, look here).

Ahaha! REDISTRIBUTION! That’s SOCIALIST! AND SOCIALISM IS BAD.

Not quite.

Let’s take a look at our definitions of socialism. Socialism is an economic policy mandating that any wealth one makes be taken by the government and given to the poorer neighbor, commonly referred to as redistribution of wealth. Socialism and Communism have frequently been conflated (much thanks to Glenn Beck and compatriots for that one), but the first is an economic system, and the second is a governmental system. While they do, frequently, go hand in hand, neither is occurring with this legislation, nor will occur. The redistribution of taxes merely pushes the money that was already coming into the federal government in a different direction. It doesn’t, except for the wealthiest, take necessarily any new money in.

You’re already subsidizing someone else’s health care costs on the current system. The only difference is it’s through a private business that is concerned about making money, rather than through the federal government that is concerned, one would hope, about the health of its people. If I am uninsured, get sick, and am unable to pay for care, the hospital passes that cost along to other insurance companies, which then pass along the cost to you, the consumer, by way of higher premiums and less coverage. You’re already subsidizing the cost of the poor and uninsured through the premiums you pay to insurance. NPR’s This American Life did a great podcast about this a few weeks back – have a listen.

But what about the requirement that you have health care? That’s heavy governmental involvement! The requirement that each person be on health care, whether or it be the governmental plan, which is determined by necessity of income level, or through private plans (which are NOT eliminated as a option, contrary to popular opinion), is a definite mark of government involvement in one’s life.

But I ask you: how is this different than mandated minimum coverage on your car? The reason the state mandates that is because, if you get in an accident and you aren’t covered, the cost of those repairs gets passed on to other people (ironically close to the current health insurance system, eh?). Governmentally mandated auto insurance ensures that the cost and penalty for failure to have basic coverage will remain with the individual responsible, rather than passing the cost along to someone else. Hmm, sounds a lot like “personal responsibility” to me…

Why do we care more to insure a material possession than the health of our bodies, something ultimately much, much more important?

Okay, okay, I hear the counter argument now: Governmentally mandating this coverage is wrong. If that’s wrong, than you have to be willing to argue that governmental regulation on ANYTHING is wrong. That means you have to be okay with handing your child a toy that hasn’t been inspected and doesn’t meet safety standards. You have to be okay with eating food that hasn’t passed an inspection and doesn’t have a governmentally mandated expiration date. You have to be okay with attending a college or high school with teachers who haven’t been certified to teach, and may tell you completely wrong information.

Extreme examples? Sure. But they are examples of governmentally regulated industry in everyday life. This bill simply extends already existing governmental regulation to health care and the health insurance industry. It’s good to know that, even if I fall in dire straits after I have children, my kids will still be covered, even if it is by a governmental plan.

But, but, ABORTION?

Ah, we have finally reached the source of much controversy and problems. Are my tax dollars going to pay for abortions?

In the new exchanges market set up by the bill – a plan that allows one to select which insurance policies to buy or not (private plans vs. governmental), and allows people to shop around more – there are two policies that are offered: one with abortions and one without. The new language inserted into the bill this weekend mandates that those who choose the abortion policy, even if it is the plan subsidized by the federal government, must pay a small surcharge, with funds that are kept separate from the overall policy. So yes, the plan allows abortions – that’s a debate that won’t be settled any time soon – but with the new language, the money is kept in separate areas. It might be a “bookkeeping exercise,” as some Republicans have called it, but it’s an important one.

Your federal tax dollars do not fund abortion, something that Obama is drafting an executive order to insure (see above link). It’s been pretty well settled.

Conclusion?

After 7 pages (typed in MS word) of my coverage on this bill, it’s a little hard to sum up, but I’ll try.

Essentially, it goes like this: [1] The Republicans cut themselves off from having a reasonable voice when they declared they wouldn’t compromise. [2] This was probably the wrong time to launch the bill, but what’s done is done. [3] The current system is broken and oppressive, something that Christians on either side need to realize and act upon. [4] Governmental regulation is nothing new. We are not on a slippery slope toward socialism. This plan is not a governmental take over of health care. Private plans are still offered and available, and will hopefully be, in fact, better. [5] Socialism is not going to be the result. Indeed, socialism has been used mostly as a way of scaring a lot of the older generation, but when the specifics of the bill are examined, there isn’t much that one could point to as socialist. [6] Your federal tax dollars are not going to fund abortions. Period.

I don’t support the way the Dems went about getting this legislation out there (it created much more divide and part of the blame for the lack of compromise lies squarely on their shoulders as well), and it will be interesting to watch it be implemented, but I am, overall, excited that 30 million people are going to be able to get affordable coverage now, and that the insurance industry will be reigned in.

It is not perfect, but it is not going to destroy America either. If anything, it will make us better because it will show that we do, indeed, care for the least of these, and that, indeed, is admirable above all.

Special Announcement

2010-03-17T19:56:00.000-05:00

I know, I know, I've posted a lot this week.

But if you'll allow me a post to be slightly self-indulgent, I would like to celebrate some recent events in my life with you all!

For those of you who didn't already know, I am in my second year of a Master of Arts program at Baylor University. This is a thesis-track program, meaning that instead of a large test, I write a long paper. Much like a dissertation on a smaller scale, the thesis requires review by a committee, ending in a nerve-wracking event known as a thesis defense. I've spent the semester thus far writing 90 pages of academic critique on Harry Potter.

Yes, you read that right. Harry Potter. My thesis is titled "Harry Potter and the Search for a Church: Spiritual Community and Sacrificial Love in J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter Series." Basically, I propose that the wizarding community functions like a church, with love as the higher power. I had a great time writing it, and if you want to read it, I'm perfectly happy to send it along - it won't be available online until about September.

On Monday of this past week - yes, on the Ides of March - I had my thesis defense. I was extremely nervous going in - I think one of my tweets from right before it reads "I'm going to throw up" - but soon relaxed and had a good time answering questions about my work. I enjoy talking about Harry Potter more than almost any other book (though I do love my Cormac McCarthy, too), and, as you know, I love talking about theology, so discussing the Trinity, church community, sin, etc. My defense was actually...fun!

Judging by that reaction, you can bet that I passed. Indeed, tomorrow, I am going over to the graduate school to turn in the last forms that I have to in order for final approval for graduation. May 15th, 2010, I will be walking across the stage to receive my MA.

WOOHOO!

Also, I received my contract for my Japan job, which makes that even more official than it already was. Now it's just the visa process, airplane ride, and packing/etc. Goodness.

I lead an absolutely insane life. Period.

Interview with a Trafficker

2010-03-12T23:50:00.000-06:00

One thing abolitionists like myself frequently wonder is what it would be like to talk to a trafficker, to hear their side of the story, what could make them enslave one of their fellow human beings, terrifying them and subjecting them to some of the worst terrors. A new documentary has given us that opportunity. Here is a section that is an interview with a trafficker from South Africa who is on the run, not from authorities, but from his own old trafficking ring. What he has to say about 1. The church's role, and 2. The demand created by the World Cup, is important and sobering.

I apologize that parts of it are hard to read, but it's captioned with a weird font and it moves quickly, so you may have to pause occasionally to keep up with what he's saying. It's 7 minutes worth watching. Also, warning: somewhat graphic descriptions of violence are used. Not for the faint of heart.

Glenn Beck and Social Justice

2010-03-10T21:15:00.001-06:00

I occasionally pay attention to what Glenn Beck has to say. My reasoning for doing so, I admit, more often than not, is of a less noble quality than one could expect. It is often a "know thine enemy" kind of keeping my eye on him, more than anything else.

I frequently find his rambling and thoughts on politics rather incoherent, but that could also be chalked up to the fact that I don't like to listen to his fear-mongering - a calm, reasoned, steady tactic could make what he says seem much more reasonable. I often feel that he is trying to scare people into agreeing with him by conflating thoughts of the Democratic party with Nazism, Communism, and everything his Cold-War generation audience finds "evil." This continued flippancy toward reasonable discussion has caused me to write him off altogether, something I admit should not be done by people who sincerely want to find common ground between two sides (translation: I'm not always the best as trying to find common ground).

This week, however, he said something that forced me to pay attention. [For audio of the clip, look to the bottom of the previously linked article]. Basically, he tells Christians who watch his show to leave their churches if they have a social justice agenda.

Now, something like that has to be taken out of context.

Nope. Unlike what happens to a lot of pundits (both conservative and liberal) in this soundbite culture, his words were not taken out of context. He really said and meant that he wants people to leave their churches.

Now, I haven't done a whole lot of commenting on political things for a reason - I believe Jesus is apolitical (Democrats and Republicans are inventions of the 20th century, and therefore can't be applied to a first century prophet and the divine Lord). But Beck is stepping into my arena, here, and I feel forced to come out of the corner and fight back.

I've often said that social justice is the end result of taking Jesus' command to "love your neighbor" into action in one's life. One cannot respond to what Jesus calls "the second greatest commandment" (the first being "love the Lord your God") without possibly taking steps to make the lives of those around you better.

Now, in this current political climate, I will admit that this makes me a liberal. But I am liberal only in the sense that I believe the staid conservative stance on the poor, on the homeless, on homosexuality, on the death penalty, on war, and on capitalism to be diametrically opposed to what I believe is right. The conservative stance of "it's your own damn fault" (what is often termed "personal responsibility") is not something I necessarily deny -- I do admit that there are often cases when the person in a problematic situation is there because of poor choices that they have made in their life.

But our reaction to that, our response to people who are in hurting situations, needs not be a pointing of the finger, and telling them to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. Our reaction, like Jesus' to many of the people he met in his time, can say to them that "I don't care where you come from, but I do care where you are headed now. And I will help you with that." Jesus looked at the Samaritan woman at the well without judging her, and offered her the water of eternal life. Jesus looked at the tax collectors, the lepers, and the prostitutes and welcomed them into the kingdom, regardless of their past. It's kind of, y'know, the point behind the gospel: "God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us" (Romans 5:8, emphasis mine).

"Social justice"/"Economic justice" is at the heart of this gospel. Loving your neighbor means not judging them for the decisions they have made, and if they need a cloak, handing yours over. Loving your neighbor means helping them get food if they have none to eat. Loving your neighbor means listening to their story, letting them feel like a person again. Loving your neighbor may mean, every so often, voting for a policy or a politician who has helping the hurting at heart - even that means that s/he has a "D" or an "I" by his/her name.

Glenn Beck has transplanted his politics into the church scene, much like the ridiculous project Conservapedia, when it should be the other way around. Taking the idea of loving your neighbor - which, at its heart, begins with Jesus - seriously and deeply means that, fundamentally, things change. It's not so much that I am voting for Democrats, but much more that I am voting against policies that work to trample our neighbors under our feet more and more.

Glenn Beck, your advice is beyond ridiculous. For Christians to abandon churches that preach social justice means for them to abandon the purpose of the church itself. And anyone who can do so at the cry of a pundit yelling in front of a chalkboard on one of several 24 hour news networks is more in need of a right-minded church than anyone preaching social justice. It saddens me and disheartens me that you would bring politics into something that is so far beyond the small world you have confined yourself in. You are a small man yelling at the wind, a King Lear standing naked before the storm, and I feel deeply sorry for you. I hope that the church can learn to respond to you in a way that loves our neighbor, in precise dichotomy to your "preaching."

Church, we have a great chance to respond here, to show the heart of the gospel for what it truly is. Angry letters and hate mail will only convince him that he is more and more right. Our response needs to reflect the love of Christ, the love that he showed even to his enemies, crying from the cross: "Father, forgive them." We have great opportunity here to clarify that, yes, this is what the church is about. This is what the entire ekklesia is built for. This is what we, as people made in God's image are made for - to love in great community, in hope, and in reconciliation.

Our nation is an interesting juncture, when the church has a great chance to become more than a fringe conservative movement. Let's step out and show the world what it means to "love thy neighbor as thyself."

___________

EDIT: For those of you looking to read some interesting further discussion of how Christians should respond to Glenn Beck's words and the philosophy behind them, and don't mind wading through message board forums, and some inane things, check [link removed] out. Beck also responded today, calling social justice "a perversion of the gospel." I must admit I am angered, frustrated, and saddened by the potential ramifications of his words. All Christians need to work out what they believe about the connection between the church and state as it will affect the future of our nation. The relation of church and state is not an esoteric problem, not one that can be simplified without undermining the issue at large, but a problem facing each and every American individual.

Are we going to let our government be a tool of oppression? Or a tool of good tidings? Are we going to let the government do what the church should be doing? We cannot have it both ways. We cannot say that the church and state should be separated and I should be allowed to practice my religion as I want, and then not pick up the torch of social justice. If the church does not do its job for the poor and suffering, then the government will, and we have forfeited our right to complain about "big government" if our complacency has allowed such tools of oppression as corporations (who use sweat shop labor), war, and lasseiz-faire (which functions based on the oppression of the poor and the rich getting richer) to proliferate. There is a link between our complacency about taking care of the poor in our world and governmental involvement in our lives.

If the church was doing its job, "big government" would not be a problem. There is a middle ground, but it requires members of the church to stand up, realize that parts of the system are wrong, and to FIX them. Beck's words at this point are entirely counterproductive - if we leave churches that are doing this work, if we weaken them, then big government ends up being the answer. And that's not what Glenn Beck wants, and, ideally, it is not what I want either. The church needs to stand up, take some "personal responsibility," and be willing to act as the eschatological, ecclessiological, salvific, reconciling body that it is. And until I see the church doing that on its own and effectively, I will continue to vote Democrat, continue to support legislation that takes care of the poor, and continue to support laws that protect the damaged against oppressors and demand peace, even if it means that "free enterprise" gets reined in and my taxes get a little higher.

For summary, this is a selection from one of the posts on the board I just linked to:

Just a few days ago I read an excerpt from Ron Sider's speech to the Mennonite World Conference in 1984, and in it he spoke about a particularly upsetting conversation he had with a respected Anabaptist minister. This minister, apparently, believed all that you and I do, in terms of Christians not being involved in the military, government, etc. However, he also apparently believed it was a good thing that the United States had nuclear capability, even to the point that he felt the US (at the time) should have stepped up this capability to meet the Soviet Union's! Sider implied sadness at this kind of thinking, as do I. It's similar to the kind of sadness I felt when I read an Anabaptist article criticising Martin Luther King for demanding civil rights for African-American people. To paraphrase his words in that excerpt I read, it's not enough for us to simply say that violence is wrong for Christians and okay for the state. We need to be unequivocally against violence in all its forms, and sometimes that does mean crying out against the empire for its abuses of human rights and dignity.

I think there comes a time, then, when Christians can't afford to disengage with Caesar and pretend that he isn't there, but I don't believe that necessarily equates to legitimising his authority. To look at it in a different way: just like pacifism demands some form of engagement with the oppressor, so does it too does the Christian political ethic demand some form of engagement with the state. The former scenario does not condone the violence which is waged, and so neither does the latter.

an edukation in passion

2010-03-04T11:36:00.000-06:00

I've been watching a lot of movies lately. Partially on purpose, partially out of procrastination. Often, when I finish a large project, the first thing I want to do is veg out, not do anything for a couple of days, and relax. As a result, I spend a lot of time on the couch, watching movies and playing around on the internet.

Last night, I finished my thesis. I'm contemplating going back in and adding one more piece of evidence from book six in my chapter four, but besides that, it is essentially ready to send out. I defend in 11 days (on the 15th) and Spring break starts tomorrow. As a result, I, for once in my graduate education, have absolutely no pressing obligations on my time.

On Tuesday, I watched Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince, the newest in the Harry Potter series (which reminded me of the section I need to add to my thesis), and last night I chose a foreign film called The Edukators.

The Edukators, or Die fetten Jahre sind vorbei, is a German film that takes place in modern day Berlin. Jan, Jule, and Peter are all anti-capitalist revolutionaries who call themselves "The Edukators." They spread their philosophy--educate people--by breaking into mansions in Berlin, rearranging the furniture, and leaving a note that says "Your days of plenty are numbered," or "You have too much money." They don't steal anything. They don't really break anything. They just give them the eerie feeling of someone else having been in their house, watching them, and watching how they spend.

It's an interesting concept, and while I can't condone breaking the law, even if it is in order to achieve a righteous end, I have to admit their philosophy and mine, to some extent, do align. That's what intrigued me the most about this movie--it broaches the idea of revolutionaries for social justice, and how well they can keep their passion going, their fire stoked.

Passion can sustain you for some time. It's good and right to be passionate about a cause, and to know that you won't waver, and that passion can inspire others to move with you. But as you try to mold your life more and more around that passion, as things begin to change, the weight of the system--capitalism, the Western culture, the selfish concern for money--can wear you down.

Suddenly you realize that you have to pay back your student loans you borrowed pursuing your love of art.

You realize that getting married and living with the love of your life means making your decisions as a team, having to compromise some things, and probably settling down in one place.

You have kids and love them dearly and want to give them the best life possible, so you start savings funds: you get a job that pays you the money you need even if the corporation's philosophy doesn't fit the one you espoused.

You realize that you've changed. You've played the game. And though you never wanted to, you are now one of the large capitalist pigs you had spent the days of your youth protesting.

This is precisely the progression of passion that the Edukators encounter. Through a series of mishaps, the group ends up hiding out in the mountains in Bavaria with one of the "rich men" they had attacked. In spending a week together, this man who has played the game, who makes $3.4 million Euros a year, tells them of his days back with the revolutionaries, reading Marx, smoking dope, and experiencing "free love." He knows that young passion all too well, and knows what it feels like when it fades, when you wake up in the morning and realize that you are the bourgeois you once protested.

The movie takes interesting twists and turns, so I'm not going to spoil it for you, but this idea of passion is what I want to discuss.

It's easy to get fired up about a cause.

To stay fired up is harder.

It's easy to hold up a sign for a day, to write an impassioned paper, to switch your buying habits for a couple of days.

To keep going, to sustain that movement forward, especially when it's a kind of "side project" is harder still.

It's easy to say, "yeah, we should love and care for the poor!" every day.

To believe it wholeheartedly is the hardest of all.

This is why I believe social justice to be one of the hardest things to maintain, why so many nonprofits start up and fail in the same year, why we're not hearing about Haiti anymore, and why the earthquake in Chile was greeted with a shrug. Why, after 9/11, we were so patriotic, so impassioned, so willing to reign in our culture, to be more modest, more careful, more loving...and also why now we seem to be back to the way we were. Why I see my friends switch from one cause to another like trying on clothes.

Passion is a sly mistress, and one that is not so trustworthy.

If you are relying only on your personal passion for an issue, your anger and rage at an injustice, your fight will not last long. All three of the Edukators are angry, enraged at the injustice that a rich man can wantonly ruin a young girl's life, that the system we work within is so broken that it crushes people under its great wheels. But when they're faced with problems, with things that threaten them, they make poor decisions, they run, they put themselves in dangerous situations.

Running on passion is like running on fumes - it sustains just long enough for you to make it to the next distraction.

Running on passion terrifies me.

The idea that, when I get older, and have a steady job, and am making enough money to pay the bills and (hopefully) have a husband and possibly kids, that I could lose my passion, that I could start justifying things...well, that's a very real possibility. And it scares me because I don't ever want to lose my passion for the disenfranchised, for the broken, for the poor, for the hurting. But it is, unfortunately, a reality that faces us 20-something, new to the real world, bright eyed, idealists.

The one thing I've learned so far is that your anger will fade. You will get desensitized to the issue. Like adjusting to living with bars on my windows here in Waco, you get to the point where you don't even notice it anymore. The trick is, before you get to that point where you don't notice the suffering, to turn your passion into conviction.

It's easy to inflame a passion because it's surface level. Now, I may be working with a definition of passion that you, my readers, are unfamiliar with - basically, what I mean by "passion" is that outrage, that initial emotional response that gets at the pathos of the issue, that responds with deep emotional love for one's neighbor. That's swell - one should always start off in passion because passion is what motivates us to change in the first place. There are times and places for outrage, but if one attempts to sustain a social justice career merely on anger, it will not last long.

A career sustained on love, however, love that extends out of a deep conviction of should and ought, not "feel like it" - that, my friends, is long lasting.

Let's redefine love. Love has become far too fluffy, far too dependent on how I feel today. Love is not that which is fleeting, it is not that sad pity that makes you hand the homeless man a dollar, it is not that anger that envelopes a discussion of white people sitting around and talking about the system.

Love is that motivation that says, "Even though I am late for this meeting, I will make sure that you have some food." It is that conviction that says, "I will vote in a way that helps alleviate the suffering around me, and not which saves me money." It is that deep, rumbling passion that never leaves us, that is always in the back of our mind saying each morning, "How will you respond to me today?"

There is a reason the Gospel message talks of loving your neighbor, and not of getting outraged on their behalf. There is a reason that Jesus only showed anger a couple of times, and was a loving servant to his friends hundreds of times. There is a reason that Paul, the apostle, tells us to look to love others first and foremost. There is a reason that James says that faith will develop into works, because once one has taken deep, gracious love and turned it into a conviction, it is impossible not to respond.

The Edukators were running on passion. Seeing the possibility of the future terrified them, and for a time it terrified me. But instead of choosing to trust in my outrage, in realizing that my passion may not always inflame others to act, instead of reacting emotionally to everything and relying on that to sustain me, I choose instead to act in the conviction that love can and will change things.

Love must be sincere. Hate what is evil; cling to what is good. - Romans 12:9

Note: in the above picture, the painting on the wall reads, in German, "Every heart is a revolutionary cell."

Meatless Mondays (And Tuesdays. And Wednesdays. And...)

2010-03-02T11:31:00.000-06:00

"Lisa! I could never be a vegetarian! I like the taste of death too much!" - Bart Simpson

I tried to put on an old pair of jeans today, and realized that, without a belt, I would soon be exposing myself to the world. Knowing that the world probably didn't want to see that, I opted to switch them out for another pair of jeans that are a size smaller.

I've evidently lost a little weight. Just under two weeks ago, I started a new diet - vegetarian. I haven't had meat (except on Sundays) for the last two weeks, and it's been an interesting adjustment.

I'll be honest, the first week, I felt terrible. I felt like I just couldn't get full, and at one point, I would have given my left eye for any sort of meat, even a Big Mac. And I *hate* Big Macs. I sent out a plea to my vegetarian friends, and after (an already planned) trip to Austin that included a stop at a Co-Op near UT to get some vegetarian and vegan products, my diet has balanced out.

Instead of eating mostly carbs - which was all I had - I've now added apples, salads, carrots and veggie-burgers/nuggets to my diet. As a result, I get to eat things that taste like meat, but are probably more nutritious for me. And on Sundays, I've been having delicious meat curry dinners (for the last two Sundays at least), so I've been ensured of protein nutrition on my days off.

But I'm not writing this blog to tell you about my woes and trials as a new vegetarian, though I could probably spend a lot of time talking about it. Not eating meat is such a new thing for me, but thinking about how my food gets to my plate is much more important.

Coming from South Dakota, I'm reasonably more familiar with the farming industry than most of urban America. I have a group of cousins who run a family farm just outside of Sioux Falls, and they are my family's main source of meat. Indeed, I don't think my family buys any beef products at the store anymore, because the bottom half of our large freezer (it's one of those large enough to fit a body in) is always lined with packages of steak and ground beef from my aunt Dianna and uncle Dave (and yes, I'm named after her).

In our late teen years, my farmer cousin who is two weeks older than me started his own little "crop" of chickens, raising them to eventually butcher and sell. From what I understand, he had a neat little business going, and it was a good skill for him to learn.

Family farmers are fast fading from the food market in America. In favor of efficiency, our farms have become bigger, and more resembling factories than they old image of the family farm anymore. What we see in the grocery store when shopping is hardly a representation of what actually happens.

In contrast to my cousins' farm, which holds pleasant memories of outdoor activities, cows roaming about within their pens, eating grass, and large fields of grain and corn, I also have the background image in my head of the John Morrell's factory on the Northeast side of Sioux Falls. Just north of Sioux Falls' famous Falls Park (which contains the city's namesake, the waterfalls of the Big Sioux River), the big white building has been a major employer of Sioux Falls residents for years and years. On days when the wind is right, the smell of meat can waft over a lot of the city, and often makes one want to cover his or her nose in disgust. I grew up with both of these images of the way of getting food, but never connected it to what I was putting into my body. This was probably because my parents' (along with most Americans) policy was just not questioning it.

I'm finally beginning to do just that: question. In thinking about how my clothes got to my closet, I'm also thinking about how my food got to my fridge. In going through the supermarket, we're presented with these images of farmers gazing over amber waves of grain, probably knowing each cow by name, and slaughtering them in the most humane way possible. I think if we really saw how our meat got to be boneless, skinless and HUGE, sitting in a neatly wrapped plastic tray in the frozen food section, we probably wouldn't like what we saw.

NOTE: Over the last few weeks, I've been reading Eating Animals by J.S. Foer, a book about factory farming and the stories we tell ourselves about our food. And last night, I watched "Food, Inc.", a film about the business of our food. If you want more information, pick up/watch either of these two things.

There were two things I learned in watching "Food, Inc." last night that I found particularly striking.

First, we've overproduced on corn. I'd heard of farmer subsidizing before, but never really knew what it meant. Essentially, the government has paid farmers for overproduction of crops, and corn is now being used and molded into thousands of different products everyday, high fructose corn syrup being the most common. Producing so much corn allows farmers to sell it at less than the price of production, creating an American corn market that does better than any other market in the world. When the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was signed into law, Mexican farmers couldn't compete with the cheap price of corn, and therefore were pushed out of jobs. Over a million Mexican farmers lost their farms to competition with the stronger American corn market. These leads me to point two:

The way the American food economy is run encourages human trafficking.

Follow me on this. When the Mexican farmers lost their jobs, lots of meat processing plants started advertising for jobs in America. Meat processing is one of the most dangerous jobs in existence today: the worker does the same action day in and day out, with sharp implements, and with high risk of injury. At the dirt cheap wages they are paid, and because they are not necessarily skilled, an injured worker can easily be replaced, like parts or cogs in a machine. In other words, it's a job perfectly primed for someone already off the radar, and thus with few legal rights -- the illegal immigrant. Some meat processing plants even set up a bus service to get immigrants to their factories from Mexico.

The most shocking thing I learned, however, was that the Smithfield pork factory (think Smithfield Hams, a longtime Christmas staple), apparently has a deal with local immigration authority to allow 15 worker arrests a day so that no major raids are conducted that hurt the production line.

The people bringing in the illegal immigrants are not being punished.

The people who are literally trafficking in workers for the factories go unpunished. We are subsidizing trafficking with the food that we eat. Why do these factories use undocumented workers? Hey, if the worker is undocumented, they have no rights to unionize, they don't have to provide insurance because the worker has no legal right to sue, and they can be paid what is easiest for the company, not what is best for the person.

All in the name of efficiency and cheap prices for the consumer.

I'll be honest, I'm not too big on animal rights. You'll never see me standing on a corner with a PETA sign, yelling about fur coats that people are wearing. I am, however, big on human rights, and, in the food industry, the two are interlocked. Farmers are under the thumb of corporations to keep their mouths shut about the food they produce. Undocumented workers are slicing apart the meat for your plate. Our market is causing fledgling markets in developing countries to collapse because it actually costs less to get food flown over from America than it does to buy local crops. There is a direct correlation between poverty and obesity in America because the cheapest foods are the most fattening, due to the overproduction and efficiency of fast food empires. Diabetes is on the rise, and showing up earlier and earlier.

So this morning, when I realized that my size 10 jeans no longer fit properly, I felt okay about that. It meant that my eating habits were probably getting healthier. I also noticed today that I feel better. Yesterday, I was able to concentrate for 3 hours on editing my thesis, and this morning, I graded three papers in a row (then took a break to write this). My energy level is already improving, and I feel a lot healthier.

Granted, the downside of this is that my grocery bill has gone up. What is normally about a $20-$25 trip shot up to $53 this last week, because I added veggie burgers, carrots and lettuce/salad dressing, along with a few other new items, this last week. The pricing as it stands is skewed toward the more unhealthy foods. It would be a lot easier to just buy 5 frozen pizzas at 90 cents each than it is to go select a good head of lettuce and some tofu.

I don't know how I can go about solving this problem, but not eating meat has already taught me a lot of different things, and I look forward to sharing more of them with you.