You matter

 

WITNESSED IN MILWAUKEE

A little girl, handholding

Two possible mothers, sometimes lifted

By them off the street, shouting,

Louder and louder, “Black Lives Matter!”

Joyous, the way it ought to be shouted.

And a guy turning around, smiling,

Showing her his makeshift sign,

That reads, “You Matter!”

Eulogies

 

MUTTERED, NOT EXPECTING
TO BE HEARD

I write more eulogies than any-

Thing else these days, he said,

Adjusting his collar the better

To rest comfortably under his double chin.

If God is not dead, he’s on an extended sabbatical.

Street debate

 

DEBATE ON THE STREET DURING A MILWAUKEE PROTEST

Indignant, she
Demands of me, “Well,
Six years later, can you show me what you were afraid
Would come to pass?” I look around,
Seeing in the street moving beside us like foam on the river
Signs about children sepa
Rated from families and encaged; poor
Women in Texas traveling hundreds of miles
For a legal procedure; violence against
Any number of citizens whose only offense is
Being neither white nor straight nor having documents,
 
Finally at her and so many others who would put him right back, and I answer,
“No, I can’t show you anything at all.”

My favorite Bly poem

 Well, Robert Bly is dead. I can't say he has been my favorite poet but he is certainly one of them. I've read and appreciated him for decades but I don't think his forms show up in my poems except in our shared sense of the poem as a Polaroid of a particular moment. So in that light, here is probably my favorite Bly poem. 

DRIVING TO TOWN LATE TO MAIL A LETTER

It is a cold and snowy night. The main street is deserted.
The only things moving are swirls of snow.
As I lift the mailbox door, I feel its cold iron.
There is a privacy I love in this snowy night.
Driving around, I will waste more time. 

What is an armed white man to do?

I intended to post the first of my new poems today, but not this one as I feel it's one of the weaker ones I've been working at. However, in light of today's Kyle Rittenhouse verdict, it's probably the most apt. 

WHY THE JUDGE IN THE KYLE RITTENHOUSE TRIAL IS RIGHT TO BAN 

USE OF THE WORD “VICTIM” TO DESCRIBE THE UNARMED MEN HE SHOT

Picture it, he found himself there, alone,
Frightened, among dark screaming shapes
Of all kinds. Singing, swinging stolen bats, TVs,
Signposts. Three detached themselves from the horde,
Ran howling and bloody-toothed at him. And he
Could only raise his fortunately-remembered rifle
In shaking hands, blindly firing off rounds that
Miraculously met their marks, stemming
The satanic tide, saving the car dealership, his medic training,
Allowing his return gratefully to high-fiving police.
 
Or say, he left home that morning,
Holding in sweating hands the rifle
He proposed to use to defend lives and property, but mostly property,
By shooting them for whom those words
Meant only destroy, loot, rob. He fired
First at one threatening target, then running
From the herd that would part him from his only
Means of defense, he fell but squeezed off more shots,
Striking surely his not-victims but foamers
At the mouth, angry deniers of his 17-year old body’s
Right to hold that Second Amendment solution,
After which he could only run home.
 
What else is a white man to do?

Poetry from a dozen years ago

I mentioned in passing recently that it's been a while since I've written poetry. Most of it has not been confessional but it often is based in my experiences, sometimes on work or relationships. These are, I think, the last I had worked on. In 2009 I was teaching creative writing and produced these as examples for the classes. I wanted to present them before I publish the new work, maybe to show the changes I'm making, the focus I'm recalibrating. 

ON THE APPEARANCE OF KURT VONNEGUT
IN A RODNEY DANGERFIELD MOVIE 

This face that looks like it has covered a lot of ground

Or ground much under it.  This face looks
Like it has ground much and covered much.
This face is a dog’s lapping unconcernedly at water.
This face considered granfalloons and I hear the sirens, I hear
The call to my karass.  It would fit so beautifully next to
Dangerfield’s, with whom he never shares a
Scene, GE PR beside aluminum siding.  Nixon, Hitler, Pol Pot,
They would not fear this face, this sleepy, disheveled
Face with a crazy son and coughing while he’s dying.  I see
Frustration and laughter, anger and resignation, this face
Cracking under the strain of living too long, asking for not much, a glass
Of water, some of my time. 

Of Your Rope
You’ve reached it not
when everything
stops, but
when nothing
is anymore,
when it wraps
around you
like your grandmother
’s afghan but
warmthlessly, no
cold there
either, the eyelets
she embroidered
staring like
her own dead eyes. 
How will you know? 
The end will
be a taunt, a bolt
that stares
up from
the floor
uselessly
beside the engine. 

 

SUZI QUATRO IN SAN REMO
I can’t get her out of my head.  Like an
            ice pick jabbed over and over
                        into my hippocampus, she’s
burrowed into my consciousness.  Those lips,
            that mullet framing a face already running to fat.
                        Years later latex pants make
sausages of her legs.  She’s
            the girl of my dreams, circa 1974, now
                        in early 1980 singing her biggest hit, her worst song,
duetting on Italian television with a guy whose muttonchops
            are probably more familiar with English
                        than he is.  But
there she is, little girl face, this voice that can
            burnish steel, can melt the paint off a car,
                        siren song of so many coke dreams, hash reveries.
Drummers are the “Q” keys of rock music. 
I would be her drummer, fold her cellulite
in, zip up that latex.

 

The Dead Girls Club 

It’d be nice if ghosts filed in,

like the future kings in MacBeth,

stately, decorous, in order.  But they don’t.

They enter like students, noisily, banging desks, dropping bags,

full of outside life.  And they don’t take their places

either, whether you’ve set them up in assigned places

or all in chairs facing one way but arrange

the room to fit around them, a corner here

to accentuate The Cutter’s curls.  A window there

so The Junkie can stare out when she gets bored.

The Crazy One makes the walls, the furniture, the others ricochet around her, mouth

open for an occasional comment or a shriek.  But that’s the thing.

They never utter a word, or none you hear.  Except for their entrances, ghosts are silent.

Except The Silent One on the floor, now spread eagled, now fetal,

mewling like a hungry kitten.  They’ve come

with the others—The Successful One,

The Trust Fund Punk, The Cold-Handed Sculptor, The Big Mother

(Big Grandmother now!), The Really

Crazy One you never fully see, the Others you don’t have names for—to do what?  Serenade you? 

You’ll never know.  They come, they shuffle around

the room, themselves.  One by one, softly,

one by one they leave you.

Ghosts always eventually leave you.

What I'm reading

The book that changed my direction toward the moments described best by poetry is one I happened to begin a couple weeks ago, Danse Macabre, a biography of Francois Villon by French historian Aubrey Burl. I vaguely remember reading Villon many years ago, mostly because I was reading a lot of erotic or bawdy poetry then as much of my own poetry was focused there. 

But Burl writes of him

Villon was born in an age of turbulence, a time of vast contrasts in wealth and poverty, in piety and villainy, in barbarity and artistry. It was a period of change during which he rejected the sterility of [common] verse in favor of sharply realistic poetry...Villon was himself a contrast...Many of his verses are remarkable descriptions of the decent delights and indecent depravities of the Paris that he knew so well: bishops and brothels; priests and prisons; clerics and criminals; Te Deums and taverns; ladies of the nobility and ladies of the streets. This empathy with everyday life and his awareness of its brevity enabled him to write poetry so ingeniously crafted that it seems to speak without art, person to person, to his readers.

I don't claim, as Burl also writes, "artistic brilliance" as a condition of my writing, although there was a period when I wrote formal poetry. It made me appreciate the work that goes into that. Here is a bit of Villon.

When I consider the dry bones 

In charnel houses, skulls lacking name, 

Which were the poor or the wealthy ones?

Masters of Requests, men of fame

Or common porters? Now the same.

King's man, merchant, soldier, baker, 

To this none-ness they all came,

Bishop like a candle-maker.

My other primary read, or rereading, is Poets on Street Corners, an anthology of Soviet dissident poets by Olga Carlisle, with her husband half the team known for translating Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago. This 1970 paperback was the place where I'd first found the Anna Akhmatova poem I quoted in my last post, and it has remained with me since at least the early 80s when I bought it for the .25 cents penciled on the cover. Aside from Akhmatova the other poet I remember best from this book is the controversial Yevgeny Yevtushenko, whose opening to "Babi Yar" still haunts me.

There are no monuments on Babi Yar, 

A steep ravine is all, a rough memorial. 

Fear is my ground--

     

 

 

 

"By Way of Introduction"

I've wanted to note what has been going on in the world for quite some time but find myself in the position of someone trying to write history as it's happening, trying to write about the events as if they've ended only to discover a new ingot of information that explains or confuses the situation further. Finally, I've decided the medium I need to use is poetry. 

I used to write a lot of poetry and for a long time. It's hard to say I gave it up; rather that I found prose was better for what I was writing. I'm returning to verse because it's the vehicle in which I can identify a moment. 

For my inspiration, I am looking to the resistance poets of many periods. But my model is Russian poet Anna Akmatova, specifically "By Way of Introduction."

In the terrible years of the Yezhovshchina, I spent

seventeen months in the prison lines at Leningrad.

Once, someone recognized me. Then a 

woman standing behind me, her lips blue with cold,

who had of course never heard of me, woke up from

the stupor that enveloped us, and asked me, whis-

pering in my ear (for we only spoke in whispers):

"Could you describe this?"

I said, "I can."

Then something like a smile glided over what was

once her face. 

The company is good

I don't remember where I got this book, but I do remember looking at it several times before actually buying it. I finished reading it last night after several years of picking it up, reading a few chapters, and putting it back down. That's often how I read novels nowadays, in short spurts that add up. 

I wasn't always impressed by the writing--too thick in places, like an overfilled pastry, where what I want is simpler, smoother--but when I was I was deeply impressed. 

<Faith spreads the blanket over the piano. At the woodpile, she balances a log on the chopping block and hoists the ax over her head, her belly pushing her off balance. Then a contraction comes and she drops the ax. Has Ray ever said the word love? Has he ever praised Faith's beauty, or has he ever held her and whispered with his lips against her hair? How could he say those things to her last night? How could he say all the things he ever said to her? 

Balancing the wood, bringing down the ax, she stops crying and gets furious. Over and over, she thinks, He has no right. She leans into the chopping, panting, fierce. The effort seems to lessen the pain. He has no right. The words fit with the rhythm of her chopping. Ugly words, from the very start. You can watch TV if you fuck me first.>

This is the author, Goldberry Long (I may have finally chosen to buy this book simply for its author's name), describing the titular character's mother, hugely pregnant with Juniper's brother Sunny Boy Blue who will, in the first sentence of the book, throw himself off a ferry on its journey between Seattle and Bainbridge Island, setting in motion the frantic, furious memories and flight of the narrator. Sunny called information from a bar on the wharf, written her number and the name Juniper Tree Burning, on the wall next to the payphone, and then thrown himself into the spray. That last sentence above is the way both she and runaway husband Ray remember as the first words he said on meeting Faith. Juniper, now living under the name Jennifer, a medical student and newly married, has a last memory of Sunny that's damaging: Sunny Boy Blue, the Backward Boy, full of cigarettes and vodka and a constant hack, kidnapped her from her own wedding for her gifts. A book of photographs and gasoline-soaked tennis balls, lit and dropped into the Rio Grande. 

Later, when she leaves her husband in a panic, Jenny kidnaps her own jilted bride, Sarah, who will become her best friend, her sparring partner, and eventually, in some ways, her salvation. Together, like some mix of Runaway Bride and Thelma and Louise, but sans the violence or abuse, they are in search of...something. It's never really clear. But the drive is picturesque and the company good.

There are issues, of course, many of them. Much of the novel is told in flashback, sometimes from Jennifer's and sometimes Juniper's perspective, while much of the present is in present tense, sometimes by Jennifer, sometimes Juniper, sometimes an insistent third person narrator. None of that is an issue, and frankly I think Long did a good job with her self-determined unreliable narrator. 

But there are questions we end up with: The above-mentioned thick writing, so winning in places, slows down the reading of the last chapters, when Jenny/Juniper is actually moving very fast and very chaotically, and I found myself skipping large patches of text to match my reading with the action. How did Sunny Blue Boy develop from terminally coughing, sickly, piss-smelling child to often drunk, chain-smoking, world-traveling, charming speaker of several languages? In addition to Sunny, Juniper's hippie parents, disappointed mother and dissolute father, show up to the ceremony and, except for figuring heavily in the flashbacks, then disappear from the narrative. Granted, the time in the present is only a few days, but she doesn't call or even think of them in the present. And Maggie, bar-owning mechanic, where does her incredible anger toward Jennifer come from? 

But here is what Long gets right. First, there's a happy ending, and novels just don't often have happy endings any longer. (No, it doesn't involve Sunny. He remains dead.) And then this, which I didn't read until after finishing the book but which explains to me why I stayed with it for years. Not a part of the narrative, but a Note From the Author tacked onto the Reading Group Guide in my edition: 

It seems to me there are many fine books about the angry young man taking his journey of self-discovery across the American landscape. There are few, however, about the angry young woman.

Now that was worth the getting through. 

 

People the barricades without me

 I hadn't promised to anyone except perhaps myself, and had only mentioned my intention to my wife and mother-in-law, but I expected to attend a small protest here in my small midwestern city. It was sponsored by the March for Women's Rights, the same organization that had set up the anti-trump protest in DC around 2017's inauguration I had missed, as well as one in 2019 in Madison I managed to attend. 

I had somewhat made plans  in the way I do, keeping in the back of my mind while my day goes on were I intend to go and what I intend to do once there. But I read an article this morning--I forget where and can't locate it again--that was a recognition of the necessity of this sort of constant protest, spurred by the recent Texas Law and the number of states trying to ape it. It is a bad law and I am against both it and the attempts by other places to make the same law. But this article had one interview that stuck in my head all day and kept me finally away.

One of the article's interviews was with an older woman who said, and I am paraphrasing here, "Will I be at the protest today? No. It's a protest against the right thing, but Roe v Wade was decided 50 years ago, and I've marched in hundreds of protests to keep it safe, and it's obviously had no effect at all. We shouldn't have to keep marching after something becomes law. I'm tired. Maybe we need to lose the right for a generation in order to remember why we fought for it."

Bitter? Oh, definitely. But it's an earned bitterness. In driving my mother-in-law home, I passed the park where the protest had just started. I saw a number of people I know, all of them over 60. 

Of course, there were other protests in other larger cities and I don't doubt there were thousands of people of child-bearing age marching and shouting and making a ruckus. But that isn't the point. This woman, whose name I can't locate, is right about one thing. We shouldn't have to keep marching after something becomes law. We've marched and made noise for a half century, and if all that has led to is the ease with which a Republican majority can effectively ban a legal and safe procedure, then we have done nothing. Is it wrong of me to agree with her that perhaps we need to lose the right to them for a generation to remind us why we marched? Maybe. But I speak from the perspective of metaphoric sore feet. Those women with more at stake and sorer feet have the right to suggest maybe it's time to step back. 

The Holiness of Lift and Drop

 

Two months ago I was asked to be part of a service celebrating the holiness of work. Most people assumed I would talk about my pastoral or chaplain work, but I wrote this about a dull, plodding job that I discovered had its own holiness. This is the five minute version I went with. I wrote a longer version to get the story out and may turn that later into a longer essay. 

THE HOLINESS OF LIFT AND DROP

    I used to work short-term jobs, most of them through an agency. There was a plant in Mankato, LMH Quality Packaging, that put together candy bags for local businesses. I rode my bike there one day and was put on the assembly line, checking bag seals. But after a little bit I was called into the foreman’s office and told, because I looked like someone who didn’t mind harder work, I would be moved.

I was taken to a room that was pretty big although there was only one table and one man in it. The fellow was a little shorter than me and what he was doing was walking around the table, which had sides about a foot tall, with a shovel. There were different candies inside and he’d dig into them and then drop them again before taking another shovelful. I was handed a similar shovel, a short-handled grain shovel, and left in the room.

The guy, whose name was Gary, told me what the work was without stopping or slowing down. What we were doing was mixing candies for the assorted candy bags you get around Halloween or party treats. About every hour someone else come along, take the table which was on wheels, and bring in an empty one. Then a half dozen other people would bring in about 20 10-pound bags of different candies—Sweet Tarts, Skittles, Peanut Butter Cups, Tootsie Rolls, the kinds of candy were always different—and dump them into the table. Our job, he explained, was to walk the length of the table and then around, dipping the shovels into the candies, and then turning the shovelful over. Every 10 minutes we’d change directions.

That was it. Not a very hard job. But shortly after starting, I was bored and my arms ached, especially my shoulders. My legs were sore from the walking and pivoting. My forearms ] jolted each time I dug my shovel into the box and it connected with the bottom. Sometimes the hard candies broke or the softer ones mushed and then I’d have to reach in and dig them out. And I was bored. God, was I bored.

At our first break, Gary gave me pointers. “Angle the shovel gently so you don’t hit the table bottom. Let the momentum carry the shovel just above the pile and then let them slide off to one side. Keep your legs bent at the knees and your legs won’t hurt as much. Stay exactly opposite me and you won’t have to hurry or slow down, just keep the same pace.” I did that and it was easier but no less boring. I hollered over to him “How do you deal with being bored?”

He said, “Bored? I never think about it. I just focus on one thing: the shovel lifting and dropping. That’s it. Everything else just gets in the way.”

I was surprised, given my experiences with Zen and meditation, I hadn’t caught onto it sooner. It was kitchen work, simply the repetition of movements without haste or worry about it’s being done. The job would never be done I realized, more tables with more candy would come in, and it would always be done by the end of the day because another two guys would take the shovels for second shift.

The rest of the week passed by with aches of course, and some foot sores. I learned to wear sneakers instead of boots, to ease the shovel because it didn’t matter how much I loaded on the shovel, it would always be added to by Gary. And I drifted, letting my mind wander away from monkey-mind, and let thoughts come, go, stay, whatever they felt compelled to do.

The work was holy, by which I mean there were people who enjoyed those candies and enjoyed the variety available. Even if no one bought the bag and it ended up in the landfill, the insects and mice would eventually eat the candy. It might not be good for them nutritionally—it wasn’t good for you or me nutritionally—but it added a little sweetness and pleasure to their lives, and I could hope for no more than that.

Joys and Concerns: Guy in a Wheelchair

 

About a month ago I was visiting a patient at a facility that recently reopened to me. We were sitting in one of the common rooms, chatting, watching TV together. A resident I didn't know was wheeling by and as he passed the door he said, "Chip? Chip Mahr?" I said, "No, I'm Bob," and showed him my badge and repeated, "I'm Bob, I'm the chaplain."

He came in and said, "Your name's not Mahr? You're not related to him?" I said, "I don't think so." Then he started talking about how much he enjoyed living at the facility and what good care they took of him. He was younger than the usual resident, late 60s, early 70s, and looked in fairly good shape. He mentioned that his house was visible from one end of the facility.

At some point, he made reference to what brought him there. "Just this January, this happened," and he dropped his head to show a large impression, like someone had stamped it, in his skull. His hair was just starting to cover it over. "I was just walking down the street and the next thing I know I'm waking up in March at the hospital. I had slid on some ice on the sidewalk and been knocked out. Brain bleed, coma, all the good stuff." He was pretty okay with it, he said. He had lived alone and didn't have any family and now he was here and they were making up his new family. He repeated that the food was good and they took great care of him.

I asked what he had done for work and he said he'd delivered packages. "Here 's the funny thing. I used to deliver to places like this and I'd walk in and I didn't know anyone. But pretty soon someone would come up to me and just start talking. I'd end up sticking around longer just to talk to them, you know, they didn't have any family or friends visiting, so I just felt good talking to them about anything. And now here I am, one of those guys I used to talk to."

Working in hospice, we often deal with people who have been ill for a while or whose ailment has been apparent and can be traced back. But it isn't always that way. Sometimes what changes our lives is as simple as an unseen patch of ice that puts us in the position of our patients. As with a lot of things, that's neither good nor bad. No warning, sudden change. It happens. I'm not suggesting we keep an eye peeled for the unexpected, that'll drive you nuts. Just being aware it can happen to us and the people we love is sobering.

Flashy queer stuff

 

A new patient this morning, a retired funeral home director, said to me something along the lines of, When you're older you start reminiscing more often. He thought it was funny that, some 20+ years younger than him, I was already doing that. But it's true that much of my time while driving or doing crosswords is spent with the equivalent of 16mm film clacking in the back of my head. 

In 1973, I was a fat, ungainly, probably acned tween, although the term wasn't used then, on the way from middle school to high school. In the next year I'd start acting in school productions, reading pulp novels, and lose my virginity. But at 13 I was just a schlub who, on Friday nights, stayed up late to watch The Midnight Special. 

Most of the artists they played were pretty good, if not terribly innovative. I mean, I was just starting to listen to groups like the Doobie Brothers and Steely Dan and appreciate the comedy of Monty Python. But Mac Davis and Anne Murray were more the stuff I'd see, and they were all right, although I could hear them in regular rotation on local radio. But in November they played the David Bowie 1980 Floor Show. 

I can't say if I knew Bowie was appearing on that show or not. I'd heard "Space Oddity" of course. It had penetrated even the stodgy AM wasteland of rural upstate New York. There had been something to the sound that appealed to me, so it's possible I was paying attention that he was headlining. 

But the first minutes of the show, a videoed version of the two night farewell to Ziggy Stardust Bowie performed at London's Marquee Club that previous October, did not prepare me adequately for the moment as he began the title song "1984" and two of his backup singers stepped forward to rip the gaudy gauzy costume he was wearing from him to show he was actually wearing a spangled bustier with fishnets and garters and high heels. That moment smacked me across the forehead with a force it would take me decades and my first experiences with LSD to identify as pleasure in the unexpected and unexplainable. 

I would go to bed that night having sat on the edge of my dad's padded rocker for an hour and a half hearing sounds and seeing things I couldn't articulate to anyone. On Monday, no one I knew or asked had remained with the show much beyond the first minutes. "You kidding, that flashy queer stuff? What was that, anyway?"

It was flashy queer stuff, no mistaking. And while my response was not equal to the imagined reaction of Christian Bale in Velvet Goldmine, it was a solid, rock hard love that's lasted my life since. Bowie's sexually charged pas de deux with strutting Mick Ronson awakened feelings in me I couldn't articulate and certainly couldn't act on for years. My first Bowie was the Changes One album bought that week at Barker's, the local department store that everyone knew had the better selection, and played deep grooves into the nylon. 

Decades later, teaching the Orwell novel, I tried to introduce it and make its messages relatable to classes by playing cuts from Diamond Dogs for them, trying to explain what seeing the songs acted out was like. But it left them staring at me like I was showing them nude photos of their mothers. I suppose some things, like the life-altering media experience one goes through at that certain age, are  untranslatable. 

What is done in the dark will be brought to the light

Over the weekend I was asked what the trial of Derek Chauvin, and the potential if finding him guilty of 2nd degree unintentional murder, 3rd degree murder, and 2nd degree manslaughter, might change anything. And it's to my shame I said, "Nothing."

It isn't exactly true, of course. For Chauvin and his family, for George Floyd's family, for many of the protesters and arguers on both sides of his guilt and complicity, much will change if he's found guilty. But in general nothing will change. It may be jaded but I've lived for 60 years and the number of innocent and guilty people killed by guns has ebbed and flowed but never stopped completely. As a nation, we are too enamored of our weapons to ever give them up. As long as they exist in our homes and garages, they'll get brought into our schools, our churches, our stores and post offices. And they don't need to leave those homes to kill our most innocent or guilty. 

My shame is not the jadedness of that belief of mine but that I have done little to change that long line of murdered dead. The litany of people killed by police is too long to post, even if I wanted to limit it to those killed this weekend, this month, this year. I don't know how long flags have been at half staff this year, but it seems it's been continuous since last summer. It may be that we haven't gone more than a week without flags at half staff. Surely, that's a condemnation of us. Surely, it's a reason we are being cut down. 

We will not be forgiven

 I want to focus on one paragraph in this essay: "These are desperate people who have been waiting for an opportunity to migrate for a long time, so it’s not clear whether that kind of messaging ['don't come to the US, stay and apply for asylum in the future in your home country'] actually resonates." 

When many of us voted for Joe Biden it was in the clear knowledge that, distinct from The Former Guy, he would be amenable to doing the correct, humane thing when it was pointed out his policies were harming people. I continue to believe this. At the very least, the policies mentioned in this article, Biden's sweeping aside building a wall and reuniting separated families, point at a recognition of the basic dignity of asylum seekers. 

But troubling elements remain. No matter how you phrase it, "reports of children in the facilities sleeping on gym mats with nothing but mylar blankets to keep them warm and not being permitted to go outside or take a shower for days at a time" is indefensible. We opposed it under trump. It is wrong no matter who it happens under.

I don't have a solution to what's happening on the border with Mexico. I don't know much about the region or its history, and I don't even speak Spanish. But I recognize wrong and separating families, whether it's done by our government, another government, even by desperate people hoping the sight of a lone child on a bus or with other kids will give that child a better chance at being accepted, is wrong. People in desperation to leave a place where they and their children are at risk will do desperate things. They can be forgiven their desparation. We can't allow their desperation to allow us to do wrong so we look like we are doing something. We will not be forgiven.

Joys and Concerns: Wonderful Life

Part of my work since we've been isolating and locking down is to write a weekly message for the rest of my healthcare team. I call it "Joys and Concerns" after the UU check-in at each service. This is my most recent one. The links aren't in the original because my readers don't have time to click on them.

We reached a couple milestones over the weekend that will have a tremendous effect, I think, on our future. The first is particular to us, as healthcare workers. The US reached the half million mark in covid-19 deaths. Figures from Johns Hopkins University tell us we are at the top of the list of countries with coronavirus deaths, followed by Brazil, at nearly half the number. There are many articles out there helping people to visualize 500,000 people, but I'm going to use an aid that, in our media-saturated culture, might have some power left. It is as if Thanos' snapping his fingers, decimating the universe by half, had happened. Slowly. And to people you know.

The second milestone is also important, and it's relevant to how we think about humanity. NASA safely landed the rover Perseverance on the surface of Mars. Consider the ingenuity that took, the ability to create, not only machines that mathematically make it possible to figure out how to do it, but machines that deliver and release--and this is critical--the rover, full of delicate instruments, without doing it damage. Surely, such creativity, turned to the development of vaccines, has helped us to perhaps cross thresholds undreamt of.

I've been thinking about this song all morning. It's by Black, an especially obscure one-hit wonder of the 80s. It's kind of schmaltzy, both in its lyrics, its style, and even in the images in its video. But maybe milestones sometimes demand schmaltz.  

Under the Pressure

 Not so long ago someone asked me what songs helped me get through the past 4 years. This is one of them. It was released some 3 years before trump's ascension; nonetheless, the music and the video helped me cope. Particularly in the video, from the intensity of Adam Grunciel's staring out the window, to the near blissful looks on Robbie Bennett's face, it has given me some sense of the historicity of this moment, how it will not last, how we can transcend it. It's harder to explain than I thought it might be. That may be what art that helps you through hard times does, gives you reason to hope in unexplainable ways. 

"And I'll be there with you"

This must not be lost down the memory hole. We risk this violence becoming the norm--as the Senate managers say, "our future"--if we do nothing or minimize it. While it's a certainty, given the numbers of Rethuglicans already on record as saying they will not vote to convict, that trump will not be held to account for his months-long incitement that led to it, his actions and his words must be remembered and their result become infamous.

Black Lives are Sacred

I'd been asked to say a few words and do a public prayer at a rally for Black Lives in Mequon, near Milwaukee, over the weekend. I did so and enjoyed the company. 

These are my remarks. "As we were setting up today, someone drove by and shouted 'Get a life!' And what they fail to recognize is that we are here because so many lives have been taken. We come together because people have died. Died frightened, died pleading, died unheard. We mourn those deaths. But we come together too because of the living. Living in despair, in fear, in poverty of spirit. We come together to make this known, to point to it and swear that lives are no less sacred for that. We would be whole. When one of us cries, we all cry. When one bleeds, we all bleed. When one dies, we all die. Today, we all mourn. We ask to be brought together. Make us one. If we've forgotten, remind us it is good to be together. It is good to be beside one another in fortune and in pain. It is good to look into each other's eyes, to hear each other's voices. Remember the sacredness of our brothers and sister's lives as our own. We would be one. To make all lives safe and meaningful. To be as one and act as one, we would be one." 

The prayer is one I cribbed from John and Sarah Gibb Millspaugh, an adaptation from Pali canons. 

Opening: In the UU tradition, it's not just ministers and religious professionals who have the power to bless. Each of us has the power to bless one another, and therefore bless the world. The words are ordinary words, but we make our blessing real through our shared intent. 

Prayer: "As we have been blessed, so we bless one another to be a blessing. Breathe in, breathe out, this breath we share with all that breathes. Feel the love of the universe flowing through this joint community into you and out into the universe again. Let the love of all the universe--your love--flow outward, to its height, its depth, its broad extent. You are more than you know, more beloved than you know. Take up what power is yours to create safe haven, and make of earth a heaven. Give hope to those you encounter, that they may know safety from inner and outer harm, be happy and at peace, healthy and strong, caring and joyful. Be the blessing that you already are. That is enough. Amen." 

A surfeit of Babbitts

 Make no mistake, I do have a background in theology. But I've

had a longer history and more specific training in literature. When the name of the insurgent killed while trying to illegally enter the chamber of the Senate while people were hiding in it was released, I was struck by the coincidence--and that's all it is--of her last name Babbitt being the same as one of the seminal novels of the early American 20th century. Babbitt, written by Sinclair Lewis, is one of his series of satires of American life whose title, like Main Street, Elmer Gantry, and to a lesser extent Arrowsmith, have lived on in depicting a certain situation or kind of person long after Lewis's death.

It's been several decades since I read Babbitt or even had a copy of the novel, so for my purpose here I'm relying on a summary.

This wouldn't pass an undergraduate 200 level class, I hasten to say. I'm simply putting out something I think deserves a closer look with competent exegesis.

We know very little about Ashli Babbitt's life beyond her chosen career--the Air Force--and the circumstances of her death--trying to enter the Speaker's Lobby in the Capitol where members had taken shelter. We know she idolized trump, placing on him all her hopes for a better America.

Sinclair Lewis's George Babbitt also placed all his hopes in something larger than himself, the Booster Club of Zenith, his hometown. Ashli, having served in the service and voting twice for Barack Obama, had by the 2016 election transferred her allegiance to trump and his cult of personality. George, on the other hand, has traveled in the opposite direction, moving from a conservative mindset to a looser Bohemian way of seeing the world. We don't know what caused Ashli's psychological move from Obama's centrist Democratic principles to the hard-core delusions of QAnon, but they may have been similar to George's: His best friend Paul finally has enough dissatisfaction with his life and kills his wife. That's enough for George to reconsider his own issues with complacency. It's the recognition that, without his confidante Paul, life may not be worth living.

No one has suggested, as yet, that Ashli lost someone, but there's definitely something in her makeup that makes her not only vulnerable but it seems eager for someone to provide answers, even if lies, for her. This is, after all, the way so many people join the ranks of a would be savior. 

In Ashli's case it seems much of her inner resources were channeled into anger as her world constricted around her: She retired from the Air Force at a demoted rank. Her pool business, which was supposed to salvage her sense of self-worth, ran into financing problems and was hit with a 71K judgment for failing to repay a loan.

George finds solace in drinking, an affair, and radical politics, all of which put him at odds not only with the Booster Club and his friends, but with everything he's ever believed about life and the way it's lived. In his instance, because it is fiction and Babbitt is a satire of American boosterism, his wife becomes ill, and while George has an epiphany that leads him back to family and safety, he's learned enough to know that for his son, there's still an opportunity to be someone different. For Ashli, because it's real life and there aren't always second chances, what she might have learned in her last minutes is unknown.

I ask myself if George is the more acceptable Babbitt and my initial answer is yes. Largely it's because he's fiction and didactic. But while it's something inside George that dies, Ashli actually died. It was avoidable, not only because she had received riot training in the military and knew the response her act would receive, but because the politician for whom she would die did not have a right to demand of her that she fight a battle he could not win, legally or morally, and then hide in his tent listening to 80s one hit wonders, wearing boxing gloves and chanting "fight", wondering why no one outside his family, who like him had never sacrificed or put their lives in danger, was boosting the insurgents with him.

Peaceful transition is the difference

 There is so much to be said about this attempt today to delegitimize the otherwise dull, ritualistic ceremony that, like clockwork, simply move forward the result of the presidential election. Like a commentator I listened to today pointed out, normally no one reports on the record of electoral college votes. It's one of those things, like asking at a wedding if anyone objects to the marriage, that is a holdover from a time when there was really a reason to make the result public. 

But that wasn't the case today. Hundreds, perhaps a couple thousand (reports vary) of trump supporters marched from the White House, where they were given "instructions" by trump, to disrupt the otherwise rote recitation of electoral results. They stormed the chambers and succeeded in postponing the naming of Joe Biden as the winner of the election. 

There's been a lot of anger aimed at the disruption by trump-supporters and I'm not entirely certain where I stand on that. I'll admit there's some jealousy I feel that a group I can't agree with has been able to do what groups I can identify with have been unable to do. Rituals are nice but they can and should be questioned and maybe thrown out. If these were Black Lives Matter or some anti-trump group, I might have been tempted to join them. But I am furious at the disruption of the most important facet of the American experience, the peaceful transfer of power. 

Democracy demands the loser of a contest recognize it and allow the winner, an expression of the will of the people, to take the reins. Four years ago, while it sickened me that he was that expression, trump peacefully and legally took the office. I protested him and protested his administration. But I wasn't going to join others in rioting against the ceremony or the final decision of the process. It would not have been peaceful or right.