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30.10.10

"Sometimes it's just New Jersey."

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.

27.10.10

storytime: a medical check up.

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.

22.10.10

Sometimes I post stupid videos.



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

13.10.10

A New Definition

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.

10.10.10

How to Combat Modern Day Slavery



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

6.10.10

an economy of mercy.

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."