Random musings on a rainy Saturday morning

I awoke to a rainy morning in Asheville. Not that we can’t use it. It’s been an exceptionally dry summer, at least until the last week or so. Global warming. It’s everywhere.

As usual, I went downstairs to feed the five feline members of our family. Shonnie sometimes handles this, but she’s at the BlogHer Conference in Chicago this weekend (Yes, I am enjoying some solitude. And I’ll really be glad to see her when she gets back tomorrow afternoon.). Anyway, feeding the kitties. And in the dim light of early morning, stepping in a small pile of cat poop. Despite my annoyance, I guess I’ll have to take some responsibility for this. While the male cats typically go outdoors (via the cat door at the rear of our home) to “do their business,” the females frequently use the litter boxes, the ones that I had neglected to clean for a few days. So my guess is that one the fastidious females was trying to tell me something. Message received, girls.

Then to my morning meditation. It’s been good to get back into it the past three or four weeks after a long lapse. Lynne McTaggart, in her book The Intention Experiment, extols the benefits of meditation in effectively using the power of intention to manifest one’s reality. And the reality I’m going for right now is excellent physical health, total wellness, fitness and strength. So I saw myself doing the things I love to do—playing handball with grace and ease, rapidly running the nearby mountain trails, riding my bike around town. And I visualized my body literally glowing with health and vitality. Having done that for over a week, I now feel close to 100 percent after having some viral illness that’s really slowed me down for much of July.

Intimations of Tricky Dick
I awakened with a nagging concern for my country. True, everything Bush has touched the past few years has turned to shit. His karma finally catches up with him and that’s been gratifying to see. I guess if he’d kept his job as the glad hander for the Texas Rangers, we wouldn’t have gotten to clearly discern what we absolutely don’t want in a president. But I’m ready for this national nightmare to be over. My concern is, however, that Bush will try to pull a rabbit out of the hat in his last 18 months. He’s already shown contempt for us, for our Constitution, for Congress, for the UN and for the world by starting an illegal war, spying on whomever he sees fit, imprisoning and torturing prisoners picked up willy nilly, turning the Justice Department and other government agencies into arms of the Republican Party . . . I could go on.

Remember when someone was following Nixon around in the White House during his last weeks there? Members of his staff were afraid that he might nuke the USSR or do something equally insane to rally Americans behind him and stave off the impeachment proceedings that were revealing bad nastiness in the man and in his administration. I wonder if someone in the current White House has the testicular fortitude to play that role today.

I wouldn’t put it past Bush to (a) bomb the hell out of Iran or encourage Israel to do it for us, (b) escalate the war even further in Iraq in response to an insurgent offensive similar to the Tet offensive in Vietnam, (c) scare us into submission with threats of or an actual terrorist attack on American soil, (d) top all of this off by declaring a national emergency and using the powers he recently put into place to declare martial law and silence all dissent, perhaps by rounding up many of the dissenters and putting them in detention camps. Just because I’m paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get me.

Pissing in the wind
Given that I’ve got a benign enlarged prostate causing me to need to urinate more frequently than I once did, the world is my toilet. I know the location of all the best restrooms in Asheville, and on trips I pee on the side of the highway, behind buildings, in cornfields, wherever. But a question reoccurred to me the other day as I was using the urinal at Jubilee Community Church (one of my favorites in the downtown area). I relieved myself, as usual, during the Old Testament reading. Now I hadn’t gotten any urine on my hands. I’d just taken a shower that morning, so I was clean all over. There was no handle to flush the waterless urinal. So, why did I feel compelled to wash my hands?

“War is Hell” by Digby

There is a lot of chatter in the blogosphere about this pseudonymously written article in TNR (The New Republic) by a soldier in Iraq. He discusses the dehumanizing quality of war in some detail by recounting some revolting anecdotes about the behavior of some soldiers, including himself.

[. . .]

The TNR piece goes on to describe some sick corpse desecration, which doesn’t strike me as being unusual among the more psychotic types in war. Something similar was recounted in Anthony Swofford’s “Jarhead” about the first Gulf War. And I’ve seen pictures of WWII trophies that would turn your stomach.The final anecdote in the piece is about a soldier who enjoys running over dogs with a Bradley vehicle. It’s thoroughly revolting, but again, there are certain types of people who are inclined to this sort of thing.

What do we expect to happen when send 20-year-olds over to fight an immoral and illegal war in an unfamiliar culture for the benefit of Iraqis who don’t want us in their nation in the first place? Dehumanizing? Damn right! Dehumanizing for the men and women of our military, dehumanizing for the Iraqis and dehumanizing for all of us at home.

Quantum physics and many of our spiritual practices tell us that we’re all connected in the web of life–all humans, all living things. And what we do to anyone or anything in this web, we also do to ourselves. Is it any wonder that we want to brush off the revolting behavior of some of our soldiers? Just a few bad apples. But it’s more than that.

Like it or not, we all have a responsibility for the terrible actions described in the TNR piece, in “Jarhead” and in the stories of My Lai during the Vietnam War. We don’t get ourselves off the hook by merely pointing our finger at the perpetrators, or even the President. When we the citizens of this nation stop condoning violence–in our entertainment, in our cultural heroes and in ourselves–the killing, the atrocities, the wars will cease.

Update: Also check out Chris Hedges’ “The Death Mask of War” in AdBusters June-July 2007 issue and  “The Other War: Iraq Vets Bear Witness” in The Nation’s July 30, 2007 issue.

Bush cedes power to Cheney?

Below is an Instaletter about Bush’s transfer of power to Cheney today that I submitted to the Asheville Citizen-Times for possible publication in tomorrow’s issue.

All the commotion about President Bush transferring presidential power to the Vice President while he undergoes a colonoscopy ignores the reality that Cheney has been the de facto president for the past six and a half years.

I mean, really, what power can Bush possibly give Cheney that the VP doesn’t already possess?

Asheville named best Southern town

The August 2007 edition of Outside Magazine named Asheville the best Southern town (population less 100,000). That’s a photo of our fair city town on the magazine cover. Here’s what they had to about us:

Cradled in a lush green bowl and surrounded on all sides by the Appalachian Mountains, this is an island of liberal alternative culture. And this town serves up more than 2,000 miles of hiking and mountain biking trails and some of the nation’s finest whitewater creeking.

I hope you’ll come enjoy our lively downtown, our diverse culture and the miles of mountain trails. Then I encourage you to go back to wherever you came from.

Tough talk about impeachment

If ever a modern-day president deserved impeachment, it’s George W. Bush along with his puppet master Dick Cheney. They continue to subvert the Constitution, ignore Congress as well as the American public and rule as though this nation were a full-fledged dictatorship.

The people of this nation are now evenly split on impeachment proceedings against Bush as shown in the American Research Group poll below:

Finally impeachment is being discussed seriously in the mainstream media, including last night’s Bill Moyers Journal. From PBS:

Bill Moyers gets perspective on the role of impeachment in American political life from Constitutional scholar Bruce Fein, who wrote the first article of impeachment against President Bill Clinton, and THE NATION’s John Nichols, author of THE GENIUS OF IMPEACHMENT.

“The founding fathers expected an executive who tried to overreach and expected the executive would be hampered and curtailed by the legislative branch… They [Congress] have basically renounced — walked away from their responsibility to oversee and check.”

–Bruce Fein

“On January 20th, 2009, if George Bush and Dick Cheney are not appropriately held to account this Administration will hand off a toolbox with more powers than any President has ever had, more powers than the founders could have imagined. And that box may be handed to Hillary Clinton or it may be handed to Mitt Romney or Barack Obama or someone else. But whoever gets it, one of the things we know about power is that people don’t give away the tools.”

–John Nichols

Watch a clip of the show below. Read the transcript by clicking here.

Nancy Pelosi for president in 2007!

Friday cat blogging

Friday cat blogging returns 240,000 hits on Google. Well, what the hell, I’ll join in this weekly ritual as observed by bloggers around the world. Pictured here is Bandit, the warrior-lover of our feline family members (of which there are five).

Bandit retains a lot of his instinctive cat nature since he and his brother Desmond had to fend for themselves in their youth. Based on his hunting prowess, my guess is that Bandit could make it on his own in the wild.

On the other end of his behavioral spectrum, Bandit greets me and Shonnie each day around daylight by jumping on the bed and licking us on the lips, kitty kisses as we refer to them.

Bandit sometimes takes walks in the woods with us, really more like walking with a dog than a cat. Though he sometimes gets distracted by squirrels and such, he sticks with us on our woodland treks and, more often than not, comes when we call.

Live Earth event in Asheville is a huge success.

Approximately 500 people at the Friends of Live Earth event in Asheville joined two billion other folks from around the world on 7/7/07 in a gigantic wakeup call for our planet about the perils of global warming.

All Saturday afternoon, concerned citizens from across Western North Carolina joined representatives of environmental organizations and green businesses at Asheville Brewing Company to determine what they could do personally to confront the climate crisis and global warming.

Event organizers Cecil Bothwell, David LaMotte, Shonnie Lavender and yours truly were well pleased with the entire event. The representatives of environmental organizations and green businesses tabling engaged the folks attending and gave them empowering ideas about actions they can take right now to address global warming. The kids events were entertaining and educational. Local merchants provided valuable door prizes. The music from the Live Earth concerts on the big screen TVs was something to behold. The And our gracious host Asheville Pizza Company provided a lot of their fine beer and tasty pizza, plus their staff displayed grace and attentiveness in the midst of what was sometimes a whirlwind of activity.

My thanks to everyone who contributed to making Friends of Live Earth Asheville what it was. I believe we have witnessed a turning point in our efforts to assure that humans do not become the first species on earth to create its own extinction. No longer will we argue about whether global warming is real or not. That’s a given. We now need to stop the wrangling about what needs to be done and take action at personal, local, state, national and worldwide levels.

* * *

* Thanks to David LaMotte for the photos, some of which were also uploaded to the Friends of Live Earth website.

* Sign the Live Earth Pledge at http://liveearthpledge.org/.

* Watch Al Gore’s message about the Live Earth Pledge below.

Independence Day Special: What we the people want is really simple: We want an America as good as its promise.*

It wasn’t, “We the conglomerates.” It wasn’t, “We the corporations.” It was, “We the people.”

The most effective way to restrict democracy is to transfer decision-making from the public arena to unaccountable institutions: kings and princes, priestly castes, military juntas, party dictatorships, or modern corporations.

Every person has inside a basic decency and goodness. If he listens to it and acts on it, he is giving a great deal of what it is the world needs most. It is not complicated but it takes courage. It takes courage for a person to listen to his own goodness and act on it.

On this Fourth of July I’m more convinced than ever that if substantive change is to come in this nation, it will come from the bottom up. We, the people, are called upon in these challenging times to right the course of America, rather than our so-called political leaders, elected though they may be.

George W. Bush’s recent commutation of Scooter Libby’s prison sentence is merely the latest example of how the system is rigged, how Washington insiders, Democrats and Republicans alike, take care of one another, while the rest of us get thrown a bone only when we howl loud enough.

Our leaders claim to have our best interests at heart, but except for a handful, they are driven by self-interest, by the desire to be reelected, to maintain their powerful positions. That takes money, and that means selling their souls to the highest bidder, rationalizing their actions by telling themselves that this is the way the system works, that they wouldn’t be able to do anything for anybody if they didn’t take the money and run.

Sometimes I feel so hopeless about the state of affairs in our country—the power of the military-industrial-congressional-media complex, our decaying infrastructure, the downsizing of the middle class, the rampant drug use (legal and illegal), the lobotomization of our youth by TV and video games, the ever-increasing prison population, the rape of the environment, our military misadventures overseas, etc., etc., etc.—that I believe that there is nothing I can do. I become paralyzed except to scan the Internet for signs that the power structure as it now exists is about to collapse under its own weight—the ineptitude to really get anything substantive done, the pissing away of our tax money on countless boondoggles, the “you scratch my back, and I’ll scratch yours” attitudes, the acceptance of lobbyists’ largesse, the belief in their own omnipotence, and ultimately, the boundless bad karma that all this brings.

Thomas Jefferson, author of our Declaration of Independence, once said, “Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just.” My guess is that Jefferson is trembling today along with many of our Founding Fathers as they reflect (from wherever they are) on what we’ve let transpire in this nation of such great promise. In fact, perhaps we should revisit the Declaration that they all agreed upon 231 years ago:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed, by their Creator, with certain Inalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.

That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

I think it’s time to start altering and abolishing, time to institute new government. I think it’s time to take action, no matter how small. I think it’s time to quit waiting for the guys who have fouled our nest to clean it up themselves. No man or woman on the white horse is coming to our rescue. Not Hillary, not Obama, not Edwards, not even Al. It’s up to us, right here, right now.

Right here, right now we can become creative in how we go about creating a more just, compassionate and sustainable world. We can care for our children by making sure that what enters their bodies, minds and spirits nurtures them to the greatest extent possible. We can in a similar manner care for ourselves. We can walk more softly on our planet by reducing our carbon footprint in numerous ways. We can buy less stuff we don’t need. We can support local merchants, especially those who are good community members. We can let our elected officials know that we won’t take their crap any more, and we can work toward the election of true public servants. We can create our homes as our sanctuaries and invite friends and neighbors in to share our sacred spaces with one another.

What one person can do may sometimes seem insignificant. But there are more of us than we sometimes realize. And when hundreds, thousands, millions of us powerfully focus our intention on the creation of a better world, a potent force is loosed that may not become immediately evident. And when we take action in support of that intention, we have already begun to create exactly the world we want.

* * *

For another take on Independence Day, visit my wife Shonnie Lavender’s blog, Lavender Log.

* Title based on quotation from Barbara Jordan