words, words and expressions, all these confessions of where we stand....

Words are as strong and powerful as bombs, as napalm. How much the government counts on those words, pays for those words to exalt our own way of life, to build up fear of the enemy. Deliver us, Lord, from the fear of the enemy. That is one of the lines in the psalms, and we are not asking God to deliver us from enemies but from the fear of them. Love casts out fear, but we have to get over the fear in order to get close enough to love them. 

There is plenty to do, for each one of us, working on our own hearts, changing our own attitudes, in our own neighborhoods. If the just man falls seven times daily, we each one of us fall more than that in thought, word and deed. Prayer and fasting, taking up our own cross daily and following Him, doing penance, these are the hard words of the Gospel. - Dorothy Day

 I find I read the Psalms and Dorothy Day more and more, seeking a measured response to what I see around me, the fear of the Other abroad, the fear of the Other at home.


There were two instances of gay-bashing that happened at a bar around the corner from me. It's in a sketchy neighborhood, and the men there aren't the most tough so I'm not terribly surprised, but it still grieves me. A group of young black kids were the ones who perpetrated this, so I see the outrage in comments sections and the neighborhood association's facebook page and it makes me cringe. These folks who said they'd never shoot Trayvon Martin and what a crazy cracker that Zimmerman guy was are the same ones threatening to go vigilante on those "thugs" in their neighborhood and have developed the same suspicion that they abhor in those down south. Is it wrong of me to observe that those marginalized by their sexuality are the ones who have the most bile towards those of a different skin color?

When your neighbors start freaking out because a young black man walks a pit bull down their street because he might be casing the neighborhood we have a problem. When your neighbors are freaking about the guy who rides a motorcycle, we have a problem. When you wonder if your best guy friend who is black is going to have trouble with the neighbors if he moves in upstairs, we have a problem.When your neighbors are disturbed that black teenagers are hanging out at the playground and have the potty mouths we all have, we have a problem.

Also, I should note here, that I live in Cleveland proper. Not the suburbs, not the exurbs. Cleveland. Statistically, you're more likely to have neighbors of African American descent than other places so I don't understand what's so shocking about this though I get the feeling sometimes that the new urbanists want things to be just as crackerific as the milquetoast neighborhoods they left behind, just with less Applebees and more brewpubs. Dudes who are creepy in general bother me, but that cuts across all demographics and is a different thing entirely.

When 9/11 happened, I was a senior in high school living in a suburb with a relatively high population of Arab immigrants. A guy crashed his car into the local mosque. The kids at my high school with last names like Hasan and Abdallah got a lot of grief, even though most of them were Christian and went to the Coptic church nearby or the Maronite church downtown. My dad delivered to the corner stores owned by their parents. It really disconcerts me to see the way that they're now profiled and viewed with suspicion, to the point where certain friends of mine disliked using their last names for fear of the social repercussions despite having no religious affiliations whatsoever.

I feel like it's the same toxic fortress mentality that pervades all of these interactions and I hate it so much. I can't even express how much I hate it that we the people are so ugly and find it so hard to even be decent to our neighbors let alone love them.

“We do not know, we do not know. We shall live from day to day, and put more locks on the doors, and get a fine fierce dog when the fine fierce bitch next door has pups, and hold on to our handbags more tenaciously; and the beauty of the trees by night, and the raptures of lovers under the stars, these things we shall forego. We shall forego the coming home drunken through the midnight streets, and the evening walk over the star-lit veld. We shall be careful, and knock this off our lives, and knock that off our lives, and hedge ourselves about with safety and precaution. 

And our lives will shrink, but they shall be the lives of superior beings; and we shall live with fear, but at least it will not be a fear of the unknown. And the conscience shall be thrust down; the light of life shall not be extinguished, but be put under a bushel, to be preserved for a generation that will live by it again, in some day not yet come; and how it will come, and when it will come, we shall not think about at all.”

choose your own religion

I'm sure in that long line of folks waiting to see a very important person who doesn't speak until late this afternoon but they've been here since before sunrise in a show of devotion and loyalty and wanting to be close to power. It's depressing the hell out of me, not just for party lines, but for the sheer absurdity of expecting so much life fulfillment out of any mere mortal.

There would be some who'd have some choice words for my superstitions and herd mentality, and they'll quote Dawkins and Hitchens or Degrasse Tyson and lump me in with those folks who cling to guns and religion even though I don't trust myself enough to own a gun. And yes I know there's nuttery in my worldview that's a hard thing to reconcile with. If anyone's honest with themselves, they'll see it in their own too.

But hell we're all a bunch of herds and sheep aren't we? We humans are hardwired to follow something or other, and that translates into organized religion, or devotion to a musical subculture or otherwise, or going to every game of your favorite team, wearing the colors and chanting, and politics is totally a religion too. Suspension of disbelief, denial of inconvenient facts, tribalism of us against them that rarely holds water when picked apart. Simplistic readings of history that fail to stand up under scrutiny. It's hard to operate on a binary anymore. I'm agnostic in all things except God, I guess. Somehow trying to follow these principles of loving one's God and neighbor have left me far afield of any political party and into territory closer to this than anything else. . 

Loving one's God means it's hard to put my hope in any candidate or party or particular cultural way of life, with one's heart, soul, mind and strength involved, it's constant and constantly fighting the mindlessness that comes from parroting platitudes without real thought. Loving one's neighbor means trying to not be a jerk to the people I deal with on a daily basis, and attempting to be conscientious as much as possible with daily life decisions, remembering that it's not just me and my comforts that are paramount. I would venture to say that mindlessly droning the hell out of the third world is not very loving. To seek justice, love mercy, walk humbly is simple enough on paper, hard as hell in real life. I guess it never ends.

that's why flags are such ugly things

Taking off yesterday to decompress and think and plant, reading Dorothy Day to get some perspective as to the living out of principles, because I have no use for platitudes, have seen too much to be an idealist, and want to know what the hell I should be doing or how I should be responding to the way that things are going here.


I can see through this expression
And you know I don't believe...

 We have a short historical memory as a country. The same things that are said about people in the Middle East are what was said about the Japanese sixty years ago, and it's often forgotten that FDR signed an executive order to intern thousands of citizens based solely on their race rather than anything else. To this day, there is next to no evidence that any of these people detained who lost almost everything were doing anything wrong or "unpatriotic."

But they hate us. You can't reason with people who blow themselves up for a cause. 

That is what was happening, right?   Kamikaze pilots were the suicide bombers of the 1940s. Kids were raised to die for an ideology if need be. People still justify the nuking of two cities, and no one remembers the devastation of the firebombing of Tokyo. Now things are more or less okay between our two countries, if only because history on both sides has been swept under the proverbial rug.

And we love to wear a badge, a uniform
And we love to fly a flag
But I won't
Let others live in hell
As we divide against each other
And we fight amongst ourselves

And I'm reading about police brutality, about scapegoating of anyone and everyone for the convenience of having a bogeyman, because in every movement, be it animal liberationists, Occupy, pro-lifers, whatever, there will always be unstable violent people that make everyone else look bad.  The faces might change, the movements have different names, but these principles are still the same.

Man's freedom stems from his free will, and he must respect the freedom of other men because they are made to the image and likeness of God and are temples of the Holy Spirit. To build up fear of other men is to build up hatred too. "Perfect love casts out fear." Such a witch hunt as has been set loose in the country today, serves to distract the mind from our own militarization and enslavement, our growing materialism, and to set us in the self righteous position of rooting out the evil in other men, paying no attention to the beam in our own eye. It is always so satisfactory to find a scapegoat on which to heap our sins. During the depression it was the international Jewish bankers. Now it is the communist.

And depending on what side you are, this scapegoat could be someone with an Arabic last name, the crusty punks on the public square, or the evangelical Christian with some weird views on fetuses and how the world came to be that you read about on the Internet and revile because you don't actually know any of these people in real life. 


The teacher is afraid to speak of interracial justice, of peace, of social justice these days, for fear he may be considered subversive. Loyalty oaths are beginning to be required at some state universities before a speaker can give an address to the students. This last month, Fritz Eichenberg, Quaker, who does magnificent illustrations for The Catholic Worker, refused to take the loyalty oath at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn where he teaches. I suppose that means he loses his job. One must accept voluntary poverty these days to keep his integrity.

I used to roll my eyes at this rhetoric when I was in college, but then I see this fly the flag and show your loyalty to the state business that's been resurrected and it starts to not seem so crazy after all. I stopped saying the pledge long ago, because I don't need to pledge allegiance to anyone's damn flag, because what it stands for goes against everything that I believe, cultural religious trappings be damned. One nation under God? The whole damn universe is, not just us, and not everyone believes in said higher power anyway. Liberty and justice for all? Ya think? And so I live here and obey the laws that don't go against my moral code and do my best to treat others the way I'd like to be treated, treat the land with respect. In theory this should make me a good citizen, but I'm sure that others would dispute this.


The occupied countries became the occupied countries because people were terrorized into saying yes, when they should have said no. Hitler and Stalin, Mussolini and Franco--this is the age of repression and McCarthy, in the guise of fighting Communism, is finding it in any honest criticism of the status quo?

Neither system proposed by the overlords or the economists or the protestors is working. Humans as a rule are broken, and therefore it's inevitable that our systems are too.

Angry words won't stop the fight
Two wrongs won't make it right
A new heart is what I need
Oh God, make it bleed
Is there nothing left?

ash wednesday incoherence

T.S. Eliot describes my frame of mind so well right now.

Because I cannot hope to turn again
Consequently I rejoice, having to construct something
Upon which to rejoice

And pray to God to have mercy upon us
And pray that I may forget
These matters that with myself I too much discuss
Too much explain
Because I do not hope to turn again
Let these words answer
For what is done, not to be done again
May the judgement not be too heavy upon us

This world that breaks my heart. 

Our problems stem from our acceptance of this filthy rotten system.


We are the nation the most powerful, the most armed and we are supplying arms and money to the rest of the world where we are not ourselves fighting. We are eating while there is famine in the world.

I've been reading Dorothy Day over dinner, and find it amusing that the last two presidents have quoted her, considering that everything they've done in the past decade or so would have been reprehensible to her, like predator drones and warpiggery and enriching the few at the expense of the many, though everyone quotes their respective religious figures when they see the need to, so there's really no difference.

I have long since come to believe that people never mean half of what they say, and that it is best to disregard their talk and judge only their actions.

It's been ten years since I've been to an Ash Wednesday service, I feel disingenuous taking ashes and not the bread, and so I try to comprehend, too unstilled to contemplate, too resigned to truly rage, because I doubt the righteousness of my fury, there is too much of me in it still.

"I hold more temper in one minute than you will hold in your entire life."


But it's hard for me to listen to people who say they respect the sanctity of life as created by God who have no problem degrading the humanity and personhood of others through torture, who seem too enthused or all too willing to blow up other parts of the world because of some perceived clash of values. Human life is cheap to the powers that be, who utilize human resources until they run dry, justify the unjustifiable with economics and ideology and appealing to emotions and blaming the other side while doing the same exact things that were once decried.

It is not just Vietnam, it is South Africa, it is Nigeria, the Congo, Indonesia, all of Latin America. It is not just the pictures of all the women and children who have been burnt alive in Vietnam, or the men who have been tortured, and died. It is not just the headless victims of the war in Colombia. It is not just the words of Cardinal Spellman and Archbishop Hannan. It is the fact that whether we like it or not, we are Americans. It is indeed our country, right or wrong, as the Cardinal said in another context. We are warm and fed and secure (aside from occasional muggings and murders amongst us). We are the nation the most powerful, the most armed and we are supplying arms and money to the rest of the world where we are not ourselves fighting. We are eating while there is famine in the world.

  ...We are the rich. The works of mercy are the opposite of the works of war, feeding the hungry, sheltering the homeless, nursing the sick, visiting the prisoner. But we are destroying crops, setting fire to entire villages and to the people in them. We are not performing the works of mercy but the works of war. We cannot repeat this enough.

Words are as strong and powerful as bombs, as napalm. How much the government counts on those words, pays for those words to exalt our own way of life, to build up fear of the enemy. Deliver us, Lord, from the fear of the enemy. That is one of the lines in the psalms, and we are not asking God to deliver us from enemies but from the fear of them. Love casts out fear, but we have to get over the fear in order to get close enough to love them.

Even as a lapsed Catholic whose soul still turns towards the liturgical end of things, I've never been good at this whole Lent thing, more out of absentmindedness than anything else, and having only been in the land of parochials for the first decade of life, never quite developed the guilt complex endemic to the others in my circle. I know better than to try and give up caffeine, and I eat too little meat for it to be denial, maybe a cut in consumption of goods, perhaps?

 We will print the words of Christ who is with us always, even to the end of the world. "Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who persecute and calumniate you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven, who makes His sun to rise on the good and the evil, and sends rain on the just and unjust."

I realize more and more that acquisition and use are so endemic to the lifestyle of paychecks and solo living. I have no one to provide for, and I make all efforts to share what I do have, but so much volunteering throughout my twenties has soured me on a lot of charitable work, when you realize that more goes to pay an entitled administrator than that goes to the people. The money trails of even the most altruistic causes make me not want to waste my time and resources, but instead of looking at other options, so often I just become busy with my own life and my own circle, and I don't give as much of myself and what I have as I should, even more not okay because I have no one to sustain except myself.

Love is not the starving of whole populations. Love is not the bombardment of open cities. Love is not killing, it is the laying down of one’s life for one’s friend.

So, to give more of my time, of what I possess, of my skills, of my soul? To just start, I guess, and see what happens. 

My strength returns to me with my cup of coffee and the reading of the psalms.  

How often it does. 


Shout it aloud, do not hold back.
   Raise your voice like a trumpet.
Declare to my people their rebellion
   and to the descendants of Jacob their sins.
² For day after day they seek me out;
   they seem eager to know my ways,
as if they were a nation that does what is right
   and has not forsaken the commands of its God.
They ask me for just decisions
   and seem eager for God to come near them.
³ ‘Why have we fasted,’ they say,
   ‘and you have not seen it?
Why have we humbled ourselves,
   and you have not noticed?’
   “Yet on the day of your fasting, you do as you please
   and exploit all your workers.
⁴ Your fasting ends in quarreling and strife,
   and in striking each other with wicked fists.
You cannot fast as you do today
   and expect your voice to be heard on high.
⁵ Is this the kind of fast I have chosen,
   only a day for people to humble themselves?
Is it only for bowing one’s head like a reed
   and for lying in sackcloth and ashes?
Is that what you call a fast,
   a day acceptable to the LORD?
 ⁶ “Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen:
to loose the chains of injustice
   and untie the cords of the yoke,
to set the oppressed free
   and break every yoke?
⁷ Is it not to share your food with the hungry
   and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter—
when you see the naked, to clothe them,
   and not to turn away from your own flesh and blood?
⁸ Then your light will break forth like the dawn,
   and your healing will quickly appear;
then your righteousness will go before you,
   and the glory of the LORD will be your rear guard.
⁹ Then you will call, and the LORD will answer;
   you will cry for help, and he will say: Here am I.
   “If you do away with the yoke of oppression,
   with the pointing finger and malicious talk,
¹⁰ and if you spend yourselves in behalf of the hungry
   and satisfy the needs of the oppressed,
then your light will rise in the darkness,
   and your night will become like the noonday.
¹¹ The LORD will guide you always;
   he will satisfy your needs in a sun-scorched land
   and will strengthen your frame.
You will be like a well-watered garden,
   like a spring whose waters never fail.
¹² Your people will rebuild the ancient ruins
   and will raise up the age-old foundations;
you will be called Repairer of Broken Walls,
   Restorer of Streets with Dwellings.