The Red Electric

Republican Riddle

2012-01-20T10:13:00.000-08:00

Help me out here.

Republicans want to cut taxes.

Now we learn that multi-millionaire Mitt Romney pays a paltry 15 percent in taxes.

You’d think this would be cause for celebration among Republicans. Nice going, Mitt!

But oh, no, his opponents in the Republican presidential nomination mud bath are lobbing clods at him for not “paying his fair share.”

Isn’t that what the Occupy Movement has been saying for months? The rich aren’t paying their fair share. (Mitt, by the way, has an estimated net worth of $250 million.)

Could GOP candidates Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul be closet Occupiers?

The answer, of course, is — only if it is to their political advantage as they exploit the latest one-day scandal in this bizarre contest.

Has anyone asked Romney what he thinks of his low tax rate? Does he think it’s fair?

Why aren't all the GOP presidential candidates driven to the edge of GOP blasphemy with the question: Should Romney and other exceedingly rich Americans pay more?

Congressional Republicans have been rock-solid, vocal opponents to raising taxes on the rich.

This much is certain: Romney can rightly say his tax rate is “perfectly legal” — thanks to the likes to legislators and ex-legislators like, you guessed it, Santorum, Gingrich and Paul.

So, Mitt, point your finger at the real culprits, your opponents, and say, “You made me and my tax accountants do it!”

For more on this subject, read “Perfectly Legal” by David Cay Johnston. It will make you weep.

Beckonings on the Beach

2012-01-16T05:40:00.000-08:00

"Hear" these photos. What is calling us?

Or consider the names I have created for these images. Try matching my names with the photos. If you don’t "get" my answer, yours is right.

For me, contemplating these gifts is surrendering to nature and spirit. They beckon, telling us we are part of a larger being.

Here are those names (Not in the order of appearance.)

Drawn to the sea
Elbow
Face in the log
Reeds
The Arch
Arrangement
Sand ghosts
Whorl
Entry

(You can click on each to make it larger so that one image fills your screen.)

But, really, what (or who) are these beyond words? Who are they in the tumbling breath of surf, the distant squawk of gulls, the beat of your heart...?

Babcockery

2012-01-13T09:03:00.000-08:00

I'm struck by the frequently shallow thinking of those who post spontaneous, often vitriolic comments to on-line news stories.

Could there be a hip-shot pathology at work?

For reasons you will learn in a moment, I call the phenomenon "Babcockery."

What prompts my sharing this thought is a near-instantaneous response to an on-line Oregonian story involving me. The first (and so far, only) comment on the story labels me a "socialist."

I can live with that, however untrue — or true, but it does make me curious about the mind set of my accuser.

The story that prompted the "socialist" charge is by Oregonian stringer Rebecca Koffman. The reporting was posted just an hour ago and immediately drew the "socialist" accusation from one "Babcock."

The story is about a petition drive intended to discourage Chase Bank from opening another branch in Hillsdale. I am correctly cited and quoted as the drive's organizer. You can read Koffman's story HERE. Babcock's comment is at the bottom of it.

By the way, if you live in or near near Hillsdale, you can sign the petition at the new Tré Bone pet supply around the corner from the Post Office and next to the Chinese restaurant.

Back to "Babcock" and "Babcockery".....

Apparently opposing JPMorganChase Bank, certainly a capitalistic icon (recently saved by the American taxpayer) makes me a "socialist."

The term "socialism" is notoriously hard to pin down. HERE is Wikipedia's attempt, which comes with a host of caveats. I'm certain some part of the term fits me. And probably you. I dare say that a sizable portion of "Babcock" is socialistic. Did he go to public school? Does he drive on the public streets? Is he protected by the police? By our military?

I also happen to be a capitalist in that I publish a little on-line newspaper. It is modestly supported by my fellow capitalistic Hillsdale sponsors and by community good will. In my semi-retirement, I volunteer my time to it and give most of the money it generates back to the community. No government money comes in the door. You can see The Hillsdale News HERE.

I'll add that some of my dearest colleagues are, well, capitalists. I venture that most who have signed the dread "socialistic" petition are too.

So where does that leave the likes of "Babcock"? Consider the "socialistic" military.

As I look around at our economy for signs of socialism, the one that jumps out at me is our military-industrial complex. Strangely the Babcocks of the world give the military and defense contractors a free pass.

Why don't they attach dashed-off comments to stories about defense contracts? "Clearly Boeing is run by socialists." "The joint chiefs of staff are all socialists." "If you enlist in the armed forces, you are an obvious socialist."

I have no explanation for Babcockery. I hope a "Babcock" will read this and explain. I also hope that my new term for this behavior enters the language.

What is "Babcockery"? Definition: "Reactionary, ill-considered, accusatory (and frequently ad hominem) on-line responses to news or opinion."

The Guest in the Tree

2012-01-09T18:10:00.000-08:00

Some of you may know that I hold the position of clerk of our Quaker meeting. It’s a two-year term, the job gets passed around, and in our egalitarian spiritual community, no one makes much of it.

But on occasion I’m reminded that, whether I like it or not, I’m the go-to guy.

Like last night when I got the phone call from Officer Gilbert of the Portland Police department.

“Mr. Seifert, I understand you are the person responsible for the Quaker meeting house here on Stark Street? Is that right?”

“Yes, I am the person responsible,” I conceded with a hint of hesitation and foreboding. “Tell me what this is about, officer,” I invited as visions of disaster bubbled up in my brain.

“Well, is the name Tre Arrow familiar to you?”

“Vaguely, isn’t he that environmental activist who camped up on a downtown building’s ledge for a few days several years ago?”

“That’s the one. Now he’s here in the fir tree in the backyard of your Quaker building. He’s yelling from up there. There’s a crowd here, some Occupy folks are shouting encouragement and the fire department has a ladder truck in place. We have the street blocked off.”

I could hear distant hollering in the background. A group chanted “Occupy the Tree! Occupy the tree!”

I heard myself say, “I’ll be right over, officer.”

It takes about 20 minutes to get from my house to the meetinghouse. That was enough time to gather my thoughts and run scenarios through my mind.

What if we have this guy in our tree for days? What if the crowd grows and “Occupies” our backyard? What if the chanting and yelling continue disturbing the neighbors in what the media would call a “normally quiet residential neighborhood.”

When I arrived I found pretty much what I imagined. It was a vision from the evening news. Flashing police lights. Squawk box commands. Barricades.

It was also an arcade for a media carnival complete with earnest correspondents and trucks equipped to broadcast “LIVE on the scene!” “Up-to-the-minute Action News.”

Before going to the backyard to assess the situation, I huddled with the police sergeant in charge. As we stood on the center line of the barricaded street, he calmly suggested that his officers and the fire department leave. There was really nothing they could do except attract unwanted attention. Wrestling Tre Arrow from his sylvan perch 60 feet above ground could lead to disaster.

I readily accepted the sergeant’s assessment and advice, and thanked him. The police and firefighters departed.

I was left to whatever might happen next, yet somehow a calmness descended on me.

As I went through the gate to our backyard, I had already decided to treat Tre not as a trespasser or intruder but as some kind of “guest.”

An uninvited guest, but a guest none-the-less. “Unexpected,” someone suggested later.

Precisely, an unexpected guest.

But who were these other folks standing around staring into the boughs above? I set about introducing myself, inquiring to whom we Quakers had the pleasure.

Peering up into the tree were the reporters with accompanying camera crews. Their lights sought out a shadowy figure who was heard far more clearly than he was seen. The silhouetted figure filled the evening with righteous ranting about the "rape of Mother Earth."

Also at the base of the tree was a small, surprisingly somber contingent from Occupy Portland.

I decided to invite the media to leave our backyard. As a journalist, I know that such requests are honored. Tre might be a “guest” but unwanted reporters and crews with cameras to be “played to” can be construed as trespassers. So the media quietly, and professionally, retreated.

As for the Occupy folks, I told them that our meeting had formally supported the Occupy movement and that I, in fact, was a member of Occupy's “Faith/Spirit” Spoke (or committee) They seemed duly impressed.

They were also impressed, and probably surprised, that I told them it was fine for them to stay. Perhaps they saw the absurdity of the “Occupy” movement's occupying part of itself.

And then there was a young woman who came up to me and quietly introduced herself as “Tre’s friend.” A friend concerned about Tre’s clearly agitated state. We quietly introduced ourselves and talked. She filled me in. She thought that once people left, her friend would come down. Indeed after the camera crews and reporters established a public safe haven on the distant sidewalk, Tre began to work his way down the tree to the ground.

I greeted him as he lowered himself from the fence at the base of the tree. I shared with him that Multnomah Friends Meeting considered him a guest.

“Thank you, thank you. You Quakers are so great,” he said as we shook hands.

I guess that was a bonding of sorts. Barefooted and a little worse for wear from his climb up and down the tree, he made his way to the media waiting at our gate. There, from our side of the fence, he proceeded to lecture the reporters on the state of the planet. It went on and on...such is the state of the planet.

Finally his quiet companion whispered in my ear, “You are going to have to stop him or he will just keep going.”

“How is he with people placing limits on him?” I asked

“Not so good.”

Great, I thought. “Let me see what I can do,” I whispered back.

When it was clear to everyone (perhaps even to Tre) that Tre’s lecture was looping back on itself, I put my hand on his shoulder and said, “I think it’s time to wind down.”

He seemed almost grateful for my interruption. He turned and we shook hands. “You’ve been very understanding,” he said. “Thank you.”

Then he led the media gaggle across the street where he resumed his sermon until, at last, everyone lost interest and wandered off into the cloudless winter night.

As more than one person noted, the moon was full.

I later joked with other Friends that there is nothing about dealing with tree protests in the clerk’s job description. But, I was reminded, there are references to being “open to the spirit” and “finding one’s center.” If not exactly a job description, the Quakerly words provided the guidance I needed Sunday night — that we all needed in this little tableau from our times.

For a news clip of what happened go HERE. Yes, that’s me in the baseball cap with our “guest.”

Just another New Year's Day in Manzanita

2012-01-03T13:15:00.000-08:00

Do they know how to have fun in Manzanita on New Year's Day, or what?

These people are as wild and crazy as Republicans vying for the White House.

They (the ones in Manzanita) call themselves the "Polar Bears." The Republican ones are calling themselves liars, hypocrites and closet liberals (gasp!).

Back to the beach in Manzanita...I'll let them tell their own story in photos.

It begins with a big fire on the beach and a whole lot of would-be bears and their extended bear friends and families huddling around them.

Then there's this mad dash to the Pacific.

Hitting the surf.

And being greeted after a full immersion.

A cold, wet and Happy New Year!

By the way, if you think this is insane, don't miss the Fourth of July here.

When winning produces losers

2011-12-27T07:14:00.000-08:00

Recently, The Oregonian ran a front-page story about how the grades of male university students in Eugene declined as the fortunes of the Ducks’ football team improved.

Of the male students, one of the researchers said: “They drink more when the team wins, they party more when the team wins, and they study less when the team wins.”

You can tell where this might lead. Note that the study was done by economists. The obvious question is whether the same phenomenon might be at work in the economy. Could the findings about students be applied to sports-crazed Duck alumni?

“They drink more when the team wins, they party more when the team wins, and they WORK less when the team wins.”

The study also raises questions about professional sports. Consider Green Bay, Wisconsin, whose Packers are on a tear. How’s the economy in Green Bay and its surroundings? Could "Cheeseheadedness" explain Wisconsin's political problems?

And more generally, could there be a feminist interpretation to all this. The researchers found that women at the University of Oregon were unaffected by the fortunes of the Duck football team. Generally females do better in school at all levels than males do. Could this have something to do with the male obsession with/addiction to all things sports?

Finally, if winning on the field produces losers in the classroom, do losing athletic teams produce academic winners?

And, getting back to the economy and civic life, could Chicago's grit have something to do with its hapless Cubs?

Two 'Truths' about Christmas

2011-12-24T10:32:00.000-08:00

One Christmas season I sent out a card titled “The Truth about Christmas.” Its main message was that Christmas is sheer contrivance. The record, including the Bible, doesn’t say when Jesus was born — not the year, not the month, not the day.

Sorry.

Indeed, recounts the card, “in the first two centuries of Christianity, church leaders derided the observation of saints’ and martyrs’ birthdays as pagan.”

There’s more. The screed goes on for three pages in small type. It took until 320 AD for a pope (Julius I) to nail down the date of December 25. Even then, the rituals largely came from pagan observances of the winter solstice.

And then there’s the “commercial juggernaut” of consumption. It’s a relatively new creation from the mid-Nineteenth Century. It began with the exchanging of Christmas Cards. I’m certain that none bore the title “The Truth about Christmas.”

Make of Christmas what you will.

Some, marking the birth of the ‘Prince of Peace,’ will rededicate themselves to peace. It could use it. Therein resides Joy.

Others will use the time to be with family and to celebrate birth, children and rebirth (yes, the days are getting longer...)

Still others will celebrate the message that Jesus brought to the world. Christmas includes reading of the Beatitudes:

“Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven....”

For fun, and for another “truth” about Christmas, I always pull out my slender, well-thumbed copy of Dylan Thomas’ lyrical “A Child’s Christmas in Wales.” In his romp through Christmases recalled, the closest Thomas comes to the sacred is on the very last page.

He describes himself as a child, stuffed on Christmas feasting, visions and laughter. And then, it is time for bed.

“Looking through my bedroom window, out into the moonlight and the unending smoke-colored snow, I could see the lights in the windows of all the other houses on our hill and hear the music rising from them up the long, steadily falling night. I turned the gas down, I got into bed. I said some words to the close and holy darkness and then I slept.”

Softly, then, to sleeping children everywhere, an Alleluia lullaby and a Christmas Amen...

More still than "still"

2011-12-18T18:32:00.001-08:00

Four options surfaced in the silence of today’s worship at our Quaker meetinghouse.

First a definition:

“What is,” as used here, is “the All,” “God,” “Spirit,” “The One.”

"What is" has many, many names, none of which does, nor can do, “what is” justice.

Consider: It even includes "what is NOT."

The options:

• We — you and I — are part of “what is,” part of “God,” “Spirit” etc. We are not separate. Our egos, while useful in our brief lives, are a small and insignificant part of “what is.”

• “What is” is within us ... and everything else. As Quakers say, “There is that of God within each of us.” Question: is ego essential to this option?

• Both 1. and 2 are true. Can we hold these two options as one or are they contradictory? Can a contradiction also be true? Is it simply part of "what is"?

• "What is" is beyond words. It resides in silence....beyond “wholes” and “parts” ... beyond “within” and “with-out” — beyond “us” and the words “what is.”

Be still, I said in the silence — even more still than “still.”

You are what your are fed...on the internet

2011-12-13T22:33:00.000-08:00

Here's a righteous plea that must be heard and shared.

It seems we are being blinded to diversity by search engines and social media that skew and narrow our information and our on-line contacts.

Somehow we must take control.

This just in: Americans are an "invented people"

2011-12-12T11:43:00.001-08:00

You have to love Newt Gingrich's messing with our heads.

I think he's on to something here with his notion of "invented people."

What, pray tell, is "an invented people"?

Certainly native Americans have every reason to consider the rest of us "invented people." We invented "Americans" out of whole revolutionary cloth, declaring ourselves a nation in the process.

Said nation then invented new expanding borders by presumably "dis-inventing" native populations and inventing the "Indian people."

What about applying Newt's "invention" notion to individuals? Who invented you, or me, or, for that matter, Newt?

Or do WE "invent" ourselves. Some have even been known to re-invent themselves. Shocking as it seems, I've even heard that said of Newt himself.

Newt is clearly playing to the Jewish vote with the idea of Palestinians inventing themselves, but this might also be a stealth effort to pull in "intelligent design" Fundamentalists.

Did the "intelligent designer" (and you just know who that would be) invent us? Could Newt be inventing a prophetic politician with "deeply held religious convictions" just in time for the Iowa caucuses.

Then again, with his remarks drawing mounting criticism, Newt could do some serious backpedalling in the days ahead.

I can hear his raspy voice now: "Well, of course the Palestinians are an 'invented people.' But aren't we all? I intended no offense by singling them out. That's just the way things are."

The costs of media's concocted political 'wars'

2011-12-09T17:17:00.000-08:00

When historians write about the incivility of American politics in the early 21st Century, they need look no farther than this nation’s media.

Indeed they need look no farther the relatively staid Oregonian. Today’s front page will do. Here's the headline on a major story there:

Political
ad wars
target
your TV

Cornilles and Bonamici
fire a fusillade of 1st
District commercials for
the holiday season

Here’s the story's lead, “The ad wars have started in Oregonian’s special congressional election, with plenty of hard-hitting political commercials in store for Portland-area voters over the holiday season.”

Sure, things may get nasty on your living room screen, but war? Targets? Fusillades?

Once again, the mainstream media roll out their tired old “war” metaphor to describe politics in this country.

Shame!

On the front page, the story to the immediate right of this one tells of real war.

More Oregon soldiers home for Christmas
The Guard’s Mideast presence nears a 10-year low as Iraq War ends

Welcome home, the paper seems to be saying. Welcome home to another war. The one we at The Oregonian have created to tell the story of American politics. Perhaps you, soldier, would like to end this one too.

My advice is this: It’s easy. Just stop reading the newspaper...and watching TV.

Stay away from the message that democracy American style is as bad as war.

Perhaps we all should declare peace and have nothing to do with the "democratic" fighting. Funny thing is that most of the voting age population does just that.

Surprised?

Could it have to do with the desire for peace and civic sanity?

The problem is that if those who value peace and sanity turn their backs on democracy, who ends up running the country?

Answer: those who are infatuated by or profit from war. Those who control the media. Those whose being is defined by conflict, inflated egos and a distorted sense of patriotic superiority.

Meanwhile, the Occupy Movement, dedicated to non-violence, gets trashed by the politicians, the ones whom the media tell us are waging “war” with each other to get elected.

Mixed in with the Occupy crowds are the cast-off veterans of real wars, those life-destroying conflicts declared by the ruling class with its insatiable need for oil, power and third homes in the Bahamas.

Do I roam too widely here? Perhaps; perhaps not. I hope these thoughts and my anger take you beyond the headlines of this morning’s newspaper.

If only we could change the story line and the metaphors of tomorrow’s reporting and headlines.

Would someone in management at The Oregonian at least send around a memo to the headline writers. “Lighten up! We are talking about an election, not a bloody war.”

Using City parks to respond to societal disaster

2011-12-06T10:04:00.000-08:00

Strange. The City of Portland has named 17 parks where citizens are to gather in case of a major disaster.

In the same issue of The Oregonian that informed us of the opening of the parks, we learned that the City is sending the police to close a single park to Occupy Portland demonstrators.

The protesters are, in real sense, messengers and victims of a disaster happening now. And it is huge, affecting the “99 percent.” It has been going on for at least the last 30 years. For many it has been going on for centuries.

The disaster’s rubble and victims have been ignored in a society addicted to consumption, spectator-ism, false fear, enemy-making and growing debt.

Thanks to the Occupy movement, our eyes have been opened. We see the destruction everywhere — in the American political system, in the ravaged “no jobs” economy, in the shrinking middle class, in militaristic spending priorities, in the ravaged environment, in the inanities of a pandering media, and in a skewed system of “justice.”

On the day the articles appeared, Occupy said it would stay in a single park for two weeks. The police were ordered in to remove them after just a few hours.

In the case of a major “natural” disaster, like an earthquake, refugees would stay in 17 parks for an indefinite period. Will the police be sent in to remove them after two weeks?

The City’s disaster preparedness could be tested and put to work in this real, immediate American disaster by welcoming the Occupy movement. Rather than evicting the protesters, see whether they can be adequately cared for, housed and fed for a fortnight.

Greet and embrace the protest and its message with hospitality, not hostility. Acknowledge that we are today our system has produced a living disaster. In the communities formed in our parks, we must begin clear away its causes and rebuild.

Leaping over a language barrier

2011-12-05T14:18:00.000-08:00

All religious groups (and really all groups) suffer from unintended “language barriers.”

The problem goes beyond nuisance jargon and its resulting confusion — language “barriers” confine our thinking and our very being.

Take language barriers created by Quakers, for instance, a religious group I belong to.

Our language barriers for newcomers are considerable and even laughable. I’ll briefly share examples without trying to explain them.

What’s a “clerk”? Why is this Quaker meeting, which meets weekly, called a “monthly meeting”? Why do some Friends seem to shy away from the very word “God”? Does “Spirit” suffice? How do I learn “the manner of Friends”? What’s this business about quaking, anyway?

The list goes on and on.

More troubling are the barriers that our Quaker language creates for our own spiritual awareness and evolution.

Recently I’ve explored the problem as I’ve been preparing a presentation on the topic of “Quaker Language Barriers.” That preparation and a chance reading has led me to consider, or reconsider, a frequently cited tenet for Quakers:

“There is that of God (or the Spirit) in everyone.”

How often we Friends find ourselves turning to that core belief for clarity, understanding and grace. For me it has stood next to the testimonies (simplicity, peace, integrity, community and equality) as fundamental.

It is at the heart of “love thy enemy.” “That of God in all” is where love begins.

Sure, I’ve stumbled over the “that of” part which doesn’t translate smoothly into modern English. Does “that of” mean “a part of”? I don’t think so. I take the entire sentence to mean that “God, or the Spirit, resides in us all.” The idea is similar to the notion that we are all God’s children. We human beings are inheritors of the divine spark.

And yet, with our “language barrier” in mind, I’ve been pondering and meditating over another quite different conception of who we are in relationship to Spirit and God. Rather than “that of God” being within you and me as individuals, suppose WE reside within Spirit or God. Or to take it one more step, what if “we” are parts of everything and “we” ARE Spirit? As Willigis Jäger writes in his book “Mysticism for Modern Times,” we are “representations of the whole” and “everything that happens to an individual part has an effect on the whole.”

Jäger speaks in terms of the “old paradigm,” which sounds not unlike our Quaker belief about “that of God" within us. The old paradigm, he says, has us “experiencing God within” us.

The new paradigm is that we ARE Spirit. “We are spiritual beings who have a human experience.”

There’s clearly much, much more to say about this, but now, for me, this is enough. I am trying to inhabit this paradigm, to feel myself as pure spirit that has happened to take human form.

As might be imagined, the silence of Quaker worship, like other forms of meditation, helps with my leap over the language barrier.

Occupy Portland evolves

2011-12-02T17:42:00.000-08:00

Tomorrow, Occupy Portland will choose a new home in a “park-like” setting.

The aim is to stay in the chosen city park for two weeks.

The two-week term limit is part of the broader evolution of the movement.

As a Quaker participant in the Faith/Spirit support committee for Occupy Portland, I was briefed this week on how the new Occupation will work.

“Sustainability” is clearly a new watch word. The old Occupy sites at Chapman and Lownsdale Squares weren’t sustainable for all kinds of reasons.

Indeed the movement has decided that no “Occupy” settlement that purports to be permanent will work.

So Occupy Portland will be migratory. Two weeks here, two weeks there....

That moves the message around the city. We could use it here in Hillsdale where Chase Bank wants to build a new branch that this community doesn't need and doesn’t want. (If you don't believe me come to the Hillsdale Neighborhood Association meeting, 7 p.m., next Wednesday, Dec. 7, at the Watershed Building, Bertha Court and Capitol Highway.)

Another important evolutionary change in Occupy is that it isn’t going to tolerate hangers-on who contribute nothing — or trouble. People who are just loitering or worse drug dealing or thieving, will be confronted at first in a welcoming way.

Here’s the plan: An active Occupier will approach a questionable character.

“Hi there! Are you plugged in?”

“No, man.”

“Well, you need to get plugged in. How do you want to help? The kitchen? The sanitary crew? The information booth?”

“I don’t want to get ‘plugged in.’ Just leave me alone.”

At that point the first community member calls over another. “Hey, this person doesn’t want to be plugged into the community.”

“Hi, let’s get you plugged in! What do you want to do?”

“I don’t want to do anything.”

So yet another encampment member is called over, and then another...until the person is surrounded by a dozen Occupiers all insisting that the aimless interloper get “plugged in” in some way.

The process continues until the surrounded person agrees to be “plugged in” or leaves.

Clearly the Occupy movement is evolving and growing stronger and stronger, and smarter and smarter.

A related point:

There’s also been a lot of discussion and planning about leaving the parks as they were when the Occupy groups arrived. Pre-Occupy photos of the condition of the sites have been taken for reference.

Much has been made in the scolding Press of the cost of restoring the original parks at Chapman and Lownsdale. According to Portland Parks and Recreation it comes to about $130,000.

What did that money buy?

Try knowledge and awareness — at last. Mass public education and broad civic engagement.

Try a stronger democracy.

Try the beginning of breaking the stranglehold corporations and the wealthy have on our government.

Frankly, it’s cheap at a price and a fraction of a CEO’s salary. For comparison's sake, Jamie Dimon, Chase's CEO, is compensated to the tune of $19 million a year. What's he done for democracy lately besides buy a few members of congress with campaign contributions? Is Dimon really "worth" 146 times the "cost" of Occupy Portland's witness for justice.

If anything, Dimon and his like should pay the social costs of their wrongs. Talk about not being plugged in....

Will future Occupancies cost the taxpayers of this city money? Absolutely. Will it be worth it? Absolutely...if we back this movement for an equitable and just society.

Evaluating my evaluations

2011-11-29T15:59:00.000-08:00

This morning, the big white, whirring garbage truck hoisted our blue recycling bin off the driveway and dumped its contents into the cavernous bed.

The truck's compactor then unceremoniously squashed 24 years of student evaluations of my teaching into illegibility.

I stopped teaching last year but I continued to horde away in the basement my college course evaluations from as far back as 1986. Somewhere in the basement may be ratings from an even earlier teaching stint in the late Sixties and Seventies.

When I find them, they’ll go curbside too.

Why did I keep those dozens of envelopes, one for each and every class I have ever taught?

At one point I thought they might help me get a job. To a hiring committee, I might say, but never did, “Here, sort through this box and pick a course at random. Let my students do the talking.”

Maybe I kept them because I remember how I’d expectantly wait to get the evaluations back from the dean. He always got first crack at them and then would seal them in a big security envelope. My feeling while tearing it open was similar to the anticipation I had as a student when my grades came in the mail. Two As, two Bs and a C — or some such.

For me my “grades” from my students were check-mark rankings from “among the very best” to “among the very worst.” A simple check in a box summarized ten weeks of “having” me.

Most of the time I was “very good” to “good” with a rare — GLORY BE! — “among the very best.”

Occasionally I’d get a student who was, as they say, a “bad fit.” I would conclude that we were, forced to be together, “among the very worst.”

It happens.

I remember one who reported that my “teaching style” didn’t fit with her “learning style.” I had utterly and insensitively failed to “adjust,” she noted. I confess, I was late to get with the whole “learning styles” issue. I’m sure I never mastered it. The good news is that the other students didn’t seem to have a problem with me, stylistically.

Perhaps they adjusted.

The majority of written comments, like he check marks, were quite positive. As of this morning's garbage collection, I am not longer capable of quoting from them ... and that’s okay. You’re going to have to trust me — not that it really matters.

After my retirement, I think I kept the evaluations just in case I needed to be reminded that my teaching was not just good, but worthwhile. The classes made a difference and some students said so, sometimes glowingly.

As it turns out, I haven’t needed the reminder. I never looked at the evaluations after my first eager-anxious reading. I’m still in touch with a few of my students. I’m proud of them. They are the best “evaluations” a teacher can have.

Since the evaluations were trucked off this morning, I have had no regrets. If anything, it’s good to be rid of those envelopes. To know the paper will be recycled and that our basement is one box less cluttered with the useless relics of a useful life.

The End of Autumn: Gabriel Park 11/26/2011

2011-11-26T16:40:00.001-08:00

Thorns and Roses for Oregonian's PERS inequity scoop

2011-11-22T15:46:00.000-08:00

"Top PERS payout: $41,342 a month"

There's a story to "occupy" your mind and your conscience.

And the top pensioner is none other than Mike Bellotti, the former University of Oregon football coach. What's that say about values at Oregon's, ahem, "institutions of higher learning"?

Why is it there's a whiff of Phil Knight to all of this? "I'm a billionaire. Why shouldn't Bellotti be one too?" On the state dole, no less....

How will this tale of greed register with all those Duck graduates saddled with debt and unable to find work? It's enough to drive a person to demonstrate and occupy a campus. Oh, wait, that was happening, even before The Oregonian broke the story.

Talk about "higher education."

Too much of the text of the Oregonian story is about how very, very, very difficult it was for the newspaper's attorneys to wrest from PERS the damning data about the top-most pigs at the PERS trough. Yes, it is outrageous that PERS fought tooth and nail to hide the list from the public. And yes, it is great that The Oregonian the Salem Statesman Journal fought back and prevailed.

But try to find in the story something about how it came to pass that Bellotti and a bunch of other high-paid state employees (many OHSU professors and administrators) got such largesse. It's not in the story.

Who is responsible for such inequity? It's not in the story.

How do they justify it? It's not in the story.

Will it be reported on later? One would hope.

Related: The Huffington Post has listed the University of Oregon on the top-ten list of campuses with the worst professors. Could that have something to do with what football coaches are paid in Eugene and what professors aren't?

Could it be that the more competitive you are in the NCAA football, the lower you fall in academics?

And, if so, is Stanford the exception that proves a rule? How so?

Just askin'.....

Walking with the Chancellor

2011-11-22T09:48:00.000-08:00

The following describes a non-violent path — a literal and a metaphorical one. The description is a soul-searching part of the Occupy Movement as it witnesses to injustice and speaks truth to power — sometimes with words, sometimes with silence.

The Rev. Kristin Stoneking is a minister in the United Methodist Church and is a pastor at the multi-faith community at Cal Aggie House at UC Davis. A link to her blog is HERE.

Why I walked Chancellor Katehi out of Surge II tonight
by Kristin Stoneking, Sunday, 20 November 2011 at 01:46

At 5 p.m., as my family and I left Davis so that I could attend the American Academy of Religion annual meetings in San Francisco, I received a call from Assistant Vice Chancellor Griselda Castro informing me that she, Chancellor Katehi and others were trapped inside Surge II. She asked if I could mediate between students and administration. I was reluctant; I had already missed a piece of the meetings due to commitments in Davis and didn’t want to miss any more. I called a student (intentionally not named here) and learned that students were surrounding the building but had committed to a peaceful, silent exit for those inside and had created a clear walkway to the street. We turned the car around and headed back to Davis.

When I arrived, there was a walkway out of the building set up, lined on both sides by about 300 students. The students were organized and peaceful. I was cleared to enter the building along with a student who is a part of CA House and has been part of the Occupy movement on campus since the beginning. He, too, was reluctant, but not because he had somewhere else to be. For any student to act as a spokesperson or leader is inconsistent with the ethos the Occupy movement. He entered as an individual seeking peace and resolution, not as a representative of the students, and was clear that he had called for and would continue to call for Chancellor Katehi’s resignation.

Once inside, and through over an hour of conversation, we learned the
following:

• The Chancellor had made a commitment that police would not be called in this situation.

• Though the message had been received inside the building that students were a peaceful exit, there was a concern that not everyone would hold to this commitment.

• The Chancellor had committed to talk with students personally and respond to concerns at the rally on Monday on the quad.

• The student assistants to the Chancellor had organized another forum on Tuesday for the Chancellor to dialogue directly with students.

What we felt couldn’t be compromised on was the students’ desire to see and be seen by the Chancellor. Any exit without face-to-face contact was unacceptable. She was willing to do this. We reached agreement that the students would move to one side of the walkway and sit down as a show of commitment to nonviolence.

Before we left, the Chancellor was asked to view a video of the student who was with me being pepper sprayed. She immediately agreed. Then, he and I witnessed her witnessing eight minutes of the violence that occurred Friday. Like a recurring nightmare, the horrific scene and the cries of “You don’t have to do this!” and students choking and screaming rolled again. The student and I then left the building and using the human mike, students were informed that a request had been made that they move to one side and sit down so that the Chancellor could exit. They immediately complied, though I believe she could have left peacefully even without this
concession.

I returned to the building and walked with the Chancellor down the human walkway to her car. Students remained silent and seated the entire way.

What was clear to me was that once again, the students’ willingness to show restraint kept us from spiraling into a cycle of violence upon violence. There was no credible threat to the Chancellor, only a perceived one. The situation was not hostile. And what was also clear to me is that whether they admit it or not, the administrators that were inside the building are afraid. And exhausted. And human. And the suffering that has been inflicted is real. The pain present as the three of us watched the video of students being pepper sprayed was palpable. A society is only truly free when all persons take responsibility for their actions; it is only upon taking responsibility that healing can come.

Why did I walk the Chancellor to her car? Because I believe in the humanity of all persons. Because I believe that people should be assisted when they are afraid. Because I believe that in showing compassion we embrace a nonviolent way of life that emanates to those whom we refuse to see as enemies and in turn leads to the change that we all seek. I am well aware that my actions were looked on with suspicion by some tonight, but I trust that those seeking a nonviolent solution will know that “just means lead to just ends” and my actions offered dignity not harm.

The Chancellor was not trapped in Surge II tonight, but, in a larger sense, we are all in danger of being trapped. We are trapped when we assent to a culture that for decades, and particularly since 9/11, has allowed law enforcement to have more and more power which has moved us into an era of hyper-criminalization. We are trapped when we envision no path to reconciliation. And we are trapped when we forget our own power. The students at UC Davis are to be commended for resisting that entrapment, using their own power nonviolently.

I pray that the Chancellor will remember her own considerable power in making change on our campus, and in seeking healing and reconciliation.

Memo to 'Planet Panetta' from Planet Earth

2011-11-15T07:26:00.000-08:00

While Defense Secretary Leon Panetta moans about possible cuts in defense spending, I find myself cheering.

Are we living in the same country? On the same planet?

Here is Panetta as reported in today’s Oregonian (which didn’t report the view from my “planet”)

Panetta “warned” the deeper defense cuts being considered by the Congressional "Super Committee" would:

• Leave the military with the smallest ground force since 1940. (Last time I checked, World War II was over. Likewise the Cold War.)

• Force the military to rethink its strategy. (How are you liking the current one?)

• "Affect" the military’s ability to “support” the war in Afghanistan. (Exactly!)

• Lead to a fleet of fewer than 230 ships. (Who’s complaining except the Navy and the defense contractors?)

• Cut back, delay or end weapons programs such as the Joint Strike Fighter, the "next-generation" Ballistic missile submarine, new Army helicopters and missile defense. (The military-industrial complex at the trough. Orwellian alert: Note the inevitability inherent in the term "next-generation.").

Panetta’s comments in a letter to two senior Republican senators (John McCain and Lindsey Graham) were larded with references to the cuts’ resulting in “substantial risks.” (Ask wounded veterans and the families of the dead — civilian and military alike — about the risks of our present “strategy.”)

Unfortunately, the story didn’t list some other facts which can be found HERE on the Friends Committee for National Legislation web site. They describe a world far different from Panetta’s.

Here are just four (FCNL's annotated and sourced site cites ten).

• The U.S. military budget accounts for 46.5 percent of global military spending.

• U.S. presence in the world includes hundreds of military bases in Europe – particularly in Germany. (See reference to the end of World War II and the Cold War above)

• Military contracts are not job-creation engines. Military dollars spent in a state yield the least number of jobs, compared to investments in health, education, transportation, and even tax cuts.

• The unaudited Pentagon budget has a history of cost overruns -- $300 billion above what Congress authorized for various weapons systems in the last five years.

Which world do YOU live in?

P.S. To put this in a political context, the last time I checked, Leon Panetta took his orders from one Barack Obama. And which planet does HE live on?

The Awakening and the Legacy of Occupy Portland

2011-11-11T09:24:00.000-08:00

From talking with friends in the Occupy Portland Movement, I’ve learned that only about 10 percent at the site believe Mayor Sam Adams is right to order the encampment’s shutdown.

Occupy activists from my Quaker meeting are among the minority. They, like the City Council and much of the public, have concluded that the overwhelmed encampment is unsustainable. It is simply collapsing under the weight of grave social problems: drug abuse, untreated mental illness, prostitution, theft, toxic filth and violence.

The chaos is all concentrated in a prominent two-block area downtown. When the encampment is forcibly removed Saturday night, the problems will not disappear. They will once again find “homes” beneath the bridges and viaducts, in the forests and in cold, isolated doorways.

The victims will return to invisibility and powerlessness; and they will lose the little public presence and power they have had in the last five weeks.

On Saturday night, the 90 percent who will resist will be clinging to their place in our consciousness and conscience.

Once removed, will they lose that place? And what will happen to our new self-awareness of our own powerlessness and invisibility in today’s America?

Three comparisons have come to mind in the hours since the Mayor made his announcement. They are found in Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man,” Oliver Sacks’ “Awakenings” and the raw exposure of poverty after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans.

Ellison’s novel is about race, Sacks’ book (and the subsequent film) is about mental illness and the New Orleans revelations are about class, poverty and race.

Each, in its own way, makes visible the invisible, however briefly.

Most of us live in a dream of denial. The Occupy Movement has cried out, “Wake Up!” It has even demonstrated how we, the “99 percent,” have been made blind to our own victimization and exploitation by privileged, powerful few.

The camps should be shut down, but the Movement, the revelation, must continue in new effective, sustainable ways. None of us should return to invisibility — to our worlds of illusion and ignorance or of discomfort and despair.

Vote in 2012 against The Fool's Game

2011-11-04T11:20:00.000-07:00

In his essay “There are Realistic Alternatives,” Gene Sharp, the renowned scholar/thinker on the use of nonviolence, outlines the “elements of strategic planning” necessary for effective nonviolent struggle.

The elements are worth reviewing in the context of the “Occupy” movement. Unless those in the movement are purposely hiding their planning, I’m seeing very little evidence of it.

What we get are shards, fragments and chucks of vital issues, but there is no evidence of systematic strategic planning.

Rather than go into the requirements as Sharp lays them out, I urge you to download the pamphlet from the Albert Einstein Institute web site. The essay and several others by Sharp are available free on-line.

Here is just one example of a fundamental missing element in the “Occupy” movement: “Develop a grand strategy for the overall conflict. Identify the objective of the struggle in clear, specific terms.”

Unless I’m missing something, we are still waiting to learn the “objective of the struggle in clear, specific terms.”

So here’s one attempt to define an objective and describe a strategy to achieve it:

We, fellow citizens, are playing a fool’s game called “Democracy American Style.” It is literally rigged for and by the rich and has produced a plutocracy/kleptocracy.

Here’s just one way it works: our system can’t represent or understand the will of the people because the major means of communication is paid for and controlled by wealthy vested corporate interests. The U.S. Constitution legalizes media domination and distortion by a wealthy elite.

Democracy requires an informed, thoughtful public making rational — not emotional — decisions. Our capitalist, controlled system of communication is not providing that information or that opportunity for full discussion and reflection.

I also believe that the size of our government makes it so diffuse, impenetrable and powerful that it cannot be responsive to the people it governs. We should be a nation of small regional or local governments. At most the “national” government should be an alliance of these small, responsive, local governments. The United States cannot be both “a major power” and a major force for good. The two have been proven to be incompatible.

The over-arching objective of the nonviolent movement should be to put an end to this Fool’s Game and to create a truly representative, fair, responsive and compassionate system of governance based on local representation and involvement.

At the end of his essay, Sharp lists 198 methods of nonviolent action. The sheer number boggles the mind. The diversity is likewise staggering, everything from strikes (he lists 21 varieties) to various kinds of boycotts, to rent refusal, to mock funerals, to marches and pilgrimages, to prayer and worship. The list goes on and on.

But one, number 124, intrigued me in light of the above objective. It reads, “Boycott Elections.”

What if we boycotted the elections of 2012? What if we “voted” by submitting blank ballots. The tally of unmarked ballots submitted would wildly exceed the number of votes cast for candidates. The tally of blank ballots would constitute the vote against “The Fool’s Game.”

What would the consequences be? Exactly what we’d get if we did cast ballots for candidates — more of the same. A continuation of the Fool’s Game.

But by voting against the system, we would have proclaimed that we, the majority, are no longer party to it — that, in fact, the resulting government does not represent the people or their “will.” These “minority unelected” representatives are hence illegitimate.

The only way to restore legitimacy is to establish a new constitution creating a truly representative government (or governments) that can address this society’s needs. A true “government of, for and by the People.”

Witness to the Occupation

2011-10-31T18:55:00.000-07:00

I’ve pondered deeply, as you no doubt have, what the Occupy movement is all about.

I’ve conclude that, at its root, it is a witnessing — witnessing for justice and a just society.

“To bear witness” is a spiritual term, and this movement is certainly that. It is driven by a spirit of outrage, of non-violence, of consensus, of fairness, of peace, of equality, of community and of justice....the list goes on and on.

To bear witness is also a legal term. Unrefutable, unbiased, untainted witnessing is the basis of justice in our courts. The Occupy movement here in Portland is encamped next to the County and Federal Courthouses. But the bearing of judicial witness is not for those courts alone.

The witnesses here have brought themselves before the court of public opinion, whose verdict, one hopes, will be cast at the polls.

So far, surveys tell us, the public sides with this committed eclectic community of witnesses. Their testimonies are beyond credible. They need only point to the homeless and bereft who have joined them. They too — the veterans, the mentally ill, the bankrupt, the homeless — are witnesses to the injustices of our society.

They also point to the greed of the one percent.

What society dare arrest and detain its honest, non-violent witnesses? That’s the question posed to those who hold public office. Here in Portland, so far, our public servants recognize the righteousness and truth of this cause.

They recognize the need of the public, to whom they answer, to fully hear the testimony and fairly weight it.

In places like Oakland, public officials will pay the price of stifling the sworn and overt truth of this movement.

To those who have not become involved but who have seen this movement and heard its message, realize that you too are now witnesses. How long will it be before you volunteer to take take the stand, to swear to tell the truth — to testify.

Remaining silent in these troubled times is not an option.

Quaker support for the Occupy Movement

2011-10-27T22:16:00.000-07:00

A couple of weeks ago our Quaker meeting approved a minute in support for “Occupy Portland.”

It reads:

We, Multnomah Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), support social and economic justice. We oppose subservience to powerful financial interests. We support Occupy Portland and other current non-violent protests seeking justice.

So the question is: What next? What, exactly, does it mean to support Occupy Portland?

I’m not being glib here. Occupy Portland folks seem to ask the same question every day. Meanwhile, there’s food to be ladled out, dishes to be washed, disagreements to be resolved, anxieties to be calmed and trash to be collected.

And that’s just a partial listing of "household" chores

In the domestic details of protest, the cause can be lost.

Is the “Occupy” movement beginning to look like a lost cause?

As long as that cause is “social and economic justice,” we, as a nation dedicated to it, can’t afford to lose.

The problem is that we need to know what is to be gained. Here’s where Quakers can help.

Those in the movement already are versed in and practicing the tried-and-true Quaker decision-making process that is built around consensus. What the activists don’t know are Quaker testimonies and values. They are why so many Quakers support this vibrant movement. The movement, in turn, has produced the energy to carry these values forward to the society at large.

So what are we talking about when we refer to the values of the Religious Society of Friends, commonly known as Quakers?

Here there are, couched in the context of “social and economic justice” circa 2011.

The starting point is that there is that of the Spirit in everyone. Some would substitute for “Spirit” the word “God,” “The Divine,” “the Light,” “the manifest” or “the beyond within.”

Frankly, the words don’t matter. If you are alive to an inner life and Light, you know what I’m talking about.

The Spirit is alive in the 99%, and, yes, in the 1% — however faintly. Its omnipresence is our hope.

The actual testimonies number five.

Simplicity. Simplify our lives. Know that the accumulation of objects impoverishes the soul and leads to injustice. Consider that less is indeed more — more for all.

Peace. Our souls are as impoverished by war and strife as much as they are by excess, materialism and greed. As we seek peace and justice, we must do so non-violently. Unless our movement is grounded in peace, it will destroy us — physically and spiritually.

Integrity. It is not enough to espouse what we believe; we must live it.

Community. We act for the greater good of community knowing that acting solely for ourselves is spiritually bankrupt.

Equality. We are equal and one in Spirit. We see and feel ourselves present in each other. We don't just treat each others as equals. We are equals.

Conveniently, the testimonies form the acronym S-P-I-C-E. If you add divine spiritual love to it, you get “SPLICE.” Together they are what Quakers, in support for the protest, bring to the this liberating, dynamic movement for social and economic justice.

'This is what you shall do...'

2011-10-20T19:02:00.001-07:00

Visiting the “Occupy Portland” encampment in the waning hours of the crisp evening of Wednesday, Oct. 19, I wandered among hummocks of tents and lulling conversations on park benches and under trees. A communal dinner was sheltered under a drapery of tarp canopies. The camp’s denizens, a mix of young, poor, educated, idealistic, committed, and, frankly, deranged, have built an utterly eclectic community intent on serving its needs. Food, shelter, clothing, sanitation...first aid, mental health counseling, legal advice, a child-car, prayer, external and internal communication.

After my amble through the passages of this nearly instant village, I sat in the small amphitheater in nearby Terry Schrunk Plaza with 150 or so others. City Hall was across the street to the west, the Federal Justice building was shouting distance to the northeast.

We had gathered in the evening “general assembly.” The discussion was civil and focused. The facilitator, who introduced himself as “Justin,” was respectful and inviting of all comment. Leadership was vested in the assembly. Justin reminded that the goal was consensus. Majorities did NOT rule. Business included a Latino community vow to remain despite harassment and theft, a proposal to march to the affluent Pearl, a resolve to create more community gardens in the City, a proposal to end “Corporate personhood.”

A speaker raised a concern, perhaps an omen: ”Camp is dying for direct action, and we are being way too wonky. Are we policy wonks, or are we about direct action?”

For now, the mere existence of the encampment speaks to what it stands for: equality, a fair and just political system, the power of people over money. Soon, one feels, the community will find ways beyond existence to assert itself.

The day after visiting the site, I came across the following passage. It spoke to my condition and, I thought, to that of those camped out for social justice in Lownsdale and Chapman squares.

“This is what you shall do; Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.”
― Walt Whitman, from the introduction to the Leaves of Grass.

PTA pitches Coke 'rewards' program

2011-10-16T09:01:00.000-07:00

An on-line PTA newsletter recently highlighted a CocaCola program that has students using soft drink label codes to raise money for schools.

It’s all part of something Coke calls “Coke Rewards.” The real “reward” is for CocaCola’s bottom line through acceptance of the consumption of harmful, sugar-laden beverages that contribute to an epidemic of diabetes.

In short, the PTA's promotion of this program is trading the health of children for a few dollars for cash-strapped schools. The problems are real; the answers can’t be found in consumption of soft drinks and corporate handouts.

In addition to Coke’s gaining positive PR through its program, it also buys silence about the harm done by its products. Note the lame disclaimer attached to the end of the newsletter item.

“This promotion is not intended by anyone at Wilson to encourage consumption of certain products, just to take advantage of the benefits the company offers from products you may already be using.”

“Certain products”? “MAY already be using”?

How about a line that overtly warns against the harm associated with the continued consumption of “certain” “products you may already be using.”

I think they call that “education,” which is the mission, if I recall correctly, of the PTA.

Question: If Philip Morris set up a similar program rewarding submitted cigarette butts with contributions to the school, would the PTA participate?

Here’s the full text of the message as it appeared....

DONATE YOUR “MY COKE” REWARDS TO WILSON HS!

If you drink Coke products, you have the power to donate points that translate to cash and prizes appropriate for improving all kinds of areas at the school. Look under the caps of any Coke product bottle and inside of the carton of Coke, Sprite, Barq's, etc cans for a code worth 3-10 points. You may enter them on your own My Coke Rewards account and then donate them to Wilson or drop them in the PTA box in front office and we'll enter them. Wilson's Students for Environmental Action (SEA) will collect caps from recycled bottles at school. Wilson is registered at MyCokeRewards.com and ready to accept suggestions for our wish list and donations of codes. Go to: http://www.mycokerewards.com, scroll over the "Schools" black tab and click "donate to a school", enter Wilson's zip code 97219 to search, scroll to the bottom of the drop down to find Wilson, click on it and then continue. If you go there soon, you can enter Wilson for their SparksParks for Schools promotion and increase our odds of winning $25,000 to improve our school's park-like grounds. This promotion is not intended by anyone at Wilson to encourage consumption of certain products, just to take advantage of the benefits the company offers from products you may already be using. For more information contact PTA VP Maureen Berrie-Lawson at reeniebl@comcast.net.

On Winter's edge

2011-10-11T10:24:00.000-07:00

I write on Sunday, October 9, Fairbanks, Alaska. It is 2:30 p.m.

The gilded, slanting sunlight angles through trees casting long shadows. The sun's rays fall on dark umber, shriveled leaves that have already begun to decay. The height of fall color came a month ago, around Labor Day. The trees have been bare for two weeks.

The first snow was in the forecast for this weekend, but it never came. It’s a good thing because no one seems quite ready for the onset of winter.

“The hammer is about to drop,” said one acquaintance.

After a while one doesn’t ask what folks are doing this weekend or next. Everyone is “getting ready for winter.”

And winter in Fairbanks is something one had better prepare for.

Laying up wood, bringing out skis, hanging up bikes, hauling out heavy-duty, warm boots and parkas, putting on snow tires, making sure the car is equipped with blankets — just in case.

Cleaning out the garage to make room for the intrepid cars and trucks. The yard gets raked and mowed one last time. Mulch and compost is spread to cloak garden and lawn.

One acquaintance was replacing his headlights with higher-beamed ones that can pick out a moose farther down the road. Braking distance, like shadows, lengthen in winter. A moose can do major damage. Early detection can save fenders, windshields and, yes, lives.

Rob hopes the moose he hit last year survived its encounter with his car. “I think the damage was kept to his knee,” he says with a shrug of uncertainty.

Flashlights need checking. New batteries are in order. Cross-country skiers will strap miner’s headlights around their balaclavas.

For all the concern about lack of light on dark days, one friend told me that the darkest time is now, in October, before the luminating snows fall. Snow and its crystals catch and scatter light on short days blessed by long, lingering dawns and dusks.

“It’s a kind of gloaming,” she says in awe of both the horizon's light and the ancient word for it. “The blues are almost greens in the distance to the north.”

And she is not referring to the crazed dancing of the blue-green Northern Lights, though she might have been.

On this day during our walk on the frozen mud of soon-to-be ski trails, the light reflects from the bone whiteness of the birch forest that surrounds us.

In another month, the temperatures, now in the low 50s during the day and mid-twenties at night, can drop to 30 below. January averages 10 below zero.

Before Fairbanks began to feel the effects of global warming, minus 50 was possible. Today the permafrost thaws in summer. Some houses built on the once solidly frozen saturated soil are sinking. The growing season now starts in May and lasts to early October. It has folks worried.

Beyond the physical preparations for winter are mental adjustments.

Fourteen-year-old Sarah Walling-Ball, already practicing soccer indoors in a school gym on a crisp, cold Fairbanks afternoon, puts it bluntly. “Good-bye to happiness. Hello to eight months of toughing it out.”

These early October days are “borrowed time” that will end with a sudden snap — and certainly the inevitable shortened days. On this very day, Fairbanks loses seven minutes of sun exposure.

Each year, Sarah's’ mom, Cathy Walling, plans a winter retreat to the south to hearten her. Hawaii and even Australia call. “It’s not a luxury; it’s a necessity,” she says of trips to southern summer sunshine.

Before and after these far-away trips, she takes vitamin D and puts herself under a special light box to ward off Seasonal Affective Disorder.

She especially feels the loss of energy on these shortening October days. Once, she used to fight the fatigue by staying busy. Now, she says, she honors and surrenders to Earth’s call to hibernation.

She knows she is not alone. Winter bonds the people of Fairbanks, otherwise known for their political differences. It’s a communal “hunkering down” in which each person is ready to protect anyone endangered by the cold.

“We really need each other. If the car breaks down at 40 below, it’s a matter of life and death. Strangers stop and help.”

It’s a time for creativity too — drawing, writing, painting, spinning wool. Much of the art is communal — knitting, quilting, reading in book groups, singing. A group of play readers perform five times each year. Three of those five presentations are in winter.

A theater troupe is rehearsing “MacBeth,” a chilling tale that warms with truth for a cold clime.

Come what come may, Time and the hour runs through the roughest day.

Postscript: I am back in Portland now. I left Fairbanks early yesterday morning. On our way to the airport, the forests and roads were lightly frosted in the brittle morning. As I looked out the car window at the gray landscape, I sensed a land and people at one in the seasons and seasonings of time.

iPad is bearer of sad news

2011-10-05T18:32:00.000-07:00

Here is where, and how, I learned of Steve Jobs' death.....

His was a life well and fully lived.

Contrasting advice for Wall Street protesters

2011-10-04T11:52:00.000-07:00

On Sunday, Nicolas Kristof, the estimable New York Times columnist and Oregon native, offered a list of “practical demands” that he thought the “Occupy Wall Street” organizers should get behind. See his full column HERE.

His three “suggestions” are as much evidence of the problem as they are efforts at a solution. Take a look. (As you will see, my own "suggestions" are radically different):

1. Kristoff wants to impose a financial transactions tax. The “modest tax on financial trades” .... would “dampen speculative trading that creates dangerous volatility.”

2. Close the “carried interest” and “founders’ stock” loopholes, which, in Kristof’s words, “may be the most unconscionable tax breaks in America.”

3. Protect big banks from themselves by “moving ahead with Basel III capital requirements and adopting the Volcker Rule to limit banks’ ability to engage in risky and speculative investments." Kristof calls this “the finance equivalent of a pollution tax.”

Right. So what’s wrong with this surprisingly modest list?

Nothing really, except nothing on it will happen because the money-driven political system won’t allow it.

What’s needed is overarching political change. Note I didn’t say “reform.” Considerable “clean slate” thinking is needed here. Instead of nibbling ineffectively at the tax code, we need to take a hard look at that “holy of holies) the U.S. Constitution to see where it is at odds with democracy, civility, freedom and fairness.

So here is a list of changes (13 demands!) to commend to the Wall Street protesters:

1. Whatever constitutional provisions allow soulless Corporations to have the rights of individual citizens need excising.

2. Whatever constitutionally allows a handful of votes (in small rural states) to block the majority's will (through filibusters etc.), must go.

3. The electoral college is an anachronism. Out with it!

4. We need universal health care, period. No compromises, NONE. (this very likely can’t happen until 2. and 3. are in effect.)

5. The right to education and employment should have equal status with the right to vote — which, by the way, is also under attack — thanks again to the Constitution and the powers it gives the states.

6. In the name of peace, we should require that our foreign aid be equal to or greater than our military spending. The two must NOT be conflated.

7. The Second Amendment should be rewritten so that it clearly serves domestic tranquility, not crime, mayhem, “accidental deaths” and hatred.

8. Media literacy should be a required course in all schools — at every grade level.

9. We should create an economy based on needs, not wants. Note: that means our societal priorities should be public needs (schools, health care, bridges, mass transit, social services) at the expense of private wants (jewelry, expensive cars, second and third homes, private jets, yachts etc.) Basic needs should be spelled out and guaranteed. Housing, health, education, food etc. (We don't need to re-invent the wheel. See the UN Declaration of Human Rights.

10. We must legislate requirements that create a “carbon neutral” economy. We must end global warming.

11. Employees (including — and notably — CEOs) should be paid what they are worth, not what the easily manipulated market will bear or what closed boards of directors decide or compromised "compensation consultants" recommend. And, yes, the question of what employees are  worth needs to be discussed, determined and negotiated openly and honestly. Questions of equity, living wages and human dignity should be addressed.

12. The judicial and law enforcement systems must be just and equitable. Minimum sentencing is a denial of due process and capital punishment is, in every case, “cruel” and “excessive.” Both should be outlawed.

13. Get big money out of politics once and for all. Limit campaign contributions and/or simply publicly finance elections. Believe me, it will be “cost effective.”

The contrast of my list to Kristof's solutions to our problems is stark and, frankly, worrying. I admire him for writing so boldly about the problems he finds among the poor abroad. Why, then, is he so wobbly and narrowly focused in writing about our problems here at home?

An afterthought: Under the present political system, my list is even less likely to be implemented than Kristof's. The difference, however, is that my list is attuned to working outside the system, which is exactly what the protesters are doing. More power to them — and us!

The end of my typewriter era

2011-10-03T16:18:00.000-07:00

As some of you know, for about four years I became quite obsessed with old typewriters, and in a mad frenzy acquired more than 50 of these wonderful old machines. A couple even dated back to the 19th Century.

In my enthusiasm, I put on displays of typewriters at three local colleges. The displays featured the same models that several famous authors used to write well-known books. After I'd install the displays, I'd stand at a distance and wait for throngs of students to crowd around.

It never happened. The typewriters barely drew a glance although a few teachers remarked on the displays. "I had one of those once," one old prof observed. Another said that he wrote his dissertation on an IBM Selectric like the one I had on display. He was impressed that Hunter Thompson had used the same model to write about Fear and Loathing.

So, after my displays flunked out on campuses, the typewriters stayed in my basement. I'd pull out a couple of the more interesting ones if a visitor showed so much as a glimmer of interest. The glimmer flickered out after the first three or four minutes of my basic typewriter dissertation.

On-line there's a pretty enthusiastic typewriter collecting community. They share advice about jammed keys, frayed ribbons and swap stories and occasionally typewriter.

A few months back the New York Times featured a story about young people getting interested in the machines. It didn't match my experience although I did heft a typewriter to an on-line organized "Meet up" group. Two of us showed up, had coffee and left never to meet again.

Mostly I became a neighborhood repository for unwanted and abandoned typewriters. "Hey, I hear you collect typewriters. I have this old one that belonged to my Mom. Are you interested?" I would follow a series of probing questions about model year, brand, condition etc. Silly me. In return I'd get: "Well, you know, it's just an old typewriter."

I'd take in a few of these orphans but then I started running out of space, so I'd donate the better ones to charity auctions until I pared back my collection to 45 or so. Selling them on-line had two drawbacks. One was the hassle of shipping them. The other was that jewelers were known to buy them to harvest their keys for bracelets. Kind of like poaching elephants for their tusks.

Then one day I noticed at Powell's Technical Bookstore downtown that someone had stashed some old typewriters and adding machines (I had three or four of those too) up on the tops of prominent book shelves. The clerk told me that the owner, Michael Powell, collected typewriters. I happen to have an ex-wife who knows Powell and through her I got a phone number and an introduction.

I figured that it was better that my typewriters be on display at Powell's than stashed away in my basement. On the phone Powell and I talked vaguely about compensation (book credit at the store) but I mostly wanted the reading public to see the assortment of Royals, Underwoods, Remingtons, Olivers, Hermes and Olympias (to name a few brands).

It took a while (Powell is mostly retired now and travels a lot) but finally, last month, a panel truck from Powell's backed into the driveway and the driver and I loaded up 40 typewriters, three adding machines and various typewriter paraphernalia.

I kept three typewriters back, just for old time's sake. They are shown here. The Olivetti Lettera 22 was the machine that got me started collecting in the first place. It as a nostalgia thing. I'd had one in the Peace Corps in Kenya 45 years ago. It was a balky little typer but I loved the way it looked. Very Italian. It is commonly found in teal. My tan one with its red shift key is pretty rare. Or at least I like to think so. Don't get me started....

There was no way I was going to let go of my folding Corona in its leather, velvet-lined traveling case. Besides, Agatha Christie and Ernie Pyle both hammered away on these little machines.

Finally, I kept an Underwood Universal mostly because I had two of them. I figured Powell's could get by on one. I particularly like the ribbon spool covers with their cut-out logos.

I also saved back my collection of ribbon tins. Some of them bear masterpieces of Art Deco graphics.

In the two weeks the typewriters have been gone, I haven't missed them. I figure they are in good hands At some point I'll call Michael Powell just to make sure, to see whether he's been to see them and whether he'd like me to tell him about what he has a treasure trove of typing history he has.

Oh, and I might ask about that credit at the bookstore.

A new perspective on Hillsdale

2011-09-30T06:01:00.000-07:00

When our neighborhood, with its commercial center, was awarded a Main Street designation last year, those who chose us for the program did so, in part, because we had a problem. A major commuter thoroughfare, Capitol Highway, cuts through the shopping district. It is both an asset and a liability to our neighborhood. It brings commuter business to the area, but it floods the Town Center with disruptive and, at times, dangerous automobile traffic.

No single event underscores the problem better than JPMorgan Chase Bank's interest in building a new branch here. This week, in an editorial in the Hillsdale News, I shared my perspective on the problem. Here's what I wrote:

Even though we say we live in a place called Hillsdale, it really is two places.

One I'll call a wide place in the road - at the top of the hill.

This Hillsdale is a dynamic, traffic-rich place defined by 32,000 work-day commuters passing through it. From the standpoint of merchants, large retailers (including banks) and commercial property owners, it is a strategically significant commercial strip.

Significantly, the patrons of the wide place pass through and don't identify with Hillsdale as a community because they don't live here.

Which brings us to the second Hillsdale, the place where you and I live. To us it is a community with a commercial center at its civic core. It has our three schools, our library, our Farmers Market, several locally owned shops, a few places to worship and a few to imbibe.

Most importantly, it is where we - 7,400 of us - reside nurtured by friends and neighbors.

It is home.

For easy reference let's refer to the two Hillsdales as the "wide place" and the "community."

Until quite recently these two Hillsdales got along fairly well. For 20 years, a couple dozen of us made plans for the "community" Hillsdale. We actually redrew the map and created a Hillsdale neighborhood. That status gave us some official standing with various governments including the City, the County, Metro, the School District and Tri-Met.

Meanwhile, some with commercial interests were also figuring out how to take advantage of the "wide place" Hillsdale.

Since its founding last year, the new Hillsdale Main Street, to its credit, has tried to balance the interests of both Hillsdales.

It hasn't been easy, particularly in light of JPMorgan Chase's interest in and single-minded motives for building a branch here.

Chase's first proposal, designed for commuters, predictably ran afoul of the desires of the neighborhood association and the Hillsdale Town Center Plan, which is aimed at promoting commercial in-fill and pedestrian, bike and bus transit.

After that setback, Chase has returned to the drawing board.

Let's hope the big bank will confer first with the community before it puts pencil to paper. To be successful, it should please BOTH Hillsdales and so unite them.

It can be done.

For the record, I'm not in favor of building another bank here. We have two plus an ATM for a third in the Town Center. Several other banks have branches nearby. Chase's presence is as near as the Burlingame Fred Meyer.

Despite my opposition, I'll offer Chase some advice about how to succeed in getting approval to build in the Town Center. It starts by treating our two Hillsdale's as one.

Zoning calls for a building more than twice as large as the one Chase originally proposed. Chase wanted a smaller building to make way for more parking. It actually reserved nine of 21 spaces for its nine employees, assuming they would ALL drive to work. Does that sound like Portland or Hillsdale to you?

For Chase's proposal to pass muster, it should adhere to existing zoning and then use just part of the big, possibly two- or three-story building for a small Chase branch.

But what about the leftover space? you ask.

Now here comes the challenging part, particularly for Chase, which seems innovation-averse. Rent the rest to a diversity of businesses. Or simply lease it to a developer to sub-lease.

I already know the criticism of my proposal. An earlier effort to lease space in a multi-use commercial building failed to attract tenants.

Here's where the creative part comes in. Until the economy improves and tenant interest resumes, Chase should donate - or make available at a nominal fee - the space to the community. We could use a community art gallery. The Hillsdale Main Street program could use a prominent location with space for its numerous meetings. The Hillsdale Community Foundation could open a small book store and stock it with donated books. The Hillsdale Bicycle Coalition might open a bike repair cooperative. SW Trails could open an information center for hikers. Hey, how about a little competition for the banks by renting to a credit union?

The list is only limited by our imaginations.

So how about it Chase? Can you get out of your Wall Street mind set and "think local."

By serving two Hillsdales you could help create one.

From car to computer crazed

2011-09-27T21:34:00.000-07:00

When I was a kid, each fall on my way home from school I’d veer off the shortest route home to walk by a trucking firm that hauled new cars.

Well before I ogled newspaper photos of the new models, I would get an exclusive look at the sleek sheet metal riding on the open trailers and lined up in the trucking company lots.

This was not idle voyeurism. Every other year I knew that my Dad would buy one of these remarkable machines. A lot of people did. The Fifties were the height of the car culture. Detroit and its auto fantasy drove the bulk of American industry.

So as I’d approach the trucking lot in anticipation, I’d feel a rush of quasi-ownership. A compulsion really. An irrational lure.

For all kinds of reasons, besides the turning of hundreds of calendar pages, those days are over.

Today, cars last longer. We keep them longer. Much longer. We have to. I’ve lost my obsession for outrageous stylistic flair and the newest, latest. Owning a new car has no cache with my friends or family. My cars have been used for the past 20 years. Not clunkers exactly, but they’d been around their share of blocks.

Still, the feeling that I had approaching that trucking lot decades ago is still with me. Today, satisfying the consumptive urge costs less and achieves more — or at least I’d like to think it does.

What attracts me and millions of others now are new computers and associated geeky gadgets. The “much anticipated” label gets applied to every new mass-marketed computer device. These machines are “unveiled” just as Chevy Impalas and Pontiac Firebirds once were. Think no farther than the anticipation surrounding the iPhone 5, and the new Amazon tablet.

Here we have “not-so-major” purchases that still create buzz and carry status. Apple, today’s Chrysler or Lincoln or Cadillac, profits from high price tags partly for this reason. It also helps that the Cupertino giant is fixated on consumer satisfaction.

Computers are much more parts of our lives than cars were. And much more important to us. In fact, our cars rely on computers. Which is more difficult to replace, a stolen car or a stolen computer? We are “into” computers far more than we are "in" our cars. These wheel-less vehicles can transport us to real and imaginary worlds in nano seconds!

Oddly, points of comparison between computers sound similar to those once used in car marketing. Power, performance, speed, design. A current Intel campaign displays a sports car with half of its front appearance portrayed in x-ray. The caption reads, “Visibly_Smart....Stunning Visuals_Intelligent Performance”

No one ever told us we were “smart” or “intelligent” to buy the now iconic 1959 Chevy Impala but visuals and performance — computer selling points — were definitely in play.

Accessories also come into play. I have a new Mac Air (yes, Apple grabbed me again). Its keyboard lights up, presumably on the off chance I need to work on the Red Eye after the cabin lights have dimmed. The metallic graceful notebook is also light, thin and, well, sleek. These non-essentials no doubt played a role as I forked over a cool grand for an Air at the Apple “showroom.”

Didn’t cars once “grace” showrooms?

No list of comparisons would be complete without mentioning planned obsolescence, except in the case of computers you don’t get the feeling it is all that planned. The “latest technology” really is the latest. With cars, the basic technology never really changed until the introduction of the hybrid system.

Finally, there is the status-defining differentiation within lines. When Dad bought his new Buick, he bypassed the “entry-level” Special and the “luxury” Roadmaster and the similar, but less powerful Super. For him, the “Century” fit his persona. It was the closest thing that Buick had to a hot rod.

When I shopped Apple for my laptop, I too had a hierarchy of MacBook models to choose from. Good, better, best.

I got the feeling that the choices were there mostly to give me pause to ponder and engage with my options and prospective purchase. They defined the field. Besides, Apple seemed to be saying that it had given thought to my individuality. Steve Jobs had, in fact, considered me.

Buick showed the same marketing “sensitivity” to my Dad a half century ago.

Have we come all that far since then?

A Quaker Sunday in a 'Year of Sundays'

2011-09-23T10:54:00.000-07:00

Amanda Westmont and Joel Gunz are local, self-avowed secular, religious reporters who write an entertaining, irreverent blog titled “Year of Sundays.”

Their catchy motto is “We go to church so you don’t have to.”

And so they have gone — to a wide variety of congregations.

Eventually, the time would come for the couple and their children to visit our Quaker Meetinghouse on Stark Street. I’ve been looking forward to meeting them and learning what they might have to say about Multnomah Friends.

On August 7, they arrived at our door.

By chance, I welcomed them after they introduced themselves as the authors of "Year of Sundays.” A couple of us complimented them on their blog and its wry perspective.

I hoped they would find Quakers as intriguing and challenging as I do, even after nearly 50 years of attending “unprogrammed meetings.”

In lay terms, “unprogrammed” means we worship largely in silence and have no pastor or minister. There is not a “programmed” order of service. Much more can be found about unprogrammed Quakers HERE.

So what would these two affable, skeptical, secularists have to say about us after their visit? In mid-September, we found out.

Joel’s name appears on the post but my guess is that his impressions reflect Amanda’s as well.

I anticipated a review that might actually reflect the vitality of our meeting. For a congregation that avoids any kind of proselytizing, we are seeing astonishing growth, particularly among young people. The obvious journalistic question is “Why?”

But to ask the question, you’d have to be familiar with the history of the meeting, or at least ask, “What’s with your congregation these days?”

But Joel never asked.

In journalistic parlance, he “missed the story.”

In fairness to him and Amanda, it was understandable. Their purpose was to report on THEIR experience during a two-hour visit. The first hour was for silent worship (punctuated by spoken ministry); the second hour was for socializing.

What they detected, and reported on, was an unquestioning, even stifling, uniformity of liberal political correctness.

End of story.

I’ve seen this happen before. People seem to want to dismiss Quakers by putting them in some familiar bag. Unfortunately, we provide them with outward signs that help their cause.

I think the stereotyping also comes from the fact that, inwardly, we are scary. Quakers call on those who worship with us in silence to look within themselves. Oh-oh. You actually have to plumb unplumbed depths. You can either do it, or at least try to do it, or you can run from it.

That’s what Joel, using his glib prose, did. We Quakers simply became grist for the “Year of Sundays” mill.

What did I expect? What did I learn from Joel and Amanda’s visit?

I expected that they would see how unique we are. That we are “radically inclusive” — we are devout Christians, devout atheists and, yes, devout skeptical, pen-wielding secularists.

Rather than being unquestioning, as Joel portrayed us, our spiritual seeking is manifestly driven by questions. We call them “queries.” Each month we post one on two walls of the large, sky-lit room where we worship. Did Joel and Amanda notice? Examples: “How do we exercise our respect for the balance of nature?” and “Do we center our lives in the awareness of the presence of God so that all things take their rightful place?” and “Do we keep to a single standard of truth so that we are free from the use of judicial and other oaths?”

Three centuries ago in England, Quakers were considered a “Dangerous People.” Many Friends share the belief that, in today’s wayward society, we still must be a “Dangerous People” — “dangerous” to injustice, inequality, deceit, consumerism and the destruction of the planet.

At the very least, to folks like Joel and Amanda, we should seem, if not “dangerous,” curiously, strikingly challenging.

Apparently not.

If Joel is right and we are simply predictably liberal and politically correct, we have failed to be true to our tradition and our callings.

Clearly in the case of Joel and Amanda, we failed to convey who we are and what it means to be a Quaker.

We have work to do.

Nicaragua: land of determination, poverty and joy

2011-09-19T16:10:00.000-07:00

Josh von Kuster is an occasional contributor to The Red Electric. Here is his report of a recent trip to Nicaragua as part of a delegation from our Quaker meeting.

By Josh von Kuster

You take three flights from Portland, spanning 13 hours and finally touch down at Augusto C. Sandino International Airport in Managua, just before 9 p.m. local time. Right on schedule. You grab your bags emerging from a fog of coach-class dozing and make your way to the front exit door.

And it hits you.

The tropics bombard you with humidity, heat, closeness and life: a constant presence for the duration of your 11 days here in the poorest country on the American mainland. The sun rises and sets, the rain comes and goes, the birds, frogs, insects and assorted other fauna share the rhythm. The tropicality remains ever-present.

Clearing customs comes with foreboding for gringos. Perhaps due to too many Hollywood portrayals, you have visions of prison guards interrogating you in Spanish in a decrepit stucco jail. Occasionally you are greeted by alluring young locals with flowers and rum drinks. Tonight, you are simply asked to pay the $10 entry fee and are waved on into the country.

You then pile into the short-bus, bound for Ciudad Sandino and the Center for Development in Central America by way of the Pan-American highway. The trip has very few delays thanks in large part to the numerous roundabouts. The ride is fairly uneventful except for the police pick-up hurtling down the road bearing men in and out of uniform standing in the truck's bed. Transportation of all kinds is communal in this country.

The bus turns off the highway onto a side boulevard by way of a U-turn and a hard-right. The street is cobbled and bumpy but far superior to the unimproved driveway up a steep bank leading to the Center. It is a concrete walled compound guarded by members of the security company required to comply with international trade conventions (thank you CAFTA).

The Center’s staff welcomes you as you disembark, and you give your thanks to Chico for the safe, speedy journey. The greeting is brief as you’re exhausted despite sleeping on all the flights. Soon you collapse on your top bunk under two fans, naively optimistic that the sweating will soon stop.

In the morning, you awake to the reality that you are indeed in a Third World country. The bathroom comes equipped with trash bins next to all the toilets with prominent placards requesting you to put your toilet paper in said bin rather than the toilet as it causes the septic system to back up. In case the point wasn’t clear enough, another placard at the door on the way out invites you to return to the toilet and fish out the offending paper with your hands if need be (and then wash your hands “really really well”).

Now the best part begins: superior coffee grown less than 100 miles distant and roasted even closer. Despite its being ground days in advance and its plastic brewer, the coffee’s rich flavor cannot be vanquished. And gallo pinto (pronounced GUY-o PEEN-toe, meaning “speckled rooster”), the national dish, accompanies two meals a day, everyday.

Following breakfast, you discover what blue collar life was like before automation and the assembly line. Your job is to make adoquines (ah-doe-KEY-nays), or paving stones, to improve the driveway. You will become intimately familiar with the pavers over the next week.You soon meet Pedro “the Baptist,” who presides over every step of the process like a masonry maestro.

It is a fairly simple process: mix concrete, pour and then pack it into a steel mould, then stack the formed stones allowing them to set. The trouble is, it’s all by hand. And Pedro is not easily impressed by your exertions, having for years overseen similar projects with countless volunteer teams, including aspiring civil engineers.

The critical step in the adoquine process is wetting the concrete just enough to be able to form it easily into the mould. Pedro expertly and entertainingly sprinkles water over the pile of concrete mix as if he were a priest baptizing a Catholic babe in arms. He blesses each paving stone before it is even formed.

This is life in Nicaragua: arduous labor which you must enjoy or go crazy. You are fueled by rice and beans.

Thanks in large part to the introduction of highly processed foods, you see a number of obese people as do your colleagues at the clinic in Nueva Vida. The refined food is available at the numerous pulperias (octopus shops) or convenience shops run out of residences. The children are often skinny, some showing the reddened hair indicative of kwashiorkor, chronic protein deficiency.

Yet you are not so aware of the problems with society in Nicaragua as you are of the happiness and determination of the people. Through horrendous living and working conditions, the people remain happy and jovial. On the occasions when you get the opportunity to converse with the residents, they all seem alert and aware. They are informed of the futility of the political process (the father of the 1979 revolution is now establishing himself as an autocrat). They know the great odds against their situation improving either personally or nationally.

Surprisingly, greed is absent in clearly defined personal spaces. Every home has a structural perimeter ranging from substantial concrete walls to a flimsy piece of string. But all is shared; that which is lent is returned. Compliment someone’s ear rings and they become yours as part of an exchange of gifts.

Surely the people here do enjoy life. Sara is a member of the Genesis Spinning Cooperative which has been her life for the past 4 1/2 years of unpaid labor. She has seen her hopes of a good job with friends-come-family dashed repeatedly in that time, yet her smile is still as broad as lake Managua.

Pedro struggles to feed a family of 7 on his reliable but meagre income from CDCA but is quick with a joke and brings a majesty to his work.

The scores of children you meet at the national landfill laugh and fight and play and bounce as much as any you have ever met, despite living in and surviving off of the largest dump in central America. Everyone you meet loves their community and works hard with and for each other.

In Nicaragua, the human spirit triumphs over poverty. Along the dirt streets with open storm- and gray-water sewage in front of homes, laughing Nicas sit in the shade on their porches and wave at the passers-by.

We, with our fiber-optic internet and wireless clouds and high-definition, 3D tv’s and glass-smooth asphalt, have paid the price of lost companionship. Walk down the streets of the world's most opulent country and you never see a soul.

After 11 days, your experience comes to an end. You feel this Nica world escaping you as you walk through Augustino C. Sandino airport, with its duty-free shops and manequin-like sales women. As you board the Continental flight, the artificiality of western life welcomes you back with air conditioning.

Josh von Kuster is a Christian Quaker attending Multnomah Friends Meeting. Having completed a 10 years as a Navy pilot, he is pursuing a career in nursing and transnational community development.

City to reject JPMorgan Chase's plan for Hillsdale

2011-09-16T05:50:00.000-07:00

JPMorgan Chase’s efforts to open a branch here in Hillsdale has received a major blow.

The City of Portland, through its Bureau of Development Services, has informally told Chase officials that the bank’s proposed plans for the branch will be denied. Douglas Hardy in the BDS Land Services office, shared his conclusion with Chase and Hillsdale neighborhood leaders.

While the formal reasons for the rejection haven't been drafted, the bank's proposed "adjustment to zoning" was expected to be found incompatible the City Council-approved Hillsdale Town Center Plan.

The plan, approved in November 1997, resulted from hundreds of hours of citizen volunteer effort.

The Hillsdale Neighborhood Association, which unanimously voted to reject Chase's plans, submitted its formal letter of objection to BDS yesterday.

Chase had wanted to build a building with less than half the footprint required by City code. The resulting extra space was to be used primarily for extra parking.

The Hillsdale TC Plan calls for pedestrian, bike and bus-transit orientation on new projects.

The City’s denial leaves Chase with three options.

1. Proceed with the current proposal, have the City formally reject it and then appeal to a citizen board. If anything, the board seems less likely to approve the plan.

2. Revise the old plan and resubmit it. But Chase is already on record as saying a larger branch won’t work on the site. (Chase’s neighborhood opponents want a large multi-use building on the site, but Chase has maintained that it isn’t in the business of “development” and building a multi-use structure that would have space for other businesses).

3. Drop plans for building a branch on the old gas station site and back out of the lease deal.

My guess is that Chase will take the third course and pull out of the Town Center. It will still have a Hillsdale presence at a nearby branch at the Burlingame Fred Meyer when the shopping center reopens in late October.

If Chase does drop its Town Center plans, the Hillsdale Main Street program must step forward and do what it was designed to do: Revitalize the commercial area, including this vacant site.

Main Street must help the property owner, Wardin Investments, lease the site to a developer sensitive to community desires and aware of the Town Center Plan. A Hillsdale consortium of investors and businesses would be best.

Meanwhile, a group of us have convened to try to attract a credit union to Hillsdale. If we do, we might (note I said “might”) have a source of funds for an investment consortium. A credit union branch might also be an anchor tenant among two or three businesses in the new multi-use building.

One simple layoff could save 200 jobs

2011-09-14T12:30:00.000-07:00

It's connect-the-dots time.

Earlier this year we learned that Bank of America CEO Brian T. Moynihan received an annual compensation (pay plus bonus) of $10 million.

On Monday we learned that Moynihan’s bank will be laying off “at least” 30,000 employees over the next two and a half years.

Why is a CEO paid $10 million to run a bank that is forced to lay off thousands of workers?

Why not lay him off and use the $10 million savings to keep 200 workers paid $50,000 a year?

My guess is that the bank could make a few other executive bonus cuts as well to keep on-line workers on the job.

And how many corporate jets does the bank have in its hangers? How many houses does Mr. Moynihan own?

By the way, numbers don’t always illustrate their significance. Let’s do this visually. Here is what $10,000,000 will get you.

One CEO symbolized by...

or 200 workers, paid $50,000 symbolized by...

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Got it?

Now tell me that pay inequity doesn’t cause unemployment.

And don't get me started on hedge fund managers.

Moynihan is pauper compared to hedge fund manager John Paulson, who earned a record $4.9 billion last year. That's 490 times what Moynihan made.

Oh, and these hedge fund managers pay their taxes at 15 percent. I still can't figure out what they do besides move money around electronically. Big deal.

Scattered

2011-09-12T22:41:00.000-07:00

This site averages around 50 visitors a day even though I have been posting less frequently of late. Who are these visitors? Who are you? (Consider sharing your identity in the comments below)

Most visits come from web surfers who stumble on a tagged topic of interest.

Two posts getting a lot of hits recently have to do with what happens when the word “God” is substituted for the word “Spirit” in familiar quotations — and vice versa.

If you are interested, the posts are here and here.

The ever-popular “tipsy beer truck” post also maintains its following although it clearly isn’t the same as those hitting on the God/Spirit posts.

Those in the know about blogging “success” (whatever that means) might fault the Red Electric for lack of focus. Beer trucks? God?

So what about my summer's lapse in writing? It’s not that I’m running on fumes; it’s just that I’m not sure anyone is particularly interested in what I’ve been thinking or doing of late.

Maybe your life is a lot like mine these pre-Indian Summer days. Scattered.

Oh, today, I went for an invigorating, forested walk with my visiting sister. How did we both end up in our sixties?

I’m going to Fairbanks, Alaska, early next month on Quaker business. Yes, there are Quakers in Fairbanks.

I’m still trying to block JPMorgan/Chase Bank from opening an unneeded branch in Hillsdale ... and I’m trying to attract a credit union instead.

The Hillsdale community held a celebratory and astonishing Paella dinner for 250 on Saturday night. It was a civic, culinary cabal of friends and neighbors.

National politics is mind-boggling and sad. The only thing worse is the horse-race coverage of it. It’s the beginning of a long silly season ... with a lot at stake.

I’m reading “The Gnostic Gospels,” Hemingway short stories and Chris Hedges’ “American Fascists, The Christian Right and the War on America” (Could things be THAT bad?)

Meanwhile I edit, write and publish The Hillsdale News, which saps writing energy and keeps me out of trouble and busy.

Our Quaker Multnomah Friends Meeting continues to amaze. Vibrant, growing, learning, nurturing, challenging.

How different are my two beloved communities: one secular in Hillsdale, the other spiritual yet deeply engaged in the suffering and injustices of the world. In both, we love, honor and respect each other. It’s hard at times. We differ. We make mistakes. We perform heroics despite ourselves. We talk. We look each other in the eyes, the windows to the soul, and connect to our shared humanity.

It’s “nothing to write home about," but, scattered as it is, it seems important to share for whatever truth it holds.

When drones come home to roost

2011-09-06T09:51:00.000-07:00

And just how long will it take for other terrorists to manufacture and deploy their own drones...with or without nuclear warheads?

And what might their targets be? Portland? Cottage Grove? Drain?

I say “other terrorists,” because the only terrorists using drones, for the time being, are us. If our drone technology doesn’t spread terror, I don’t know what does. Terror, in my book, defines terrorism, whether it is the jetliner-delivered terror in lower Manhattan or drone-delivered terror in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

And if you buy the CIA's contention that our drones don't kill civilians, go HERE.

So what next? Metastasizing, profit-driven technology doesn't play favorites. What goes around comes around.

This is madness, folks. More madness.

Happy Trails

2011-09-05T08:08:00.000-07:00

We went hiking along Eagle Creek trail in the Columbia Gorge this Friday, the first day of a busy Labor Day weekend.

We weren’t alone as we jaunted along the steadily rising path high above the rushing creek.

A steady stream of hikers was getting an early start on the three-day weekend.

I like my hikes in solitude with Nature. No such luck on the Eagle Creek trail on this Friday, but the five-mile hike brought a different joy.

Smiles. Hundreds of smiles.

Human beings are a bit goofy and susceptible when it comes to smiles. We even talk about “infectious” smiles.

How rarely family snapshots are without smiles. We have to suppress smiles at the DMV office. We present ourselves photographically as smiling, though we spend most of our off-camera hours in a smile-less state.

This may be a media literacy moment worthy of a brief detour. Bear with me.

When you think about the famous, pre-photography, oil portraits, how few have smiles. Face it: it’s hard to sustain a smile in a mirthless artist’s studio. Try saying “cheese” for a two-hour sitting.

Old portraits are remarkable when they do offer smiles — as remarkable as Mona Lisa’s smile.

Back on the trail, smiles are everywhere. Happy trails!

We meet a family coming ‘round a bend, and we smile at each other and say “Hi!” “How you doin’?”

Try this on downtown sidewalks or on MAX trains at your peril.

On the trail, two women ease their mismatched dogs by us, with a smile. Even the tongue-lolling dogs smile slobbery grins.

Children didn’t really smile. Hiking is work on short legs. But you can tell it is fun — the adventure of it all.

The only other group exceptional for not smiling was the photographers, intent on “capturing” nature. I’ve been one of them. What a different experience a camera makes of a walk in the woods. Surrounded by beauty, the photographer, intent on preserving it for the future, is somewhere else. Composing, framing, cropping.

One hopes the smiles come later.

So what’s with all this smiling among hikers? Unlike the “cheesy” smiles of posing, these were the real thing, the uninhibited reflections of joy ... of being in the forest, above the rushing waters, along a canyon wall, beneath the sheltering mountains, and, yes, among fellow elated hikers.

The joy!

It wasn’t until later, thinking of those smiles that I was reminded of “Happy Trails,” an ingrained tune from my youth. I’d associated it with Gene Autry, but an on-line search set me straight. The song was composed by Dale Evans, Roy Rogers’ matrimonial sidekick.

It’s a ditty worthy of an ambling ride into the Great Sunset:

Some trails are happy ones,
Others are blue.
It's the way you ride the trail that counts,
Here's a happy one for you.

Happy trails to you until we meet again.
Happy trails to you, keep smilin' until then.
Who cares about the clouds when we're together?
Just sing a song and bring the sunny weather.
Happy trails to you 'till we meet again.

Paul Pintarich: His voice will survive his death

2011-09-01T06:26:00.000-07:00

Paul Pintarich, writer and friend, died Wednesday of injuries suffered in an August 8 kitchen fire in his apartment.

Paul, who was 72 when he died, was a big man who lived a big life, as Rick Bella's excellent obituary profile attests.

Now on my to-do list goes compiling several columns and articles Paul wrote for the Hillsdale/Southwest Community News in the mid-1990s when I was founding editor.

They will appear here. I'm also considering an on-line archives site to make Paul's work readily accessible.

Be assured that Paul's voice will survive his death.

Are you 'vulture aware'?

2011-08-31T07:38:00.000-07:00

On a hike in Portland’s Forest Park earlier this week, I ambled into the Audubon Wildlife Care Center on Cornell Road to discover volunteers preparing for “International Vulture Awareness Day.”

I have to confess I come up short when it comes to “vulture awareness.” A full day of it never crossed my mind.

I also snarkily thought the publication of Dick Cheney’s book might have some kind of tie-in with this Saturday's festivities.

There’s no question that vultures get a bad rap. Generally you don’t want to be referred to as a “vulture.”

But look at the up-side.

One web site expressed the benefits of vultures this way:

Vultures are scavenging birds that help recycle and prevent the spread of disease. Woodland Park Zoo is home to the turkey vulture, a species that ranges from southern Canada to South America. Turkey vulture numbers declined in the 1950s and 1960s, most likely due to the mistaken belief that they spread diseases. Shooting and poisoned baits often targeted these useful birds.

I mean, wouldn’t you like it said of you that you “help recycle and prevent the spread of disease”? From Southern Canada to South America, no less.

Can Cheney say as much?

Of course, like all do-gooders, there is the danger that you, fellow vulture, will be misunderstood. “Don’t shoot! I PREVENT disease; I don’t spread it! I may be ugly but, remember, I’m ‘useful’!”

So consider heightening your vulture awareness this Saturday at the Portland Audubon shelter, 5151 NW Cornell Road, from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.

You and the little vulture-unaware ones in your family can:

“Meet Ruby, Portland Audubon’s Turkey Vulture close up.” (I have and she’s one ugly vulture, but she has soulful eyes. At her feet are dead mice — also known as “vermin.")

“Compare your ‘wingspan’ to that of an Andean Condor.” (Hint, you are waaay “wing-span” deficient.)

“Discover why vultures are important” (This, as it turns out, is as important for vultures as for you.)

“Make a pledge to help vultures survive.” (Raise you right wing and repeat after me....)

Sad news about Paul Pintarich

2011-08-28T15:12:00.000-07:00

Many of Paul Pintarich's friends are visiting him at the Emanuel Hospital Burn Center where he is unconscious and is on palliative "comfort care."

When I called the center today to check on his condition, I was told that Paul is "not expected to survive." His family gave me permission to share the sad news.

Paul was severely burned in a kitchen fire in his apartment on Monday, August 8.

The hospital is located 3001 N. Gantenbein in Portland.

As I wrote in an earlier post, Paul is the former, long-time book review editor at The Oregonian, but I got to know him when he was a regular columnist for the monthly newspaper I started here in Hillsdale back in the mid-Nineties.

Paul grew up in Southwest Portland and shared vivid memories of his childhood with the readers of the Southwest Community Connection.

I wrote a Red Electric tribute to Paul and his writing back in April of 2007. You can read it HERE.

The Gospel Truth?

2011-08-27T15:02:00.000-07:00

We have a lively discussion group at our Quaker meetinghouse early Sunday mornings.

The leader of tomorrow's discussion sent out his ideas about the scheduled discussion topic. I thought you might find them interesting and even challenging.

The topic is:

“What Did Jesus Say
and What Does That Mean to Me?”

Jesus did not say many things we assume he said, and he said many other things people have found convenient to ignore.

He did not say he was God, nor that people should start a new religion in his name, nor that abortion or homosexuality were bad.

He did say that the meek and the peacemakers were his favorite people; that if a man hits you, do not defend yourself; and that you must love and honor those who mistreat you.

I would like us to discuss what Jesus said, and then I would like each one of you to state what Jesus’s message means to you. To get things started, this is what it means to me:

I believe Jesus said far more about social change than what little is stated in the Sermon on the Mount and elsewhere in the New Testament. I believe that is why he was murdered. I believe he was a real troublemaker, in the very best sense of the word, and that separates him from Confucius, The Buddha, Mohammed, Krishna, Moses, and the rest who started a major religion.

My reading of history is that the founders of religions, with the clear exception of Jesus, have generally tended to get along relatively well with existing civil authority. At least, they didn’t get themselves crucified. That is because none of them, except Jesus, declared that existing society was corrupt top to bottom and needed to be first ignored and then changed.

I believe the rest of them said, “Change yourself, one convert at a time, and eventually the world will change, too.” The civil authorities will accept that kind of change.

But Jesus proposed instead the Law of Upside Down, and for that, they killed him.

This is what I believe Jesus actually said in the Sermon on the Mount:

“You have heard it said, that you shall love your friend and hate your enemy. But I say to you, that you shall love your friend and also your enemy. You shall love him who hates you. You shall speak kindly of him who defames you. You shall help him who has tried to injure you. For if you love only him who loves you back, do not the Romans and (Re)publicans the same? How are you any better than they are? What have you learned following me?

“And if a man hits you, turn your cheek, so that he may hit you again. For if you take revenge for every wrong, do not the Romans and (Re)publicans the same? How are you any better than they are? What have you learned following me?”

So far, so good. You’ve heard the above 10,000 times. What follows is the part you haven’t heard, and this is what got him killed.

“You men are as obvious as dogs. You grow up, but you never grow wise. Every one of you wants to sleep with the prettiest girl in the room, and you mock her ugly sister. Every one of you honors the hero, and you laugh at the terrible toils of the common laborer.

"Every one of you exalts the rich man and pretends that he is wise, while you ignore the poor man and pretend he has nothing to say. Every one of you wants to be praised and recognized as some sort of great man, while you refuse to praise and recognize the greatness of others that is all around you.

"You middle-aged men will jump up out of your chairs to help a pretty young woman open a door, even though she has no need of your help. But let an ugly old woman need a door opened, and you sit on your behinds. She must fend for herself. And it is she who needs you.

“I say to you, turn it all upside down. Seek the ugly maiden’s favors, and she will weep for joy that you noticed her. She may also be ten times sexier, ten times kinder, ten times smarter, and ten times more likely to care about you and your future, than her pretty sister.

"Honor the common man, not the hero. The hero has more honors already than he can count. Ignore him, and seek out that man whose work is dangerous and underpaid, and make him your new hero.

"Ignore the rich man. He already has more so-called 'friends' than he can count, because of his money. He has no need of your friendship. Give it instead to the poor man, and ask for his opinions on the issues of the day. His wisdom will surprise you.

"Do not seek promotions, awards, medals, and honors. Seek instead to follow the examples of the ordinary people around you, and praise them for their works. If you watch them closely, you will find much to praise.

"Start living your lives the opposite of how you lived them before. Stop believing that you must cooperate with authority, or that you must be what your parents or teachers wanted you to be.

"Stop helping the existing order to crush our spirits. Stop continuing to do all those things that have made us so miserable for so many generations.

"Start living Upside Down."

The logical conclusion of such a message is a powerful challenge to secular and religious authority. It says that everything is open to scrutiny, to see if it does what it claims to do. It says that nothing is sacred, except treating people right. Ultimately, it says that no person has to right to tell any other person what is right or wrong or what one must do.

Today, in a liberal democracy, you might be able to get away with that kind of preaching. In 33 AD, it was treason.

So that’s what I think Jesus said. What do you think?

Considering "Joys and Concerns"

2011-08-23T11:29:00.000-07:00

We Quakers traditionally seek to learn about each other and to share through expressions of “Joys and Concerns.”

I find myself increasingly relying on these two terms as I go about life. At the very least, they provide balance and open communication.

But I also have come to question whether they provide the proper “frame” for our feelings and experiences. How much outside, and even inside, the Quaker frame of “Joys and Concerns” are we missing?

Consider the defined margins of “joy” on one extreme and “concerns” on the other. Beyond those margins are certainly other feelings. Beyond “joy” consider “ecstasy” and “bliss.” A vast emotional space reaches beyond “concerns,” a word that seems steeped in traditional British understatement. Consider, for instance, “stress,” “worries,” “anxieties,” and even “paranoia.”

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not suggesting that Quakers replace our “joys and concerns” with “bliss and paranoia” (or some such). But what I am suggesting is that the words we choose may limit our awareness and discernment of Truth.

And what about all that falls within the Joy-Concern frame? Why do we share only joys and concerns? How about, for example, sharing “interest” or “passion” or “anger” or “love“ or “disinterest” or “ambivalence”?

Some feelings have little or nothing to do with joy or concern.

Consider too that joy and concern are closely related. In fact each is essential to defining the other. A world without concerns by necessity would be one without the joy of putting concerns aside. A world without joy would be a flat, depressing landscape where concerns wouldn’t be recognizable.

So why must “joys and concerns” be kept distinct? Can we find ourselves in situations that produce both simultaneously?

If you are like me, you may even find joy in a concern. Concern can lead, for instance, to an opening that brings with it the joy of creativity, accomplishment and giving. In Quaker terms, a concern is the beginning of a “leading.”

You may also find concern in joy. Recently I’ve found myself expressing joy at holding a position of responsibility that brings satisfaction. In the same breath my joy evokes the question, “Am I missing something? Has my joy blinded me? Do people I work with have concerns I’m unaware of?”

It would actually make me feel better to know of concerns. Learning them brings me the joy of awareness and the opportunity to help.

Praying for Paul Pintarich

2011-08-19T18:26:00.000-07:00

I checked with Legacy Emanuel Hospital's Burn Center this afternoon about the condition of Paul Pintarich, who was severely burned in a kitchen fire in his apartment on Monday, August 8.

Sadly, he is still listed in critical condition. The center's receptionist said that while Paul can be visited he is heavily sedated, is on a ventilator and can't recognize his visitors.

Paul is the former, long-time book review editor at The Oregonian, but I got to know him as a regular columnist for the monthly newspaper I started here in Hillsdale back in the mid-Nineties. Paul grew up in Southwest Portland and shared vivid memories of his childhood with the readers of the Southwest Community Connection.

I wrote a Red Electric tribute to Paul and his writing back in April of 2007. You can read it HERE.

Paul is much on the minds of his many friends. As Quakers say: Friends, hold him in The Light.

Recent Allures

2011-08-17T15:10:00.000-07:00

Consider this a compare-and-contrast post.

Then again, you might just let the images wash over you — separately.

They combine very different visual experiences from the past week.

The nature photographs are from the Wallowa Mountains of Northeastern Oregon.

The metal sculptures (I hesitate to call them automobiles) are on view at the Portland Art Museum in an exhibit called "The Allure of the Automobile."

The "Allure" exhibit ends Sunday, Sept. 11.

With luck, the Wallowas should be around a bit longer.

Chase: Too big to succeed in Hillsdale?

2011-08-10T12:21:00.001-07:00

Last night’s Hillsdale Neighborhood Association meeting (above) bored in on Chase Bank’s efforts to build a branch in Hillsdale.

Three Chase representatives present got an earful. Indeed, throughout the day in various conferences and meetings, the Chase reps heard why Hillsdale isn’t exactly welcoming the big bank’s plan with open arms.

“You kind of caught us off-guard,” said Chase VP Greta Pass.

And therein lies the problem.

Will the Chase bureaucracy and line-of-command be able to respond to what the bank’s little delegation learned on their visit?

The fact is that Chase is up against a seasoned, savvy group of local folks, several of whom are no strangers to land-use law in Oregon.

Many have been devoted to planning Hillsdale’s future for two decades.

As they see it, Chase, which carries a lot of baggage to begin with, has acted as if Hillsdale were some sleepy, rube-inhabited burg.

With no advance word to anyone in the community, the bank is asking the City for an “adjustment” in the zoning that the local group helped hammer out 15 years ago. Chase wants approval for a building less than half the size required by zoning.

The reason? More parking for home-bound commuters.

But several Hillsdale plans (and there have been at least four) have noted that Hillsdale is a transit district (with seven bus lines) that should invite bus riders, not more cars. It is also a pedestrian district that sorely needs more and better sidewalks and pedestrian connections between businesses on the north side of Capitol Highway, where the bank wants to be.

Planning documents also call for higher density next to the bus lines. Accordingly, they recommend mixed-use buildings of more than one story.

Either Chase officials didn’t read the plans or ignored them. Chase wants one use (a bank, even though two others are just feet away.) It also wants a single story.

A Wall Street outfit of this size is apparently use to ram-rodding its proposals through planning agency bureaucracies. Why scope out the community in advance?

So Chase is off to a bad start.

The question now is whether this big corporate ship wants to change direction in the suddenly choppy waters of Hillsdale.

The HNA last night asked Chase to delay its “adjustment” filing for two months. The Chase delegation said they would have to take the request to “superiors.” Not a good sign.

But it’s a start. If the superiors turn out to be truly superior they will accept the recommendation. If they don’t, HNA has vowed to oppose the “adjustment” request.

Assuming Chase higher-ups agree to the delay, both the bank and the community need to use those two months to sit down and come up with a project that both sides can accept.

It’s a great opportunity for Chase to craft a “Hillsdale Initiative” that can be replicated throughout Oregon, where the bank wants to build three or four dozen branches in the next few years.

As Chase’s Greta Pass told the group last night, Chase considers itself “under-branched” in Oregon compared to its competition.

She also told the group that her bank wants to be a “good neighbor.” Whether Chase is seen as “good neighbors” on ribbon-cutting day and those that follow, depends on what Chase does now — long before ground is broken for construction.

Will Chase suddenly be able to “act small” the way competitors like Umpqua and a few other banks and credit unions do in Portland?

Or is Chase simply too big to succeed in Hillsdale?

My Cyber-Zombie

2011-08-09T16:31:00.000-07:00

A couple of days ago I deleted a blog I posted here. Some readers had found it offensive. Belatedly, I regretted ever hitting the “post” button, but, fortunately, blogger's “delete” button erased my post — or so I thought.

In the post, I compared the appearance of a proposed JPMorgan Chase bank branch for our neighborhood to the ominous appearance of a certain concentration camp's entrance.

I added pictures of both to drive home the point and the vague similarity in appearance.

At best, the reference was a cheap shot. At worst it was an odious, outrageous comparison. Somewhere in the middle it was in poor taste, however true.

When I alerted a well-known local blogger to the community’s reaction to Chase's desire to open shop here, he discovered my deleted post and managed to exhume it.

As best I can figure, he dredged it back to life from someone’s trash cache.

In any case, the "dead" post now lurching around cyber space has been read by more viewers than it ever was in life.

Call it a cyber-zombie. Grim, haunting, shocking to some and embarrassing to me, it has taken on a life after death.

There’s a morbidly familiar lesson here. Once loose on the internet, any message is impossible to contain. There’s even an ad on TV these days of a guy who makes the mistake of unintentionally “replying all.” The only solution is for him to dash around snatching computers from the hands of his friends and colleagues.

Fortunately, my error was not that egregious and I did apologize. The apologetic post survives.

I suppose the lesson I’ve learned was worth the penalty of my on-going discomfort.

The lesson? In cyberspace, "deleted" messages can become more alive, famous and dangerous once they have been “killed.”

Chase-Community Compact needed

2011-08-06T15:03:00.000-07:00

Here is my Hillsdale News commentary on the unfolding story about JPMorgan Chase's proposal to build a branch in Hillsdale. For the story itself, go to hillsdalenews.org.

Communication is equal parts sharing of views, attentive listening and keeping an open mind.

But first you have to get everyone in the same room.

And if agreement is the objective, they need to be willing to meet again and again.

That desperately needs to happen here in Hillsdale as sides line up over Chase Bank's push to put a branch on the old gas station site next to Baskin Robbins.

The atmospherics surrounding Chase's surprising filing for City approval is already tense, to say the least.

We may disagree about the bank's plans, but the need for harmony and progress is such that we can't disagree over the need to communicate.

As things stand now, the community has less than two weeks to comment to the City about the proposal - this in a month when neither business nor neighborhood associations meet.

An "emergency" neighborhood association meeting has been called for Tuesday, August 9 at 6 p.m. at the Watershed building.

That's a beginning. Chase officials, to their credit, plan to attend to answer questions.

I believe they need to do more than that.

I have a proposal which I've shared with some members of the Hillsdale Main Street Board. It doesn't pretend to be a silver bullet, but it might provide a framework for a solution, better use of the lot, an attractive building and a stronger community.

Call it "The Chase/HIllsdale Community Compact plan.

Under the plan, Chase would extend the comment period until bank officials and community members can forge a partnership. The Chase-Community partners would jointly draft the compact, a document that identifies shared objectives and pledges to meet them.

After that, the representative compact group would come up with an agreed upon site design and structure. The discussion leading up to the compact should include, but not be limited to: mixed use building occupancy, more than one story, transit-pedestrian orientation, affordable housing, sustainability, community needs (meeting room, financial support, gathering places), architectural integration with adjacent properties, undergrounding utilities and streetscape aesthetics, local lending and on-going Main Street involvement and cooperation.

I'm sure others will add to the list.

After the inevitable give and take of next Tuesday's meeting, the essential next step should be to establish a framework for moving forward.

A Deletion, an Apology and a Compact

2011-08-05T13:24:00.000-07:00

Until now I have never killed off a Red Electric post. Today I deleted one I put up a couple of days ago.

It had to do with Chase Bank’s efforts to put a branch in Hillsdale. The surprise (some would say “shock”) of Chase’s intentions has brought out the worst in a lot of us in this small community.

In my anger I compared the appearance of the proposed bank to an image of a concentration camp photo. Now I understand why some sites simply don’t accept comments with Nazi references. For many, the pain and emotion aroused simply overwhelm their comprehension of whatever point the writer is trying to make.

For some dear friends, that happened with my post, and I apologize for the pain I caused.

I also made a mistake that I have criticized others for. I got trapped in an inappropriate metaphor. In this case, I relied on “David and Goliath.”

Lazily, I portrayed multi-national Chase as Goliath and, of course, our little Hillsdale community as David.

Worse than being predictable, the metaphor leads inevitably to confrontation and death.

That’s obviously not where I want this to go.

What’s needed here in Hillsdale is quite the opposite. Chase and this community need to sit down together and come up with a mutually acceptable plan for the bank’s new branch.

If that happens, I actually believe good can come from this seeming crisis. But for that collaboration to happen, major change is needed. In the case of Chase, it may even be institutional change.

Change, as they say, also needs to begin with me. I hope this post reflects that. And I dare say it needs to begin with my Hillsdale friends and neighbors who are upset with Chase and me and a number of others. How quickly we manufacture adversaries!

So I have proposed since I posted my “David and Goliath” essay that community leaders and Chase officials forge something called the “Chase/Hillsdale Community Compact.” The compact would lay out mutually-arrived-at objectives and describe an action plan for achieving them.

Unless there is a mutual willingness to come to an agreement, we will all lose. Chase will lose business by simply localizing its tarnished national reputation. Hillsdale will lose the opportunity to advance improvements and values identified in the numerous plans and studies conducted here in the past two decades.

I’ve concluded that the way to bring pressure on Chase and the community is to tell the story of what happens here. Will it be a story of “triumph” or “tragedy”?

I plan to tell that story as best I can — both here and in The Hillsdale News.

My great regret is that I got off to such a divisive and emotion-laden start.

As always, we proceed from here and now.

P.S. The Hillsdale Neighborhood Association has called an "emergency" meeting for Tuesday, August 9, at 6 p.m. to discuss the Chase matter. The meeting is at the Watershed Building at Bertha Court and Capitol Highway. The public is welcome.

Why the media miss the story

2011-07-30T08:13:00.000-07:00

Jeff Cohen’s Common Dreams column, “Mainstream Reporters: Too Close to the Field and Teams to get the Debt Story,” uses sports' play-by-play coverage as an analogy for why the Press is missing (and the Public isn’t getting) the real story about the country’s economic and fiscal crisis.

He blames the Press’s “cult of balance” and “impartiality” for its woeful short comings.

The analogy to game coverage, while helpful, misses the point.

The real failing of the media is that underlying causes aren’t “news” to a Press corps working the 24-hour news cycle. A cause doesn’t “develop” or change each and every day. Causes are “old news” and hence unreported.

And so we, the public, forget or ignore the causes of our problems.

It is hardly breaking news that this country has a shameful disparity of income between the wealthy and the poor, that the rich own the political system, and that the tax code is shot through with loopholes benefiting the wealthy and corporations.

It isn’t news that the military accounts for nearly half our budget and shovels money (and retired generals) at corporate America.

Meanwhile our infrastructure, our health system and our schools crumble. No “news” there, either.

Instead, the “news” of the day, and hence the public’s focus, is play-by-play coverage between the 10-yard markers on the field, as Cohen notes. Such coverage results in headlines like, “Boehner gets debt plan through House.” Big deal.

Imagine a front-page story with this headline: “The richest 10 percent account for 80 percent of Republican campaign coffers” or “Tea Party: bought by, beholden to Billionaires” or “The Richest Americans scapegoat the Poorest.”

The problem is that each of these stories did not "break" in the “news cycle.” In short, it doesn’t fit the definition of "the news." No, to find out about these mega-causal issues, you have to read books.

Who in this knee-jerk, instant analysis, Twitter world has time for that?

Finally, Cohen knows, but doesn’t mention, that the Press is beholden to its advertisers, stockholders, interlocking corporate boards and financial chiefs. And just who might they be? (think Rupert Murdoch...) And to what extent do they define the news and determine the information the public receives?

Beyond checks and balances

2011-07-28T08:48:00.000-07:00

The nation’s founders wanted a government of checks and balances. What we have now are checks with no balances. Deadlock.

The next to go, thanks to a small group of folks with a whole lot of money (and hence power), are the checks.

The super-rich are on a course to take over the country.

But what kind of unchecked country do they want? What kind of life do they want for themselves? And what will it mean for the rest of us?

Do they really want to live in private, guard-dog patrolled fortress-mansions? Do they aspire to endless jaunts on private golf links? Is the goal a yacht in every harbor? Is it fleets of lofty helicopters, Lear jets and armor-plated limousines? Is it endless pool-side hours with vats of sunscreen and margaritas at the ready?

Is it the assurance of luxury for their equally vain and selfish progeny?

And do they really want lives filled with paranoia about retribution from angry masses who have been evicted from their homes, left without jobs and deprived of health care and security?

Do they want a planet beset by drought and famine — a cinder in space, a barren globe awash in toxic, rising oceans?

Do they want a country of spreading ignorance caused by a crumbling school system? Do they seek endless wars abroad and blood in our streets?

Are the rich and powerful really willing to spread disease, suffering, ignorance and anarchy to feed their own private profligacy?

It would seem.

Nor are we blameless. We have bought into a value system of consumption and mass deception that now has produced a “checks and balances” government of, for and by the rich.

Soon, we will be forced to act beyond the bounds of checks and balances. I have no idea what the tipping-point actions will be (mass demonstrations? boycotts? riots? strikes? out-and-out insurrection?), but I do believe this tired, values-challenged, rigged game must end.

While we work on getting rid of it, we must plan for its replacement. It’s easy to imagine. It is committed to long-held universal values: peace, a sustainable planet, equality, education and knowledge, health, adequate food and shelter, honesty, and trust....

Such values should not be subjected to “checks and balances”; they must be established and defended as sovereign rights.

Speaker Boehner responds — sort of....

2011-07-23T13:39:00.000-07:00

I recently wrote House Speaker John Boehner an email cordially and generously giving him my carefully considered advice for solving nation's deficit problems.

Here is a synopsis of my suggestions:

* Get the mega-rich to pony up their fair share (They are pursuing happiness — and life and liberty — to the detriment of the rest of us).

* Slash defense spending (stop playing the cop-on-the-block to the world).

* Get rid of tax loopholes and corporate subsidies.

* Go after off-shore corporate tax havens.

* Hands off Medicare and Social Security.

* Get rid of the new "health care reform" and institute universal health care (a REAL revenue saver, John).

Ever the optimist, I was hoping for a point-by-point reasoned response. No doubt the Speaker's predictable refutation, followed by my thoughtful and cordial rebuttal, would lead us to a productive exchange — all in the name of saving the Republic. At some point, I conjectured, John and I might invite the President to join us. Perhaps in the Rose Garden.

Fat chance.

Instead somebody in the Speaker's office punched the wrong "response" button on the computer. Or perhaps a more charitable explanation is that John, weary from visits to the White House or flailings on the fairways, simply lapsed into mindless ingratiation larded with Republican orthodoxy.

I'm sharing his words as a public service, just in case you were thinking of writing the Speaker with the expectation of receiving a response worthy of Boehner's tax-paid salary and perks.

Dear Mr. Seifert:

Thank you for taking the time to contact me. It's good to hear from you.

Your ideas, comments, and questions help make possible my goal of leading a House of Representatives that listens and reflects the will of the American people. That's why I'd like to ask you to keep speaking out by:

Visiting Speaker.gov to sign up for email updates on issues that concern you; Offering your solutions and engaging other Americans on the challenges facing our country at AmericaSpeakingOut.com; Joining the conversation on Facebook.com/OfficeofSpeakerBoehner/; and Connecting with my office on Twitter.com/SpeakerBoehner/.

I made a Pledge to America to focus on removing government barriers to private-sector job creation and economic growth - that includes cutting spending to help end the uncertainty facing job creators; repealing the job-crushing health care law and replacing it with common sense reforms that lower costs; reining in excessive regulations; and promoting an American Energy Initiative that increases energy production to create jobs and lower energy prices. I also pledged to lead an effort to reform Congress and rebuild the bonds of trust between the American people and their representatives in Washington.

I hope you'll stay engaged and keep me updated on your thoughts as we work to keep this pledge.

Thank you again for contacting me and please stay in touch.

Sincerely,

John Boehner
Speaker of the House

How the Internet shapes decisions — a Quaker's perspective

2011-07-22T08:58:00.000-07:00

Communicating via e-mail, texting and Facebook exchanges present a host of inherent problems. Unless you are a Writer (that’s with a capital “W”), such communication is often one-dimensional, lacking inflection, dramatic pauses, and texture.

If you agree those limitations pose problems, consider the loss Quakers experience as they try conducting business on the internet.

Traditionally Quakers rely heavily on silent "gathered" reflection to discern what to do. Yet silence “plays” about as well on the internet as it does on talk radio. Imagine Rush Limbaugh interrupting a debate (usually one-sided) with “Let’s pause a moment in silence to consider what the caller is saying.”

Quaker silence gets even more complicated because Friends seek to be “spirit-led” in the stillness of reflection and meditation. When was the last time you sought the spirit as you were e-mailing or texting? I’m not saying it doesn’t happen (it is more likely in the pauses of text exchanges than in, say, board room discussions or political debates), but it’s increasingly unlikely in this rapid-fire world.

For many Quakers, “spirit-led” means led by God. As a Friend recently commented, “When I look into the eyes of another, I am looking into the eyes of God.” The comment comes from the core Quaker belief that there is “that of God (or the Spirit, or both) in everyone.”

But if you aren’t looking at another person, you are unlikely to fully feel in the presence of their divinity. And if they are not looking into your eyes, your own divine presence may be forgotten. Our communication is shaped by that presence, or, alas, lack of it.

I raise these questions because of the tendency to conduct more and more business through the internet, conference calls, and, yes, video conferencing. I’m suggesting, as many others have, that every medium shapes its content — and hence the outcome of communication.

We all should ask ourselves how our decisions are altered by the medium we choose. And then we should consider what we might have decided had we met face-to-face — sharing in timely silence, allowing the “spirit” to lead us, seeing the divine presence in each other’s eyes.

Question: How might the decisions of our democratic institutions (Congress, the judicial system, elections) be different if they adopted these practices?

'War is the Enemy'

2011-07-18T21:48:00.000-07:00

In 1942, just after the U.S. entered World War II, and the propaganda machines rallied Americans to the cause of the “Good War,” A..J. Muste, a devout and articulate pacifist, wrote a pamphlet addressed to his fellow Quakers.

In it, he proclaimed the on-going need to speak out against war during war time. His pamphlet carefully and rationally lays out why.

I came across Muste’s essay on line after watching a recent PBS Newhour segment featuring First Lt. Paul Rieckhoof, who heads Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America. Rieckhoof told the TV audience that more US military personnel engaged in the Iraq an Afghanistan conflicts are now dying by suicide than are dying in the fighting.

Last year, 468 suicides occurred throughout the armed forces. Of those, 301 were in the regular Army, Reserves, and National Guard, up more than 20 percent from the year before.

As Rieckhoof pointed out, the problem of war-related suicide is even bigger than these figures indicate. “We're not even tracking the 2.3 million veterans who have come home and have cycled out of the military since 9/11."

The PBS story grew out of the President’s announcing a policy change regarding presidential letters of condolence. The President has decided to add the families of military personnel who died by their own hands to all families receiving the letters.

Mounting suicides, the civilian deaths and the damage caused by the post-traumatic stress of war all reveal how, even after the fighting stops and the enemy retreats or is vanquished, the shock, pain and grief never end for those who have experienced war.

The words that immediately came to me were “War is the enemy.”

Certainly, I thought, this phrase couldn’t be original. I searched for it on line and up popped Muste’s nearly 70-year-old essay.

Its title...“War is the Enemy.”

The link to it is HERE.

A Story before Sleep

2011-07-13T07:48:00.000-07:00

Here’s some all-purpose advice from Mabel, a 3-year-old friend who lives near Bristol, England. The story is conveyed by her grandfather, Richard, a friend of much, much longer standing.

Mabel is being visited by another small girl for an overnight. Mabel’s parents are socializing with the girl’s parents while the two children are sent off to the bedroom.

Richard reports that Mabel’s mom, Ruth, checks up occasionally on the two “to find that they have transformed the bedroom into a dance hall, then a pirate ship. At last, the kids snuggle themselves down and Mabel reads a goodnight story to her companion.”

When Ruth peeks in again, it seems that Mabel hasn’t realized that a goodnight story is just that — an end-of-the-day, drop-off-to-sleep event. “Every time the friend nods off Mabel shouts, ‘Wake up! We aren't at the end of the story!’”

Richard shared the story with me yesterday and throughout the day the line kept coming back like a refrain as I encountered life’s little challenges and opportunities.

“Wake up!” I’d say to myself. “We aren’t at the end of the story!”

Good advice. I will use it today and until I exhaust my tomorrows.

“Wake up! We aren’t at the end of the story....”

Practical Spirituality

2011-07-11T08:31:00.000-07:00

At the heart of Quaker life — and potentially everyone's life —is connecting with our spiritual leadings and putting them into practice.

With this in mind, the imminent annual session of Northwest Friends (the North Pacific Yearly Meeting) is focusing on the topic “Being Practically Spiritual: The Integration of Inward Life and Outward Action”

As part of the four-day proceeding in Tacoma beginning Wednesday, Friends will meet in worship groups devoted to various aspects of the topic. Quakers call this “worship sharing.” The small groups of roughly ten always begin their sessions in silent worship. Out of the depths of silence, the participants are invited to speak to the topic. Between each speaker’s words, we return to contemplate what has been said in the silence before another person speaks.

The shared words are inspired by pre-selected quotations and focused through questions, or “queries.”

Much thought goes into the selection of the quotations and the framing of the accompanying queries.

Those for this year's topic cry out to be shared with readers of The Red Electric, whether you are a Quaker or not.

The quotations and the queries for the four sessions may lead you to ask how you integrate your inward spiritual life with “outward action.”

There is much to ponder here. Consider, reading one and responding to it first before moving on. Indeed, the reading of these might well be done in four “sessions” with yourself and perhaps others.

Session 1, Thursday

Being practically spiritual in relation to myself.

The time of business does not with me differ from the time of prayer; and in the noise and clatter of my kitchen, while several persons are at the same time calling for different things, I possess God in as great tranquility as if I were upon my knees at the blessed sacrament.
--Brother Lawrence, The Practice of the Presence of God

For God can be found…There is a Divine Center into which your life can slip, a new and absolute orientation in God, a center where you live with him and out of which you see all life through new and radiant vision, tinged with new sorrows and pangs, new joys unspeakable and full of glory.
--Thomas Kelly, A Testament of Devotion

Queries to consider:

What does living within the Divine Center mean for me in ‘the noise and clatter’ of my everyday life?

Which practices help me become--and which hinder me from becoming--more mindful of, more attuned to the workings of the Spirit in my daily life?

Do I center my life in the awareness of the presence of God so that all things take their rightful place? (Adapted from Faith and Practice, North Pacific Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends)

Session 2, Friday

Being practically spiritual in relation to those I touch in daily life.

(I was) convinced in my mind that true religion consisted in an inward life, wherein the heart doth love and reverence God the Creator and learn to exercise true justice and goodness, not only toward all men but also toward the brute creatures.
--John Woolman

What do I mean by growing into wholeness? It is working at being all we were meant to be. (Most of us only live partial lives.) It is seeking integrity, striving to be what William Penn called George Fox, “an original and no one’s copy.” It is not wearing a mask. It is acknowledging our strengths and gifts without false modesty, and accepting our weaknesses and limitations as part of us. It is springtime and winter. It is light, and it is also darkness. It is being present where we are, seeing the personhood of others, saying “thou” to them. It is being at home in our bodies, aware of their needs, and it is being in touch with that of God in us.
--Elizabeth Watson

Queries to consider:

When have I experienced the integration of the inward life and outward action in my own life and the lives of those I relate to most intimately (including the ‘creatures’ I may share my life with)?

What nurtures my growth into wholeness? How do I nurture that growth in others?

How do I make my home and Meeting places of friendliness, peace and renewal, where God is real for those who live there and those who visit? (Adapted from Faith and Practice)

Session 3, Saturday

Being practically spiritual in relation to my community.

Jesus said… ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And the second one is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.
--Matthew 22.37:39

There is a principle which is pure, placed in the human Mind, which in different Places and Ages hath had different Names; it is, however, pure, and proceeds from God. It is deep, and inward, confined to no Forms of Religion, nor excluded from any, where the Heart stands in perfect Sincerity. In whomsoever this takes Root and grows, of what Nation soever, they become Brethren.
--John Woolman

Queries to consider:

What am I doing to build “the beloved community?”

Who do I envision as embodying the pure principle that John Woolman testifies to? What have their lives meant to me? What are the fruits of such embodiment?

Do I practice the art of listening to my neighbor, even beyond words? (Adapted from Faith and Practice)

Session 4, Sunday

Being practically spiritual in relation to our world.

When we confront injustice, when we engage in Spirit-led service, when we speak prophetically to the world we live in and witness to the world we know is possible (and already here among us), when we are instruments of the Spirit for reconciliation, healing, and mutual understanding, we are testifying to the Truth through our experience of that Life and Love and Power that takes away the occasion of all war. That is remaking the world in far more effective ways than we can through our anger, grief, passion, and social action—no matter how well-intentioned.
--Noah Baker Merrill

I know more firmly than ever that the way of Jesus—of Gandhi and Woolman and Fox and Penn—is the only way worth traveling. But I also have some inkling of the discipline required if we are truly to enter into God’s way. The needle’s eye is closed to those of us who hold wealth to ourselves, to the self-interested, or the self-indulgent. Our lives can be of good use in this world only if we dwell in the Spirit that was in Christ Jesus, stay in the Light, and walk firmly in the way he showed us: the way of love, truth, identification with the poor and oppressed, poverty, non-possession, purity and humility.
--Carol Reilly Urner, from The Needle’s Eye: A Philippine Experience

Queries to consider:

When has the “Life and Love and Power that takes away the occasion of all war” broken into my life?

What does dwelling in the Spirit look like in my daily life?

Do I search diligently for ways of assuring the right of every individual to live in dignity? (Adapted from Faith and Practice)

"Just like ringing a bell"

2011-07-06T16:12:00.000-07:00

Recently I’ve had this feeling that there’s a jazz pianist locked inside of me trying to get out. Of course the feeling occurs when I’m listening to the likes of Oscar Peterson, Billy Taylor, Bill Evans, John Lewis, Ray Bryant or Gene Harris. Increasingly my listening happens through my iPod as I’m jogging along trying to stay limber and fit.

My locked-up-jazz-pianist feeling is one of later life’s nagging little regrets. It isn’t all-consuming and besides I suppose that I could even take a “fun run” at dispelling it by...what? Taking lessons as I approach my eighth decade?

Not impossible but unlikely.

This morning I was vaguely communing with my inner jazz pianist while listening intently to changes in a spare and perfect Count Basie riff. The iPod was in its randomizing “shuffle” mode. Suddenly, after the pause following Basie’s little opus, Johnny Winter’s pounding version of “Johnny B. Goode” popped up on the play list.

Way down Louisiana close to New Orleans
Way back up in the woods among the evergreens
There stood a log cabin made of earth and wood
Where lived a country boy named Johnny B. Goode
He never learned to read or write so well
But he could play a guitar just like ringing a bell....

His mother told him someday he would be a man
And he would be the leader of a big old band.
Many people coming from miles around
To hear him play his music when the sun go down
Maybe someday your name would be in lights
Saying Johnny B. Goode tonight!

Oddly the line that jumped out at me was “He never learned to read or write so well.”

Imagine. There’s a trade-off, I thought. What if I had “never learned to read or write so well” but could play the piano “just like ringing a bell.”

What if I had to choose? What difference would it make? Would the wisdom of the choice be determined by whether my name “would be in lights”? Or was there something more here? Emerson and Thoreau perhaps. Or Hemingway or Baldwin or Orwell.

To me, the story of Johnny B. Goode is a story of success and failure. It doesn’t consider Johnny’s regrets in later life because “he never learned to read or write so well.” Who would he be if he had written and read well?

Then again, perhaps “playing a guitar just like ringing a bell” was enough. We don’t regret what we don’t know. (Question for another time: If ignorance is bliss, what is knowledge?)

For me, simply playing and having my name in lights would not have been enough — knowing what I do know from reading, and, yes, the challenges of writing.

Still, thanks to the Johnny B. Goodes (and the Johnny Winters and the Chuck Berrys) and the Basies and Petersons, I have music in my head.

Come to think of it, why not do it all? Find music in the words — and words in the music.

A 'Thank You' note to Vandals

2011-06-27T13:02:00.000-07:00

Our neighborhood has a little green telephone junction box at a prominent street corner not far from our house. Like many public surfaces in this city, it has been repeatedly hit by taggers (I had photos posted of the tags, but after advice given in the first comment and by the City's graffiti abatement officer, I've deleted them).

I’ve taken to cleaning off the graffiti with a kit provided by the City’s anti-graffiti office. Sometimes the paint comes off easily, but recently taggers have been using a kind of etching paint that defies removal.

Occasionally the utility company comes out to spray paint the box so it looks like new. The crew did this last week but the box was tagged the very next day.

My most recent response is shown here. After trying to remove an angry face marked on the box, I simply covered the whole thing with black plastic from a cut-up trash bag. For good measure I duct taped it in place. I know, that too is ugly but at least the intention is obviously well-meaning.

Besides I added a small sign to the cover.

I gave some thought to what the sign might say. How does one get through to a young ego-centric, sociopath? The unprintable words I mutter when I see this vandalism clearly shouldn’t be on public display and would only provoke the perpetrator. I finally settled on....

Thank you for not
defacing our
Neighborhood.

Violators will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

The irony should be apparent. Why am I thanking a would-be vandal for not vandalizing? Do I thank bank robbers for not bank robbing? Or jerks for not being jerks?

Shouldn’t I just say “Lay off!”? I concluded a command would only be a goad.

My mild “thank you” approach seemed worth a try. At least other people will read the sign, and, who knows, my in-your-face gratitude might be direct enough to get through.

If the large print doesn’t work, perhaps my starkly contrasting small print warning will.

So far my sign has been up three days without being trashed. That’s longer than the freshly painted box lasted, but I fear my handiwork’s days are numbered.

I’m already working on a Plan B.

P.S. Now the abatement officer tells me that the black bag could heat up and damage the contents of the box. Fortunately, the weather has been cool. I asked her to send the repainting crew out again. I also requested that my sign be allowed to be pasted to the box. I'm waiting to hear what she has to say.

Can "God" substitute for "Spirit"?

2011-06-23T19:15:00.000-07:00

This is the companion piece to an earlier post in which I took well known references to God and substituted the word "Spirit.” The idea was to “test” what happened to meaning by the substitution. Are the two words equivalent and interchangeable? When I speak of “Spirit,” do you understand that to mean “God”? Are we talking about the same thing?

I’m holding off sharing my impressions, but the post has drawn considerable attention, if little comment.

In that post, I promised to flip the exercise and substitute “God” for “Spirit” in a number of “Spirit” quotes.

But which quotes to use? I found that, like “God,” “Spirit” is used in a variety of contexts which morph its meaning. Some meanings are clearly non-religious, tending to the political or commercial. Consider just one, “The Spirit of ’76,” which turns out to be both. Think of this nation’s independence and the gasoline company, Union Oil.

I found too that the word can be personal in that each of us has a “spirit to survive.” Hence “his spirit was broken” or “her spirit was lifted.” It didn't seem to be spiritual, or at least as spiritual as other references.

“Spirit” or “Great Spirit” is also at the heart of Native-American religious belief, so some quotations are from Native-American historical figures.

Countless passages of Biblical text refer to "The Holy Spirit" as God. Could this be the answer to my questions? Do Christians automatically consider references to "Spirit" as being references to God? Frankly, that hasn't been my experience among my fellow Quakers, as I noted in my first post.

With that, here are some “Spirit” quotes, many from THIS site. They are followed by the “God” substitutions.

Life without liberty is like a body without spirit. —Khalil Gibran

Life without liberty is like a body without God.

I love you when you bow in your mosque, kneel in your temple, pray in your church. For you and I are sons of one religion, and it is the spirit. —Khalil Gibran

I love you when you bow in your mosque, kneel in your temple, pray in your church. For you and I are sons of one religion, and it is God.

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. —Genesis 1:1-2

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the God of God moved upon the face of the waters.

There is no worse screen to block out the Spirit than confidence in our own intelligence. —John Calvin

There is no worse screen to block out God than confidence in our own intelligence.

All men were made by the Great Spirit Chief. They are all brothers. —Chief Joseph

All men were made by the Great God Chief. They are all brothers.

I myself do nothing. The Holy Spirit accomplishes all through me. —William Blake

I myself do nothing. God accomplishes all through me.

All life is a manifestation of the spirit, the manifestation of love. —Morihei Ueshiba

All life is a manifestation of God, the manifestation of love.

Nature always wears the colors of the spirit. —Ralph Waldo Emerson

Nature always wears the colors of God.

In each individual the spirit is made flesh, in each one the whole of creation suffers, in each one a Savior is crucified. —Hermann Hesse

In each individual God is made flesh, in each one the whole of creation suffers, in each one a Savior is crucified.

Where the spirit does not work with the hand, there is no art. —Leonardo da Vinci

Where God does not work with the hand, there is no art.

And while I stood there I saw more than I can tell and I understood more than I saw; for I was seeing in a sacred manner the shapes of all things in the spirit, and the shape of all shapes as they must live together like one being. —Black Elk

And while I stood there I saw more than I can tell and I understood more than I saw; for I was seeing in a sacred manner the shapes of all things in God, and the shape of all shapes as they must live together like one being.

It isn't until you come to a spiritual understanding of who you are - not necessarily a religious feeling, but deep down, the spirit within - that you can begin to take control. —Oprah Winfrey

It isn't until you come to a divine understanding of who you are - not necessarily a religious feeling, but deep down, God within - that you can begin to take control.

It is written on the arched sky; it looks out from every star. It is the poetry of Nature; it is that which uplifts the spirit within us. —John Ruskin

It is written on the arched sky; it looks out from every star. It is the poetry of Nature; it is that which uplifts God within us.

All that is true, by whomsoever it has been said, has its origin in the Spirit. —Thomas Aquinas

All that is true, by whomsoever it has been said, has its origin in God.

Finally, and tellingly, this from Voltaire

Woe to the makers of literal translations, who by rendering every word weaken the meaning! It is indeed by so doing that we can say the letter kills and the spirit gives life.

Woe to the makers of literal translations, who by rendering every word weaken the meaning! It is indeed by so doing that we can say the letter kills and God gives life.

But is it news?

2011-06-17T08:51:00.000-07:00

In the current issue of my hyperlocal on-line newspaper, The Hillsdale News, I wrote the following editorial. It raises some important questions, which I posed to my readers. I'm looking for comment from Red Electric readers as well.

Recently I've been challenged to answer the most basic question in journalism: What is news? Or more specifically, what is the news I should include in this hyperlocal publication?

I frequently get calls and e-mails from readers who want to bring certain worrying events to my attention. I'll give you some examples, but first let me share a few principles I try to use in determining what is important to pass on to readers.

Number one is "Do no harm." That's not always easy, but at least it raises two related questions: Will the story cause harm and to whom? Can this harm be justified? Will the harm caused by public exposure lead to a greater good?

Another question is whether the "story" will resolve itself. Will the parties involved find a solution on their own without my exposing it to public view? Indeed, will public exposure make it even more difficult to resolve.

Next, is there a public need to know about a problem? Does it violate a matter of public policy? Is it illegal? Are elected officials involved? Is public money involved? If so, how much?

Finally, is this a story that is wider in scope than Hillsdale? Has it been covered, or should it logically be covered, in a media outlet with a wider readership?

With those "news values" in mind consider these stories.

1. A citizen's complains at a neighborhood association meeting about a proposed new brew pub.

2. Landlords in Hillsdale have been named in a widely published city-wide report about discriminatory landlords.

3. A parent has submitted a formal complaint to the State and to the school district about a teacher, accusing the teacher of presenting issues in a biased way. The parent criticizes school administrators of being slow to respond.

4. Another parent complains about the rental of City parks facilities to parents who then fail to supervise teens using those facilities. The result has been a public disturbance and the alleged illegal use of drugs and alcohol.

Note that by simply writing those few words, I'm alerting parties concerned that the stories are on my radar. That may have effect in itself.

Before I share how I applied my "news values" screen to each, I invite you to apply your own to the stories. Question: Would you report on and publish these stories in the Hillsdale News?

What did I do? Let's take them one by one:

1. The objection to the new brew pub came up at a recent Hillsdale Neighborhood Association meeting. Both the complainant and the pub owner were present. The consensus at the meeting was that the two parties should sit down and work out the concerns. I decided to let that happen without publicity. I told both to get in touch with me if they were at an impasse. Sitting next to me was Jim Mayer of The Oregonian. He chose to write the story which ended up in the June 11 Oregonian in the "Community" section. It was also on his news blog, where it attracted the all-too-familiar vituberative comments.

2. The landlord story was widely reported in The Oregonian so I decided to let it go. I may follow up later to see how renewed efforts to enforce anti-discriminatory regulations are working here in Hillsdale.

3. I also chose to let the complaint about the teacher work its way through the system. In fact, the ability, or inability, of the school district and state authorities to deal with the complaint seemed more important than the alleged bias. I'm watching this one to see what happens.

4. The complaint about seemingly negligent parents renting facilities to be used by unsupervised teens should be shared with the officials renting the space. If the problem persists after the complaint is lodged, I'd pursue the story.

There it is. Now you make the call. As always, I'm interested in what you are thinking.

Do "God" and "Spirit" equate?

2011-06-17T08:49:00.001-07:00

Our brand of Quakers, liberal and “radically inclusive,” gives itself a lot of leeway when it comes to what many folks, including most Quakers, call “God.” Because some of us are uneasy with the word “God” and its associations, we variously substitute “the divine,” the “Light,” “the indwelling spirit,” or simply “the Spirit.” A smattering are Quaker agnostics or atheists.

I personally have trouble with “God” for oft-cited reasons. Most come from ingrained Biblical references to judgements, damnation, patriarchal superiority, cloud dwelling, gray beards and retribution.

To me, they make “God” hard to love. So I'm a "Spirit" person.

When I’ve talked with fellow Quakers about our varying terminology for something which is ultimately ineffable, I get assorted reactions. To be sure some welcome the discussion, but others signal discomfort with visual signals (a raised eye-brow, a hardening around the mouth, a blank stare). In effect, they are saying, “Don’t go there,” or “It’s irrelevant,” “Been there, done that” or “How much time do you have?”

One, long-time Friend abruptly dismissed the substituting of “Spirit” for “God.” “It isn’t the same thing,” she insisted. That comment has stayed with me and begs to be put to the test.

So here’s the test, or at least a test. I’ve taken several familiar references to “God” and substituted “Spirit” for them. I’ll leave it to you to decide whether “God” and the “Spirit” equate. Are we talking about the same thing? Can you read beyond the words to the meaning? Or do words fail us — literally?

“A mighty fortress is our God.”

A mighty fortress is our Spirit.

“God, the father.”

Spirit, the father.

“God — our rock and our salvation.”

Spirit — our rock and our salvation.

“Fear God and his Commandments.”

Fear the Spirit and its Commandments.

“The Kingdom of God is within you.”

The Kingdom of The Spirit is within you.

“With God, all things are possible.”

With the Spirit, all things are possible.

"In God we trust"

In the Spirit we trust.

“Our Father who art in heaven...”

Our Spirit which art in heaven...

“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.”

Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see the Spirit.

“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the sons of God.”

Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the sons of the Spirit.

I’m tempted to launch into an analysis of what this little exercise reveals, but for now I’m more interested in where it takes you. For one thing, you might want to add your own quotations to the list of “God” references to see whether they meet the “spiritual” test.

Next, I’ll post some “Spirit” quotations and substitute “God” for “Spirit” to see where that takes us. (I have now posted it HERE)

Stay tuned.

Deciphering Sarah

2011-06-11T08:10:00.000-07:00

"The Sarah Syndrome."

There’s a book “concept” but I’m not sure the book's worth writing. Well, I’m certain it’s “worth” writing. It would sell hundreds of thousands of copies. Maybe millions.

What is it about Sarah Palin? What is it about us, as a nation and as a culture that makes all things Sarah so intriguing?

When she first emerged nationally as John McCain’s vice presidential choice (giving new meaning to the term “femme fatale”), I wrote a little essay here about her glasses, noting that Sarah punctured the quip (attributed to Dorothy Parker) that “men don’t make passes at women who wear glasses.”

Sarah’s glasses, essential to her trademark looks, invite us to ponder and linger over Sarah — imagining her sans specs. They are, in a way, a visual come-on.

Tagged “sarah,” “palin,” “glasses,” the post attracted more hits than any I’d put up on this blog. (The only one that has beat it was the “Tipsy Beer Truck" post that gained near-mass popularity from someone’s link to it from a porno site.)

The fascination with Sarah’s glasses should be no surprise. Sarah is nothing if not visual. Face it, she’s the best looking national politician since John Kennedy. Eye candy. The smile, a faint deer in the head-lights look, the stray locks of hair, the lingering beauty pageant figure. No fool and surrounded by marketing experts, Sarah is a package.

Content? You betcha! Here it gets interesting. Start with the verbal nuggets. Is there gold or fools gold in Sarah’s Alaskan e-mail lode? Mining for riches, hordes of journalists rush to Juneau.

On the national stage, Palin is a political high-wire act. We gasp at her wobbliness. We are astonished by her contortions to right herself. Paul Revere’s ride reconsidered, Russian policy shaped by staring across the Bering Strait, her avowed love of motorcycle emissions, a gaffe flipping of North and South Korea. The fractured English. A mouth disconnected from mind—at best. Joe Biden in drag.

The improbability of it all. Sarah Palin matches our own improbability as a nation and perhaps even as human beings. Somehow we survive on our own high wire. So far....Somehow we even thrive, as Sarah does. At least so far....

We’ve turned our own cartoonish ignorance and audacity into a strength, so far....

In her eyes, we see our own. There’s no there there, and yet...THERE it is! So far....

Sarah Palin, like us, is magical and frightening to behold. I think we call this entertainment. I often wish that the late Neil Postman (“Amusing Ourselves to Death”), who brilliantly analyzed mass media, were alive to decipher Sarah. Here is a pop figure seemingly created for a mass culture.

Visual, vulnerable, sexy, unpredictable, marketable, opportunistic, frightening, naive and earthy.

Oh, did I mention her family?....

James Arness, Ray Bryant and me

2011-06-05T22:20:00.000-07:00

On Saturday, on the same page of the New York Times, appeared obituaries reporting the deaths of James Arness of “Gunsmoke” fame and jazz pianist Ray Bryant.

Arness died last Friday at age 88; Bryant died Thursday at 79.

Both, in their own ways, touched my life.

Arness portrayed the benign, stolid Marshal Matt Dillon on the long running TV Western. We can all be grateful Arness didn't sing. His lanky, lyric-less marshal protected a fragile frontier town inhabited by equally beguiling characters, most notably Chester (played by a gimpy Dennis Weaver), Doc and Miss Kitty.

The series taught justice and virtue and probably shaped me more than a year of days at Keith Country Day School in Rockford, Illinois in the mid-’50s.

I first heard Bryant when he was a young man. At the time, I was only 10 years younger than Bryant himself. The encounter must have been at the Blue Note in New York City when he was in his early 30s and I was in my early 20s training to go into the Peace Corps. Bryant had not yet been discovered by the wider public.

Being riveted to his blues playing, tinged with ringing gospel references, brought a lump to my throat. That night was a musical epiphany.

Hear what I mean HERE.

In an age smitten by Rock ‘n Roll, Bryant’s “Little Susie” became one of the few jazz pieces to climb the charts. Its success gave hope that new generations, including my own, would feel the gospel roots at the heart of the blues.

James Arness and Ray Bryant. How very different and yet how very similar they were in the values they represented and nurtured. In my mind, they conveyed depth, purity and honesty in their art. I would never have thought of them together in life as I now do in their deaths.

How honored and graced I was to live during their time here.

Nailing the PBS coffin

2011-06-01T21:14:00.000-07:00

Poor public broadcasting. Remember when it was called “non-commercial” television and radio because it really was.

Some countries still have such a thing. No commercials.

Imagine.

But here things have changed.

First we had on-air “underwriting,” which merely mentioned the name of the “underwriters,” mostly do-good foundations. The brief name mentions were limited to the beginnings and ends of the programs.

Then underwriting became sponsorships, which gradually became highly produced commercials or “promos.” Their length grew and grew, presumably with the size of the "contribution."

Somewhere along the way the term “non-commercial” broadcasting was replaced with “public broadcasting.” But because the sponsors had now largely become private corporations, “public broadcasting,” with few exceptions (like Bill Moyers' Journal and Frontlines), was bent to private interests over The Public Interest, a tenet enshrined in the original Radio Act of 1927 and the Communications Act of 1934 (but that's another story....)

Still, at least “public broadcasting” left programming uninterrupted by commercial or promotional interruptions.

Now we learn that those days are about to end too, with PBS planning to do “preliminary testing” of intrusive commercial fare in the middle of programing. Are PBS executives so out of touch that they have to “test” a bad idea? Sounds like a done deal.

What, pray tell, is the difference between PBS's commercial interruptions and those found on commercial broadcasting? And why should we, fellow viewers and listeners, make monetary pledges to support yet another advertising vehicle.

Do I send checks to CBS, ABC, NBC or, heaven forbid, FOX?

Oregon Public Broadcasting, which prides itself on viewer and listener support, is certain to suffer financial fallout from the PBS change.

To show you how far PBS has fallen, consider its response to a story posted HERE. The response is crafted in PR-ese by PBS communications Vice President Anne Bentley (formerly of AOL), who has clearly learned the dark art of corporate double-talk.

We are always looking at ways to improve the viewer experience. In line with that, we’ve done research and one of the things that we’re going to try is to come up with is a way to develop better flow between shows. It is all about the viewer and how the viewer gets an opportunity to see our shows.

Our intention is to test it out with a single night and see how that goes. Depending on what we learn, we’ll see where we go from there.

We’ve done some preliminary testing, but we intend to do more before we move forward absolutely.

Initial testing showed that viewers didn’t really notice the change, but we want to do additional testing. As we move forward, we’ll be monitoring it closely.

As PBS "moves forward," a few millions of us will no doubt be moving on to some other improved "viewer experience."

A message for Quaker non-Quakers

2011-05-26T19:46:00.000-07:00

I have many friends whom I consider to be Quaker non-Quakers. By that I mean they hold the values of Quakers without knowing it.

There’s part of me that would like to whisper, “Pssst. You are a Quaker non-Quaker.”

There’s another part that tells me to let it be.

First what are the values we share? Quakers call them “testimonies” and they are usually listed as Simplicity, Peace, Integrity, Community and Equality. They happen to create the acronym “SPICE." Some add Stewardship or Sustainability to the list. Make that “SPICES.”

In these times, each deserves long, deep contemplation and consideration. We need to consider whether we, Quakers and non-Quakers, truly live by these testimonies.

But for me, as a Quaker, there’s more. Quakers add a spiritual dimension to the testimonies. We believe we are “spirit-led” to these values and that the spirit will lead us to incorporate them into our lives.

So while I share the Quaker testimonies with many non-Quaker friends, I also want to explore the spiritual dimension with them as well.

Our secular culture does not invite such exploration. To push into matters of the spirit smacks of unseemly proselytizing. I hear the voice again, “Let it be” (The voice, by the way, sounds suspiciously like John Lennon’s.)

Quaker author Robert Lawrence Smith “speaks my mind” (as Quakers say) when he writes in the introduction to his illuminating and highly accessible book, “A Quaker Book of Wisdom”:

"It is my ever-growing conviction that the compassionate Quaker message badly needs to be heard in today’s complex, materialistic, often unjust, and discriminatory society. Every day brings new public debate over issues Quaker have always addressed: war and peace, social justice, education, health care, poverty, business ethics, public service, the use of world resources. The list goes on....”

Later he says, gently touching on the timeless leadings of the spirit, “To me, Quaker values of simplicity and silent contemplation, truth and conscience, seem more important now than ever before....the basic humanistic Quaker precepts of valuing racial and gender equality, promoting social justice and nonviolence — and, yes sometimes civil disobedience —seem to me to me so modern, so relevant to today’s society, that when I thought about writing this book I was suddenly surprised that no one had written one like it. What particularly struck me is that the Quaker ideals formulated in the Seventeenth Century remain contemporary in every sense, and the basic injunction to ‘let your life speak,’ to live each day in accordance with these beliefs, seems totally untarnished by the passage of time.”

That is exactly the message I want to share with you, Quaker non-Quakers.

For more, much more, on Quakers, go to www.quaker.org.

Letter from a Friend: Crime in Portland

2011-05-23T20:20:00.000-07:00

My friend Josh von Kuster writes the following for the Red Electric:

I am guilty.

Before I call you out on the carpet for also being guilty, know that I hold each of you dear. I hope to spark thoughts, not to offend.

A teen has been killed in North Portland every month since February.
• Yashannee Vaughn disappeared near Northeast 82nd on March 19. She is presumed dead.
• Shiloh Hampton was killed at Lloyd Center on April 18th.
• Shalamar Edmond was shot and killed in New Columbia around midnight the morning of May 16.

Additional very recent criminal happenings in Portland:

• A Tri-Met bus was struck by gunfire on the corner of North Williams and Fremont on April 21st.
• Two men were arrested for possessing $200k of heroin in North Portland on May 5.
• Debra Ross was shot in the chest on North Lombard on May 10.

This is a woefully incomplete list of the dangers and carnage raging in our city this year.

In OUR CITY!

Portland is a great town; home of Powell's, bicycling, Mercy Corps, food carts and more excellent coffee and beer than I could ever possibly enjoy (although I intend to give a go).

Portland also is home to double-digit unemployment.

And Portland is no longer home to Shiloh Hampton, Yashanee Vaughn or Shalamar Edmond.

Portland is home to even more self-styled do-gooders, including yours truly, than it is to coffee houses and brew pubs combined, by a power of 10. We all want to change the world, be it by ending petlessness, buying only fair trade/organic goods, urban composting, not eating meat, fighting the violence inherent in "the system."

But what about ending the violence plaguing OUR CITY?

How can we possibly hope to make the world a better place when our own backyard is a killing field? Let’s get together to end the homicide, larceny and decay rampant IN OUR OWN CITY! Let’s decide to raise healthy, safe, secure, respectful youth IN OUR OWN CITY! How can we tell the world how to solve all its problems when we can't even keep our children alive long enough to graduate from high school?

Shame on me. Shame on us.

There are other worthy goals, true. But certainly preventing of the killing of own young people must be high on our list.

The first step to reclaiming our city is to pay attention and talk about what's going on.

Next is to take some action.

• Stand on a street corner with a sign asking who Shalamar Edmond is.
• Write a letter to the mayor or the city council.
• Ask the metro desk at The Oregonian how Shiloh Hampton's family is dealing with his death.
• Go to church somewhere in North Portland this week.
• Check out what some people are already doing about the problem here: http://www.kptv.com/news/27698442/detail.html
• Ask your children if there are gangs at school or if they have ever seen a firearm in their friends' possession.

I wish I had a good idea for what to do, but as I have confessed, I too am guilty.

A bad "Judgment" call? The Good Book wasn't?

2011-05-20T14:27:00.000-07:00

Okay, so it’s Sunday, May 22, and, like, the world didn’t end.

I will have spent most of a sunny Saturday hunkered down in the basement with the wife, cat, three cases of Granola bars, sacks of cat kibble and kitty litter, four cartons of toilet paper, a bottle of Scotch, mounds of chips and vats of salsa and 10 gallons of Gatorade.

Oh, and water, lots of water.

Some of the Rapture media folks (Have they done a good job or what?!) must be scripting media sound bites to soothe the disaffected who wasted a perfectly good day.

Trust me, we will not be amused. Who called off The End?

Here are some of the answers at the ready for why the big stage manager in the sky missed the final curtain call.

The wires got tangled.

The labor unions refused to cooperate.

Management changed its mind at the last minute.

The message was garbled. Seems that it was the end of something else. We aren’t sure what...yet. Possibly taxes; maybe death. Stay tuned.

We’ve learned not to believe everything we read.

It just wasn't working out.

It was a bad fit.

We decided to go with Plan B.

It wasn’t such a Good Book after all.

We forgot to read the fine print.

We should have run it by legal.

We always knew there was a very, very small probability it might not happen.

The Big Guy in the Sky was having trouble focusing because there was too much else going on in the Realm. Wars, floods, earthquakes, adultery. Some of the angels have turned out NOT to be "better angels of our nature.”

It’s going to take longer than originally anticipated.

Go to our web site for a full explanation.

We experienced theological difficulties. Sorry for the inconvenience.

It was always a "Judgment" call.

We misspoke.

We’ll get back to you.

No comment.

Two kinds of graffiti in Gabriel Park

2011-05-16T20:33:00.000-07:00

First you need to visit Southwest Portland' Gabriel park on a glorious spring day like today. The billowing clouds, the fresh foliage, the rolling hills. And down in a draw, the skateboard park.

I've come to appreciate Gabriel's skateboard park as an integral part of the landscape's sinuous contours. It's as if the ghost of sculptor Henry Moore had shaped the site — and beckoned us to play.

So enjoy the park. I visit it three times a week.

But there are dark clouds over the park as well.

Sadly Gabriel is under constant siege by graffiti hoodlums. (They also hit Pendleton and Custer parks)

Two Friday's ago, they struck the skateboard park; three days later the Park Bureau's two-person sandblasting crew was out to remove the scrawl. Graffiti removal is their full-time job.

By the end of the week, the graffiti was back. One tag read in large black letters: "We're sorry about your wall."

If only.

On Monday, the blasting crews were out again.

And, of course, the clean-up is expensive. We pay for it through our taxes. I find it as wearing psychologically as financially.

There's another form of graffiti in Gabriel too. In a way it is more depressing. The same park officials who order the clean up of the messy and often obscene spray painting at the skateboard park, actually welcome technological graffiti that defaces the park. The culprits are known. We are their customers. Their names are Verizon, Sprint, AT&T and other cellular providers.

Not that we can live without their services any longer, but a tower like this prominent monstrosity next to the park can be hidden in trees or even church steeples. Two churches are just yards from this tower. Clusters of trees are everywhere in the park.

And just four blocks away is yet another cellular tower. Can't these industrial giants double up, or do they each need a prominent corporate erection?

Graffiti.

Attention, Portland Parks and Recreation and Parks Commissioner Nick Fish: Thanks for fighting the defacing of the skate park; now stop enabling corporate vandals.

A school by any other name would come up short

2011-05-11T15:49:00.000-07:00

Ever wondered why the very, very wealthy give money for civic and university buildings and the like and then, predictably, have their names put on the object of the gift?

Presumably a fair amount of ego-massaging goes into obtaining “naming gifts,” as they are called in the philanthropy world.

But no one wants to talk about egos publicly. It all seems a bit shallow, and besides, isn’t the reason for naming gifts obvious? Isn’t it a bit rude to ask, “Where did you find the moxie to have your name put on the building (or park or bridge or water fountain)?”

If only the deals were cut with a modicum of modesty.

Here’s the scene:

An executive fundraiser seeking a multimillion dollar gift: “Of course, we’d want to name the building ‘The Daddy Warbucks Graduate School of Lucrative Investing.’”

Warbucks: “No, no. Name it after Gandhi or Mother Teresa.”

Fundraiser: “Mr. Warbucks, we insist!”

Warbucks: “Well, okay, if you insist. You might add Momma Warbucks’ name as well.”

Fundraiser: “Done! ‘The Daddy and Momma Warbucks’ Graduate School of Lucrative Investing’ it is!”

Warbucks: “No need to illuminate the sign on the building.”

Fundraiser: “We insist! Absolutely! Right up there in lights!”

Warbucks: “Well, if you insist.”

And so it goes, all behind the scenes.

Until now.

In today’s New York Times we learn that the University of Pennsylvania has obtained a $225 million naming gift for its medical school from Raymond and Ruth Perelman.

No hidden motive here. Said Mr. Perelman, 93, “I look at it as Penn Medicine gave me a gift. They offered me an opportunity to have my name on one of the best medical schools in the country.”

Opportunity taken. For Mr. Perelman, apparently, it was cheap at the price, a cool $225 mil.

But it isn’t all about his name in academic lights for Mr. Perelman and his wife, who are known for their philanthropy in Philadelphia.

Later in the story, Mr. Perelman shares with The Times that he expects the school to use the money to expand to meet “the growing demand for doctors.” (The Times story does not relate whether at 93, Mr. Perelman has his own growing demand for doctors.) The president of the university, Amy Gutmann, who reportedly worked on the Perelman deal for a year, responds that the donation “might” make more doctors possible.

“Might”?

For $225 million, Perelman gets “might”? Apparently more doctors weren't part of the deal.

What was a part of it is the school's new name, “The Raymond and Ruth School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.”

Truths beyond words

2011-05-05T19:47:00.000-07:00

Tao called "Tao" is not Tao

Names can name no lasting name

Nameless: the origin of heaven and earth.

So begins the Tao Te Ching

Consider...

God called "God," or any other “divine” name,

is neither God nor divinity.

Names are neither infinite nor eternal.

Tao and God, eternity and infinity, are ineffable — beyond icons and names.

Names, particularly names like these, are, at best, frail representations of truth.

Only after this recognition and caution are shared and absorbed, can such names be used — sparingly and humbly, in full knowledge of their inadequacy.

The difference a day makes at The Oregonian

2011-05-04T08:19:00.000-07:00

The front page headline on today's Oregonian took an entirely different slant than yesterday's (see previous post.) Today's read:

U.S. revises details of killing

You will recall that yesterday's headline was:

How we got bin Laden

"We" has become the "U.S." and "got" is now "kill."

If I had the time or desire, I'd call the big O to find out if there was a different headline writer on duty for today's paper or whether the order came down from on high to get real.

Wonder what tomorrow will bring....