I think this quote is doing the rounds on the Net, but it's worth putting it here anyway: 

Here’s the thing. When we talk about race relations in America or racial progress, it’s all nonsense. There are no race relations. White people were crazy. Now they’re not as crazy. To say that black people have made progress would be to say they deserve what happened to them before.... So, to say Obama is progress is saying that he’s the first black person that is qualified to be president. That’s not black progress. That’s white progress. There’s been black people qualified to be president for hundreds of years.

Chris Rock

"In Conversation" in Vulture

"The US"

I have a tendency to talk about 'the US' as though it was one united country in which everyone agreed with the policies that Washington and the Presidency promote.  Of course this isn't the case, and there are millions are very sensible Americans who don't go along with all the political and patriotic nonsense that's foisted upon them.  I have to be even nicer about Americans these days because I have a wonderful American daughter-in-law, and she has a lovely family, and lots of great friends. 

So when I talk about 'the US' please remember that I'm meaning, usually, those in power, and those who are seeming warmongers. Obama slides in and out of this group; for the most part he manages to be on the edge, but there are others who seem to wholeheartedly race towards any opportunity to go to war.  Regrettably they have the clout to bring their country to such situations very readily. 

These are the kind of hypocritical people I'm talking about when I say 'the US.'  And these are the people who can, without blushing, say to Syria, we're going to bomb you unless you destroy all those nasty chemical weapons.'  But as Gwynne Dyer points out in an article today, the US, (those whom I've been defining up above) cannot, if it wishes to keep its integrity, call Syria a harbourer of chemical weapons, as though no one else had any.  As Dyer notes, 'the US' (yup, that same crew again) 'agreed to destroy the 31,000 tonnes of sarin, VX, mustard gas and other lethal gases that it owned within 10 years. That's 30 times as much as Syria has, but 10 years should have been enough. It wasn't. In 2007, Washington [another way of saying, 'the US'] asked for five more years to get rid of all its poison gas, the maximum extension allowed under the Chemical Weapons Convention. [This is the same Convention that Syria has just been forced to sign.] It didn't meet that deadline either, so last year [yup, just last year, so 'the US' has a very short memory] it announced a new deadline: 2021.  Given its own record, the US will find it hard to use Syrian delays as an excuse for resurrecting its bombing threats.'

Could the hypocrisy be any plainer?  I'm learning Psalm 119 at the moment (and have been for several months, and will be at least until Christmas!) and one of the recent verses was: I hate those who are double-minded.  Does that ring any bells?  Is it surprising that 'the US' does itself no favours when it acts in such double-minded, double-standard fashion - as it has done continually over Guantanamo Bay (a situation where Obama has slid into the 'the US' camp as well) and the spying on private citizens?

There's a difficulty in being the World's Policeman, the Greatest Nation, a Modern Empire.  Unless you bring integrity into the picture, and throw double-mindedness out the window, you're going to defile yourself continually, and all your best efforts to do great and grand things will come to naught.  Increasingly 'the US' has failed to keep its integrity.  And as more and more of its 19th and 20th century history is exposed, we're seeing that this lack of integrity goes back a considerable way.  Historians  bring these failures to light, journalists too, and artists even more so. Let's pray for a swing towards a greater integrity in 'the US.'  Without it, this nation will eventually become yet another victim of its own success, just like Greece, Rome, Russia, and many others.

politico

I just came across a news website called Politico.com. Fascinating stuff if you're into US politics in a big way - and by 'big way' I mean a really, really big way.   Every jot and tittle is covered until your brain is soaked in the stuff.  It's like being in New Zealand during the Rugby World Cup; supposedly nothing else goes on in people's minds except the awful game (and of course, I mean 'awful' in the old sense: awe-ful - don't I?)  Talking of which, though I hadn't intended to, the USA beat Russia yesterday; bit ironic, huh?

Anyway, back to Politico.com.  It's the online version of a real newspaper which has a relatively small circulation of 32,000, according to Wikipedia.   However, that's bolstered more than a little by the 6.7 million (unique) visitors the online version gets each month.   It kind of doesn't matter that the paper version is so small, when you add those two together.  

Politico focuses on the backstories, rather than the big headlines - according to its mission statement - and they aim to make their stories just as interesting as talking with the reporter over a sandwich or a beer.   Amongst of heap of stories floating around their site, I found this line: post-Sept. 11 veterans suffer a 23 percent unemployment rate. “After a decade of war, it’s time to focus on nation-building here at home. And our veterans, especially our 9/11 generation veterans, have the skills and the dedication to help lead ... 

There's a great deal about veterans on the site; it's plainly a big issue in the US, but not one that has hit our newspapers here with any great impact.  Our involvement has been so minimal, comparatively speaking, in the so-called war on terror, that we can practically count our lost soldiers on one (maybe two) hands.  Not so in the States, where thousands of men and women have died fighting a war that, IMHO, should never have been.  But it was, and now the US is facing the consequences of that.  There are sites where you can find information on a Military VA Loan for instance (I'm assuming VA stands for something like Veterans' Association, but I could be wrong). and the need to get veterans back on their feet is obviously very high on everyone's priority list, including Obama's.   Veterans can get home loans with no down payment, for instance, and the maximum loan you can go for is a whopping (by NZ standards) $US719,000.   That's some loan, but hopefully the Vets are getting enough in payments to cover that sort of mortgage.  

From where I sit (and I'm not likely to be alone in not understanding the full ins and outs of the current American monetary crises) it's hard to appreciate everything that's going on in the US economy.  (It's always been hard, mind you, not helped by the overly involved system that's evolved over there.)   For me it becomes a big clutter - even seven seasons of West Wing didn't help greatly.  I guess the way to understand it better would be to focus on something like the Vets and their situation.  I'm not sure that I'm going to be able to focus like that, but at least, when you're faced with a major issue, breaking it down in some way helps!

Out of his own mouth

For those who still think Barack Obama is a Muslim (as do a number of Americans, apparently)....here are some words from his own mouth. First from the God Blog June 2008

Well, look, obviously as a Christian I believe in the values that are laid out in Scripture. I reflect on them often. I reflect on the lessons of Scripture as I’m going through the day. I pray frequently. I wrestle with doubts and try to figure out whether I’m doing the right thing, am I operating in an honest and moral way that is true to my religious precepts? Sometimes I may falter. So I guess the point is, I approach my work or I guess my faith is part of everything that I do. And I don’t think there’s a clear separation between my faith and how I try to live my life. And I certainly think that part of my motivation in the work that I do is a belief in what I consider the core precept of Christianity in addition to Christ dying for your sins and that is treating your brothers and sisters as you would have them treat you. A sense of empathy and a belief in the golden rule. And that’s what I try to apply to my work and what I do every day.

Second from the same source in Sept 2010

“I’m a Christian by choice,” the president said. “My family, frankly, they weren’t folks who went to church every week. My mother was one of the most spiritual people I knew but she didn’t raise me in the church, so I came to my Christian faith later in life and it was because the precepts of Jesus Christ spoke to me in terms of the kind of life that I would want to lead. Being my brothers and sisters’ keeper, treating others as they would treat me, and I think also understanding that Jesus Christ dying for my sins spoke to the humility we all have to have as human beings, that we’re sinful and we’re flawed and we make mistakes and we achieve salvation through the grace of God.”

Mr. Obama went on: “But what we can do, as flawed as we are, is still see God in other people, and do our best to help them find their own grace. That’s what I strive to do, that’s what I pray to do every day.’’ Yet he said that as president, he also “deeply believes that part of the bedrock strength of this country is that it embraces people of many faiths and of no faith.’’

Trafficking, Water, Wallis

Blog Action Day is coming up in Oct - there's a link for more information right down the right column of this blog. Not sure why it decided to hide itself way down there, but now you know, and have no excuse for not finding it!

I was hoping that they'd choose Human Trafficking as their big issue for the action day, but they've chosen Water, which, in terms of the need for clean water in many countries is certainly an issue, and the lack of which results in deaths.

However, I've been getting tweets (tweets galore, in fact) relating to Human Trafficking and consequently that's an issue that's more on my mind. A friend on Facebook alerted me to a site called The A21 Campaign, this morning, so I've been checking it out. In line with its name it has 21 things you can do to help make people more aware of human trafficking. Click here for the list.

I went and heard Jim Wallis speak on Tuesday - he'd been brought to the city by the Professor of Public Theology at the Otago University. He's a fairly low key/laid-back speaker, has a good sense of humour, tells lots of stories, and (quixotically) is married to the woman who was consultant to the series The Vicar of Dibley. She's an Anglican priest, British born.

His theme is injustice, injustice, injustice. You may have heard of Sojourners, the organisation that he heads, but he does far more than that. He has the ear of people in high places - including Barak Obama, and is a Christian who is able to speak into society in a way that many Christians cannot - through lack of opportunity. You might put him in the prophetic mode, except that he wasn't wearing anything outlandish in the way of garb, now was he eating locusts or intending to cook his evening meal over dung; nor had he buried his underwear in the ground and disinterred it a year later (only to find, as would be expected, that it had deteriorated considerably); now has he been fed by ravens at any known point.

Nevertheless, prophet to the nation(s) is pretty much what he is. Thank God for him.

Wallis had plenty of injustice issues to comment on, and there's only so much you can say in a couple of hours, so he didn't speak much about human trafficking, as it happened. It did come up at one point, when he pointed out that there were more slaves now than there had been in Wilberforce's time - millions more. Wilberforce successfully fought for the abolition of slaves but the battle needs to be fought all over again in our day. Check out the A21 site if you're devoid of ideas as to how you might be involved.

It makes you weep

In the video below, you can see President Obama interrupting a review with CNBC to swat a fly, which he then manages to dispatch to wherever persistent flies go.



Unbelievably, a group called People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals is now calling this piece of nifty fly swatting an 'execution!' They want the President to show more compassion, even to this least of 'animals.' I'm not sure that the fly would have been pleased to have been included in the animal kingdom, being an insect by nature, but plainly Bruce Friedrich, the Vice President for Policy and Government Affairs at PETA thinks it should have been.

"We support compassion for even the smallest animals," says Bruce Friedrich, V.P. for Policy at PETA. "We support giving insects the benefit of the doubt." He continues by saying that PETA supports "brushing flies away rather than killing them" and was disappointed that the President had killed the fly.

I'm not exactly sure how the fly should have been given the benefit of the doubt: had it just taken diet pills, and so was a little more dizzy/buzzy than usual? Had it stumbled into the White House under the illusion that this was actually Fly Heaven and therefore, being an otherwise well-behaved fly, it had every right to be there? Was it protesting some particular fly Policy or Government Affair and hoping to heard by the President himself? Had it been swatted out of the room next door by some underling? We'll never know.

In case you think I'm anti-fly, I'm not. Many years ago a friend of mine expressed distaste at my longstanding habit of swatting flies with a newspaper and squashing them on the window. I forsook the habit from that time on, and have tried to let the plainly unhappy creatures back out into the wild. I still don't care for their propensity to find their way into the house in the first place, particularly when there is food on the table, but I forgive them for doing something they're probably built to do. I haven't yet understood why God made them in the first place, though I guess something's got to clean up the dung on this planet, and flies seem to have first dibs at the task.

I still don't understand why it is that when I sit in the bay window in my house, enjoying the sunshine and trying to do the cryptic crossword, flies seem to think I will enjoy their interminable buzzing. Our cat, which is now about seven months old, was so fast when she was a kitten that she could chase and catch flies - and eat them. Now that's dispatching. It was difficult to discourage her.

Meanwhile, Bruce Friedrich's group sent the president a Katcha Bug device, which traps bugs and allows their safe release back into nature. (Bruce is also on the governing board of the Catholic Vegetarian Society, the advisory board of the Christian Vegetarian Association, and is a founding member of the Society of Ethical and Religious Vegetarians. Groups I never knew existed.)