Yesterday, I wrote in support of newspapers. This morning, in the NY Times opinion section I got to read this rather long piece by Bret Stephens. Which actually hits many of the points that I have been mulling over in my head over the past week at least, maybe much longer than that. Stephens is one of the conservative voices that I have felt rather reflects the reason I used to identify as sort of center-right. He values things like truth, and acknowledges that no ideology has the market cornered on truth. That is not a relativist statement, it is an important acknowledgement of the reality that poets have noticed from Yeats to Bukowski. Yeats says it this way: "the best lack conviction and the worst work with passionate intensity." Bukowski said it this way: "The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts and the stupid ones are full of confidence."
One of the most valuable things that I read about the recently departed evangelist Billy Graham was the story of how he overcame one of his darkest moments. The moment is, of course, his association with Richard M. Nixon, and not just in sort of a generic support, but in a rather close relationship which included tape recorded conversations in which Graham seems to be on the same bigoted and paranoid train as Tricky Dick. Graham did a hard thing in the wake of Watergate: he admitted he was wrong. Not just about the relatively small act of bad behavior, but about his theological confusion of America for the Kingdom of God and his idolatrous infatuation with political power. That is respectable, whatever else you might think about the Preacher, that sort of public repentance and ability to learn from a mistake is a good thing.
It is not a thing that is much on display in our public discourse about anything at the moment. I will be the first to admit that nuance is a really annoying feature of the real world. Decisions and arguments are much easier when things are simple, black and white options. Who wants to parse details when it comes to things like immigration, health care and gun regulations. No one wants to think about moderate, incremental compromises on those things, everyone wants something done right now, and they want it done all the way. Stephens points out in the above article that one of the big threats to the free press is the way that people seem to want to be in a permanent state of rage. They don't want to see the other side of an issue because it distracts from their righteous indignation.
It is far too easy for me to totally write off the conservative side of the coin when I listen to Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity (which is why I choose not to do that), they just make me angry with their smug pandering to an ideology I no longer agree with. I do watch Bill Maher, but with an awareness that he is doing the exact same thing, just in my preferred end of the cesspool. People like Mr. Stephens, and others like him, are becoming important to me, because I can't write them off, in fact, more often than not, I agree with them, not necessarily about everything, but about enough to keep reading.
This is an important piece of our way back from where we are now: to find middle ground, somewhere, on those issues that divide us. Both left and right have their extremists, we need to stop listening to them. We cannot and should not try to silence them or shout them down, for in doing that we become the very enemy we seek to destroy. They have a first amendment right to spew their venom with as much confidence as they like, the intelligent people, with their doubts, must learn to tune out the wingnuts and find the people that might actually challenge their thinking.
Believe me, you will be a better thinker if you don't just tune into things you agree with. I believe that Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death ought to be required reading for people today. Even though it was written in the mid 1980's it is a prophetic analysis of what was happening and has continued to happen as people moved away from the printed word as a primary means of communication and to the visual media of television. Our brains process written things differently than we do people talking, we think more carefully about what we hear and what we say in writing (twitter and facebook sometimes challenge this premise, but do not entirely negate it). In a world of written things, ideas can be formulated, refined and debated. In the world of TV, everything is a soundbite and attention to detail is not really wanted or much pursued. The internet seems to have some of the strengths and weaknesses of both visual and written media, and honestly it often seems to be like the worst of both worlds. Postman was prophetic in his description of how destructive this could be to our very civilization, and boy was he right.
But here we are, stuff is broken, that we can all agree upon. We may disagree on how to fix it, or even on what stuff is broken and on how broken it is, but the one thing that I see on all sides among people with good sense is the acknowledgment that something is indeed wrong with our civilization. That's pretty unsteady ground to stand upon, but it may be the only place we have to start the journey back.
Thursday, February 22, 2018
Wednesday, February 21, 2018
Trolls, and How to Beat Them
No pictures today. No pithy quotes. Just one piece of advice: subscribe to a serious newspaper. Most big cities have at least one. The Washington Post and the New York Times are my choices, and yes I know a lot of people would say they are "liberal," and yes both of their editorial boards tend to lean a bit to the left, but they also consciously present voices from the right as well: George Will, Ross Douthat, Bret Stephens, David Brooks and Marc Thiessen to name several. You will find in the pages of either one of those daily publications facts, analysis and opinions that will both challenge your views and confirm things that you already think or feel. You cannot blindly trust newspapers any more than you can blindly trust TV news or what your cranky uncle might tell you, but you have, in the printed (or online, but at least written) media, a way to sort out lies from fact that still at least attempts to be somewhat rigorous about that fleeting thing we call the truth.
You will need to pay for this, it costs about $20 a month to subscribe to both papers online. The reason payment is important is because it lessens the degree to which they are beholden to their advertisers and it decreases the temptation of employing algorithms and filters to feed you what you want to see (as Google and Facebook do). Your subscription fees pay editors who might just feel that the truth is more important than sheer volume of traffic, and so they do things like fact check things that sound sensational and perhaps even more importantly, when they make a mistake (which they do), they print retractions and sometimes even apologize for the problem.
I know how you might think about the press, I grew up with all those TV shows where reporters were sort of obnoxious attention hounds, or driven people who all too easily bend ethical principles to "get the scoop." I understand that it's much more comfortable to just listen to people who tell you what you want to hear, we have been so conditioned to sales and advertising that we sometimes have a hard time when we're not being "sold." But this Russian troll farm (which sounds a lot cooler than it is), story is a pretty major crisis for the future of humanity. I'm not even going to go into the election meddling aspect or talk about Trump and collusion and all that. I'm just going to focus here on what it means for our commonweal that a group of people doing nothing but employing the tactics of your average eighth grade instigator, can call into question the prospects and progress of democracy.
You've heard the joke about the internet: it gives us nearly instant access to the sum total of human knowledge, right on a device that fits in our front pocket, and we use it mostly to look at pictures of kittens and argue with strangers. That tongue in cheek assessment is proving to have dire consequences for our political reality and our public discourse. Fox News has also proven in the medium of television that people generally prefer a mix of pleasant fluff and selective anger. There is something rather attractive about listening to people who are angry about the same things as you are. There is also something soothing about not having to think too hard to get to "the truth." The perfect combination is hearing someone, like say Sean Hannity (who has practically perfected the art of being angry) go on a rant about something that also makes you uncomfortable. I personally love listening to Cornel West, or Rev. William Barber, go on prophetic rants about things that make me angry. It is a good feeling.
Because it is a good feeling, it is unpleasant to have to think about how they might be wrong, so a lot of the time we just don't do it. The Trolls have figured this out. The Russian government did two kinds of things during the last election cycle; first, they hacked the DNC and released emails (this is the illegal part and this is the part that might get Trump in trouble). Second, they organized the "Troll Farm," where people just got on line and created fake social media accounts, they then proceeded to just sort of take what Americans were already saying and doing and sort of "kicking it up notch," as Emeril Legasse used to say. It's easy, you just make an argument (about say gun control or immigration) that has already been made, but you just take out some sliver of of reason or push it just a little further towards the extreme. You're not doing anything new, you're just repeating gossip essentially, but the Internet is a Gossip whirlwind.
Most of you have experienced that moment where someone you know re-posts a particularly jarring headline and then you look and the by-line says The Onion, it happens more than we want to admit. If you've just woken up from a coma or come out of suspended animation, The Onion is a satirical news website. Their headlines do the same thing as the Russian Trolls, but for the sake of being funny. Take something intended to be satirical, move it just far enough away from funny, and repeat it 100,000 times and Bam, you have a new "fact."
That's how the Gossip Whirlwind works. I work in a church, I am a freaking expert on gossip and the deleterious effect it can have on community and commonweal. True story, on multiple occasions the gossip whirlwind has reported a death that didn't happen yet. It very rarely does anything constructive.
But gossip is popular, and kind of fun, and humans have been doing it since we learned how to use language. The problem we have now is that we have loosened the moorings we have to the sorts of things that would teach us how to calm the Gossip Whirlwind, things like facts and reasoned discourse and disciplined journalism. We have let ourselves be convinced by the whirlwind that those things are just more "fake news" or that somehow all of it has some sort of bias, which mysteriously always seems to be biased away from our own previously held position.
I know better than to think that human nature is going to somehow change on this matter. We're going to need the serious people, committed to the truth, to help us get through this moment where the whirlwind has ripped the roof off of our house. To continue to deny that the winds have gotten this bad is not a good idea. It would be great if we could recover some semblance of civil discourse, reasoned debate and actual ideas to improve our society rather than just new ways to spit at each other. As I talked about yesterday, it's not necessarily the tool that is the problem, it is the misuse and abuse of that tool that creates a crisis.
The interweb has the capability to solve the very problem it started, if only we had some way to access filtered, edited, fact-checked and vetted stories about what is going on...
Yeah, subscribe to a newspaper.
You will need to pay for this, it costs about $20 a month to subscribe to both papers online. The reason payment is important is because it lessens the degree to which they are beholden to their advertisers and it decreases the temptation of employing algorithms and filters to feed you what you want to see (as Google and Facebook do). Your subscription fees pay editors who might just feel that the truth is more important than sheer volume of traffic, and so they do things like fact check things that sound sensational and perhaps even more importantly, when they make a mistake (which they do), they print retractions and sometimes even apologize for the problem.
I know how you might think about the press, I grew up with all those TV shows where reporters were sort of obnoxious attention hounds, or driven people who all too easily bend ethical principles to "get the scoop." I understand that it's much more comfortable to just listen to people who tell you what you want to hear, we have been so conditioned to sales and advertising that we sometimes have a hard time when we're not being "sold." But this Russian troll farm (which sounds a lot cooler than it is), story is a pretty major crisis for the future of humanity. I'm not even going to go into the election meddling aspect or talk about Trump and collusion and all that. I'm just going to focus here on what it means for our commonweal that a group of people doing nothing but employing the tactics of your average eighth grade instigator, can call into question the prospects and progress of democracy.
You've heard the joke about the internet: it gives us nearly instant access to the sum total of human knowledge, right on a device that fits in our front pocket, and we use it mostly to look at pictures of kittens and argue with strangers. That tongue in cheek assessment is proving to have dire consequences for our political reality and our public discourse. Fox News has also proven in the medium of television that people generally prefer a mix of pleasant fluff and selective anger. There is something rather attractive about listening to people who are angry about the same things as you are. There is also something soothing about not having to think too hard to get to "the truth." The perfect combination is hearing someone, like say Sean Hannity (who has practically perfected the art of being angry) go on a rant about something that also makes you uncomfortable. I personally love listening to Cornel West, or Rev. William Barber, go on prophetic rants about things that make me angry. It is a good feeling.
Because it is a good feeling, it is unpleasant to have to think about how they might be wrong, so a lot of the time we just don't do it. The Trolls have figured this out. The Russian government did two kinds of things during the last election cycle; first, they hacked the DNC and released emails (this is the illegal part and this is the part that might get Trump in trouble). Second, they organized the "Troll Farm," where people just got on line and created fake social media accounts, they then proceeded to just sort of take what Americans were already saying and doing and sort of "kicking it up notch," as Emeril Legasse used to say. It's easy, you just make an argument (about say gun control or immigration) that has already been made, but you just take out some sliver of of reason or push it just a little further towards the extreme. You're not doing anything new, you're just repeating gossip essentially, but the Internet is a Gossip whirlwind.
Most of you have experienced that moment where someone you know re-posts a particularly jarring headline and then you look and the by-line says The Onion, it happens more than we want to admit. If you've just woken up from a coma or come out of suspended animation, The Onion is a satirical news website. Their headlines do the same thing as the Russian Trolls, but for the sake of being funny. Take something intended to be satirical, move it just far enough away from funny, and repeat it 100,000 times and Bam, you have a new "fact."
That's how the Gossip Whirlwind works. I work in a church, I am a freaking expert on gossip and the deleterious effect it can have on community and commonweal. True story, on multiple occasions the gossip whirlwind has reported a death that didn't happen yet. It very rarely does anything constructive.
But gossip is popular, and kind of fun, and humans have been doing it since we learned how to use language. The problem we have now is that we have loosened the moorings we have to the sorts of things that would teach us how to calm the Gossip Whirlwind, things like facts and reasoned discourse and disciplined journalism. We have let ourselves be convinced by the whirlwind that those things are just more "fake news" or that somehow all of it has some sort of bias, which mysteriously always seems to be biased away from our own previously held position.
I know better than to think that human nature is going to somehow change on this matter. We're going to need the serious people, committed to the truth, to help us get through this moment where the whirlwind has ripped the roof off of our house. To continue to deny that the winds have gotten this bad is not a good idea. It would be great if we could recover some semblance of civil discourse, reasoned debate and actual ideas to improve our society rather than just new ways to spit at each other. As I talked about yesterday, it's not necessarily the tool that is the problem, it is the misuse and abuse of that tool that creates a crisis.
The interweb has the capability to solve the very problem it started, if only we had some way to access filtered, edited, fact-checked and vetted stories about what is going on...
Yeah, subscribe to a newspaper.
Tuesday, February 20, 2018
Tool Time
"There must be some kind of way out of here,"
said the joker to the thief.
"There's too much confusion here, I can't get no relief."
-Bob Dylan, All Along the Watchtower
Almost a week after the latest catastrophe the aftermath is in a fairly familiar place. After a few days of silence the obfuscation and steady turning of the issue has begun. Whether it is Russian bots stoking our already overheated dialogue or just the revival of many of the same old intractable arguments, things seem to be getting back to normal in America. Some hope that maybe this time will be different, but I suspect that is going to fade as well as we remember that the righteous and prophetic voices of the Florida survivors get swept under by the constant stream of emotional arguments.
I'm not going to talk politics today. I'm going to talk tools, because one of the strongest arguments concerning guns and gun control is that the guns are just tools. As a gun owner and someone who enjoys shooting just for the sake of shooting, I would like to express my appreciation for a wide range of firearms. I have shot one of the much maligned AR-15 (Armalite Rifle not Assault Rifle). I have shot a .44 magnum, "the most powerful handgun in the world" according to Dirty Harry, shut up Desert Eagle people, your .50 caliber hand cannons are ridiculous. Honestly these sort of extreme shooting experiences have their place, but as for what I actually need to own...
Well, let's talk about guns as tools, and the emotional response a lot of men have to tools. A few years ago the comedian Tim Allen made a lot of money with comedy about how men love tools. He got his own TV show where he played a man who had a TV show about tools called Tool Time. A lot of people, including me, get pretty stoked about tools. Last year I went through the proper legal process in Maryland to purchase a handgun. All told it took about two months and involved fingerprints and background checks, but in the end I got my Ruger American 9mm and I have spent many happy hours at the range punching holes in targets. It was a good feeling, and strikingly similar to the feeling I got when I went and purchased a new Stihl chainsaw to save myself the vexation of trying to keep my old Poulan saw running, which seemed to require increasing amounts of sorcery. I noticed that the feeling of being in control of a new chainsaw, an extremely useful tool, and also a dangerous thing, was very much akin to the feeling I got from shooting a gun. So I've been thinking about this for a while.
Good tools are a joy, and in my experience the AR-15 in all it's variations is a good tool, but it is a tool whose primary purpose is to kill people, that's what it was designed to do. My chainsaw could kill people too, but that is not what it is designed to do. My 9mm handgun, well you could make the same argument about that as you can the AR, but it is different in some important regards. First of all has to do with ballistics, a 9mm handgun round is deadly enough, inside about 20 meters I can plug away pretty accurately. Outside that range it becomes more about luck than anything else, unless I'm bracing my hand on a bench, even then, a 3-4 inch barrel just doesn't give you the control over your bullet that a 15 inch carbine barrel does. Also, a handgun round is relatively low powered, and the slug is sort of big and slow (for a bullet that is). Mythbusters have done several interesting experiments on ballistics and the penetrating ability of various rounds, if you want, look them up. The .223 round that the AR platform uses is really different. It's a fairly small caliber bullet, if you notice .223 is only 3/100 larger than a .22 LR, which is the standard plinker round and far from high powered (deadly enough in the right circumstances still though). Here is a side by side comparison of a .22 LR and a .223 round:
You will notice that the .223 has a LOT more room for something very important: gunpowder. The .22 LR sounds like a little crack when it is fired, the .223 sounds like a righteous boom. Not quite like a big old 30-06 or some kind of monster gun, but noticeably more violent than a .22 LR. The .223 is, in my opinion, just about the perfect round for people who like to shoot. It's relatively cheap, it produces little recoil, and it shoots straight and true. It is also capable of penetrating through car doors and various sorts of walls. Then only place you can shoot a .223 in my part of the world is at the range. You're not allowed to hunt with rifles where I live, because in the flat lands bullets like the .223 or even the .22 can travel a long, long way.
So there is a reason why the people who commit these mass shootings like the .223 as opposed to handguns or other sorts of rifles, they obviously want to do the most damage and tool wise the .223 is a champ for that.
But the bullet alone is not the whole issue, the platform also has a lot to do with it. I'm going to use a lot of pictures here to explain exactly what I mean. First let's start with a much more basic tool/weapon, the good old knife, one of man's oldest and most important implements. Here are pictures of two knives that I own. I purposely did not include a kitchen knife because I want to try and keep this as apples to apples as I can. First, here is a Condor Bushlore:
Then there is this thing:
I bought this when I was 17 and had been reading too many Ken Follett novels. This knife is beautiful to be sure, but it is not good for much except stabbing things. If I were to wear this on my belt, unless it was part of a Halloween costume, I would look like an utter psychopath. To be honest, I don't really need to own something like this, but I do, and that leads me to what I've been thinking about with regard to guns.
The reason why some people will dig in and resist gun control measures of any sort is because of an emotional attachment to things like that second knife. An AR-15 is the firearm equivalent of that stiletto knife, it is designed for a purpose, it is good at that purpose and it is a beautiful thing in its own way. In the hands of a person bent on violence, either knife could be deadly, but I'd be willing to bet that if you gave most homocidal folks a choice between the Bushlore and the stiletto, they would take the stiletto more often than not.
Handling an AR-15 is a different experience than handling a comparable weapon. Here are more pictures, this is a Ruger Mini-14, which is also a .223 semiautomatic rifle:
It is a close cousin of the AR-15, but it is marketed as a "ranch rifle." and even though it can be dressed up in some pretty tactical gear:
I will be honest with you, shooting this thing makes you feel things, it really does. Honestly, I wouldn't mind owning one, but I can also understand that, if I was of a mind to harm others, putting this gun in my hands would make me more likely to do so. That's the thing that is so damning to "the gun is a tool" argument, it's not that you couldn't use a Mini-14 to shoot up a school, you absolutely could, it's that, in almost every high profile shooting episode of the last several years from Sandy Hook to Las Vegas to Stoneman Douglas, some variant of an AR-15 has been involved.
As I've said before, there is not a simple solution to this problem. I am not particularly a fan of prohibition as a means to preventing bad behavior. I think that our prohibition on various sorts of drugs is a disaster, I think that alcohol prohibition was a disaster, I suspect that just trying to flat out ban guns would also be a disaster.
Most of the people that I know who own an AR-15 or something like it have never shot anything but targets with it. In some hands the gun is safe, in some hands the gun is a beautiful tool, to those people a ban sounds punitive and intrusive. Here is something I firmly believe about our current gun situation: if we are going to make meaningful progress on the state of affairs concerning guns, we need people who really understand the relationship we have with firearms from the inside. The threat of prohibition is nothing but a shutdown inducing rage button to people who are willing to own guns by the rules.
So the gun control crowd has this problem of alienating the very people who would be and probably should be on their side. I did not mind at all that I had to fill out some forms and wait a minute to get a gun. I certainly don't think that that AR should be any less regulated than my pistol. The reason it's not is because humans are emotional animals, plain and simple. We should be able to plainly tell that this:
The reason why some people will dig in and resist gun control measures of any sort is because of an emotional attachment to things like that second knife. An AR-15 is the firearm equivalent of that stiletto knife, it is designed for a purpose, it is good at that purpose and it is a beautiful thing in its own way. In the hands of a person bent on violence, either knife could be deadly, but I'd be willing to bet that if you gave most homocidal folks a choice between the Bushlore and the stiletto, they would take the stiletto more often than not.
Handling an AR-15 is a different experience than handling a comparable weapon. Here are more pictures, this is a Ruger Mini-14, which is also a .223 semiautomatic rifle:
It is a close cousin of the AR-15, but it is marketed as a "ranch rifle." and even though it can be dressed up in some pretty tactical gear:
It has not gotten the attention or the ill-use of the AR-15, which looks like this:
As I've said before, there is not a simple solution to this problem. I am not particularly a fan of prohibition as a means to preventing bad behavior. I think that our prohibition on various sorts of drugs is a disaster, I think that alcohol prohibition was a disaster, I suspect that just trying to flat out ban guns would also be a disaster.
Most of the people that I know who own an AR-15 or something like it have never shot anything but targets with it. In some hands the gun is safe, in some hands the gun is a beautiful tool, to those people a ban sounds punitive and intrusive. Here is something I firmly believe about our current gun situation: if we are going to make meaningful progress on the state of affairs concerning guns, we need people who really understand the relationship we have with firearms from the inside. The threat of prohibition is nothing but a shutdown inducing rage button to people who are willing to own guns by the rules.
So the gun control crowd has this problem of alienating the very people who would be and probably should be on their side. I did not mind at all that I had to fill out some forms and wait a minute to get a gun. I certainly don't think that that AR should be any less regulated than my pistol. The reason it's not is because humans are emotional animals, plain and simple. We should be able to plainly tell that this:
While it may be not that much different in principle from the AR, is probably not going to be quite as emotionally attractive to someone who has broken loose from the moorings of their humanity enough to decide that shooting up a school is a thing they want to do. How can we, as a society, take sensible measures to address that reality? Slippery slope arguments and false equivalencies are not helpful. Overheated emotions and increasingly polarized rhetoric are not getting us anything but more dead kids. Every gun owner I know, and probably most of the ones that I don't, hates what happened last Wednesday, this should not be gun owners against the world, that way lies madness. We have to find sanity on this issue and we need to find it fast, kids are dying.
Thursday, February 15, 2018
Pardon my Weariness
So I guess we have to do this again huh? I guess I'll try to think of something different to say this time.
I had to go all the way back to October to find my last Jeremiad about mass shootings. That was about Las Vegas. At this point you have to whistle past a lot of graveyards when it comes to mass shootings and just focus on the biggest ones, or the ones that involve schools. Every time this happens the same arguments get trotted out: more gun control, better mental health care, trying to change our violent culture, arming the right people, being prepared for such events.
People always think there is some sort of simple solution. There is not. We have spent years, if not centuries creating the culture that produces this sort of violence, and we have worked ourselves into a state of utter paralysis to deal with the consequences.
In the initial wave of reactions this morning I read that the suspected shooter in the Florida case is nineteen year old Nicholas Cruz. He had exhibited some problematic behavior, he had been expelled from school and his social media history shows an obsession with guns and violence. Okay, apart from the expulsion, and the fact that social media wasn't a thing when I was nineteen, that fairly describes at least half of the guys I knew in high school, probably including me.
There was a chilling assessment in one of the Post's articles about it this morning:
"Probably not," I wanted that to probably not be true, but I had to admit that it pretty definitely was true. I really wanted to at least indulge the fantasy that we could have stopped what happened. It was true because none of us could bring ourselves to suspect that he would kill his little girl with the shy smile and the trusting eyes. Like people who knew Cruz, we understood that he was a little off, we knew there was a history of violent and erratic behavior and we knew he was being treated for depression. We could not bring ourselves to expect the worst.
That one time taught me to never assume the worst won't happen. It also taught me how powerless we can be to actually stop something like this. To this day I don't know when he made the decision to do it, but I know all three of us probably talked to him after he had become a murderer in his heart. All three of us had the connection to him to get him help if we knew he needed it, but we didn't have any resources that could stop him. We couldn't have him committed without some solid proof that he was a danger to himself or others, if we had called the police they might have stopped by and talked to him, but they probably would have had the same impression that we did: he was sullen but stable.
I know you might want easy answers, but in my experience there are none. The hard answers are that we have to make some deep changes in our national psyche. We have to have the will to enact good gun control legislation, yes, legislation that responsible gun owners can support. We have to curtail the ability of lobbyists like the NRA to hamstring gun laws and the efforts to make them better. These groups represent corporations more than individuals and their rhetoric relies on and stokes highly emotional arguments against "taking away our freedom."
But gun laws alone are not going to prevent things like this. As we have seen in Las Vegas and here, it is possible to buy these things through entirely legal channels. I don't suspect that is likely to change for real, the best we can do is tighten up the requirements and do a better job at enforcing the rules we do have. As for the "They're coming for your guns" rhetoric, the government, contrary to what some might tell you, is rather constrained from taking things you own away from you (4th Amendment on top of the 2nd). Even in a tightly regulated state like Maryland there are still plenty of ARs at the range on any given day, even if their owners did have to pass a background check and do some paperwork to get them, they are bearing the heck out of those arms.
We've got other, less obvious and more difficult work to do. We need to build communities that do not simply marginalize people who are struggling with mental illness, and we do need to do a better job of getting people who know about troubled folks connected with each other and with resources to help. That can be really tough, because many of us are bound by confidentiality rules, and we are every bit as capable of denial as anyone. We need structures that can help individuals like pastors and guidance counselors intervene in situations where people are troubled; we need more latitude to get support even if all we have is a hunch, a lot of times we just don't have any options.
Of course none of this is ever going to make us completely safe, but at some point we need to get the people involved into the same room so that they can compare notes. I think we're at a point now where we really have to stop being shocked that this happens. We haven't changed anything meaningful from Columbine to now. Sandy Hook was six years ago and there have just been too many of these incidents for us to plausibly claim ignorance or innocence.
I had to go all the way back to October to find my last Jeremiad about mass shootings. That was about Las Vegas. At this point you have to whistle past a lot of graveyards when it comes to mass shootings and just focus on the biggest ones, or the ones that involve schools. Every time this happens the same arguments get trotted out: more gun control, better mental health care, trying to change our violent culture, arming the right people, being prepared for such events.
People always think there is some sort of simple solution. There is not. We have spent years, if not centuries creating the culture that produces this sort of violence, and we have worked ourselves into a state of utter paralysis to deal with the consequences.
In the initial wave of reactions this morning I read that the suspected shooter in the Florida case is nineteen year old Nicholas Cruz. He had exhibited some problematic behavior, he had been expelled from school and his social media history shows an obsession with guns and violence. Okay, apart from the expulsion, and the fact that social media wasn't a thing when I was nineteen, that fairly describes at least half of the guys I knew in high school, probably including me.
There was a chilling assessment in one of the Post's articles about it this morning:
Had everyone who knew of his (Cruz) struggles sat down in a room and compared notes, perhaps an alarm would have sounded ahead of what emerged on Valentine's Day...In 2012 a man I knew and had been counseling killed his estranged wife and two daughters. Two of his neighbors, one of whom was also clergy, and I were talking as the three men who probably knew what was going on better than anyone. Two of us were actually experienced in dealing with mental health problems. All of us knew that there was potential for violence. None of us expected what eventually happened. One of the other men said, "if we had all sat down and compared notes we might have been able to see this coming, but probably not."
"Probably not," I wanted that to probably not be true, but I had to admit that it pretty definitely was true. I really wanted to at least indulge the fantasy that we could have stopped what happened. It was true because none of us could bring ourselves to suspect that he would kill his little girl with the shy smile and the trusting eyes. Like people who knew Cruz, we understood that he was a little off, we knew there was a history of violent and erratic behavior and we knew he was being treated for depression. We could not bring ourselves to expect the worst.
That one time taught me to never assume the worst won't happen. It also taught me how powerless we can be to actually stop something like this. To this day I don't know when he made the decision to do it, but I know all three of us probably talked to him after he had become a murderer in his heart. All three of us had the connection to him to get him help if we knew he needed it, but we didn't have any resources that could stop him. We couldn't have him committed without some solid proof that he was a danger to himself or others, if we had called the police they might have stopped by and talked to him, but they probably would have had the same impression that we did: he was sullen but stable.
I know you might want easy answers, but in my experience there are none. The hard answers are that we have to make some deep changes in our national psyche. We have to have the will to enact good gun control legislation, yes, legislation that responsible gun owners can support. We have to curtail the ability of lobbyists like the NRA to hamstring gun laws and the efforts to make them better. These groups represent corporations more than individuals and their rhetoric relies on and stokes highly emotional arguments against "taking away our freedom."
But gun laws alone are not going to prevent things like this. As we have seen in Las Vegas and here, it is possible to buy these things through entirely legal channels. I don't suspect that is likely to change for real, the best we can do is tighten up the requirements and do a better job at enforcing the rules we do have. As for the "They're coming for your guns" rhetoric, the government, contrary to what some might tell you, is rather constrained from taking things you own away from you (4th Amendment on top of the 2nd). Even in a tightly regulated state like Maryland there are still plenty of ARs at the range on any given day, even if their owners did have to pass a background check and do some paperwork to get them, they are bearing the heck out of those arms.
We've got other, less obvious and more difficult work to do. We need to build communities that do not simply marginalize people who are struggling with mental illness, and we do need to do a better job of getting people who know about troubled folks connected with each other and with resources to help. That can be really tough, because many of us are bound by confidentiality rules, and we are every bit as capable of denial as anyone. We need structures that can help individuals like pastors and guidance counselors intervene in situations where people are troubled; we need more latitude to get support even if all we have is a hunch, a lot of times we just don't have any options.
Of course none of this is ever going to make us completely safe, but at some point we need to get the people involved into the same room so that they can compare notes. I think we're at a point now where we really have to stop being shocked that this happens. We haven't changed anything meaningful from Columbine to now. Sandy Hook was six years ago and there have just been too many of these incidents for us to plausibly claim ignorance or innocence.
Wednesday, February 14, 2018
For Michele
When you love you should not say,
"God is in my heart," but rather,
"I am in the heart of God."
And think not that you can direct the course of love,
For love, if it finds you worthy, directs your course.
-Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet
For most of my life, prior to meeting my wife, I profoundly disliked this day. I figured it was simply because I was introverted and not much of a success at this thing some call dating. Several bouts of ill-conceived romantic profligacy did not really qualify as relationships in any real sense, and to this day I consider myself rather fortunate that Michele had both the inclination and the determination to haul me out of my own clueless world and into a place where Valentines Day might actually be considered a holy day.
However, I find that after 21 Valentine's Days together, I'm still not happy with this day. Before I was a humbug about Valentines Day because I thought it was pointless and it reminded me that I was alone. Now I am entirely on the other end of the spectrum, because I think that Love is far too deep and holy a thing to be reduced to flowers, red hearts and chocolate.
This year, as many of my clergy friends have been noting, Valentines day falls on Ash Wednesday and for those of us that actually pay attention to such liturgical milestones this presents an almost comical contrast. But I don't think it's actually that much of a juxtaposition, if you really understand the depth of love. "Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return," is a bracing reminder that we are mortal, and our mortality makes love all that much more salient. I have been thinking a lot over Kahlil Gibran's meditation on love in The Prophet. I recommend reading the whole thing if you have access to it. I will share just a bit more:
For even as love crowns you so shall he crucify you. Even as he is for your growth, so is he for your pruning.
Even as he ascends to your height and caresses your tenderest branches that quiver in the sun. So shall he descend to your roots and shake them in their clinging to the earth.Love is far too elemental a force to be adequately dealt with by Hallmark, which is why, even now, when I am happy with my love and treasure our life together, I still sort of chafe against Valentine's day. This Valentine's Day/Ash Wednesday thing has really got me thinking, and Kahlil is taking it deep:
But if in your fear you would seek only love's peace and love's pleasure, then it is better for you that you cover your nakedness and pass out of love's threshing floor, into the seasonless world where you shall laugh but not all of your laughter, and weep, but not all of your tears.Finally, there is this song that has been getting heavy rotation on my Sirius XM station called the Spectrum: Jason Isbell and the 400 unit, If We Were Vampires. When I first heard the title I thought it might be some silly little thing about wanting to live forever and love each other, but as it turns out it is a rather poignant little folk song that asks the question: "What if time running out is a gift?"
I think it's a pretty good thing to put here for Valentine's Day/ Ash Wednesday:
Tuesday, February 6, 2018
Strategy
I learned to play chess in the third grade. My teacher, taught us the basic rules and then turned us loose in a round robin chess tournament. I remember that I did pretty well, which was a change from most competitive things I did at that time. The basic level of chess is that you try to take all of your opponents pieces and eventually you have his king cornered on a mostly empty board. Checkmate and stalemates are things that happen only after a long war of attrition. One of the most rudimentary elements of strategy is the trap, tempting your opponent into moving one of his pieces into danger by dangling some reward. Maybe it's the chance to get your king in check or the possibility of capturing your queen. A good player is wary of traps, a really good player is thinking at least 4 or 5 moves ahead. Third graders can't resist the cheese, at all. What I remember about those early days was that I learned about traps, I learned not to take the obvious opportunity. I learned to conceal my real strategy behind layers.
I'm still not a chess master, I just don't play enough, but I still look out for traps. I'm not sure yet, but I think there is a giant trap in the process of being sprung right now. If it's true then our democracy is in better shape than I thought, if it's not true, it really doesn't change my pessimism much. Here's what I think might be going on vis-a-vis the Nunes Memo and the Russia investigation. The House Intelligence Committee makes a show of whether or not to release this memo, going against every precedent, going against opposition invective and even reservations from allies. They say they're going to do it, along party lines and they give the Executive Branch its chance to squash it. But they know that's not going to happen because, ostensibly there is a thin veneer of vindication for the occupant of the oval office. The Nunes Memo says that there might have been some impropriety in obtaining a FISA warrant to do surveillance on Carter Page, a Trump adviser during the campaign and one of the people who has been shown to be clearly involved with the Russian intelligence apparatus.
The memo does not exonerate Page, nor cast doubt upon the reality of Russian interference, but it gives a certain person what he obviously sees as a chance to "win" something. In this case it amounts to little more than dangling a solitary pawn out there to be swooped up by a bigger, more powerful piece. The Trump administration can crow victory and Fox News can chirp about how the FBI is really in the pocket of the Clinton machine. Then, the House Intelligence Committee comes back with a rebuttal memo, this one, I'm betting, is more detailed and probably more substantive than the Nunes Memo. They just voted to release it, unanimously. Let that sink in, like you see that knight just waiting to knock the queen down. The Democrats and the Republicans, including Adam Schiff, Nunes himself and Mr. Benghazi Trey Gowdy, just unanimously voted to release another document that rebuts the bait.
Now that has to go to Trump for approval or disapproval. If he squashes this one, it's a catastrophe, he is deeper in the mud of public opinion, because it looks like he has something to hide (which is already what a lot of this looks like). If he releases it, and it is what I suspect it is: a confirmation that the FBI is actually not a bastion of liberal conspiracies against the POTUS, he and all of his cronies look like fools and he has even less cover for attacking Robert Mueller, who very well might be the piece that will eventually put this foolish king in checkmate.
I'm not a politician, but I have watched The West Wing and House of Cards, and I have played chess for a long time; this seems to me like a trap being sprung. The people in Congress, Republicans included, are no fans of Trump. They are also the branch of government most capable of putting him in check. I'm going to give the benefit of the doubt and assume that they all know this. I'm going to assume that when he calls people who don't stand for his speech or the national anthem treasonous, and when he vents his venom at the free press, they know that this is not acceptable for the leader of the "free world." I'm going to assume they are all R and D alike, as weary as I am of being embarrassed by porn star affairs and toilet tweets. I'm going to assume that they know that obstruction of justice, not collusion, is really the checkmate move here, and that he doesn't actually have to succeed in obstructing justice to be guilty of trying. You don't have to walk out the door with money and a Slurpee to be guilty of armed robbery if you hold up a 7-11 clerk at gunpoint. I'm also going to assume that the House Intelligence Committee knows quite a bit more about what Mueller knows and doesn't know than I do.
I also wonder if it's entirely unrelated that the much ballyhooed growth of the Dow Jones has just gone in the tank big time over the past few days. If Trump doesn't have a blooming stock exchange I fear his popularity will go even lower than it already is. He might find himself suddenly surrounded by enemies on all sides, I mean for real, not just in his head.
Of course, I could be wrong about all of this. It could be a "nothingburger." But if it does turn out to be a move by a seemingly incompetent legislature to do their job of restraining a dangerously unstable Executive, well then rope-a-dope I say, rope-a-dope. I'm still doubting that this ends in an impeachment, but it might very well result in fool-king Trump running scared around the board for the next three years, thereby severely limiting the damage he can do and leaving him no chance of actually winning.
I'm still not a chess master, I just don't play enough, but I still look out for traps. I'm not sure yet, but I think there is a giant trap in the process of being sprung right now. If it's true then our democracy is in better shape than I thought, if it's not true, it really doesn't change my pessimism much. Here's what I think might be going on vis-a-vis the Nunes Memo and the Russia investigation. The House Intelligence Committee makes a show of whether or not to release this memo, going against every precedent, going against opposition invective and even reservations from allies. They say they're going to do it, along party lines and they give the Executive Branch its chance to squash it. But they know that's not going to happen because, ostensibly there is a thin veneer of vindication for the occupant of the oval office. The Nunes Memo says that there might have been some impropriety in obtaining a FISA warrant to do surveillance on Carter Page, a Trump adviser during the campaign and one of the people who has been shown to be clearly involved with the Russian intelligence apparatus.
The memo does not exonerate Page, nor cast doubt upon the reality of Russian interference, but it gives a certain person what he obviously sees as a chance to "win" something. In this case it amounts to little more than dangling a solitary pawn out there to be swooped up by a bigger, more powerful piece. The Trump administration can crow victory and Fox News can chirp about how the FBI is really in the pocket of the Clinton machine. Then, the House Intelligence Committee comes back with a rebuttal memo, this one, I'm betting, is more detailed and probably more substantive than the Nunes Memo. They just voted to release it, unanimously. Let that sink in, like you see that knight just waiting to knock the queen down. The Democrats and the Republicans, including Adam Schiff, Nunes himself and Mr. Benghazi Trey Gowdy, just unanimously voted to release another document that rebuts the bait.
Now that has to go to Trump for approval or disapproval. If he squashes this one, it's a catastrophe, he is deeper in the mud of public opinion, because it looks like he has something to hide (which is already what a lot of this looks like). If he releases it, and it is what I suspect it is: a confirmation that the FBI is actually not a bastion of liberal conspiracies against the POTUS, he and all of his cronies look like fools and he has even less cover for attacking Robert Mueller, who very well might be the piece that will eventually put this foolish king in checkmate.
I'm not a politician, but I have watched The West Wing and House of Cards, and I have played chess for a long time; this seems to me like a trap being sprung. The people in Congress, Republicans included, are no fans of Trump. They are also the branch of government most capable of putting him in check. I'm going to give the benefit of the doubt and assume that they all know this. I'm going to assume that when he calls people who don't stand for his speech or the national anthem treasonous, and when he vents his venom at the free press, they know that this is not acceptable for the leader of the "free world." I'm going to assume they are all R and D alike, as weary as I am of being embarrassed by porn star affairs and toilet tweets. I'm going to assume that they know that obstruction of justice, not collusion, is really the checkmate move here, and that he doesn't actually have to succeed in obstructing justice to be guilty of trying. You don't have to walk out the door with money and a Slurpee to be guilty of armed robbery if you hold up a 7-11 clerk at gunpoint. I'm also going to assume that the House Intelligence Committee knows quite a bit more about what Mueller knows and doesn't know than I do.
I also wonder if it's entirely unrelated that the much ballyhooed growth of the Dow Jones has just gone in the tank big time over the past few days. If Trump doesn't have a blooming stock exchange I fear his popularity will go even lower than it already is. He might find himself suddenly surrounded by enemies on all sides, I mean for real, not just in his head.
Of course, I could be wrong about all of this. It could be a "nothingburger." But if it does turn out to be a move by a seemingly incompetent legislature to do their job of restraining a dangerously unstable Executive, well then rope-a-dope I say, rope-a-dope. I'm still doubting that this ends in an impeachment, but it might very well result in fool-king Trump running scared around the board for the next three years, thereby severely limiting the damage he can do and leaving him no chance of actually winning.
Monday, February 5, 2018
Underdogs
I would not consider myself to be an optimist. Most of the time, I expect that things will go wrong and fall apart. I am not an abject pessimist though, I don't usually expect the worst, I just think that there will always be some level of disappointment in most things. I attribute that feeling to a lifetime of being a fan and follower of the Philadelphia Eagles.
For those of you not familiar with the Iggles and their pathology, let me explain. They are not the Cleveland Browns, doomed losers that can take the brightest opportunity and watch it drown in Lake Erie. They are a team that can show you flashes of greatness, whether it was Dick Vermeil's teams in the early 1980s with Ron Jaworski and Wilbert Montgomery or whether it was Buddy Ryan's Gang Green defense in the late 1980s with Reggie White and Jerome Brown, or the Donovan McNabb/Andy Reid "dynasty" of the early 2000's. The Iggles managed to rise only so far, they never quite made it to the place that they made it last night. This morning, I don't quite know what to do with the Super Bowl Champion Philadelphia Eagles. I'm happy for sure, but I have to tell you that game last night was balanced on the head of a pin, and to long time fans of the Iggles, it really felt like it could go sideways at any minute. The touchdown to Zach Ertz was one of those moments that I felt was surely going to go wrong for us. It was a review of whether or not he caught the ball before he crossed the goal line and the ball bounced on the ground. Everything in my experience told me it was a catch, he had the ball firmly in two hands, took two or three steps and dove across the line, still with the ball firmly in two hands. In the end zone, when the ball breaks the plane of the goal line, the play is over and the score is good. Running backs stretch the ball across the line all the time, not worrying about whether it is dislodged because of this rule. Ertz clearly possessed the ball and was a runner before crossing the line and having the ball bounce off the ground. But the review stretched on and the two morons doing the TV commentary (seriously Al Michaels and Chris Collingsworth need to go away, someone needs to make that happen) were dead sure that the play would be reversed. Given what I have experienced in my life as an Iggles phan, I almost knew that it would be, unfairly, unjustly yet inexorably, that play could not stand. Then it did, the zebras got it right, they were not in the pocket of the Patriots and the Iggles had the lead back.
But there were still two minutes to go... and as the insufferable ignoramuses in the booth kept telling us Tom Brady is the greatest football player ever. Then Golden Boy got sacked for the first time in the game and fumbled it with no chance of claiming the tuck rule, and the Iggles recovered the ball. I was screaming at the TV now, "Please let this be a real thing!" It was, no challenge, no reversal. There was the predictable run of three plays: run, run, run, kick field goal. Even Doug Pederson, who had gone for it on fourth down and called a trick play where Nick Foles actually caught a touchdown, knew that playing in safe was the way to go. An eight point lead, one would hope would be enough.
But Brady had the ball with a little over a minute to go and it still seemed highly unlikely that a team a little over a month removed from losing their best player to a torn ACL could possibly beat the New England Dynasty. Gronkowski caught a couple passes and the Pats had a last ditch hail mary chance into the endzone. It wasn't until that ball bounced off the turf and there was no yellow laundry on the field that I finally allowed myself to breath.
I know that football is just a game and that this moment has no real significance in the grand scheme of things, but after a lifetime of watching my Iggles get close, but not quite there, today feels kind of different. I noticed that a lot of people became Iggle phans last night. Across my social media community, which is honestly comprised of about equal numbers of Iggles and Stillers people, there was a lot of rejoicing that at least it wasn't the Patriots winning again. As it turns out, having all the luck and all the success in the world doesn't necessarily make you likable.
It was a pretty stark contrast, Nick Foles, back-up journeyman QB with a hard earned humility about his place in all of this, versus Tom Terrific. The team that no one gave a chance versus the team that everyone picked to win. Legarrette Blount, who has been around the league a bit, including spending last year with the Patriots, spoke about his Eagles teammates as though there was really something special going on. They were together, they were focused and they had hope, always hope. When Carson Wentz went down, they held onto hope, when they were home underdogs to the Falcons and the Vikings, they held on to hope, when they were not given a chance against the mighty Patriots they held on to hope. Hope is something that the history of the Philadelphia Eagles almost beats out of you, but last night, all that hope, all that hanging on, all that waiting for next year, finally bloomed into a reality. The Philadelphia Eagles have won the Super Bowl. I'm not sure how long it's going to take before that sounds normal.
For those of you not familiar with the Iggles and their pathology, let me explain. They are not the Cleveland Browns, doomed losers that can take the brightest opportunity and watch it drown in Lake Erie. They are a team that can show you flashes of greatness, whether it was Dick Vermeil's teams in the early 1980s with Ron Jaworski and Wilbert Montgomery or whether it was Buddy Ryan's Gang Green defense in the late 1980s with Reggie White and Jerome Brown, or the Donovan McNabb/Andy Reid "dynasty" of the early 2000's. The Iggles managed to rise only so far, they never quite made it to the place that they made it last night. This morning, I don't quite know what to do with the Super Bowl Champion Philadelphia Eagles. I'm happy for sure, but I have to tell you that game last night was balanced on the head of a pin, and to long time fans of the Iggles, it really felt like it could go sideways at any minute. The touchdown to Zach Ertz was one of those moments that I felt was surely going to go wrong for us. It was a review of whether or not he caught the ball before he crossed the goal line and the ball bounced on the ground. Everything in my experience told me it was a catch, he had the ball firmly in two hands, took two or three steps and dove across the line, still with the ball firmly in two hands. In the end zone, when the ball breaks the plane of the goal line, the play is over and the score is good. Running backs stretch the ball across the line all the time, not worrying about whether it is dislodged because of this rule. Ertz clearly possessed the ball and was a runner before crossing the line and having the ball bounce off the ground. But the review stretched on and the two morons doing the TV commentary (seriously Al Michaels and Chris Collingsworth need to go away, someone needs to make that happen) were dead sure that the play would be reversed. Given what I have experienced in my life as an Iggles phan, I almost knew that it would be, unfairly, unjustly yet inexorably, that play could not stand. Then it did, the zebras got it right, they were not in the pocket of the Patriots and the Iggles had the lead back.
But there were still two minutes to go... and as the insufferable ignoramuses in the booth kept telling us Tom Brady is the greatest football player ever. Then Golden Boy got sacked for the first time in the game and fumbled it with no chance of claiming the tuck rule, and the Iggles recovered the ball. I was screaming at the TV now, "Please let this be a real thing!" It was, no challenge, no reversal. There was the predictable run of three plays: run, run, run, kick field goal. Even Doug Pederson, who had gone for it on fourth down and called a trick play where Nick Foles actually caught a touchdown, knew that playing in safe was the way to go. An eight point lead, one would hope would be enough.
But Brady had the ball with a little over a minute to go and it still seemed highly unlikely that a team a little over a month removed from losing their best player to a torn ACL could possibly beat the New England Dynasty. Gronkowski caught a couple passes and the Pats had a last ditch hail mary chance into the endzone. It wasn't until that ball bounced off the turf and there was no yellow laundry on the field that I finally allowed myself to breath.
I know that football is just a game and that this moment has no real significance in the grand scheme of things, but after a lifetime of watching my Iggles get close, but not quite there, today feels kind of different. I noticed that a lot of people became Iggle phans last night. Across my social media community, which is honestly comprised of about equal numbers of Iggles and Stillers people, there was a lot of rejoicing that at least it wasn't the Patriots winning again. As it turns out, having all the luck and all the success in the world doesn't necessarily make you likable.
It was a pretty stark contrast, Nick Foles, back-up journeyman QB with a hard earned humility about his place in all of this, versus Tom Terrific. The team that no one gave a chance versus the team that everyone picked to win. Legarrette Blount, who has been around the league a bit, including spending last year with the Patriots, spoke about his Eagles teammates as though there was really something special going on. They were together, they were focused and they had hope, always hope. When Carson Wentz went down, they held onto hope, when they were home underdogs to the Falcons and the Vikings, they held on to hope, when they were not given a chance against the mighty Patriots they held on to hope. Hope is something that the history of the Philadelphia Eagles almost beats out of you, but last night, all that hope, all that hanging on, all that waiting for next year, finally bloomed into a reality. The Philadelphia Eagles have won the Super Bowl. I'm not sure how long it's going to take before that sounds normal.
Thursday, February 1, 2018
Lose Yourself
Snap back to reality, oh there goes gravity,
Oh, there goes Rabbit, he choked,
He's so mad but he won't give up that easy? No.
He won't have it, he knows his whole back city's ropes
It won't matter, he's dope, he knows that but he's broke
He's so stacked that he knows, when he goes back to his mobile home,
That's when it's back to the lab again yo, this whole rhapsody
He better go capture the moment and hope it don't pass him.
-Eminem, Lose Yourself
For those who want to save their life will lose it,
And those who lose their life for my sake will will find it.
-Jesus of Nazareth, Matthew 16: 25
I'm not a huge fan of rap music. I have a few, mostly old school, artists that I like a bit: Public Enemy, KRS-One, Cypress Hill, NWA (Ice Cube, Dr. Dre inclusive), and of course Snoop Dogg (for shizzle). But honestly I never expected to actually like Eminem, even though he may seem old school now, and he is about my age, I just couldn't quite like the Slim Shady thing and the edgy, violent and frankly psychotic persona that he was putting out there, and maybe honestly, I had some sort of preconception about white rappers that goes back to the ill-conceived age of Vanilla Ice and Shaggy.
Some of you (maybe a lot of you) probably have no idea what I'm talking about. You should feel no shame about that, thank you for persevering with me through the first paragraph. If you've seen the movie 8 Mile, which is a (sort of) biographical story about how Eminem made it in the hip hop world, you will know that the song Lose Yourself is sort of a microcosm of what he does as an artist. For those of you not familiar with hip hop in general, you should know that introspective, self awareness is not really the strong suit of the medium. Anger, braggadocio and conspicuous consumption are more par for the course. Project strength, be the Tyrannosaurus Rex, posture yourself as a madman, a crazy wild man, or so chilled out that everybody knows you don't give a you know what, that's the range of emotions available.
Eminem did all of that, but then he also told people about all the bad stuff that was going on. He rapped about his messed up trailer park momma, his failed relationships, even his own self doubt, and you notice that he does it with this command of his voice and the flow of his words that only the absolute best rappers can manage. But what made Eminem different was his willingness to be honest without "going soft." That's bad news for a rapper, if you can write a song about your struggles parenting your daughter and not come across as a sap, you are talented. Eminem pulls it off in my opinion.
What I really want to talk about this morning is the way that following Jesus in the world could use a little Eminem. I started, but did not get very far into reading a blog post that was titled: Self-care During Spiritual Deconstruction or something along those lines and I kind of threw up in my mouth a little bit. There was nothing wrong with the basic premise of the post. The point is that when you go through times of spiritual struggle, or when your faith is being stretched or challenged, you can get worn out or "burned out." This is true, but the tone of the blog post was something that just sort of gives me the shivers. The phrase "self-care" is like a trigger for it, "life-giving" is another, "seeking balance," "taking 'me-time,'" dear Lord spare us from the doom of "going soft."
I think a lot about why the church fails to reach people. I rarely think it's because we're too hardcore. We can be judgmental, angry and even brutal, but we fail most woefully when we do not learn to resonate with people's struggles. Sometimes we try to hard to be nice and fail to be honest. Sometimes we are honest, but only about other people's problems. Sometimes we can seem nice, actually be sort of honest, but fail to be kind (or merciful). Following Jesus is hard, I mean actually following him, taking up your cross and all that, if we try to do it on our terms, we inevitably choke and melt down. Part of authentic discipleship is confession of sin and unfitness, it is the part of the song where Eminem admits he has more problems than he knows what to do with and stops trying to pretend that he's a world-beater. He puts down his ego, he loses himself.
What Eminem picks up is the words, the music, writing the next lyric, mastering the rhythm and the flow. What Christians need to pick up is Jesus, his radical ability to love, his willingness to be open and vulnerable, even when he is at the end of his rope. If we are to be prophetic to this world, we have to learn the path of descent and be willing to go into the dark places, whether it is the place where the greed and lust for power that runs the world crushes down, or whether it is the dark night of our own soul, where we wrestle with our own inadequacy and the smallness of our faith.
The best way to exercise "self-care" is to put yourself entirely in God's hands. You burn out when you try to do it yourself. I'm all for rest and Sabbath time, I'm all for deep introspection and self-examination, I'm just saying, "suck it up buttercup," it's hard work to actually do that stuff the way it needs to be done. Honestly putting yourself out there might just push you to the edge and maybe even over it, it did that to Jesus. Be prepared to lose yourself.
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