Selling God

Don’t do it.

unless it comes out of

your soul like a rocket,

unless being still would

drive you to madness or

suicide or murder,

don’t do it.

unless the sun inside you is

burning your gut,

don’t do it.

when it is truly time,

and if you have been chosen,

it will do it by

itself and it will keep on doing it

until you die or it dies in you.

there is no other way.

and there never was.

-Charles Bukowski

We just signed up to get replacement windows in our house.  It needs done, but it's really expensive.  We knew it needed to happen when we bought the house, and we knew it was going to cost some serious coin.  We thought we would get a couple estimates, but in the end we ran into a really good sales pitch and we went with it.  The salesman really believed in his product, he had confidence that if we bought his product we would not be disappointed.  I remember sitting through his spiel and being impressed by his conviction.  I knew I was being "sold," yet I had this sort of detached appreciation for the skill with which I was being talked into spending a heck of a lot of money.  

It was exactly the right situation; Michele and I had a need, we agreed upon the need, and we know that getting our old drafty, beat up windows replaced is going to be a good investment in the long haul.  But still, we weren't quite ready to pull the trigger.  Until we were convinced in our minds and hearts that this was the best way to meet our need.  That's where the salesman is at his best, and I admired the guy who sold us our windows, because unlike so much of the advertising that saturates our world, I didn't feel pressured, hustled or outright misled.  Even though I can see through the "our product is the greatest thing in the world" dogma, even though I could chuckle to myself when he revealed the latest-greatest "discount," I felt like I was at least an honorable participant in an economic process.  Ultimately what happened seemed pretty natural, and that's a good feeling.

Which brings me to the church, as most things do (occupational hazard).  I have been reading a lot about why people come to church, why people leave the church, why people never start going to church and even some things about why people think church is more or less irrelevant to their lives.  I'm also getting ready to teach a four week study about the practice of evangelism and faith sharing here at Good Samaritan.  And I have to admit that the idea that evangelism is somehow "selling God," is a rather odious  concept.  In fact, I tend to recoil from many practices that are common to the work of the evangelist.

I know we are supposed to share the gospel with people, but my soul and my stomach turn at the idea of a Jehovah witness style door to door campaign.  I am all too ready to believe that it just wouldn't work anyway, I'm all too ready to assume that most people are just like me and don't want to be hassled about religion.  Mostly because I don't want to go out knocking on doors, I'm simply not called or gifted to do that sort of thing.

It's not that I don't  believe in the product either.  I can't imagine facing grief without faith.  I can't imagine going through life disconnected from the community of the church (even if they can rub you the wrong way sometimes).  I don't much like the idea of trying to make sense of humanity without the exemplar of Jesus of Nazareth.  But I wonder how I would sell that to other people.

That last sentence even makes me cringe.  Is that what evangelism is, selling the church?  Yes and no.  We certainly are entirely too prone to adopting the sales techniques of the commercial world.  The problem is, we're really bad at it.  Seriously, watch the TV ads that churches make, they're horrendous.  I'm sure most of the churches that make them are good places, full of genuine and loving people, but they make bad TV.  Maybe it's because, as Jesus said, "The people of this world are more shrewd in dealing with their own kind than are the people of light" (Luke 16: 8 NIV).

Indeed, maybe it's because we have allowed the drive for worldly success to obscure our vision.  Maybe we have begun to drink the kool-aid and actually assume that our job is to purvey religious goods and services and that the solution is simply to offer the "best product" out there, and to diligently market that product with all the creativity and dedication we can muster.

I want no part of that, and I don't think that's at all the vision that Christ had in mind when he sent the disciples out into the world with the great commission.

I'm rather certain that Charles Bukowski would be bitterly amused to find one of his writings at the head of an article by a Presbyterian Minister musing about evangelism, but I couldn't help it.  when I read the words: "don't do it unless it comes out of your soul like a rocket," I thought, "Yes, that is what calling is all about, doing what you can't not do."  The reason why it's hard to "sell" God and church is because God doesn't want to be sold, and thus he does not call people to the task.  God calls people to witness, God calls people to serve, God calls people to shine like a city on a hill, but God does not call people to dangle the kingdom out there like a really sweet deal on a used car.

So yeah, as unlikely as it may seem, I'm going to open my series on evangelism with Bukowski...

May God have mercy on my soul.

Minor Tragedy?

This is getting out of hand.  Pretty soon we're going to have revise our cliches; the saying "American as Mom and apple pie" is going to have to add "shooting incident" to the list.  This time around (see how I said this time around, because if you look back at my blogs over the past few years you will find me lamenting several incidents very similar to the one at the Navy yard earlier this week),  I'm not going to try and analyze the causes or critique our culture for creating a stew of violence and dysfunction where this kind of thing happens about every other month; I'm just going to talk about our response.
I'm not even going to talk about the whole response, I'm just going to zoom in on one little corner of the response.  I'm not going to try and get in the heads of the victims or their families, or even their casual acquaintances.  I'm not going to cogitate on how this latest tragedy will affect the thousands of people who work at the Navy yard (a few of whom are members of my congregation and live in my community).  I'm just going to talk about sports, but not in the "hey this uncomfortable, but did you see that football game?" kind of way.  I'm going to look at how sports responded to the latest shooting and what that says about our society.
The new NFL season is upon us, baseball is coming down the home stretch towards the playoffs, hockey and basketball are about to launch, it's a great time of year in the world of sport.  And then something terrible happens, thirteen people died a few more were wounded and scores upon scores have had their worlds cracked down the middle.  So the Nationals wore Navy hats in a game against the Braves and we had a few moments of silence, and... the games go on.
You might think that I'm about to be critical of that, but I'm not.  I actually admire it.  I'm actually a little envious of it, because sport is now doing for millions of people, what the church used to do.  Think about it.  Sports provide a framework and a setting for the human community to come together and celebrate and grieve, they unite people and generate fierce opinions and allegiances.  Sport has become sacramental in our society, you can lament that if you want, but it's a fact.  Sport is actually demonstrating a consciousness of it's place in society, and taking it seriously.  The morning after the Navy Yard shootings sports center opened with a piece about the Nats/Braves game and Linda Cohn, with admirable gravitas, told us that sports help us heal from stuff like this.
They do too!  I remember after 9-11, when the games began again, it was a triumph and a heart-swelling moment.  As a representative of organized religion I am tempted to be pharisaic and negative and talk about idolatry and such, but I'm going to take Jesus' advice seriously, "whoever is not against us is for us," Mark 9:40.  It is a true fact that sports play an important part in the lives of millions of people, in fact, much to the dismay of many churchy-type people, they are whooping our butts.  Seriously, try having a church event on Sunday afternoon during NFL season, see how that goes over.
I think that sports are able to give people a whiff of transcendence, but not so much that it actually makes them uncomfortable.  In the story of the Exodus, God was present on Mt. Sinai as a fire and smoke and thick darkness, and the people were terrified and most of them wouldn't go near.  They sent Moses, their hero, their liberator, their law giver, he was the only one who could approach the mysterium tremendum.  The people were encouraged by God's transcendent presence, they just didn't want to get too close.
Sport allows us to glimpse transcendence in tiny bites; an inspiring story here, a personal triumph there, a superhuman performance that sometimes gets called miraculous every so often.  And they mostly don't require you to confront your sinfulness, or follow any really laborious moral code.  Thousands upon thousands of people will shell out $500 and deal with all manner of inconvenience in order to "be a part" of the home crowd, but if you give them one little reason, or ask for a little too much, they're going to run away from Church faster than you can say stewardship campaign.
I know all about idolatry, and I know that this probably doesn't bode well for our culture.  I know that in the waning days of the Empire the Romans had similar obsession with games and diversions, but I wonder if maybe this time things are different.  Maybe God has changed his mind and has decided that sports really are more effective at inspiring worship than a bunch of words and songs.  I'm a preacher and I watch Sportscenter every morning before I ever get to my office and start reading scripture, it just goes so well with my coffee!

Putting aside my sarcasm for a moment, I do offer my condolences and prayers to the people affected by the Navy Yard shootings.  I am glad that all sorts of human communities have taken a moment to recognize that there is no such thing as a minor tragedy.  Sometimes, in church and in baseball, all we can do is take a moment and be quiet to mark our sorrow about what has happened in this broken world.

Lucky Fourteen

Fourteen years ago we had no concept of what fourteen years would be.  Honestly, you can’t blame us, fourteen years before we got married we were ten and eleven years old.  All you old timers who are sitting on forty or fifty years of marriage will have to forgive us, because in our chronologically limited perspective, fourteen years is a long time, it’s still more than a third of our lives.  Which is interesting if you think about it this way: for the first ten years of life, your parents are the most important people in your life.  For the second ten years of your life, you are the most important person in your life (sorry tweens, teens and twentysomethings, you do tend to be rather self-absorbed), all of the sudden, when you get married, you have to learn how to make someone other than your mommy, your daddy or yourself, a priority in your life, and that can be hard.

So here we are at a tipping point.  We have been married as long as we were children, as long as we were adolescents, we’re going to start creeping up on that point where we have been a couple longer than not.  I guess we’ve learned some things, I know we still have a lot to learn, but it’s good to take inventory every once in a while, so here are some of the things we’ve learned in fourteen years of marriage:

Teamwork is hard, but really important: too many people approach marriage as a goal, like the wedding is a victory celebration for all their hard work on the dating scene, but it’s totally not the goal, it’s just the kickoff.  All we really had after our wedding were some gifts we didn’t know what to do with and some pictures of ourselves looking about as nice as it’s humanly possible for us to look.  In fairly short order though, before we even wrote the thank you notes, we had to learn how to sacrifice what we wanted as individuals for the good of our relationship.  It was worked out in fits and starts, it involved some tears and some hurt feelings, it often felt like a lot of work, sometimes it still does.  But we needed to do that work, not just for the sake of staying married, for the sake of staying sane.  We’re both pretty glad that we had four years to work it out between the two of us because…

We didn’t get to be blissfully alone for very long.  You know how the song goes: first comes love, then comes marriage, then comes (insert name of spouse here) with a baby carriage.  Don’t get me wrong, kids are great, they teach us the real meaning of love in a way that we never could have imagined on our wedding day, when we were positively oozing with talk of love.  But kids also push us to the absolute limits of what we can handle as grown ups.  We really appreciate each other most keenly when we’re dealing with our two kids.  Parenthood is not something either one of us wants to go alone (props to all the single parents out there, but I bet you wish you had a little more help sometimes).  Kids happen, they are a force of nature, and probably the only thing more frustrating than raising a couple of people that are a lot like you, but not quite you, is not being able to have them in the first place.  Which brings us to the hard reality…

Things won’t always go swimmingly, and we needed to learn to handle the bumps in the road.  We were lucky, neither one of us really thought that life was full of hallmark card sentiments and sappy love-story moments.  But it still came as a bit of a shock to both of us that person we just promised to spend the rest of our life with isn’t always going to look, act and smell as wonderful as they did on our wedding day.  The bumps in the road have built trust in each other.  It’s not the naïve expectation that we are each other’s savior, rather it is the reality of finding another who will stick with us in the rough patches, even if they are the proximate cause, or at least a major contributor to said rough patches.  We have noticed that a lot of people spend years on the dating scene looking for someone who shared their interests, was compatible (whatever that means), and gave them that tingly feeling in their guts.  If that’s you, stop it now!  What you really need is someone who is going to “be there when you fall, and not hold you down when you fly.”  Some goofy kids actually wrote that into their wedding vows fourteen years ago, but had no idea what that sort of thing actually entailed or how often they would have to rinse/lather/repeat.  Which means…

Don’t give up.  Most people that have stayed married for a lot longer than fourteen years have told us, when we asked the right questions, that it’s mostly a matter of sheer stubbornness.  You have to be dedicated and single-minded and not consider failure an option, and you both have to be that way, it doesn’t work in halves.  Luckily for us, we’re both ridiculously stubborn, but it can still push us to the limit.  On good days, like an anniversary, we know it’s all worth it, like when those little people we’re raising come and give us a hug for no reason at all.  At some point it’s not flowers and chocolates that show how much we love each other, it’s the much more mundane realities, like a sandwich packed for you before you go off to work, or a new Batman t-shirt waiting for you when you come home some random Tuesday.  There are times when we can sit together doing nothing at all, and realize that you don’t remember what it was like before that day you got married, and you don’t really want to think about not being together, and that’s after only fourteen years.

A Letter to Myself, 12 years ago

September 11, 2013
Dear Me,
I know what you're doing right now, you're sitting on your futon in the apartment in Pittsburgh watching the news.  I know that you're watching a couple of big pillars of smoke rising into a sky so blue, on a day so beautiful, that it just seems to mock the tragedy that's unfolding before your eyes.  I remember how you felt, I remember some of the things that were going through your mind.  I remember that mostly, on that day, it was just shock, and trying to deal with something that just seemed too terrible to comprehend.
I've got some good news and some bad news, but let's start with the good, because I know that's what you need more right now.  In the next few days you're going to see and hear some amazing things, you're going to see the best of what human beings can be in the rubble of the worst of what we can do.  You're going to hear about flight 93 that went down not too far from where you're sitting and how a bunch of people gave their lives to save a lot of others.  You're going to see police, firefighters and more random volunteers than you can possibly imagine, wade into a hell of twisted metal and rock and put up an American flag and you're going to have that image with you for the rest of your life, and it will still bring tears to your eyes every time you think about it.  You're going to listen to speeches by politicians that aren't completely self-serving and arrogant, and you're going to watch the greatest nation on earth collectively grieve, and it's going to be beautiful.  It's going to restore your faith in humanity, which I know is a little shaky right now.
Hold on to that faith, you're going to need it.
You're going to need it because it won't be too long before we start beating the war drum.  It won't be too long before the shock and the desire to just help out any way we can gets replaced by the dark and inevitable sentiment: "You hurt us, now we're going to hurt you worse."  Never mind that the real reason why Al Quaeda (yeah it was them, and you're going to hear a lot about them for a long time) did this was because they believe that the United States is basically just a big bully that imposes it's will on the rest of the world.  They look at this like taking a big swing and punching that bully right in the nose.  Well they did it, and we're bleeding.  The problem (for them) is that, unlike that big awkward kid in the fourth grade, we're not just going to run off and sob to mommy, we're now going to hunt them down like dogs.
We have been hunting them in the mountains of Afghanistan for over a decade.  We invaded Iraq because we thought they might be there along with Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction (neither thing was actually there).  We finally got Osama Bin Laden (the supposed "head" of the operation) living in a suburban neighborhood in a city in Pakistan.  The Navy Seals went in, offed him and we dumped his body in the ocean.  They made a movie about it.  It felt kinda good, but it really didn't make the world a better place.
You know that thing about not learning from history and being doomed to repeat things?
A bunch of people just died this morning, but much larger numbers are going to die as a result of what happened this morning, over the next 12 years there is going to be a staggering cost,  a lot of which is just going to serve to prove the bastards right.
There are going to be massive civilian casualties in Afghanistan and Iraq.  There are going to be thousands of mothers who lose their children.  Soldiers are going to be put in untenable situations, in the name of revenge. There are going to be thousands who never come home.  There will be thousands who come home broken.  There will be thousands who are okay in body, but will be haunted by the horror of war.  We are going to have our freedom hedged in the name of security, we are going to do terrible things in the "war on terror."
The ledger is never going to balance.
Violence just begets more violence.
The world is going to change, but not noticeably for the better.
It seems that maybe (keep your fingers crossed) the diplomats are finally getting foothold back from the warmongers, but it's too early to tell.  It's been 12 years and we can still drum up enough fear to have people calling for us to invade yet another country where nobody wants our "help."
Today, there are a lot of people putting up little pictures of the twin towers burning with the slogan "never forget."  For anyone who lived through it, is there really any danger of that?
I hope we don't forget the lessons we have learned from the last twelve years either.
I hope we don't forget all the young men and women who have given up part or all of their lives in the vain quest to end hate and fear by violent means.
I remember that you were thinking about some of this stuff this morning, but hoping and praying that maybe it wouldn't all play out that predictably, but it did, and it still is, sorry.
But hey, you get through seminary, you find your way into pastoral ministry, you have a couple of kids, and Dr. Who comes back on TV!  So chin up kid.
Love,
You, just older.
P.S. Read as much Wendell Berry as you can get your hands on, watch your sugar intake and for the love of Pete, start exercising.

Changing our Destiny

Once you start down the path to the Dark Side,

Forever will it dominate your destiny.

-Yoda

I admit that the first President I honestly remember is Ronald Reagan.  You are all welcome to feel sorry for me, or to feel old, whichever happens to strike you.  I remember hearing about Reagan winning the election against someone named Jimmy Carter.  It seemed at the time, that Reagan was the perfect guy for the Oval Office, he was slick, he could crack a joke, he had pretty good hair, and he was hawkish enough to make us feel safe.  Over the years though, the legacy of the Reagan years had been a mixed bag to say the least.  He played a major role in toppling the Soviet Union, but his economic policies have proven to be the path to the Dark Side (they were successful in the short term, but lead you to ruin in the long run).

As I grew up, I became interested in learning a bit about Jimmy Carter, the plainspoken southern gentleman that got his political butt handed to him.  History generally shares the opinion that Carter was a ineffective, if not incompetent President, and I'm not a political expert, so I won't argue that point.  In my opinion though, it strikes me that Carter was perhaps the best human being to ever have the misfortune of being elected President.  Carter is intelligent, insightful, with deep moral convictions and consistent ethical principles; in other words, he was bound to be a lousy President.

It saddens me that such admirable, humane qualities are almost anathema to successful politicking.  It saddens me that, even a Democratic populist like Obama, feels the need to engage in saber rattling and sending messages via tomahawk missile.  This, I suspect, is largely a result of our system turning down the path to the Dark Side.  Nixon resigned about a week after I was born, Ford bumbled and stumbled through a few years, and Carter was elected, I surmise, as a sort of anti-Nixon, a relative outsider to the political system, a solid citizen, and rather determined to do things a different way.

But Iran, OPEC and the USSR were a little too big and scary for us to trust to a peanut farmer from Georgia, with a down-home accent and a decidedly not-made-for-TV sort of look.  Never mind that he was a brilliant guy, never mind that he always tried to do the right thing and keep a cool head, not good enough, I guess we needed Reagan and his cowboy-actor bluster, or maybe that's just what we deserved.

If Carter had won, maybe we would have actually learned the lessons of Vietnam about not being able to be the sheriff of the world.  If Carter had won maybe we would have gotten more of a start on responsible environmental and economic stewardship, instead of Reagonomics and unchecked ecological pillaging.

I don't know for sure, I was only six, and I grant you that I am judging Carter largely by his later work, the wisdom of which is due largely in part to his being chewed up and spit out by the world of politics, but I know that his Law Day speech in 1974 is one of the finest examples of rhetoric this side of MLK's I have a Dream speech, and it proves that he is no wimp, he's bold enough to call out a room full of southern lawyers about voting rights.  If you have the time, read what then Governor Carter had to say, particularly read the little homespun tale about having a handful of rocks for his slingshot and having to put them down to get cookies from his Mama.  Now think about any other president in the last 40 years that would honestly put down the rocks...

American politics has gone down the path to the Dark Side.  It didn't look that bad in the Reagan years, but by now we have found out what life is like inside Vader's mask.  If we had taken the path of integrity and common sense, instead of the quick, easy path, we might not be where we are now, if we had just put down the rocks...

Minimums and Margins

One of the most important things that is beginning to happen in our society is the honest consideration of a living wage.  There are labor movements happening before our very eyes, the likes of which we have not seen in nearly a century.  Near Pittsburgh, there is a place in the south hills called Homestead, which had lots of retail type businesses.  Now it's kind of a bustling shopping-mall kind of place, but Homestead also has a dark history, it's where Andrew Carnegie and his manager Henry Clay Frick hired Pinkerton detectives, basically as mercenaries, to break a strike of steel workers, they succeeded rather brutally, and the cause of labor unions was severely set back.
You can make a lot of arguments about whether unions are good or bad, but history teaches us one thing rather clearly: without organized labor, the worst impulses of greed and lust for power will roam free and crush lives and dreams, and eventually people like Carnegie and Frick will have their names on parks, universities and monuments, despite the fact that the blood of those they crushed cries out from the ground.
So now in Homestead, instead of steel mills they have box stores, and across the country retail workers are beginning to cry out for the same sorts of things that the steel workers wanted: honest and fair pay for what they do.
The problem is that working in a big store like Wal-Mart or Best Buy is generally considered to be a low value job.  You generally make minimum wage, which has not come close to keeping up with inflation over the last 50 years, you do not have what people consider a "skill," which would give you options about when and where you work.  Let me tell you, as someone who has worked in retail, it is a hard job, it's frustrating, it's boring, the hours are generally terrible and the pay is depressing, but because we are becoming more and more of a consumer society it's where millions of people make their living (or don't make their living).
Wal Mart is the poster child for modern retail.  The things they sell are cheap and disposable, they treat their workers pretty much the same way.  They are economic bullies, just like Carnegie and Frick, but without the bullets.  They don't need the bullets because big business has been slowly undermining the advances that labor made in the first half of the 20th century.  A company like Wal Mart does by sheer scale, what would have been a dream for Andrew Carnegie: they simply ignore the critics and their own disenfranchised employees.  Don't like working for Wal Mart?  Fine, quit, there are ten people waiting for your job.  Don't want to shop at Wal Mart?  Fine, don't, pay more somewhere else, there are a million people without your ethical standards and a million people who probably have no idea that we're even the modern equivalent of a robber baron.  And guess what, we lobby, threaten, and strong arm suppliers, politicians, city governments and just about anyone else that gets in our way, and it's all perfectly legal, because we don't have any rules any more, because of free market dogma.
But I don't want to just pick on Wal Mart, because they're not alone, they're just the most visible.  Listen to all the people who will tell you that people who work at McDonalds ought to be happy about their minimum wage job, but minimum wage is not a living wage, at least not if you want to live in an actual apartment with heat and running water.  Poverty is a major problem in this country.  The poverty line for a household with two adults and two children is around $22,000, but that is the absolute floor.  That assumes that you probably get some kind of government assistance, that assumes a whole lot of things.  The current Federal Minimum Wage is $7.25 per hour.  If you work 40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year, no vacations, no sick days etc. your gross pay is $15,080.  To top it off the "poverty line" is based on calculations that date back to the 1960's and, as most people will recognize, life has gotten more expensive since then in more ways than simple inflation data can reflect.  The poverty line reflects food and shelter, it does not account for vehicles, insurance, or healthcare, let alone, phones, internet access, or numerous other things that, while they would have seemed like a luxury or even a pipe dream in the 1960's, are now rather necessary to basic function in our society.
Something is broken and people are being crushed just as surely as those Homestead steelworkers, but there are Pinkertons gunning them down, there are only big corporations bloating on profits, as children go to bed hungry.
We can do better than this, we need to do better than this.  We owe it to our neighbors who we are supposed to love, and our children who will one day have to grow up and learn to make their way in the world.  Our goals and our methods need to change.  We need to carefully examine what we define as "enough" and stop striving constantly for excess.  The poverty line is not a good indicator of what it takes to live,  I mean really live, with some security and some margins to your life, with sabbath time and some basic comforts and advantages.  What I'm describing is a biblical idea, it's what the economic codes of the Old Testament are working for, it's what Jesus describes as the Kingdom of God, it's a world where people have enough, and children and families come before profits.  It's not a joke, it's not a pipe dream, it's a reality that our Creator takes rather seriously and we should too.

Don't make me come back there...

I was in the dentist's office this morning, waiting to have a couple fillings done, my kids had missed the bus because of passive aggressive moping, and did I mention I was at the dentist?
Anyway I was not having a spectacular start to my week.  The news was on the TV.  These days I generally prefer to gather my own news from the many and varied outlets of the interwebs, it just seems like a more responsible way to process the horrors of modern life.  I can determine the source more readily, I can usually find intelligent commentary, and I don't have to sit through commercials (all the advertising is neatly posted along the margins, so I can attempt to ignore it while I read).  The news, CNN I believe it was, quickly validated my world awareness strategy, as they covered the ongoing Syria kerfluffle.  They had a 30 second segment with someone in khakis and a desert-looking shirt talking about the hundreds of thousands of refugees, both internally and externally displaced by the conflicts in Syria, then they quickly cut away to a distance shot of the White House parking lot where they had just seen the House majority leader, John Boehner depart from a "fancy" car (the fanciness of the car was apparently important enough to be included in the description Mr. Boehner's arrival to discuss the Syria situation with President Obama and Minority leader Nancy Pelosi).  The news gave people getting out of a car almost equal time with the plight of the refugees.
Let that sink in for a minute.
Now Syria is not an easy thing to understand, some very intelligent people who are familiar with the dynamics of the region are kind of throwing up their hands in exasperation at the complexity and spaghetti-like entanglements of the whole mess.  But it troubles me that most of the American people, who will shortly be forming opinions about whether or not we ought or ought not to get involved in Syria in any way, and may get a major case of angry if we do or don't do what they think is the right thing, are being informed as much about the fancy car that an unnaturally tan politician has disembarked from, as they are about the staggering number of women and children that have been chased from their homes and are living in crowded camps in the desert.
I can't really begin to wrap my mind around what the right thing to do with regard to Bashar al-Assad really is.  My gut tells me he probably deserves a tomahawk missile with his morning tea, but as we have seen in Iraq, Afghanistan, Egypt and Libya, power vacuums should not be taken lightly.  The whole military angle is just way outside my field of expertise, and I'm really upset that so many innocent people have died and are dying, whether they were killed by bullets or Sarin gas is really not much of a thing I worry about, they're just as dead, and they're just as innocent.
I get the conventions of warfare and why they're important, but as seems to be the case with pretty much every armed conflict since Korea, this doesn't exactly fit the definition of war (see Friday's post), but it's still a violent conflict, and people are still dying, and soldiers are still going to be put in harm's way, and it at least seems war-like.
What really made me wish that the dentist had some novocaine for my brain this morning, was the all too brief snippet about the refugees.  There were kids about the same age as my kids, going to school, just like my kids, except in a dusty tent instead of a nice safe building.  There were people who have to worry about things like getting enough food and clean water, instead of missing the bus and a couple of bad fillings in their teeth.
I had been having a bad morning, but I got a rude slap of perspective.
I noticed some things though, like the blue lettering on the side of the tent: it said United Nations.  Like the same United Nations that just said, "No," to armed intervention, basically because Russia and China will block any vote in the security council.  A bunch of people on the TV were talking about that, how Russia has a vested interest in Syria, how they've got they're only naval base outside of the former Soviet Union in Syria, how they've been best buds with Assad for a long time.  Russia is saying that they don't think armed intervention will help, because of complicated stuff like power vacuums and geopolitical instability, but they're really just looking out for number one right?
Then it occurred to me that Russia, our old enemy from the cold war days, with a James Bond villain for a president, that Russia, might actually be right about a lot of stuff.  If they really do have such a vested interest in Syria, they might actually know a thing or two about the joint.  It occurred to me that they learned some of the same lessons about the pitfalls of the whole empire thing a few decades before us.  I seem to recall them being Afghanistan fighting some of the same dudes we are fighting, and having a bit of trouble getting out.
I know, it's hard to take advice from someone you don't like, but they just might actually be right.
Which brings me back to the United Nations.  Everyone likes to give the UN a hard time for being irrelevant and not being the global military peace-keeping force that we think we actually need.  It's true, the political reality of trying to get Russia, China, the US and various European nations to agree on what we ought to do about a mess like Syria is rather bleak, but while the UN really is not big on breaking down the door and getting the bad guys, they are actually pretty good at running cities of refugees in the desert.  They've had a lot of practice, in many different deserts.
I don't know whether we ought to start flinging cruise missiles upside Assad's tyrannical melon, but I do know that we ought to be doing what we can to help all those women and kids who are left out in the dust and the heat and the cold, while the boys fight over the darn sandbox.  The UN, apparently, does that.  So while Obama confabs with people who arrive in fancy cars about whether or not we should break out the whuppin stick, someone is bringing a drink to those who are thirsty, and clothing those who are naked, and giving shelter to those who are homeless.  I think I know what it more important, even if the "news" does not.