Sweet Sixteen

Michele,

Our marriage is old enough to drive.  E.E. Cummings once wrote a rather racy poem using driving language, called “She, being brand new,” but that doesn’t really fit the situation anymore.  Kids, parents and such might read this so I'm going to go a different route, but given the whole sixteen thing and all we’ve been through with our cars in the past year or so, I’m going to roll with the metaphor.

So let's talk driving, and let's start with trust.  You don’t put someone you don’t trust behind the wheel of a car.  I’ve ridden with people I didn’t trust, it’s not a good experience.  You never know what they’re going to do, and foolishness and mistakes can be painful or deadly.  I think we confuse the adrenaline rush of a difficult and dangerous (or at least novel) relationship with the passion that can really only grow between people who trust each other with everything.  We put our lives in each other’s hands, we give our hearts, and we take some risk.  We would not do this if it wasn’t worth it somehow.

In a car, and in a marriage, you have to be able to trust the stuff you don’t always see on the surface.  You need to trust what’s under the hood, and the brakes and all of that stuff in order to be able to have a good ride.  All that stuff takes maintenance, but as long as you keep at it, you shouldn’t have to worry about it every time you get behind the wheel.  Maintenance requires vigilance and being proactive, not just waiting until something goes wrong.

Let's face it, even though people who have been married forty or fifty years might chuckle, sixteen years is a good while.  we have now been married for a decidedly significant portion of our lives.  It's actually hard to remember what it was like not being married.  I know, in most romance stories there’s always this element of mystery and novelty, but at this point there aren’t many surprises. That's really okay with me. We can both get dressed up fancy from time to time, but we aren’t Ferraris, there’s no room for kids in a Ferrari, and quite frankly the maintenance is a nightmare.  It’s a sign of maturity when you learn to be satisfied with what you have and to know what you need.  We need a relationship that can handle ridiculous schedules, tweens and taking smelly dogs to the park.  Paris in the spring it is not, but it is our life, and it is good, and trustworthy, and there is some evidence that it is working out.

In one of his Sabbath poems Wendell Berry says that we must:

Love where we cannot trust,

Trust where we cannot know

And await the wayward coming grace,

That joins the living and the dead.

I took that out of context, artistic license, but I think my little snippet of the poem captures what it takes to be married.  There are times when even well-worn trust gets tested, and love has to take over.  I think that trust must involve some element of not knowing and I know that grace is always unpredictable and never shows up exactly when you expect.

Grace shows up in doing things you don’t want to do for the sake of another.

Grace shows up in accepting each other as we are.

Grace shows up in indulging your husband when he compares you to a station wagon, so here’s my poem to you (apologies to E.E. Cummings):

She, being not so brand new;

I know where all her buttons are.

I know how she handles the curves,

And I like hers.

When the weather’s clear,

Just put it in gear

And go.

When storms come,

We drive a little slower,

But we always get home.

The mirrors are adjusted pretty well.

The blind spots are very small.

I think I even know what’s in

The glove compartment.

I notice some of the dents and dings,

And maybe I put a few of them there,

But they don’t bother me one little bit.

 We're not alone on this ride anymore.

Let's roll down the windows,
And make the kids whine that the music is too loud.

Sweet sixteen.

Poking Holes

You should know that statistics are not my thing.  I enjoy the Mark Twain, Benjamin Disraeli or whoever actually said it, quote about the pliability of numbers in making arguments: "lies, damned lies and statistics."  But every once in a while I like to do a little fact checking as it relates to things arguments that are made concerning things I care about.  Economic justice is something I care about more and more.  I often hear (I will make no effort to quantify or even identify the source, because I don't want to blame specific people or groups of people, but you will know who you are), that our nation is weighed down by a massive crush of people who are simply leeching off the system, living off the sweat and hard work of good, honest middle class folks.  You know, "the takers."
I began to wonder if this is actually true.  So I went looking for numbers, which is weird for me, I'll be honest.  I have no way of knowing what has been done to things by way of interpretation and manipulation by groups who have an agenda in one direction or other so the only thing I can really think of to do is go as close to the source as I can.  I wanted to pick my numbers carefully, because too much math makes me feel kinda funny, so I decided on public assistance, as quantified by the latest Census and people on disability as reported by the Social Security Administration  because they should know, they pay it.  Why these two?  Well first of all they seem to be the favorite whipping boys for the "why should my tax dollars pay for those lazy bums" crowd, so I wanted to see if the outrage is justified.  Second of all, I know at least one person personally who is reliant on both of these means of support, and I know, first hand, what their lives are like and something about what they have to do in order to get what they get from "the government teat."
Let's do welfare first, because that is far and away the most vilified and often accused of corruption. Just by the raw numbers there are 3,341,535 people receiving welfare (this encompasses both temporary assistance to needy families TANF, which is time limited as the name indicates and General Assistance, GA benefits).  That seems like a big number until you realize that there are 320 million people living in these United States and this accounts for 2.9% of total households in the US and just barely over 1% of the total population, far from being a millstone around the neck of our great nation.  I will also mention that receiving welfare is by no means a permanent solution to poverty, nor is it easy, nor will the amount you receive pay for a big screen TV or a cell phone if you are feeding a family.  The people I know who are on welfare are actually employed and work pretty darn hard, as food servers, retail employees and other such low paying, yet necessary functions (saving minimum wage argument for later date).  In fact, if you don't show some initiative and jump through certain hoops, your welfare gets pulled.  And don't even start with the whole drug argument, states that have mad drug testing a requirement for welfare recipients have turned up absolute bumpkiss.  One state tested thousands and came back with one positive, uno, one, which I'm sure was a real gotcha moment against that one person who just couldn't stay clean in order to collect that sweet sub-poverty level income for a limited period of time.
The actual abuse of the TANF, and GA systems as well as SNAP (food stamps), public housing and such seem to me to be greatly exaggerated and based almost entirely on anecdotal evidence, the actual numbers don't bear the weight.  Don't get me wrong, I deal with enough scammers and professional beggars in my line of work to know that some people have no shame and will scam anyone to get a 20 spot, but I don't think that the overall numbers justify the vitriol that gets pointed a the honestly poor and down on their luck folks that rely on public assistance to get by.
So let's talk disability, and you need to know right off the bat that the number is bigger here: 8,954,518 people on Social Security disability in 2014 (2.7% of the total population), but you also need to know that these people all paid their Social Security taxes up until the point they became disabled, many of them are ex-military, most of them would probably give up their fat disability check in order to live normal healthy lives.  Before you go assuming that people on disability are "takers," you really ought to walk a mile in their shoes.
I don't know if this captures all of the people that sometimes get lumped into the characterization of those who are not willing to work hard and take responsibility for their lives, but these two categories taken as entirely discreet segments of the population don't even make up 4% of the population.  Take into account that many of the people represented in the first category are children, and that there may be some overlap between the two groups and you are dealing with a segment of the population that is nowhere near the scourge on our nation that it is made out to be.
Want to be mad at something? How about the fact that the Fortune 500 companies received almost $63 Billion in subsidies and tax breaks (according to Forbes magazine, which isn't exactly a liberal rag). Companies that are all large and profitable are able to take advantage of our system and worm out of paying their fair share of the burden of improving our infrastructure, maintaining our defensive capabilities, and caring for those who are left out of the lifestyles of the rich and famous.  They can throw millions at politicians to make sure their little loopholes remain open and functioning.  Those millions must be worth it.
I think we are mad at the wrong people.
I think the rage and discontent of the middle class has been hijacked and misdirected.
It has been pointed at the people who eat the crumbs from the table instead of at the people who are taking the lion's share of the main course.
I'm no math whiz, but I think I have figured out that we're being hoodwinked.

Pernicious Deception

The only other thing I have formal training in, besides theology and ministry, is Environmental Science.  I hold a Bachelor of Science Degree in Environmental Resource Management from The Pennsylvania State University.  I tell you this, not so that you will consider me an expert, because I'm not, I was a pretty mediocre student and found out rather quickly that I was actually being called to something rather different.  But there is one certain area where my two educations overlap, and that is when it comes to stewardship of our environmental resources.
See, you might think that studying environmental science would make you one of those "tree hugging" types, who think we all need to ride bikes everywhere and eat nothing but organic vegan diets.  Not so, actually what I ran across over and over again was the idea of responsible use of resources.  Pristine wilderness is great and all, but you know what else is great?  Corn, wheat, rice, beef, chicken and these days even fish, these things are all a part of human agriculture.  I also am a fan of man made things: textiles, machinery and electronics.  In the heat and humidity of a Maryland summer, I love me some air conditioning, and in the cold of winter I like to sit by a warm fire.  I understand that life in an industrialized society requires a certain amount of impact on our environment.  I also understand that the impact we have on the environment can be mitigated to a large extent through technology and simple common sense.  Actually, "Green Sector" jobs are kind of a big thing in this country, and you know what, most of them are good paying, stable and sustainable sorts of jobs. It would be great if we could really turn our focus from growth that destroys our environment and helps us make better weapons, to learning things that actually help us improve the world for all of us, future generations included.
There are two things we will always need that are currently in some degree of peril: clean air and clean water.  If we don't have those things, our continued existence on this planet is not a tenable proposition.  Climate change is a problem to be sure, and I'm going to be terribly anthropocentric here, but polar bears going extinct is really a rather small problem compared to humans going extinct.
I saw a commercial on the TV yesterday, sponsored by some political action group representing manufacturing industry, which was bemoaning the arduous restrictions that the EPA puts on pollution, particularly air pollution.  The thing is blood-boiling, filled with misleading information and downright prevarication.  It starts with the fact that China doesn't impose any regulations on their emissions of smog causing substances, and that, in their opinion, puts us at a competitive disadvantage because all of this concern for the quality of the air we breathe is costing the good and holy 'Merican companies lots of dollars in the rather futile effort not to give our children asthma, pulmonary dysfunction and lung cancer.  And what good is it doing anyway because China's dirt is blowing all the way across the Pacific Ocean anyway?  It's costing us jobs people: JOBS!
Economic arguments against environmental protection are not only terrible morally, but also do not make real sense in the long run.
You know what else hurts the economy?  A parent who calls in sick every other day to take care of a kid with chronic bronchitis.  Someone who goes on disability because they lose a lung.  All the myriad respiratory illnesses that come with poor air quality.  Outbreaks of dysentery and cholera from polluted water supplies.  Severe drought that leads to crop failures and wildfires.  Massive soil erosion and non-point source pollution that leads to dead zones in the Cheaspeake Bay.  Destruction of riparian areas that make us more vulnerable to floods and catastrophic levels of pollutants in the water supply. I could go on.
Did I mention that people in Bejing have to wear respiratory protection against the smog?
Did I mention that the Yangtze river is an irreparable environmental catastrophe?
China is not a valid arguing point when it comes to environmental sanity.  I don't care how good their economy is or how much money we owe them.  I'm going to make a new rule, similar to Godwin's rule about using Hitler in an argument about violence or racism.  If you're talking about the environment and you bring up China as anything other than a bad example, you lose.
I'm a little out of date here, but when I was a youngin there were these things called the Kyoto protcols, some of the strongest international environmental standards that had been attempted by the human race up to that point.  They were an attempt to level the playing field when it comes to the environment.  They were scaled to be more restrictive on already industrialized nations like the US and European nations, because we got our shot to grow dirty.  Developing countries were given more latitude, however, standards were in place.  Almost every nation in the world signed and has since ratified the protocols, including China (doesn't mean they're playing by the rules).  Take a guess who didn't. Scroll all the way to the bottom.  Yep, it was us.  We signed but never ratified.  Canada signed, ratified and then backed out.
Our reasons?  People (meaning nations like China) aren't going to follow them anyway.  Which is sort of like saying, "Let's not put up speed limits, because we know people are going to break them anyway."
Here's the thing though, if we only ever passed laws and standards we knew wouldn't be broken, we never would have even gotten the Magna Carta.  We never would have gotten the Ten Commandments.
The thing that troubles me most about the whole situation is that I know many people, good people, who will buy the whole "it's not fair" argument, hook line and sinker.  But fairness is relative.  You know who environmental de-regulation is really not fair to?  My kids, my grandkids, the entire human race.
Mitigating our environmental impact requires a certain willingness to look beyond the immediacy of a balance sheet.  It requires a sense of duty and obligation to something more than just the here and now.  That is why stewardship of our resources should and must be a concern.  That is why it matters, that's why we need to speak, and vote, and stop drinking the Kool-aid offered to us by those with a vested interest in running dirty, it's probably got PCB's in it.

Moving Targets

September 11, 2015
It was the same kind of beautiful September day, blue sky, the barest hint of a cool down coming.  I sat down to coffee and Sportscenter, the same way I did fourteen years ago.  Then I had a class to go to, today is a day off.  Then there were no patriotic stories about how baseball brought us back from a tragedy, because as of yet there had been no tragedy.  I watched a little mini-documentary about President George W. Bush throwing out the first pitch of game 3 of the World Series between the New York Yankees and the Arizona Diamondbacks, and I remember the backdrop all too well.  The piles of rubble that still smoldered downtown, the walls of pictures of the missing and the dead.  The shock and the grief.  In addition to the usual birthdays, anniversaries and holidays I am growing a collection of horrible, tragic days that I remember every year: personal/family, July 23rd, communal, pretty much the entire first week of June, and national, September 11.
On my walk this morning I saw a jet streaking it's vapor trail across a blue sky, and I started having thoughts, but I'll be honest, I really didn't come up with anything new.  I've been down this road and also this road before.  So I'm going to reach for something a little more hopeful.
I remembered a moment when I was actually proud of George W. Bush.  It was the baseball thing that jogged my memory, but it was how he responded in the immediate aftermath of 9-11.  You had to be paying attention because the warmongers got on the scene awfully fast, but there was a moment where he didn't jump right on the revenge train.  It was before the "mission accomplished" fiasco, before the axis of evil, before we went shambling off to war.  He seemed like a pretty regular person who was just trying to do his best with a bad situation.  I remember a moment when even the President of these United States was humble and thoughtful and had no other choice than to lean into grace and hope.
Too bad it didn't last longer.
I can't help feeling like Al Quaida and the warmongers have pushed us to a point where we have stopped seeing each other as human beings.  Every once in a while (actually more often than you might think), as a fan of non-violence, I stub my toe on someone for whom non-violence is akin to a belief in unicorns, it's a nice idea but probably has no place in the real world.  My belief that the world would be a safer and better place if we had not gone all Rambo/Chuck Norris across the middle east seems to them to be dangerously naive, and perhaps it is, but to tell you the truth I think I'm pretty safe in believing it, because no one is ever going to actually test it out by foregoing the all too natural urge to vengeance.
As an interesting note, on the occasions when I have had these conversations with actual soldiers and/or veterans, I actually found more common ground and assumptions than I do with your garden variety armchair general.  I'm just going to chalk that up to a sort of silent testimony to being right.
But here's where I have to confess to being a bit un-fair.  Somewhere in the seven years after 9-11 I forgot that W was actually not that bad of a guy, I lost sight of his humanity because I don't agree with so much of what he did.  I've been on the other end of that stick, and I don't particularly care for it.  Not that POTUS was actually losing sleep over what some small town pastor thought about him playing Sheriff of the Globe, but nonetheless I stand convicted of being the sort of idealogue I often criticize.
I think this is why genuinely thoughtful, and committed Christians are so often thought of as wishy-washy, because we have realized that being right is probably not even half the battle.
It's getting a little annoying to tell you the truth, every time I get a good case of righteous indignation going about something or someone, anytime I creep near to righteous and justified hatred, God likes to  remind me: "Yep, they're my children too."
Well, I guess if I have to lay off W, there's always Cheney...
What him too?
Poop.

Showing My Work

I used to love it when teachers would give me partial credit on things for showing my work.  The theory behind it is sound, because it's not always about getting the right answer, often it is about learning the process and being able to see exactly where you go wrong.  The best teachers are good at showing you where you messed up, and the worst teachers are the ones that just tell you you're wrong, maybe in a way that seems less than constructive, and leave you hanging out there in your wrongness.
Anyway, I'm preaching on the lectionary text from James this week (James 3: 1-12, if you're a dutiful reader and want to know).  I don't remember doing too many sermons from James in the past, though I'm sure I've done a few.  One reason for the choice is that I feel like I just did the one about Peter telling Jesus he was the Messiah.  Another reason is that I think I may have neglected James, I mean aside from the fact that I just walked the Camino de Santiago (The Way of Saint James). I think I usually look at the letter of James as the one that makes Paul look less cranky by comparison.  Don't get me wrong, James has some good things to say, it's just the tone... let's just say it's a little hard to take sometimes.
When he starts by talking about teachers and how they're going to be judged with greater strictness, I start to get nervous, the same way I do when Jesus starts slamming the priests and pharisees.  Because he's talking about me, in way that's rather more specific than I would generally prefer from someone who uses the word iniquity and fires of hell, so blithely.  But I take the critique with great seriousness, because I do believe that what he says about teachers and leaders is very true, they do tend to shape their students and their followers, and that can be good and that can be bad, depending on the teacher or leader.
It's a terrifying reality that leaderless groups tend to go all Lord of the Flies in a big hurry.  And this includes groups that are lead by people who are not willing to do anything that sacrifices their popularity and likeability (also known as pandering to the base).  A good leader, or parent or teacher, is a balance of being loved and respected and being responsible.  If everyone likes everything you do, you are probably not leading, you're just following the whims of the crowd and calling it your idea.
Edwin Friedman, aka the Yoda of family systems theory, wrote a book called Failure of Nerve that can be applied to the current mindset of leaders in various arenas of the modern world.  He talks about the ways in which a leader can and should make changes in the behavior of the system, and he talks about the inevitable forms of resistance they encounter, and how "nerve" or courage or resolution is the only way to overcome said resistance.  I find myself thinking, talking and writing about this book and the ideas therein an awful lot, because it's like a diagnosis of an epidemic disease that I very well might have.
I think James has the same quality.  The Epistle of James diagnoses diseases to which our communities of faith are particularly vulnerable.  Such as making distinctions between "the right kind of people," and others usually based on dollar signs (see chapter 2). Oh and talking a good game about Jesus and all, but not really acting at all like he wanted us to act: "faith without works is dead," is perhaps the most famous quote in all of James.
This little ramble is sort of like a deleted scene from my sermon on Sunday.  (As hard as it is to believe, there are indeed things I choose not to say in a sermon).
Maybe this is me trying to get the log out of my own eye.  Because what I'm fixing to say on Sunday is that we have become too mean and nasty to really show the love of Christ with the world.  We're just entirely too homed in on "defending the faith," and the violence and vigilance that that requires has made us cranky.  My focus on Sunday is going to be: "From the same mouth come blessing and cursing.  My brothers and sisters this ought not to be so."  This is part confession and part hope that somehow or other we can turn this ship away from the waters of anger, fear and bitterness, before we crash ourselves on the rocks.

The Golden Boy

As an Iggles phan I really want to hate Tom Brady.  He beat us in the only Superbowl we have made in the past thirty years.  I am perfectly willing to believe that he would cheat to win, even by doing something as picayune as taking some air out of the ball.
But - and this really does pain me to say - I'm glad he won his suit against the NFL.  I'm glad the judge decided that the NFL overstepped and acted improperly, and basically made Roger Goodell wear the cone of shame.  It's not that I find Goodell personally problematic, but I have observed that the NFL is becoming a bit of a monstrosity, and this little thing kicks that monster in the shins just a bit.
See, the NFL is an organization that enjoys tax exempt status, while the owners of teams who comprise it are really rich and keep getting richer.  Instead of contributing to the public good by paying taxes, like you me and everyone we know, they just get to keep the change, they make a profit, in some cases heaps of it.  They are not churches (even though football is a religion in this country), they are not non-profit organizations or an educational institution, but they don't pay taxes.  The logic behind this is, I suppose, they provide a public service in entertaining people and stimulating the economy of the city where they play.  Those in government have a vested interest in keeping them around and keeping them happy. There is probably a correlation between re-election rates and NFL franchise success (just a guess, some stat people check that out for me).
But the NFL is not a scrappy little conglomeration of guys in leather helmets any more, they are freaking huge and have demonstrated rather callous corporate behavior, most tragically in the way they have slow played the effect that concussions have had on their players, but also in their approach to discipline of their players.  Football players have made headlines for all different sorts of maladjusted behavior: domestic violence, DUI, drug use, murder, attempted murder, lying, cheating and stealing.  It's to the point where if it's not a felony it barely even gets mentioned.  The problem is that the NFL only seems to care when it's a public relations issue.  When Ray Rice punched out his fiancee in an elevator, on camera, the NFL issued a six game suspension when we saw the tape of him dragging his unconscious girlfriend out of the elevator.  Ray admitted he was the cause of her unconsciousness, via his fist hitting her in the face.  Yep, six game suspension, bad boy!
No problem so far, punching women out is definitely in the realm of behaviors that society and organizations within society ought to say is a big no-no.  However, when the video of said incident, all the way through surfaces, and shows exactly the action that Ray Rice had already confessed and apologized for, now the suspension goes boom to a possible lifetime ban (which was later moderated to a season).  Why? Bad PR.  Not moral outrage on the part of the League, not legal liability, not anything that had any basis in the facts of the case, but just because it looked so much worse on film, in slow motion, replayed over and over again, so that people could get a real good look at a man making a really bad decision.
Ray Rice was a running back who was definitely on the down side of his career, he was not at all a sympathetic character because he punched a woman in the face.  He really had no grounds to do anything more than say, "hey that's not really fair."
Tom Brady on the other hand, just won the Super Bowl.  Tom Brady is pretty and articulate and married to a super model, and has super hair and a winning smile, and has won since he basically appeared out of nowhere, and is called the golden boy.  He is the guy you really want to hate, but you also kind of want him on your team.  He has also just demonstrated how people who are privileged can use their privilege to benefit the community.
When the NFL sicced their pack of lawyers on Brady, and they generated a million dollar report that turns out not to be worth the paper it was printed on, which basically says that Brady, or someone may or may not have cheated, and Brady or someone may or may not have known (call me the next time you want to pay someone to write 50 pages without saying anything), Emperor Goodell imposed a 4 game suspension, incidentally the same amount that Greg Hardy was suspended for trying to kill a woman and then either terrorizing or paying her not to testify.
Tom Brady is arguably the face of the NFL, and has been for over a decade.  He is not a hulking linebacker who can barely grunt more than a syllable, and he is not accused of some heinous act of violence, or even something really shameful.  In fact, what he is accused of could very well not be anything at all, depending on who you talk to, but that's not even the point, the point is he had a chance to stand up to perhaps the only thing that would have the audacity to try and bully Tom Brady, the National Football League.
Honestly it would take a confrontation with such a monopolistic, heavy handed corporate entity to make Brady seem like an underdog, but there he is, and he gonna fight.  And he gonna win round one.  Oh yes, there will be appeals, but it is unlikely that the facts of the case are going to change.
The thing is, he didn't have to go through all of this, he could have just taken the four games and then come back to lead the Patriots into the playoffs, again.  He could have mumbled an insincere apology, not really admitted anything and taken a reduced suspension and been back even sooner, but that would have left the next dude who gets railroaded by the Goodell public relations/discipline machine with less of a leg to stand on.  Maybe the next dude is a special teams guy who needs to launch himself like a human torpedo just to bring home another game check, maybe nobody notices that that guy is getting the shaft.  The NFL's methods and judgments have now been firmly brought under suspicion.
I can't really say that I'm now a Tom Brady fan, and he may have had no other motivation in this than pride and trying to win another game, but he has taken on Goliath and won, and I guess I'm fond of when that happens.

I'm Feeling the Bern

When Bernie Sanders announced his candidacy for President a few months back, someone said by way of pithy facebook post: "Bernie Sanders, the lesser of two evils I have been waiting for all my life."  To be honest, at that point, I barely knew who Sanders was, but I had heard two things: he was a socialist and he stood almost no chance of gaining the democratic nomination let alone a general election.  The socialist part, I'm okay with, because in the current milieu it basically means anyone who is not a wholehearted supporter of  unbridled capitalism.  As a perpetual resident of the middle class, I do not support unbridled capitalism.  As a Christian, I believe that serving mammon is antithetical to following Jesus, you know, because he said so.

Over the past few months I have heard things come out of Bernie Sanders' grumpy old mouth that I have wanted someone, anyone, particularly someone with some political clout to say for a long time.  The list includes:

1. Paying a living wage
2. Reforming the system of public higher education and attendant crushing student debt.
3. Paying for such things by taxing stock market speculation and capital gains
4. Properly and stringently regulating the financial sector.
5. Even better health care solutions (single payer system)
6. Campaign finance reform
7. Ecological sanity
8. Racial Justice
9. Effective Gun control legislation

You may notice that a lot of those things have to do with getting a grip on our economic situation and tilting the playing field back towards level for the middle class.  That's simple self interest on one level, because I'm aware that I'm never going to sniff the upper echelons of the income scale or become super wealthy.  But on another level, I hear in Bernie Sanders platform, perhaps the most Christian set of values brought to this particular table since Jimmy Carter.  And Bernie is Jewish, and not even particularly religious.

But for the love of all that is holy, give me person who wants to try and create a more just society and fight oppression, and I will tell you that he's following Christ more than certain other candidates who demonstrate a rather callous attitude towards the poor (especially if the poor happen to come from south of the border).  Show me a secular Jew who wants to restore dignity to public discourse and I will show you Jesus (a religious Jew) who told us that if we call someone a fool we are liable to damnation.  Bernie rather notably refuses to attack Hilary, Biden or even any of the Republican candidates, other than stating his disagreement with their platforms and policies.  When he actually chastises reporters who would like to make some comment about Hilary's hair (or his hair for that matter), you get the sense that we are dealing with an actual grown up.

Maybe it's just because I'm in my 40's now, but I really want our next president to be an actual grown up.  I think Obama has been, and I think history will show that he was, even if the latest polls or the adolescent media don't particularly reflect that.

I have two things that I'm looking for when I vote: 

1. Do their policies and platform reflect a mature and realistic way forward.
2. Does that way forward mesh with Christian ethics.

Notice, I don't include whether or not they can win, whether they have good hair or whether or not they profess to be Christian.  I don't care about those things, those things got us Reagan and W. Bush (and Billy Clinton, just in case you think I'm picking on the Red side of the aisle).  Those things got us a mess of bad wars and rampant greed and eventually crashed us into the ditch.

I feel like we need to get our house in order, and for that to happen the focus of the conversation needs to change.  Even if Bernie doesn't get the nod from the Dems, he has still changed the conversation.  You know who is pushing buttons on the other side of the aisle? Donald Trump and his spectacular, horrible, really bad hair.  But it's okay, Bernie won't go after the hair, he'll go after the immoral and unfeasible ideas that Trump represents, that should be fun to watch if it happens.