Eight

I've been living with the presence of an absence for eight years.
Early in the morning on July 23, 2005 my brother stuck a needle in his arm and left us.
Since then my family has had a hole in the middle of it.
I've written about it, a lot.
I've talked about, a lot.
It has become a part of me.
What I have discovered, especially over the past year and half, is that the part of me that it has become is actually rather useful.  Painful, but useful.  It is a gift I would rather not have, but I have to admit that it is, in fact, a gift.
It's like there's all this stuff that I have stored up over the past eight years, all this flotsam and jetsam that I have found washed up on the shores of the rivers of Babylon.  When I run into someone who is new to this thing called grief, I can show them these things.
I'm never quite sure it's the right thing to do.
Sometimes I wonder if I'm keeping the proper professional boundaries.
Sometimes I wonder if maybe I'm trying to hand them something that really has no use in their context.
But in the end, I can do nothing else.

Yesterday I was at the beach for a few hours.  I was right up the road from where our family spent years of vacations, where Jon and I learned to ride waves, a place that marked the passage of years, a place we left behind for "better" things about two years before he passed.  I had my kids in the surf, teaching them how to jump over and duck under waves, and I remember doing the same thing with my little brother, when he was still too young to go out past the breakers by himself and he needed someone bigger to take him out and help him.  For the first time in years it didn't make me angry... it just made me sad.  But my kids made me happy, and so I was happy and sad at the same time, as I have been so many times in the past eight years.  The presence of an absence was still there, and it was as big and terrifying as ever...
But it wasn't quite the same.  I think it's like people who learn to work at great heights, or handle dangerous animals, or do other dangerous jobs, you learn to handle the fear, you learn to live around it and live with it.
It doesn't go away, that's the blasted hard truth of the matter, it just becomes something you get used to.
I'm learning to use it, to not be afraid of it.  I'm learning to run it like a chainsaw, which is both dangerous and useful at the same time.

Eight, it feels like counting, as the years slip by.  They do now, it's one anniversary to the next in the blink of an eye.  I realized that I have come to mark my life into the era before Jon died and the era after.  It's hard not to let something that becomes that significant have too much power.  Normally I would use, before I was married, or before I had kids, or even before I went to seminary, but really it's the stone-etched tragedy that gives me my frame of reference.

Eight, and I still don't have "closure," I'm pretty sure that's a lie that psychologists and counselors tell people to fool them into thinking that void will just pack up it's stuff and go home if you handle it right.  It's not over when you close the casket or scatter the ashes, it's not over after a year or two, or three, or eight.  When death comes to the young, it tears open a hole in the fabric of the way things are "supposed" to be, and you can't fix it because it's a hole in the potential of things.  It's what "might" have been, not what was.

It's like those waves, some are big, some are small, but they all demand your attention, or you're going to get clobbered.

A Rolling Stone can gather some ire

They took a clean cut kid;

And they made a killer out of him is what they did.

-Bob Dylan

So Rolling Stone Magazine decided to put a picture of Tzokar Tsarnaev on the cover of it's August issue and feature an article about how a seemingly normal kid becomes a terrorist capable of setting off a bomb in a crowd of innocent people.  They just took a stock photo and put it on their cover, I'm pretty sure I've seen that photo in scores of other places.  But certain people, many people as a matter of fact, are rather irritated by Rolling Stone putting his picture on the cover, and they're calling for people to drop their subscriptions and boycott Rolling Stone.  After I got done chuckling over the quaint idea of still subscribing to an actual paper magazine, I found this reaction rather fascinating.  It's certainly not hard to see why people might have some qualms with putting a notorious mass murderer on the cover of a magazine like Rolling Stone.  After all RS is not exactly a news rag, but it does sometimes aspire to be a little more than just a music review sheet.  Historically, there have been times when RS crossed the line from pop-culture into some serious journalism, I think particularly of Hunter Thompson covering the '72 Election, and producing some of the most insightful articles about the nature of the American political system I have ever read.  Yeah, that was for Rolling Stone.

I'm not saying I agree with the decision.  But it's not the first time Rolling Stone has gotten into some trouble for blurring the line between news and entertainment.  Rolling Stone has occasionally become culturally significant, but in this case maybe they're trying too hard, maybe they're being a little too sympathetic to a man that everyone would rather pigeonhole as a monster, maybe they are granting him "celebrity status."  I'm not sure about the sympathetic part of the equation, I haven't read the article yet, it hasn't hit "newsstands."   I'm not really sure you can blame Rolling Stone for making Tsarnaev a celebrity either.  His image was plastered on our idiot boxes for like a week running, we all know what he looks like.

I think maybe the problem is that the picture they're using makes him look like a pretty normal 19 year-old kid.  We don't want him to be a pretty normal 19 year-old kid, we don't want to have been a pretty normal 17 year-old kid, because then what he did seems somehow more terrible.  We don't like this whole Tsarnaev bombing thing because they weren't made into terrorists because they lived in desperate poverty in the West Bank or some fundamentalist Muslim enclave in Afghanistan, they were from Boston.  Yeah they were immigrants, thank goodness for that, that saves us from really having to think too much about how normal and American they were at one point.  They were Chechnyan, and we know all about "those people."  They're all crazy terrorists, just ask V. Putin.

The reason this sort of story fascinates me is because it shows how large segments of the American population are rather reluctant, perhaps to the point of being absolutely unwilling, to face to complexities of the world we live in.  Television media coverage is, I think, largely to blame for this.  Television, as a general rule, likes to present us with striking images and create a very clear cut reality for it's viewers.  Print media tend to get more into the nuances of a story, hash out some of those contradictions and find the places where things just aren't what you expect.

Sometimes they get it wrong.  Sometimes print media has to retract or apologize for going too far, or getting their facts wrong, but the evidence and the reversal is always there in a solid form.  The TV is just flickering images and most of the time the mistake and whatever reversal may come all happens so fast we barely notice.  Print media creates a dialogue in a way that TV cannot, even though TV can literally have people talking to each other.  Rolling Stone can run their article and people can think about it, respond to it, agree or disagree with it, that's fine, it's called journalism.

But because we're now a decidedly visual, TV culture, just be careful what picture you put on the cover.

The Call of the Wild Man

...society can never prosper, but must always be bankrupt, 

until every man does that which he was created to do.

-R.W. Emerson, Conduct of Life

How's this for a connection: Ralph Emerson and The Turtle Man?

There's a show that I am rather fascinated with: The Call of the Wild Man, where this crazy hillbilly named Ernie aka Turtle Man, goes and catches all kinds of critters, from snakes to raccoon, with his bare hands.  He has the prerequisite charisma, and silly catch phrases, like "Live Action!" and a crazy trilling noise that he does.  He's basically a Kentucky version of Steve Irwin.  He makes like $80 per critter removal, and often gets some sort of barter system type reward, but he seems to genuinely love what he does, and he does something that most people think is just plain crazy.  Thanks to the miracle of television he probably gets more income from letting a bunch of cameras follow him around than he ever would from the actual work that he does.  Likewise with the impressively bearded boys on Duck Dynasty, they are national celebrities because they do something slightly unusual (make duck calls) and because they are interesting characters that people will watch on TV.

I never thought I would say this, but reality TV may actually be on to something.  At least on the cable networks, like The Discovery Channel and A&E, they seem to have found that people doing what they love to do is a marketable commodity.  Whether it's Turtle Man, or the Gator Boys, or Fast n' Loud, or Duck Dynasty, they seem to have a stable of unusual characters doing the rather marginal things they love to do, often with impressive facial hair, and that is a recipe for good television.

Why?  The pure crazy of the things they do is only a part of the equation.  At the core of their appeal is a world where the "mass of humanity lives in quiet desperation" as Emerson's gardener once said, doing jobs they hate for a lot less money than they think they deserve.  They look at people who live life on their terms and follow their true vocation as heroes.  Going back to Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone, people who lived on the edge, on their own terms, have been American dreams.  Shows about homesteaders in Alaska and people mining gold are a continuation of that fascination.

There is a basic human need at the core of all this: a satisfying vocation.  It's something that I managed to more or less fall into, so I don't have any magic secrets to tell, but I have given it a lot of thought as a parent.  Even when my kids are in elementary school, I am watching their talents and their dreams.  No one ever dreams of becoming an underpaid cashier at Wal-Mart, but a lot of people end up there because they don't know how to follow their actual dreams.

I watched an interview with Mike Rowe, the host of Dirty Jobs, a show built on the premise that people are interested in seeing how the nitty gritty jobs that are absolutely necessary to our modern society get done.  Rowe is now fronting an organization called Profoundly Disconnected (check it out here: www.mikerowe.com ), which hopes to address the gap between the supply and demand for skilled tradespeople.  We have become a nation that emphasizes white collar work as the American dream, because of the image, because getting dirty seems like it is a bad thing, but we are running ourselves into the ground.  We can't all be doctors, lawyers and accountants (Lord, what a terrible dystopia that would be).  But who wants to spend their whole life working at McDonalds or Wal-Mart?  Not too many people I know.

I discovered something when I was in college, working for a summer in a sheet metal shop for a local business that installed HVAC systems.  The skilled trade world is starving for people who are actually smart enough to go to college.  Seriously, within two weeks of working there, the shop foreman literally begged the owner not to send me out into the field with an installer to just hand them stuff and carry things around.  I had learned how to run the shop machines, how to organize components and fabricate duct work, I was, rather quickly, useful.  In contrast to a kid from the local Vo-Tech school who had been there six months and was still pretty much only good for handing people tools and carrying things around.

On my end the deal wasn't too bad either, because I actually liked what I was doing.  Unlike some of the other menial jobs I had held, I felt like I was making something, being productive and actually learning a little each day.  Before I went to seminary, while I was doing various jobs I found much less rewarding, I often thought about that track, the skilled trade track, where you learn to make things other than words and paperwork, but by that point I had a $50000 education and, other than three months of sheet metal work, no marketable skills.

As a society, we need to put people in touch with resources that help them figure out what they're called to do.  My son wants to drive a bulldozer.  He's nine, that might change, but he is a very hands on sort of kid, he loves to figure out the way things work and build stuff.  I'm pretty sure he's smart enough to be on the college track, but I find myself questioning the wisdom of trying to force him down that road.  What if he's called to be a carpenter or a mechanic, or a bulldozer driver?  "Well what about architecture or engineering?" the voices of well meaning grandparents chime in, "aren't then he could do what he loves and be educated."

Yeah, but they're different things, and the question of calling can be pretty darn specific.  Architects and engineers rarely get their hands dirty.

I think we are blindly biased as a society.  We have bought an assumption that there is only one path to success, and we are rather fascinated by people that have not taken that path and yet found success despite going their own way.  Robert Frost's Road Less Traveled poem is used ad-nauseum at graduation ceremonies, which is at least slightly ironic, since what graduation ceremonies imply is that you have gotten rather adept at treading carefully down the path that was prescribed for you by parents, teachers, professors and guidance counselors.

Don't get me wrong, I like education.  I am called to do a job that requires a Master's degree, but I think that not everyone is called to do the same thing, and maybe the world needs people who are intelligent and talented to swing hammers and turn wrenches every bit as much as it needs people to work in the world of words and numbers.  I think that God, in great wisdom, has made us different, given us different talents and callings, and I think we really will be bankrupt, until we all find and follow our callings, and until our society recognizes the equal value of those callings to the larger community.

X2Y

Dear Generation Y,

I'm about two weeks from turning 39, which means, gulp, I'm about a year and two weeks from turning 40.

I can honestly say, when I was 19, I never thought this would happen to me, but here I am, about to be officially middle-aged, and yet I don't feel old, I don't feel anything like what I imagined an almost 40 year-old would feel.  Sure I'm not going to rock concerts anymore, and I don't just go out and drive around for the fun of it (gas is $3.71 for crying out loud).  But the other day I was driving somewhere listening to Led Zeppelin and I turned it up uncomfortably loud, and I remembered being 17.

I have read a few articles lately about how maligned, and conversely how under-estimated, the current generation of "young folks" seems to be.  Millennials, sometimes called Generation Y, are thought to be narcissistic, entitled, directionless and worst of all, obsessed with their darn iphones.  They also might just be the hope for a brighter tomorrow, somehow or other.  I notice, with some chagrin that the writers of both dire criticism as well as the wearers of rose colored glasses are generally representatives of my old nemesis: the Boomers.  Look kids, I graduated from high school in 1992, which puts me smack dab in the middle of what was labeled Generation X, which unfortunately, is the reference point from which you were perhaps mislabeled Generation Y.  But Gen X was a somewhat derogatory term from the very beginning, it meant we had no identity and no direction.  We were perceived as narcissistic, entitled and directionless.  iphones weren't a thing then, but if they were you can bet we would have been addicted to them as much as you (most of us are now glued to them as well).

My point, and a not so subtle one at that, is that the aging boomer generation, using their quaint old fashioned media outlets like Time Magazine and Newsweek (which have been pushed to the brink of extinction thanks to the interweb), to criticize and label my generation with tags like "slackers."  Which was largely a result of the fact that many of us, despite increasingly expensive college educations, were entering the workforce and finding that there was no room at the big kids table.  This happened for a lot of reasons: because our parents generation (the boomers) was freakishly large to begin with, because during their tenure women had re-entered the workforce in a major way, because they all stopped smoking and started doing yoga and thus were not checking out in their mid 40's due to massive coronaries.

By this point, most of us have managed to claw our way out of our parent's basement and into the workforce, but it wasn't easy, and for most of us it involved working at jobs that were, quite frankly, not in our social contract.  No one tells you that when you graduate with most bachelor's degrees, you are qualified for absolutely nothing.  Sure, in the long run, that piece of paper is going to open some doors for you, but in the meantime you have no marketable skills and (probably) heaps of student debt, congratulations kiddo, welcome to McDonalds. At this point in your life, you see those commercials for ITT tech and think, "why didn't I just do that?  They teach you how to fix stuff, and stuff always needs fixing."

My generation went through a major case of blaming the boomers, and they kind of deserve it, they are narcissistic, entitled and they're taking up too much space, but now you probably think we're on they're side.  But we totally are not!  Despite the fact that we might gripe about how you younglings are just re-doing all of our movies and music (seriously, everything these days is just a remake of 80's and 90's stuff, it's really bizarre), we really like you little hipsters, you're like our nerdy little brothers, and we just love your gadgets and how you think that you "discovered" Mother Lovebone, and the fact that Nirvana had this album called Bleach, really you're just adorable with that stuff.

What I want to tell you, although you probably don't care, is that you're going to grow up.  Whether you want to or not, you're going to grow up.  You're going to be 40 before you know it, you're going to get married, have kids and probably get a divorce or three, life isn't going to be easy and you're probably not going to "make it" the way you thought you would, but you will "make it" in the only way that really matters, you'll be around and you'll have a life that somehow goes around that iphone you're always staring at (I'm always staring at mine too, I'm not judging).

In the meantime, don't listen too much to the boomers, they're responsible for how messed up everything is, and they were the ones who thought they were going to "fix" the world.  But cut them some slack, they're my parents, and your grandparents, and they gave us some really great music, so for the sake of Hendrix and the Rolling Stones, lets just hope they don't completely eat our inheritance and destroy our environment before they shuffle off the mortal coil.

Good luck and God Bless,

Generation X

Now is the time for your tears...

But you who philosophize disgrace, and criticize all fear...

Bury the rag deep in your face... now is the time for your tears.

-The Lonesome Death of Hattie Caroll

Bob Dylan

So George Zimmerman is not guilty...

Even though a bullet from a gun in his hand ended up in Trayvon Martin's chest and ended his life, Zimmerman is not guilty of murder, or manslaughter, or even unlawful possession of a handgun.  He didn't break the law.

I have read recently that I shouldn't really have much to say about this, because I'm white, because I'm "privileged," but to me, telling someone they shouldn't have an opinion, or shouldn't speak up, because of their race and their class sounds a lot like oppression.  I think that telling someone to shut up because they're a white middle class person with a master's degree is something that could really only happen in the hyper-sensitive and often ironic world of postmodern America.  

But I will admit, I'm white, I'm middle class, even if my bank account doesn't necessarily show it, I'm educated, and if that invalidates my opinion on something that happened to a poor black kid in Florida, judge me and stop reading right now.

Still reading?

Okay, then here's why I think I need to say something.  Actually I have three reasons, their names are Logan, Jonathan and Kevin, my nephews, whose fathers are all black.  While you're at it throw in Mike, Logan and Jon's father, who I often call a brother, even if his marriage to my sister didn't work out.  The point is these boys are people I care about, and the boys, particularly Logan, are just about to enter Trayvon country, they're about to become young, urban and non-white, which is, quite frankly, treated as though it's illegal.

I'm not naive enough to think that these relationships somehow absolve me of all claims of racism, but I do want you to know that I care enough about these boys to want them to live in a world where it's not okay to shoot them in the chest and not even be breaking the law.

Depending on what story you believe:

Trayvon Martin was a kind, innocent kid on the way home from the store with some tea and skittles

or

Trayvon Martin was a thug, high on something, who went to the store because he had the munchies, and who was probably looking for a house to burglarize on the way home.

George Zimmerman is an upright citizen who was doing his duty as a citizen and keeping his neighborhood safe,

or 

George Zimmerman is a coward and a racist who was literally hunting down young black men just hoping for a chance to use his gun.

The fact of the matter is, most people would rather believe the latter statements, it's just simpler and helps them deal with the tragedy of a young man who died rather senselessly, but the reality is probably closer to the first statements.  The tragedy is that we live in a world where both of them can actually be true.  Trayvon doesn't have to be a thug and Zimmerman doesn't have to be a racist psychopath for something like this to happen.

Race is a big deal.  Black men are immediately suspects in any dark alley.  That doesn't mean that Zimmerman was a racist, it means he was human and he was scared.  It means that there had been burglaries in the neighborhood, and black youth were the most likely culprits (not necessarily the culprits mind you, just the usual suspects).  Zimmerman said he was doing his duty to observe and report suspicious activity.  To him, a black kid in a hoodie, at night, was suspicious, he observed and he reported.

Trayvon then did something wrong, he decided that he wasn't just going to keep walking.  Not an unusual mistake, especially for a teenager.  It wasn't illegal, but it was stupid.  He didn't deserve to die for it, but that simple mistake set up a tragedy.

Once the confrontation was underway several factors kicked in: Zimmerman probably had a healthy infusion of, "Authorititis," his "authority" being inflamed by his esteemed position on the neighborhood watch and, more importantly, because he had a gun.  Guns make you feel powerful, I know, I've shot them.  You hold the power of life and death in a neat, shiny little package.  We love our guns in this country, no matter how many of us they kill and maim.  If Zimmerman had not had a gun,  he never would have gotten out of his car, he would have driven away after an angry black kid said some things and pointed at him.  But because he felt like a big man with his gun, George Zimmerman did something wrong, he got out of his car and was no longer just doing his duty to observe and report.

The score card is tied at this point, one stupid mistake per person.

Almost inevitably, violence happens.  Apparently the jury believed that Trayvon attacked Zimmerman and Zimmerman defended himself.  Trayvon brought fists to a gunfight, stupid mistake number two, he's not going to get a third strike.

That is the clearest picture that I can get of what happened that night from the various media outlets.  I think that is probably something like the narrative that the jury thought was true.

In that case, given Florida's laws, what he did was not illegal, but was it right?  Was it righteous?

No.

A kid is dead.

Even if you believe the worst about that kid, he didn't deserve a bullet in the chest.  His parents don't deserve to have to mourn their son.

The problem is, our culture is the guilty party, more so than Zimmerman.  Even if he wasn't a racist, racism is still a big problem.  Even if his gun was legal, guns and violence are still a big problem.  Trayvon wasn't exactly Medgar Evers, but he has now joined a list of martyrs to the American hobgoblins of racism and violence and guns.

It's up to all of us, white and black, privileged and underprivileged to fix these problems.  If we don't, our children are going to keep dying in the streets and our world is going to become more and more hellish, and no laws are going to be able to stop it.

See what happened in that court room was not injustice, it was the result of flawed justice.  The courts do not have a duty to see that righteousness triumphs, they only have a duty to uphold the law.  If followers of Jesus learned anything from him we would notice how many times he told people how flawed the law actually was.  Most of the Sermon on the Mount, goes like this: "You have heard it said, but I say to you..."

The court did what it was supposed to do: it sorted out a tragedy and doled out justice based on the evidence.  It wasn't perfect, it was human, just like Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman.

I read a rather wonderful prayer in a facebook post yesterday:

"Lord, I pray for a world where George Zimmerman offers Trayvon Martin a ride home, because it's raining."

I pray for that world too.  I pray for my children and my nephews that they will live in that world, but I think I'd better prepare them to live in the world we've got.

Bummer.

Resonance

This Sunday, I'm going to be preaching about the parable of the Good Samaritan for the first time at Good Samaritan Presbyterian Church.  The sermon is going to be called Eponymous, because I'm a fan of REM and because, well, it just works.  But a close second for title would have been Resonance.  This is one of those posts that is going to be a bit of overflow material from stuff, I would love to cram into the service, and probably would if I was Rob Bell and had about 45 minutes and slick AV/Tech people to help out.
The Parables in general have a resonant quality.  Resonance can be a powerful force, the vibration of strings creates music from a violin and a guitar, the resonant qualities of brass instruments allow the player to transform a funny little thbbt shound into booming tuba notes or soulful trombone riffs.  Resonance can make crystal glasses sing as you rub your finger around the rim, and if you hit just the right frequency with sufficient decibels, you can shatter glass with sound.  Those are all audible examples, but there are other ways that resonance can affect things.  For instance, the Tacoma Narrows bridge.  The engineers could not have forseen that the exact length and stiffness of the center span would be a perfect harmonic for certain wind speeds, and that, because of resonance, thousands of tons of steel and concrete would vibrate like a blade of grass stretched between your thumbs when the wind really got going.  So this happened:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=fhVHGuJk4eg#action=share

Resonance can destroy things that you think are solid.  The parables usually attempt to tear down something, some misguided human assumption, so that God can replace it with something better.  In the case of the Good Samaritan, Jesus was deliberately shaking apart the legalism and, as a matter of fact, the ethnic prejudice of his questioner.  The parable starts with the question: "Who is my neighbor?" and that is like plucking a string that starts building in volume and ferocity, until there's no room to hold onto your old assumptions of who is truly "good."
People won't move off of their prejudices until they're challenged.  If you grow up in a white family and you never have any black neighbors, and you never go to school with black kids, you are very vulnerable to becoming prejudiced, if not down right racist.  If you don't know any (enter the name of some group of people different from you) you will probably begin to de-humanize that group of people.  The word that is translated neighbor is used in a very special sense in this part of Luke's Gospel, it is used not just to indicated physical proximity, it is used to indicate mutual humanity.  Who is my fellow human?  Might be a better translation, but it sounds wonky, so we can stick with neighbor and just know that the word is meant to be interpreted in the broadest sense.
The resonance of this story ought to break down the excuses that many followers of Jesus use to hold on to their excuses for not truly working at being as open and fair to people of various sorts.  The specific example of a Samaritan being the merciful neighbor to the man in the ditch, was specifically pointed to challenge the racial, ethnic and theological assumptions of the teacher of the Law.  None of those reasons are really good reasons to neglect one's duty to be merciful and humane.  Convenience, purity, important other business; these are not acceptable excuses to ignore the plight of someone who has been victimized.
But this isn't just about being charitable or helpful, it's about being a neighbor, a fellow human, recognizing a commonality in the other, no matter how different they might be from you.
I have often heard this parable used as a sort of exhortation to help those who are in need, but I think it's bigger than that.  The resonant frequency of this story is meant to shake us out of our assumptions about who is and who is not our brother or our sister.  It is meant to challenge the notion that there are people out there in the world who do not have a rightful claim to be called and to call us neighbors.

And There... on the other side... in the middle of the other side...

I was listening to Alice's Restaurant the other day.  Not really an unusual thing for me to do, considering that I used the chorus of that song as the only notation below my senior yearbook picture, but I hadn't really listened to it all the way through in a while, so when it came up on the shuffle play mode of my iphone, I started reciting/singing the massacree with the four part harmony and all that kinda stuff.
For those of you who were not hippies, or the progeny of hippies, Alice's Restaurant, is not the name of a restaurant, it's the name of a song, by Arlo Guthrie, son of Woody Guthrie.  And it's not really a song in the traditional sense of the word, it's more of a rambling story spoken over a catchy little guitar line with only the chorus being sung at rather unpredictable intervals: You can get anything you want, at Alice's Restaurant.
The song is really a sort of 1960's parable, it embodies the open, idealistic attitude of youth, yet with a profoundly cynical slant when it comes to authority and institutions, which is why I like it, and why I liked it a whole lot when I was 17 years old.  Arlo got the hippie thing down pretty well, but he also inherited some of the anti-fascist, proletarian ideals of his old man.
The first part of the song is a narrative of how he and a friend of his get arrested for dumping garbage illegally  on account of the dump being closed on thanksgiving.  It's funny, and strangely prophetic in a world where small time offenses seem to always get caught while large scale atrocities often go unpunished.  The second part of the song is the story of going to Whitehall street to register for the draft, "getting injected, inspected, neglected and rejected."  Arlo runs into a problem when the Armed Services want to know if he's ever been arrested and he has to say yes, "for littering."  But then they want to know if he's "rehabilitated himself," and that is a little too much to bear.  The question of, "whether or not he's moral enough to join the army... after being a litterbug."
At that moment the anti-war punch of the song comes through loud and clear.  But Vietnam was over before I was born, so that punch doesn't really hit home that solidly for me.  What it did hit this week is the question of morality.  See I just rambled on for quite a while before I actually got to the point, which is just what the song does, it disarms you with humor and absurdity and then it smacks you with a real question: What exactly is morality.
I would be willing to surmise that there has never been a completely immoral or amoral person, ever. There have been lot's of people whose moral standards may not be the same as yours or mine, but they have morals none the less. What exactly are bad morals?  They are usually defined by the culture in which you are located at the time.  For instance Guthrie's rant about how absurd it was that littering could morally disqualify him being a soldier, is based on the assumption that killing, and perhaps war in general, is an immoral activity.  However, soldiers, at least good soldiers, are some of the most moral people you will find anywhere.  Their morality is defined by adherence to a very particular code and a very well defined set of principles.  When violence and killing takes place in a war, it is by most definitions moral.  When similar activities take place in an elementary school, they are decidedly and tragically immoral.  Sorry Arlo, context really does matter.  You can take issue with whether or not the war in Vietnam, or Afghanistan, or Iraq is moral in principle, but you cannot accuse the soldiers of immorality for participating, unless they break even the unusual conventions of warfare.
Context always matters in defining morality.  Behaviors and even ways of dressing that would have scandalized society 50 years ago have become par for the course, and in due time will probably lose the stigma of immorality altogether.
Technology has increased the speed with which cultural mores shift.  Mores are the foundation of morality, they are the principles underneath our moral code.  For example, in the song, the protagonist is doing his friends Alice and Ray a favor by helping them clear out their house, a very moral and upright thing to do.  They try to take the trash to the dump, but for some reason the dump is closed.  They end up littering, breaking the law, and getting arrested.  Even though their overall intent was kind and moral, their behavior was out of bounds.  This is called utilitarianism in ethical practice; the ends justify the means.  In the pursuit of doing a favor for some friends you break a law.  Not a big law, just a little one, just a minor infraction, but an immoral act all the same.
It's not as simple as Arlo would lead you to believe.  It's not just "the Man" trying to keep down the young folk.  Without certain mores, society will break down.  When Europeans came to the new world, they encountered native peoples whose moral code found the idea that a person could own land absurd.  Native Americans thought they had encountered the biggest fools that ever walked the earth, and the early settlers thought the natives were nothing but brute savages who had no sense of culture.  Neither assumption was correct and the clash of moral systems became a tragedy of epic proportions.
We need to be careful when we judge the morality of others.  There is no such thing as immorality or amorality, but there are many different moralities out there.  They all have their own way of seeing things.  To a radical hippie, an overzealous police officer or an army recruiter was an absurd creature with a completely foreign way of seeing the world, and vice versa.  It didn't always go well.  Clashes of morality are often very dangerous, and in melting pot like the USA, we are walking smack into them all of the time.
Being able to laugh at ourselves, and sometimes sing stupid little songs, truly might be the only way we can avoid killing each other.
You can get anything you want at Alice's Restaurant.
You can get anything you want... at Alice's Restaurant.
Walk right in, it's around the back, about a half a mile from the railroad track,
You can get anything you want at Alice's Restaurant.