Feeling Blue About Feeling Guilty

November 25, 2007 by Sasha Lorenzo Posted in Audio available, Davidson Loehr, Former Ministers, Sermons

November 25, 2007

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

Prayer:

We gather here both sincere and flawed. We are interconnected with much of what is good in the world, but also – more than we are comfortable knowing – with what is evil.

Is it really possible that as a nation we have so much more than others without having somehow taken it from them? It felt so much better to believe that we are pure, and the world’s riches flowed naturally to us as rewards for our great purity. Yet we do know better.

We gather here as good people, but not perfect people. We gather not to seek a false purity but a more informed, more nuanced kind of wholeness. For even if we are as poets have said dust of the earth, within the dust there are motes rising to the light – and they too are part of us.

Let us seek grown-up blessings for the dust of our bodies, for it is the dust of Mother Earth, made of stardust. And let us seek the blessings of the “motes rising,” those small but sacred signs of the spirit within us that can be both aware and awake.

For this very human combination of imperfect lives and hopeful, rising spirits, we give thanks, and ask for the blessings of life that flow to all who seek them in honesty and humility.

Amen.

SERMON: Feeling Blue About Feeling Guilty

I’ve spent a few weeks reflecting on some insights from the author John Perkins, one of my current favorite authors. He’s writing about the dark underside of our American imperialism, how empires work, about the slavery always involved somewhere when those in an empire are living much better than those whose labor supports their life style.

In 2004, he wrote the best selller Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, later brought twelve other writers together to write A Game as Old as Empire, and this year wrote The Secret History of the American Empire.

Empire is not about control for its own sake; it is about exploitation of foreign lands and peoples for the benefit of at least the more privileged in the country that controls the economies of others (GOE, p. 17). This is also what I’ve been calling chimpanzee politics: the pursuit of power and privilege for selfish interests.

Slavery may sound like a quaint notion from the 19th century, but it is always part of empires, and our global empire enslaves more people than the Romans and all the other colonial powers before us (EHM, p. 205). we’re Number One.

These are important things for us to know. But as I was putting together this picture of the nature and the cost of our American Way of Life, something else started bothering me, which took me down a very different path.

So I want to start by sketching the dark side of our imperialism, but then take you down the second path, too. The two paths form a dilemma that was expressed by the author E.B. White, when he said, “I arise in the morning torn between a desire to save the world and a desire to savor the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.” It also makes it hard to plan a sermon.

We now have the first truly global empire in history. Most of us aren’t terribly aware of this; but those exploited by it are, and many of them suffer from extreme poverty. On average, twenty-four thousand people die of hunger and hunger-related diseases every day. More than half the planet’s population lives on less than two dollars a day. For us to live comfortable lives, millions must pay a very high price (SH, p. 6).

How have we established our empire? One answer is, through sheer military force. We have military bases in more than a hundred countries, and almost without exception they are not there for national defense. But more importantly, we establish our empire through economic policies that let us control other nations. One measure of this, which I found very clear and helpful, is about the difference between using tariffs to protect your industries, versus using “free trade” to break down and control the economies of other countries.

Our own economy developed behind some of the highest tariff walls in the world. President Ulysses S. Grant reportedly said in the 1870s “within 200 years, when America has gotten out of protection all that it can offer, it too will adopt free trade.” It only took another eighty years, but US tariff rates were not significantly reduced until after WWII. Since then, the most successful developing countries besides ours have been Japan, China, Korea, and Taiwan, which have prohibited the import of any goods that would compete with any of their most important industries. That’s also how we developed our own strong economy. Now under the mantra of “free trade,” the First World has kicked away the ladder, prohibiting Third World countries from using the only economic development strategy proven to work: the strategy of protectionism and tariffs (GOE, p. 21). “Free trade” is neither sacred nor wise; it’s a devastating weapon the strong use to enslave the weak.

Ghana, for example, was forced by the IMF to abolish tariffs on food imports in 2002. The result was a flood of imported food from European Union countries that destroyed the livelihoods of local farmers. It seems that the IMF’s economic hit men “forgot” to ensure that the EU abolish its own massive agricultural subsidies. As a result, frozen chicken parts imported from the EU cost a third of those locally produced. (GOE, p. 22)

Zambia was forced by the IMF to abolish tariffs on imported clothing, which had protected a small local industry of some 140 firms. The country was then flooded with imports of cheap secondhand clothing that drove all but 8 firms out of business. Even if Zambia’s clothing producers had been large enough to engage in international trade, they would have faced tariffs preventing them from exporting to EU and other developed countries. And while countries like Zambia are supposed to devote themselves to free trade, First World countries subsidize their exporters through export credit agencies – often with disastrous results for the environment and economies of the Third World. (GOE, p. 22)

The IMF’s structural adjustment program in Peru slashed tariffs on corn in the early 1990s, and corn from the US – whose farmers are subsidized at a rate of $40 billion a year – flooded the country. Many of Peru’s farmers were unable to compete, and so turned to growing coca for cocaine production instead. (GOE, p. 22)

Many IMF programs have required sharp cuts in health and education spending, making it harder to improve the quality and capabilities of work forces with low levels of literacy and few technological skills. In some countries, such as Ghana, the percentage of school-age children who are actually attending school is falling because of IMF-imposed budget cuts. (GOE, p. 22)

John Perkins describes Ecuador – a country in which he helped cause this harm – as typical of countries around the world that we have brought under our control. For every $100 of crude oil taken out of the Ecuadorian rain forests, the oil companies receive $75. Of the remaining $25, three-quarters must go to paying off the foreign debt. Most of the remaining six dollars and change covers military and other government expenses – which leaves about $2.50 for health, education, and programs aimed at helping the poor. So out of every $100 worth of oil taken from the Amazon, less than $3 goes to the people who need the money most, those whose lives have been so adversely impacted by the dams, the drilling, and the pipelines, and who are dying from lack of edible food and potable water (SH, pp. xx). Two weeks ago, I talked of how we lure Third World countries into great debt as a tactic for controlling them.

The cost of servicing Third World debt is greater than all Third World spending on health or education and nearly two times the amount those countries receive each year in foreign aid. Despite current lip service to forgiving it, Third World debt grows every year, currently approaching $3 trillion. It is one of our most effective weapons against countries that have resources or locations that we want to disempower and control.

Why don’t we read about these things? The tactics are brutal, but They’re simple and clear – why don’t we read about this? Perhaps it’s partly because the US was ranked #53 on the World Press Freedom list in 2006 (compared to #17 in 2002) and has been severely criticized by Reporters Without Borders and other non-governmental organizations for jailing and intimidating journalists (EHM, xviii). Using fear to silence criticism is another hallmark of both empires and slavery.

Number 53! Fifty-two countries with greater freedom of the press than we have? This is not the America of our myths, the one so dear to our hearts, is it?

Where else can you see the kind of slavery that supports our lifestyle? You can look at Mexican workers living in shantytowns just south of our border, or Asian children practically chained to their work stations, working 12-hour days, six or seven days a week to make our sweat shirts, tennis shoes, Gap jeans and other cool clothes. You can multiply these stories a hundredfold, but they are all forms of slavery, of people being coerced to work in desperate situations in order to keep us supplied with our way of life. Meanwhile, about 8,760,000 children a year are starving to death (24,000 a day x 365), with millions more dying of treatable diseases because they can’t get treatment. Some of those people may have made the clothes we’re wearing right now.

Where else can you look? Columnist Bob Herbert wrote a disturbing piece a few weeks ago in the NY Times, on the slave trade that is alive and well in the U.S. – the sex slave trade.

He says that over 18,000 foreign nationals are believed to be trafficked into the U.S. each year. According to the State Department, 80 percent of them are women and children, an overwhelming majority of whom are used for sexual purposes. (Bob Herbert, “Today’s Hidden Slave Trade,” 27 October 2007, The NY Times op-ed page).

If you don’t think we have this in Austin, leaf through the Yellow Pages in the Austin phone book as I did this week. Look under “Escorts,” and see if you aren’t a little stunned at the number of listings for 24/7 services. See how many of them advertise international women from all countries, and imagine how many of those women are forced into that work.

But most of our slave traders aren’t involved in the sex trade. They just recruit desperate people and build a factory to produce the jackets, blue jeans, tennis shoes, automobile parts, computer components, and thousands of other items they can sell here, there and everywhere (EHM, p. 181). We get cheap prices; they get lives that are nasty, brutish and short.

There really is a lot of suffering, a lot of injustice. we’re not likely ever to do anything about it if we don’t even know about it. I”m not even sure what we can do if we do know about it. And there are hundreds more dark stories like these, as many of you know.

Now here’s my problem: the more of these stories I read, the more depressed I got, and the less I wanted to read any more of them. Did I need to read them all? Was I insensitive if I got sick of feeling depressed? In order to be a caring person, must I be miserable?

Then an insight hit me when I read this week that the United Nations now says that Somalia is the worst humanitarian crisis in Africa, not Darfur. I thought, “My God, have we been hopelessly depressed over the wrong one? Is there a prize for being hopelessly depressed over the right one?”

I have a colleague who really seems to believe that as long as there is injustice anywhere, we should never be happy; we should starve with the hungry, suffer with the suffering, and the rest of it. He’s believed it and lived it for the thirty years I’ve known him, sometimes showing a lot of personal courage – I don’t think He’s going to change.

I know good committed people like this. Their passion is sincere. But this is a philosophy that wants us to believe that as long as one person is suffering, none of us should be happy – as though our being miserable somehow helps the world, or has a positive moral value.

This is like one of my favorite strange stories from religion, a story about the Jains. Jainism is an ancient religion derived from Hinduism, with over ten million followers today. One of their key teachings is their insistence on the sacredness of all life, from humans to bugs and even smaller.

This is a belief that can lead to some very odd behavior, like wearing surgical masks around during the day so they won’t inhale any microscopic organisms. My favorites are the stories of Jains who will carry a mattress infested with bedbugs around the city. Rather than killing the bugs, they want to feed them. Bedbugs feed on our bodies when we lie in bed, so these Jains support themselves by going around yelling, “Who will feed the bugs? Who will feed the bugs?” When someone gives them some money, one of them will lie down on the mattress and let the bugs feed on him. Who will feed the bugs? Who will support my belief that the world needs me to suffer?

If you believe we are morally bound to be miserable as long as there is injustice, you can never stop suffering. So many bugs, so little time! So much suffering, misery, war and injustice to get upset about. How could it ever end? But I think the Jains have missed the point.

Our job is not to suffer, but to live. Don’t feed the bugs. Don’t look for reasons to be miserable just because there is so much misery in the world. The theologian Howard Thurman was right when he said, “Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs are people who have come alive!”

So we’re back to that dilemma: Do we spend our days trying to save the world, or savor it?

This is the dilemma that brings to mind a wise statement made by the historian Will Durant some years ago. He had written his massive dozen-volume history of pretty much the whole world as his life’s work. Then he wrote a 100-page summary of those big volumes, The Lessons of History. And finally, in an interview, he was asked if he could sum it all up in half an hour.

He did it in less than a minute, this way: “Civilization is a river with banks. The river is sometimes filled with blood from people killing, stealing, shouting, and doing the things historians usually record, while on the banks, unnoticed, people build homes, make love, raise children, sing songs, write poetry, and even whittle statues. The story of civilization is the story of what happened on the banks. Historians are pessimists because they ignore the banks for the river.”

That river always runs through life, carrying not only the unjust and evil, but also the benefits of the unjust and evil, the good things they bring us. The river has ships that bring us goods from sweatshops where people work in conditions of virtual slavery to support our way of life without making us pay a fair price for it. There are things in that river to which we are addicted.

Because we’re the empire, we’re complicit in most of the major evil in the world. We can’t be pure, ever. And there is no way we can stop being complicit in this, just as Jains kill thousands or millions of micro-organisms every day – just by living, inhaling them, or having them destroyed inside by their body’s T-cells. No one is pure; we’re interconnected with everything, the good and the bad. And that isn’t a “problem” to be solved; it’s the human condition.

This was brought home to me in a wonderful way during a worship service about a decade ago. An activist man in the church seemed absolutely to believe that as long as there is injustice anywhere, we cannot rest, and his Sunday announcements were tedious for almost everyone but him. One Sunday he was on a rant about the destruction of the rain forests – how some large corporations are cutting them down for lumber or to make grazing pastures for cattle, what a crime this is against Mother Earth, and how all decent people must be outraged.

After getting worked up and trying to guilt-induce the entire congregation – something that almost never works – he said that well, those who really care about the earth can join him and his group for a meeting after church. Then he said, “We’ll meet at the Burger King.” He seemed not to know that Burger King was one of those corporations that had cut thousands of acres of rainforest to make pastures where they grazed the cattle that produced the hamburger he was going to be eating. we’re complicit. we’re interconnected. You can’t get away from it. If you can only be happy when You’re not complicit in evil, You’re doomed.

We have these two paths: living in the river or living on the banks. Deciding to save the world or deciding to savor it. And it does make it hard to plan a day!

So what do we do? I don’t think we’ll agree on this.

Should we honor the tried and proven tactics of willful ignorance & denial? They’ve worked wonders for many centuries. “Don’t tell me, I”m happier not knowing how the world really works? I also don’t want to know how politics works or sausage is made.”

Should we suffer, feed the bugs, and bank on some kind of salvation by purity? That’s a bus stop at which no buses stop.

One solution is to act locally in simple ways that don’t drain our life force, but which strengthen it. Last week I challenged you to write letters to the editor about the nearly burlesque bad behavior of the leaders of the Hyde Park Baptist Church, in refusing at the last minute to allow the 23rd annual Austin Area Interreligious Ministries Thanksgiving service to take place in a gymnasium they owned, because it involved non-Christians – particularly, Muslims. “Interreligious” doesn’t seem to be a word in the vocabulary of that church’s leaders. I don’t like to ask you to do things I”m not willing to do, so I wrote a Viewpoint piece on it, which the paper printed yesterday. I don’t know how many of you wrote letters, but this is something that we can do. we’re this well-educated bunch of liberals, and one thing we owe the larger community is our voice in trying to help others see a nuanced responsible moral path more clearly. It is also empowering for us. And writing some of these pieces can be a lot of fun. Let’s take care of ourselves and our gifts first, then feed the world with the overflow of our gifts.

Of course, this isn’t new advice. You’ve all heard this wisdom before, if you’ve flown commercial airlines. When They’re giving you the pre-flight instructions on the oxygen mask, they say that in the event of an emergency, put your own mask on first, and then help others. Give oxygen to yourself first, or you may not be able to help anyone else. It’s the same rule in life.

Your job is to live more fully, not to suffer, not to feed the bugs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. For the world needs people who have come alive. Then, from your own fullness, let it spill over. If you have joy, spread it. If you have extra money, help out. Just finding those organizations with people devoting their lives to improving the lot of the less fortunate is a noble thing to do. They are living much closer to the river than most of us are who just read, talk and write about it. we’re not doing the work, they are. But they can’t do it without financial support, and it isn’t wimping out to write a check. Twenty-four weeks a year, we split our collection plate with different non-profit organizations doing just this – and I hope we can move toward sharing every week’s collection. This isn’t feeding the bugs, it’s feeding the de-buggers.

Supporting the efforts of those who live and work much closer to the river than we do or would want to is one way we can live on the banks while remaining creatively aware of the greater suffering that must be attended to by people who can do that day in and day out without – I hope – losing their own joy in life.

And yet it isn’t this simple. Just the act of acknowledging our complicity in the world’s largest and most rapacious empire changes who we are. Our complicity in the world’s major evils of slavery runs deep. We show it at Wal-Mart, Sears, and at exclusive shops – many of which are now reportedly getting their name brands made in China. We show our complicity in our technological gadgets, our cars, everywhere. We wear our complicity in our clothing; we drive it, use it in laptops and cell phones. We are dipped in complicity with the evils of our American empire, all the way down.

So what now? Where from here? I don’t have that answer, but I know how I must begin, and I invite you back into the attitude of prayer with which we began:

We gather here both sincere and flawed. We are interconnected with much of what is good in the world, and also with what is evil.

For this very human combination of imperfect lives and hopeful, rising spirits, we give thanks, and ask for the blessings of life that flow to all who seek them in honesty and humility.

Amen.

—————-

(NOTE: I’ve used three of John Perkins’ books for this sermon: Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, A Game as Old as Empire, and The Secret History of the American Empire. To make the references shorter, I’ve abbreviated them as EHM, GOE, and SH.)

Thanksgiving Homily

November 18, 2007 by Sasha Lorenzo Posted in Dina Claussen, Former Ministers, Sermons

Dina Claussen

November 18, 2007

The winter holiday season is with us again. It starts out on a simple note with the rituals of Thanksgiving. We give thanks in the presence of community and celebrate with stories and food. It involves an incredible amount of taking care of business, on top of the usual tasks that we do. There can be a lot of stress and often unreasonably high expectations. For those who spend time with their extended families, it?s the extra closeness that reminds us of what we love and what we find challenging in those relationships. And this can hold true, whether we are with our family of origin or with non-biological families that we have found to take their place. The whole thing may remind us of painful realities, like recent deaths or divorces, or old hurts not dealt with. There is nothing like close encounters with families of whatever kind to stir things up.

Even for those who celebrate without that larger gathering, it can be a reminder of the difficult realities of how that came to be. I believe that we are compelled by a primal human instinct to reflect and give thanks whether we come from amazing abundance or from the simple fact of having survived terrible times. Despite whatever commercial, political, or religious agendas are served by these rituals, I believe that these rituals would wither away if deeper needs were not being met by them.Even with that primal instinct, reflecting on what we are thankful for and what that means in our lives can be a risky business. Our blessings are often mixed at best. Feelings can run high or we can retreat into numbing routines that will hold a lid on it.

Given all that, what are we to do with Thanksgiving? Do we simply go through the motions to do what is expected and count ourselves lucky to have made it through another intense task-driven experience? Some people do feel that way about any major holiday. In that mode, even sitting with people who you care about can be thought of as a task. It can be a relief to get back to our everyday life.

Now, I don?t believe that rituals are necessarily big affairs invented by ministers and rabbis, for instance, and intensely wrapped up in the Gross National Product Index. They can be private or done with a few others. It can be as simple as taking a breath and being thankful that you can breath, especially if you have memories of having experienced any difficulty in breathing at any time in your life, which is pretty common.

It can be enjoying washing dishes after a meal, with your hands immersed in warm soapy water, as it evokes fond memories, like mine of the times in my family when we sang rounds together as we did the dishes.

It can be glorying in the ritual of taking the dog for a walk, as you enjoy the cool crisp air of fall or winter and the excitement of the dog who revels in getting out. It can be passing on a simple, enjoyable skill to your children, like for instance tying special knots for fishing, and watching as they feel pride in having a new skill.

In a New York Times article, Susan Schnur wrote about a time that she witnessed her boyfriend?s father do an amazing private ritual of thankfulness. In the middle of the night, evidently unaware that she lay quietly awake rather than asleep nearby, this man came to the kitchen and cut a slab of rye bread. He stood looking out the dining room window for a while.

He then began to repeat the word ?bread? in many different languages as he thrust the bread into the air, held it to his heart, shook it, kissed it, and then took a bite. He continued this ritual until his hands was empty of bread and then returned to his bed.

She goes on to say, that even on an ordinary day, he appeared to be ?stunned by his own fierce happiness.? He met that with his extravagant ritual of thanks for the simple gift of bread. We have air to breath, water to drink and simple food like bread for our survival in this extraordinary thing called life. Surely that calls for some reflection and some gestures of gratitude, if not as dramatic as the man with his bread.

As for those who have lived with a great deal of trauma and difficulty in their life, it can stun us when they still manage to approach life in this way. I was working in a hospital where I met a young man who had cerebral palsy. He worked as a messenger before they had email. As he whirled around the hospital in his wheel chair, he made friends wherever he went. If you took the time to listen carefully, you discovered an intelligent, witty and warm person who lived with what he had with ease and laughter. He told me that it was good to be alive. He had the audacity to give thanks in the middle of what would look like woe to most of us.

What are the things that we live with that can make it difficult for us to feel gratitude? Is it our weight in this culture that is so obsessed with thinness? Is it that we are outside of the narrow models for what a male or female should look like and act like? Are we not interested in the kind of work that would bring us more money and respect?

Do we have mental or physical conditions that allow others treat us as less than fully human? Do our sexual realities, our race, or our gender make us targets for discrimination and violence?

As the world changes, do we feel we have lost the world that we came from? Or are we coming from a new sensibility, still not accepted widely in the world? Are we too young or too old?

Do we have to share our life with half-truths because of experiences that would make others fear or pity us? Do we have more passion than is accepted in our culture? There are so many to name. I?m sure that you can fill in those others.

What are some rituals that you do now to help move you out of being caught in all the negatives? Do you do them fully present or are some of them done now as routine, forgetting the original feeling that they arose from? I have a ritual from my childhood that involves peanut butter. I take bread (the vehicle is unimportant actually) and lay down slabs of butter (no thin layers here), gobs of peanut butter, and gobs of jam. This is definitely comfort food for me. I now understand that this ritual reminds me of those rare times when my mother would feed me in between meals and I would feel especially cared for. Now that I understand this, perhaps I can move into thinner layers for my health?s sake. Are you naming and reclaiming old rituals? Or are you and your loved ones finding new ones to take their places?

As a community, we also have rituals. We gather here every week as a congregation, looking to renew our sense of who we are, what we are grateful for, and what we feel our work is in this world. May our rituals here live up to the task of doing that for us. If they no longer do that well, I trust that there will be a process in which the congregation will be moved to come up with new ones that will. Since I have found my spiritual home in Unitarian Universalism, I have felt gratitude every day that I can be a part of communal rituals that help to sustain me. Thank you for being one of those sustaining congregations. Gracias! [thrust] Danke! [to the heart] Wah Do! [shake] Merci [kiss] Thank you![hands open wide]

Susan Schnur, Hers; Susan Schnur, New York Times (www.nytimes.com search), July25, 1985.

Courageous Caring

November 18, 2007 by Sasha Lorenzo Posted in Audio available, Davidson Loehr, Former Ministers, Sermons

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There is no text available for this sermon, but you can listen to it by clicking on the play button above.

Our Soldiers: Armed Corporate Mercenaries?

November 11, 2007 by Sasha Lorenzo Posted in Audio available, Davidson Loehr, Former Ministers, Sermons, Video available

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November 11, 2007

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button below.

PRAYER:

Let us be honorable and courageous stewards of the lives of our soldiers. Let us match their willingness to go where we aim them, by making sure that the cause is worthy of their lives, and of our own highest ideals. They trust us with their lives, and that is not a figure of speech. We ask them not to flinch in the face of possible death; let us not flinch in the face of what may be uncomfortable truths.

May we learn from our veterans that there is something noble, even sacred, about putting our lives in the service of honest and high ideals, no matter the risk. It is our duty as citizens to insure that the ideals our armies are really serving are as high and noble as those our soldiers think they are serving. And the pursuit of that may require from all of us a quality of courage like that shown by our soldiers in their wars. May we find that courage, and be reconnected with those highest ideals.

Amen.

SERMON: Our Soldiers: Armed Corporate Mercenaries?

This contentious sermon title was inspired by the words of a remarkable soldier of 75 years ago. A Marine Corps General named Smedley Butler, he was one of only seven men ever to win the Medal of Honor twice, and one of only two to win it for two different occasions (the other five were given two medals for the same action – the feeling being that they were exceptionally courageous. After WWI the rules were changes, so that the Medal of Honor could be awarded only once per soldier. So General Smedley Butler will forever be one of only two men who were awarded the Medal of Honor on two separate occasions.) I’ve read that he was one of the most respected veterans by other soldiers, which was partly due to his courage both on and off the battlefield. It’s his courage off the battlefield that interests me today. On August 21, 1931, General Butler stunned an audience at an American Legion convention in Connecticut when he had said:

“I spent 33 years – being a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism”. “I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1916. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City [Bank] boys to collect revenue in. I helped in the rape of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street”. “In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested”. I had – a swell racket. I was rewarded with honors, medals, promotions”. I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate a racket in three cities. The Marines operated on three continents.” (Joel Bakan, The Corporation, p. 93)

Now I’m a veteran of the Vietnam War, and I would never want to think of myself as a corporate mercenary. Our dangerous private army of Blackwater today has plenty of people who seem proud to be corporate mercenaries in Iraq, but I suspect nearly all of our real soldiers would be appalled at the idea, as I would be. Still, General Butler certainly didn’t hate soldiers, and he didn’t hate America. In a story we should all have learned in school but didn’t, he was approached in 1934 by a messenger from a consortium of wealthy men, offered a suitcase full of $1,000 bills as a down payment if he would assemble an army, take over the White House, and install himself as America’s first fascist dictator. Instead, he went before Congress to tell the story. That testimony was filmed, and I’ve watched part of it. He was a genuine American hero. Yet in spite of his public testimony, the group of wealthy corporate men were powerful enough that not even President Franklin Delano Roosevelt could have them prosecuted, and influential enough that as far as I know, the story has been kept out of history texts for all high school and almost all college courses, to this day. So maybe there is something to what he said. A second person whose writing has both irritated and persuaded me is John Perkins. I read his book (Confessions of an Economic Hit Man two years ago, and it made me feel like I’d been a naive and gullible child for decades – though I also thought he had eagerly worked at a slimy job only a sociopath could love, for a whole decade. But he too talked about how our soldiers are routinely used as pawns of some of our most powerful corporate and political interests in a game of American Empire, against the high ideals for which our country supposedly stands.

So on this Veterans Day, I want to take our soldiers seriously enough to explore this story of American empire, the role soldiers have been used to play in it, and the role we all play in it. The hope is that the truth can help make us more free, though I have no idea how, in the real world, to change a story that’s been part of us for so long. Our country was begun by the Puritans as a nation chosen by God with a “manifest destiny” to rule the world. John Winthrop used the concept of “manifest destiny,” without using the specific words, in his 1630 speech “A Model of Christian Charity,” written while aboard the flagship Arbella on his way to this country. His phrasing was that we shall be “as a city on a hill; the eyes of all people are upon us.” Carried in this was the belief that God had set us apart and above others. The phrase “manifest destiny” wasn’t coined until 1839 by John L. O”Sullivan, but the seeds of the concept go back to our very beginnings. So the dream of a worldwide empire – and a Christian empire – goes back nearly four hundred years. Eventually, such a dream would have to require soldiers as the weapons and as the cost. As Gen. Smedley Butler said, war is a racket in which the profits are counted in dollars and the losses are counted in lives. The Monroe Doctrine of 1823, was used to take Manifest Destiny a step further when, in the 1850s and 1860s, it was used to assert that the US had special rights all over the hemisphere, including the right to use our soldiers to invade any nation in Central or South America that refused to back our economic demands – usually referred to as our “vital interests.” President Theodore Roosevelt invoked the Monroe Doctrine to justify US intervention in the Dominican Republic, in Venezuela, and stealing Panama from Colombia. A string of subsequent US presidents relied on it to expand Washington’s Pan-American activities through the end of WWII. And during the latter half of the 20th century, the US used the Communist threat to claim the right of invading countries around the world, including Vietnam and Indonesia. (Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, p. 61)

The 20th century was fueled by oil, as this one still is. As our own oil fields began running out, we became dependent on Middle Eastern oil. But since we needed it, we believed – as we always have – that we had a right to it. This bi-partisan greed was stated very dramatically by President Jimmy Carter in his 1980 State of the Union address, when he said, “Let our position be absolutely clear. An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.” Although he referred to “outside force,” the policy has equally applied to actors within the Middle East itself – as was seen in the Gulf War of 1991 and the Iraq invasion of 2003 – and it is playing out now in the crisis over Iran. (A Game as Old as Empire, p. 140) These are insights and patterns from John Perkins, who is for me the most important and readable author for understanding how our American empire works, what’s going on behind the scenes, and the role our soldiers are assigned in the grand scheme. Perkins worked for a decade as one of a group of people known among themselves as Economic Hit Men. Here’s what he says about them, and I’ll quote him because some of his persuasiveness comes from his confessional (and arrogant) style:

“We are an elite group of men and women who utilize international financial organizations to foment conditions that make other nations subservient to [those who run] our biggest corporations, our government, and our banks. “Like our counterparts in the Mafia, we provide favors [to those whose cooperation we are buying]. (Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, p. xvii) “However – and this is a very large caveat – if we fail, an even more sinister breed steps in, ones we refer to as the jackals (professional assassins). The jackals are always there, lurking in the shadows. When they emerge, heads of state are overthrown or die in violent “accidents.” And if by chance the jackals fail, as they failed in Panama, Afghanistan and Iraq, then young Americans are sent in to kill and to die. (Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, p. xxi) Perkins says they channeled funds from the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and their sister organizations into schemes that appeared to empower developing countries and serve the poor while primarily benefiting a few wealthy people. They would identify a developing country that had resources our corporations wanted (such as oil), arrange a huge loan for that country, and then direct most of the money to our own engineering and construction companies – and a few collaborators in the developing country. Infrastructure projects, such as power plants, airports, and industrial parks, sprang up; however, they seldom helped the poor, who were not connected to electrical grids, never used airports, and lacked the skills required for employment in industrial parks. (The Secret History of the American Empire, p. 3)

“At some point we returned to the indebted country and demanded our pound of flesh: cheap oil, votes on critical United Nations issues, or troops to support ours someplace in the world, like Iraq.” (The Secret History of the American Empire, p. 3) The loans were used as a tool for enslaving these countries, not empowering them. If they wouldn’t bite at the bait of loans, jackals – assassins – were sent into replace uncooperative leaders with cooperative ones. And as Perkins says, world leaders understand that whenever other measures fail, the military will step in – as it did in Panama, Afghanistan and Iraq. (The Secret History of the American Empire, p. 5) The most dramatic instance of this before our two invasions of Iraq happened in Panama, a story that seems not to have been covered or understood very well.

We had trained General Manuel Noriega at our School of the Americas, in the methods of terror and violence, so we saw him as an easy mark. In 1977, President Jimmy Carter had signed a treaty with Panama giving control back to the Panamanians after 1999 as originally agreed. And when Noriega became president of Panama, he refused to bow to Reagan administration demands that the Panama Canal Treaty be renegotiated giving the US control. Instead, Noreiga negotiated with Japanese to see about rebuilding the canal with Japanese money. This was, of course, their legal right. But it would frustrate our dream of empire – the dream to which we’ve felt so singularly entitled. So on December 20, 1989, the first President Bush had our soldiers attack Panama with what was reported to be the largest airborne assault on a city since WWII. It was an unprovoked attack on a civilian population which killed between 2,000 and 3,000, and injured an estimated 25,000. Panama and her people posed absolutely no threat to the US or to any other country. Politicians, governments, and press around the world denounced the unilateral US action as a clear violation of international law. (Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, pp. 175-176) We even kidnapped the president of Panama and put him in American jail as our only “prisoner of war” for frustrating our economic ambitions. You can’t make this stuff up. And you can’t spin it around enough times to clean it up. It was illegal, immoral and murderous. We killed people because we wanted to steal from them. In this country, that crime is called “homicide in the commission of a felony.” And in Texas, it’s a capital offense. Our soldiers were used in this invasion, not to serve freedom or democracy, but simply to serve the economic interests that brought great profit to quite a small number of wealthy investors, which is one dimension of our American empire, our “manifest destiny.” Then came our first invasion of Iraq, also done under the first President Bush. Why Iraq? It had nothing to do with 9-11, of course – those lies have all been exposed and aired too often to need repeating.

We know the current Bush administration had talked about wanting to invade Iraq since the first week they were in power in January of 2001. But the West has been trying to grab Iraq’s oil since 1918. Contrary to common public opinion, Iraq is not just about oil. It is also about water and geopolitics. Both the Tigris and Euphrates rivers flow through Iraq; so, of all the countries in that part of the world, Iraq controls the most important sources of increasingly critical water resources. During the 1980s, the importance of water – politically and economically – was becoming obvious to us”. (Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, p. 183) Also, Iraq is in a very strategic location. It borders Iran, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria and Turkey, and has a coastline on the Persian Gulf. It is within easy missile-striking distance of both Israel and Russia. Military strategists equate modern Iraq to the Hudson River valley during the French and Indian War and the American Revolution. In the eighteenth century, the French, British and Americans knew that whoever controlled the Hudson River valley controlled the continent. Today, it is common knowledge that whoever controls Iraq holds the key to controlling the Middle East. (Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, p. 184)

By the late 1980s, it was apparent that Saddam was not buying into the Economic Hit Man scenario. This was a major frustration and a great embarrassment to the first Bush administration. Like Panama, Iraq contributed to George HW Bush’s wimp image. As Bush searched for a way out, Saddam played into his hands. On 25 July 1990, Saddam invited US Ambassador to Baghdad, April Glaspie, to a meeting, and sounded her out about Kuwait. Here’s part of her response, from a transcript of their meeting: “We have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait. I was in the American Embassy in Kuwait during the late 60’s. The instruction we had during this period was that we should express no opinion on this issue and that the issue is not associated with America. James Baker has directed our official spokesmen to emphasize this instruction.” (NY Times International, Sunday September 23, 1990, p. 19)

A week later, on August 2nd, Saddam invaded Kuwait. Bush, incredibly, responded with a denunciation of Saddam for violating international law, even though it had been less than a year since Bush himself had staged the illegal and unilateral invasion of Panama. (Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, p. 184) The Economic Hit Men tried to convince Saddam to accept a deal similar to the deal we had made with Saudi Arabia. But Saddam kept refusing. If he had complied, like the Saudis, he would have received our guarantees of protection as well as more US-supplied chemical plants and weapons. When it became obvious that he was entrenched in his independent ways,

Washington sent in the jackals. Assassinations of men like Saddam usually have to involve collusion by bodyguards”. Saddam understood jackals and their techniques. He had been hired by the CIA in the sixties to assassinate a predecessor, Qasim, and had learned from us, his ally, during the eighties. He screened his men rigorously. He also hired look-alike doubles. His bodyguards were never sure if they were protecting him or an actor. (The Secret History of the American Empire, p. 211) So the first President Bush sent in the US military. At this point the White House did not want to take Saddam out. He was, after all, our type of leader: a strongman who could control his people and act as a deterrent against Iran – as well as controlling the religious factions in Iraq, which we’ve never been able to do. The Pentagon assumed that by destroying his army, they had chastised him; now he would come around. The Economic Hit Men went back to work on him during the nineties. Bill Clinton imposed sanctions to remain in effect until Saddam agreed to US terms of ownership of their oil.

Clinton’s sanctions killed an estimated one million Iraqis – half of them children: this remains a completely bipartisan American imperialism. (Many will remember the chilling interview with Clinton’s Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, where she was asked about our sanctions causing the deaths of over half a million children. She said, “We think it’s worth the price.”) But Saddam wouldn’t give control of Iraqi oil to American or other foreign corporations. Assassinations were attempted, and once more they failed.

So in 2003, a second President Bush deployed the military. Saddam was deposed and executed. (The Secret History of the American Empire, p. 211)

Then Haliburton, Bechtel and other well-connected corporations got billions of dollars in unbid contracts, just as they had in so many other countries. When this happened, John Perkins finally decided to write his book exposing the game he had once been a part of. Twenty-six publishers refused to touch it. Finally, a small publisher in San Francisco took it. The book was an almost immediate best-seller. Perkins then contacted twelve other people who had worked in the empire game, had them each write a chapter, and brought out a second book called A Game as Old as Empire. Then he wrote a sequel to (Confessions of an Economic Hit Man which he brought out this year, under the title The Secret History of the American Empire. I recommend all three books to anyone interested in these issues. Our game of empire always has the same three steps. First, we try to use heavy-handed persuasion – mostly economic – to bring a country’s assets under our control. If that fails, we try to assassinate its leader – a tactic which has worked in many countries for us. If that fails, we send in our soldiers. So this seems to be how our dream of manifest destiny works today, and how both assassins and our soldiers are used not just to make those who run a few US corporations rich – that’s too clean to be realistic – but also to give us the benefits we call the American Way of Life.

See how this picture Perkins draws brings together a lot more data than our mainstream political and news stories, and ties them into a scheme that has a simple clear plot that makes, I think, far more real-world sense than the spin we’ve been fed? It isn’t a picture I’d ever had or wanted, any more than I’d thought of war as a racket or soldiers as pawns. But so many other people are affected, I think we owe it to them, to our soldiers and to ourselves to consider this darker picture and become far better-informed about it.

We are complicit in so many things we don’t want to think about because it feels like it pollutes our life. But then I remember the 4,000 American soldiers who have died in Iraq, the tens of thousands who have been wounded, and the estimated two million Iraqis we have killed since 1991, in order to take their oil and to start taking control, we hope, of the Middle East and, through controlling the world’s oil supply, to dictate terms to the world. It sounds like a very bad movie script written by very arrogant and immoral people within our government, a script in which our soldiers are being assigned key roles, but not noble roles.

John Perkins goes into many more details in other areas of what our American empire looks like in and to the rest of the world, and I’ll revisit him in two weeks. But war and imperialism, no matter how awful they may be, just aren’t what life is mostly about. Life is mostly about its healthy parts: living, loving, hoping and trusting, making things of meaning and beauty, and learning to enjoy being with one another and giving thanks for being alive. Some of you may know of this story from Will Durant. Durant was the historian whose life work was writing about a dozen-volume “Story of Civilization,” an ultra-ambitious task for one man and his wife. After writing those millions of words, he wrote a 100-page book called The Lessons of History, to sum up the giant set. And late in his life, he was asked to sum up civilization in half an hour. He did it in less than a minute, this way: “Civilization is a stream with banks. The stream is sometimes filled with blood from people killing, stealing, shouting, and doing the things historians usually record, while on the banks, unnoticed, people build homes, make love, raise children, sing songs, write poetry, and even whittle statues. The story of civilization is the story of what happened on the banks. Historians are pessimists because they ignore the banks for the river.”

we’ve been wading in the river here. Nobody can live that way, and nobody should live that way. It’s being defeated by the tragedies that are often the background against which we are challenged to live our lives. This always reminds me of another story, one I experienced in Vietnam. We had shelled a small hamlet by mistake, taking out about two of the half dozen huts. Driving by a day or two later, we could see some of the damage. In one family the father had been killed, the wife wounded, a young daughter had part of her arm blown off and was wearing bandages covering both eyes. It was heart-wrenching and shameful to us. About three weeks later we drove by those huts again. The thatched roofs had been repaired. And out in the yard were the injured mother, her young son, and her one-armed blind daughter. They were laughing and dancing, playing and singing. Some of us wept bitterly. They were living on the banks; we were caught in the river. The challenge of life is to know the river, but not to let it poison our life on the banks. So next week, for Thanksgiving, Dina and I will each share a homily, and I’ll share some very optimistic, hands-on, actual real-world things we can do in a lot of different ways to help those serving the high ideals we prefer.

For now, thank you again for your service, veterans. And something more. I know that when you served, you believed, as I also did, that we really were serving high ideals and noble causes, not just imperialistic greed and sociopathic empire-building. It may seem hard to fathom, but as a combat photographer and Press Officer in Vietnam forty years ago, I believed what I was told. I attended briefings by General Westmoreland, and thought I had heard the word straight from the top. I believed we were there to serve high ideals, though the violence and blood confused and eventually kind of paralyzed me. Most of us believed what we were told. It’s how we served with pride and integrity. It was those high ideals and noble causes that made our service memorable to us – sometimes even sacred, as mine was to me. And I believe, as I think you do, that if we can find a way to convert our nation back to high and noble ideals, it can transform our nation’s soul back to something noble, perhaps even sacred.

The Language of the Land: An Invitation

November 4, 2007 by Sasha Lorenzo Posted in Dina Claussen, Former Ministers, Sermons

November 4, 2007

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

While working on this sermon, I had a vision. I saw a huge boxing ring with thousands of people gathered to watch the match of the century.

The announcer began “In this corner, we have those elegant, linguistically sophisticated, technologically savvy bipeds: Human Beings: Masters of the Universe!”

The crowd goes wild. He continues.

“Now in this corner we have that fascinating and dangerously unpredictable force: the bringer of fire, flood and upheaval, the ancient enemy of mankind – Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Nature, ruler of the Earth!” There is only a smattering of applause; the animals, after all, have not been invited. It’s home ground for the humans, so hisses and boos predominate.

Meanwhile, technology reigns supreme: the stadium is climate controlled and large television screens bring the ring up close and personal to everyone. Everything is accompanied with canned music.

Isn’t that how we like it – nature as entertainment? Meanwhile, we leave the stadium in our cars, increasingly sealed in, having less and less contact with the world around us.

I have been meditating on that “sealing in” process since I have been here. One day, early in the morning, I stepped out onto the porch of my home, and let the Austin environment wash over me. I have read many accounts of “sultry” days before that sounded wonderful, but that was the first day that I had really experienced it. The humidity clung to my skin, giving me the sense of being enveloped in the warm air. The many overhanging limbs of large trees in my neighborhood felt inviting and comforting. The cicadas were at it serenading with their almost buzz saw like sounds as they went about their business. Even the birds made some sounds that were different than I was used to.

I was experiencing a language of the land that was different than the familiar West Coast places that I have lived. It could be said that I really began to hear Austinese, the language of this land, for the first time. As I walked to church, I could smell, feel, hear, and really see the details of things around me. Even the walk along Lamar Blvd had its own language, though it was much more a language of technology – the buzz of electricity, the sounds of the vehicles, and the smells of pollution, along with many others.

On the other hand, recently, I have been gifted with the use of a car for a month: a wonderful Prius with all its lovely technology. I began to notice how different an experience it was. As I glided down the street, I felt powerful, less vulnerable, less likely to pay attention to the needs of the people around me. I became impatient with even the smallest delay on the road and I even began to forget that I actually liked walking. I didn’t really notice much of the landscape as I moved along either, as I was focused on when to stop and go and turn in order to reach my destination. I mostly heard only muted technology sounds. I wasn’t hearing the full spectrum of Austin’s language anymore – I could have been anywhere.

As much as we love the comfort of the technology, it’s inescapable that we are in trouble with it these days. So, how did we get to this place anyway? After all, for millions of years, human beings lived in concert with the land with minimal technology. They knew the land because they had to in order to survive. There are many accounts now of the lives of current indigenous people, so we have some idea of how it used to be. These people know their land thoroughly and have respect for its abundance and poverty, as well as for its dangers and safety. They have a habit of thrift in the use of its resources so as not to endanger that which sustains them. They don’t need a scientist to tell them this. It’s part of the grammar of their full language of being embedded in this world that they learn from birth.

Over the past 40 years, I have read a great deal about the environment, about anthropology, and about body wisdom (whether in movement or in the healing arts). Because of those interests, I read something recently that ordinarily I would never have picked up. For one thing, it has a great deal of philosophy in it and I am not a real fan. I go for the Cliff notes versions you find on Wikipedia these days. And then there is the very long title. It starts out well: The Spell of the Sensuous (could be a body thing). But then it continues: Language and Perception in a More than Human World. Still it sounded intriguing and it had been highly recommended by someone who knew me, so I read it. The author, David Abram, is a philosopher, an ecologist and, fortunately for me, a compelling and lyrical writer. His is one of the many important voices these days writing about the intersection of humans and the environment.

We don’t know what came first, but he asserts that language changed along with a change in attitude away from the clear connections with the land that humans started with. The oral languages and even the first written languages were still tied to the land. I recommend reading about the Aborigines in Australia with their dreamtime stories for a modern day feel of that. It is quite compelling. As western languages came to be written down in symbols not referencing the land in any way, there was also a move into thinking of the environment as something to exploit, to control, to own. Abram suggests that Greek thought especially, was the beginning of the idea that our minds and souls were considered separate from the sensing body and religion played a part as well.

Certainly we do know that by the time of the Enlightenment, we were on a clear track to thinking that our minds (souls) were separate from our biological body and our humanness in general was separate from everything else. And that view persisted despite Darwin’s work that pointed us to being part of the animal kingdom. The jump to the sense of entitlement over the environment that has come to dominate western history since was not a huge one.

Now, we are so out of touch with nature as a culture that regularly we have people wandering off even on snow covered mountain trails and getting lost with out having taken adequate clothing, food and water, because they just wanted to take a bit of a walk. In Austin, I understand that 3 students got lost exploring a cave that was really only for advanced spelunkers and it took 11 hours to rescue them. They at least took the precaution of telling someone to call for help if they did not return in 13 hours and that may have saved their lives, as they had run out of water before getting rescued.

On a more communal note: There is an island, very close to the Massachusetts mainland called Plum Island. It’s really just a large sand spit. When I was there, there were a number of people who lived on the north side of that island who were up in arms about what they felt was a property rights issue. The winter storms were regularly eroding away the sand on the north end and sending it to the south, where there was a nature preserve. People thought that the government should do something about that. The government should either stop the sand from moving somehow, or they should have some government program that would ensure that the sand was brought back to the north end.

Now I thought that that was an incredible story when I heard it, but recently, I heard from someone that in Southern Florida they are moving the sand back after storms to ensure that the huge resort buildings have their beaches intact. I can totally empathize with them, and at the same time, be appalled.

These are stories of a people not knowing and not accepting the reality of the land where they were living. This earth is a living earth. It moves and changes by understandable processes, but over the centuries, we have come up with some pretty hair-brained ideas of how to control these, rather than trying to figure out how to be with the earth as it is.

If you want to read a textbook case of the basic insanity of this approach, a good one is that of the Imperial Valley in California, a desert sink area that used to be flooded by the mighty Colorado River every couple hundred years or so, and thus had rich silt deposited and re-deposited on the desert floor. That rich soil drew people to begin to dam up the river for irrigation canals and so that the river would not flood anymore. Then big business agriculture (the only ones who could afford the technology needed) came in to exploit the soil for as long as it lasted.

If you check online under “Imperial Valley,” you can begin to get a taste of the incredible and unending story of more and more expensive technology being proposed to get around the increasingly sterile soil for agriculture since it is no longer replenished by the flooding.

If you check under “Salton Sea” you can read about the build up of salt in the Salton Sea, which is destroying the sports fishing resource and the wildlife refuge for migratory birds. The technology that has been seriously proposed to deal with that is truly bizarre. There are many stories in other places with issues of increasing technologies to deal with the consequences of the original technology.

Abram writes that we probably cannot go back to the ancient way of living in small groups, totally in tune with the environment. Certainly a completely oral culture has its own problems. He suggests that what we can do is to use the language that we do have in new ways; to use our cool reason and our more sensory ways of knowing to root us in the particular and the local as we work on solutions using more sensitive technologies; and to write, speak and think of ourselves, not as masters of the Universe, but as fully responsible citizens of this planet. Let’s return to our birthright and know it in this new way.

On the other hand, why should we? It all sounds nice, but we can fool ourselves a bit longer couldn’t we? What would really do it for us to move ourselves out of the current technological comfort that we are enjoying at an already high price? Do we need to have a messy, violent revolution to get it? Do we need to wait until our technology leads to complete breakdown of our whole system of living?

I don’t know about you, but going over all of this, tends to make me hyperventilate a bit, and begin to go into evangelical mode: “The End is Near” and Repent and Be Saved!” Fortunately, I have another impulse that so far has won out. I would rather look at what is actually happening in the world that might reverse that whole trend.

In 1962, Rachel Carson brought the conversation about the consequences of our technology out into the community, with the publishing of her book, Silent Spring about the evils of the pesticide DTD. Carson also described in other books, the complex web of life that linked mollusks to sea birds to the fish swimming in the ocean’s deepest and most inaccessible reaches.

Though she never used the word ecological, it was what she was describing. There are more and more people who have made a commitment to that conversation by learning the language of their particular area and sharing their experience and knowledge.

There are writers, activists, inventors, ecologists and scientists working on this already, some of who are in Austin, as well as in this congregation. In our congregation, I know of Margery Adams, a nature writer, who has shared with us the stories of the birds of this area. Dale and Pat Bulla, who are National Wildlife Habitat Stewards, have a home that is built to be environmentally sustainable. Don Smith has built an environmentally sound home as well. Elizabeth Gray has spearheaded turning our grounds into an accredited wild life habitat.

Our church also has a Green Sanctuary Committee, which is giving a program this next Tuesday evening that you might want to check out. I also discovered that Austin is a mecca of wildlife preserves, which gives us other places to get a feel for the land and of that special language.

I for one, am going to put my efforts into assisting the move forward in that conversation, as we utilize a full dance of ideas, information, stories rather than relying on scripted rhetorical bouts, like the ones that would go in the stadium in my vision. This would be a conversation that included more of the kind of people who I have already mentioned and a place of respect for all at the larger table of society. This would be a conversation that included the larger educating of all our children and a willingness to let them take the lead in it more and more.

There are actions to be taken and we need them badly. We need the same kind of actions that labor activists did in the 1930’s that gave us whatever work benefits we have now. Our world needs us to wake up and to live out what we believe in as fully as possible.

It is a challenge, especially for those of us who have gotten really comfortable in our technological cushion, but it is one that can use the best of our traditions’ liberal ideals and efforts. If we can move out of guilt and into action, we can then have a cheer, a roar come up that has, alongside our voices, the sounds of the wolf, the crocodile, the birds, and the rush of the wind and the rain through the trees, as we speak the language of the earth that includes us no longer as a major menace, but as once again true partners.