As I followed the events on February 11, 2011 in Egypt, a day that no doubt will be considered Egyptian Independence Day, I heard an Egyptian say: “This is ours. We own it.” That observation crystallized much of what I had been thinking about the character of this regime change in contrast to the regime change that the United States brought to Iraq at the point of a gun. This was a just peace revolution.

Security, truth and respect are three important values of my interpretation of just peace theory. Just peace theory, the middle way between pacifism and just war theory holds that while nonviolent means bring nonviolent ends, the hard power of military force is sometimes needed for the sake of security. Former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak had used the argument of security and stability to justify his brutal and kleptocratic governance of Egypt. The United States, including the Obama administration, had used this logic to justify the money this government sent to Egypt over the years. The United States trained the Egyptian military, and significant personal relationships developed over the years between individuals in the Egyptian military and individuals in the United States military. It seems that those relationships may have made an important difference in bringing about the end of Hosni Mubarak’s rule.

The Egyptian military provided security for the protesters during most of the 18 days of revolution. There was a moment when the military stood by and watched while so called pro-Mubarak demonstrators engaged in violent conflict with the anti-Mubarak protesters. But the cries of outrage from the international community brought the end of that kind of intimidation. God only knows what kind of person-to-person communication was happening military to military. God only knows what subtle effects time spent in classrooms in the United States had on the Egyptian military to help them see the advantages of civilian control of a democratic government.

Most of us have a moral compass, a rule, a set of beliefs that serves as a North Star to help us find our bearings when we have to decide what is right to do. For some of us it is the Golden Rule: “IN ALL THINGS, do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” Many people think of the respect we owe to everyone and everything that carries the image of God. It is the image of God that is the warrant for human dignity. People who do not believe in God may still respect the self evident truth that every human being possesses an inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Some may consider the logic of Ubuntu, an African moral principle teaching that our personal humanity is a function of our own moral evolution as we interact righteously, justly, and generously with Others in the human community.

The State of the Union Address is an annual grand occasion when a president speaks about the accomplishments, challenges and hopes of the nation. Traditionally, Congress members sit according to party affiliation. They applaud the president according to the things he says that comports with their political ideas. So, one side applauds while the other side sits silently. There are a few moments when everyone applauds.

This year, in a gesture intended to show and to foster increased civility, Congress members of different parties will sit together. This will no doubt change the optics of the selective applause, yet it remains to be seen whether or not the seating arrangements will result in a new commitment to civil discourse, cooperative politics and thus make a substantive difference in governance.

It is too easy for mentally and/or emotionally disturbed people to legally buy a semi-automatic weapon in the United States. Further, sane or not, who needs such a weapon? An ordinary citizen does not need it to hunt or to protect person or property. Such a weapon is designed to kill as many people as possible in as short a time as possible.

In the wake of the tragic shooting in Arizona that left six people dead and 14 wounded, including Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, we find ourselves as a nation back in a much too familiar place. How do we stop such tragedies from happening again? How do we stop the gun violence that happens every day in our society? Each death, each person wounded for life is equally precious. My position is the same as it has been since the early nineties when a teenager pulled a 9mm semi-automatic weapon on my son and his friends while they were sitting on my front porch and demanded their sneakers. They gave up the shoes. It was only by the grace of God that no one was hurt that night. Other families have not been so blessed. The second amendment does not protect us.

The second amendment does not give citizens the right to own semi-automatic pistols. When the second amendment was written, the gun technology of the moment was muskets and dueling pistols. One shot was all a shooter could shoot before s/he needed to reload, and that took a minute. Fast forward more than 200 years and we have pistols that a person can carry concealed on his or her person that can fire more than 30 bullets in less than a minute. Again, the technology gives one individual the capacity to kill several people in a short period of time. Again, why does anyone, sane or not, need this capability?

Whenever I hear political pundits talk about anger and fear as primary motivating factors for the outcome of elections, I ask: where is the love? I cannot speak for my sister and brother citizens, but my frustration with politics and my righteous indignation grows from passion, from a radical love for my country. I suspect this is probably true for others as well, even those with whom I do not agree politically.

A country is more than geography, history, culture, and shared values and beliefs. A country is made of human relationships. It is made of relationships between humanity, animals and ecosystems. It is made of relationships with all the other peoples and nations of the world. My country is the place of my birth, the land upon which I stand. My country is also all the people who chose to come to it, documented or not, to work and learn and contribute to our survival and flourishing.

My country is all my various families, all my various communities, my ancestors, peers and progeny. My country is all the people I love and who love me in return. My country is all of my rivals, my opposites in the democratic contestation of ideas that at once constitutes and is constituted by our moral values. I love all the various relationships that my country is with a passion.

We do not speak much about love in our public discourse. We speak even less about passionate love. The terminology makes us nervous. Beyond its sexual connotations, love is both weakness and strength. We are powerless before it, but it makes us strong enough to do incredible things. We think of passionate love as dangerous out of control violent ardor. It is too intense for polite conversation.

On the darkest day of the year in the northern half of the globe, the deepest gloom has already passed, and the next day will be brighter.

Darkness serves a purpose. It is necessary for rest and for regeneration. Unpolluted black velvet starless moonless night does not differentiate. Deprived of sight, we see through sound, taste, touch and the mind’s eye imagining fresh possibilities both alluring and frightening.

Even before the winter solstice the cold comes with its secret that the only way to stay warm is to relax into its frigid embrace. Some of us migrate. Some hibernate. Most of us continue our work as best we can as the weather allows. When the snow falls softly, quietly and blankets the landscape there is a deep peace. A friendly fire or a warm comforter keeps us company. It is the season for hot chocolate, stews, soups, chowders and chili warming us from the inside out.

The sparkling bare beauty of winter is fleeting. In a few short weeks, we will be planning the spring garden. The earth will be soft again, the flowers laughing in pastel colors again. Then summer heat and autumn cool and winter will be back again.

I hope that Stevie Wonder will not mind this appropriation of the title of one of his songs. However, the uproar from the progressive wing of the Democratic Party over President Obama’s compromise on tax cuts is misplaced outrage. So what the fuss? Rather than fulminating against President Obama, the more productive action is to turn up the rhetorical heat on the Republicans in Congress and to make the progressive case to the country. This is a contestation of ideas.

First, let us understand that President Obama’s responsibility is to govern. Every political system requires the art of compromise. He cannot govern as an ideologue and get anything done. Next, it is important to understand that President Obama is a pragmatist, not only in the functional sense, but also in the philosophical sense. Barack Obama ran as a conciliator. He did not run as a progressive. We projected our progressive agenda onto him. However, being a pragmatist both functionally and philosophically does not mean that he lacks core principles or is without political courage. He fought valiantly for universal health care when his advisors in the White House advised him to go for something smaller. And those of us who do not have health insurance appreciate the effort because it establishes the principle of universal health care in the United States. It gives us a foundation upon which to build.

The hypocrisy of Veteran’s Day in the United States is stunning.

It is mind-numbing, mind-blowing, jaw-dropping, stomach-churning-turning astonishing. On Veteran’s Day, we talk about the heroism of the women and the men who serve in our military. We talk about how much we honor them. Yet, the other 364 days of the year, we seem to forget our veterans. Veterans are homeless in the United States of America. Many need to be in rehab programs for drug and alcohol abuse, and they are not because of a lack of space. They suffer from physical, psychic and moral injury. On Veteran’s Day, we say we care. The facts say we do not care.

People need a progressive vision. The various progressive initiatives and solutions to the problems of our society and of our world seem strange standing alone. We need to put them into a larger narrative that captivates the imaginations of a coalition of American people that is large enough to carry elections.

In my opinion, President Obama was right to pass healthcare, even though it was not the kind of healthcare program that progressives wanted. He is a pragmatist, and he necessarily has to work with the people present in the room. If he had waited for this election to try to get health reform, he no doubt would be looking at the same situation only without a landmark piece of legislation to show for his time in office. The Democrats did not defend the legislation. They could have. They should have. However, healthcare is difficult to defend without placing it into a larger narrative of how a 21^st century America and a 21^st century world ought to look. The Democrats were criticized for the size of government. However, they did not defend the stimulus. That was difficult to do without putting it into a larger narrative of how it would help to bring the country back from the economic brink of disaster. They did not drive the point home that the stimulus contained money for unemployment compensation that Republicans opposed.

The Democrats did not say how the financial reform legislation would help ordinary people, especially the poor who are victims of immoral pay day lending practices. They did not say enough about how the various government interventions — TARP, money to the auto industry and the stimulus — were necessary to keep the country from going into another Great Depression. I do think that President Obama’s attempt to gain Republican support by putting tax cuts into the stimulus bill was a mistake because it took money away from projects that could have gone to giving people jobs.

That silent scream you heard, that reverberating vibration that you felt, that disturbance in the force that caused you to pause this past Sunday was me screaming silent screams at my television as I watched debates in several senate races. What is a silent scream? This is when the body and breath tenses as if to scream and rather than releasing a sound, one releases a cleansing breath.

I perform these silent screams so that my family watching the NFL on Sundays do not call 9-1-1 thinking that I have experienced some kind of psychotic break. These debates are enough to make a body want to just hand back one’s sanity. I am a Sabbath-keeping Baptist. I learned to honor the Sabbath from my Jewish friends. Because I write six days a week, I only write on Sundays to take notes during the sermon during worship. So, I cannot accurately name the names of the candidates in the various debates. Perhaps this is a good thing because some of what came out of the mouths of these people is worth writing about only as a source of incredulity.

I could not believe the distortions, the lack of logic, the irrelevancies and the outright nonsense that I heard. But what I really found frustrating was the discussion around health care.

The human is a fragile being, a furless, clawless, big-brained animal with no fangs. We have little unaided strength and less speed. From epoch to epoch our human condition is one that leaves us vulnerable to a natural world that does not care whether we live or die. We are vulnerable to our own physical and moral limitations and to those of the people around us. And time makes dust and ashes of us all.

Despite our quivering fears, or perhaps because of them, in our will to survive, we huddle together into family, clan, class, tribe, occupation, nation, state, culture, religion, world. These various divisions at once help us to survive and lead us to violent conflicts that threaten our survival. However, one of the most inscrutable battlefields is the terrain of ourselves.

Love/fear, hatred/indifference, injury/pardon, doubt/faith, despair/hope, darkness/light, sadness/joy, consolation/disconsolation, understanding/ misunderstanding, forgiveness/ vengeance, life/death struggle for control of our thoughts and emotions. The contestation disturbs our personal peace and the agitation reverberates from the center of ourselves to change the space around us. The air is different. We take our wars and our peace with us wherever we go.

Year to year, day to day, moment to moment, the human condition requires us to make a decision about whether we will bring peace or war into a situation. The questions become: how do we settle the wars inside ourselves? How do we make peace between the various oppositions striving for supremacy in our heart/minds? What is the key that will allow serenity entrance into our inner most being to mediate our most secret conflicts? How can our own personal peace lead to social justice that is necessary for peace in the world around us?

Before, behind and within the statistics and theories regarding violent conflict, poverty, violation of human rights and the misery that these realities bring, there stands the laughter and tears of ordinary human beings longing for peace. In his remarks before various meetings at the United Nations, President Obama gave a concrete illustration of a just peace philosophical pragmatism. It is an approach that speaks to the aching human desire for peace and requires real life results.

Our tears stood still that day, and we could barely breathe watching airplanes crash into buildings on a tiny television in a faculty office in a chapel basement.

We put on our academic robes and marched into Convocation.  We knew of the crash into the Pentagon and learned of a crash in a field in Pennsylvania.  At this awful unbelievable moment, we believed to read the words of Jesus:

This is a tale of two rallies, or more precisely, one rally and one march.  Both brought together religion and patriotism, one from the perspective of left-leaning politics, the other from the political right.  One focused on recognition of individuals for their virtues; the other focused on public policy.  The one aspect of both rallies that was painfully, shamefully obvious was the racial divide.  One was overwhelmingly European-American, the other overwhelmingly African-America.

People do harm out of their own pain. When we see people causing harm to other people, we ought to ask ourselves and ask them: “Who hurt you?” Sometimes the answer to that question is difficult to know. The answer to the question may be entangled in several different strands of personal, political and historical factors that are too complicated to disentangle. We are perplexed by a Gordian knot of our own psychological pain that cannot simply be undone by the stroke of a sharp sword and an indiscriminant mind.

Opposition to the Park 51 Community Center revolves around the sensibilities of people who lost loved one on September 11, 2001 and the sensibilities of a nation that suffered one of the most horrific attacks of its history. When someone we love dies, the world is never the same. Even if they die full of years with their family surrounding them with love and prayers, the pain is palpable. Even if we have a grave site to visit, their passing leaves a space that can only be filled with memory and hope. It is especially difficult when the someone that we love dies suddenly, violently, needlessly. It is difficult not to have a place to visit, a headstone to talk to, a stream of water, ocean, a green field, or beautiful landscape to visit and remember the moment we scattered the ashes. There is nothing that anyone can do or not do that will make the ache stop. And our tears have a will of their own.

The controversy over Park 51, captiously misnamed the Ground Zero Mosque leads us to ask the national question: “Who hurt us?” I say: A group of terrorist criminals hurt us, not Islam itself. (I have written about this in two blogs at the Washington Post On Faith blog and at God’s Politics.) Most people know with their rational minds that this nation was attacked by criminals whose actions were a desecration of Islam and all that is holy. Islam teaches that Allah is merciful and compassionate. He is all powerful. Logic tells the believer that an all powerful God does not need humankind to kill. Islam teaches that God wants us to compete as in a race toward all the virtues. Yet, when we seek an answer to the question of who hurt us, we find it difficult not to lay responsibility at the foot of Muslims. We see them as different, as dangerous and Other. Thus, we do not want to see an Islamic Community Center anywhere near ground zero in New York City. Our pain is still too raw and too real. And the political exploitation of this pain is an abomination.

However, I think something more may be at work here, something beyond the willingness of people to set aside the Constitutional protections of freedom of religion in this case in the name of wisdom, propriety and sensitivity. There is something more than a culture war or clash of civilizations at work here. I think the pain that many Americans feel at this moment is the fear that the September 11 signaled the end of America’s supremacy in the world.

I love Jon Stewart. He makes me laugh. After a long day of reading and thinking and writing about the ethics of public discourse, and considering the various issues that are the subjects of our national and international conversation, I need a laugh. “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” on Comedy Central allows me to have a good laugh before I turn out my light and go to sleep. The segment “I Give Up” on the August 4, 2010 program at once makes me laugh and shows the absurdity of what Stewart called “craven political expedience.”

The people were sick and tired of being sick and tired. They had come to the conclusion that they wanted a government that protected their health and wellbeing. They organized from coast to coast to tell their representatives that they were taking the blindfolds off and were no longer going to stand for their elected representatives serving the interests of the gas and oil industry at their expense.

It was a movie that woke the people in Gasland. The movie told the story of a group of faceless executives who had come into the lives of the good people of Gasland and offered them and their neighbors money to allow oil and gas companies to inject thousands of gallons of water and toxic chemicals into the ground to extract natural gas, a process called hydraulic fracturing. They were given money for the rights to use this method of extraction on their property. They did not know that the chemicals would contaminate their drinking water, that natural gas would come out of their taps so that they could light the water on fire. They did not expect muddy water to flow from their taps as a result. They did not expect to have to buy water from Wal Mart. They did not expect that they would be afraid that their homes would explode underneath them.

On the Sunday, July 11^th edition of ABC’s “This Week”, the moderator, Jake Tapper, asked a panel of pundits their opinion of Sarah Palin’s online advertisement for her political action committee where she speaks about “mama grizzlies.” The female grizzly bear is noted for her fierce protection of her cubs. Ruth Marcus of the Washington Post called the ad “vapid “and “platitudinous”. George Will countered by saying that on the “vapid meter” it did not compare with a sentence in Barack Obama’s presidential campaign: “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.”

I respectfully beg to differ. Will’s judgment regarding the sentence served only to betray his own stunning supercilious ignorance. The sentence: “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for” derives from both Hopi wisdom and from a poem by the late Blackwoman activist, professor and poet June Jordan -”Poem for South African Women.” The poem has been set to music by the a cappella singing group Sweet Honey in the Rock. Writer Alice Walker used the last line in the poem: “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for” as the title for a book.

This has been a difficult few months for proponents of marriage equality. Most recently, Hawaii’s Governor Linda Lingle vetoed a bill that would allow gay marriage. She said the issue ought to be decided by voters. Last November, voters in Maine overturned the legality of same-sex marriage. The New York legislature said “no.” The issue may have influenced the outcome of the governor’s race in New Jersey. However, the Washington D.C. City Council voted to allow same sex marriage. When I consider my own history as an African-American woman, I am so glad that during the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s there were judges and legislators willing to stand for equal protection under the law even before the general public was ready for racial equality. I am so glad for a faith that believes that my LGBT brothers and sisters will one day receive justice.

When nations make decisions that keep a cycle of violence going, it is appropriate to bring critique to bear on those decisions. When nations make decisions that help break the cycle of violence, that helps to move the world one centimeter, one inch, closer to just peace, it is appropriate to give that decision its proper respect.

When the government of Israel decided to ease its policy regarding the flow of goods and humanitarian aid into Gaza, it was a decision worthy of recognition and of gratitude. For years, critics of the policy, both inside and outside of Israel have called on the government of Israel to ease the restriction against Gaza. Gaza has been described as a big prison. The blockade is violence. It is structural violence that deprives people of the materials they need to support a decent standard of living. Such violence is a violation of human dignity. Peace will only come when people have the material they need to sustain life and the spiritual and psychological security that brings joy into life, when they can create the conditions that make life worth living.

Much that was on the list of things that could not be brought into Gaza were items that denied both sustenance and joy to people in Gaza. This kind of violence invited retaliatory violence and hatred. To deny people pipes for clean water, cement to build houses and chocolate is an injustice. It is not what ordinary people deserve, even if their leadership is unwise in its rhetoric and policies. Peace will come on earth the instant everyone begins to do justice no matter what the Other does.

This new policy of the government of Israel is more just than the old policy. It is full of caveats and caution, but such is reasonable for a nation whose primary concern is security. The six steps the government plans to implement are sensible and welcome. In a statement issued June 20, 2010, Israel committed to: