This year, I finished my Christmas shopping early. Two telephone calls to two catalogues and voila, my shopping was done. I made these calls shortly after Thanksgiving and the first week in December, my packages arrived. My son put up the Christmas tree early. So, I had plenty of time to take a week and go up to the North Pole to help Santa.

Aside from the elves and his full-time workers, some of us volunteer during the holidays to come up and help with the rush that the season brings. Everything is on computer now. But, letters still come in with children’s wish lists and that data must be entered and then cross checked against the naughty and nice list. However, Santa has such a generous heart that if he could, every child would get something. Then, there is the work of keeping track of address changes. Since the economic downturn, Santa and his helpers have had to do more work to track down those children whose families have lost their houses due to foreclosure or other difficult circumstances. Santa thunders with anger whenever he sees yet another situation of a child and h/er family becoming homeless.

“How in the name of all that is holy can a country as rich as the United States allow such a thing to happen?” he asks at the top of his voice. He is most definitely NOT a jolly old man when the issue of poverty in the world, especially poverty among children, raises its ugly head. Yet, it is an ugliness that he insists that we tackle when we return to our home countries. (Note: Santa gets volunteers from all over the world.)

Credit: Creative Commons/gainesp2003

This weekend I ate lunch with a woman who grew up in Joplin, Missouri.

It was not yet a week since the tornadoes, which we had not met to discuss. We wanted to talk about other things, and we spoke for two hours about what we’d meant to say to each other: about being our fathers’ daughters, navigating the tricky terrain of dating art-making men, the ways that we make things ourselves, stage fright and good music.

But the thing that we couldn’t avoid in our talk was her news of home.

Her sister had called crying the day before. She still lived in Joplin, and after days of driving through the battle zone of ruined buildings, trying to find ways to help, she was beaten by it, and called my new friend from the side of the road, weeping in exhaustion. My friend sat on the phone, impotent here in our big, momentarily safe city, and listened while her sister begged her not to come home.

It’s a sad day in Wisconsin. Yesterday afternoon in less than two hours, our Republican Senators — after insisting for a month that their union-busting law was needed because the state was broke — separated the collective bargaining sections of the bill from the financial parts and then passed it. They no longer needed a Democratic Senator for a quorum, since the bill was no longer ostensibly about finances! They unmasked themselves with this political maneuver. Now everyone can see that it never was about the money. It was an attack on workers’ rights all along. And despite massive protests last night and today, the Republican Assembly passed the bill as well.

Many of us thought Republican legislators were shoving an undemocratic bill down our throats three weeks ago. But at least they gave us six days (a ridiculously short amount of time) to think and talk about it then. Yesterday’s two hours of discussion breaks that record by a yard. The upshot of all this is that 60 years of workers’ rights have been swept away using undemocratic methods for an undemocratic outcome (there will probably be a lawsuit about the tactics). This is especially hard to take, since polls show that anywhere from 65% – 74% of Wisconsinites believe that public workers should have the right to organize.

For most of the country, last week’s winter storm is old news. But for residents of Rio Arriba County, one of the nation’s top gas-producing counties, last week’s storm has not passed. Residents of Rio Arriba County remain without natural gas for cooking and heating in frigid weather nearly a week later.

And another Arctic front is on its way.

Last night, the Board of Rio Arriba County Commissioners summoned Governor Susana Martinez to explain the debacle. My video of the event is shown below.

“Hogwash, Mr. President,” Robert Scheer’s critique of President Obama’s State of the Union talk last night, is worth reading. Both that and my own analysis of the State of the Spirit in the Winter 2011 issue of Tikkun, written over a month ago, have important elements of truth. My approach, if applied to Obama’s talk last night, would agree with many of Scheer’s points, yet take a more compassionate approach, balancing Scheer’s correct righteous indignation with a larger view of the crisis facing the human race.

Our NSP point of view would address what was even worse about the Obama talk: the reiteration of the dominant values of the capitalist order — such as that the real goal of society should be to enhance our capacities to compete with each other, that what we need is a return to economic nationalism in which the U.S. is number one, that education should be primarily in science and technology in order to make sure that we can beat the other countries of the world and retain our previous position as the most powerful force in the world, and that to do that we must build our military might and make our education focused on getting more power. As the writers of Tikkun magazine have repeatedly stressed, these ideas generate a world in which there is a struggle of all against all to “make it,” and a world of endless warfare in which our resources are aimed not at satisfying human needs but at achieving dominance.

No wonder, then, that ideas like “caring for each other” or “caring for the planet” or words like love, generosity, compassion, solidarity, and environmental sanity were absent from the Obama talk. Please read both pieces linked to below and compare them with the trivialities and distortions of most of the media. And then, please join our Network of Spiritual Progressives (NSP) at www.spiritualprogressives.org and help us bring our perspective into the public arena. And yes, please send these two articles to everyone on your email lists to help them go viral. And you have my permission to post my article on your websites or reproduce it in your web magazines or wherever else you wish to have it printed.

Hogwash, Mr. President

by Robert Scheer

What is the state of the union? You certainly couldn’t tell from that platitudinous hogwash that the president dished out Tuesday evening. I had expected Barack Obama to be his eloquent self, appealing to our better nature, but instead he was mealy-mouthed in avoiding the tough choices that a leader should delineate in a time of trouble. He embraced clean air and a faster Internet while ignoring the depth of our economic pain and the Wall Street scoundrels who were responsible – understandably so, since they so prominently populate the highest reaches of his administration. He had the effrontery to condemn “a parade of lobbyists” for rigging government after he appointed the top Washington representative of JPMorgan Chase to be his new chief of staff.

The speech was a distraction from what seriously ails us: an unabated mortgage crisis, stubbornly high unemployment and a debt that spiraled out of control while the government wasted trillions making the bankers whole.

Read the rest here.

The State of the Spirit, 2011

by Rabbi Michael Lerner

The bad news is that global warming will soon be irreversible and, by the end of the twenty-first century, large parts of the earth will be under water. China is emerging as the world’s greatest superpower while continuing to regiment its people and repress democratic civil liberties and human rights. Just as today the West spends its energies fighting an elusive “war on terror” generated by its fantasy that its survival depends on dominating other countries to gain their fossil fuels, in the future Western elites of wealth and power may seek to create medieval-style enclaves surrounded by private Blackwater-style armies to prevent ordinary citizens from getting at their dwindling supplies of food and other goods. Most people will be encouraged to blame each other and fight each other for the decreasing sustenance left to the majority of the planet’s residents.

When I was a teenager I believed that science was the route to all the best answers to the most important questions. I would have applauded Sir Ernest Rutherford’s dictum: “There is physics and there is stamp-collecting.” It took the sixties to loosen up my views, to help me recognize that there were things not measurable by science, but true none the less. Love and literature were two early examples; the power of spirituality came later. Today my views are closer to what Stephen Jay Gould called Nonoverlapping Magisteria , the perspective that there are areas of expertise over which science holds sway, and other areas over which it does not, and that wisdom can best be reached through exploring both. But as I have opened to ideas in the world outside science, I am horrified at how of increasing numbers of people are moving the opposite way, abandoning science, logic, rationality and embracing magical thinking.

Magical thinking is the idea that what you think changes the physical world directly. In a harmless form, I learned it when my family watched Saturday night hockey games, and my mother warned my brother and I that any premature celebration before the final siren would certainly cause the Canadians to suddenly lose the game. In a more dangerous form, it is promulgated through books like “The Secret” which teach that if you choose to believe that you will be successful, you will (and if you aren’t it’s your own fault for not choosing to be.) It is a belief which allows the rich to feel that they simply chose to be rich, and the people who were poisoned by drinking the effluent dumped into rivers from their factories chose that, so everyone gets what they wanted and no guilt is necessary.

I mentioned in my last post that the question I was raising – how  to respond morally to change when even our moral sources are changing – is an ancient question.

Consider the story of the ancient Greek philosopher Cratylus, who was influenced by the philosophical vision of Heraclitus. Though the name Heraclitus may be unfamiliar, his dictum that “you can’t step into the same river twice” is probably very familiar. Heraclitus was one of the original philosophers of process and flux – everything is dynamic, whatever is, is in motion.

Cratylus was deeply influenced by this idea and followed it to what he deemed to be some of its logical consequences: he argued that not only can one not step into the same river twice, but one can’t step into the same river once.

We had much to celebrate at “Earth Day at 40.” But, of course, we had much to concern us as well. The good news is that whenever we touched on “global weirding,” water rights, or any number of other environmental issues, someone at the conference offered ideas or solutions. These ranged from the most massive — a new electric grid across the United States — to the smallest and most local — digging up your lawn and planting raised beds with vegetables.

And there was even better news — we all left the conference fired up to make a difference! I’m just sorry we didn’t use that new-found energy to walk the few blocks to the capitol and demonstrate for the “Clean Energy Jobs” bill, which the Wiscsonsin legislature didn’t pass the next day!!!!

Author Margaret Atwood, Activist Robert Kennedy, Jr., Wilderness Society President William Meadows, UW-Madison History Professor William Cronon, and Gaylord Nelson’s daughter Tia Nelson, who is the executive secretary of the Wisconsin Board of Commisioners of Public Lands, all spoke, giving rousing speeches and words of warning (or were those words of “warming,” as I originally typed?). Almost all of these talks will be online at the Nelson Institute website in the next few weeks. I’ll let you know when. But until then, here are some highlights.

Permaculture is a movement whose time has arrived. We’re all concerned about “global weirding” (climate change), and according to Starhawk, permaculture offers a set of simple solutions to this problem. In my last post (and the accompanying video), Starhawk talked specifically about how permaculture would sequester carbon in the soil.

Carbon Farmers of America is a group that’s taking this issue seriously. Star explained that they’re funding research to discover the best practices for large-scale building of soil and paying farmers for every ton of carbon dioxide they capture in new topsoil by marketing carbon sinks to the public to fund the work. Topsoil has the capacity as a carbon sink to capture the excess carbon in our atmosphere. And our soils desperately need that carbon. So this group is creating a win-win situation, really taking the permaculture saying “Pollution is the solution,” and applying it directly to “global warming” and topsoil depletion.

Permaculture for Starhawk is a practical application of Paganism. This is the link that connects the Goddess(es) and our vegetable gardens. The Goddess, as we know her within Wicca and other forms of Paganism, represents the cycles of birth – growth – death – decay – and regeneration, exactly the cycles that permaculture deals with in a more pragmatic way.

To say that the Goddess is sacred doesn’t mean you have to believe in something outside of yourself, according to Starhawk. It simply means that you need to shift your attitude towards viewing these natural cycles as amazing, even miraculous. Spiritually, we need to pay attention to how they’re happening around us all the time. They are the ways we connect with each other most deeply and with all other life forms on the planet. If we approach them with awe, reverence, and respect, these natural processes will lead us into ways of living and working that will create more health, abundance, beauty, and biodiversity as well as more joy and freedom on the planet. And if we don’t, Starhawk admonishes, we’ll get the mess we’re in today.

Starhawk was generous with her time while she was here in Madison a month ago. She granted me two interviews, the first about Palestine and the second — which I will begin to post today now that I’m back from my vacation — about permaculture. For those of you who don’t know her, Starhawk is the best-known Wiccan author alive today. She’s published eleven books, including The Spiral Dance, which introduced many of us to Wicca. From the beginning of her career, she’s been very involved as an activist, and since the 1990s she’s been most active in promoting permaculture.

Star came to permaculture as a natural outgrowth of her Paganism. After many years in the Goddess movement — where we declared that the Earth was a sacred, living organism that manifests Herself in the cycles of birth, growth, death, and regeneration that occur in all of nature, including our own human culture — Star discovered permaculture. She soon realized it was a practical application of her spiritual path.

Growing up I believed that you could get either love OR respect in life, but not both. This was my mother’s understanding of the way the world worked — one she taught me from day one — and maybe it was true for her or even for women of her generation. But over the years, I’ve discovered that without respect, love is a hollow sweetness, and that without love, respect can result in a distance that undoes its best intentions.

These insights came back to me Sunday at First Unitarian Society in Madison as I listened to our associate minister Karen Gustavson offer one of her best sermons ever. It was well-crafted, contained great stories and great intelligence, but I disagreed completely with what she had to say. The sermon was also about a topic that I care about with every cell in my body — about our need to love and care for the Earth. And so I feel compelled to present a different viewpoint.

We in the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) are considering changes in the language of our “Principles and Purposes,” the statements that guide our work together as an association of free, but interdependent congregations. Karen was responding on Sunday to the rewording of the seventh principle, a change that would substitute the word reverence for the word respect in the phrase “we covenant to honor and uphold … respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.” She made an effective appeal for retaining the original language –respect — because she believes that to revere something implies a certain passivity — true for our fundamentalist brethren, but not for me and other people on the left hand of God — while respect indicates an active response. Obviously, this is not my experience.

What all Unitarian Universalists want in this rewrite of the seventh principle is language that reflects care for the Earth as a religious imperative, not an optional activity.

Newspaper Vendor

My newspaper this morning gave me hope. And brothers and sisters, that doesn’t happen very often. On the front page, taking up about one third of the sheet, there was an article entitled “Trying to open the ‘inner eye.’” It was a piece that described the new Center for Conscious Living, an offshoot of the Church of Religious Science, which the pastor said is “reinventing the idea of church, with ‘stand you up music,’ meditation, singing, chanting and ‘an inclusive message of self-empowerment.’” Above this article, the top story was about our governor’s clean energy plan, in which 25 percent of the Wisconsin’s energy must come from wind, solar, biomass, or other renewable sources by 2025. My friend Jack Kisslinger, whose website is called Planet for Life, tells me that 25% might be a good number, but it has to be 25% of reduced overall energy consumption. So the governor’s goal is at least a step in the right direction. These days we’re at less than 5%!?! But the miracle is that some of Wisconsin’s business leaders are lining up behind the governor, including executives of Johnson Controls, an auto parts and building products manufacturer. All of this combined with the EPA’s stricter standards for smog-causing pollution made me ebullient.

I’ve been really angry at the Obama administration lately, so it was nice to agree with them for the first time in what seems like months. The last straw for me was Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize speech, coming right on the heels of his announcement about expanding the war in Afghanistan. Until then had I tried to see his incrementalism as “realism.” But Rabbi Michael Lerner‘s editorial in the latest Tikkun, “Afghanistan: Obama Capitulates to the War Makers,” says it all. I agree with Rabbi Lerner that Obama’s announcement represented “a decisive endorsement of the strategy of domination.” And then Obama’s Nobel Prize speech tried to justify his decision by saying that we will not eradicate violent conflict in our lifetimes, that “Evil does exist in the world.” When Obama used that final phrase, I stopped listening to him. Christopher Hedges‘ article in the same Tikkun, “Celebrity Culture and the Obama Brand,” describes the shift in my opinion at that point: “President Obama does one thing and Brand Obama gets you to believe another.” I stopped believing in Brand Obama.

It’s hard to be optimistic given the world situation these days. But I believe that the three stories that filled me with hope today are related in a way that may not be immediately apparent. Without more spiritual exploration, people in this country will have trouble opening their minds to the changes in store for us. And those changes are going to be very fast, whether for the better or for the worse. As I said in a post several months ago,

In the Talmud in the tractate Brachot (Blessings), the rabbis raise the question of what is meant by the mishnaic statement “ha oseh tefilato keva, ain tefilato tachanunim – the one who makes his prayer fixed, his prayer is not one of supplication.”

One explanation given is that our prayer lacks supplication when it is not done “eem dimdumei chama – with the reddening of the sun.” While on a peshat level the rabbis may be referring to the need for one to be earnest in his or her prayer in order for it to be supplicatory, I think there may be another level to their words.

Wind Turbines of Copenhagen by Daniel Greene

A few days ago Dave Belden asked us to “Imagine a time when the Eco-Crisis is Over: Then tell us How we Got There“.

There are two aspects of “how we got there” – a structural/legal one, and a cultural one. To look at the structural/legal one, it may be good to start by considering a quote from science fiction writer William Gibson, “The future is already here – it is just unevenly distributed”. Where can we look to find a society that is close to already achieving what Dave has asked us to consider?

Perhaps the best place to look is Scandinavia, which includes Denmark and its capital city Copenhagen. The city of Copenhagen is considered to be one of the most environmentally friendly cities in the world. Its carbon footprint per person is about half of that in the United States (details by country here), and yet its quality of life is ranked better than that in the United States by some measures. How do they do this? They have a strong national policy for long-term environmental planning, and they  use taxes to adjust price incentives. Denmark has very high taxes on cars to discourage car ownership, and the highest home electricity prices in the world. They use some of this tax revenue to provide incentives to promote wind power and energy conservation.

But there’s also a cultural change that needs to happen – a change in attitudes.

Winter solstice is time of greatest darkness, which of course is why so many cultures have festivals of lights at this time. But in our culture the lights have gotten over the top, with thousands of lights blazing as you walk down the road, and when you get to the mall at the end of the road (all our roads may not lead to Rome, but most lead to a mall) the lights have become so bright there are no longer any shadows. That’s a profound loss. In the shadows lie our deep fears, and this time of the year traditionally allowed us to look at those fears, to name those shadows, and to learn how they connect to us. If we don’t connect to our shadows, we never grow up, and (like my namesake) we can only live in never never land.

This year, when I look in the darkness, I see the shadow of my country, and it is a dark and oil-stained shadow. I used to be proud of Canada. When I travelled around the world, and people asked me where I was from, I would answer Canada, and they would say, “Oh, Canada good” and then make jokes about snow and cold and I would laugh, and then we’d go out and have a drink and become friends. But as George Monbiot so accurately says, “So here I am, watching the astonishing spectacle of a beautiful, cultured nation turning itself into a corrupt petro-state. The tar barons of Alberta…are turning this lovely country into a cruel and thuggish place.” I read that and wish I could find a reason to disagree.

David R. Loy

David Loy is one of the most socially aware Buddhists that I am aware of. I don’t know that much about Buddhism, despite having various friends who are strong Buddhists. When I read Buddhist magazines, I find myself disappointed that there seems to be so little on social change as Buddhist practice and necessity. David Loy, who is Besl Professor of Ethics/Religion and Society at Xavier University in Cincinnati, is certainly a great exception (and I am not saying there aren’t many others out there, just that I am not aware of them). We have just posted at Tikkun Current Thinking a piece he has sent us about his response to Copenhagen. In it he calls climate change “the greatest threat ever to our species.” Some quotes:

The basic difficulty about responding to the “climate emergency” – and a host of related eco-crises such as desertification, and what is happening to the world’s oceans, and mass extinction (half of the earth’s plant and animal species may disappear by the end of this century) – is that climate change requires us to notice something we normally prefer to ignore or resist: that we are not separate from each other, but interdependent, and that we must therefore also assume responsibility for the well-being of each other…

In the past Western nations could use their technologies (including weapons, of course!) to dominate the rest of the world and exploit its resources, but suddenly we find ourselves in a new situation, where each nation is now directly dependent upon the good intentions of other nations, whether developed or undeveloped.

I’ve decided to take Dave Belden up on his challenge Imagine a Time When the Eco-Crisis is Over: Then Tell Us How We Got There? and address one aspect of how necessary behavioral change was achieved. Imagine if we got to a point where the realized threat of climate change to our own personal health and well-being and the health and well-being of our children was so ingrained in us that we would even consider a carbon footprint tax as a realistic revenue source for California? What if we got to a place that our understanding of ecology was such a given that a carbon footprint tax would even be popular and acceptable to the bipartisan leadership of this country with almost 1/2 of the Republicans supporting it?

As I channel-surfed from Green 960 (Air America) to Hot Talk 560 in the car this morning, I stopped on 560 long enough to listen to Rush Limbaugh ranting about the climate change “hoax” he says we’ve all been duped by and the tobacco industry’s lies way back when claiming that there was no proof that smoking caused cancer. I found it strange that Rush was connecting the two together, and wondered if he realized that the folks that lied about smoking back in the day happen to be the same folks that have been lying about global warming.