Midlife Meditation

LaVoy Finicum addresses the press at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge.  Note the pistol on prominent display. Then Jesus said to him, “Put your sword back into its place; for all who take the sword will perish by the sword." --Matthew 26:52 It's not over. Not nearly. There are still four insurgents occupying the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, begging on YouTube for backup, demanding full pardons before they will lay down their weapons and surrender to the authorities. Meanwhile, a right-wing organization called the Pacific Patriots Network has issued a "call to action" for militants to "peacefully" travel to Burns to protest the shooting of LaVoy Finicum following his attempt to evade a traffic stop. So even with the occupation's ringleaders in custody, this is not over. There's no way of knowing whether the militant right wing community retains any enthusiasm for Ammon Bundy's nutty cause, and if anyone at all will respond to ...

I've got students who are like this guy--though he wears a much cooler hat than they do. All right, Ammon, you had your turn to say whatever the hell it was you wanted to say. I realize it makes sense to you and some tiny fraction of the rest of the country. Now can we please get back to what we were doing before you grabbed the spotlight? Two or three times a week, I have to tell a student something very much like what you just read. For reasons too complicated for me, their classroom teachers, their parents, the administrators responsible for discipline at our school, or any of their classmates, these individuals feel the need to make music class be all about them. They talk loudly, bang on drums (it's music class), abuse instruments, roam around the gym shouting (yes, due to a stuffed-to-overflowing school building, I teach grades 3-5 in the gym), are utterly unafraid of me calling an administrator to come and get them, care not a bit about the referrals I'm suppo...

First things first: it bugs me, too. The meme comes by way of "Brave New Films," and features this image: Violating a court order, Mary Ann Grady Flores continued to protest drone warfare at an Air Force Base in upstate New York. She was arrested and jailed, sentenced (over the objections of the prosecutor) to a year in prison, but as far as I can tell from a cursory Google search, is still out on bond while her case is being appealed. While most peaceful protesters are tolerated by authorities, it is not uncommon for them to spend time in jail. Jail time is, in fact, a key part of civil disobedience strategy, as it highlights the irony of a government that has to protect its enormous firepower from sign-waving grandmothers. And yes, there's no denying that the gun-loving, government-hating right wingers occupying the Malheur Wildlife Refuge post a far greater threat to government officials, ordinary citizens, and themselves than do any pacifists who have ever...

The door of this refrigerator is regulated. The handgun is not. Sometimes, a meme sums things up beautifully. Here's one I saw on Facebook, originating with Occupy Democrats: Just to be sure I've got the facts right, I Googled "refrigerator safety regulation," and got the text for the Refrigerator Safety Act of 1956 . I was unable to find any reporting on how the appliance industry reacted to this legislation, or how long it took to get it through Congress, but I think it's important not to rush to any generalizations about corporations having more common sense than other collectives of people: think for a moment about how many decades it took for the automobile industry to take steps to improve gas mileage, or to install airbags and other safety devices. With that disclaimer out of the way, though, I am quite ready to jump to an explanation of why the refrigerator lobby made little or no effort to resist the imposition of safety regulations by ...

Ground zero. First things first: I get the outrage. No, I'm not talking about anything being said by any member of the Bundy family, whether it involves claiming they have a right to graze their damn cattle anywhere they damn well feel like it, for free; or the notion that occupying a publicly-owned wildlife refuge is somehow a patriotic defense of the Constitution. Any outrage expressed by either Cliven Bundy or his son Ammon is hypocritical nonsense that ought not be given even a tiny fraction of the air time it's receiving. How could anyone seriously believe such things? (Though, in light of the rabidness of first the Tea Party movement and, more recently, Donald Trump's followers, it's clear there's a significant minority of Americans who do.) The outrage I understand is that of the progressive voices I see everywhere I look on the social media I peruse, voices angrily comparing nationwide violence by police against persons of color with the measu...

Reinhold Niebuhr He looks so benign. Who could even guess this avuncular baldy was mid-century America's answer to Machiavelli? Reinhold Niebuhr's career was the ecclesial and academic equivalent of Barack Obama's rise to the Presidency. Niebuhr was an ordained minister in the Evangelical Church, a mainline Protestant denomination (this was in the days before "Evangelical" became synonymous with "reactionary") of primarily German immigrants. Niebuhr's first and, it turned out, only parish was in Detroit. It was small when he arrived, large by the time he left, but that probably had as much to do with demographic shifts as anything else: Detroit was growing by leaps and bounds as the auto industry matured. If his memoir of those years, Leaves from the Notebook of a Tamed Cynic , makes clear, he was frequently neglectful of the more mundane aspects of the pastorate, preferring instead to nurture a developing career as an activist and theologic...

(with apologies to U2) Christmas, 1985: the last time all the Anderson boys were simultaneously unmarried. I was going to start this essay with a picture of An-Di-Fan, the house in McMinnville that has been at the center of my family's identity since 1945, but which will (hopefully) soon be changing hands. We've had two family gatherings there--Thanksgiving and Christmas--since it went on the market, each of which could have been the last time we were all together under that roof. Unfortunately, the market for large craftsman homes in McMinnville is sluggish at this time of year, so there may yet be more potentially final gatherings of the House of An at the eponymous homestead. I changed my mind about using that picture--one that prominently features the "For Sale" sign that still gives me a jolt every time I drive up, and see it there in front of the house--because the house is not what I'm primarily writing about today, though it will still play ...