Midlife Meditation

Quick, where's the Kleenex box? It was a hard week. It began, as so many hard weeks have in this chaotic era, with a news story: a white nationalist, the kind who are the most rabid believers in the Trump agenda, only this one was even more extreme than they are, took his Trump-empowered bigotry and part of his NRA-empowered gun collection into a synagogue in Pittsburgh and killed eleven people. I saw that in my news feed Friday after school, and coupled with the other horrible things that no-longer fringy conservative white men had done that week (pipe bombs, shooting elderly African-American grocery shoppers when a prayer meeting proved inaccessible), I started the weekend in a bad place. All these crimes hit close to home one way or another: the bombs being sent to people of any prominence at all who'd been critical of Trump (making me thankful my blog reaches dozens, rather than thousands, of people); the attempted assault on a church much like the one where I pl...

Not nearly as scary as Trump wants you to think. It's been yet another time-dilated week, a week crammed with presidential verbal bullying, dehumanizing policy proposals, racist fear-mongering, and on top of all that, pipe bombs sent to prominent critics of the Trump regime, an arrest revealing the bomber to be a rabid Trump believer, and finally a synagogue massacre. That last atrocity was committed by a right-winger who believes Trump colludes with the Jews he mowed down with an assault rifle, but it's still of a piece with every other horror that has issued from the putrid mouth and thumbs of our monstrous accidental president. In an effort to escape the horror of the news cycle, Amy and I took advantage of a break in the weather to walk through a new development near our home. The neighborhood was still going up, and we passed several houses under construction. The carpenters' work was lent an air of festivity by the music they had playing: mariachi-style Mex...

No, it doesn't make me believe him--but maybe I'm weird. Once or twice a school day, one of the two hundred children I see makes a bad choice that results in another child being in tears. Classmates are quick to finger the perp, who initially will point at innocent bystanders as the true culprits. When that fails to impress me, the child will say something along the lines of "It was an accident" or "I didn't mean to." My response is consistent: whether or not you meant to hurt someone else, you did, and now you need to apologize. In some cases, the denials take on an angry edge, with raised voices and furious eyes accompanying the insistence of innocence. Sometimes this works, to an extent: I'll investigate further, wanting to be absolutely sure who was responsible for the incident. As often as not, though, the stridency of the protest correlates with the guilt of the protestor. The louder they deny, they guiltier they are. For much of my ...

First Lady Melania Trump visits Elmina, a Cape Coast slave castle. This means nothing. That's all I could think when I read of Melania Trump paying a visit to a slave castle and being moved by what she saw. I've been to that castle, both in 2014 and, again, three months ago as I concluded my second trip to Ghana. It's a shattering experience, seeing the horrific conditions slaves were kept in even before they were crammed into ships for the middle passage. Knowing about the abuse, torture, and murder experienced by untold millions of West Africans ought, if this were a just world, to transform the way we who are descended from the abusers live our lives every day, opening our hearts to the plight of refugees, immigrants, and impoverished people. If we took these lessons seriously, there would be no question but that our borders should be open, our nation generous, and our world utterly interdependent. Instead, we live in a country whose president makes it a habit t...

Neither of these men belongs in public office. Of all the candidates Republican presidents have nominated to the Supreme Court in my lifetime, Brett Kavanaugh is the least qualified. That list includes both Robert Bork, whose nomination was withdrawn once his then-too-extreme opinions became known, and Clarence Thomas, whose more-extreme-than-Bork views were nothing next to the extent of his inappropriate behavior around women. The extent of Kavanaugh's own history of sexual assault and alcohol abuse may never be known, unless the House of Representatives goes Democratic, and a genuinely thorough investigation is launched; but even without a full reckoning of his youthful history of beer-drenched recklessness and aggression, his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee should have demonstrated, to any rational, principled legislator, that he has no business joining the court. Faced with credible accusations of both sexual and alcohol abuse, a qualified candidate w...

Mark Judge and Brett Kavanaugh, c. 1982 I was not one of those boys. The boys I hung out with were not like those boys. But I certainly knew some of those boys, knew how they behaved, how they talked, and what they did when they weren't at school. I'm a few years older than those boys. The high school I attended was a rural public school, not a posh urban prep school like those boys went to. But I knew athletes like those boys--and also athletes who were definitely not like those boys. I also knew other boys whose love of alcohol, tobacco, and marijuana kept them off the teams, and some of these non-varsity boys very likely engaged in similar pastimes to those boys. Again, I didn't typically associate with them. I willingly embraced my parents' puritanism around controlled substances, and while my attitude toward them has loosened up in my adult years, I still am uncomfortable around people who use them to the point of impairment. As a college student...

Brett Kavanaugh and Lindsay Graham are angry about the same thing: a woman has challenged their entitlement. I love being a music teacher. It's physically, mentally, and emotionally challenging--by the time I leave school, my Apple watch tells me I've completed all my exercise goals for the day, and at the end of my commute, I frequently take a nap in the driveway before leaving my car--but it's the best work I've ever done, and it saddens me to imagine not doing it when I retire in a few years. The previous paragraph is actually a slight exaggeration: I'm rounding up from 96%. That's the percentage of children I typically see who, despite their many problems--and this includes homesick kindergartners crying for mommy, emotionally disabled kids hitting each other (or me!), hyper kids that literally can't stop wiggling, impulsive kids who can't keep themselves from touching and playing instruments without permission, anxious kids who hide in th...

These boundaries go better with seat cushions. So much gray hair. That was my first thought walking into a sanctuary with 120 of my fellow United Methodist clergy for the "Healthy Boundaries" workshop I was grudgingly giving up a Saturday to attend. Many--most?--of the middle-aged and older ministers (there were perhaps three under the age of 40) filling the pews were there because, as the workshop leader acknowledged in her opening remarks, our presence was mandated. We'd all received letters and emails telling us that, to remain active in ministry, we had to attend. Now, I'm no longer a parish minister--my status is "honorably located," and as a public school music teacher, I'm under no supervision at all--but the waiver I would've had to sign to skip the workshop, stating I would not engage in any  of the tasks of the pastoral office, was so broad (it included "teaching," for instance) that I decided to grit my teeth and go. ...

Hawkeye loses it. Aw geez. There I go again. I was listening to NPR's Up First  podcast, a ten-minute early morning rundown of the top three stories of the day, and I found myself tearing up. It wasn't the latest example of the Trump regime exemplifying its ABE motto (Always Be Evil) that did me in this time, though that has happened in the past--forced parent-child separations? American citizens, born in this country, denied a passport because of their Mexican ancestry and their birthplace being south Texas? And there I go again...[sniff] No, this time it was two stories about the funerals of great Americans: John McCain and Aretha Franklin. Earlier this week, I listened to a Fresh Air that played interviews with McCain from 2000 and 2005, and hearing the sincere, idealistic voice of this wounded warrior, even as he explained policy positions I vehemently oppose, had my eyes misting up. And don't get me started on Aretha: I've had her music on a constant loo...

Antman and the Wasp is an enjoyable summer movie, a lovely palate cleanser after the loud, gloomy, and commercially cynical (of course they're not killing off all those franchises! Money!)  Avengers installment. As my time on earth steps more fully into its downhill phase, I'm far less likely than I used to be to see movies multiple times, but I didn't mind at all seeing this one twice. Most of the jokes held up very well (though one unfortunate trope involving a Hispanic character and a hot little car really bugged me on the second viewing), and one in particular, with clever callbacks throughout the movie, resonated with our contemporary political situation in ways the filmmakers may not have anticipated. To set the stage very quickly: Antman is under house arrest for something having to do with his involvement in the last Captain America movie (it's never really explained what law he broke). To entertain himself, he's taken up a variety of hobbies, including...