Category Archives: America

Bullying and Cowardice in the Senate

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Yesterday’s vote in the U.S. Senate comes down to this: cowardice in the face of gun-lobby bullying.

How did they bully?

A well-funded misinformation campaign by the NRA, gun-manufacturer’s lobby, and FOX alleging – although the bill itself explicitly prohibits it – that the moderate compromise proposal would mean a “national registry” of gun owners and erosion of the Second Amendment. The fact that the bill’s co-sponsors had “A” ratings by the NRA made no difference. What makes a difference is money and profits. And the difference they make is fear.

Why were the Senators cowards?

They put their campaign financing ahead of moral principle. According to President Obama, speaking to the American people yesterday, NOT ONE of the Senators could give him or Vice President Biden a reason for opposing the legislation…other than “politics“. Not one.

90% of Democrats voted in favor. 90% of Republicans voted against it.

Polls show that 90% of the American people SUPPORT universal background checks and limiting the size of magazines.

Democrat Senators Max Baucus (D-Mont.), Mark Begich (D-Alaska), Heidi Heitkamp (D-N.D.), and Mark Pryor (D-Ark.) broke ranks with their Party by voting against.

Republican Senators Susan Collins (R-Maine), Mark Kirk (R-Ill.), John McCain (R-Ariz.), and Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) broke ranks with their Party to vote in favor.

BREAKING NEWS: Last night former Republican Presidential Candidate Senator John McCain, joined by Senators Collins, Kirk, and Toomey, invited the other caucus members of the Grand Old Party (GOP) – “the party of Abraham Lincoln” – to join them for an evening at Ford’s Theater for a private showing of the film “Lincoln” and discussion of how he and the children and teachers of Sandy Hook Elementary School died.

Views from the Edge re-published today

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Thanks to Sojourners for publishing “After Boston – Above and Beyond“, published earlier on Views from the Edge.

After Boston: Above and Beyond

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"Above and Beyond" - National Veterans Art Museum, Chciago

“Above and Beyond” – National Veterans Art Museum, Chciago


The National Veterans Art Museum in Chicago has an unusual work of art.

When visitors first enter the museum, they hear a sound like wind chimes coming from above them. Their attention is drawn upward 24 feet to the ceiling of the two-story high atrium.

The metal dog tags of the more than 58,000 service men and women who died in the Vietnam War move and chime with shifting air currents. The 10-by-40-foot sculpture, entitled “Above and Beyond” was designed by Ned Broderick and Richard Steinbock.

Family and friends locate the exact dog tag of a loved one as a museum employee uses a laser to point to the tag with the name imprinted on the dog tag, now part of a chorus of wind chimes.

After the horror and tragedy in Boston, our heads have been down. This work of art serves as a reminder to look up to hear the sound of the spirit of goodness, compassion, and creativity that can turn tragedy and death into wind chimes played in silence by the air.

The word for “Spirit” in Hebrew Scripture is “ruach” (“wind”). “When God began to create the heavens and the earth – the earth being unformed and void, with darkness over the surface of the deep and a wind from God sweeping over the water – God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light” (Genesis 1 – 3, translation from the Hebrew by Rabbi W. Gunther Plaut in The Torah: a Modern Commentary (Union of American Hebrew Congregations, New York, 1981).

Click HERE for a YouTube video of an interview with a National Veterans Art Museum volunteer Joe Fornelli.

End the Violence

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Today’s Sojourners’ blog posted End the Violence .

After reading this article, I submitted this comment about the “comments”:

I am continually amazed and dismayed by the character and content of comments on articles like this. I have the sense that Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh have told their listeners, “Go on Jim Wallis’ blog and take him down!” Lines like “liberal Christian drivel,” “a law that restricts a persons (sic) ability to fulfill their divine obligation to protect their home and family” (the legislation does NOT restrict it, and there is no such “divine mandate” except in the NRA Bible), and “what are these faith leaders doing about abortion?” (when the issue here is violence with guns and the allegation is that religious leaders must choose between the two) – these comments do not engage the issue.

There is an anti-legislation, anti-democratic, anti-government streak in so many of these comments. The comments are political in the worst sense, demeaning the integrity of the writers and stereotyping their views into predetermined conclusions.

This seems to be the nature of the blogosphere, but it is especially distressing to see it here on Sojourners where readers mostly profess Christ and have attempted to take to heart The Epistle of James, “So the tongue is a little member and boats of great things. How great a forest is set ablaze by a small fire!” The tongue is “a restless evil, full of deadly poison. WITH IT WE BLESS THE LORD AND FATHER, AND WITH IT WE CURSE OTHERS, WHO ARE MAD IN THE LIKENESS OF GOD. FROM THE SAME SOURCE COME BLESSING AND CURSING. Brothers, this ought not to be so. (James 3:5-10).

As a writer and a blogger, I am grateful that the comments on Views from the Edge are respectful and thoughtful. Those of you who choose to comment engage the substance of what this blog posts. Such is not the case with the Sojourners blog with Jim Wallis. Jim Wallis is a progressive evangelical Christian, author of “God’s Politics: How the Left Doesn’t Get It, and the Right Gets It Wrong” and subsequent books on American values, economics, religion, and politics. Glenn Beck has publicly targeted him as a Social Gospel liberal (i.e.) a socialist disguising himself as a Christian.

Lady of Liberty and the Mother of Shame

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As Washington takes up immigration reform, this piece is worth a read.

This was written in 1982 when McKinley Presbyterian Church, Champaign, Illinois (where Steve Shoemaker was Pastor) joined with five other local churches as part of the national “Sanctuary Movement“–providing help for undocumented residents fleeing oppresive regimes in Central America.

A NEW INSCRIPTION FOR THE STATUE OF LIBERTY

The lamp once was a beacon. Now the hand
holds high a searchlight, torch, a burning flame
exposing all the exiles, all who came
unasked in search of liberty. Our land
is full, our steel gate closed. Those who demand
a chance to live in freedom now will name
our border guard lady Mother of Shame:
the rich protected, refugees are banned.
“No sanctuary here, no room,” she cries
with rigid lips. “No welcome at our door
for homeless masses struggling to rise
above the hunger, pain, disease and war
in lands where they were born. Compassion dies.
I send the poor back to El Salvador.”

[Published in The Presbyterian Outlook,
August 18-25, 1986.]

Comedian Jonathan Winters, the Man, RIP

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News of Jonathan Winters’s death arrived today. This conversation with him at the presentation of a Sedona Film Festival tribute is priceless for its humility, humor, honesty, and unvarnished humanity. It begins with a short clip from the Tonight Show with Jack Paar.

A Prayer for the U.S. Senate Today

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Homeless children and a society that didn’t care were the subjects of this century-old prayer by Walter Rauschenbusch, father of the Social Gospel movement that Glenn Beck loves to hate.

The language is dated. The substance is not. As the Senate sets about its debate of universal background checks and other measures to improve public safety, the children of Sandy Hook and their families also come to mind as those who find themselves “homeless” in a violent, uncaring world.

O Heavenly Father, whose unveiled face the angels of little children do always behold, look with love and pity, we beseech Thee, upon the children of the streets. Where men, in their busy and careless lives, have made a highway, these children of Thine have made a home and a school, and are learning the bad lessons of our selfishness and our folly. Save them, and save us, Lord. Save them from ignorance and brutality, from the shamelessness of lust, the hardness of greed, and the besotting of drink; and save us from the greater guilt of those that offend Thy little ones, and from the hypocrisy of those that see and see not, whose sin remaineth. Amen.

Is there no cure for these?

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Gordon C. Stewart April 11, 201

Today the Senate begins a floor debate on gun control that brings to mind an earlier “floor debate” several months ago in Chaska, Minnesota.

Ever since the community Dialogue on “Gun Violence in America,” I’ve searched for answers to what happened.

A crowd of 138 people came out on Tuesday night to chime in following the tragedy at Sandy Hook in Newtown, Connecticut.

As the night wore on, it became clear that there would be no real dialogue, no moderated discussion. No give-and-take. A series of monologues, without interruption and with a time limit, was the best we could expect.

Fear, anger, hostility and suspicion were in the room. The room was hot.

The months following have been a personal search for understanding of what happened that night, and how we in America move forward together on such a divisive issue.
———————————-
Imagine two people going into separate audiologist booths for hearing exams.

John grew up in rural America. Betty grew up in the city.

In their hearing booths Betty and John repeat the word they hear.

“Say the word ‘gun’, says the audiologist.

“Gun.”

Their hearing is good. They say the same word.

—————————–

After the hearing test, John and Mary are taken to different rooms for interviews. A social psychologist wants to know what emotions and thoughts are triggered when they hear the word ‘gun’.

“I’m going to give you a word. After you repeat the word, I want you to give me the other words that come to mind. It’s called “word association”. Don’t think about it. Just say whatever comes to mind.

“Gun”:

    John:

“Safety, protection, coyotes, wolves, cows, cattle, sheet, careful, responsibility, civil right.”

    Betty:

“Run, violence, threat, death, war, robber, gangs, school massacres, NRA, Sandy Hook.”

NRA:

    John:

“Second Amendment, right to bear arms, protector of civil liberties, defender of the Constitution.”

    Betty:

“Right-Wing, powerful, myopic, out-of-touch, vigilantes, white supremacist, radical, dangerous.”

Gun control:

    John:

“Government, anti-democratic, anti-Constitutional, intrusion, loss of freedom, fear, police state, socialism.”

    Betty:

“Safety, safe home, necessity, protection, peace, hope, end of fear.

Kingdom of God:

    John:

“Hmmm… Soul, salvation, heaven?”

    Betty:

“Hmmm… Safe streets, the common good, love?”

————————

Both are church members. They are practicing Christians. Betty and John pray the Lord’s Prayer. “Thy (Your) Kingdom come; Thy (Your) will be done on Earth as it is in heaven.”

Could the common bond of Jesus’ prayer bring the two into the same room in a shared search for understanding and action? Or are the formative cultural experiences so determinative that faith and religion are what Marx said they were – blinders that prevent them from seeing anything but what we’ve already chosen to see?

Perhaps some singing might help – a hymn or two – and reflection on the lyrics, like those of Fred Pratt Green (1969):

O Christ, the healer, we have come
To pray for health, to plead for friends.
How can we fail to be restored,
When reached by love that never ends?

From every ailment flesh endures
Our bodies clamor to be freed;
Yet in our hearts we would confess
That wholeness is our deepest need.

How strong, O Lord, are our desires,
How weak our knowledge of ourselves!
Release in us those healing truths
Unconscious pride resists or shelves.

In conflicts that destroy our health
We recognize the world’s disease;
Our common life declares our ills:
Is there no cure, O Christ, for these?

The Other Side

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The poem of one dying of cancer:

“NOTES FROM THE OTHER SIDE”

I divested myself of despair
and fear when I came here.

Now there is no more catching
one’s own eye in the mirror,

there are no bad books, no plastic,
no insurance premiums, and of course

no illness. Contrition
does not exist, nor gnashing

of teeth. No one howls as the first
clod of earth hits the casket.

The poor we no longer have with us.
Our calm hearts strike only the hour,

and God, as promised, proves
to be mercy clothed in light.

Jane Kenyon (1947-1995), New Hampshire Poet Laureate, written while dying of cancer.

Toy Gun Manufacturers – Tom Paxton and Pete Seeger

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Pete Seeger hosted the show. Tom Paxton sang the song he composed. That was way back in 1965.

Today….a cute three-year-old boy dressed in a cowboy hat, cowboy shirt, Sheriff’s badge, and cowboy boots, waves his toy pistol as he proudly marches past the tables and the three rifles of the video shooting-range at Heartbreakers pub on his way out the door into the world.

The toy gun manufacturers will deliver him into the hands of the real gun manufacturers; the toy gun will become a real one in the hand of the real man when his little mind expands.