John Adams versus the Quakers

Recently I have been watching the excellent John Adams (HBO Miniseries). I am enjoying it as much as I enjoyed reading the book (John Adams by David McCullough) on which the series was based.

John Adams famously had a dispute with a Quaker named John Dickinson over the issue of whether it was wise for the American colonies to declare independence from England. Dickinson favored a cautious course of negotiation that he thought would avoid war. He said he could not endorse a declaration of independence that would surely result in British retaliation and armed conflict from one end of the colonies to the other. Adams acknowledged that war would inevitably follow a declaration of independence, but his passion for freedom and justice made such a conflict, in his mind, justifiable. Indeed, Adams argued that in the face of British injustices, a declaration of independence was morally obligatory; if such a declaration resulted in war, then the war also was morally obligatory.

It is common, when one reads about history, to ask oneself where one would have stood in the sort of controversy between Adams and the pacifist Quakers of Pennsylvania. (Not all Quakers, of course, were pacifists. Some fought in the war for independence, just as some fought in the American civil war.) In this particular instance, no sooner do I ask the question, than I know exactly what my answer would be, given my current beliefs. I would have been firmly with the Quaker Dickinson and opposed to those in favor of taking the risk of a bloody war. Even knowing everything I know now, from a 21st century perspective, about the consequences, I would be opposed to a declaration of independence that would result in war.

The American war of independence was bloody and brutal. It is impossible for me to see the result, independence from the British, as being anything near worth the horrible price of bloodshed that was paid. In gaining independence, the newly independent Americans went on to be every bit as savage and unjust as they had been while they were British colonists. Slavery continued unabated. Wars against the native Americans continued and even increased. Independence changed almost nothing. Moreover, it would surely have come about on its own anyway, just as it did for Canada. The British were far less interested in the Americas than they were in their other colonies, the ones in Asia, Africa and the Middle East. America was small potatoes in the British Empire.

Given my current way of thinking, I would have opposed the war of independence, and even the declaration of independence that, as all rightly saw, was sure to result in that war. There has not been a single war or conflict that the United States of America has participated in since 1776 that I would have endorsed, given how I now view the world. I would, of course, have been in the minority most of the time, for the United States has long been addicted to violent solutions to problems that might have been solved peacefully.

What is not clear to me is whether I always would have had the courage of my convictions. I can only hope that in the years I have before me, I will not falter.

Learning from Granddaddy

A couple of years ago I had the unexpected pleasure of going to a social event in an apartment that was right above the apartment where my grandfather lived when I was a child. He lived in the apartment from 1935 until his death in 1964, and I spent many of my most joyful moments there. I have been past the apartment building many times over the years but had never been inside. The apartment immediately above his had almost exactly the same layout, so being in it was almost like returning to childhood for a few moments. As in all returns to childhood, everything had changed almost beyond recognition.

As a child, I learned a lot of important things from my grandfather. He taught me how to play solitaire, an important skill for an only child. He also taught me how to cheat at solitaire, which he said was an acceptable thing to do, since no one was really being cheated except an ornery deck of cards. Any other kind of cheating, of course, he strongly discouraged. He also taught me how to read the baseball statistics in the sports page, and eventually he taught me how to keep track of a baseball game on a scorecard. He also taught me how to use a typewriter and let me practice using his old Smith-Corona, the machine on which during my childhood I composed a number of stories about improbable heroes. I learned all that and more from him when I was a boy, soaking up knowledge of the world around me like a sponge left in the kitchen sink.

This year I'm the same age my grandfather was when I was born. I find I'm learning from him again. I'm learning from his example as I recall them, and I find a great deal of what he taught me through example is something that not only I, but many people I know, could benefit from mastering.

My grandfather was born in 1982 and spent his early life on a farm in Kansas. The electric light bulb was invented just four years before he was born, and he did not have electrical lighting for much of his early life. He was seven years old when Gottlieb Daimler and Karl Benz made the first automobile, and he was 26 years old when the first Model-T Ford came out in 1908. I have no idea when he starting driving a car, but I know he never trusted an automobile as much as a horse, or at least that's what he said. As long as he lived, he preferred to walk any distance less than about three miles. It didn't make much sense to start up the car to go any distance that could be walked to in less than an hour.

My grandfather had a telephone, so people could contact him. He initiated no more than about four calls a year. A telephone conversation with him rarely lasted more than thirty seconds, just long enough to make arrangements to meet somewhere in person so that one could have a proper conversation.

Perhaps because he never quite got over the feeling that electricity was a miracle, and a darned expensive one at that, he never turned on a light switch until it was pretty nearly impossible to see which cards were laid out in his solitaire game. The lights were never on during the day, of course. When he ate lunch in the small dining room of his apartment, he never turned on the overhead light, even though there were no windows in the room, and precious little light came through the small window in the adjacent kitchen. Electrical lights were to use after the sun was well down, and even then they were turned on only when there was really something one had to see (such as the cards in a solitaire game.) To my great shame, I probably use as much electricity in a day as he did in a few months, despite the fact that I use compact fluorescent bulbs and have formed the habit of turning lights off when I leave a room. Like most people I know, my house is full of appliances and gadgets that never existed when I was a child. All of them, strictly speaking, are unnecessary. It's a shame that I've become accustomed to having them.

People of my grandfather's generation never used credit cards, and they never bought anything for which they hadn't saved up the money. If my grandfather did not have enough cash in his savings account to make a purchase, he reckoned he had no real need to make that purchase. If there was a need, he saved up until he had the money to make it. As a consequence of those habits, he was a frugal man. He used a deck of cards until at least have the cards had broken in half and were held together with cellophane tape. When it was no longer possible to make out whether a face card was a King or a Jack, it was time to start thinking about getting a new deck, but not before. He wore a pair of shoes until it was no longer possible to repair them by having another sole and heel put on them.

As much as he approved of me, and even doted on me as only a proud grandfather can do, he did express his concern about how wasteful youngsters of my generation had become. Not wanting to dismay him too much, I developed the habit of keeping things rather than throwing them away, just in case I would someday learn to repair them or find some other use for them than the use for which they had been invented. I had several shoe boxes full of pencil stubs too short to sharpen further, eraser crumbs, and rusting paper clips. For about ten years I held on to a spark plug that I had found in an alley way. Unfortunately, I never did find a use for most of the contents of those shoe boxes. The only effect that came from keeping them was a habit to hang on to things that no one could use. That habit does have one good effect. It reminds me how many of the habits a person forms are really pretty useless, if not downright destructive. That's a good thing to be reminded of.

These days, as I look around at homes and offices filled with electrical and electronic equipment, gymnasiums filled with exercise machines that use electricity to tell people who many calories they are burning off, driveways with several vehicles parked in them, people ambling along talking into mobile telephones to tell people the stupendously important news that they are in a shopping mall and are thinking of buying a beef taco, and people using fuel-consuming machines to blow leaves instead of raking them or to mow a patch of turf that a push-mower could take care of in ten minutes, I wonder what on earth my grandfather would think of the world we now live in. If asked what is wrong with this picture, he would know the answer right away. Everything.

Pretty much everything has gone wrong. The average American family, I just heard on a news program, is $16,000 in debt, not counting mortgages for living accommodations. People are going into debt to buy things that make them lazy and sick. Our economy is no longer based on the manufacture and sale of goods and necessities. It is based on the manufacture of bads. People spend far less on needs than on their many addictions. Civilization has been destroyed and replaced with a pseudo-culture of delusions and fantasies. The American dream has turned into the world's nightmare. It needn't have turned out this way. But it did. Or at least it has so far. We cannot continue on the course we're on. Reality will not allow it.

Some of the damage done to civilization and the environment is irreversible. Some of the destructive habits we have let ourselves fall into might be unlearned, if we have the will to do things in ways that at first feel a little awkward and uncomfortable. Learning how to live a sensible and sustainable life might be possible if we study the ways of some of our ancestors. I have a grandfather to remember. You probably have someone, too.

Why our electoral process breeds presidential monstrosities

The United States is nearing the end of what has been without a doubt the most destructive and morally bankrupt presidential administration in our history. Many people believe that the next president, whoever is elected, will be a significant improvement over what we, the citizens of the world, have endured for the past eight years. I am not among those who hold that belief. I believe we are destined to continue a moral and cultural decline, and therefore a political and economic decline, for the foreseeable future, no matter who is elected. Our system of government, and especially our way of choosing who will govern, is incapable of producing anything but moral dwarves. (I say this with apology to dwarves, who do not deserve to be compared with American politicians.)

The American form of democracy was devised at a time when candidates for public office rode around on horseback or in carriages. It was a time when candidates met with voters in meetings small enough that the voters could take a reasonable measure of the candidate. Candidates announced their positions in broadsides and other written publications. When votes were submitted on election, the results were often not announced for weeks or even months. The process was slow and deliberate and conducive to reflection.

The American form of democracy that exists today has little in common with its ancestor. Results come in and are analysed at lightning speed. Hours before the polls close in California and Oregon, there is a strong indication of who has won in Maine, Pennsylvania and Florida. Some people still vote after a careful reflection on the positions of the candidates on issues that matter to them, but it is safe to say that everyone is to some extent influenced by factors that have nothing whatsoever to do with actual issues. People spend billions of dollars encouraging Americans to avoid thinking altogether or, if they must think, to think as superficially as possible about tangential matters that have little bearing on the character or the policies of the candidates. The candidate who is most successful in manipulating the irrational emotions of the majority of voters tends to win the election. The candidate who spends the most money tends to be the most successful in manipulating the irrational emotions of the voters.

In today's society election campaigns are conducted in such a way that the winner of an election is almost guaranteed to have bad character. It could hardly be any other way. Our current way of conducting important campaigns makes it unlikely that anyone will enter office except for moral monsters. It is worth reflecting on why this is so.

Character is the sum total of habits that a person has developed. Habits are the consequences of choices that a person has made. Every deliberate, voluntary action reinforces a habit. Everything we have done increases the likelihood that, given similar conditions, we will do a similar thing in the future. This is elementary moral theory and something very much along these lines has been spoken about in detail by the ancient Greeks, by thinkers in India, by Chinese sages, and by elders in traditional oral cultures. If anything can claim to be a universal principle that holds for all human beings, it is something along the lines of what has just been said about the relation between choice, habituation and character.

If we now give a thought to the way that campaigns are conducted in technologically advanced nations in present times, we observe that the pattern followed by almost every candidate—I say“almost” even though I really cannot think of any exceptions—is that the candidate exaggerates his or her own strengths, usually quite dramatically, and magnifies even the smallest (or even the most imaginary) blemish in his or her opponent. The decision to distort the truth through hyperbole is made again and again as the candidate tours the country attending political rallies, and as the candidate approves the contents of televised paid political advertisements. Presidential campaigns in the United States nowadays go on for well over a year, during which time every candidate reinforces the habit many times every day of speaking in a way that is neither balanced nor in accord with reality. Such virtues as truthfulness, fairness, courage, compassion and humility are weakened, perhaps even obliterated. Vices such as pride—regarded in many cultures as the most vicious or sinful personal characteristic of all—and vanity and narcissism begin to rule the candidate's character. No matter what kind of character she or he may have had at the beginning, when candidacy was declared, is bound to have undergone a steady and dramatic turn for the worse by the time the last votes have been counted and the candidate has won.

During my life there have been twelve presidents of the United States. Of these there has been only one that I would allow into my house or welcome into my circle of friends. The rest I would not be willing to have in my company or to have contact with anyone I love for more than a few moments (and then only with plenty of chaperons on hand).

I do not believe this is a matter of bad luck that the United States has had men of such demonstrably inferior character in the White House. I think it is an inevitable consequence of democracy as we know it and as we have let it become. As long as we embrace the status quo of money-driven superficiality and persuasion through fallacy, we will never see anything but more monsters in the White House. I use the word “monster” advisedly. It comes from the Latin word for “warning”. We have been warned repeatedly. Still we seem, perhaps because of the bad character that results from our own educational institutions, unwilling to heed the warnings.

Memories of Hiroshima

There was part of me that hoped Hiroshima would still be a pile of rubble when I arrived there in November 1977. Of course I knew it would not be. I was going there to study for two academic years at Hiroshima University, and I knew from the people there and from friends who had visited the city before me that Hiroshima is a beautiful, modern city. Somehow I did not like the idea that a place destroyed by an atomic bomb could recover so well in a couple of decades. Knowing that cities can eventually get over atomic bomb attacks, I thought, might give people the idea that attacking enemies with nuclear weapons is not as dangerous as all the disarmament people claim it is.

Before going to Japan I talked to a friend in Toronto whose parents had died in the atomic bomb attack of Hiroshima. His family had lived in the suburbs of Hiroshima, and they had, as usual on a working day, gone to the downtown area to work on August 6, 1945. My friend was about five years old at the time. He remembers being taken downtown to search for the remains of his parents. Where their workplace had been, nothing was left but a vacant lot filled with rubble. Everything less solid than rock had been atomized. There were no human remains at the site. His parents had apparently turned to vapor almost instantly. One moment they existed, and the next they did not. My friend was eventually adopted by Japanese Canadians in Toronto and lived a pleasant and safe life there. As long as he lives he will never forget the fruitless search for his parents' physical remains.

We were standing in the Asian Studies library when my Japanese-Canadian friend told me about his memories of the days after the atomic bomb attack. Our conversation was overheard by a Chinese woman. When my friend and I parted company, the Chinese woman came up to me and said “I'm glad his parents were killed. They deserved nothing better.” She then told me of her childhood memories of nearly starving to death as Japanese soldiers who had occupied her village ate almost all the available food. She remember seeing Japanese soldiers toss a Chinese baby high into the air and impale it on a bayonet as it fell back to earth.

What can one say when people report such memories? All I could do was listen and wonder how on earth people who have witnessed such horrors can go on with their lives and eventually recover enough to spend most of their waking hours in banal pursuits and superficial conversations. I had had hundreds of other conversations with the Chinese woman. Her favorite topic of conversation was barbecue chicken. Talking about food seems to have pushed all those memories of starvation deep into the shadows of her subliminal mind, just as talking about baseball banished my Japanese friend's memories of the atomic bomb far into the background.

A few months before going to Hiroshima I read a book about Paul Tibbets and the flight crew of the Enola Gay, the airplane that dropped the first atomic bomb used in a war. Tibbets eventually rose to the rank of Brigadier General and lived to the age of 92. The book I read about him focused a lot of attention on the remarkable finesse Tibetts manifested in the complex and dangerous bombing mission. It also dispelled the myth—one that I had heard dozens of times—that the pilot of the Enola Gay had gone insane from guilt. General Tibetts never, so far as I know, expressed any regrets about his role in the mission. Indeed, he talked as though he was proud of it. One member of the flight crew did eventually end up in a mental hospital, but the story is that he was considered so unstable toward the end of the war that there was a question whether he should take part in the Hiroshima mission. In other words, said the book, he was well on the way to being crazy before the mission and did not get much crazier after the mission.

The book also explained why Hiroshima was chosen as a target for the first atomic bomb. It was chosen because it was not an important military target. It was chosen because it had never been bombed by conventional bombs. Hiroshima had managed to get through the war almost completely unscathed. Why choose such a target? Because the United States military wanted to know just how much damage an atomic bomb would do, so they needed a target in which no damage had been done by anything other than the atomic bomb itself. One might say it was chosen out of scientific curiosity. One might also say that it was a target populated by hardly anyone but civilians. The only military there were those needed to operate a small prison in which about a dozen American prisoners of war were being kept. The American prisoners of war, like the thousands of Japanese civilians were what a later generation of American military people would call collateral damage. The death of innocents is just part of the cost of doing business when the business is warfare. (This is nothing new or especially modern. The Bible is full of stories of Israelites and their enemies putting thousands of women and children to the sword.)

Eventually I worked up the nerve to visit the atomic bomb museum in the Peace Park in Hiroshima. Like most visitors to the museum I stumbled silently through the exhibits, numbed by the horrific photographs, stunned by a chunk of a stone wall that had melted into liquid in the unimaginable heat of the atomic bomb and then resolidified in a grotesque caricature of stone. No wonder so many human beings had essentially been turned to gas by the heat.

When I got home after seeing the atomic museum I tried to put my thoughts down on paper. The moment I tried, I began to sob. Once I began, the sobbing lasted for hours. I sobbed until my ribs hurt and my lungs burned. I have rarely felt so exhausted. Never had I been so aware of the cruelties of war. Never had I felt so ashamed of being human. Never since then have I recovered. Never have I been able to understand why human beings are so willing to inflict pain on others for the sake of getting a bit of land and control over others, so eager to visit magnified suffering on others when others have hurt them.

In August Japanese people commemorate the deaths of their ancestors. In Hiroshima this special religious holiday has a special significance. It is a day for remembering all those who died in the atomic bomb attack, and of those who have died since then of radiation-caused diseases acquired most probably as a result of being in the vicinity of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. The deaths are commemorated by putting candles into paper lanterns and letting them float down the river past the Peace Park. I watched the lanterns come down the river on August 6, 1978. At first just a few came. Then more and more came. It was beautifu as a sight. It became terrifying only when one stopped to remember that each beautiful lantern represented the soul of a victim of the atomic bomb. So many beautiful lanterns! So much pain. Once again I was overcome with shame at being human.

During the time I lived in Hiroshima, I talked with many Japanese people about the atomic bomb. I was amazed at how many Japanese people I met who told me the atomic bomb had probably been a good thing that had saved both American and Japanese lives in the long run. Some added that if the Americans had not stopped the war when it did, the Soviets would have invaded Japan and demanded at war's end that Japan be divided as Germany and Korea were into Soviet and Western zones. There is, of course, no way of knowing what would have happened. All one can do is speculate about what might have been if things had not turned out as they did. All one can know for sure is that Americans managed to convince themselves, and quite a number of Japanese people, that killing many tens of thousands of people was unavoidable and ultimately had good consequences.

Since 1979, when I left Hiroshima and returned to Canada, I have heard many times that the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved many lives. Interestingly enough, the report of lives saved has climbed steadily since 1945. The figure climbs in proportion with estimates of the number of people who died as a result of those attacks. The more we learn of the long-term effects of radiation and adjust the death toll upwards to account for all those who died lingering deaths in years and decades after the atomic bomb attack, the more lives we become convinced were saved by the attack. It is obvious that most of the people in the only nation in history to use nuclear weapons against innocent civilians are not yet capable of coming to the conclusion that the attack was unjustified, let alone possibly an unconsionable evil. Americans, after all, don't do evil. That's not part of the American self-image. Tragically, it is not part of any nation's self-image. And so the evils continue without interruption.

Coming to terms with Biblical brutality

In a previous squib I confessed to wondering how pacifist Quakers such as George Fox came to terms with all the violence and aggressive behavior depicted in the early books of the Bible. I was pretty sure there was an answer, but I did not yet know what it was. Since then I have been reading George Fox's Journal, and some hints have emerged. The one I'd like to focus on now is this passage:

I saw the state of those, both priests and people, who, in reading the scriptures, cry out much against Cain, Esau, Judas, and other wicked men of former times, mentioned in the holy scriptures; but do not see the nature of Cain, of Esau, of Judas, and those others, in themselves. These said, it was they, they, they, that were the bad people; putting it off from themselves: but when some of these came, with the light and spirit of truth, to see into themselves, then they came to say, I, I, I, it is I myself, that have been the Ishmael, the Esau, &c. For then they saw the nature of wild Ishmael [Gen 16:12] in themselves; the nature of Cain, Esau, Corah, Baalam, and of the son of perdition [John 17:12, 2 Th 2:3] in themselves, sitting above all that is called God [2 Th 2:4] in them. (For context, see George Fox's Journal on line

George Fox chooses a slightly different set of villains than I would choose. Cain, of course, killed his brother. But that villainy is as nothing compared to the genocidal brutality inflicted by Joshua on the peoples living in Canaan. In the book of Joshua we read of entire towns being levelled to the ground, and all the human beings and their livestock killed, and their holy shrines desecrated. Similar abominations are found in two books of Samuel, as Saul and especially King David continue the conquest of the Philistines and other inhabitants of the land of Canaan. Acts of horrible cruelty follow one another with tedious succession, all of them justified with the claim that the god of the Israelists had promised this land to the descendants of Israel and had grown disgusted with the Canaanites because of their wicked behavior, about which we are told almost nothing except that these people worshiped gods other than the god of Israel. In the relations between Saul and David, and then between David and his own sons, and among the various offspring of David through his many wives (one of whom he acquired through an adulterous affair and an aborted attempt to have her lawful husband killed in battle), we find few examples of anything morally uplifting. We find plenty of examples of ugly, uncivilized, aggressive, self-centered, anti-social behavior, none of which a person would wish to emulate.

The paragraph in Fox's Journal cited above helped me to realize that looking for anything admirable or heroic in the Bible may well be looking for the wrong thing. Perhaps what one ought to be looking for is simply a description of how human beings behave, and how they find a way to justify doing to others the very things they would find loathsome and unconscionable if those things were done to them.

Is the story of the brutal conquest of Canaan by the Israelites not the history of everyone who had built a nation? It is certainly the story of everyone who has built, or tried to build, an empire. It is the sad and disgusting story of how Europeans (and their African slaves) took control of North America, and of how native North Americans dealt with each other before the Europeans came along with horses, sharper swords, and gun powder. One looks in vain for much to admire in the building of a continental empire justified by the self-serving ideology of manifest destiny. As the descendants of Israel did to the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Hivites, the Perizzites, the Girgashites, the Jebusites and the Philistines, so the Spanish, French and English did to the Cherokee, the Lakota, the Arapahoe, the Comanche, the Apache, the Ute, the Haida, the Inuit and the Hawaiians. The same story continues with new locations and a new cast of characters from one century to the next.

It is not primarily in looking for inspiration that one reads the Bible wrongly, says Fox. The greatest mistake in reading the Bible is to read all these accounts of hideous human conduct and to think that barbarism and savagery belongs to others and not to oneself. The wrong way to read the story of David's oldest son Amnon's rape of his half-sister (2 Sam 13) is to see rape as a vicious act that other men (they, they, they) do and that one would never do oneself, as if testosterone is toxic only to others but an ambrosial nectar in one's own bodily chemistry. (I speak as a man, because I have experienced being a man. I am sure women have their own toxins to contend with.) Similarly, the wrong way to read the story of Absalom's vengeful killing of his half-brother Amnon is to see vindictive anger as a vice that afflicts others but not oneself. The wrong way to read the story of Absalom's rebellion against his father, King David, is to think that others, but never oneself, are driven to dethrone their fathers out of jealous impatience.

The wrong way to read the bloodthirsty rampages of the Bible is to pin such labels as “terrorist” and “insurgent” on those who fight back against empires that have taken their land or imposed their cultural standards on the colonized, not realizing that military and economic imperialism is itself terrifying to those who are subjected to it. Folly gives way to wisdom only when self-righteousness gives way to humility and blaming turns into confession.

I admit that I was on the verge of giving up reading the Bible, so distasteful did I find the conduct narrated in it. I longed for something inspiring, something sacred. I had forgotten the observation of David Elkins in Beyond Religion: A Personal Program for Building a Spiritual Life Outside the Walls of Traditional Religion that the sacred is made up of two components: 1) what he calls the spiritual, which aspires to lofty heights and nobility and transcendance and triumph; and 2) what he calls the soulful, which dives into the abysmal depths of the human experience and into the pain and suffering that we inflict upon ourselves and others through our short-sightedness and moral blindness. There is plenty of soulful material in the Bible—enough to keep one going for a lifetime—but only if one remembers that the constant failures are not only the failures of them, them, them, but also (and more importantly) the failures of me, me, me.

Dare I say it? George Fox read the Bible as a Buddhist might read it.

Winning the Buddhist Quaker vote

The news analysts I regularly watch on television—I admittedly watch nothing other than PBS—keep saying the 2008 presidential election may be the most important election in American history. I disagree. I think the election of 2000 was the most important. That election was so disastrous, and the consequences so damaging to the United States and to the world, that the election of 2008 amounts to little more than a contest to see who gets to stand on the bridge while the ship of state sinks. The ship has taken so many hits that she is no longer seaworthy, and she has been pretty much beyond repair since the current captain took the wheel for his second watch after proving to everyone except for 62,040,606 (51% of the) American voters that he was unfit for public office.

Even if it were still possible for anyone to salvage the wrecked ship of the American state, it would not be easy for me to decide for which of the surviving candidates to vote. Like many other voters, I watched all the debates among the presidential candidates of both parties and sank deeper into dismay at the superficiality of the questions and the answers, and the adolescent coverage of the race. We viewers learned a great deal about how countless experts expected the various sociological divisions of the American electorate to vote in the primaries.

One still hears a fair amount of discussion about who is likely to win the evangelical vote and the Jewish vote. One does not hear quite as much about which candidate is mostly likely to win the Unitarian vote, the Buddhist vote and the Quaker vote. And so, as a service to election watchers everywhere, I have compiled a modest list of issues that may be decisive in determining who gets the vote of one fellow who comes from a Unitarian family and who is now a practicing Buddhist Quaker. Whether this one fellow is representative of the Buddhist Quaker segment of the American population, I leave it to pollsters to determine. So here is a guide to what a presidential candidate has to pledge to do to earn my vote. The guide, of course, can be used to figure out who will get my vote for congressional representative and senator of my home and native state.

1. Close all US military bases outside the 50 states, and reduce the military to a size no larger than what is needed to deal with domestic issues, such as providing disaster relief after storms, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. (The Canadian military would be a good model to follow in reforming the US military. Worth considering is the Canadian model of a unified military service rather than having a navy, marine corps and air force separate from the army.)
2. Dismantle all nuclear warheads and chemical weapons and find a safe way to dispose of the toxins contained therein.
3. Open the borders to all citizens of every North, Central and South American country so that all people living in the Americas can move freely throughout the two continents of North and South America.
4. Make Spanish and French official languages along with English.
5. Enforce strong environmental laws. Make sure those already on the books are properly enforced and pass new standards and regulations in consultation with scientists.
6. Build an infrastructure for generating electrical power by harnessing solar power, wind, geothermal energy and tidal forces.
7. Start a national campaign to reeducate the public to use their own muscles for many tasks now done with the help of energy-consuming machines. Thus, instead of only seeking new ways to provide artificial forms of energy, reduce dependence on all forms of energy not generated by the human body.
8. Bring in a system of universal health care in which no citizen or legal resident alien is deprived of basic medical coverage.
9. Begin a national campaign to reeducate the public in preventive health measures. (Worth considering is a policy, similar to those in Singapore and Japan, of offering annual cash incentives to citizens who maintain their weight within healthy limits and who pass fitness tests, and fining those who do not.

10. Abolish the death penalty throughout the country.
11. Decriminalize narcotics and other recreational drugs and make available clinics in which those wishing to break addictions could receive effective therapy and where others could procure regulated drugs administered safely rather than having to rely on illegal sources.
12. Take all prisons (and, ideally, hospitals and clinics) out of the hands of private ownership and for-profit management.

13. Require the registration of all firearms and the licensing of users of firearms, who must prove their ability to operate them safely and who must provide proof of carrying sufficient liability insurance to compensate anyone they may injure through improper use of firearms.
14. Make provisions for giving massive amounts of food and educational aid to struggling countries.
15. Work to make the United Nations and world courts strong and effective.
16. Balance the budget. Raise sufficient revenues by taxing corporations and investment earnings and the purchase of luxury items and by imposing a modest tax on salary earnings, and then keep expenditures lower than the revenues so gained.

In short, all anyone needs to do to get my vote is embrace my politically moderate values and run the nation by the bodhisattva standards of love and compassion toward all sentient beings. If any of the readers of this blog know of any candidates who meet all, or even most, of these criteria, please leave a comment.

Struggling with the Bible

At this year's meeting of the InterMountain Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends there was a workshop entitled “Top 10 Quaker Bible Verses.” The purpose of the workshop was to enable Friends to explore their attitudes toward the Bible to become more aware of just how large a role the Bible played in the journals and epistles of George Fox (1624–1691) and other early Quakers. Among the resources available for this kind of study are on-line annotated versions of the letters of George Fox at Earlham College. Scholars have gone through the journals and epistles of Fox and noted the many direct quotes from and allusions to the Bible. A look at a randomly chosen letter will show how extensive Fox's use of the Bible was. Every paragraph has several quotations; indeed, nearly every sentence has at least an oblique reference to the Bible. There is no doubt that George Fox knew his scriptures very well.

Many of the people of the seventeenth century, including most Quakers, followed a lectionary in their Bible studies. A typical lectionary suggests one psalm, one passage from the old testament, one passage from a gospel and one passage from an epistle for every day of the year. Some lectionaries are designed to guide the reader through the entire Bible every year, while others are designed to take three years to read the entire text. Anyone wishing to experiment with a lectionary can find one on the web site of the Presbyterian Church of the USA .Never having approached the Bible through a lectionary, I chose one a few weeks ago and plunged in. I also began reading the Bible from the very first page, just to see how far I could get. So far I have made it through the five books of the Torah, Joshua, Judges, Ruth and most of 1 Samuel. My bookmark seems barely to have moved from the front cover. Clearly reading the entire Bible is going to take a good deal of time, and there's a good chance I'll lay the task down for periods of time, making it take even longer.

Reading the Bible has been quite a struggle for me. I have not yet found much that I like or find in any way inspiring (except for the heartwarming book of Ruth), and I have found a great deal that I strongly dislike and find disgusting. As I read, I find myself growing increasingly curious about how the early Quakers reacted to what they read in the so-called Good Book. For example, given that most of the early Quakers were committed to some version of the peace testimony, which is based on these well-known lines in George Fox's journal:

I told [the Commonwealth Commissioners] I lived in the virtue of that life and power that took away the occasion of all wars and I knew from whence all wars did rise, from the lust, according to James's doctrine... I told them I was come into the covenant of peace which was before wars and strifes were. (See the Wikipedia article on the Quaker Peace Testimony.)

Early Quakers fashioned a testimony that included the phrase “we do certainly know, and so testify to the world, that the spirit of Christ, which leads us into all Truth, will never move us to fight any war against any man with outward weapons, neither for the kingdom of Christ, nor for the kingdoms of this world.” So the question that has begun to rumble in my mind is how the people who testified that they would wage no war against anyone with outward weapons understood all the passages of the Torah and the books of Joshua and Judges in which the Israelites are slaughtering tens of thousands of men, women and children belonging to the peoples who inhabited Moab and Canaan before the Israelites waged what can only be described as a genocidal campaign against them. Not only do we read that YHWH did not disapprove of the slaughter, but we read that he encouraged it, even demanded it. Not only were all the people residing in those lands to be killed (with an occasional exception made for women who had not yet slept with a man, whose lives were spared so that they might be forced to become the wives and concubines of Israelites), but often their animals were to be mutilated, and all their holy places were to be demolished and scattered to the winds. How did Quakers square this bloodthirsty deity, who commanded brutally aggressive actions against people who had never done harm to the Israelites, and who ordained the death penalty for Israelites who failed to honor the sabbath, or who committed adultery, or who disobeyed their fathers and mothers, or whose eyes fell upon the sacred objects around the altar on which countless animals were burned after their blood was poured on the floor–how did they square this deity with the observation in the gospel of John that God is love?

One approach to this problem might be to say that YHWH, who plays such a central role in the lives of the descendants of Israel, is just a different character from the God who inspired the Jews at the time of Jesus of Nazareth. After all, there is such an apparent different in “personality” of the YHWH of the Torah and the God of the gospels that one might as well say they are not identical to one another, perhaps do not even have the same essence. A modern reader of the Bible might well approach scriptures as a phenomenologist of religions and say that the deity of the early descendants of Israel is just plain a different character than the deity of the gospels and the letters of Paul, and one might say the angry, jealous, almost petty YHWH of Exodus makes a comeback in the Book of Revelations, where once again there is no shortage of smiting promised for the enemies of God and Christ. This strategy, however, would clearly not have worked for the early Quakers, who were strongly committed to the story told in the Bible itself, a story in which the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob. Moses and Joshua is the very same God who so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son as an atonement for the sin of Adam.

I do not know how the early Quakers managed to find a way to find the Bible inspiring; I expect this is a topic for considerable research in the writings of George Fox, Isaac Penington, William Penn, Margaret Fell, John Woolman and other early Friends. Whether I will muster the curiosity myself to do this research, I don't yet know. What I do know is that for me, as for many other liberal unprogrammed Quakers, it is much easier to search elsewhere for inspiration than in the Bible. When I attended Quaker meetings forty years ago, it was not uncommon to hear Friends quoting the Bible in their verbal testimony in meetings for worship and giving inspiring oral commentaries on them. As I recall (after forty years!), there were rarely any passages cited of the sort that I have reported finding so challenging. I don't recall hearing much about the smiting of enemies of God and the stoning to death of adulteresses and disobedient sons.

Nowadays, I find Biblical citation less frequent than it used to be. Judging from things Friends were saying in the workshop at this year's IMYM, it is not hard to understand why. A good many liberal unprogrammed Quakers these days admit to finding the Bible unpalatable. Many who have a taste for reading early Christian writings at all would rather read Gnostic texts such as the Gospel of Thomas or the Gospel of Mary. Elaine Pagels has become their scholar of choice. Others have pretty much abandoned Christian writings altogether, preferring instead to read Thich Nhat Hanh, Swami Vivekananda, Rumi and Laozi. (I myself get almost all my inspiration from Buddhist sources, so how can I blame them?)

Here is my concern: as liberal Friends turn increasingly away from the Bible and toward the vast body of inspirational writing in the rest of world literature, they may slowly be dissolving the very glue that has held Quakers together for the past four hundred years and that gives context, shape and meaning to the testimonies on peace, integrity, simplicity, community, equality and ecological stewardship. In a postmodern Quakerism I fear the prophecy of William Butler Yeats:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

The Winter of My Deep Content

During my youth I was in the habit of letting important decisions make themselves, with as little interference from me as possible. So when my wife and I left Argenta in search of gainful employment, we had a decision to make when we got to Revelstoke: go west toward Vancounver or head east toward Calgary. Both sounded appealing. We flipped a coin. The toss sent us east toward Calgary.

When we got to Calgary, the Calgary Stampede was still on, and there was hardly a bed to be found. A kind-hearted hotel clerk put us up for a night on a couple of air mattresses in a hallway near the kitchen, and the next day we headed south for Lethbridge, Alberta. Within a day, I found a job working on a dairy farm. The work was hard, and the pay was awful. It was just the sort of thing I was looking for.

The farm work lasted until December. The Canadian immigration authorities sent my wife back to the USA for medical reasons in September, so I was on my own as I faced my first Canadian winter. Work proved to be very hard to find. I headed back to Lethbridge and got a cheap apartment in a dark and depressing basement. It seemed like a perfect place to write a novel. So I did. Writing a novel proved to be just what I needed to think through the jumble of thoughts and emotions that were blowing through my heart and mind like an Alberta blizzard. The cold, the loneliness and the tedium of having no job were hard to take, so I took to drinking hard. (That, I learned, is a Canadian solution to many a problem. I've heard rumors that Canadians are not unique in seeking refuge in this particular solution.)

Fortunately, before going too far down that road, I got an unexpected call sometime in early 1968 from a man named Larry I had met briefly as he was passing through Argenta in June. He had heard I was in Lethbridge and might need a friend. He invited me to his home for a meal and told me I'd be welcome to join the handful of Quakers who met in his home for meetings for worship. A lifeline was thrown to me, and somehow I managed to catch it.

Larry knew I had too much time on my hands, so he invited me to join him as he made calls connected with his work. He worked for the John Howard Society, an organization that helps people just released from prison find suitable housing and work. By attending him on these calls I met several remarkable people who had been imprisoned for various crimes. Most of them were First Nation people, because, as I learned, native peoples make up a disproportionately large percentage of Alberta's prison population. White people tended to be given suspended sentences on first convictions. Native people tended to be sent to prison on first convictions. (There is a book entitled The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Prison that chronicles how social class is correlated with sentencing in the USA; the same pattern exists in Canada.) The more I saw of Larry's world, the more I saw that there is not much justice in the justice system, and the more I saw that prison does not do most people who go there much good. A few people manage to acquire skills that they can eventually use for honest work, but the majority come out worse than they were when they went in. About all that more will be said in other posts.

Living with Larry's family was an old man known only as Duke. Duke had had a stroke and could speak only with great difficulty. He read everything he could get his hands on. I got into the habit of going to Duke's room after meetings for worship, and he and I would spend hours together. He wanted me to read aloud passages from books he found inspiring. As time went on I learned that Duke considered himself a Buddhist, although he pointed out that Buddhism teaches that there is no I, and therefore it is, strictly speaking, impossible for a Buddhist to say “I am a Buddhist.” Like me, Duke had also dabbled in Communism. He fancied himself to be an artist, a painter. I fancied myself to be a novelist. We both knew we were destined to be unknown. We had a lot in common.

Another thing Duke and I had in common was that we both loved the Quakers we knew, but we both felt uneasy about their Christian roots. Larry quoted the Bible quite a lot in conversation and obviously spent much of his time reflecting on the life of Jesus. Duke and I approved of Jesus; he was, in our minds, a sort of honorary Buddhist. We liked the Quakers we knew, because they seemed to be trying hard to live as much like Jesus as they could. They helped the poor and the weak and the downtrodden. They worked in every way they could to remove the root causes of systematic violence, such as is provided by the military and the criminal justice system with quite a bit of help from taxpayers. Like Jesus, the Quakers won approval from Duke and me for being very much like Buddhists.

Conversing with Larry, spending time with Duke, and going to Quaker meetings for worship helped me shape a novel, and writing a novel helped me make sense of my life and got me started on the road to making sense of religion. Duke lent me a book on Buddhist meditation, and I taught myself to do mindfulness meditation and loving-kindness meditation. Despite being allergic to labels, I begin to think of myself as a Buddhist. And a Quaker. A Buddhist and a Quaker. I wondered what Jesus would have to say about all that.

One night, one very cold night in the dark basement where I spent the winter of 1967–1968, I had a troubled dream. I awoke from it full of terror. I was afraid to go back to sleep, for fear of having another nightmare. As I lay there in that state of being neither fully awake nor quite asleep, I sensed a stirring in the room. I bolted upright just in time to see a man in white robes walking through the closed door of my bedroom closet. He came toward me. He placed his hand on me. He said everything would be fine. I recognized him. He was the honorary Buddhist that men call Jesus. No sooner did I recognize him than he was gone.

I can never be sure that I am not being a complete fool. Like everyone else, I take my chances. That night I took a chance on interpreting that dream, or vision, or hallucination as confirmation that Jesus took no offence at Duke and me for making him an honorary Buddhist, a bodhisattva instead of a Christ. I also took it that he thought it was just fine that I continue practicing Buddhist meditation and going to Quaker meetings for worship.

The teachers and the hippies

Argenta, British Columbia is pretty far away from almost everything that most people have heard of. One way to get there is to drive along the Trans-Canada highway until you get to Revelstoke (population 7500, located about six hours east of Vancouver and five hours west of Calgary). Head south on road 23. Argenta is 237 km (142 miles) to the south of Revelstoke. Figure on taking about four hours, averaging about 35 mph but often going quite a bit slower. Part of the journey involves taking the world-famous Shelter Bay Galena Bay ferry for about three miles across a wide spot of the Columbia river.

There is a Quaker Meeting in Argenta. It was established in the 1950s by three families who had been school teachers in California during the McCarthy Era. During the height of the paranoid dread of Communism that grabbed hold of the United States, the state of California required all school teachers and other employees of the school system, including janitors and bus drivers, to swear an oath of loyalty to the United States. Quakers do not swear oaths; to know why, read the Gospel of Matthew 5:33–37. People who did not swear oaths during the McCarthy era were not allowed to work for the public school system. So John and Helen Stevenson and George and Mary Pollard and their families moved to Canada and eventually settled in a tiny settlement on glacier-fed Kootenay Lake. They were joined by four other Quaker families and eventually founded the Delta Co-operativeand a small Quaker school.

I met John and Helen Stevenson at a Yearly Meeting of Quakers in the late spring of 1967, just a few months after arriving in Canada as a draft-dodger, and somehow an invitation to visit Argenta was offered and accepted, so my newly acquired bride and I drove from Winnipeg to Argenta, via the route that involves taking the Shelter Bay Galena Bay ferry. When we arrived, we were warmly welcomed and told we could stay for as long as we liked in any one of the unoccupied cabins.

Being accustomed to the ways of the world, I was uneasy about moving into a cabin before knowing who owned it and how much rent I would be expected to pay. I was stunned to learn that most of what was there did not belong to anyone in particular. Things belonged to the community as a whole. If a cabin was empty, we could stay there. Of course, it would always be appreciated if we pitched in with whatever work that needed to be done. I learned to milk the community cow and took on the responsibility of doing that twice a day, and I worked in the community garden for a couple of hours every morning. That seemed to be the only “rent” that anyone expected in return for having a place to sleep and joining the community for three meals a day, all cooked on a big wood-burning stove. As drawn as I was to theidea of radical communism, I never did get over being uneasy with the practice. I thought I needed money, even though there was no need to buy much of anything. I was used to making around $80 a week doing menial labor, and I could not adjust to the idea that the average annual income for the citizens of Argenta was around $600, about 15% of what I was used to making.

On First Day (which expression Quakers used to prefer to Sunday) we attended the unprogrammed meeting for worship in the Meetinghouse the Friends had built in the 1950s. It was roughhewn and simple, and it served several functions. It suited my tastes perfectly. The people who attended meetings for worship were delightful. When they spoke, it was always worth listening. One regular attender named George rarely spoke, but on most weeks he would stand and whistle a hymn. I had never heard anyone whistle so beautifully. George was a nudist. He wore a shirt and trousers to meetings for worship, but most of the time he walked around the wooded mountains wearing no more than he was born with. That feat amazed me, especially as I became acquainted with the thick clouds of aggressively hungry mosquitoes that drove both human beings and animals frantic. George did not mind them at all. He fed them with the same loving kindness that he manifested in everything he did.

Sometime during the summer of 1967, a van full of hippies pulled into Argenta. Like me, they were evading the draft and seeking sanity and refuge in Canada. They were lively, full of interesting conversation and open to experimenting with Quaker meetings for worship. The Quakers were every bit as hospitable to them as they had been to me—at first. It did not take long, however, to learn that the hippies also liked to smoke marijuana and use LSD, and—more alarming—that they were quite a bit more casual than the Quakers about sex. It was not long before some of the Quakers were expressing concern about the students attending the Argenta Friends School. It would not do, they reasoned, to send pregnant daughters and drug-using sons back to their parents in Philadelphia. Quaker parents, said the concerned Friends, do not send their children to Quaker schools to be turned into hippies. A crisis had emerged within the community.

A special business meeting was held to work through the crisis. Some Friends expressed the concerns outlined above. Others pointed out that Quakers have always struck mainstream society as radical, experimental, non-conformist seekers, and Quakers have a long history of landing in jail for their non-conformist ways. Hippies were not so different from the radical Quakers of the past and the present. Besides, they were in favor of making love, not war, and Quakers ought to embrace everyone who is dedicated to cultivating the virtues that are the occasion of harmony and peace rather than conflict and war.

The disagreements that arose at that meeting were expressions of deeply held convictions that seemed at first irreconcilable. And yet no tempers flared. People spoke. People listened. The atmosphere was charged not only with disagreement but with love. The love triumphed. A solution was found. Unity was reached. Now, more than forty years later, I have completely forgotten the details of the solution, but I shall never forget the love with which it emerged. The hippies continued to live nearby and to come to meetings for worship when they pleased, but somehow they were gently persuaded to keep some of their behavior to themselves, at least until the more cautious Quakers had a chance to make a more considered assessment of ways that struck them as a little too worldly and un-Quakerly.

Being in the presence of Quakers striving to reach unity on a perplexing and potentially divisive problem allowed me to witness a process that became for me a paradigm of how conflicts should be resolved. Even in years when I had almost no contact with Quakers, the Quaker process remained my model.

Turning points in one's life can be astonishingly brief. When I look back on the Argenta experience, it feels as though it had such a profound effect on me that I must have been there for years, perhaps decades. In fact, I think the stay in Argenta was not much more than six weeks. By mid-summer my bride and I were taking the Shelter Bay Galena Bay ferry in the opposite direction and heading back to Revelstoke and heading from there in the direction of Calgary. I have never been back to Argenta. There has been no need. Argenta has never left me.

The Comrade and the Friend

One bitter-cold night in late March 1967, I arrived in Winnipeg, Manitoba by Greyhound Bus on a one-way ticket from Chicago. I had no need for a return ticket, because I had decided to stay out of the United States forever, or at least until I was no longer eligible for military service there. I checked into a hotel around midnight and thumbed through the telephone directory, not having any idea where to begin making a new life in this city I had never even visited before. My eye was caught by an entry for the Communist Party of Canada. I jotted down the address and determined to visit them the next morning. After all, I reasoned, I like the idea of Communism, and surely Communists will be sympathetic to a refugee from the United States who refuses to go to Vietnam to fight Communists there.

I never did find my way to the Canadian Communist Party. I did, however, discover a Communist bookstore in the same neighborhood. I browsed the shelves and discovered a couple of titles that looked interesting and took them to the bookshop owner, a lean and hungry-looking young man with wild hair and horn rim glasses. He looked the part. I told him I wished to purchase these two books and to have information about people who might be willing to help an American draft dodger get established in Canada. He seemed quite uninterested in my situation, but he gave me two names of people he thought might be willing to help me. He also said he thought I had chosen two interesting books, pointing out they were published in the Soviet Union and were quite authentic.

I got in touch with both of the two men. One said he was a Communist and would be willing to billet me in a spare room in his small apartment. The other said he would be happy to see me and gave me a location where I could meet him on the campus of the University of Winnipeg. I made arrangements to meet him the following day, then found my way to the billeting Communist. The Communist made me tea and introduced me to his family and his ferocious German shepherd. The dog later bit me twice, grabbing onto my knee so firmly that I limped for several days afterward, but his wife and daughter were more hospitable. Shown to my room, I read one of the books from the Communist bookstore. The contents horrified me. I began to think I might not be a Soviet-style Communist.

The next day I went to see the university professor. Right away I told him that I was a Communist of sorts and asked if he was, too. No, he said. He was a Quaker. Naturally, I was somewhat disappointed at the prospects of being aided by some kind of Christian, but at least I knew enough about Quakers to know that they were opposed to war.

There is no need to go into further details about my first encounters with a real live Communist and a real live Quaker. Suffice it so say that after a week my disillusionment with what I had seen of Canadian Communism was matched by a new fascination with the gentleness, good humor and intelligence that I was encountering in Canadian Quakers. Although my flirtation with Communism continued on and off for several more years, my attraction to Quakerism proved much deeper and more durable. About it, more will be said in subsequent posts.

Thy saving health among all nations

Harry Emerson Fosdick (1878–1969) wrote “I would rather live in a world where my life is surrounded by mystery than live in a world so small that my mind would comprehend it.” While I am inclined to subscribe to that sentiment, there are mysteries that I would not at all mind having unraveled. One of the mysteries I would love to see solved is why the United States of America has allowed itself to have the most expensive but the least efficient health care system in the industrialized world. A related mystery is why the people of the United States are as a rule so resistant to the models provided by various other countries.

In debates about the state of health care in the United States, I have heard people say firmly that they would not at all like to see the USA have a Canadian-style health care system. It is difficult to know exactly what that means, since Canada does not have a health care system. Each of Canada's provinces has a health care system, and each province has a different model. The only thing they have in common is that a person can receive higher-quality and more-affordable health care in any of them than one can get in the United States. So part of what Americans who reject Canadian models are rejecting, it seems, is quality, efficiency and affordability. Apparently, these Americans prefer overpriced mediocrity.

One of the arguments I have heard some of my fellow Americans use is that the United States simply cannot afford to provide universal coverage. Those who cannot afford health insurance policies must therefore either go into personal debt to get medical care, or they must do without medical care. This raises the question of why so many other countries can provide health insurance to every adult and child without going broke. Why is the United States alone among wealthy nations in being unable to provide reasonably priced health insurance to everyone, and to provide subsidized policies to those who cannot afford them?

Let me suggest a few speculative answers. One reason might be that the United States spends far too much revenue on maintaining a military that it really does not need, including military bases in around twenty nations around the world. According to The Arithmetic of America's military,

Our military deploys well over half a million soldiers, spies, technicians, teachers, dependents, and civilian contractors in other nations. To dominate the oceans and seas of the world, we are creating some thirteen naval task forces built around aircraft carriers….

The expense of maintaining all these unnecessary bases does not include the cost of waging wars that contravene international law and that do far more to endanger the American people than to protect them. It is estimated that the war in Iraq costs around $5000 per second. Supposing a health insurance policy costs $10,000 per year, the money being spent in Iraq could provide one year's worth of health insurance to 43,200 people for what it costs to finance one day of war in Iraq. For the cost of about three months of war, more than 4,000,000 Americans could be provided with health insurance.

Were it not for a bloated military, the United States could easily provide health insurance to all those who cannot afford it. But that still would not address the extraordinarily high costs of medical procedures and pharmaceuticals. The cost of those is held within reasonable bounds in Canada, most European countries and many Asian countries by simply putting a cap on how much profit a health-provider can make. Physicians, hospitals, and pharmaceutical companies are allowed to make reasonable livelihoods in Canada, Europe and Japan, but one will find no billionaires, and perhaps not even many millionaires, among health-care providers.

The United States has for a long time been married to an abusive ideology, an ideology that leaves Americans of all walks of life battered, bruised and impoverished. The principal dogma of that ideology is that unrestricted and unregulated competition keeps prices affordable for all consumers of every kind of product. Therefore, say those who propagate this dogma, the best way to keep costs reasonable is to make sure that providers of goods and services must compete with one another, and the best way to make sure of robust competition is to minimize government regulation and interference.

The argument may sound good, but it is demonstrably flawed. This is the system we have had since at least the time of President Reagan, and it has not worked at all. First of all, companies that are forced to compete in a free market are also forced to advertise in expensive media. Watch television for one evening and count how many advertisements you see for pills, salves, creams, ointments and powders. Who pays for those advertisements? The people who are persuaded that they need the product being sold. Who pays for those advertisements in other countries? No one. Medical providers usually do not advertise in other countries. Products there are plentiful and affordable. And the providers of those products are regulated. Their system works. The system in the United States does not work. It is perhaps time for our policy makers to stop preaching and to begin learning.

What we need to do to fix our broken health care system is no mystery. The only mystery is why we don't do it.

12,000,000 reasons to change the law

During the past year or so, a figure that has been repeatedly used is 12,000,000. That is supposed to be the number of people who have come to the United States seeking employment without going through the formal process for becoming immigrants or permanent residents as recognized by United States Citizenship and Immigration Services . Those who enter the country without the proper documentation are often referred to as undocumented workers or illegal immigrants. Their presence in the United States causes alarm to some.

If it is true that twelve million people have entered the United States for employment, then we have twelve million good reasons to change US immigration laws. There is clearly a demand for permanent residence in the United States in people now living outside the country. If there were not, these people would not be coming here. There is also obviously a demand within the United States for the labor that these people from outside the country provide. If there were not, these people would not be finding gainful employment. What makes the most sense, then, is to make it possible for workers from outside the United States to come to this country to work, and to bring their families if they so wish. Probably the best way to do this would be to form an American Union, along the lines of the European Union, such that every citizen or legal immigrant to any country in North, Central and South America could take up residence in any other country on these continents. In this age, such documentation as passports and visas make very little sense any more; they are instruments of an earlier world whose political and economic conditions bear little resemblance to the world as it it now.

The argument most commonly used against allowing more free access to residence in the United States is that doing so would amount to a kind of “amnesty”. It would, so the argument goes, send the wrong signal to people; it would send the message that those who break the law are not punished. That claim is plainly silly. The message that amnesties in general send is not that those who break the law can avoid punishment, but that some laws are so foolish that they cannot be enforced and that those who break them really ought not to be punished.

To punish people for seeking a livelihood is clearly unjust. To put obstacles in the way of those prepared to do honest work for honest wages is monstrous. America's immigration laws are unjust—monstrously so. It is time to repeal them and bring into effect policies that reflect a more generous spirit and that manifest the celebrated American admiration of industriousness, resourcefulness and ingenuity, not to mention the kind of courage it takes to move to another country in search of a better life.

What makes no sense at all is to set up the kinds of conditions that almost guarantee a black market. When people cannot work legally, they will work on the black market, and people will hire them, and those who hire black market labor will not infrequently exploit the laborers so employed. Black market labor will almost always be paid substandard wages, receive substandard benefits (or none at all) and be subjected to the cruelties of an essentially criminal economy. As the law stands now, those who cross the borders of the United States without proper documentation are by that action alone classed as criminals. The people who employ them are also criminals. Criminals working for criminals is not a promising formula for honest, integrity and humane treatment. But the criminality in this case is a completely artificial one. It is a criminality created by a law badly in need of reform, not a criminality consisting of dangerous or harmful behavior. It is a criminality that could be removed by reforming laws, making it possible for people to do what they do now, which is to earn money so that they can feed, house and perhaps even educate their families.

One hears opponents to immigration reform talking of the need of securing our borders. One look at a map or a globe shows what a foolish concern this is. The borders between the United States and its two continental neighbors, Canada and Mexico, are mostly the work of a draftsman using a straightedge. Except for the Rio Bravo (known in the US as the Rio Grande), there is not a single natural geographical feature defining the borders between the United States and Canada or Mexico. The border to the north cuts the great prairies in half, runs in the middle of Great Lakes and bisects mountain ranges and their valleys and basins. The border to the south runs in the middle of two great deserts. They make no geographical sense whatsoever. People live in geographical realities, not on maps. When cattle graze in a basin, or when coyotes run along the ridge of a mountain, they have no idea of going from one country to the next. There is no good reason it should be otherwise for human beings. If we had any desire at all to live in a way that made sense, we would abolish all these man-made lines on the earth and allow everyone to live wherever they can make a livelihood. That may not happen within the next couple of years, but at least we Americans, who pride ourselves on pragmatic values and on observing the moral imperative to help provide the conditions of freedom throughout the world, could begin by erasing our foolish and unnecessary borders.

There, another pseudo-problem has been solved with a single stroke of sensibility and clear thinking.

"All punishment is mischief"

Certainly on of the most remarkable religious figures of our times is Mata Amritanandamayi Devi, better known to her devotees (and those who struggle with long Indian names) as Amma-ji. She is also known to many by her description as the hugging saint. Amma-ji's organization is known around the world for its humanitarian work in the fields of education, housing for the poor, agricultural service and just about every other area in which there are people are in need of kindness and help. One of the many projects undertaken by her organization is called Circle of Love Inside, which puts prisoners in touch with volunteers who are willing to correspond with them regularly.

Earlier this year I received a letter from a prisoner with whom I have been corresponding. He had not written for a while and apologized for the pause. The prison in which he is serving a life sentence was undergoing a lockdown, as a result of which all inmates were confined to their cells for a month without access to the exercise facilities or the commissary. Without access to the commissary, the prisoners had no access to any food except what is served to them in their cells. My friend said something in his letter that I was unable to forget:

I cannot imagine ever hating anyone so much that I would force him eat the food they serve us in prison.

He had described the food to me in earlier letters. It sounded both unappetizing and lacking in nutritional value. Most of the prisoners with whom my wife and I correspond have described the food as barely fit for animals. Add to that the fact that prisoners are routinely subjected to insults and often appallingly insensitive comments from guards and other inmates, and that guards often look the other way when inmates are being harassed and abused by other inmates, and the picture emerges of overcrowded prisons as environments that promote very little that conduces to positive transformation.

Statistics speak volumes about the effectiveness of this way of treating prisoners. According to the Department of Justice website, 65% of the criminals convicted of violent crimes in the United States are arrested on suspicion of committing violent crimes within three years of being released from prison. About 50% of those who serve sentences for violent crimes are sentenced to more time in prison for further violent crimes. American prisons do very little to reform behavior or build character; they do a great deal to punish, demean, belittle, shame and humiliate. The days of the penitentiary (a place to do penance) seem to be gone; the culture of the dungeon, which the European enlightenment tried to banish, has come back. Americans have forgotten Jeremy Bentham's dictum: “All punishment is mischief; all punishment in itself is evil.”

A good many people in American prisons have little education. Those who long to use their time behind bars to improve themselves through education are thwarted. Classes exist in many prisons, but there are often more people waiting to get into them than actually taking them. Some schools offer on-line education, but tuition is prohibitively high. Schools that offer lower tuition for in-state residents often do not regard state prisoners as legitimate residents of the state. As prisoners seeking educational opportunities face a long road of red tape and obstacles, their frustration mounts. Eventually, many simply give up. When their sentence ends, they are sent back into the world with no more education or skills than they had went they went in, and whatever social skills they may have once had have been eroded by years of abusive treatment. Few people on the outside are inclined to forgive a person who has served time in prison. America has increasingly devolved into a “one strike and you're out” society.

The American way these days seems to be to create problems through short-sightedness and stupidity—the war in Iraq comes to mind—and then to deal with those problems with reactive, fearful, angry, hateful and vindictive measures that make the situation dramatically worse. This pattern seems to prevail in almost everything American society as a whole does nowadays. It should come as no surprise that this pattern manifests itself in the prison system. Until this changes, we can only thank God (or whomever we wish to direct our thanks) for organizations like Amma-ji's, who make time to offer comfort to prisoners.

Why are so many Americans in prison?

The next time you are aboard an airplane in the United States, think about this: the Department of Justice predicts that one out of fifteen Americans will spend time in prison sometime during their lifetimes. If you were on an airplane with 416 passengers aboard (the capacity of a Boeing 747), figure that statistically speaking about 27 of them will have spent time in prison by the time they die (that's about how many sit in the first-class cabin).

One quarter of all the prisoners in the world are imprisoned in the United States of America, which has 5% of the world's population. 737 out of every 100,000 US citizens is currently in prison, by far the highest incarceration rate in the world. That's 5.3 times the incarceration rate in the United Kingdom, and 6.6 times the incarceration rate in China and 12.5 times the rate in Norway. The state of Maine, which has the lowest incarceration rate of any state in the United States (with 148 prisoners per 100,000 people), still has a higher incarceration rate than the UK.

According to the Department of Justice website, about 52% of the prisoners in the United States are serving sentences for violent crimes. 20% are there for drug offenses. 57% of prisoners in Federal prisons are there for drug-related crimes, as opposed to 21% of those in state prisons.

The Daoist philosopher Laozi (Lao-tzu) observed that the sole cause of crime is the making of laws. One way to reduce crime, therefore, is to make fewer activities illegal. Most people would probably not favor decriminalizing such activities as intentional homicide, assault and battery and rape. But aside from some activities that are clearly so disruptive to the social harmony that people who do them should probably be given an opportunity to reform their conduct, there are some activities that should probably never have been considered criminal in the first place.

Two activities that are obvious candidates for being decriminalized are drug-related offenses and coming into the country with the purpose of making a livelihood. America's immigration laws are absurdly exclusive. One way to eliminate some crime is to open the borders so that people seeking honest work are not classified as dishonest just because they seek ways to enter the country without being kept on the outside by America's ridiculously overprotective restrictions. The campaign to “secure our borders” is little but a thinly disguised xenophobia like the nativism of the 19th century that resulted in ugly populist campaigns against Irish and Italian Catholics and Jews and Asians, not to mention a trumped-up invasion of Mexico that resulted in an illegal and unnecessary war—the first of many the United States would wage.

A second way to make a dramatic reduction of the country's prison population would be to give drug addicts who seek to overcome their addictions state-funded addiction therapy. And drug addicts who have no desire to overcome their addictions should be given access to safe and legal drugs, just as tobacco and coffee addicts and alcoholics are. Making substances illegal serves only to make them prohibitively expensive, thus increasing the likelihood that the addict will commit crimes to make money to pay for artificially expensive substances. While the campaign to secure our borders is a war against poor people from neighboring countries, but not against poverty itself, the “war on drugs” is a war waged by the American government against Americans.

It is time to look for congressional representatives, senators and presidential candidates who have the imagination to seek creative and effective alternatives to the kind of thinking that has resulted in needless suffering to thousands of addicts and millions of hard-working neighbors who seek nothing more sinsiter than to make an honest livelihood in the United States.

American support of Tibet: Too little too late

Tibet was taken over by the Chinese in 1951. In 1959 Tibetan protests led to repressive measures by the Chinese that resulted in thousands of Tibetans fleeing their homeland and taking up residence in India, Switzerland, Canada and various other countries. The brutal treatment of Tibetans by the Chinese has been taking place for fifty years. And now the United States half opens one eye and takes a little notice. Why now?

I have nothing to offer but speculation as to why the United States now pays some attention to the suffering of the Tibetans, and speculation is of no use to anyone. I'll therefore keep it to myself. Instead of offering that, let me make a few observations about why it is too late for the United States to play a significant role in helping Tibetans find justice in their homeland.

From the Chinese perspective, the Han treatment of Tibetans, Uigurs and Mongols has been far more beneficial to those minority peoples than American treatment of the Cherokee, Lakota, Apache, Navajo, Ute, Shoshone, Crow, Cree, Iroquois and Ojibway peoples. The native American peoples were subjected to genocidal treatment, and their cultures were in many cases almost entirely obliterated and their traditional lifestyles made impossible by the forceful occupation of their lands. In past years I have been involved in several conversations with people from the People's Republic of China, and this point is always brought up. American treatment of ethnic minorities has been shameful from beginning to end. Americans enslaved Africans and forcibly brought them to America to do labor. Americans conducted an illegal war against Mexico and took parts of Texas, New Mexico and Arizona from the Mexicans before buying even more land from them at unreasonable prices, and Americans have never treated the descendants of those Mexicans who now find themselves in America particularly well. In the process of settling the West, Americans repeatedly betrayed native peoples, took their land from them, rounded them up and shot their women and children even when they had peacefully surrendered. The picture of Geronimo, Chappo, Perico and Chihuahua with the caption “Homeland Security–Fighting Terrorism Since 1492” is not just an amusing joke. The Chinese know that well and find it sufficient grounds to dismiss Americans now who try to take the moral high road.

In more recent times, the American government has engaged in yet more illegal invasions of sovereign nations, this time not a neighboring country but two countries halfway around the world. The pretext for invading both Afghanistan and Iraq was quite similar to that of invading Mexico in 1846; in all cases, the sovereign nations invaded were portrayed as a threat to America's safety and an enemy of American freedom. How can a country that has repeatedly behaved in this way object to the Chinese invasion of Tibet?

Unlike any other war in American history, the American occupation of Iraq has not been financed by taxation of American citizens. It has been financed by borrowed money. Estimates vary, but an estimate published today in the New York Times is that the invasion and occupation of Iraq will have cost every man, woman and child in the United States about $10,000. None of that cost has come through ordinary budgeting, which, during the Bush presidency has already been deficit financing every year. The national debt has grown out of control. About 40% of that debt is owned by foreign nations, most of it by the Chinese. If the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan are being waged by borrowed money, and if each citizen of the USA bears $10,000 of the burden, and if China owns around 35% of the American debt, then this means that each American is about $3500 in debt to China. And this does not include the massive trade deficit that America has to China as a result of buying goods produced in that country. It also does not include the credit card debts and home mortgages and automobile loans that most Americans carry, a significant amount of which is also owned by Chinese investors. Being deeply in debt to someone does not put one in a strong position to make demands on the way they behave. The protests of a debtor are easy to shrug off. Ask anyone who has been in debt to the IRS.

As outrageous as Chinese policies in Tibet (and toward the Uigurs and Mongols in their homelands) have been, this may be a situation in which we must listen to Jesus and let him who is free of sin cast the first stone. Unfortunately, the candidate for throwing the first stone at the Chinese for their imperialistic sins is not going to be anyone who has had an empire in the past several centuries. The English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Germans, Dutch, Austrians, Hungarians, Israelis, Arabs and Turks will have to be sidelined along with the Americans, and of course the Japanese will have to sit on the bench with the rest of us. So who is left? Is there a David able and willing to sling a rock at the Chinese Goliath?

Unfortunately, any David preparing a sling to hurl a rock at the Chinese Goliath is likely to be just as ready to hurl a stone at the American Goliath, too. Thanks to our past conduct (or what Asians are inclined to call karma) as a people, most of us who belong to the human race (or to some subset thereof) have no option but to hold Tibetans in the light, as the Quakers say. That is, we have little option but to let the best of ourselves feel compassion for all those who are suffering injustice everywhere, beginning with those in our own homes, neighborhoods, countries, and continents and extending it to all living beings, animate and inanimate on this entire planet. That is the very least we can do to begin the healing of the world. Unfortunately, the very least we can do is probably considerably more than most of us will manage to do.

Will the real fascists please stand up?

In a squib called The Danger of Misidentified Dangers I criticized the neologism “Islamofascism” that is used in some circles these days. There is no need to repeat here what was written there, except to say that the word misuses the word “fascism”. Properly used, that word refers to a cluster of characteristics, especially, authoritarian government, patriotism/nationalism, militarism, corporatism and opposition to political liberalism. Some of those terms require futher discussion.

Corporatism

This term is used to refer to a political system in which power is given to corporations. Corporations are hierarchical structures made up of unelected officials that are formed with the purpose of controlling or strongly influencing people's behavior. Typically corporations foster more of a collectivist than an individualistic approach to what kind of conduct is acceptable. Corporations can be of any kind, but a familiar type is the kind formed for the purpose of conducting business and maximizing profit. A fascist form of government tends favor the efficient operation of corporations considerably more than it favors the well-being of individuals.

Liberalism

Political liberalism is a policy that favors the freedom and well-being of individuals over the collective interests of collectives such as the nation, religious organizations or economic corporations.

Given these understandings, it is not difficult to see that Fascism—a form of government that promotes the interests of the state and its economic corporations over the interests of individuals—would be diametrically opposed to liberalism and might even see any kind of liberalism as dangerous. (Who cannot have noticed how the word “liberal” has become in American political discussions a label that no one can wear without suffering automatic disapproval in many quarters?)

When certain politicians and political commentators pin the label “Islamofascism” on real or imagined enemies of democracy who are also often called “terrorists”, it is not difficult to suppose that at least part of their plan is to deflect attention from the genuinely fascist forces that truly are undermining democratic governments and terrorizing all those who have liberal leanings. The people called Islamofascists, in other words, could well be a smokescreen behind which the true enemies of the United States and other constitutional democracies are hiding. The most dangerous enemies of democracy may not be those hiding in caves halfway around the world, but those people, both unelected and elected (or at least supposedly elected), who are wielding power in our own governments and waging a war of attrition against the governed citizens.

In an informative and insightful article in the March 16, 2008 issue of The New York Times Magazine, Jeffrey Rosen writes in “Supreme Court Inc: How the nation's highest court has come to side with business” how all but one of the supreme court justices appointed by George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton and George Bush are strongly pro-business and have consistently made decisions that have limited the degree to which major corporations can be sued for damages by private citizens or have their enterprises regulated by state and federal regulations. David Souter (appointed by G.H.W Bush), Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer (appointed by Clinton) and John Roberts and Samuel Alito (appointed by G.W. Bush) have consistently made pro-corporate decisions that have limited their accountability to consumers. Many of the most important legislation protecting consumers passed as a result of the efforts of Ralph Nader and his colleagues have been overtuned or severely muted by the Supreme Court during the past two presidencies. The Supreme Court has joined the Reagan, Bush, Clinton and Bush II presidencies in championing the interests of the economically powerful over the interests of relatively powerless private citizens. Since 1980, when Reagan was elected, Americans have conspired with the major corporations and the government to erode many of the important protections of individual rights and freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States. Fascism is alive and well, with no help at all from Islamic forces.

Aaron Russo, in a film entitled America: Freedom to Fascism produced in 2006, offers interesting food for thought. While most people will probably agree with me that the film goes over the top in drawing many far-fetched conclusions and uncritically endorses a libertarian ideology, it also offers sobering chonicles of many of the successful tactics carried out by the Bush administration to expand presidential powers, diminish congressional powers, expand corporate and military powers, and dramatically shrink the powers of ordinary citizens. It is worth watching with an open mind and a critical eye.

If the idea of living in a fascist nation with undisguised imperialistic aspirations is no more appealing to Americans than it is to those who are portrayed as enemies of freedom, it may be time for those who love the liberty of individuals as protected by the American Constitution to consider what we all—whether we are Buddhists, Christians, Jews, Muslims, Sikhs, Unitarians or Quakers—have to offer one another in our common spiritual resistance to systems of government that consistently favor the wealthy, the powerful and the oppressive over the poor, the weak and the oppressed.

Your tax dollars at work

The current budget of the United States is $2,397,308,000,000 (in words, two point four trillion dollars). Every person who pays taxes into the coffers of the United States contributes something toward that budget, and taxpayers in future generations will pay for what today's taxpayers do not cover. According to the national debt clock the  debt is now over $9.3 trillion, or nearly $30,620 for every living human being in the country (bearing in mind that about 23% of the debt is owned by foreign agencies).

So how are US tax dollars spent? According to the Friends Committee on National Legislation web site, the current national budget is apportioned as follows: 44% of every tax dollar goes to the military (a figure that includes 13.5% that is paying costs associated with previous wars); 19.7% goes to various aspects of health care; 11.8% goes to dealing with poverty; 10.9% goes to paying interest on the national debt; 7.0% is used to maintain non-military government programs; 2.5% is allocated to scientific research (including NASA) and environmental issues; 2.2% is dedicated to various social programs; and 1.5% goes to all non-military interactions with other nations, such as foreign aid and humanitarian work.

Let's state a hypothetical case. Suppose you paid $5000 in taxes this year to the IRS. This means you are paying somewhere around $2,220 to help pay for everything the military does and has done through the Department of Defense, the Department of Energy, Homeland Security, and aid to foreign militaries. Compare that to the $125 you are contributing toward scientific research through the National Science Foundation, NASA, the National Forest Service, the National Park system and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The chances are good that you have helped finance more killing, detaining, torturing, wiretapping and other forms of spying than you have helped finance finding solutions to global warming.

It has been estimated that even if American troops are withdrawn from Iraq fairly soon, the total cost of the Iraq war could surpass $1 trillion, or about $3300 for every man woman and child in the USA. (If the average family has 4 people, then the average family's share of that war would be $13,200.)

If the choice had been yours to make, would you have spent money in the ways just outlined? If not, there are things you can do. First, you can write to your various representatives and urge them to spend money in ways you find more appetizing. (I personally would favor reducing military spending to around 3% of the national budget and putting the a much larger share into a national health care system, scholarships for students at all levels, and scientific research. I would also favor balancing the budget by dramatically reducing military spending.)

A second thing you can do is to take more control over how your money is spent by giving substantial amounts to charities and causes that dramatically reduce your taxable income so that little or none of your money falls into the hands of a government that apparently cares much more about killing than in healing, educating and aiding.

Think very carefully about how you vote in this year's elections. None of the leading candidates at this point have shown signs of being willing to make major cuts in defense spending. (Democracy Now! reports that Obama actually supports increasing military spending. That is not the sort of change I can believe in; none of the other leading candidates offer anything much better.) At the very least, if you have grown weary of the American Empire, make the American budget an issue. Ask tough questions. And don't feel there is any wisdom in settling for a candidate whose priorities do not reflect those of you and your family.