Waking

I'm visiting my birthplace in Phoenix, AZ with my daughter Cybela.  She's 17 now, newly graduated from high school and possessed of a depth and earnestness that always leaves me proud and teary. We're looking at the summer stars under an inimitable desert night sky and at her request I'm pointing out stars and constellations, some of which she remembers from past nights like this.  Some are new.

I tell her the Tlingit story of how the lights of the Big Dipper got caught in the sky when the people used long poles to push it up above the earth from the four corners and we trip over the topic of Native wisdom and European colonialism.  She tells me "Sometimes I picture the old villages and how they used to live, without the modern world touching them or knowing about them.  It's sad that's gone." 

I tell her that there are still some left.  I tell her about the Kogi people in the Sierra Madres, who rolled up their bridges and pulled back into the mountains when they saw the Spanish coming.  They've lived the last 500 years as they always have, unknown and untouched by the mental illness of greed and environmental opportunism the Europeans brought with them.  Elder brother, as they call themselves, came down from the mountains in the 80's to urge their Younger Brother to wake from this illness, to take better care of the earth and the water and the air.  Younger Brother is what they call people of European descent and all those who live like them.  The Kogi, I tell Cybela, choose their medicine people at age 7, and train them for 7 years in caves to learn how to dream clearly.  7 years of darkness so they can learn how to See.  Like aboriginal Australians, they believe that the dreaming world is the real world, and this world is the dream.

I'm filled with gratitude in these moments I share with my smart, caring, shiny daughter.  My mom gets teary watching me pass on teachings of the constellations that I received from my dad, and I'm overflowing, too, with this precious gift of finding my place in the long chain of generations, of anchoring my existence in Love and Duty and Relationship.

Looking up again and listening, with Cybela's eyes looking parallel to mine, somewhere in the black fabric between the stars I think I see the Kogi dreamers looking back at us.  She feels it too, and comments about how much time we spend in our little bubbles of awareness and self-centeredness, how much of our lives we spend focusing only on taking what we can for ourselves, while we can.  In that moment, we share the realization that, when we step out of that little bubble, our awareness expands and we feel the fragile gift of this life, the gravity of responsibility we have to take care of each other and the world, the water and the air.  

For that moment at least, I wake from the dream and I know without doubt that the Kogi are right.

A Modern Proposal: some thoughts on Arms and the 2nd Amendment

I’ve listened to a lot of different kinds of people lately, since the latest really big mass shooting in America.  (We have to qualify them now, since we have varying degrees of “mass shooting” happening on the regular in this, the  Gravest Country on Earth.) 

I’ve listened carefully to the young people organizing en masse and walking out of their schools, staging sit-ins outside the chambers of stuffy old Senate Majority Leaders.  I’ve listened carefully to red-faced, right-handed apocalypticals who’ve been convinced in their very guts that any kind of gun-control legislation is the next phase of the Liberal-Elite Government’s takeover of Freedom.  I’ve even listened to well-researched podcasts that carefully trace the relatively recent rise of the NRA and its obsessively narrow reading of the 2^nd Amendment—an obsession which began, ironically, not with White Rednecks but Black Panthers claiming the right to arm themselves for their own protection.

For any readers unfamiliar with the Second Amendment to the American Constitution, it reads, bad commas and all:  

“A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the Security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

As short as it is, it’s a doozy, not the least because clear people see it as loaded, while loaded people see it as clear.  

Let’s ignore for a moment the whole “well-regulated militia” part; regulation is a dirty, liberal word, so let’s focus on the arms part.

I think one reason even our well-meaning, red-faced, right-handed apocalypticals have become so mobilized, so patriotically inflamed about this particular Amendment in recent years is this: as the instruments of political power have grown more and more, well, powerful, it becomes more and more difficult to believe that We the People have any control at all over our own politics.  Information, media and education: out of our hands.  The economy, jobs, foreign trade and interest rates: out of our hands.   Voting, gerrymandering, the electoral college and runaway campaign finance: out of our hands.  These are important instruments of power, it’s true, but let’s face it: when Americans want to feel powerful, especially when we start to fear that we’re not, the first form of power we grab for—instinctively, you might say—is the armament. 

After all, how is the average, increasingly uncritical American citizen supposed to feel powerful when the Black folks are getting shot in the streets, the White folks are losing their unquestionable majority privileges, the Brown folks are threatened with deportation, the Red folks are getting even more of their grounds poisoned and dug through with pipelines, all the while some Yellow folks across the ocean are building nuclear missiles, and not a one of us can honestly believe that our teeny, tiny vote makes a damn bit of difference?  Of course we need assault rifles!  How are we supposed to defend ourselves against our own military and police forces, King George and the Liberal-Elite if they have them, and we don’t?  In fact, I think we need to go all the way with this argument.

Therefore, in the fairly recent but still somehow hallowed tradition of the 2^nd Amendment, in order that the People shall feel empowered and secure in their person (which after all is why we have a Constitution in the first place), here is my proposal: 

I propose that, immediately and forthwith, every man, woman and child in these United States of America be armed with a tactical nuclear weapon. 

It is the best and only way, in this crazy Age and this crazy Day, to insure the security of a Free State. And that's what we're after isn't it?  Security?  Or was it Freedom? Note that I include children in this demand.  Age-limits are a slippery slope and where will it end?  Any limitation is logically the same as total limitation, I’m sure the NRA will agree.  The second Amendment gives us no limits on the size of the arms we have the right to keep and bear—Madison even capitalized the word!—and yet time and again, the Government has given literally trillions of our hard-earned tax dollars to private contractors to build itself Stealth bombers and Raptors and Smart Bombs and Blackhawks and subs and tanks and depleted uranium rounds while We the People quibble over bump-stocks and clip-sizes and age limits.  Why shouldn’t every American have access to that wealth of technology, being necessary for the Security of a free state?

I say: No more! 

Put a nuke in the hands of every citizen and I guarantee we will have all the Freedom we can stand, once and for all!  And if it brings about the Apocalypse, well, isn't that our God-given right too?. 

My red-faced, right-handed friends are sick of waiting for it anyway.

Paid in Full: Reconceiving the Currencies of our Life-Salaries

For years I have been working for nonprofits, consulting, creating, directing.  The first nonprofit organization I helped to launch was a tiny one dedicated to creating curriculum and programming for children’s peace education.  As you may imagine, I volunteered an enormous amount of time to see it grow and even when I did manage to raise the money to get paid a salary, it was a pittance compared to what my two M.A.s might command elsewhere.  At the time, though, I was a single dad raising a young daughter, and my time with her was so precious to me, the ability to participate in her school and play so valuable, that I considered it a fair bargain.  Certainly, there were months when rent was tough to meet and I grew used to level of poverty that many know far more intimately. I also experienced a kind of shame in that poverty that, I think, is particularly acute here in the US where the Myth of the Self-made Man so dominates the thinking of the people.  That Myth I speak of, that opportunity is equally and justly distributed among all, and if you’re poor it’s your own damn fault, is a complex and powerful one, of course, and I will not get too deeply into it here.  You will draw your own conclusions by the end of this piece, hopefully with some new ways to think about it. 

My real purpose here is to offer some thoughts about the way we conceive of money and payment for the work we do.  As a poet and a writer, I am of course, passionate about language, and I revel in the act of swinging from words and exploring their roots and branches.  Let’s consider, then, the word “salary.”  We use it so often in modern English and, particularly because of its modern connotation, we spend a great deal of energy hunting the larger members of the species.  Isn’t a large salary, after all, why we spend so much time and money going to the right college for degrees,  why we spend so much time and energy getting good grades in high school?  Isn’t a large salary why we so readily change the place we live when its demanded of us, or why we spend so much time away from our loved ones, and over-stressing our minds and bodies, and placating the egos of superiors, whether we respect them or not?  

The word salary comes from the Latin sale, meaning “salt.”  The word is a descendant from the Roman Empire, which would reimburse its soldiers with portions of salt, if they were worth theirs, of course.  At the time, before refrigerators or Ziploc baggies, salt was extremely valuable as the primary resource for preserving meat and therefore feeding one’s family over long periods of time.  It’s a good reminder, I think, particularly since salt is so cheap and readily available now, of two important facts: a) symbolic currencies have never been more than a means to the ultimate end of providing security, health, and happiness to ourselves and our families, and b) when those currencies are no longer useful to that purpose, it becomes time to consider them in a different way.

If you listen to elders on their deathbeds, you will find what many researchers and interviewers find when they ask dying people what, if anything, they regret about their lives.  Very often, people who are dying don’t really regret not having made more money or spending more time at work.  People usually regret spending so much time pursuing money, at the expense of time with their loved ones, or in pursuit of their deep dreams.

Consider then, the idea that it is not actually a greater salary that we are all interested in—at least in the monetary sense of the word.  It is rather what we believe money provides, which is security, happiness, ease, and freedom, all of which taken together become synonymous with a Healthy Life.  The problem is a very old one, and one that many wisdom traditions speak about at great length, which is mistaking the symbol of something for the thing the symbol represents.  In the Old Testament, for example, one of the first commandments specifically warns of worshipping graven images, precisely because when we give too much attention to the representation of something, especially of the Divine, we begin to think that the representation is the thing itself.  This notion of idolatry was so deeply ingrained that it included not just literal graven images, but even verbal ones, which is why it was forbidden to speak the Tetragrammaton, the four-letter name of God.  It is also why usury was expressly forbidden in both the old testament and the new.  Usury, though it’s often believed to refer to charging excessive interest on a loan, originally referred to charging any interest on a loan.  The reason for this is that money is by definition a symbol.  It is the representation of the value of a thing.  I want a goat and you have a goat, so we agree on the value of it and exchange a piece of metal or paper that represents that value.  That’s all fine and it makes practical sense for trading merchandise; however, as soon as I treat that symbolic representation as a Thing in its own right, something that can generate more of itself through interest, I have committed the sin of usury.   In fact, I have gone even further and created a symbol of a symbol.  This is also why, in the New Testament, Yeshua famously threw the money-lenders out of the Temple, for profaning a place of direct connection with the Divine with graven image-worship. (For a deeper trip down that Rabbit Hole, think about the stock market, which creates symbols of symbols of symbols.)

So consider again what we so doggedly pursue in our careers, that Holy Grail of a great salary.  Think of how fiercely we fight and lie and cheat—or even just how hard we work—all to obtain more and more symbolic representations of what it is we are really after, meaning and happiness and freedom.  Think of the bankers and businessmen who threw themselves off of tall buildings, or committed equally tragic forms of suicide during the various stock market crashes, when the symbols they worshipped revealed themselves to be hollow and they felt they had lost everything.  The good news in all of this is of course that if we are clear what the symbol is, the graven image if you will, and what it is we are truly pursuing, then we can renegotiate our salaries, so to speak.  We can include other forms of currency to symbolize meaning and happiness and healthy lives.

During the time that I worked part-time in the nonprofit sector and refused to compromise my time with my young daughter, it became clear to me that I was being compensated in non-monetary ways for the work I was doing.  Not only did my position pay me in units of Freedom, which I used to pick up my daughter from school and volunteer occasionally in her classroom, it also paid me in units of Meaning.  I believed absolutely in what I was doing.  Developing curriculum and programming for young people to learn about historical peacemakers, and to develop skills in conflict resolution that could last for many generations into the future—this was work that fit in perfect congruence with my values as a human being.  When I add these units of Meaning and Freedom to the relatively small sum of monetary currency I was paid, my salary was huge indeed.

How many people make great monetary salaries but hate their work, or worse, feel morally compromised by it?  In such cases, I think we should subtract units of Meaning or units of Freedom from that monetary salary to get a more accurate calculation.  You’ll notice I’m not saying that the monetary currency has no value at all—of course it does, but we have to remember that it a currency—which is to say a flow of energy that we measure in symbolic units, and the point here is that it’s not the only one.

What I’m proposing, then, is a new kind of formula for calculating the salaries of our lives and work, to see whether our labor is worth its salt, so to speak.  I will not presume to tell you how to value your own Freedom, or the sense of fulfillment (ie. Meaning) you get from the work you do, but I will ask you to assign some kind of symbolic value to these universal life Goals.  Call them Life-Chips or Freedom-Francs or Meaning-Dollars if you like.  Then add those into your calculations when you decide how much your job is worth to you.  Of course, you might say “You can’t pay a mortgage with Meaning-Dollars” and that’s true.  (Though I would also point out that in Latin, “mortgage” translates to “death-grip.”)  And it may also be true, after a fashion, that you can’t put a kid through college with Life-chips, but you can leave your children a considerable inheritance of them—and Meaning-Dollars, if you gather them wisely.  And with College Debt taking its own kind of death grip on our young ones these days, which is a wiser investment? 

As a final thought, I think it’s important to mention the power of our minds to shape our realities by the way we perceive them.  There are many worthwhile conversations to be had in response to my arguments here—about the privilege that my white maleness and education afford me to talk this way, for example, or about the realities of oppressive systems which have been deliberately created to keep working-class people chasing money in a sort of indentured servitude.  These are both valid points which I acknowledge humbly and honestly.  However I will also submit that the great gift—the Divine Gift, if you will—of being conscious human beings with at least some measure of Free Will, is that we get to choose where to invest our time, our beliefs and our life-force.  In this small regard at least, I think that the Myth of the Self-Made Person is not totally off-base.  And I hope that, as you consider how to evaluate the profit and loss of your own Life, the Freedom of Time, the Meaning and the Happiness—the true goals of a healthy salary—will factor in as much as the paper and metal symbols of Money.

Educating Global Citizens

Over the course of human affairs, as societies have steadily increased in size and complexity, it has become more and more important to question.  Particularly, as humanity become globalized in its economy and information sharing, and as the number of media messages bombarding our brains grows each year, it becomes ever more important for individual citizens to stay sharp.  In 1787, Thomas Jefferson wrote to James Madison, “Above all things I hope the education of the common people will be attended to, convinced that on their good sense we may rely with the most security for the preservation of a due degree of liberty.”  

The education of everyone is not a privilege bestowed upon the people by a democratic institution; it is a necessary condition of a democratic institution.

We simply don’t spend enough time in public dialogue about what education is, or what qualifies as a good education.  Sure, we spend a great deal of time and money evaluating whether a student can solve basic algebra, or name the causes and consequences of World War I, and of course, content is important.  I agree that we need some basic standards by which we judge whether someone has actually been educated or not.  However, with the takeover of profit-driven standardized testing in recent years, two issues in education have become painfully clear: 1) no one method of assessing content knowledge is complete, and 2) we must be diverse in deciding what that content is, and who decides it.    

Especially given the current mental health crisis in this country as evidenced by the recent rise in mass shootings and other pervasive violence, basic coping skills and conflict resolution seem like a high priority to me, yet there are almost no content standards for the one subject that literally everyone deals with from cradle to grave: conflict.

There is much to say about testing, and a great deal more to discuss about the narrowing of curriculum that has resulted from corporatized testing.  My point here, though, is that real education is not something that can be measured like a long jump or scored like a soccer match.  Real learning doesn’t only happen in a classroom, but in the world, at home, with friends, and, if you’re doing it right, for the rest of your life.  I believe that a full education requires not just knowledge but wisdom.  We need to learn the critical tools for processing information relevant to the world and an understanding of our power to influence it.  I work for an educational program combining conflict resolution and social-emotional skills with community project design, social justice education and a survey of the work of recent Nobel Peace Prize winners.  PeaceJam was developed with the help of the Dalai Lama and 13 other Nobel Laureates to inspire young people to learn concrete skills by creating real projects in their communities addressing global issues at a local level, issues like understanding racism and poverty and resource conflicts.  I have seen firsthand the way that such an education engages students in the world.

A class working on a water catchment project, for example, will incorporate geometry, chemistry, algebra, planning and budgeting, and, if the project is done well, the social and legal context of water rights and access to building materials, to name but a few.  Students’ progress can be assessed (by the actual teacher working with them) by measures of work ethic, project completion or even self-assessment.  Granted, this requires flexibility for teachers in conducting their own classrooms, and there is no profit in this model for Pearson, the global testing conglomerate, but a great deal of profit for students and for the society they will certainly be shaping.

Even better, when students have input into creating a project that is meaningful to them and even fun, addressing a pressing issue, they become engaged citizens, invested in the workings of their communities.  And if education is not about preparing and empowering young people to be informed and engaged citizens, what is it about at all?  In the current flood of false information, polarizing political identities and thinning budgets, can even a fake democracy afford not to invest in such an insurance policy?