Half, bi or double?

@ Duck and Decanter

Originally I planned to post this on Wednesday the 27th but we had some cockpit problems – so here it is now.

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I spent a lot of time in Japan during the 90s. During my time in Japan I came to think of Japanese as being a more racist society than America. Occasionally I spotted signs that read “Nihongo only”. (Nihongo = Japanese.) I worked with a friend (Japanese) who once told me: “You should find yourself a girl friend here in Japan – one of your kind, of course.” He was older, mostly retired and I am sure that he did not understand the racism in his advice. He just took it for granted that races should remain separate. Sort of like most states in America did before the sixties. There are also several minorities – maybe ethnic group would be a better description – that face discrimination. One is the Ainu who may have immigrated to Japan before the present Japanese people. There are also many people of Korean ancestry. Most of the Koreans, Zainichi in Japanese, are descended from workers brought to Japan during the colonial period – roughly 1905 to the end of WWII. A recent article, ‘Breaking the silence on burakumin’, in The Japan Times was about the descendants of workers in “unclean” professions.

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I had another friend married to a Japanese woman. He first came to Japan as a Marine Guard at the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo. I met Steve after noticing a note in English taped to a bar door. I went in and found this gaijin, Steve, serving drinks behind the bar. Steve sometimes faced discrimination in Japanese society and told me stories on how he handled it. Steve took great delight in ignoring any “Nihongo only” signs. He also took pleasure in giving cab drivers a tip. In Japan most taxi drivers feel insulted if you offer a tip. I thought about my friend as I read of the struggle of a parent with children of mixed parentage in an article, Half, bi or double? One family’s trouble, in The Japan Times. But mostly I thought about discrimination, our new president, the lingering odor of racism in our country and my own difficulty in struggling with stereotypes.

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I have been finding myself getting a little angry every time I read about Obama being our first “black” president. In the first place we all know that by now. OK let’s get over it and move on from here. On the one hand I can, and do, understand the pride that a black American can take in that fact. I think I want to amend that to just American. I take pride in his presidency also. But more troubling to me is an assumption I have noticed. Is our definition of “black” or “African American” anyone with any amount of tint to their skin other than the pasty white alabaster version that some of us are cursed/blessed with? Maybe the problem is in the labeling as Half, bi or double? One family’s trouble seems to suggest. When it comes right down to it we are all African Americans – including those we call “native Americans”. Some of our ancestors just took longer detours than others.

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I asked myself a few questions after thinking about Half, bi or double? One family’s trouble. How is my characterizing the Japanese “racist” any different than their views of the burakumin, Zainichi or Ainu? Is my anger over the pigeon holing of President Obama as “black” about racial profiling or is it about wanting to take credit for one half of him being a member of my race? I also thought about what Jesus would have said about people of mixed parentage. I think I know. He told a parable about one of them. In Jesus’ times the Samaritans were of mixed ancestry. They were a mixture of the 10 tribes deported by Assyria (surley that deportation by the Assyrians was like that of the Babylonians many years later – not all people would have been deported, maybe just the upper class?) and whoever the Assyrians moved into Samaria. That was one of the reasons that Jews disliked the Samaritans so much. And so today even in English we have a term celebrating a half (or bi or double). Every one knows what a good Samaritan is.

I wonder how the President views himself. Half, bi or double?

Not so?

@ Duck and Decanter

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I thought this would be easy. I have this great quote but can’t verify that it was actually uttered (or written) by the person it is attributed to. It was brought to mind by a couple of things I read. I’ll give the quote here.

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Found on Page 569 of the “Big Book”, aka Alcoholics Anonymous 3rd edition.

There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all arguments and which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance – that principle is contempt prior to investigation.

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Herbert Spencer?

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What first brought this to mind was getting some food for thought with my coffee at Starbucks. I often read the Way I see it on my Starbucks coffee container and usually I like what I read. Only occasionally does it force me to reconsider my opinion (formed prior to investigation) of the author. In this case it did. I tend to dismiss most TV journalists with the label “news reader” as if they have no original thoughts or as if they did not write their own material. As soon as I read it I thought of the quotation by Spencer (if indeed he did originate it).

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The way I see it #130

It will do little good to wire the world if we short-circuit our souls. There is no delete button for racism, poverty or sectarian violence. No keystroke can ever clean the air, save a river, preserve a forest. This transformational new technology must be an extension of our hearts as well as our minds. The old rules still apply. Love your mother – Mother Earth.

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-Tom Brokaw

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The second occasion for me to remember the quote was finding out via an email from Meighan Pritchard that there was a media blackout on the prayer offered by Gene Robinson at the inauguration of our new president last Tuesday, 20 January 2009. The email included a transcript of the prayer. I read the prayer and frankly was just awed by the thoughts it contained. My second thought was that of course there would be a media blackout on it. If anyone actually heard or read it they might reconsider their opinion of Bishop Robinson. It seems that there is some debate over the reasons why the prayer was left out of the HBO broadcast. As I read here. You can also get the entire prayer here.

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It occurs to me that those that objected (and still do from some of the comments about the posts that discuss Robinson’s prayer) would really object with my applying a quote attributed to Spencer to them. Spencer coined the phrase “survival of the fittest”. He was a passionate advocate of evolution (some would say he overly advocated evolution and applied it to areas where it should not be applied). But, I could be wrong; I wonder if I should investigate that assumption.

Hopes

@ Duck and Decanter

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I have a new course from The Teaching Company. It is The Old Testament taught by Amy-Jill Levine. The contents of the course have come as a bit of a shock to me. I had imagined that it would be rather dry, scholarly, and difficult to understand. While there are dry boring parts (the “begats”, for example) there are also a lot of rich visual images which Levine brings to life. Once again I am surprised by how much I missed reading a book of the bible. True, I read the book of Judges with a fundamentalist mind set but still I would have thought that at least I had a sense of the story. I think that like many, I got so immersed in the details that I never glimpsed the scenery. According to Levine Judges tells of the descent of the covenant community into a chaotic anarchy. The book ends with:

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In those days there was no king in Israel; all the people did what was right in their own eyes.

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Judges 21:25 NRSV

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I could not help but think of this verse in relation to our own time and nation. We have banks and Wall Street to look at for examples of people doing right in their own eyes. Where was the higher authority that should have been overseeing them? Where was the protection for those with less power? Then we have Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice negotiating a vote in the UN Security Council on Israel’s invasion of Gaza and not voting for it because her boss (the President) tells her not to. Reportedly he did so at the request of the Israeli Prime Minister. Seems almost like anarchy to me.

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Yesterday, Inauguration Day, we got a new “king” for at least four years. My hope is that he will put an end to the chaos.

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Does anyone else connect Bush to the dim witted (and last of the Judges) Samson? Samson killed more of the enemy with his going than he ever had with his life. May it be so with Bush’s going.

Why?

@ Duck and Decanter

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Sometimes my naivety amazes me. I am surely the slowest person that has ever lived to pick up on political bias. I have been reading the online version of the Washington Times for several years now and I have just come to the realization that the Times is a conservative paper. Some of problem comes from the fact that I don’t normally read any of the political news. I find the headlines disturbing enough and so generally refrain from reading any of the articles. But still, the bias of the Times is fairly blatant. Not long ago (sometime in 2008) the Times changed their online format and that is when I began to notice a few things. One new feature that was added is a “Question of the Day” where readers vote and then view the results of the “poll”. I only rarely participate but I began to notice that I never agreed with the majority. I also noticed that only on the rare occasion was any of the votes close. Then yesterday, Thursday Jan. 14, I read the comments listed below the results. The question was: Do you think that Gitmo, the U.S. detention facility holding terrorist suspects, should be shut down? Clicking on the link will take you to the results and comments. I read the results after 80 people had participated and eight people had posted comments. I intended to check back later in the day but decided not to, simply because I had read enough hate for one day. I will give you two samples from the comments:

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By: Bubba Shawn

The US should kill them all and then cover the bodies with pig skins.

January 14, 2009 at 8:35 a.m.

By: lloydfl2

where can we torture the animals if we close that down? Who will take the animls we now have there. Maybe turn them lose in chicago or detriot?

January 14, 2009 at 8:18 a.m.

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From comments posted in Do you think that Gitmo, the U.S. detention facility holding terrorist suspects, should be shut down? In Washington Times on January 14, 2009.

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The other comments were of a similar nature. Having just checked the link I noticed that comments made since I first looked at the results have not changed in nature.

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Fortunately there is an antidote (at least for me) to reading this kind of, ah, stuff. After reading the Times I read the Washington Post a (admittedly) liberal rag. In the On Faith section was a posting by Susan Brooks Thistlewaite. It was on ‘Bush’s Tortured Morality’. In the posting Thistlewaite argues that Bush’s morality is driven by his moral certainty that he right and that his actions are justified. Judging from the comments posted in Do you think that Gitmo, the U.S. detention facility holding terrorist suspects, should be shut down? It is obvious that he is not alone in possessing that moral certainty.

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There are a few aspects of the differences between the Times and the Post that I am both puzzled and worried by. The Times founded by Sun Myung Moon in 1982 is the smaller of the two and has never turned a profit. In fact the total losses of the paper are over a billion dollars since 1982. The Times has been innovative in several ways such as the use of color which the Post was not as quick to follow. The Post however has a terrific track record of investigative reporting (Watergate and more recently Walter Reed Medical Center). There is a perception that because of the competition that the Post has become more conservative.

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But the real puzzle for me is this question. Why did the Post not cover Crosswalk America in September 2006 (you do remember that Labor Day 2006 marked the end of our walk from Phoenix to Washington DC – don’t you) and why did the Times? Did it have to do with size? From all I now know of the two papers I would have thought that reporting on something like a progressive Christian event would have been much more in line with the liberal Post.

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I wonder if lloydfl2 is just a terrible speller or if he was so angry that he could not think straight. I get that way if I watch too much news on TV or if I read particularly offensive tripe such as his comment. Fortunately my spell checker doesn’t care.

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PS – You might want to read another article in the Post just to put things in perspective. The article, Detainee Tortured, Says U.S. Official, is about how we have been treating the detainees.

Contemplation by the parts.

@ Duck and Decanter

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I tried a different area for my afternoon hike this last week. I live close to the Phoenix Mountain Preserve and my usual hike is either the Piestewa Peak Summit trail or one of the trails that connect with it. But to enjoy a change I opted for the Shaw Butte area of the Phoenix Mountain Preserve. I don’t normally hike there because it is more than five miles from my house to the trailhead at 7^th Avenue and Peoria. The most noticeable difference in the geology between here and where I usually hike is the presence of lava boulders (more properly boulders of basalt) strewn about. The boulders come from the top of Shaw Butte which is capped with a lava flow that, according to the Gemland website occurred about the same time that Shaw Butte, North Mountain and the other Phoenix Mountains were being formed about 16 to 18 million years before present (the Gemland website has a great explanation of how). So the bottom of Shaw Butte is composed of 1.7 to 1.8 billion year old rocks and at the top the basalt is less than 20 million years old. Sometimes I think it is a shame there is nothing left of any of the in between rocks (they were eroded away before the lava flow) but then I wonder if that would mean more distance from bottom to top for me to climb. The top at 2195 feet elevation is just right for a light hike. This area of Phoenix has many hills made of left over volcanic rock. I am not sure but I believe the black lava rocks gave Moon Valley on the North side of Shaw Butte its name. Many of the basalt rocks exhibit the gas bubbles left when the lava cooled. Near the top the change between the solid basalt on the bottom and the lighter gas filled basalt on the top can be observed.

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Near the bottom ~ Almost at the top

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The 1.7 to 1.8 billion year old Precambrian rocks at the bottom of Shaw Butte (and Piestewa Peak and the other Phoenix mountains) are about one eighth of the age of the universe (at 14.7 billion years) and a third of the earth’s age (at 4.5 billion years). I don’t know about you but I can’t imagine a million years let alone a thousand million years. The atoms that make up the rocks (and everything else on earth) were made in the first stars that formed, burned brightly and then exploded. These stars lasted only a short time (a few thousand years or maybe tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands) for a star. The first stars blazed into life 200 million to a billion years after the big bang that started everything. Before these first stars, hydrogen and helium were the only kind of atoms present in the universe – there were other things such as light and neutrinos but we are only concerned with ordinary matter here. Now, here are the same atoms, manufactured in those first stars, forming the earth we walk on. But the neatest thing is that the components of those atoms, the neutrons, the protons and the electrons, were formed in the first minutes of the hot big bang. So the earth is made of parts (neutrons, protons and electrons) that were formed some 13.7 billion years ago. These parts were first used to form atoms of various kinds, like iron, silica etc., in stars. Then they were rearranged in a molten earth, and finally cooled to form what we see today. All of the processes that formed the rocks apply to us as well – plus the fact that the atoms we are composed of were chemically joined into simple molecules and then finally into more complex molecules that became the self replicating forms -through evolution – that we call life.

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The Intelligent design types (you knew I was going to get to them sooner or later – didn’t you) would say that the earth and everything on it was created in its present form a few thousand years ago. Most cosmologists (and scientists in general) agree on the scenario in the preceding paragraph. Furthermore the process of creation, and everything that the process led to, proceeded inevitably from what happened in the first few microseconds. This is opposed to what the ID types believe which is that life forms are too intricate not to require a divine creator to have individually crafted them. One the one side we have an ancient orderly process with known rules eventually resulting in life (through a process known as evolution). Standing against this we have a theory of God speaking a few words and a magical transformation some few thousand years ago. To me, the billions of years old process is both more miraculous and more believable.

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In either case, isn’t it amazing and fantastic that a part of the universe (us humans) can contemplate the origin of itself?

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I am indebted for that thought to Professor Mark Whittle and his course Cosmology: The History and Nature of Our Universe from the Teaching Company. Indeed, I am also indebted to him for my understanding of the hot big bang theory.

Food for thought

@ Duck and Decanter

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I went to a New Year’s Eve Party Wednesday. I cannot remember the last party I went to on New Year’s Eve. I have a lot of reasons for not celebrating the arrival of the New Year. I don’t like to be on the road late when all the amateur drunks are out for one thing. I also view midnight on January 1^st (local time) as not being of much significance. I admit that this year I was quite happy that 2008 was over. Thinking of a quote by the creator of Peanuts that morning before the party (I was reading Peanuts at the time) I immediately seized on it and gave thanks that 2008 was over.

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Don’t worry about the world coming to an end today. It’s already tomorrow in Australia.

Charles M. Schulz (and here)

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So if it is already tomorrow elsewhere in the world what is all the fuss about? But this year I was invited to a party by Bob (Robert) Neilson. I have posted about Bob before (here and here). While talking to Bob (the previous Sunday) he suggested I wear something festive. Something …, such as a boa. I am not quite sure why Bob suggested that. At the time I took it as a dare. Since then I have reconsidered. I think maybe he just wanted me to dress and look more appropriate. Left to my own devices I would have probably worn nothing more than freshly laundered jeans and a sweater.

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My host (in white) and I (in black)

I reconsidered after reflecting on how natural wearing the boa was. Not once during the evening did I feel self-conscious or wish that I had not accepted what I felt at the time was a dare. Looking back, it seems as if wearing the boa was a symbol of the change in my thinking and attitudes over the last twenty years. Twenty years ago I might have accepted the dare but I would not have felt comfortable and natural. Come to that, I would not have gone to a party where I knew there would be gay people. I was helped in my reevaluation by seeing the photo taken by my friend, Robin, at the party. Looks good, don’t you think?

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I wonder if there is a way to keep the white boa feathers from shedding on a black sweater.

Happy New Year everyone.