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Bigotry by any other color.

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Bigotry is “a stubborn and complete intolerance of any creed, belief, or opinion that differs from one’s own” according to the Dictionary webpage.

Nothing is driving me up the wall more than seeing/hearing African Americans be bigoted about gay people getting married, and use the Bible to condone it. I don’t like seeing anybody do it, but it is especially vexing when it is from members of the African American community. Perhaps they forget that in the United States, in this very century, African Americans could not marry white people, and that the very same Bible was used to support that bigotry.

Once I was at a Japanese restaurant enjoying a hibachi dinner. There were 8 other people at the table, all strangers to me. There was a black man there who snapped his fingers at the Japanese waiter and called him “Boy”. He turned and said to me with a big smile “It feels good to call someone boy.” I was repulsed by how much he enjoyed that, and that he felt that it was something I would agree with. What is bad for one is bad for all. If it is not OK to call a black man “Boy” it is not OK to call anybody that.

“Love the sinner, hate the sin” is not anything Jesus ever said. It is the exact opposite of Jesus’ message. I am pro-gay rights BECAUSE I follow Jesus. Jesus said absolutely nothing about homosexuality. He said a lot about not judging others. Saying other’s people ways of life and living is sinful is judging them. It is bigotry.

What was the sin of Sodom? The prophet Ezekiel has the answer.

Ezekiel 16:49
49 Now this was the iniquity of your sister Sodom: she and her daughters had pride, plenty of food, and comfortable security, but didn’t support the poor and needy.

Their sin was that they didn’t support the poor and needy. They had plenty and didn’t share it. This is why God destroyed them. Not because they wanted to have sex with the angels.

Jesus tells us how we are to serve others in these verses from Matthew.

Matthew 25:31-40
31 “When the Son of Man comes in His glory, and all the angels with Him, then He will sit on the throne of His glory. 32 All the nations will be gathered before Him, and He will separate them one from another, just as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. 33 He will put the sheep on His right and the goats on the left. 34 Then the King will say to those on His right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by My Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.
35 For I was hungry
and you gave Me something to eat;
I was thirsty
and you gave Me something to drink;
I was a stranger
and you took Me in;
36 I was naked
and you clothed Me;
I was sick
and you took care of Me;
I was in prison
and you visited Me.’
37 “Then the righteous will answer Him, ‘Lord, when did we see You hungry and feed You, or thirsty and give You something to drink? 38 When did we see You a stranger and take You in, or without clothes and clothe You? 39 When did we see You sick, or in prison, and visit You?’ 40 “And the King will answer them, ‘I assure you: Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of Mine, you did for Me.’

Jesus is referring to the words of the prophet Isaiah when he tells this parable. Here is the original – please pay special attention to verses 6-7.

Isaiah 58:5-12
5 Will the fast I choose be like this:
A day for a person to deny himself,
to bow his head like a reed,
and to spread out sackcloth and ashes?
Will you call this a fast
and a day acceptable to the LORD?
6 Isn’t the fast I choose:
To break the chains of wickedness,
to untie the ropes of the yoke,
to set the oppressed free,
and to tear off every yoke?
7 Is it not to share your bread with the hungry,
to bring the poor and homeless into your house,
to clothe the naked when you see him,
and not to ignore your own flesh and blood?
8 Then your light will appear like the dawn,
and your recovery will come quickly.
Your righteousness will go before you,
and the LORD’s glory will be your rear guard.
9 At that time, when you call, the LORD will answer;
when you cry out, He will say, ‘Here I am.’
If you get rid of the yoke among you,
the finger-pointing and malicious speaking,
10 and if you offer yourself to the hungry,
and satisfy the afflicted one,
then your light will shine in the darkness,
and your night will be like noonday.
11 The LORD will always lead you,
satisfy you in a parched land,
and strengthen your bones.
You will be like a watered garden
and like a spring whose waters never run dry.
12 Some of you will rebuild the ancient ruins;
you will restore the foundations laid long ago;
you will be called the repairer of broken walls,
the restorer of streets where people live.

Feed the hungry. Clothe the naked. Take care of sick people. Visit those in prison. Fight against injustice. House the homeless.

These are the jobs of Christians. Nothing else. To serve God by serving our neighbors.

Mother Teresa took care of everyone who came to her, regardless of their beliefs. They could be suffering from leprosy, malnourished from starvation, abandoned by their families because they were too poor to afford another child, or dying of AIDS, it made no difference to her. She said that she saw every single person in front of her as being Jesus himself, and served them accordingly.

It didn’t matter that they weren’t Christian. She was.

What are we to do as followers of Jesus? Start with the primary commandments –

Luke 10:25-28
25 Just then an expert in the law stood up to test Him, saying, “Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” 26 “What is written in the law?” He asked him. “How do you read it?” 27 He answered: Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself. 28 “You’ve answered correctly,” He told him. “Do this and you will live.”

Love God, and love your neighbor as yourself. Love. Don’t judge. Don’t call them sinners. Jesus never called anybody a sinner. Don’t “love the sinner but hate the sin” – because that is not a Jesus concept at all. He never said anything like that. He said to love people.

The story gets more interesting though. The person who is asking Jesus continues, because he wants to “justify” himself – in short, he wants to justify being less than neighborly to people he doesn’t like.

Let us read the rest of that section to find out the answer – who is your neighbor?

Luke 10:29-37
29 But wanting to justify himself, he asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?” 30 Jesus took up the question and said: “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho and fell into the hands of robbers. They stripped him, beat him up, and fled, leaving him half dead. 31 A priest happened to be going down that road. When he saw him, he passed by on the other side. 32 In the same way, a Levite, when he arrived at the place and saw him, passed by on the other side.33 But a Samaritan on his journey came up to him, and when he saw the man, he had compassion. 34 He went over to him and bandaged his wounds, pouring on olive oil and wine. Then he put him on his own animal, brought him to an inn, and took care of him. 35 The next day[l] he took out two denarii, gave them to the innkeeper, and said, ‘Take care of him. When I come back I’ll reimburse you for whatever extra you spend.’ 36 “Which of these three do you think proved to be a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?” 37 “The one who showed mercy to him,” he said. Then Jesus told him, “Go and do the same.”

This story is significant because of the players. The man who was robbed and left for dead was Jewish. The two people who ignored him were upper-class Jews – a priest and a Levite. They were responsible for the maintenance of the Temple and the sacrifices there. The man who helped him was a Samaritan. Jews and Samaritans were enemies of the first class. They’d had a feud going on for generations by this point. There was no way that a Samaritan would have helped a Jew, or vice versa. But this man helped someone who his culture said he should hate. He helped him because it was the right thing to do.

How are we to draw people to the love of Jesus if we are calling them sinners? How are we to serve people like Jesus did if we are separating and excluding them? Jesus embraced lepers and made them whole by doing so. Jesus included the excluded. Jesus made us all equal.

I’m not saying for you to become gay. Straight people can’t turn gay any more than gay people can turn straight. But what I am saying is stop denying others their civil rights. Stop turning them away from your churches. Start showing love by being kind. We have enough hate in the world. Let us not join them.

Let them know we are Christians by our love.

(All Bible verses are HCSB)

Speaking up.

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I overheard two regulars talking in the library today. They are both white men over 50. To be honest, only one was talking – the other was listening.

He was talking about the police officer who pulled a gun on unarmed teenagers at the pool party. He was sympathizing with the police officer, saying that he had attended two suicides that morning – and went into graphic detail about one of them. I was considering telling him to be mindful of where he was at that point alone. Small children do not need to hear brutal details like this. Heck – I don’t need to hear them.

But what made me speak up was that he kept going on about the officer, and the kids, saying that they were wild and unparented.

I leaned in and said “That still does not give him the right to pull a gun on unarmed teenagers.”

He agreed – but as I was walking away he then said to his companion that he would have shot them.

I continued to walk away. There are only so many battles to be had.

A few minutes later he caught up with me at the front desk. So many people think of us as a sympathetic ear there. We have to listen – right? Public servant, and all. We are trapped behind the desk. We can’t defend ourselves.

He said that so many of these kids weren’t being raised by parents, but by their grandparents. He is generalizing, and stereotyping. He doesn’t know these kids or what their home life is like.

I repeated – that still does not give him the right to pull a gun on them.

He said “You know what I would have done? I would have pulled a billy club on them!”

I said “That is unfortunate.” and walked away from the desk. He is unreasonable and it isn’t worth continuing the discussion with someone who speaks like this.

Note that in front of me he changed what he would have done from shooting them to striking them with a billy club.

As I was walking away, he again repeated that the officer had attended two suicides that morning. I did not respond.

Whether that is true or not – does seeing someone kill himself give another person a right to kill?

To be silent to injustice is to condone it. Will he change because of what I said? Doubtful. But that wasn’t the point. It would be great if he changed, but if I didn’t speak up I would have been part of the problem. I don’t feel qualified to have long debates on any hot topics. I do better with writing than speaking. But I had to – because to me, his words were the same as hitting someone in the face. I have to speak up, or the violence will continue. The poison that he was spewing would spread. I cannot allow this to happen in front of me.

Food and news – raw vs processed

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We suffer from too many opinions, and not enough reality. We are pulling away from the mindsets and modalities of the past, but walking into the future with no tools and no idea.

No matter what you read or where you read it from, find at least three other sources on that same topic. Don’t share anything as “true” or a “fact” until you’ve learned as much about it as you can from as many different sources as you can.

I think the real issue is that people don’t trust “The authorities” – so they want to get everything raw, for themselves. They want to put it together themselves. This applies to information as well as food. They feel that their stuff has been tampered with, adulterated. They feel they are being lied to.

So they try to get their food organic and as minimally processed and as close to home as possible. Or they grow it themselves. This way they know where their food came from. Likewise, they trust the opinions of their friends and individuals more than they trust the news. They’ll learn from YouTube rather than a commercially-run organization.

While there is a lot to be gained from doing things for yourself, there is also a lot that can be lost. Do we have to become our own doctors and lawyers and therapists? They went to school to learn how to do what they do. They went through years of study and oversight and tests. Their experience and training has to count for something.

There seems to be a trend where people think they can simply “listen to their own inner voice” and know what needs to be done. Is this healthy? Is it wise?

While we are pulling away from the passive mindset of our past, we are jumping blindly into our future. We aren’t experts, but we are starting to think that even the experts aren’t the experts.

Where do we go from here? What happens next?

Say we can’t trust the authorities, the government, our teachers. Say that doctors are paid to give us pills, rather than get us well. Say that politicians are out to make money rather than make things right. Say that teachers teach indoctrination and submission, rather than how to think. Say that the farmers fill their produce and animals with poisons, rather than provide us with healthy food.

What next? Pull away from all of this, and do it all on our own?

While it is a good idea to be intentional about your life and mindful, it is also good to not think that someone with no education and experience is wiser than someone with a Master’s degree and thirty years on the job.

Take everything that is given you and study it for yourself. Ask the authority figure. Read as much as you can. Trust you own intuition. Talk to people you trust. Try it yourself. Do it all.

Ask the doctor why you should take this medicine. Ask what the benefits and side effects are. Look up your condition yourself and learn what the cause is. Do what you can to get and stay healthy – quit smoking, eat more vegetables, drink more water. Go for a walk every day. Move more, sit less.

Ask the teacher why you need to learn this lesson. Get your own books and read more about it – or anything else. Don’t homeschool – supplement. Double up on your education.

Ask the minister, the politician, the lawyer. Ask everybody – and learn on your own as well.

This isn’t an either-or kind of thing. It is a yes-and. Use what we have, and more. Learn on your own, and listen to that inner voice. Be mindful, be awake.

To pull your kid out of school and try to teach him yourself is the blind leading the blind. To stop going to the doctor and just pray over your illness is to do the same. To grow your own food can be as insane as being your own lawyer – you don’t know what you are doing. You aren’t an expert.

It is just as dangerous to be submissive and passive as to be blindly self-supporting. There is a middle path.

Action? Affirmative.

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I read a story of a lady who was applying for jobs online. She thought that she had a pretty good résumé and skill set. But she wasn’t getting any hits. She thought that it might be because she had a noticeably African American name. She created a fake profile, with all the same information – schooling, work experience, and skills. But this time, she used a name that sounded white.

Her inbox was flooded with requests for interviews.

She thinks it is racist, and it is, but it isn’t for why she thinks it is.

I’m not going to win any friends with this post. I’m pretty sure someone is going to say I’m being racist. But if we don’t start talking about this problem, it will continue. And good people will keep getting shafted because of the actions of bad people.

We’ve created our own monster.

Affirmative action prevents someone from being fired because of their race. This means that someone who is African American cannot lose their job solely because they are African American.

But here’s the reality of it.

It also means that someone who is African American cannot be fired, or even censured, or even get a bad review AT ALL, because of the fear that they will pull the race card.

Thus, employers are afraid to hire someone who is African American, because they cannot treat and train them the same as every other employee. They are above the rules.

The intent of Affirmative Action was to help them, but sadly, some people are using it as a way to get away with bad work. This is affecting everybody else.

I’ve seen this over and over again. I was born and raised in the South. In my nearly thirty years of working, I’ve seen this play out over and over. When I lived in the North, I saw an entirely different thing. It was better there. So this is why I’m writing about this. Perhaps people don’t see this because it doesn’t happen where they are. But it happens plenty here, and it is terrible.

African American employees are allowed to do substandard work, and they still get to not only keep their jobs, they will get raises. Sometimes they last long enough to become supervisors. They still can’t do the work, but they get paid thousands more than those who actually do the work.

They can come in late and leave work early, and nothing happens.

They can be surly or indifferent to their fellow coworkers and customers and nothing will happen.

Is this true for all African Americans? No, certainly not. I’ve had the privilege of working with many fine people of all races who were great employees.

But I’ve also had the sad misfortune of working with too many people who were African American who were terrible employees. If they were challenged about their bad work habits, they threatened to sue for discrimination.

I can understand why employers are not wanting to take the risk.

So yes, we need Affirmative Action – we need members of the African American community to affirmatively decide to act – to self-police, and to hold each other up to a higher standard.

Sure, you shouldn’t be fired because of your race, but likewise it shouldn’t be that because of your race you can’t be fired. Ability should matter, right?

Immigrant / Refugee

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These words are on the Statue of Liberty –
“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

But they don’t mean anything anymore. They sound good, but we as Americans don’t really mean them. We like to think we do, but our actions and policies say otherwise.

Remember when “immigrant” wasn’t a dirty word? Now, with the large group of Mexican children at America’s border, the word has shifted from “immigrant” to “refugee”.

That is what they are. That is what they have always been. They are looking for a better life. They can’t make it there, so they are trying to make it here.

This has always been a nation of immigrants.

The Puritans, seeking religious freedom.

The Irish, escaping famine.

The Chinese, in search of jobs where they can earn a living wage.

Layer upon layer, they come and add to the flavor of this country. This country is made up of mutts.

But Americans are scared. They don’t want “them” to take away their jobs or use up their resources. Public education and healthcare isn’t free – they are supported with tax dollars. If you are illegally here, you aren’t paying taxes. You are using resources that you haven’t paid for.

And then we gripe about having to change our signs and paperwork to be in English and in Spanish. That costs money too, money we don’t have.

We may say that America is the richest country, but we are in debt up to our ears. We don’t have the resources to take care of ourselves, much less everybody else. We don’t have room, or time, or much of anything else left over.

But what we do have is more than what they have.

Mexicans are fleeing drug cartels and police on the take. They are fleeing crushing poverty and illiteracy. They are fleeing lives where the only thing to look forward to is death.

For years they were referred to as “illegal immigrants” – but now with this huge group of Mexican children at the border, the term has shifted to “refugee” to garner sympathy.

So what do we do? Take them in? Adopt them out? Put them in foster care? Who is going to tend these children? Where is the money going to come from?

Should we make every Mexican in this country “legal” – drop all immigration limits and expect everybody to work and pay taxes and learn the language? Make a rule that if you want to come here, you have to pull your weight just like everybody else?

We all have to be on the same page.

We aren’t united. We are rather divided. And we are falling. We have a chance here, a choice. We have a chance to be “A Christian nation” like we like to think we are, and welcome in the stranger and treat our neighbor with the same kindness we wanted.

But how? With what money? We had to shut down the federal government for weeks last year due to no money.

We say we want to do the right thing, but when push comes to shove, we’d rather do what hurts less.

People control – on school violence and gender roles

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We don’t need gun control, so much as people control.

If you ban guns, then only the people who obey laws will not have guns. The people who don’t obey laws will have as many as they want. They are the ones who kill people anyway.

We need to address why people, especially young boys, are killing other people.

We need to address the rage and powerlessness that young boys are feeling and counter that. They kill to make themselves seen and heard. Address that in a healthy way, early on, and they won’t feel a need to kill.

We have to address the sense of hopelessness and alienation they feel.

When boys are told to not cry, to “be a man”, they are not allowed to be in touch with their softer sides. They are molded into an unnatural shape, like a bonsai tree. But unlike a bonsai tree, they aren’t shaped into anything beautiful, but warped.

If a boy acts in any way other than the traditionally masculine role he is seen as either gay or a girl. He is emasculated by his peers. He is a “pussy” or a “fag” or “has no balls”. A guy who is caring, who is considerate, who is loving, is seen as not a guy. This is unhealthy and damaging to him as a person.

The only way that guys are allowed to express themselves is through being physically aggressive. So is it any surprise that they become violent, and the only way they feel that they can be seen and heard is to use violence? Gun violence is the most extreme form of “acting out,” but it is still in line with being a guy.

First, we must drop all the “rules” about what it means to be male.

Our society has really started to raise its collective consciousness about women’s rights and roles, but we’ve failed the boys. We tell women that they can be anything they want to be but we don’t say the same thing to boys. We tell women that they can be doctors or lawyers or mechanics, but we don’t support boys who want to be dancers or artists or stay-at-home-Dads.

Sure, they can be, but at a loss to their masculinity. Sure, they can be, but they run the risk of being seen as not male. In American society, that is the same as not being a person.

When a woman has a job that is seen as being traditionally “male”, she is a groundbreaker. When a man has a job that is seen as traditionally “female”, he is seen as not being a man. For a woman, it is a step up. For a man, it is a step down.

Let’s drop the “rules” for what defines someone as “male” or “female” and start thinking about what it means to be a person. Let’s focus on character and compassion instead. Let us let people be people, and not gender.

Let us also teach everybody – boys and girls together, as many ways to express their emotions and needs. Humans need connection. We are not solitary beings. We have to communicate with each other. But not all of us are good at communicating with words. We all need to learn different “languages” – of art, of dance, of music. We all need to learn as many ways as possible to “get it out” of ourselves. Bottled up feelings tend to bubble over in unpleasant ways.

Remember how frustrated a small child gets when something isn’t right? He wails and whines and fusses. He’s hungry, or tired, or something hurts, or he needs something that isn’t there. His frustration grows and grows until someone figures out what is wrong and fixes it. Sometimes a parent will say “Use your words” to remind him that he has to communicate his needs. Then he has to slow down and think about what it is that he needs so he can express it. Then the parent can help.

But what if he doesn’t know what is wrong? Or what if he hasn’t been taught the words?

There is a trend these days to teach sign language to infants. They are taught a gestural language because it is easier for them than speech at that point. The frustration level is reduced dramatically. Instead of guessing what is wrong, the parent knows because the child has said it with gestures.

But what if you are older? What if you know a lot of words? And what if they still aren’t enough?

I believe that this, along with the rigidity of the masculine gender role, is the heart of the problem. I believe that everybody needs to learn how to express themselves in multiple “languages”. Bring back art programs. Bring back music in the school. Let everybody take a turn at theatre. Or gardening. Or cooking, or sewing, for instance. Everybody needs to learn the skills necessary for life, for being an independent person, anyway.

I also believe that everybody needs to get moving. Lack of physical exercise results in too much pent up energy.

We can turn this around. We can’t wait for the government to do it, or the school systems. It will take too long for the committees to study it. Every person who cares for a young person is responsible for this change. Anything counts. We can’t do it all, and we certainly can’t do it all at once. But we have to start.

Go to the library for ideas. Check with the Y, or the community center. Get moving, get creating on your own. Think it costs too much? It is cheaper than a coffin.

The life you save will be that of your young friend and twenty random strangers.

Torn. Thoughts on #Yesallwomen

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I’m really torn about the #Yesallwomen tag. It is starting to sound like an airing of grievances. I have my own list, trust me. I thought about posting it. But how will this heal us? Men and women are both feeling alienated and misunderstood and threatened. What can we do to teach boundaries and compassion and respect? How do we build a bridge? What can we as a community, as a culture, do to stop the psychic pain that causes these outbursts of random violence?

This isn’t about gun control.

It would be stupid to think that banning guns will do any good. The cat is already out of the bag. If we ban guns, then only the “bad guys” will have guns. That isn’t safer. That is actually more dangerous. I’m not saying everybody needs to have a gun either. I’m saying that it is too late to even talk about gun control. In the last two examples of mass murder a knife was used. It isn’t about guns. It is about violence. What pushes someone to the point that they kill?

We need people control. We need self respect, and respect for others. We need for everybody to learn how to establish and enforce and respect boundaries in themselves and in others.

This isn’t about mental illness either.

Involuntarily committing people just because they are odd or different is a very dangerous idea. There are reasons why people have to present a clear example of being a danger to themselves or others before they are involuntarily committed. It is to prevent someone being essentially imprisoned without cause.

If we committed every person who was different, fully half the population would be in a mental institution. Who would get to decide what is “normal”? Who would be in charge? If you vote differently, don’t make enough money, go to the “wrong” church or no church at all – you are different. In you go. Sure, the idea of committing all the “crazy” people seems like a good idea, until you are the “crazy” one, according to someone else’s standards. You haven’t done anything wrong, but they think you might.

See how this sounds?

Speaking from the perspective as someone who has voluntarily committed herself twice, mental hospitals aren’t a great idea. A mental institution is not a place to learn how to be healthy. It is not a place where you are taught good coping skills and how to deal with the “real world.”

It is more like a holding cell. It is a place where you get medicated to the point of being a zombie. Of course people stop taking their medications when they get out. They don’t see the point of them. They make them feel terrible. The medications often make it harder to be a human being, not easier.

It would be better if mental hospitals taught people how to prepare healthy food for themselves, how to choose an exercise routine they can stick with, and how to interact with other people in a healthy way. If you can’t handle life before, you certainly can’t handle it when you are on drugs that make your thinking processes fuzzy. It is better to teach people how to be people first.

We need to rethink everything.

We have failed our boys. We have failed our girls. We have failed as a culture. These no longer random acts of violence have taught us this.

How do we change? What can we do to heal this rift?

Handout, handbag

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I was walking downtown and saw a black man cross my path. He was a bit shabbily dressed – worn t-shirt, baggy jeans. While I’ve been taught to be wary of strangers, I’ve been taught that message applies double to black men.

Is it fair? Is it fair that I have been taught to think that a black man wants something from me? My handbag. A handout. Or something more heinous.

How much have we created the very thing we expect, by expecting it? If the only interaction white people, white women especially, are able to have with black men is an adversarial one, it is all we will have.

People need to interact with each other. It is part of what makes us human. We live in community. It is our common life that sustains us.

We may think we live independently, but we don’t. We eat food that is grown and harvested by others. We use electricity and water that is harnessed and directed to us by others.

When we allow only a small kind of interaction, and a warped kind of interaction at that, to take place between entire groups all the time, then we are short-changing individuals of their basic humanity. We are seeing them as things and not as people.

Perhaps I was taught that black men are lesser are thieves and beggars because that is what was seen as the truth by my role models. Perhaps there were far more bad examples than good examples for them.

But perhaps there were far more bad examples because that is what they were looking for. Perhaps they created this reality.

In the child rearing books that I have read, you are supposed to ignore the bad behavior and praise the good. Children, like all people, crave attention. Even if it is negative attention, it is still attention. If we focus and give energy to bad behavior, we will get more of it.

If we tell black males that we will relate to them only in terms of being thieves or thugs or transients, we will get more of it.

Time to change the script.

Survey – the questions are all wrong.

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My afternoon was interrupted by a survey call a week ago. I informed the guy that I’m on a “no call list” but he told me that my opinions matter, so I went through with it. In a way I wish I hadn’t. I learned that my opinions only matter if they fit in the boxes he had to tick off his survey.

He said that the survey would only take a few minutes. When it was over, half an hour was gone. Perhaps he was lying about it taking a short time just to get me to do it. Perhaps it took so long because the questions were all wrong.

The survey was about reducing America’s dependence on foreign oil. The choices were using more ethanol or fracking.

I of course am opposed to fracking, for numerous reasons. It poisons the water supply, it harvests yet another non-renewable resource (natural gas), and the product itself is dangerous and hard to transport. Natural gas isn’t the answer, and in order to use it for our cars we’d all have to buy new ones. You can’t get more wasteful than that. What would we do with all the old ones that won’t work anymore?

But I’m opposed to ethanol too. The more land we use to grow corn for ethanol is less land we use to grow food for people. Empty stomachs rate higher than empty gas tanks.

At one point he said as part of the survey that the corn used for ethanol wasn’t the same kind of corn used to feed people – and that it was also used to feed cattle. I had even more problems with that. Cows aren’t meant to eat corn. They develop E-coli in their guts when they eat that. It isn’t how they are designed. They are meant to eat grass. But then, that isn’t even the point. Again, there is a distraction there. The more meat we eat, the more unhealthy we are. Skip the whole issue about feeding corn to cows. Skip the cows entirely.

See my frustration? No matter what he said, it was wrong.

So, what about ethanol? It isn’t oil. We would reduce our “dependence on foreign oil” and “become more independent” as he said. Ethanol isn’t an efficient fuel. For many older model cars, just using it voids the warranty. It is a cheap filler.

So from my perspective, he was asking the wrong questions. Really, if we want to become less dependent on foreign countries by our need for oil, we need to stop using up so much energy.

My husband takes the train or the bus to work. Mass transit is more efficient. It is better to use one vehicle to take forty people to work than forty vehicles. When the weather is nice he takes his bike. As for me, I bought the house close to work. It is a short drive. Not only am I saving fuel, but time.

Both of us fill up our gas tanks only once a month. It isn’t everything. Everything would be not using gasoline at all. Because of how American neighborhoods are laid out, that is nearly impossible. The grocery store is too far away to bike to and get everything. We drive as little as possible, being mindful of combining errands and catching rides with friends if we are going to the same events.

It is something, and something counts. We are reducing our use.

Better than that, we as a culture need to start using renewable resources. Solar. Wind. Water. Oil and natural gas will be used up. Probably not in our lifetime, but does that matter? We need to think about future generations. What are we leaving our children, and their children? An empty husk of a planet? We had the party and left them the mess to clean up.

The guy administering the survey was just reading off the script. I had a hard time with them because they weren’t the right questions. If the choice is get more oil or go for more ethanol or go with fracking, it is still wrong. I argued with the questions in my frustration. There simply wasn’t a way to answer the questions the way he was asking them. I could tell he was trying to shoehorn me. I kept questioning. I kept getting frustrated.

I doubt I woke him up. I doubt he was even listening to what I was saying, because I wasn’t really answering his questions. The call “was being monitored for quality assurance purposes”, but even then I doubt I was able to wake the monitor up and make him think. I’m pretty sure they think I’m another quack who just doesn’t understand the questions. The problem is that I understand them too well.

I’m pretty sure my answers are being tabulated and calibrated and measured and made to fit whatever theory they had before they even started calling people. Surveys don’t prove anything. If you know what you are doing, they can mean anything you want them to.

I wish I’d not even talked to him. I feel like I wasted my time. I feel like my personal space was invaded for half an hour. To let someone talk mindlessly at you on the phone is just as invasive as letting them in your house. It is all space.

Poem – “Fighting for our Freedom”

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We tell our children to trust us
And then we send them off to war.

We tell them that they are “fighting for our freedom”
but really we are sending them to die.

They fight for oil. They fight for glory.

They fight for nothing more
than to prove that the American Way
is the only way.

We’ve become the hall monitors
the snitches
the bullies
of the world.
What we say goes.

We are the ones who go and tell countries to stop
doing things their way
and to start doing things
our way.

Because our way is best,
you see?

Rampant obesity, depression, anxiety
in children and adults.
People stocking up canned goods
and dried milk
and ammunition
enough for years
enough for an outbreak of
zombies
or talk show hosts.

Same thing.

Our way is best.
Be like us.

With one in four children
going to bed hungry,
with people graduating high school
who still don’t know how to read
or think
for themselves,

our way is best, you see?

America, heal thyself.
Then,
if you have any money left over
after every child is fully fed
and fully educated
and every person has
a job
and a home
then maybe
you can think
about sending out your citizens
as ambassadors of this new
American Way
instead.

What about we “fight for freedom”
with love
instead of bullets?

What if we teach and train
instead of terrorize?

Oh, no, they say,
we aren’t the terrorists.
The terrorists are our enemies.

But how are we different
when we impose our will
on another nation,
another culture
by force
at the point of a gun?

Let’s invade them with water wells
and textbooks
and fresh food
and self esteem
and peace
instead.

But first, let’s practice here
to make sure we’ve got it right.