As a part time prognosticator, I sometimes get it wrong. Sometimes I get it right. When I get it right, it is not necessarily a reason for feeling smug. Today, I reread this post that I wrote back in 2005. I wrote it when the oil squeeze was just beginning. I remarked how uncomfortable I felt seeing new exurbias sprouting up in nearby Loudoun County, Virginia because virtually all of them are inaccessible to public transportation. I wondered what would happen to these communities with continued increases in price of oil or its unavailability.
Now we are finding out, and the answer is scary, as this NPR story reports. Ashburn, Virginia is in Loudon County, Virginia and part of the greater Washington D.C. metropolitan area. It is one of those newly built exurbias. What is happening in Ashburn is that home prices are tumbling much faster than the national average.
Realtor Danilo Bogdanovic surveyed two rows of neat, new, brick townhouses on Falkner’s Lane. “These were selling for about $550,000 at the peak, which was about August ‘05, and they’re selling right now for about $350,000,” Bogdanovic said. “Fifty percent of this community has been ether foreclosed on or is facing foreclosure.”
Coincidentally, my hair stylist lives in Ashburn. Today while she was cutting my hair, we were chatting about high gas prices. If she and her husband had to do it over again, she said, they would have never moved to Ashburn. Their gas prices are driving a big dent in their budget. Yet, I learned, moving in closer was not an option. They would lose too much money, because their house was worth less than they paid for it. If her house is on Falkner’s Lane, I can understand why she would feel blue, since she might now own a house worth $200,000 less than what she paid for it.
What might turn things around? As I implied back in 2005, some public transportation might help. That is not to say that it doesn’t exist in Loudoun County, but it is very limited and assumes you commute to work in Washington, D.C. A resident of Ashburn could drive or bike to the Dulles North Transportation Center and from there take an express bus into Washington D.C. This bus is not cheap. It costs $6.00 each way with a smart card, or $7.00 if you pay cash.
What would someone in Ashburn do if they needed to commute to some other job center like Tyson’s Corner? Perhaps they could catch another bus at the West Falls Church Metro Station, where the bus stops on its way into Washington. What if they need to take public transportation to go to a doctor’s office in Reston, Virginia? It might be technically possible at certain times of the day, if they can make it work with the commuter bus schedule and make their bus transfers on time. What if they need to take public transportation to go to the grocery store? As best I can tell, there are no such routes. Even if routes were put into place, given that Ashburn is such a sprawled out community they might have to walk a mile or more just to get to a bus stop.
For all practical purposes, residents of Ashburn are stuck. Owning a car is required to live there. Their lifestyle is held hostage by the price of oil. Oil prices may seem astronomical, but they are fortunate that gas is available at any price. Without it, Ashburn would become a gigantic modern ghost town. Combine rising oil prices with a falling dollar and the negative net worth of so many residents of Ashburn and you end up with houses that are worth $200,000 less than they were just three years ago. You have whole communities of people with negative equities in their houses, unable to move and who are one job loss away from financial catastrophe.
My own house is about three miles away from Reston. Reston is a major source of employment and has thousands of great jobs for knowledge workers. In the unlikely event that you lose your job at one company in Reston, you can probably pick another one like it somewhere else in Reston. A Fairfax Connector bus serves my neighborhood, but it operates during rush hours only. However, my house is just three to five miles away from thousands of jobs, not ten or fifteen miles away like in Ashburn. Where I live, you can probably get to your job without a car if needed. I bicycle to work, which is three miles away, three or four days a week. Consequently, gas prices affect me much less than most commuters. Yet even if I worked downtown, I still would not be too badly inconvenienced. I could bike to the Herndon Monroe Park and Ride, which is also three miles away, or grab the 929 bus, which runs by a road a few hundred feet from my door. Once at the Herndon Monroe Park and Ride there are plentiful express buses that will take me to the West Falls Church Metro station. From there I can get to any place on the Metro system. If I needed to take a bus to nearby Reston, Herndon, or even some of the local malls, I can transfer at the Herndon Monroe Park and Ride. Obviously, I could get to these places more quickly by car, but it is possible. The same cannot necessarily be said about communities like Ashburn.
My neighborhood is not immune to the real estate slowdown either. Our house has lost about $75,000 in value since its 2005 peak. However, that is $75,000 though, not $200,000. There are plenty of houses for sale on my street, virtually all in excellent condition. We live in a terrific family neighborhood where owners take pride in their houses. I suggested to my stylist that they should move to a house on my street. She would be two miles from work so the cost of gasoline would be insignificant. However, with the negative equity in her house, moving is out of the question. Where would she and her husband find the money to pay off their loan on closing?
I do not think these underlying dynamics are likely to change. We are at the beginning of a fundamental transformation of America. This means our love affair with the automobile is likely to change dramatically. At best, I expect oil prices will stay about where they are now. Therefore, for many homeowners out in exurbia the financial squeeze, already bad, is likely to get much more painful. The long-term trends though are clear. Unless you can work from your home or can find employment close by that pays your bills, do not buy in the exurbia. If you are in the exurbia and can move in close, this is the time to do it.
Housing prices are down substantially in good neighborhoods like mine that are close to jobs and public transportation. Because prices are down and mortgages are very affordable, now is an excellent time to buy in these neighborhoods. It may not be easy to sell your current house, but as I learned in 1993 if you lower the price enough you can sell any house. You can buy a better and closer house at a substantial discount and be primed for appreciation during this seismic realignment of society. In addition, selection is plentiful.
To the many residents of Ashburn and similar far-flung communities who are feeling the squeeze, you have my sympathy. If I lived in Ashburn, I would still move closer in if I could find a way. The long-term housing dynamics for Ashburn and places like it look dismal. You may find yourself inhabiting a modern ghost town.
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April 25th, 2008 at 09:25pm
Posted by
Mark |
Best of Occam's Razor, Politics 2008 |
one comment
Tags: Energy Independence, Environment, Housing, Loudoun County, Virginia
It is rare that I am riveted by a news story. Yet this story (and its many variants) had me riveted. It appears that Mother Teresa (the Roman Catholic nun who founded the Sisters of Charity, and who spent fifty years caring for the least of our brethren, mostly in the slums of Calcutta) largely did not feel the presence of the God she served.
What is next? Will we see secret diaries of Adolf Hitler saying how much he loved and admired the Jews? The irony is that Mother Teresa’s feelings, articulated only to a series of confidential confessors over many years, seems to be one of the reasons that she will be elevated to sainthood. It appears that in the eyes of the Catholic Church, being disconnected from the Jesus she believed means she suffered, like Jesus on the cross, so that makes her even holier. Perhaps her experience is somewhat akin to the forty days and forty nights that the Bible says Jesus spent in the desert tormented by the Devil. For Jesus though, forty days and nights was enough. Mother Teresa spent more than fifty years consumed by her humanitarian work while rigidly towing the Catholic line. Yet she did this apparently without the consuming zeal of a religious devotee.
Well knock me over with a soda straw! Yet, some part of me was unsurprised. I have discussed Mother Teresa in bits and pieces in a variety of other blog entries. While I cannot but help admire her and feel astonished by the scope of her humanitarian work, some part of me was also appalled. Perhaps I could understand her if it she found passion in her work, but apparently, that was not the case. She loathed it. Seeing such wretched people day in and day out for fifty years, by her own admission, filled her with immense inner pain and suffering. And yet she soldiered on, put on a happy face and towed the Catholic line all while feeling nothing from the God she worshiped and served.
Just who was Mother Teresa anyhow? Judging from her works the answer is clear. She was a humanitarian the likes of which will probably not recur for many centuries. Judging from the divergence between her public words and private thoughts, she was also something of a hypocrite. I hasten to add that her hypocrisy was not the type deserving chastisement. Hypocrisy is typically manifested as selfish or immoral behavior while pretending the opposite. That was not the case here.
It appears that Mother Teresa was a hypocritical humanist. Humanists like Mother Teresa and me generally do not feel the presence of a personal God in our lives. We believe that relieving the suffering of our fellow humans is nonetheless a worthwhile goal. We believe that all people have inherent worth and dignity and that includes rich and poor, as well as the moral and the reviled. Mother Teresa followed the Catholic faith, but appeared to receive no enrichment from it. Receiving the Eucharist, for example, sparked no closer feelings toward God. She followed and advocated the teachings of the Church but they did not provide her with the passion that motivated her to do her work. Rather than taking care of the wretched out of a feeling of passion, she did her work because she said she said she was called by God to do so.
What does it mean to consume your life doing something that fundamentally disagrees with you? Is this virtuous or insane? If I started cutting myself like many teenagers do I would be up to my armpits in therapists. It is generally understood that actions that are self-destructive are harmful. In her confessions, Mother Teresa acknowledges that her actions wreaked a dreadful psychological toll on her. Her actions helping the poor were clearly virtuous but the 24/7/365 nature of her work suggests to me that most clinical psychologists would say she was also mentally ill.
Perhaps it must go this way if you are angling for sainthood. Mother Teresa went out of her way to not draw attention to herself. She was obsessive about being used as a means for people to find Jesus and Catholicism. If she were to take any pride in her accomplishments, she would perceive this as sinful in itself. The primary criteria for sainthood then seems to be the ability of the human will to persistently engage in actions perceived by the Catholic Church as beneficial yet contrary to our human nature. In other words to be a saint, you have to unlearn or deny yourself the right of personal happiness.
Yet it appears that as much as Mother Teresa tried, she could not stop feeling like a human being. Underneath her saintly demeanor was a thinking and passionate woman. Where she “succeeded” was in ruthlessly repressing her own human nature. This strikes me as tragic.
Some years back I wrote about toxic shame. I was introduced to it by the noted therapist John Bradshaw, who wrote this book on the subject. Bradshaw’s thesis was that shame can reach a toxic level, wherein it colors all of our actions. Instead of being a human being who can take joy in life, many of those inflicted with toxic shame become (in his words) human doings. Clearly, Mother Teresa was a human doing. It is now also clear from her confessions that she took no personal joy in her work. How she ended up this way is something of a mystery. However, if I had to bet, I would bet that her childhood was very rough indeed. A casual Wikipedia search did not return much information on her early life. Her father died when she was eight. She was born in Albania (Macedonia at the time), which is a poor country, known for large families. I would bet that her childhood was harsh and women were not valued very much. I also bet she did not get much in the way of parental attention. For whatever reason, she left home at 18 to join the Sisters of Loreto and never saw her family again. Her motivation for helping others might be a result of the lack of personal attention that she craved during her childhood. Obviously, I am speculating here, but it seems logical.
If so, then clearly many have benefited from her feelings of toxic shame. She inspired a new religious order, which continues to carry on with her work. Nevertheless, to be able to give out such love, yet to have been denied the kind of connection that she needed to feel from her God (and likely her family) strikes me as unbelievably tragic. Mother Teresa lived 87 years but it appears she was denied the love and intimacy she needed to feel like she was a human being. Instead, she became a human doing.
While I think humanitarianism is a noble cause, I do not think it should wholly consume anyone’s life. If it does, it should be because a person is truly passionate about it, not because someone feels they should do it. I suspect if Mother Teresa were alive and Dr. Sigmund Freud tried to psychoanalyze her, even he would throw up his hands in despair.
Mother Teresa for me remains an utter contradiction, at once both holy and someone for whom I feel even more compassion for than the wretched people she served. I hope her utter selflessness in her life earns her great spiritual reward in heaven. The irony is that, based on her own confessions, she would not enjoy such spiritual rewards. She would feel unworthy to receive them because they would dim the glory of the God she worshiped, but for whom she felt no passion.
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August 25th, 2007 at 11:09am
Posted by
Mark |
Best of Occam's Razor, Sociology |
no comments
Tags: Compassion, Humanism, Love, Mother Teresa
Las Vegas attracts many of life’s losers. If people are going to gamble on living then why not die here in this neon filled city that epitomized the extremes of American living? In 1998, my wife’s father, a man who I never met, died indigent and homeless here in Las Vegas.
His death was suspected for many years but for a long time could not be confirmed. He had a habit of disappearing for a few years then reappearing. When he reappeared, it was usually not a joyful experience. Generally, he was petitioning his siblings for two things: money and shelter. He must have been something of a smooth talker because over many years he talked them out of thousands of dollars. They wanted to believe in his rehabilitation. He promoted cockamamie business schemes involving their money, all of which eventually failed. About this time that he crept out of town.
Around the year 2000 after many years of no one hearing from Bob, one of my wife’s aunts entered his name into the Social Security Death Index. When his name and social security number came up positive, some basic facts about his death were gleaned. Date of death: September 14th, 1998. Age: 67.
Earlier this year I happened to speak to one of his sisters, my wife’s Aunt Pat. I informed her that her brother had died. She expressed neither surprise nor sorrow. However, she did take the time to get a copy of the death certificate, and she sent me a copy.
The death certificate filled in a few holes about his last days. He died at St. Rose Dominican Hospital in Henderson, Nevada. Henderson is a town just outside of Las Vegas. His place of residence did not list a street address, but Searchlight, Nevada was listed on the death certificate. Searchlight is a town of about 500 people an hour’s drive south of Las Vegas. There is not much in Searchlight, but it is the birthplace of Senator Majority Leader Harry Reid.
Bob must have died indigent because the Clark County Social Services Department was listed on the death certificate where his parents’ names would normally be. The certificate showed he was never married but here too the facts were incorrect. He was married to my mother in law for many years. In addition, he sired not only my wife but also my brother in law. He died of “end stage cardiac and pulmonary failure”. In other words, his heart stopped, but he was likely suffering from some form of congestive heart failure. He was reputedly quite obese as well as an alcoholic.
Among his entire family, including his former wife (my mother in law) there has been a noted absence of curiosity about Bob. When I broached the subject with them, what I usually heard was that he was just a bad man. The less said about him the better. Yet I found myself wanting to know more about Bob. For better or for worse he help shaped the woman I married.
My wife essentially grew up without a father. In the first six years of her life, her father did live in the household. However, he was not the nurturing type. My wife does not remember much about him in part because she was so young. What she does remember is not flattering. He was loud. He and her mother argued a lot. Perhaps that is how she acquired her introversion. Perhaps it was safer to be alone in a room reading a book than to deal with the ugly reality of two parents yelling at each other.
By early grade school, her mother and father were divorced. Her mother had custody, but her father had informal visitation rights. Her father’s idea of daughter-father time was to take her to bars to meet his friends. Since her brother was nearly ten years older than she was, she spent much of her formative years living with only her mother. There was no June Cleaver mother waiting for her after school with milk and cookies; she had to work. In the mid 1960s, she was the only child of divorce in her entire class and felt its stigma.
Trying to know her father so many years later is a challenge. Bob apparently was loud. He argued a lot in front of the children. At times, he had trouble maintaining a job. He was obsessed with his son excelling in sports, but not enough to bother to attend any of his games. My mother in law claims that he never physically abused her, but her son remembers differently. He recalls one episode when he was so angry that he put his fist through a wall. For a day or two, my wife was an innocent six-year-old girl embroiled in a nasty marital dispute. Her father essentially abducted her for a few days. Her brother, then sixteen at the time, threatened to kill their father if he ever showed up in their lives again. Apparently, he took his threat seriously and disappeared. He reappeared only to sympathetic siblings that hoped for his rehabilitation.
I had this image of Bob as fat, a drunkard, coarse and abusive. However, a discussion about Bob with my mother in law this week (we were in Phoenix, Arizona) portrays a somewhat different man. He did not always drink to excess, but when he drove a beer truck, he had more opportunities to imbibe, so that may have started his addiction. That and perhaps his loveless marriage seemed to tip the balance toward dysfunction. I imagined him running around with other women but that was not the case. He wanted to desperately to save their marriage. My mother in law wanted it to end because she was not in love with him. Much of his emotional abuse was manifested as reckless attempts to keep their marriage together. He had a hard time coping with the reality that there was no way he could win back her love. Moreover, my mother in law was doing quite well in the workplace by the standards of Flint, Michigan. She could provide for her children on her own income. She was eventually able to purchase her own home and even furnish is with brand new furniture. As she entered her teens, my wife had a home in the suburbs at last with her own bedroom and supportive neighbors. My mother in law made the best life she could for her daughter.
Nor was Bob a bad provider. He managed to stay employed in decent blue-collar jobs throughout his marriage. It appears that the divorce and his messy abduction of my wife triggered a long descent. He lived in Denver for a while, close to one of his sisters. I have heard that he probably had adult diabetes. He may have lost a leg because of his drinking. He sounds like a man who was probably clinically depressed for much of his life. Like most people born in the 1930s, he chain-smoked.
Talking with Aunt Pat I learned something of his family of birth. He was raised in a poor North Carolina household. The family eventually moved to California. He grew up in a family full of marital strife and high drama. Perhaps I assumed he was a philanderer because he had the opportunity to learn it from his father. His father and mother eventually divorced. Bob became the family’s black sheep. Aunt Pat was pulled toward the other extreme. She embraced religion. Now in her early eighties she remains a devout Adventist who despite her background managed to add a PhD to her name. Pat also sponsored my wife for several months when she moved to the Washington area. Were it not for Pat’s loving heart, I would never have met my wife.
Only my mother in law offers a different perspective of Bob from the other stories I heard. He was a good provider when they were married to each other. He only actually hit her once, and he just pushed her. She was not physically injured. She just did not love him. She wanted to be free of him. In particular, she wanted to follow her infatuation with the man who was her boss.
It appears that their divorce instigated Bob’s long, slow and painful downhill spiral. Eventually he ended up homeless in Searchlight, Nevada. He ended up sick but made it to a hospital in Henderson, Nevada. He died there ignobly and most likely alone. With no one to claim his body, the Clark County Social Services Department took up the slack. They paid for his cremation. His remains are now deep in a county crypt somewhere in here in Las Vegas. They can be released to the family if sufficient documentation is provided and for a $200 fee.
While I am forwarding these details to Aunt Pat, I doubt anyone will claim his remains. No one mourned his passing. In fact, everyone seems glad to know that he has exited this world. With Bob gone, their lives became just a little less stressful too.
I wonder how long the Clark County Social Services will hold on to his remains. We arrived in Las Vegas today, where my wife and daughter will attend a convention. I was going to try to track them down along with any records maintained by the county that may exist. However, after a couple phone calls I know not to bother. There is no place to go to see what is left of my father in law. There is no county crypt with his name on it that I can photograph. They will not even release his records, not even to family. It is prohibited by HIPAA regulations. There is a possibility that I could retrieve his hospital records, if a local probate court grants the writ, but it is unlikely it would shed much information about the last years of his life.
Therefore, I fill in what I can with sketchy information, anecdotes and a certain amount of reasonable conjecture. I should be angry with my father in law too. I should be angry at his abduction of his own daughter. I should be angry at how he used her, a vulnerable child, as a pawn in a larger personal war. Nevertheless, I am also now aware that in many ways Bob was acting out the behavior he witnessed inside his own dysfunctional family.
I do not know how long Clark County in Nevada will hold his remains. They will likely not stay in county custody forever. Perhaps in fifty years, perhaps in a hundred, Bob’s remains, like the many of indigent homeless men and women who have the misfortune of dying out here in the desert, will be unceremoniously dumped into a county landfill. After all, there are plenty of new desperate and homeless people in Las Vegas. Others wandering the streets here tonight are doomed to also share his fate.
Everyone just wants to forget about Bob. Perhaps I should too. Perhaps instead of keeping his death certificate, I should throw it out with the garbage. “Every man’s death diminishes me, for I am involved in mankind,” the poet John Donne once wrote. My Unitarian Universalist values call me to respect the inherent dignity and worth of every human being including less than stellar humans like my wife’s father.
It is nice to know that Bob was not entirely a bad man. Most likely, he was just a lost man, who never knew love and consequently did not know how to show it. It is good to know that he loved my mother in law in his own inept way, even if she did not feel the same way. It is good to know that even though he never paid child support, he helped support his family for a number of years. It is also sad and a bit pathetic that his life devolved the way it did.
This leaves only me, lamenting only not knowing the man who sired the woman I love. I wish I could have a conversation or two with him and hear about life from his perspective. It may be that after such a conversation, like his son, I would want to kill him. Instead, I feel an unrequited mild curiosity. It might be the hardest thing I would ever do, but if he were alive here in front of me, I would try to give him a hug. Somehow, I do not think he ever received one.
There is just a cardboard urn of his ashes somewhere here in the Clark County crypt. There they are likely to remain forever unclaimed.
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July 13th, 2007 at 01:37am
Posted by
Mark |
Best of Occam's Razor, Life 2007 |
no comments
Tags: Families, Parenting, Relationships
The suburbs are literally killing us.
Not only are they killing those of us who live in the suburbs, the suburbs are also killing our planet. Somehow, we have to break our addiction to suburban living.
In the short term, this seems unlikely. As documented in the lead article in this week’s Washington Post Magazine, more and more of us are literally driven to extremes. The article documents a few of the more egregious marathon commuters here in the Washington D.C. metropolitan area. However, the phenomenon is hardly limited to the area where I live. Los Angeles pioneered it. Two hundred mile daily commutes like Marc Turner’s (as documented in the article) are becoming more and more common. The four hours Turner spends behind the wheel every workday gives him his affordable house in the suburbs for his wife and children. Unfortunately, his affordable house is in Charlottesville, Virginia and his job is in McLean, Virginia. He leaves for work around 7:30 AM and typically does not get home until sometime after 9 PM.
Turner drives 1000 miles a week getting two and from work. Think about this. 1000 miles is roughly the same distance between Washington D.C. and Miami. Imagine driving that distance every week to stay fully employed. But here’s the wackier thing. It would be faster to drive those miles between Washington D.C. and Miami. Even with modest traffic type ups on I-95 you can reasonably expect to average 55 miles an hour, which means you could drive that distance in 18 hours. During a typical week, Turner spends 20 hours a week getting to and from his job. This number will only go up. As traffic volume increases, roads become more congested and accidents increase. This will mean of course a longer commute. Every year a few minutes per day will be added to his commute.
Assuming he gets four weeks of leave a year, he commutes 48,000 miles a year. Turner drives a 1999 Saab 9-3 that according to the EPA averages 20 miles per gallon. Thus, his car consumes around 2400 gallons of gasoline a year commuting. Being kind and estimating only $2.75 a gallon for gasoline, he spends $6600 annually just for gas for his commute. This works out to $550 a month. Of course, there are the other costs of commuting like car payments, depreciation, auto service and other miscellaneous expenses. It is likely that the true cost of his commute is $1000 a month or more.
Those are just his direct costs. What are the costs to the planet? According to the EPA, the average car emits 12,100 pounds of carbon into the atmosphere per year. By my calculation, Mr. Turner’s car emits 53,095 pounds of carbon per year just in commuting, or more than four times the national average.
I suspect his job in Tysons Corner, Virginia pays a lot more than he could make in Charlottesville. Presumably, that helps compensate for the time, distance and expense of his commute. Nevertheless, you have to wonder. He spends at least twenty hours a week commuting. Let us assume he has a high tech job in Tysons Corner that pays $100,000 a year. That is $48.07 an hour. However, if you consider the time commuting as working time then he is working 60-hour weeks and is earning $32.05 an hour. My bet is that he could find a job in Charlottesville that is equivalent, pays at least this much per hour and he would have 20 more hours a week to do something other than commute. His marriage would improve and he would do more than glance at his kids every day. He probably makes the commute in part because he wanted a larger lifestyle than he could afford earning $32.05 an hour in Charlottesville.
Turner’s case is perhaps one of the more egregious ones. Yet as the Post Magazine article points out, he has plenty of company. Rush hour traffic is starting well before 6 AM on roads in West Virginia heading for Washington D.C. All that time sitting in a car though by yourself though is unhealthy. First, humans are social creatures. Not many of us would choose to spend four hours in a locked room by ourselves every day. Doctors worry about people developing blood clots from long airplane rides. What do you do to your health sitting in a car seat four hours a day? As the article documents, commuters have three times the likelihood of getting a heart attack in a car as opposed to not being in a car. I am also betting that with his marathon commuting lifestyle, Turner is not getting anything resembling regular exercise.
Why are we doing this to ourselves? Most likely, we are chasing the lifestyle our parents knew. Our desire to have a similar lifestyle is understandable. We are comfortable having this kind of lifestyle and it would be disconcerting and embarrassing if we cannot have it. There are many reasons why this kind of lifestyle is increasingly challenging. The principle one is that there are many more human beings than their used to be. There is also a big disparity between where the good jobs are and where affordable housing exists.
The suburban lifestyle is also bad for our health. You cannot live in a suburb without a car. Instead of walking somewhere, you are likely to drive there instead. Of course, with all that commuting getting any exercise if problematical. And speaking of commuting, if your suburb is like mine then it is probably missing a bus service. We actually do have a bus but it operates during rush hours only. Most of the time it runs empty. We cannot be bothered to take it because it is not convenient. It does not run frequently enough and it does not necessarily take us where we need to go anyhow.
Of course, most of us who do have access to a bus in the suburbs are already living out here. We bought in when prices were affordable. I could no longer afford to buy a house in my own neighborhood. My house, bought for $191,000 in 1993 is now worth close to half a million dollars. Unless a new couple comes complete with some very generous parents or have excellent jobs, the $3000-$4000 monthly mortgage payments are probably out of their price range. Therefore, they are buying further out instead.
There are alternatives, but they require reorienting your perspective and values. One alternative is to move far away from major metropolitan areas and live a smaller, more downsized life doing work that probably is less challenging and does not pay as well. Another alternative is to surrender those dreams of a house in the suburbs and a good neighborhood school for your kids. You have to imagine a lifestyle like in that 60s TV show, A Family Affair, where you and the kids live in an apartment or condominium somewhere in or very near the city. Unless the walls between units and floors are very thick, expect to have your neighbors in your face a lot more. You will still pay a lot for that apartment or condominium and it will have half the space or less of that house in the suburbs. However, at least you will be close to where you work. You will probably not have to spend twenty hours a week like Marc Turner commuting to and from your job.
These are essentially your choices for living in America in the 21st century. If you are emulating the Marc Turner lifestyle, expect that every year your lifestyle will become more difficult and more aggravating. At some point, it will become unendurable. There are West Virginians who rise at 3:30 AM in order to get to work in the city. The human body cannot endure such crazy hours and sleep depravation forever. If you lust after the suburban experience, you should face reality and downsize your expectations.
Our planet will appreciate your thoughtfulness.
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June 5th, 2007 at 10:42am
Posted by
Mark |
Best of Occam's Razor, Life 2007 |
2 comments
Tags: Environment
Well, it has taken a few centuries but it looks like there is a small, tiny hairline fracture in the religious space-time continuum. When atheists and devout Christians can sit down together and learn from each other without dismissing or proselytizing to one another, this is news. Yet somehow, this momentous event was largely overlooked. Yet it is actually happening, albeit in a relatively small way.
Mehta, now an honors graduate in mathematics and biology, has not converted, but the two have become friends. Mehta has started his own blog (friendlyatheist.com) and travels to speak to churches and humanist organizations. He has written a book - “I Sold My Soul on eBay” - that explains why he is an atheist and gives churches advice on what it would take to reach nonbelievers.
This is not to suggest that interfaith dialogs never occur. They do. Even the Pope occasionally catches the ecumenical wave and is seen openly praying with Muslims, Jews and assorted Protestants. The problem with most of these dialogs is that no real understanding occurs. These dialogs serve some other purposes but mutual learning is not one of them.
Nevertheless, when atheists and devout Christians can actually hear what the other is saying and take some actions based on their learning, I begin to feel that there is hope for humanity. It makes me wonder if seemingly intractable problems like global warming can be solved too. In the case of Jim Henderson, a former evangelical pastor, he is learning from atheists what I suggested back in 2004: Christian marketing practices suck. They suck because they are based on the model of the ignorant savage. There are not many of us still running around the bushes. Evangelicals hoping to draw in new adherents had better understand where the modern unchurched are coming from.
As for the “friendly atheist” Hemant Mehta, he is getting an eye opening in contemporary Christianity. If he was inclined to believe that Christians are starry-eyed myopic zealots, his understanding is now clarified through actual experiences. It seems that Christians are not necessarily always studying their Bible on break, or spending their weekends knocking on doors bringing the good news to the unenlightened. It seems that Christianity does not necessarily wholly define the lives of all Christians. Who would have thunk?
If you ask me, both the religious and the non-religious should spend much more time listening to each other. Talking at each other is easy. Listening is hard. When you listen, you have to acknowledge the point of view that you are hearing. When you listen, some part of your mind must see the world through the eyes of the person you are hearing. When you listen, it is hard not to develop empathy with the person talking. The person you are tuned into is no longer objectified as the heathen or the unenlightened. Instead, they become a human being. They become personable and real.
Many issues needlessly divide us from one another, and one of our most polarizing differences is religion. I count here atheism as a religion too. I am sure many atheists will want to harass me on the point, but there are many similarities between the religious and the atheists. Christians and atheists have this in common: certainty. Christians are certain that Jesus is our Savior. Atheists are certain he is not and God is a fiction. Both are dogmatic. Only now, maybe they are a little less so than they used to be.
Here is one of life’s lessons that I fortunately learned quite early after I pulled away from Catholicism: what religion you do or do not practice doesn’t really matter. Religion is the window dressing. Values are the window itself. I am guessing that you think that Christians and atheists do not have many values in common. Guess again. Both likely have a reverence for life. Both likely believe in love, fidelity and family. Both share a passion for the truth and only differ in how the truth should be interpreted. Of course, they also have other values that are not in common. That is okay because we are all unique. We all arrived where we are at via different paths. Consequently, we are not all going to believe the same things. So of course, we are not always going to share the same exact perspectives. We are each like a unique mold of gelatin, but we are all made of same gelatin. Our mold just happens to be our path through life. We are different but simultaneously we are also the same. This is natural for us. This is the way it was meant to be!
We need to never forget this. Truly, far more commonalities tie us together than pulls us apart. Your religion, your lack of it or your complete indifference to it should not matter any more than your eye color. The world would be a less interesting place if we all had brown eyes. The same is true with our many faiths and spiritual practices. Why not embrace our differences, instead of feeling affront if your beliefs are different from mine? If we were all the same then this world would be deathly dull. You can see how exciting the world was when much of it lived under communism. Was it better when everyone lived in the same kind of drab block apartments? How much more interesting life becomes when we celebrate, respect and realize we draw collective strength because of our differences.
My inner theist almost thinks this meeting of minds between religious and irreligious must be divinely inspired. How wholesome it is. How intuitively right it is. Now what is needed is much more of the same. Let us bring many more of the churched and unchurched together. Let us get them talking in measured and respectful ways. We have nothing to fear from open and respectful dialog and everything to gain. We are simply who we are. Yet almost all of us want to be listened to with respect. When we are not heard in a respectful way that is meaningful to us, the extreme cases can end up wreaking their vengeance in horrifying ways.
Look, I know it is not easy to listen. It is as hard for me as it is for you. Nonetheless, we need to make active listening a conscious and regular habit, particularly with people we are most prone to disagree with. Let us listen to each other with a kind and open heart. Let us find common connections with each other. There may or may not be a heaven in the hereafter. However, we can all agree that there is plenty to do in the here and now to make our world much better, kinder and gentler place.
Genuine dialog is the means to achieve this end. So step one is simply this: to listen.
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May 14th, 2007 at 10:07pm
Posted by
Mark |
Best of Occam's Razor, Philosophy |
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Tags: Christianity, Faith, Religion
There is more recent evidence for those who quietly lust to be a celebrity that it ain’t all it’s cracked up to be. Call me nuts, but if you ask me being rich, beautiful and famous is just not worth it. I will take turnip farming any day of the week.
No doubt, you are aware of two recent cases in point. Pop star Britney Spears checked herself out of rehab today, a day or so after shaving her head, which was a day or two after she checked herself out of rehab the first time, which was shortly after she was photographed at Club One in New York City, trying on the skimpy attire required of its erotic dancers.
Perhaps these incidents are not surprising given that her personal life is in shambles. She recently divorced the dancer Kevin Federline, some years after a 55-hour Las Vegas wedding with Jason Allen Alexander. Here she is at age 25, the dysfunctional parent of two young children, both of whom, no doubt, are being raised by nannies. Mommy has little time for temper tantrums, poopy diapers and 3 AM feedings. I hope that she sees very little of her children; they are probably better off hanging around with their completely ordinary nannies than with their wacky mother. Oh, and then there is her career. It is unclear to me where her income is coming from. She is no longer popular with the teen crowd, and she never had much talent to begin with. She appears to be living far beyond her income. We know she smokes, but going to rehab twice suggests that she is trying to shake a problem bigger than a nicotine addiction. Most likely, Britney is quaffing or snorting something very pricey. She seems to be trying to emulate Madonna’s bad girl act, except she has neither her talent nor her ability to stand on the precipice of a cliff without falling off.
And then there is the recently deceased Anna Nicole Smith, former March 1992 Playboy magazine playmate, proud 8th grade graduate, ex stripper and wife of the late oil billionaire J. Howard Marshall. She married Marshall in 1994 when she was 26 (a year older than Britney) and he was 89. You would have to have been living in a cave for the last dozen years not to know about her dispute with Marshall’s family over his estate when he died about a year into their marriage. For some mysterious reason her case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. Her marriage to Marshall, in addition to making her the nation’s premier gold digger and bimbo, led her into unmemorable parts in various movies and TV shows. She had a son when she was only 18, who unsurprisingly grew up to become drug addicted. Clearly spaced out on something, he died at age 20 in his mother’s hospital room. What a way to introduce himself to his new baby sister, whose paternity, incidentally, is still being argued. Ms. Smith had a “commitment ceremony” but apparently not a legal marriage with her attorney Howard K. Stern. She died ingloriously on February 8th at the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel in Hollywood, Florida. She reportedly had a very high fever at the time of her death. Until yesterday, her body sat on ice. The most honest income she probably made was for being a spokesperson for TrimSpa, which was reputedly her means for losing the 69 pounds that she put on during her court challenges.
Certainly not every celebrity is a walking train wreck, but they do seem to end up doing a lot more stupid and foolish things than the rest of us. Money gives them the means. Talent and/or good looks also ensure they are constantly showered with attention.
As I alluded to in another entry, underneath the façade of course they are fallible people just like us. Unlike us though, they have the means to keep tripping over themselves. The evidence suggests that their talent and good looks are often a deadly combination. “All the world’s a stage,” Shakespeare told us. That is certainly true for celebrities. Like it or not they are always on stage. They do not have the privilege of living with their shields down. Even if they try, the paparazzi are just around the corner. Instead of being an advantage, being a celebrity becomes a prison for which death is the only final escape. There is always a fan that wants to tell you how wonderful you are. There is always a queue of people wanting to sleep with you. You need a staff: a publicist, a hairdresser, a personal trainer, an agent, accountants, bodyguards, servants, chauffeurs, and personal shoppers. If you want to do something ordinary like run through the drive thru at a Burger King, you need to don a disguise, and hope your dopy disguise does not give you away.
Thankfully, I am ordinary. I do not have these problems. With the exception of the office or within a couple hundred feet of my house, I can go anywhere and I will likely be unrecognized. While my average looks ensure that glamorous women will not be making passes at me, they also ensure that I do not need to deal with the stress that such constant attention would cause.
Truly, I am blessed to be unnoticed and so are you. Being a celebrity is simply too much stress and too much of a hassle. Britney and Anna Nichole are recent and somewhat egregious examples of the hazards of being a celebrity. They suggest that Darwin was right and that being a celebrity itself is reduces your odds of survival. My ordinary life comes bounded by reasonable constraints. These constraints are not evil; they provide a structure that allows me to reach my natural potential.
I do not wish to be a celebrity and I believe neither should you. Celebrate how fortunate you are that your life is ordinary. Celebrate that because you are ordinary your values are likely magnitudes better grounded than Britney Spears’. Celebrate that you are likely to make it to an old age in good health, instead of being in rehab at age 25. Celebrate that your parents, while flawed, likely filled you with more function than dysfunction. Because they cared, you had enough common sense to wait until you were ready before you tackled major life chores like marriage and children.
If you truly aspire to be the next Britney or Anna Nichole, American Idol is likely taking auditions in a city near you. Just be careful what you ask for because you may get it. The package may look all nice and pretty. However, if your dream is actually realized then beware: it may be momentarily thrilling, but it is more likely to be descent into hell.
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February 21st, 2007 at 09:51pm
Posted by
Mark |
Best of Occam's Razor, Sociology |
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Tags: Celebrities
I spent part of my weekend in Boulder, Colorado with my brother and his fiancé. My visit was short but sweet. It included relaxing in a hot tub and snow shoeing for miles in the Rocky Mountains through a gentle snowfall. I felt relaxed and pampered.
My brother, who is in his early forties, is marrying late, but marrying well. My sister in law to be is a wonderful woman. She learned some hard lessons from her first marriage on what not to do in a marriage. My brother will be the fortunate beneficiary of her experience. I suspect my brother learned some things too in his long quest for a spouse. Ms. Right, when she finally appeared, did not come from meeting someone on eHarmony or one of the many Internet dating sites out there, but inadvertently through friends at work.
Of course, neither my brother nor his fiancé want or expect their marriage to fail. She knows the heartache of divorce. My brother knows the difficulty in finding the right person to marry. They inquired into my thoughts on marriage, from the perspective of someone who has been in one for 21 years.
I have written about marriage before, so I will not attempt to repeat myself. I have written a bit about love too. However, this latest conversation helped me clarify in my thoughts on the meaning of love. It made me believe that love’s mission is not what we think.
Love, if you can find it in its modern manifestation, is a wonderful experience. However, the word “love” does make me grit my teeth from time to time. I think it does because the word comes loaded with all sorts of baggage which can turn love from something joyful and freely given from the heart into an albatross around the neck. Keeping love joyful, particularly throughout a long-term relationship like a marriage, is a trick worthy of Houdini.
Like pornography, love is hard to define. Just as you can tell pornography when you see it, you will know love when you feel it. One person’s pornography though is another’s erotica. Similarly, one person’s experience with love will not be the same as another’s. The book, The Five Love Languages: How to Express Heartfelt Commitment to your Mate, and its many variants by Gary Chapman, suggest that most of us feel and broadcast love in different ways. For me I feel most loved when my wife spends quality time with me, and just me, in ways that I find meaningful, such as working on a joint project together. Her way of expressing love might be to buy me gifts, but such expressions of love would largely be lost on me. It would not take too much behavior like this to conclude that she may be trying to love me, but she does not really love me, because if she really loved me she would express love in a way that I would feel as love.
Most couples expect their lovers or spouses to be mind readers. Chapman is one of many marriage therapists out there who suggests this is folly, and divorce statistics would probably bear him out. Nonetheless, after 21 years of marriage I think I have become something of a mind reader. I truly believe that at this point I know my spouse better than she knows herself. Moreover, I am convinced she knows me better than I know myself. This is a bit of a problem because after 21 years neither of us are the idealized creatures we found when we fell in love. Now we see each other’s warts, blemishes and fallibilities, much the way a doctor can focus in on a symptom and ignore an otherwise remarkably healthy body. In addition, what we see in each other has become, not so much an accurate picture of the other, but a darker image of ourselves. It is the phenomenon of projection that has been so well studied by psychologists: we see in our intimates the unacknowledged deficiencies in ourselves.
This is a tough lesson to learn. Now, whenever my wife does something that irritates me, I try to turn it around. What is it about me that makes this aspect of her behavior irritable? That she does X or Y does not mean that she is unlovable, but it does mean that there is something about X or Y that irritates me, and which I need to resolve.
I think in the natural course of events, that love moves from the infatuation stage to the stage where love becomes this mirror that shows you yourself in the form of your spouse. The challenge then becomes to move beyond this phase. It involves being psychologically naked to yourself and your spouse and seeing the warts on yourself and your lover. The real trick is to move past them.
I think love fulfills its mission when you are both stripped naked of all pretenses. Love is not about having all your specific needs expertly met by some other human being. It is about a new stage of growing up. Rather than being an end in itself, love is a means toward another end. The end game of love is understanding that your notion of love was all wrong. Perhaps “love” was just a trap. For I believe that the purpose of love is to give you an intimate encounter with yourself that would not likely occur any other way. It is there to find a way to help you tackle your deepest fears and deficiencies.
For most of us, this becomes too daunting a task. That is when the marriage devolves toward superficiality. We press what we think are our spouses buttons in order to keep them docile, so they do not give us an intimate encounter with ourselves. For it becomes easier to do this than acknowledge our shortcomings. However, marriage by design puts you in a long-term intimate space. Rather than acknowledge and work through our issues because they can no longer be avoided, it becomes convenient to project them onto our spouse instead.
If it becomes too acutely uncomfortable, we will seek someone else. For we will need someone else who will give us the illusion of love, but not its reality. What we really want in a spouse is someone who continually places Band-Aids on our self-inflicted cuts, rather than helps us to the doctor. We want a spouse that can distract us from confronting some fundamental and disagreeable facts about ourselves. It seems that the ideal spouse must lie shamelessly to us. In short, we desire the spouse we want, not the spouse we need. The proper spouse is like eating a glazed donut: it brings us a sugar rush and makes us feel wonderful. Unfortunately, what we really need is a spouse that tastes like a serving of vegetables instead. To get there we must convince ourselves that our spouse makes vegetables taste like glazed donuts. It can be devilishly difficult to maintain perspective when inside a positive romantic relationship.
In fact, the ideal spouse will love us in spite of our faults, and we will honestly love them in spite of their faults too. They will not lie to us. However, they will help us find the courage to acknowledge and tackle tough issues within ourselves. Moreover, they will be there to reassure us that they love us in spite of these flaws. The ideal spouse will be more coach than critic, and do so in a loving, firm but gentle way. In doing so they help us move through our issues into acceptance of who we are as human beings. In the process, we will grow in understanding of ourselves and eventually put these issues behind us. As a spouse it is our mission to do the same.
I wish my brother and his fiancé the very best in their upcoming marriage. Deep, intimate and caring communications seems to me to be means to achieving a long, lasting and healthy marriage. This kind of communications though will be a challenge for any couple. They will probably be moving through a minefield of sorts on a journey of joint self-discovery. If it works out right, I suspect it will be a journey of self-exploration through the lens of someone who will be a partner with them on this most intimate of journeys. I suspect (though I will never know) that marital love will complete neither of them, but instead it will be a conduit: a swiftly flowing journey of the soul into brave, uncharted worlds of self-understanding.
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January 22nd, 2007 at 10:46pm
Posted by
Mark |
Best of Occam's Razor, Philosophy |
one comment
Tags: Love, Marriage
National Public Radio has been running a series called This I Believe. The series gives ordinary people like you and I the opportunity to tell the world what we believe and why. The series is always insightful and worth your time. Even if you cannot agree with the person’s beliefs, you should be moved by the passion and eloquence by which participants express their beliefs. Since the producers receive thousands of entries, they unfortunately cannot broadcast but a tiny fraction of them. However, there is a This I Believe web site where you can contribute your essay. Perhaps this one will end up there too.
Frequent readers of Occam’s Razor will have little doubt about what I believe. Like all of us, I have many beliefs. I may spend the rest of my life trying to put them all down here on this website. Unlike many of my contemporaries, I do not often say I am certain that my beliefs are accurate. They simply represent the perspective of me: a 49-year-old white middle class man living here in the United States. My beliefs are undoubtedly formed by my life experiences. Since your life was on a different path, I should not be surprised that you would have different beliefs. However, it has only been in the last few years that I have found the time and the energy to organize my thoughts. Here they exist online for your amusement, castigation, insight, or dismissal.
Last night in my covenant group, we discussed our “isms”. Simply saying what your “isms” are gives insight into your own beliefs. To help us out, many of us turned to Beliefnet. On the site is an online survey you can take if you are having a hard time categorizing your beliefs. Since we are a small group of Unitarian Universalists, not one of us was surprised to find out we were categorized highest as UUs. In fact, the survey showed me as 100% Unitarian Universalist, but also 98% Quaker. Perhaps I should not be surprised that I have a brother who is a Quaker.
For many, labeling their beliefs is simple. For me, it is hard to put a label on what I believe. The label probably does not exist. I can say I am a Unitarian Univeralist, but this really does not say what I believe. After all, you can be a UU and believe anything you want. There is no creed you have to profess in order to be a UU. I can say that I subscribe to agnosticism, but that does not say much about my beliefs either. It simply asserts that I cannot find a rational basis to either believe or not believe in God. In some ways, I feel the call of Buddhism. I have acknowledged before that I think karma is a real and natural force. Yet I maintain some skepticism that we go through a series of lives, and each life is an attempt to address our karmic issues from previous lives. Perhaps I align most closely to natural pantheism. Wikipedia says it is “a form of pantheism that holds that the universe, although unconscious and non-sentient as a whole, is a meaningful focus for mystical fulfillment.” However, I am not quite so certain that I can wholly dismiss the notion that some external or omnipresent God did not set our universe in motion. I do believe that our universe is an amazing place.
As human beings trying to understand the universe, I believe we have some serious limitations. First, we are temporal. This gives us perhaps a biased perspective. Our natural fear of death I think drives many of our beliefs, since most seem to offer tailored solutions that address our fear of nonexistence. Since we experience existence through time, we naturally assume time exists for everything. However, arguably time only exists for organisms of sufficient complexity. For example, the physicist Brian Greene asserts that at the subatomic level, time ceases to exist.
Since we are also limited by our senses, it can be excruciatingly hard to relate to things that we cannot directly perceive. We can infer that radio waves exist, even though we know we will never touch, taste or feel a radio wave. We can make similar observations about the limitations of our other senses. For example, there are sounds we cannot perceive but other animals can.
What I infer from all this is that we perceive the universe at best through a gauzy curtain. I believe what we see approximates the universe’s actual complexity. Perhaps you read recent news reports about the indirect proof for the existence of dark matter in the universe. Here again is something that physicists tell us simply must exist in the universe, but which we cannot examine. I think that my analogy that our view of the universe is through a gauzy curtain is too expansive. I believe we see the universe through a straw.
A therapist I am seeing tells me that humans tune out most of the experience that surrounds them. Perhaps there is so much of it that it is impossible for our brains to process all of it. Like a horse with blinders, to survive we focus on what is straight ahead of us. Perhaps this is because we have learned through experience that straight ahead is where it is easiest to make sense of the world. At best, we are only dimly aware of the consequences that our behavior has on not just our intimates, but on everyone who we meet.
If we spent our life looking at the same small part of the sky through a straw, we would clearly not have a very good understanding of our universe. All we could do is describe what we see through the straw. It would be hard to infer the meaning of the things we saw. If a cloud obscured our vision, we could not necessarily infer the entity we call a cloud. We would likely need a wider perspective to detect the cloud. We might pick up some clues. If a bird passed through our line of vision enough times then we might be able to infer the existence of birds, although the concept of flight may be beyond our comprehension. Similarly, it would be hard to imagine trees, or houses, or the ground, or computers, or time, or perhaps even death.
So if I am a natural pantheist, it is because I believe that the universe is far more complex, far more amazing and far richer than what I can comprehend, simply because I am bounded by a finite life and limited senses. Philosophers and scientists must do the best they can by seeing the universe through a straw. However studying the edges of the straw, which is what physicists, philosophers and the devout spend much of their lives doing, likely gives them a very jaundiced and probably inaccurate perspective of the universe as it actually is. Even if we could see all aspects of the universe as it actually is, it is unlikely our brains could comprehend its full complexity and manifestation.
It may be that instead of seeing the universe through a straw, we are seeing it through a drainage pipe. In other words, perhaps we perceive more of the complexity of the universe than I assume. There is no way to know for sure, however. Since there is no way to know, that is where I personally draw the boundaries of my faith.
I do my best not to infer too much about the truth of our universe because I assume my perspective is severely constrained. However, I could just as easily be wrong. It can be fun to speculate on whether God exists, and if it exists whether it is a personal or an absent God. Nevertheless, I believe that when we do so we really arguing about what we see on the edges of the straw. We are using that very limited field of observation to infer much more about the universe than we should. Perhaps that is why I often feel the need to surrender to the mysticism of it all. It is why the Pantheistic Church, if there were one, would probably call me more than Unitarian Universalism. As much as I try, I do not really understand our universe, but I am still in awe of it and under its spell. However, I sense, what the character Ellie Arroway in the movie Contact (and by inference, the late Carl Sagan, who wrote the book) said:
I … had an experience… I can’t prove it, I can’t even explain it, but everything that I know as a human being, everything that I am tells me that it was real! I was given something wonderful, something that changed me forever… A vision of the universe, that tells us, undeniably, how tiny, and insignificant and how… rare, and precious we all are! A vision that tells us that we belong to something that is greater then ourselves, that we are not, that none of us are alone! I wish… I… could share that… I wish, that everybody, if only for one… moment, could feel… that awe, and humility, and hope.
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November 14th, 2006 at 09:13pm
Posted by
Mark |
Best of Occam's Razor, Philosophy |
2 comments
Tags: Brian Greene, Karma
“Bless me Father, for I have sinned.”
That is what the Rev. Ted Haggard would be saying in confession today, were he were a Catholic. Alas, he is not a Catholic, just a prominent evangelical minister. You might say that until yesterday he was the nation’s No. 3 evangelical preacher, right after Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell. Before yesterday, Haggard held the lofty title of the president of the National Association of Evangelicals. Now, as you have likely read, Haggard appears to be the latest casualty among prominent Christian hypocrites. Specifically he is accused of buying methamphetamine and paying for sex once a month over a three years period with a gay Denver masseur. Both are vices far removed from those he has consistently preached.
It should be time for a full confession from Rev. Haggard. What we got today was a qualified confession: while sorely tempted, he never really succumbed. So what he did was okay, sort of, except for the hypocrisy thing and the small fact that buying methamphetamine, even if you never use it, is a serious crime. He is like Bill Clinton claiming that he never had sex with Monica Lewinski because intercourse never occurred.
Needless to say, I do not believe that Haggard passed on either the meth or the gay sex. Jesus spent 40 days and 40 nights in the desert. He too was tormented by the Devil. Reputedly, he succeeded in keeping Lucifer at arm’s length. Haggard may want to emulate his Lord but Jesus did have the tiny advantage of being God. Haggard, however, is not God. He is a human being like the rest of us. Therefore, his assertions are not plausible. They fail the Occam’s Razor test, to say the least.
I am sure the 14,000 members of his New Life Church are very loving and forgiving people. Yet somehow, I doubt many will accept his explanation. Evangelicals may be passionate in their faith, but they still inhabit the real world. Likely, many of them are struggling with their demons too. Their demons may not be gay sex nor getting high. Yet it is clear that they do not go to church because they are saints. They may want to become saints, but, like their minister, they remain fallible human beings. They are searching for a permanent way to act contrary to their innate and fallible humanity. Like their minister, they are likely searching for Godot.
Likely, the full scandalous details of his relationship and drug use will soon come out. Perhaps he can join former Florida congressional representative Mark Foley in rehab. The parishioners of the New Life Church will be left scratching their heads wondering why they had such faith in this charlatan. Maybe the devil led them astray.
Haggard preached against homosexuality, although curiously not as forcefully as other prominent evangelical ministers. It is unlikely he found the masseur Mike Jones by thumbing through the Yellow Pages. Moreover, I doubt he was complaining to his wife about lower back pains before making those many trips to Denver for “massages”. Finding vice is now very convenient. My bet is that he simply used his local web browser and searched through the Denver Craigslist erotic services for men looking for men. To find the meth, perhaps he browsed the Craiglist casual encounters page and looked for homosexual men who wanted to go “skiing”.
There is no question that I do not like hypocrisy. I have railed against it with politicians, and it would be inconsistent of me not to decry preachers who are also charlatans. While we should be used to it by now, we should not be surprised when it happens. For none of us are perfect: we are all human beings.
Yes, we are all sinners, and that includes prominent evangelicals. We are all driven by itches that we need to scratch, but we know we should not. Therefore, while I castigate Haggard for his predictable hypocrisy, I also feel a small sliver of compassion for the man. For I know, like everyone on this planet, I have a few demonic itches lurking inside of me too. While a prominent part of me does not like having these itches, in one sense they give me comfort. They tell me that, thank goodness, I am no saint. I am a human being. Moreover, as a human being, I have free will. I can choose to “sin” if I want to. Having these itches means that I am free. It tells me that I am alive. It tells me that at least someone else cannot control some part of me. Perhaps these sins are tickets to our own personal destruction. Nevertheless, these sins might also be something else: messages asserting that there is an authentic human being inside of us. It is not necessarily God-like, but it is genuine 100% authentic fallible humanity.
Since we are human beings, sinning is in our nature. We can no more purge sin from our lives as we can change our eye color. However, sinning is not the only thing in which we can excel. We can also excel in loving. And in taking pleasure in food. And in drink. And in enjoying a good joke. And in swearing. And in having good, dirty sex. And in the pleasure of hearing an opera. And in feeling some vicarious satisfaction when a hypocrite like Haggard gets his just deserts. By accepting my humanity, I even have the freedom to feel defiled and loathsome about myself if I want to. All this freedom may not bring me happiness, which by its nature is elusive, but it at least it demonstrates that I have free will, and that I am someone entirely unique. I am not just alive, it means I feel alive.
So welcome to the human gene pool, Reverend Haggard. I am sure you genetically were programmed to excel in informing the rest of us on how we are sinners and how we can move from sin toward holiness. Still, you remain a sinner just like me. I take both pleasure and comfort in this fact. I do not want you to be the upright and moral man that, until a few days ago, you appeared to be to your congregation. I want you to be a human being with failings just like me.
I am a human. You are a human. We are sinners. We are brothers too. Perhaps instead of drowning yourself in a predictable orgy of repentance and confession by parroting someone else’s words and ideals, you should say some things that perhaps are authentically you instead. My guess is they would go something like this:
“I am a human being. Like the rest of you, I make mistakes. While I try to learn from my mistakes and become a better person, some part of me will always be a sinner. I accept that this is part of the human experience. It is part of who I am and always will be. I will do my best to live my life by being faithful to the person I really am, rather than the one I want you to perceive. While I have hurt many people, including my family, and myself I have also learned some important things about myself. I have learned what it means to be a human being. In some mysterious way, perhaps God wants me to embrace both my good and my bad sides, and be humbled by the complex, fallible, mysterious but embracing mystery that makes me a human being.”
I wish he would say this. I would chime in “Amen, brother!” That is what I would like him to say. Somehow, I doubt this will be forthcoming.
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November 3rd, 2006 at 09:56pm
Posted by
Mark |
Best of Occam's Razor, Philosophy |
one comment
Tags: Christianity, Homosexuality, Hypocrisy
In Egypt’s sandy silence, all alone,
Stands a gigantic Leg, which far off throws
The only shadow that the Desert knows: -
“I am great OZYMANDIAS,” saith the stone,
“The King of Kings; this mighty City shows
“The wonders of my hand.” - The City’s gone, -
Nought but the Leg remaining to disclose
The site of this forgotten Babylon.
We wonder, - and some Hunter may express
Wonder like ours, when thro’ the wilderness
Where London stood, holding the Wolf in chace,
He meets some fragments huge, and stops to guess
What powerful but unrecorded race
Once dwelt in that annihilated place.
–Horace Smith.
I am certainly no Middle East scholar. I suspect even if you grew up in the Middle East and earned a degree in Middle East studies that you would still be challenged understanding the current situation there. I believe that there are too many permutations between the nations, races, ethnic groups, religious groups, paramilitary groups and shifting alliances to understand the totality of the issues and conflicts. As if things were not confusing enough just in Iraq and Afghanistan, now we have this war between Israel and Hezbollah, the Shi’ite paramilitary group, which has blossomed into a larger war. Lebanon is now unjustly receiving the bulk of Israel’s fury.
Make no mistake. This is not a “police action”. This is not a “limited incursion”. This is a war. Israel has always seemed proactive when it comes to their national security, yet they were blindsided by this one. From their actions to date, it is clear they do not understand that the conflict has changed in a fundamentally new way and that the existence of Israel itself is now in serious jeopardy.
The capabilities of their enemies have morphed. In the last couple of decades, short-range rockets have become cheaper to make and easier to move around. In addition, those funding Hezbollah (which doubtless includes Iran) have dug deeper into their pockets. Hezbollah now has longer-range rockets that are reaching deep inside of Israel. Some of these rockets can reach twenty or more kilometers into Israel. They can be moved with relative ease and are often hard to detect. In a way, the Israelis are fortunate that most of these rockets are low tech. Hezbollah soldiers point, shoot and hope they are effective. So far, their effect has been more psychological than lethal. However, these rockets have killed Israeli citizens far from the front lines. Even if the Israelis could shoot them down, given the large quantities of them and the short flight time, it would be impossible to intercept them all.
Therefore, they are left to try to secure southern Lebanon by clearing it of all of Hezbollah’s fighters and missiles. This is already proving to be very daunting. It is a large territory. To secure it and hold it now requires a large and continuing military presence. Moreover, this territory is not desert. Much of it is wooded. Hezbollah is imitating the Vietcong by digging tunnels. This makes destroying all the missiles and removing all the Hezbollah fighters a very iffy proposition for Israel. Moreover, once they capture all this land realistically they cannot secure it indefinitely. They hope that some other armed force will keep it secure for them. If they return the land to Lebanon, there are no guarantees that Lebanon can keep the land secure.
It is unlikely though that Israel will succeed in controlling Southern Lebanon. On some level, I think they know this already. Therefore, they are blowing up much of Lebanon instead. The plan seems to be that if they bomb Lebanon enough, its government will start securing its Southern border. Yet it makes no more sense to expect Lebanon to secure its southern border for Israel than it makes sense for us to expect the Mexican government to keep illegal immigrants from entering our country through Mexico. The Hezbollah militia is far bigger than the Lebanese army is. Even if it had the means, Hezbollah and affiliated Shi’ite parties democratically control 35 of the 128 seats in Lebanon’s parliament. Hezbollah itself has 14 of these seats. Many Lebanese welcome Hezbollah. If Israel is serious about having the Lebanese government control its own territory, it is hard to see how destroying much of its infrastructure aids their cause.
In addition, they are working against their own long-range interests. The Israelis seem to suffer from cognitive dissonance. It amounts to if you hurt me, I will hurt you back ten times worse, and then you will learn never to bother me again. What actually happens, of course, is they leave people deeply traumatized, upset and eager for retribution. In short, they inadvertently sow the seeds for their own destruction.
Most likely Israeli partisans that read this will insist I am anti-Semitic and want to see the destruction of Israel. Aside from the obvious problem that pro-Israeli advocates just love to paint broadly with their anti-Semite brush, I am not stupid. It was not Israel that lobbed the first missile, but Hezbollah. All this is beside the point: the game has changed.
To really secure Israeli citizens, a DMZ is needed. Since indefinitely occupying Southern Lebanon is not practical, the next step is to withdraw civilians from northern Israel and relocate them further south. Hezbollah has demonstrated that Galilee is no longer defensible. Unfortunately, even if Israel were to embrace this strategy, it would only be a stopgap measure. For rockets and missiles will get cheaper and more accurate. It is possible that within years all of Israel will be vulnerable to rocket attacks.
Israel goes after governments like Lebanon because they do not know what else to do. Perhaps it gives the illusion of doing something that will bring results. They have all the firepower they need to render most governments in the Middle East ineffective. Unfortunately, even if they can destroy the governments in Lebanon and Syria, that does not mean they have won this war. For they are no longer battling other nations. They are fighting paramilitaries. Anarchy is what paramilitary groups like Hezbollah prefer. If the state does not exist, their mobility improves. No central government is left that can constrain their behavior.
Although wars between nations are not yet obsolete, their days may be numbered. The future will see more of what we are seeing now: wars between states and paramilitary groups, or, in the case of Iraq, simply wars between paramilitary groups. Cheaper and more accessible armaments, some of it coming from our defense contractors, have lowered the cost of waging insurgencies and paramilitary efforts. Few nations can totally control what happens inside their own borders. Real control requires the overwhelming consent of those governed. The people who live in the country have to have an emotional commitment to their country to keep paramilitary organizations from having any traction. This loyalty to country must come before loyalty to ethnicity, religion or political cause.
One result of this trend will be the slow dissolution of the nation-state. My thoughts on this will likely be the subject of another entry. In brief, I believe the future will move either toward global anarchy or toward one world government. The nation states of today will eventually become as obsolete as kingdoms.
Whether Hezbollah and similar paramilitary groups understand this or not is beside the point. This is the new reality. What it amounts to is a country cannot effectively fight paramilitary groups using armies trained to attack other nation-states. Ready or not, the paradigm and tactics of modern war have changed. We are already learning this lesson painfully in Iraq. I am left to conclude that Israel simply has no future. I believe that in fifty years, maybe less, it will be a memory. Insurgencies and paramilitary groups will have nibbled it out of existence.
How do you counter a trend like this? I know I would hate to try to find a formula that would bring peace to Israel and its neighbors. Frankly, I do not think that one exists. What would help is a pragmatic vision of hope that all parties can latch onto. Perhaps what is really needed is not a Jewish state, but a Semitic state. Semites in this context does not mean Jews. It means the Semite race, and that includes the Palestinians, who are also Semites. There has to be consensus that all that live there must dwell together in peace and brotherhood, or no one can. It is hard to see how this can be achieved when the hatred continues to grow on all sides due largely to Israel’s latest actions in Lebanon.
Meanwhile, here in the United States, more than a few wacked out religious nut jobs are taking this conflict as a sign that Armageddon is near. They are nearly in rapture because they are convinced the Lord is ready to return. Soon they figure they will be occupying their reserved spots inside the pearly gates, for they are the true believers. Arguably, there are more than a few of these nutcases in the West Wing. From my perspective, it looks like Armageddon is already here. Only it is not quite what evangelical Christians had hoped. Armageddon appears to consist of eternal skirmishes, bloodshed, death, destruction and the sad defilement of the area that gave birth to our greatest religions. With each crime against their neighbors, sides dig in their heels further and refuse to learn any karmic lessons. Somewhere up there Allah, Yahweh and Jesus are watching, and they are crying.
Sphere: Related Content
July 25th, 2006 at 09:03pm
Posted by
Mark |
Best of Occam's Razor, Politics 2006 |
2 comments
Tags: Hezbollah, Israel, Lebanon
