He Gives us all His Love

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“A mother and father whipped their 19-year-old son to death with an electrical cord during an all-night spiritual counseling session triggered by his desire to leave their church, a New York court has heard.

Lucas Leonard was subjected to a 12-hour ordeal by his parents, sister and fellow church members at the Word of Life Christian church in New Hartford, New York, on Sunday, police and witnesses alleged.

His 17-year-old brother Christopher was also beaten and was admitted to hospital in a serious condition. See full story:”

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/oct/17/new-york-church-beating-teen-whipped-word-of-life

An antidote is needed before we discuss the above story. See:

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2015/10/16/dog-who-stood-guard-over-friend-week-receives-award/74061712/

Given no other solution, how many people would stay with a family member without food and shelter for six days?

Back to the Christians. What is it about religion? Europe was plagued with one religious war or another for more than a thousand years. Richard the Lion Hearted waged war with Muslims for no historically relevant reason. Jews and Arabs have attacked one another since before recorded history and continue to this very day. Now, terrorists, presuming instruction from the Quran, roam the world seeking mindless destruction. Muslims fight Muslims between Sunni and Shia. Even among the ‘civilized’ Roman Catholics and Protestants, there is an obvious competition. During the last half of the 17th century, Massachusetts Puritans split open the noses of Quakers and cut off their ears – just because they were Quakers.

As it is with our 33rd cousin the chimpanzee, Homo sapiens likes to mix it up every once in a while for some materialistic cause – worthy or not. Chimpanzees don’t have religion. Humans developed religion to explain the unknowable universe; religion is based on having respect and love and compassion. Yet, as a single cause, religion has started more wars than any other cause. What is it about religion that two boys will be beaten by their parents for twelve hours until one dies and the other is in serious condition? What happened to the two Great Commandments, the Beatitudes and the Ten Commandments?

Mariner certainly doesn’t understand. He notes, however, that when Christians leave their New Testament to roam around in the Jewish Old Testament, something strange happens.

He gives us all his love
He gives us all his love
He’s smiling down on us from up above
And he’s giving us all his love

Lyrics by Randy Newman, from Cold Turkey, written and directed by Norman Lear (1971).

Ancient Mariner

 

Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely

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There is a sign of cultural collapse that is growing. Consider the following headlines – headlines that are common and forgotten in one month:

Police Officer shoots [teenager, African American, traffic violator, boy with toy, wife…]

US citizen shoots [30,000 other people]

Los Angeles teacher sues school system for 1 billion dollars for targeting older teachers for dismissal to avoid paying pensions. See:

http://www.cnn.com/2015/10/15/us/los-angeles-teacher-class-action-lawsuit-rafe-esquith/index.html

9 incidents where crazed gunman shoots many innocent victims.

Big banks cause US recession by trading questionable derivatives using customers’ cash.

VW deliberately fools emission tests.

2.1 trillion dollars tax free held overseas by corporations. See:

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/04/09/us-usa-tax-offshore-idUSBREA3729V20140409

Social Security receives no COLA adjustment because of inexpensive gasoline. Retirees do not use much gasoline but other costs rise.

A former hedge fund manager purchased the rights to a drug that’s been used for 62 years to treat parasitic infections, and then hiked the price from $13.50 per tablet to $750.

The mariner quickly typed the above incidences from memories of news headlines. With little effort, he could fill pages with similar headlines which allude to the excessive abuse of authority and a corresponding lack of concern for the wellbeing of others. One wonders why a police officer can’t defend himself without suddenly emptying his pistol into a troublesome individual. A gun versus a knife isn’t quite a fair confrontation – especially six bullets later. Nor is shooting a fleeing individual in the back – six bullets later.

If one wants to live in a society where corrupted power prevails, buy a home in Syria. We in the US aren’t quite that bad; remember that Reagan budgeted research for a bomb that would kill people but not hurt buildings.

The cultural collapse is becoming a permanent patina in our lives. One could claim without exaggerating that no governments, federal, state, or local, have the best interests of the citizens within their jurisdiction. Examples abound where politicians espouse the importance of education while slashing education budgets first. There are ways to fix this issue but likely they aren’t popular with the citizenry at large (I don’t have kids; why should I pay a school tax?). Goodness! Is each of us endowed with indifference? May as well join ISIL. The NRA will be glad to arm us.

It began unnoticeably when Maytag moved to Mexico in 2003. Since then, Iconic American companies such as Coca Cola, Ford, RCA, General Motors, General Electric and Nokia have opened up assembly plants in Mexico. In fact, GE employs 30,000 Mexicans in 35 factories in the country. The difference in wages between the US and Mexico is $30,000 per year per employee. Mariner suspects the profit stays with the corporation. When mariner was young, he believed that businesses were obligated to remain in their location – even changing the product if necessary, to provide continuous support to the workers who otherwise would lose their jobs. Silly mariner.

All this information points out that business, too, abuses its authority at the cost, or corruption, of our wellbeing, AKA our culture.

Do we abuse our authority with other individuals? Words that allude to our abuse are greedy, indifferent, vain, cheat, vindictive, unfair, opportunist, prejudiced, selfish, unempathetic and unsympathetic. Someone somewhere must care for our wellbeing. All that is left is us.

Perhaps via the 2016 election, we can try to fix the governments who then can fix the businesses – but it is up to you and the mariner to fix ourselves.

Ancient Mariner

 

 

Nobel Prize for Economics

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Dr. Angus Deaton won the Nobel Prize for Economics. His methods for determining the wellbeing of an economy start with the poor and disadvantaged classes – a new attitude among economic theorists.

Mariner remembers a television show hosted by Bill Moyers that aired several years ago. His guests were three economists. Mariner was aghast at the indifferent attitude toward those who lose their jobs because of a major change in the economy. All three economists agreed that fifteen percent of the job market disappears in a major economic shift. That’s just how it is. Sure, there are some unhappy people but that’s how economics works.

A year ago, on Global Public Square (GPS), Fareed Zakaria also had three economists who had the same attitude about the loss of jobs caused by an economic shift. Again, it was estimated, matter-of-factly, that fifteen percent of the work force becomes unemployed.

In common for all the economists mentioned and most others are the formulas and data used to determine the health and efficiency of a given economy. Simply, to avoid pages of economic jargon, economists use bulk data drawn from major industries; they use corporate growth and productivity; they use Gross Domestic Product and trade balances. All this summarized data is plugged into various formulas that provide the measure of success for a given economy.

Angus Deaton won a Nobel Prize for his analysis of poverty, welfare and consumption to determine the health and efficiency of a given economy. His data is compiled from interviews with thousands of individuals rather than summations from corporate and government sources. Deaton measures wellbeing rather than profit. Don’t tell other economists there is a humanist among them; an economist is supposed to have the attitude of an individual with aspergers syndrome – zero empathy. That’s how economics works…

Dr. Deaton’s research is very broad, covering microeconomics, econometrics, macroeconomics and development economics. Mariner will cover interesting bits and pieces but it will require more than one post. The reader may find the mariner referring to Deaton insights from time to time. For now, mariner found observations about the very poor to be insightful and he will share just a few bits and pieces here.

While macroeconomists had been satisfied that their theories could explain the relationship between the total level of consumption and total income in the economy, Mr. Deaton showed that those same theories struggled to explain what individual households were doing. This has spawned a large and productive continuing research program trying to understand the spending patterns of actual households. Angus Deaton is the leading expert on the economic behavior of the extremely poor. In this post, the mariner will describe economic behavior among those earning between $1.08 per day and $2.16 per day. Much of the information is taken from a Deaton-related study, The Economic Lives of the Poor by Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo published in the Journal of Economic Perspectives, Volume 21, Number 1—Winter 2007.

The first insight for the mariner was how entrepreneurial the abject poor are. An example is the women of Guntur, India living in the biggest slum. At 9:00AM, many women are sitting in front of their homes with a kerosene stove and a round griddle. For 15¢ (US value), a woman will cook a dosa, a rice and bean pancake; dipped in a sauce and placed in a banana leaf, it is a common breakfast. An hour later, the stoves are gone. One woman is walking door to door selling saris she has decorated with beads and sparkling objects the day before. Income is accrued from other activities including but not limited to labor, collecting trash and making pickles to sell. Women in this large slum have no stable economy, no banks, no lending institutions but they maintain a day-to-day economy solely with their own ingenuity. The economy is virtually penniless but is sustained by simple entrepreneurship providing a cultural stability that allows everyone to participate on a level playing field and to earn enough among each family to survive.

In the United States, there is an intense disdain for the abject poor. The reader can’t survive a day without hearing someone say, “They ought to get off their asses and get a job!” Deaton wrote that the very poor behave the same all over the world. Without meaningful assets, without the ability to borrow, without permanent salary, without decent clothing and with no health care, the poor are more nimble at finding a living where none should exist. What lies in the way of economic equalization from either side is a large abyss between funded culture and the penniless poor. As it turns out, the very poor in Guntur are happy!

Ancient Mariner

An Eclectic Post

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Inspiration comes from many sources, in this case from road kill. Carcasses lie abandoned on the side of the road which led the Mariner’s wife to write this poem:

Elegy for a Dead Raccoon

The body lies beside the road

A furred lump hit by a passing car

Left like refuse, unremarked.

We in the cocoons of our cars

Pass by without a second glance

Without a second thought.

If we gave it a second thought

We would have to recognize

That we, too, will become a lump

Beside the road.

Our mammal bodies are not different:

A baby raccoon was born, suckled,

Stretched his paws, struggled to walk,

Learned to eat, to drink, to clean himself,

Wrestled with his brothers and sisters,

Explored the same world we live in

With the same five senses.

The only difference is that when he died,

In a sudden, tragic accident

His body was left as a furred lump

Beside the road.

There were no remarks at a solemn funeral

And no elegy

Except for this one.

REFERENCE SECTION

Getting the most out history is an art form. History books that deliver dates, events and event correlations are full of facts but leave out the human condition, the three dimensional reality that makes history real and provides the reader with human substance. One trick to expand one’s understanding of history is to read biographies of those who played a role in history but may not have been on the front page. As a bonus, biographies are easy to read and almost like reading fiction. Below are four biographies spread across a wide spectrum of history.

Lucy by Ellen Feldman, W,W, Norton, 2011.

One of the most important romances in the last century. Although their relationship was heavily constrained, their love lasted. Lucy was with FDR when he died. Arthur Schlesinger gave a review:

“It is a story which reminds us of the code of another day, of the complexity of human relationships, of the human problems of statesmen bearing the heaviest responsibilities and of the capacity of mature people to accept the frustrations of life and, perhaps, to make of frustrations a sort of triumph. Eleanor Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, and Lucy Mercer all emerge from the story with honor.

And, if Lucy Mercer in any way helped Franklin Roosevelt sustain the frightful burdens of leadership in the Second World War, the nation has good reason to be grateful to her.”

Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.

The Sixth Extinction, an Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert, Henry Holt & Co. 2014.

Mariner has referenced this book in past posts. It is an accounting of Kolbert’s travels around the world visiting scientists and living creatures. However, it is a biography of us and our association with the Earth’s life forms. Written in a story-like style, it is mesmerizing.

Paul Newman, A Life by Shawn Levy, Random House, 2009.

Historian Shawn Levy gives readers the ultimate behind-the-scenes examination of the actor’s life from his merry pranks on the set to his lasting romance with Joanne Woodward to the devastating impact of his son’s death from a drug overdose. This definitive biography is a fascinating portrait of an extraordinary man who gave back as much as he got out of life and just happened to be one of the most celebrated movie stars of the twentieth century.

Frederick the Wise by Sam Wellman, Concordia Press, 2015.

Little is known about one of the most powerful individuals in the Reformation, Frederick III, Elector of Saxony. Blessed by a translation of German works by Sam Wellman, Frederick’s life and influences are readily available. Frederick was the protector of Martin Luther as Saxony battled the Holy Roman Church during the 15th and 16th centuries.

Ancient Mariner

Time to Act against TPP

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The infamous Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is on its way to congress. Details finally have been released through several channels. The TPP is heavily tilted toward increased power for corporations. If TPP passes, it will be a new era where business begins to dictate to government regarding the rights and wellbeing of the citizenry. Church and state is small potatoes compared to the corporate intrusion into the Constitution and Bill of Rights.

Since World War II, the generic corporate model began to operate between nations; tax evasion, hidden funds, no allegiance to workers, no need to sustain environmental or product quality – all are indicators that corporations have become a new kind of nation not bound by traditional government authority. The TPP is the same as a military invasion aimed at taking away the authority of target nations. Plain and simple, the US is under attack to increase corporate profit and to avoid responsibility for citizen wellbeing.

This week, Wikileaks released the long-secret investment provisions of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) that revealed the trade deal would give big business the ability to sue governments for protecting the public interest – confirming our worst fears about the trade deal being pushed by the business community, Republican leadership and the Obama administration.

Mariner asks for a small inconvenience from his readers. Will you please write or call all federally elected politicians, especially your senators, that represent you; tell them to veto the TPP. There are different ways to do this:

Write a letter using the US Postal Service.

Write an email; the address of your representatives can be found using searches for Congressional Representatives.

Call your representatives; phone numbers are on the same websites as addresses.

Use the following link to Food and Water Watch to use the convenient procedure for sending your opinion to your representatives. Do not feel hesitant about providing your information; elected officials want to know you live in their district and may want to respond. Uncheck the boxes if you do not want FWW to contact you in the future.

https://secure.foodandwaterwatch.org/site/Advocacy?cmd=display&page=UserAction&id=1777&s_src=blg#_ga=1.267545422.1527426085.1431442204

Visit your representatives in their home offices.

The precedents set by TPP will create a world-wide culture where citizens are not the first priority – profit is.

Thank you very much for this favor.

Ancient Mariner

 

Follow Up Stuff

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Liberal Arts
The mariner recently submitted a number of posts about the importance of the fact that liberal art majors are disappearing. The group of subjects in this major includes what is commonly referred to as “humanities:” literature, languages, art history, music history, philosophy, logic, history, mathematics, psychology, and general science. The general theme in all these subjects is to have an understanding across several disciplines of thought. This broad understanding sharpens the student’s awareness about people and their cultures; it provides space in one’s knowledge base to make comparisons and apply lateral thinking across disciplines. Every subject has something to do with human interaction.
The mariner watched a book review on Fareed Zakaria’s GPS show (Sunday 10/04/15 CNN). The book is “Succeeding at Life – What High Achievers Know that Brilliant Machines Never Will,” by Jeff Colvin. Colvin has a stellar reputation as an organizer of startup businesses and the automated technologies that support them. Until recently, he was CEO of CIGNEX Datamatics Corporation. He now is a board member of The Estes Group, a prominent consulting firm. The next two paragraphs start the book:
“What hope will there be for us when computers can drive cars better than humans, predict Supreme Court decisions better than legal experts, identify faces, scurry helpfully around offices and factories, even perform some surgeries, all faster, more reliably, and less expensively than people? The unavoidable question – will millions of people lose out, unable to best the machine? – is increasingly dominating business, education, economics, and policy.
The answer lies not in the nature of technology but in the nature of humans. Regardless of what computers achieve, our greatest advantage lies in what we humans are most powerfully driven to do for and with one another, arising from our deepest, most essentially human abilities—empathy, creativity, social sensitivity, storytelling, humor, building relationships, and leading. This is how we create value that is durable and not easily replicated by technology – because we’re hardwired to want it from humans.”
Colvin goes on to cite a number of relationships where people strongly prefer human-to-human service. People find more comfort, trust and satisfaction visiting a human medical doctor or nurse than punching keys on a machine – even if all the doctor does is punch the same keys. Similarly, social workers, managers, organizers, consultants, attorneys and virtually every profession that interacts with people in a reflective situation will become more important than their technical counterparts associated with computers.
The mariner learned from this review that Australia and Japan are reducing humanities and increasing classes on computer programming as early as the fifth grade. He agrees with Zacharia and Colvin that wisdom, leadership and innovation are found in the humanities, not in computer code.
Church and State
If the Monday School class is still studying church and state, the mariner offers a “middle of the road” perspective for those areas where church and state conflict with one another. See post “Among the People” (Sep 22 2015)
In 1962, Eugene Rostow, a former dean at Yale Law School, coined the phrase “civil religion.” It related to government sponsored religious speech that was as conventional and uncontroversial as to be constitutional (example: In God We Trust on US money). In 1984, Justice William Brennan first used the phrase “ceremonial deism.” He said, in a Supreme Court case that involved a government sponsored Nativity scene that also included reindeer and candy canes, that some religious displays could be permissible under the first amendment. [Details from Church and State magazine March 2015]
The mariner recently wrote a letter to the editor of a local newspaper that was covering a local conflict between an atheist organization and the city mayor about putting a cross in a government park. In his letter, mariner claimed that Christian and Jewish tombstones in military cemeteries – and even government memorials – serve only to remind us what we required of these men that they gave their lives for us. It is the buried soldiers that are sacrosanct, not the tombstones and memorials. In reference to Rostow and Brennan, the tombstones are an example of ceremonial deism.
Ceremonial deism is a grey area along the barrier between church and state. State advocates complain these “uncontroversial” exceptions are an example of deism and religiosity slowly creeping into the state domain. Is this good, bad, or irrelevant? Perhaps the Monday School can advise us.
REFERENCE SECTION
An easy read that talks about various subjects of controversy between religion and science, culture, and changing attitudes. Easy. Quick. See:
http://altreligion.about.com/od/history/p/History-Of-Deism.htm?utm_term=galileo%20book&utm_content=p3-main-1-title&utm_medium=sem&utm_source=google&utm_campaign=adid-a521dd03-6347-4247-9136-0d38501528e2-0-ab_gsb_ocode-4954&ad=semD&an=google_s&am=broad&q=galileo%20book&dqi=books%20about%20galileo%20and%20church&o=4954&l=sem&qsrc=998&askid=a521dd03-6347-4247-9136-0d38501528e2-0-ab_gsb
Billy Collins, Poet
Reading Billy Collins’ poetry is not what the occasional reader of poems imagines. Billy Collins was the Poet Laureate for the US twice in a row and holds the same title for the State of New York. He is, by far, the most entertaining poet alive today. If you desire to broaden your mind by reading some poetry, read Billy Collins. The poem below is from his collection, The Trouble with Poetry: And Other Poems. He has written several collections.
“The Lanyard”
The other day as I was ricocheting slowly
off the pale blue walls of this room,
bouncing from typewriter to piano,
from bookshelf to an envelope lying on the floor,
I found myself in the L section of the dictionary
where my eyes fell upon the word lanyard.

No cookie nibbled by a French novelist
could send one more suddenly into the past —
a past where I sat at a workbench at a camp
by a deep Adirondack lake
learning how to braid thin plastic strips
into a lanyard, a gift for my mother.

I had never seen anyone use a lanyard
or wear one, if that’s what you did with them,
but that did not keep me from crossing
strand over strand again and again
until I had made a boxy
red and white lanyard for my mother.

She gave me life and milk from her breasts,
and I gave her a lanyard.
She nursed me in many a sickroom,
lifted teaspoons of medicine to my lips,
set cold face-cloths on my forehead,
and then led me out into the airy light

and taught me to walk and swim,
and I, in turn, presented her with a lanyard.
Here are thousands of meals, she said,
and here is clothing and a good education.
And here is your lanyard, I replied,
which I made with a little help from a counselor.

Here is a breathing body and a beating heart,
strong legs, bones and teeth,
and two clear eyes to read the world, she whispered,
and here, I said, is the lanyard I made at camp.
And here, I wish to say to her now,
is a smaller gift—not the archaic truth

that you can never repay your mother,
but the rueful admission that when she took
the two-tone lanyard from my hands,
I was as sure as a boy could be
that this useless, worthless thing I wove
out of boredom would be enough to make us even.
Billy Collins

Ancient Mariner

2016 – A Signal Election

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In the last post about lawless gun ownership, the mariner suggested that 2016 was a signal election where serious change may be possible. This perception is still true. However, attacking the gun issue will require more than a compromised registration solution. The real issue is that money is awash in elections at all levels of campaigning. A quick and simple way to disrupt the control of money is to limit a candidate’s funds to the region for which they would be responsible if elected. We would live in a fantasy world if campaign funds were required to be net zero balances – that is no funds can be carried over to the next campaign, making campaigning a fair activity that may improve turnover in legislative bodies.

If a Senator was campaigning for office in Ohio, fund raising would be limited to Ohio; similarly, a state legislator campaigning for state office could only receive funding from his or her district. If such legislation were passed, candidates would not be able to depend on arbitrary corporations like the NRA. Wherever NRA headquarters is located, the NRA could contribute only to that district’s campaigns. For a set of issues that can easily be remedied in 2016, search mariner’s archives for a January 17 2014 post titled “The Big Picture.”

Ancient Mariner

Umpqua Community College

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The mariner is not a gun advocate. He is not a hunting advocate. Further, he thinks that people who are afraid that government will take their guns are paranoid and irrational. The easiest solution is not to own a gun so there is nothing for the government to take. The mariner thinks people who hole up in remote places and maintain an arsenal of weaponry to defend themselves against government are the very crazies that should not be allowed guns in the first place. The ne’er-do-wells that gathered round the rancher who was to be arrested for grazing cattle illegally are the very ones who should not have guns.

In American culture, the gun is easily absorbed into the owner’s psyche. Somehow, owning a piece of steel and gunpowder magnifies one’s sense of self importance and minimizes one’s rationality. These are the very people who should not own guns.

In Australia, guns were outlawed. In the next year, death by gun statistics dropped by half. In the United States, more people die from guns than die in automobile accidents. The mariner is more afraid of gun owners than he is of government – and that says a lot considering his opinion of government.

The mariner knows an individual who owns a fifty caliber machine gun. Fortunately, it is too heavy and bulky to carry around and cannot be concealed. But weapons like the AK-47, grenade launchers, automatic handguns can be carried about, even concealed in some cases.

None of the gun owners mentioned would be identified as mentally ill. However, mentally ill is not a constant state in most people; mental irrationality pops up in everyday life. In those moments of duress, a gun should not be handy.

Instead of providing military hardware to civilian police departments (tanks?), government should bolster data bases sophisticated enough to identify domestic disturbance, spousal abuse, underage (21) applicants, and a registration system that will catch the ownership of any weapon obviously intended for hunting people rather than game.

The President spoke forcefully today. It is worth watching at

http://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=umpqua+community+college+obama+speech&FORM=VIRE5#view=detail&mid=D90E69944FB2AEA7518FD90E69944FB2AEA7518F

The President made a plea to US voters to vote only for those who oppose undocumented gun ownership. He was sincere but the mariner fears the plea is futile. Mariner is skeptical about the wisdom of voters. It remains true, to the President’s dismay, that voters get what they vote for.

To check on a candidate’s record on gun control, simply search online for the candidate’s name along with “voting record guns.” It is as important, if not more so, to search local and state candidates as well as federal. As an example, the mariner typed “Steve King voting record guns”. The search sent back pages of sources. The first source, http://www.ontheissues.org/House/Steve_King.htm#Gun_Control

returned the following sorted by subject for his entire record:

Voted YES on prohibiting product misuse lawsuits on gun manufacturers. (Oct 2005)

Voted YES on prohibiting suing gunmakers & sellers for gun misuse. (Apr 2003)

Rated A by the NRA, indicating a pro-gun rights voting record. (Dec 2003)

No United Nations taxation on firearms. (Sep 2003)

Loosen restrictions on interstate gun purchases. (Oct 2011)

Allow veterans to register unlicensed guns acquired abroad. (Jul 2011)

Ban gun registration & trigger lock law in Washington DC. (Mar 2007)

Allow reloading spent military small arms ammunition. (Apr 2009)

Anger fades now, to sorrow for the victims and families. But this must not fade as any other fading massacre has. It is a bridge too far. There is a very important election in 2016. The mariner urges the sane among us to change the stranglehold of the National Rifle Association and gun manufacturers who lobby and give too much money to elected, in-it-for-the-buck, officials.

Ancient Mariner

Autumn

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The vegetable garden is winding down. Just a few chard and the last run of tomatoes left. The mariner canned apple pie filling today and it looks like more will be canned tomorrow plus a few jars of applesauce. Unlike many, the mariner doesn’t add cinnamon or nutmeg to the applesauce; just a few tablespoons of malt vinegar to heighten the apple flavor.

The flower gardens always look a bit tattered this time of year with only the marigolds, chrysanthemums and fall color of the spirea showing energy. The mariner may have mentioned that a strong storm destroyed three wonderful, old Ash trees. Having a tree service drop the trunks on the lawn means that a new lawn will have to be laid in the spring. Where the trees once stood looks like a landfill. Piles of wood chips from grinding the stumps are everywhere. The compost pile, about four feet high, adds to the dump motif.

The mariner had dug about half of a water feature that was to be an attractive pond with a small waterfall (when there were big old trees). The remaining trench has become home for four leopard frogs. They have become pets of a sort – depending on the ugly ditch to sustain itself. They pay their way, though, thriving on mosquitoes, gnats and crickets. He will give them winter quarters but in the spring, they must move on; restoration begins in earnest then.

Soon, projects will turn to cleaning the activity of summer. The shed, well let’s say the shed isn’t orderly and would appreciate some reorganization. Further, the mariner must harvest frost-sensitive bulbs and prepare the winter lamp garden. Cuttings will be taken of frost-sensitive plants like geraniums; seedlings of herbs and a few vegetables will be planted for winter growth. The rabbit fence must be completed before spring so that another vegetable bed can be added.

Otherwise, the job jar waits with many, many tasks too numerous to mention. The mariner has decided to take a vacation….

Ancient Mariner

 

The Fullness of Time

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The Fullness of Time was a period of expectation in Israel that began in intensity around 700-600BC when the Book of Isaiah was written (there were other prophets before and after Isaiah). In essence, the Hebrew population was admonished for being lax in faith and practice; at some point in time, when the time was right – AKA fullness of time – God would send a Messiah to lead the Hebrews from this degenerate period of history. The Christians leaned heavily on these prognostications when pronouncing Jesus as that Messiah (See Galations 4:4).

What is relevant in the fullness of time today is that the same paradigm is occurring. Not limited to Bible interpretations but more broadly framed in the 21st century’s international, cultural, technical, scientific and multi-religious history, our fullness of time has reached a point of advancement that requires a significant shift in humankind’s values. When Jesus was born, the few hundred years before provided advancements that set the stage for Christianity to represent a new age of understanding; the Greek language (capable of documenting precise ideas), the emergence of a larger Earth (Roman Empire), and the spread of monotheism (Israel) required a new culture and a new understanding of human value.

Reaching the point of salvation, that is, passing through the tumultuous whorl of change and finally living in a new age is not a pleasant trip. As a clear example, consider the history of slavery in the United States. Slavery was present in US colonies in 1609 and reached as far north as Massachusetts by 1629; slave sugar republics in the Caribbean Islands began around 1650. Southern slave states in the United States emulated the culture of Caribbean slave republics leading to a plantation society.

Slowly, over a period of 150 years, the US transitioned into a northern society where slavery became a social and moral issue – thereby gradually passing legislation that outlawed slavery. Nevertheless, even in the north, common rights afforded by the Constitution and the Bill of Rights were not available to most blacks. In the south, where the economy of slavery and the social prejudice of color were firmly entrenched, there was no intention to abolish slavery. It took the Civil War in 1860-65 where 750,000 citizens died to change government laws that would protect minimal rights for African Americans. Education remains an issue in the US even today; in 1957, the National Guard had to be called to have nine African Americans enter Central High School in Alabama over the objections of Governor George Wallace. Even today, voting rights, affirmative action, and segregation are unresolved.

Today in 2015, 406 years after the first slave entered the United States, the residue of prejudice remains. In former slave states disdain for the Federal Government remains strong. The slavery age is not over but is there a fullness of time? Is there a moment when US culture will become multiracial without prejudice? Slowly, the race issue is changing before us with the increase of immigrants from all over the world – especially Central America and the Gulf region. Changes to slavery have been brutal and continues to suffer in a wrenching time of change.

Add to slavery the fullness of time for a fair economy, stopping the abuses of international corporatism, providing dependable financial support for all citizens, health reform, and protection of a planet capable of supporting its biomass – not to mention many civil issues like starvation, war, prison reform, and better treatment of livestock – the new slave on the block.

All these issues are entering the whorl of rapid change. Congressman Boehner is but one tick of the clock.

Ancient Mariner