Journal of daily reflections on the progress of my home-based agriculture experiments, mixed with observations about life, peace, justice, faith, family, community and friends.
Let It Be! - Thursday, September 02, 2010
Mother Mary garden in 2007One of my favorite Beatles’ songs is “Let it be”. The lines: “Mother Mary said to me ‘let it be’, ‘let it be’” rings in my ears frequently.
Today we buried an evergreen tree given to us by friends to honor Peter in the front lawn. We noticed how nice our front lawn gardens have come to be, the rain garden full of flowers on one side and the vegetable garden full of tomatoes and basil on the other side.
Tonight a random picture from 2007 appeared on my computer screen of the center of our backyard garden featuring the statue of Mother Mary, bird bath and flowers. The statue and bird bath are still there but is now surround by overgrown plants and weeds. All the attention paid to the front garden has resulted in a lack of attention to the backyard garden.
My son Peter used to say “I am doing my best”. All we can do is our best and the rest we need to say with Mother Mary, ‘let it be’, ‘let it be’.
See the full list of articles in the Diary of a Worm.
Quotes
Various quotes
“Nonviolent action is born of two very powerful forces: the absolute and total rejection of injustice committed against human beings, and a love that impels one towards the construction of a new society. It transforms hatred into a constructive force. The process of Christian interpretation helps us to see that the real enemy is not another human being but the system that has made individuals evil. These individuals are the oppressors, who must who must be liberated from their active oppression. By dramatizing the injustice in a social context, one obliges consciences to face up to the injustice in a social context, one obliges consciences to face up the injustice that is there. The oppressor is forced to recognize his injustice in an explicit and public way. The repression he uses to stifle nonviolent action makes clear his usual pattern of conduct, and nonviolent resistance reveals his own moral inferiority.”
(Freedom Made Flesh The Mission of Christ and His Church by Ignacio Ellacuria, Orbis Books, 1976
“You can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.” -- Anne Lamott
All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.(Edmund Burke).
Our problem is civil obedience. Our problem is the numbers of people all over the world who have obeyed the dictates of the leaders of their government and have gone to war, and millions have been killed because of this obedience. And our problem is that scene in All Quiet on the Western Front where the schoolboys march off dutifully in a line to war.
Our problem is that people are obedient all over the world, in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity, and war and cruelty. Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves, and all the while the grand thieves are running the country. That’s our problem. We recognize this for Nazi Germany. We know that the problem there was obedience, that the people obeyed Hitler. People obeyed; that was wrong.
They should have challenged, and they should have resisted; and if we were only there, we would have showed them.
Even in Stalin’s Russia we can understand that; people are obedient, all these herdlike people. — Howard Zinn
There can be no joy in living without joy in work. – St. Thomas Aquinas
What is a merciful heart? It is the heart’s burning for the sake of the entire creation, for men, for birds, for animals, for demons, and for every created thing; and by the recollection and sight of them the eyes of a merciful man pour forth abundant tears. From the strong and vehement mercy which grips his heart and from his great compassion, his heart is humbled and he cannot bear to hear or to see any injury or slight sorrow in creation. For this reason he offers up tearful prayer continually even for irrational beasts, for the enemies of the truth, and for those who harm him, that they be protected and receive mercy. And in like manner he even prays for the family of reptiles because of the great compassion that burns without measure in his heart in the likeness of God.
— St Isaac of Syria
History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people. Martin Luther King Jr.
If there were no God, there would be no Atheists.
— G. K. Chesterton
“The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it’s indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it’s indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it’s indifference.” Elie Wiesel
“Don’t fight forces, use them.” — Buckminster Fuller
“I am not trying to abolish conflict. There is great value in healthy conflict. And the dangers of group-think are real. Conflict can inspire creative leadership. Where there are fundamental conflicts over values, they should not be ignored in a sentimental yearning for consensus. The problem in our communities today is not that we have conflict, but that we manufacture conflict and exaggerate differences to the point where it is very difficult to make meaningful change. Too often we abandon basic civility and cannot disagree without questioning the motives of our adversaries. Our standard as we debate should be similar to doctors’ Hippocratic Oath: “Do no harm.” Disagree, but don’t tear the community apart as you do.” Frederick Douglas in a speech in 1857
“There are two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is.”-Albert Einstein
“We live in a deranged age, more deranged than usual, because in spite of great scientific and technological advances, man has not the faintest idea of who he is or what he is doing.” — Walker Percy
“Everyone believes the Theory, except the man that makes it. No one believes the Data, except the man who takes it.” —from a friend David Kruschke
“The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. This new type of criminal … commits his crimes under circumstances that make it well-nigh impossible for him to know or to feel that he is doing wrong.” — Hannah Arendt
“Taking a new step, uttering a new word, is what people fear most.” — Feodor Dostoevsky
I find it strange that the last place I can really quote Jesus these days is in American churches. They don’t want to hear ‘overcome evil with good.’ They don’t want to hear ‘those who live by the sword die by the sword.’ They don’t want to hear ‘if your enemy hurts you, do good, feed, clothe, minister to him.’ They don’t want to hear ‘blessed are the merciful.’ They don’t want to hear ‘love your enemies’.”- Tony Campolo quoted in Christian Week magazine
“If we don’t change direction soon, we’ll end up where we’re going.” — Irwin Corey (Corey is an American comic and actor who is perhaps best known as “The World’s Foremost Authority.”)
Jokes
Retirement
I wish this were true.
|
Nonviolence or Militarism
Breaking the Silence
War Spending Records of Congresspersons Gwen Moore and James Sensenbrenner Jr.
Here is an article by a woman who has spent time (several years since early 2002) living in Afghanistan alongside Afghani citizens, in effort to help enable and protect Afghani women in opposition to archaic Taliban suppression. Ann Jones, a elderly woman of remarkable courage and strength, publishes in Tom Dispatch an article written while embedded with the US Army in Afghanistan, an alternate view of how things are being done in that war-torn country to supposedly aide in “making life better” for all Afghani.
MRAPs, Sprained Ankles, Air Conditioning, Farting Contests, and Other Snapshots from the American War in Afghanistan
In the eight years I’ve reported on Afghanistan, I’ve “embedded” regularly with Afghan civilians, especially women. Recently, however, with American troops “surging” and journalists getting into the swing of the military’s counterinsurgency “strategy” (better known by its acronym, COIN), I decided to get with the program as well. Last June, I filed a request to embed with the U.S. Army.
Polite emails from Army public affairs specialists ask journalists to provide evidence of medical insurance, a requirement I took as an admission that war is not a healthy pursuit. I already knew that, of course — from the civilian side. Plus I’d read a lot of articles and books by male colleagues who had risked their necks with American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. What struck me about their work was this: even when they described screw-ups coming down from the top brass, those reporters still managed to make the soldierly enterprise sound pretty consistently heroic. I wondered what they might be leaving out.
So I sent in a scan of my Medicare card. I worried that this evidence of my senior citizenship, coupled with my membership in the “weaker sex,” the one we’re supposedly rescuing in Afghanistan, would raise questions about my fitness for missions “outside the wire” of a Forward Operating Base (FOB, pronounced “fob”) in eastern Afghanistan only a few miles from the tribal areas of Pakistan. But no, I got my requested embed — proof of neither fitness nor heroism required (something my male colleagues had never revealed). In the end, my age and gender were no handicap. As Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple knows, people will say almost anything to an old lady they assume to be stupid.
|
