Oh, Night Divine

Joyous expectation.

For reasons that I will probably uncover and clarify only as I write this post, I am looking forward to the holidays this year. I've erred more on the side of the Grinch than Buddy* in previous Decembers, but one could argue that this is a natural consequence of working in the service industry, where you can't escape the Christmas music and there are always some random, useless products that must be sold if the lumbering, ancient bark is going to make it through the dead waters of January and February.

I don't know why, but this year I feel as though the whole thing is somehow more... holy. Probably somewhere between going to an All Soul's Day Episcopal service structured around Faure's Requiem, and the realization that most of my Christmas budget ended up going to a mechanic so I'm going to have to get creative, and oh, let's not forget that Maria won't be here this year, so no Christmas cookie party or cherished sister time...

I wanted this to be more eloquent, and it was, in my head, two hours ago when I was blissfully stabbing cloves into oranges and listening to choral renditions of (actually) classic Christmas songs. But I suppose it just comes down to this: it has been a hard year. I'm not where I want to be, even when I'm being gracious with myself; and I have tasted something of the bitter side of life in a way that I've been avoiding for a long time.

But as I begin to ascend into the heights of December, I look back across the wasteland and what stands out to me are the bright spots of love and joy and hope. And it strikes me in this moment that there is something magnificent and sacred about celebration, and that something arises not out of an innocent naivety, but rather from the admission that the world is often neither kind nor good, and yet we are not going to allow that to govern our response to it.

Celebration is an act of resistance. It is a backbone of steel disguised by holly wreaths and pine garlands, surrounded by carols that redound with those words with which I began: joyous expectation. That, to me, is Advent. The building sense of expectation, the serene image of the pregnant woman curled around the life within her, as the whole world waits, breathless, for a miracle to take place.

So if you care to join me, I'm going to be filling my house with paper snowflakes, having holiday gatherings, making wassail and Christmas cookies, going to church unusually often, and hopefully experiencing Christmas in the time-honored way, which has very little to do with presents and everything to do with cultivating a holy sense of peace, expectation, and joy.

*To be clear: I will never be Buddy. I hate Elf, and I think Zooey Deschanel is annoying. Gauntlet: thrown.

What I Find in Times of (Personal) Crisis

In these past few weeks immediately preceding and following the election, I have been admittedly rather morose about prospects for the future. Which is probably only fair, when you're hanging your hopes for change on a political process and not on the polis that the process seeks to organize and govern. In my defense, the polis has also been disappointing. But as it is closer to home and nearer to my heart, the picture they compose has more details to it than mere disappointment can convey.

"I have just seen the largest pale yellow splodge in the clouds that I shall see in my lifetime. #deeplymoved #cosmicsignificance #wordsfailme" {Andy Jones, 11/15/16}

The above lines are shamelessly reprinted without permission from a friend's recent tongue-in-cheek Facebook post about the supermoon. And you're probably going to think I'm crazy (go ahead--I'll think I'm crazy in two years when I come back and read this post), but when I read that in the context of recent events, I kind of want to laugh hysterically and maybe cry a little bit too.

Because it feels like a perfect summation of recent events. Something big happened, yes. For lots of people, it was a meaningful something, although the meaning you find in it varies by the weight you place on different factors relevant to interpretation (was that a truism? I'm sorry if it was). But at the end of the day, it's also a bit absurd and comical. This feels like an appropriately Chestertonian view of the situation: that something huge is not therefore important and, more importantly, not serious--and may indeed be quite the opposite if we're willing to look at it the right way 'round, which is to say that maybe we need to stop looking through the wrong end of the telescope, or through a telescope or microscope or any scope at all. What's right in front of our faces is what we have to work with. Let us proceed accordingly.

Now that I've got all of that off my chest, and hopefully absolved myself of the charge of being too bitter or hopeless: a happier subject.

Sometimes it's easier to turn our sights on national crises, because they're too big for one person to solve and you and I both know that from the get go. If we just throw words at those problems, well, who's really to blame us at the end of the day? What can be more difficult to face are the personal crises that come up in our day to day lives. These are emotionally charged, immediate, urgent, and blurred or distorted by how we are situated in the midst of them. They change how we see the world and how we respond to it (a good thing to remember before any of us judge anyone else for decisions made out of fear, distress, or anger). So we panic. Because I can't solve a lot of things by myself. I have needs that I can't meet, and beyond those, things that I want to do, but can't.

I was listening to a podcast recently, an episode of On Being with Krista Tippett interviewing Congressman John Lewis talking about "the art and discipline of non-violence." At one point, he mentions a phrase with which I am familiar from other discussions about the civil rights movement, but which always strikes a chord with me: the Beloved Community. The below is taken from The King Center's website, and I'm going to the trouble of an extensive quote because I feel like I couldn't say it better:

"For Dr. King, The Beloved Community was not a lofty utopian goal to be confused with the rapturous image of the Peaceable Kingdom, in which lions and lambs coexist in idyllic harmony. Rather, The Beloved Community was for him a realistic, achievable goal that could be attained by a critical mass of people committed to and trained in the philosophy and methods of nonviolence.

Dr. King’s Beloved Community is a global vision, in which all people can share in the wealth of the earth. In the Beloved Community, poverty, hunger and homelessness will not be tolerated because international standards of human decency will not allow it. Racism and all forms of discrimination, bigotry and prejudice will be replaced by an all-inclusive spirit of sisterhood and brotherhood. In the Beloved Community, international disputes will be resolved by peaceful conflict-resolution and reconciliation of adversaries, instead of military power. Love and trust will triumph over fear and hatred. Peace with justice will prevail over war and military conflict.

Dr. King’s Beloved Community was not devoid of interpersonal, group or international conflict. Instead he recognized that conflict was an inevitable part of human experience. But he believed that conflicts could be resolved peacefully and adversaries could be reconciled through a mutual, determined commitment to nonviolence. No conflict, he believed, need erupt in violence. And all conflicts in The Beloved Community should end with reconciliation of adversaries cooperating together in a spirit of friendship and goodwill."

These paragraphs use certain significant buzzwords: nonviolence, global vision, racism, discrimination, conflict. They are a big picture. But as with all big pictures, they start here, on the ground, with individual people performing small daily acts. Sometimes those acts are not obviously or overtly about overcoming issues of race or conflicts. But they are the small graces that make a community healthier over time, that overcome divisions of class and economy or differences of opinion, that are the training ground upon which we are taught to work together peaceably and wherein we learn that our success does not lie in our individual strength, but in our shared strength as a community.

With that in mind, some things I have found in times of personal crisis (and you thought I was just pulling that title out of a hat--fair enough, I usually do):

1.) You learn how strong your support group is. I grew up without a lot of the supports that most people expect from their parents. Oh, there was a never a time that my dad didn't manage to put food on the table, but I knew that it was hard sometimes, and he made his dollars stretch with the garden and Mom's freezing and preserving, and most of my clothes came from thrift stores and charity bags. But in so many other regards, I was raised with the tacit recognition that if I didn't do it, nobody else was going to do it for me, and to expect otherwise would be to burden and trouble someone who already had enough on their plate.

So it's a bit surreal when you're confronted with a problem, you start taking stock of your options, and you think you know what you're going to have to do, but then this person out in left field says, "Well if you buy X, Y has the space you need, and Z has the skills to help you do it: does that work?" Suddenly you've gone from I alone, to I, U, Y, and Z, all working together to pool resources, skills, connections, and favors, and the bleak prospect of being forced into a decision you don't want to make is... gone.

Because the weird thing about operating out of a sense of community is that when you step up to support someone or they step up to support you, you don't just bring or get one person. You also get the full force of all of the people they know and have supported, or you bring all the people you know and have supported over the years. There has to be a pebble to get the landslide going, but once it starts, it moves an army of boulders.

2.) Money has nothing to do with it. When you take stock of what you have, list your financial resources last, even if you're actually so comfortably well off that you can make a substantial difference that way. Look at your skills, look at the people you know, look at the places you have access to, look at the physical tools that you possess, and don't be afraid to think outside of the box.

Chances are, to make something happen, to make something change, to fix a problem, you'll need a little bit of all of those. And chances are good that if you're missing something, you know someone who has it.

3.) There is no end point. When you exclude money and explicit numerical transaction values, nobody ever manages to balance the books. This comes up somewhere in David Graeber's book, Debt. He mentions an African society in which people are regularly making small loans and gifts to one another, and their social interactions are structured around these small transfers. The key here is that you do not repay someone the exact amount or in the exact kind that something was given to you. This means that the exchanges must continue, because you have never settled. It would in fact be rude to do so, because it would signal to the other person that you want nothing more to do with them. Instead, with a few pennies here or a pound of flour there, you build up a lifetime of debts and repayments, and so you continue in relation to one another.

This is not an economy of exchange with a particular destination. It's an informal system that, because of its lack of definition and precision, leaves room to accommodate the crises, both large and small, that the members of a community face. The resources move to the points of greatest need, when they are needed. I do not own what is mine to use only as I see fit (notions of property have their place, but that which is mine is mine humbly and in trust, for we all die, and our possessions do not follow us to the grave), but as a service to others.

This is where I find my warmth on the colder nights. And for the regular readers of this blog, I believe that most of you fall well within the bounds of my community. I hope that in time I can offer you hopefully more (and maybe, sadly, less), something, but never perfectly equal, to what you have given me.

When Despair for the World Grows in Me

The American government does not exist to protect the interests of the American people. It exists to protect the interests of American corporations. In theory, this could transfer benefits to the people, but historically, that doesn't seem to be the case.

I mention this, because I was thinking about US foreign policy and the prison system. Not necessarily related, except for a few points. Intervention/invasion in Iraq and Afghanistan was not for my sake. Certainly, 9/11 provided a convenient, symbolic rallying point for massive public support for those actions, but I can't say that I feel any more secure or less likely to suffer from a terrorist attack as a result of them. Furthermore, that all comes at the expense of the security of vulnerable civilians whose entire lives have been disrupted for over a decade and who can be targets of drone attacks for the simple crimes of proximity or being male and in the wrong age bracket.

What's being protected are economic interests. Keep the petroleum flowing. Ensure access to valuable mining operations that feed metals into the ever-ravenous maw of developing technology.

Do I benefit from those? Tangentially. I'm not spending $5 per gallon for gas. I have a relatively new iPhone, a MacBook, etc.

But am I actually benefitting from those? Or have my tastes and needs been conveniently adapted to suit what's available? Am I being regularly molded as a consumer toward a particular company's vision of the world and an acceptance of and desire for its products?

I just think that the sense of inevitability--that obviously we must have oil, that obviously we must have cheap labor because otherwise I have to pay more than $10 for my t-shirts, that obviously...--it's an illusion that directs our attention away from contemplating alternatives. What could life be like if we didn't...?

Alternatives, for example, to killing innocent people so that multibillion dollar corporations can continue to churn out profits for their shareholders, profits that are converted into financial speculations or carefully protected from taxation by the elaborate machinations of very good accountants taking advantage of loopholes that ostensibly don't exist to enable them to do what they're doing, but that nobody is closing, because the people who could close them are probably benefitting from the system that's in place.

This has been a bit of a ramble, and maybe a paranoid one. But what kills me about all of the candidates that are on the table right now is that every last one of them, at the end of the day, doesn't give a shit about social policies once they've stepped off their political grandstands. They'll pander to the electorate for one more week of my-god-why-do-we-have-to-listen-to-this political campaigning, and then they'll go right back to doing what they do best: protecting American businesses, at home and abroad.

Meanwhile, African American men are incarcerated at alarming rates and essentially stripped of their citizenship, while older white men far from the East and West coast megalopolises are unable to compete for skilled jobs. Women's reproductive rights, so closely tied to their progress socially, politically, and economically, are being chiseled away, because what we clearly need is a return to a world in which falling down the stairs while pregnant could get you convicted of feticide (don't even get me started on this one).

I'm not keen on this world they're protecting. And I don't like the solutions they're offering. It's like intentionally generating pollution, then having the state supply us with asthma medication to cure what wouldn't be an issue if the cause of the asthma was removed in the first place.

...That's all she wrote.

There and Here

I was going to spend my evening nursing a toddy while watching Galaxy Quest and crocheting, and I'll probably end up going back to that plan. But I've been neglecting this blog recently and Dan has inspired me to finally write about something that I had thought of, but dismissed. Also, if an explanandum is required for my recent inactivity, it's quite simply this: the Blogger app hasn't been working on my phone, and I'm apparently too lazy to drag out my computer to write things. So now you know the truth and we can all move on, me with my hipster Bluetooth typewriter, you with your.... whatever. Hopefully a toddy, or something lovely like that.

I've recently been reading a great deal about Germans during World War II, and on related subjects like the psychology of killing on battlefields, that sort of thing. There are a few things that obviously stand out, even before you've spent any time looking deeply into the subject. If I could be an average American and you were to ask me about the German national psyche in 1943, the two things I would have to bring up would be 1) the support for National Socialism with its central cult figure of Hitler, and 2) the near universal turning away from the plight of Jews and other undesirables. 

There's this burning question, or questions really, behind any study of the Holocaust: how could they have participated in this horror? And for those who did not directly participate: how could they look away? Undergirding these questions is another, almost subconscious one: how could this happen here? Where, by "here," I mean the global West, supposedly so civilized and advanced, as assessed within our Western-originating paradigms of progression. 

From the outset, it may be worth our while to distinguish between passive participants and active participants. That distinction is set up by the first two questions, which imply two kinds of responsibility: that of commitment and that of deliberate disengagement. Later, I will challenge this dichotomy, but for now, it will suffice.

So, to begin: how could they look away? Some people have argued that many Germans just didn't know. To lend credence to their argument, German Jews were, overall, more likely to survive the war than those in occupied territories. The death camps, the Einsatzgruppen, entire cities in Poland, Ukraine, and Russia starved through the long winters... These happened out of sight of those many German citizens who remained at home through the course of the war.

But this argument leaves out several factors. First of all, there were an enormous number of soldiers and administrative personnel transferred to posts in the East. And all of them, in spite of severe encouragement to voluntarily censor themselves, were sending home letters full of the deeds of the Eastern front. While some could not bring themselves to detail everything that they saw or did, many were proud of their own accomplishments or, if not proud, then at least compelled to thrill their readers with all of the most gruesome and gory details.

And second, it ignores the immediate presence of the death and internment camps. The most notorious of these were in occupied Poland: Auschwitz-Birkenau, of course, and also Sobibór, Treblinka, and Majdanek, and the list goes on. There were, however, quite a few in Germany itself. Ravensbrück and Dachau are two names that come to mind. And I can personally attest, having visited there, that Dachau is not at all far from the populous city of Munich. Even if there were no camps nearby, many towns had rail stations, through which the trains carrying the condemned would pass—and there was no doubt about who the condemned were.

Third, and finally, it fails to account for those few protests that did occur and suggest some degree of awareness. For example, the T4 program, through which many institutionalized, disabled individuals were starved or poisoned, did generate critical commentary from public figures once it was uncovered, and I believe among them were several priests of considerable regional influence. However, these protests, such as they were, were ultimately silenced by a greater commitment to the nationalist program.

Here I must apologize for a slight discrepancy. I began with a question which I don’t yet intend to address, namely how one could choose not to confront the atrocities. Instead, I have said a few words to justify the question in the first place and hopefully establish that the more brutal elements of Nazi ideology were not out of the public awareness, even if they were not a part of the official Party propaganda.

And with regard to those who did directly participate in the camps and in the treatment of the occupied territories, well, they were clearly aware, so what was it that motivated them?

To be fair here, there was a great deal of nuance to the ideologies and opinions of the many people who participated in the war, both at home and on the Eastern and Western fronts. There were many who were not ardent Nazis, for example, and yet their dissatisfaction with the Versailles Treaty and its humiliating terms left them desirous of a reckoning and a reestablishment of their place in the world--better still, the conquering of that world. 

Thus many, in those aforementioned letters home, expressed qualms about the activities of the occupying forces, but were not necessarily opposed to the overarching plan. For example, Wilm Hosenfeld, made famous through The Pianist for saving the Polish musician Wladyslaw Spilman, worked to hide and protect numerous Jews, all while continuing to support nationalism and apparently experiencing no dissonance over the execution of his military duties in Warsaw alongside his personal protective efforts--this, from his letters to his wife.

Other soldiers initially held back from more wanton violence, such as needlessly burning villages in their path. But as time wore on and they endured hardships both mentally and physically exhausting, many became hardened or paranoid. The slightest movement might trigger a man to shoot, thinking he was the target of a Russian sniper, only to find that he had downed an unarmed peasant.

And, unfortunately, there were also those who simply enjoyed killing or whose blatantly racist ideologies were, for them, sufficient justification. Of these individuals, what more needs to be said?

I’ve probably given this more time and space than it really requires, but I feel like it’s easy to take a simplistic view of the situation. Easy, not only because we don’t even know where to begin unpacking the full implications of the Holocaust and the surrounding atrocities, but also because we don’t want to acknowledge the possibilities that a more complicated picture entails.

In 2015, 60 Minutes did a segment entitled “The Hidden Holocaust,” which talks about the recent, ongoing work of a French priest, Father Patrick Desbois. Father Desbois tends to no church of his own. Instead, he travels from town to town in Poland, Ukraine, Moldova, and other territories that were once behind the Iron Curtain, seeking their oldest living citizens who can tell him where the mass grave is.

While the death camps posed one solution for the mass extermination program, they involved a great deal of administration and transport. It was quite common and simpler for the Jewry of a particular town to be rounded up, led out of town to a semi-secluded place, and executed right there. These mass graves are generally unmarked and, save for the memories of those who were children at the time, they would be wholly forgotten.

One of the most interesting things about the 60 Minutes segment, however, were the taped interviews where Father Desbois questions these people about the circumstances surrounding the executions. At one point, he pulls out a photograph of one such occasion. In it, there are of course the soldiers and the Jews. But there are also onlookers. What comes out of these interviews is that these were not secretive, hidden slaughters in the dead of night. Rather, they were carried out with the full awareness of the townspeople, and many times with a crowd of said people standing by, there for the spectacle.

Earlier I said that I wanted to challenge the dichotomy I had set up, between passive and active participants. Because I really do think we have distinct ideas regarding the responsibility that people bear, based on those questions I asked—those who simply turn away and refuse to acknowledge what is taking place around them may be complicit in what occurs, but they leave open room for doubt. They did not hold the gun, therefore: what was the punishable nature of their crime?

And yet these spectators are precisely, by definition, not looking away. They are both present at the scene of the crime, and they are gazing upon it. They are, in essence, a jury. And this is a special category. For a jury cannot wash its hands of the consequences, as Pontius Pilate does.

The words of a jury are “performative.” Throughout the course of the trial, the defendant is simply that—a defendant. It is only upon the deliberation of the jury that he becomes innocent or guilty, although the jury will not ultimately be responsible for carrying out his punishment.

Likewise, the spectators at the scene: their participation is consecration beneath the unchallenging gaze. For some, this is mere entertainment. For others, it is justice for another collective guilt—that of Hitler’s much-abused “European Jewry.” Regardless, they are actors every bit as much as the one whose finger rests on the trigger.

I want to go back to what I said earlier about easy answers. The easy answer is to point the finger. To say, “See what they have done. They are guilty.” And they are. But when you begin to break down the question of what, exactly, it is that they are guilty of, when you begin to add nuance to your understanding of what took place, there comes a point at which an honest person cannot fail to realize: “But see what we have done.”

It’s the spectacle that got me in the end. Because I realized that there are probably people alive today in the South who were part of a lynch mob.

How could they do it?

It’s harder to ask when “they” are virtually indistinguishable from “I” and from “we,” and suddenly the safe distance we’ve been maintaining as judge, standing over and above, is completely collapsing in on itself and we find ourselves sitting opposite the bench.

How could we do it?

A Matter of Injustice

There is this sense that if justice is getting what one deserves, then a punishment ought to fit the crime. On a podcast I listened to recently, the host told the story of a judge in North or South Carolina who sentenced three men in a brutal rape case to either twenty years in prison or voluntary castration. While his sentence was decried as inhumane cruelty and the sentence was changed to just twenty years in prison after an appeal, there is a certain fittingness to it, at least in my eyes.

The man who carries out sexual abuse gives up something of his sexuality. The thief who steals with his hand is relieved of it. The one whose tongue runs with slander or lies likewise silences the offending member. As if we can make some kind of amends by removing from our bodies those parts of it which are crucial to the sins that we commit.

And yet underlying it all is this realization that however much we may deprive the physical, we have made no inroads on the mental or spiritual, and it is there that the action originates. But how can we punish the soul? For those with some feeling, I suppose one might torture their family members to impress upon them the pain that their own crimes have given. Or we could, as we do, cut them off from all social contact by placing them in isolation chambers with no comforting umbilical cord of human speech to tie them to the outside world.

As usual, that wasn't quite what I meant to speak of, although it gets there eventually. At some point, we realize that systematic criminal justice fails because the crime typically involves an *injustice* toward the victim, and so justice becomes a contradiction in terms, for we deliver to the criminal what is deserved and yet what is deserved is what is undeserved. The punishment can never satisfy the crime.

I only think of this because I feel at times as though I had stuck my fingers into the heart of Pennsylvania and ripped its heart out, and now, from some grieved impulse to make amends, I read its biography, or more intimate still, its letters and diaries. But these do not bring it back to life. It would require something else to do that, and I'm not sure whither the solution lies.