The Homefront

Golden Gate National Cemetery, San Bruno, California
Today, Tomorrow or Next Week


“Ready, Fire!” the sharp crack of seven simultaneous rifle shots split the grief thickened air of the cemetery.
“Ready, Fire!” again.
“Ready, Fire!” once again
“Order…arms.” The seven members of the white gloved honor guard snapped their M-16s back into the “Port” position across their immaculately uniformed bemedaled chests. At that moment the mournful melody of "Taps" sang out from a lone bugler standing on a rise a short distance away. The six uniformed pallbearers folded the flag that had draped Billy’s coffin in the traditional manner of a military funeral, each performing a single fold until the flag rested in the hands of the last in a perfect triangle. Billy’s Dad, Jim, listened to the sad tune as the flag was folded. He thought he could hear just a touch more heart and a touch more feeling in the age-old rendition. Maybe it was just the moment or maybe it was because it was his older son Jason who was playing it. Jason played trumpet in school and picked it up again to help pass the endless down time that is so much a part of being a soldier. They pulled Jason out of his unit in Baghdad to attend Billy’s funeral after he was killed in southern Afghanistan near the Pakistan border. Jason requested that he be allowed to play "Taps" over his brother. The Army loves gestures like that so his request was granted. Jason knew the stretch of road where Billy got lit up as he almost met his own end there two and half years earlier on his first trip down range. Billy wasn’t the first American kid to come home in a box because of an ambush there and Jason knew he wouldn’t be the last.
Jason was always a tough kid. He was a notoriously vicious linebacker who made “All State” in high school then went on to the Army going through Ranger School, then Special Forces. He had one combat tour in Afghanistan under his belt and he was half way through another one in Iraq. Today he didn’t look so tough as the tears streamed down his face under his green beret, some actually falling on the rows of ribbons that decorated his uniform and told the world that at twenty-two years of age, he had seen blood by the bucket full and death by the car load. He tried for all he was worth to finish his tribute to his brother. Near the end of the tune, he faltered ever so slightly as he almost broke down. At that, two soldiers that were from Billy’s unit lost it and bowed their heads to weep. In his four years in the service Jason had seen so many people die; now it was his kid brother. Jim almost lost it too. He felt he had to keep it together for the sake of Billy’s Mom who hadn’t stopped crying since the two Chaplains, from the local National Guard unit knocked on their door in the middle of the night to inform them of Billy’s death. Jim did his duty but it was hard. His mind kept flashing to memories of Billy as a kid. The Christmases and birthdays kept coming back. He thought of how proud he was when Billy’s soccer team took the regionals. He remembered the scoldings for a variety of youthful trespasses and the thousands of tender moments that seem small at the time but came back to him larger then life now. He remembered pride mixed with trepidation as Billy followed his brother’s footsteps into the army. At first he told himself that he just didn’t understand but he understood all to well. Jim had been a soldier once himself as were his dad and uncles and cousins. It was expected in his family. You graduate high school, enter the service, get out and have a life. He understood alright, it was the way it had always been except that Billy didn’t make it to the “have a life” part. What Jim didn’t understand is what the hell was in Afghanistan that was worth dying for. He had heard the “party line” over and over again, about how we had to fight terrorists there so we wouldn’t have to fight them here. The trouble was that the more the government and the media pounded that message, the hollower it sounded. Added to that is the fact that you never seemed to hear about a senators or oil billionaires child being buried just the kids of working stiffs and today it was his boy. Jim was rapidly coming to the conclusion that it was all bullshit. He was starting to feel that his family had been had. His Dad and all the rest had fought and sometimes bled for the greater good of some rich bastards that never had to put their own butts on the line. Billy died and for what? Nothing that he could see.
The flag made its way down the line of soldier pallbearers to the hands of a young captain who never knew Billy. He walked over to Billy’s Mom and gave her the flag and whispered “the thanks of a grateful nation” to her as he handed her the memento. She was near blind and paralyzed with grief and took the flag absently from the captain’s hands. Jim wasn’t even sure if she knew where she was.
As the flag was passed to the grieving mother, troops on the other side of the world were mounting up in helicopters and Humvees. Weapons were being checked and prayers were being said, prayers in different languages. The Americans didn’t know if today was the day they would find the roadside bomb with their name on it or take a bullet in an ambush. Afghans and Iraqis wondered if this was the day they would get blown to bits in an air strike coming home from the market. They wondered if they were going to get shot in the crossfire between Jihadis and Coalition soldiers or maybe just get killed because someone was having a bad day. Fear and death were constant neighbors, lurking in their homes, cities and villages. The “War on Terror” didn’t seem to stop a lot of terror. It just seemed to exacerbate it.
Jason finished Taps and bowed his head and cried unashamedly. Green Berets be damned, this was his brother.
“Grateful nation my ass” Jim spat under his breath as he wiped his own tears away, “I want my son back”.

An Open Letter to the Richmond Police and Fire Unions

Regarding the recent disclosures about Mayor Gayle McLaughlin of Richmond:

How dare you? How dare you encourage the stigmatization of the mentally ill for political gain? How dare you insinuate that suffering from depression somehow makes one unfit to lead? Does the name Abraham Lincoln ring a bell? How dare you search out old wounds that are completely unrelated to the Mayors performance in office and try to rip them open after a difficult, painful and successful recovery. Mayor McLaughlins past challenges and her victory over them is cause for celebration and admiration, not an invented handicap to be used as a campaign weapon. Is it your intention to get to the Mayors office by crawling through the sewer? How can people that act with such bravery on the streets be so cowardly in smoke filled rooms?

The Mosque

Let me start by saying that nobody was more enraged and horrified on 9/11 then I was, but consider this...Wouldn't it be a sign of our strength if we allowed the Mosque to be built? Wouldn't it show the world that we are tough enough to fight our enemies without persecuting our own Muslim citizens? My son and my nephew have committed themselves to put there lives on the line in defence of our nation, just as my father, uncles and cousins did before them. Don't we owe it to them to show the same guts at home that they show overseas? Please know that I am sympathetic to the pain of those who lost loved ones in the attack and I grieve along with the rest of the country, that is why it is important that those deaths have meaning. If we are the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave, let us be brave enough to exercise our freedoms. That's what winning looks like.

Where is Beauty

Where is Beauty?
Sold in the market place
of a brutal culture
numbed by greed
Prostituted
Buried in the mindless drone
of televisions
of computers
of video games
It has been abandoned
In the desolate wasteland
of material desire
But it survives
In a childs hug for his grandfather
In the eyes of a dove
bathing herself
in a soft warm rain
In the churning surf
Of a Northern California beach
Just after a storm
In the damp floor of a redwood grove
So dark, so deep, so cool
In wisdom
In knowing
In us all
And for us all
In the love of creation
And in creations love
Beauty is here

Beauty In Being

I am blessed to lived on the northern end of a long, wide belt of parkland that stretches almost thirty miles from West Contra Costa County, California to Southern Alameda County. Although there is heavy urban development to the west and suburbs to the east, it is a beautiful, functioning wilderness that is truly a gift of God.

Most days, weather permitting, I walk our Greyhound, Honey, for about an hour over a ridge near our home. Last year, not to far into our walk, I was startled by a vulture taking flight from some bush near the trail. I walked over to where it been and saw the remains of a deer. I noticed that a variety of insects were already busily feeding on the putrefying flesh and I found the process to quite fascinating. Over the course of the next several weeks I would take a short time out from our walk, while Honey would busy herself romping and frolicking over hill and dale, and check the progress of the deer disposal operation that the local carrion creatures were performing. Little by little, the corpse disappeared. The flesh was soon gone then the hide started to disappear. The skeleton disintegrated until it was just an unrecognizable pile of bones. Eventually, the deer was gone completely. I marveled how something so ugly as death and the consumption of rotting flesh could have such an interesting and desirable result. Then it occurred to me: there is no ugliness in nature. Certainly there are things that are unsightly, disgusting and even nauseating, but there is no ugliness. I found a new affection for the much maligned vulture that I had previously believed to be one of the ugliest critters in creation. The vulture, a symbol of death in our culture, frequenter of haunted houses and other scary places, does not cause death but merely cleans up after it. Francis of Assisi might have called him "Brother Vulture" after being startled by his abrupt departure from breakfast that morning. That is the beauty and lesson of Saint Francis, all creatures have a part in creation and all are beautiful in their own way.

The biblical book of Matthew (25:40) quotes Jesus as saying:

"whatever you did for the least brothers of mine, you did for me"

Consider, if you will, the next time you are walking on a city street and you see a homeless person muttering to himself or rummaging through dumpster, or perhaps when you consider the problem of undocumented immigrants or paroled felons. As in the species of nature, there are no disposable people. To torment the afflicted or to oppress the poor or to deny basic health and dignity to other human beings is a crime against creation.

Now I am not suggesting that we all go out and find a homeless person and put him in the spare bedroom, or throw the borders open to unregulated movement or allow murderers and rapists to leave prison and roam the streets freely. What I am suggesting is to approach social problems with the love of families and not the wrath of avengers. Instead of getting hung up on the surface, look more deeply into the potential. Strive to find beauty in what seems to be ugly, not simply destroy for the sake of convenience. Respect the dangers but appreciate the beauty. Life is sacred, this is true throughout creation, animal, vegetable and human. Let us be circumspect when we take life be it for food, or the common good or whatever reason and let us not do so lightly. Let us look at those less fortunate then us with loving eyes and contemplate how we may help instead of how to get them out of our sight because they upset us. Let us reorder our priorities and make the focus of our journey one devoted to love, life and community as opposed to material profit. Just pick up a news paper and as you contemplate the events of the day ask yourselves: As a people are we prosperous? Are we fulfilled? Are we peaceful? Are we happy? What does our future look like? If we don't like what we see, how can we change it?

When considering our neighbors we would be well advised to remember Brother Vulture. Ugly at first appearance but valuable in his presence. Remember that what we do to the least of our brethren we do to creation. That which we do to creation, we do to ourselves.

Old Time Religion

I recently watched an episode of "The American Experience" entitled "Surviving The Dust Bowl". ( yeh Netflix!)

In the early 1930s, the southern Midwest suffered a severe drought that lasted more then half a decade. The soil in the Texas Panhandle, Oklahoma and Colorado, as well as other places, simply turned to dust and blew away. Great black billowing clouds of this windblown dust covered entire communities choking the life out of the land. Death from respiratory ailments was widespread and virtually all the crops were destroyed. Hundreds of thousands of people watched their livelihoods simply blow away.

The narrator of the program quoted a passage from the bible that was on the lips of many of the dust bowls victims.:

"For rain, the Lord will give your land powdery dust, which will come until you are destroyed". Deuteronomy 28:24

If I were a God fearing farmer in the Texas Panhandle at that time, I would probably freak out too if I thought about that one for a while, but the fact of the matter is that the Dust Bowl disaster was not the act of a wrathful God for sins committed by farmers. It was a purely man made catastrophe.

At the beginning of the Twentieth Century, the Southern Plains were a huge undeveloped open space, unmolested by the plow but the country was growing and with it the demand for agricultural products. The Southern plains were surveyed with greedy eyes and soon, the developers stepped in. Land was sold and farms. established. Business men from urban areas. often referred to as "suitcase farmers", pumped millions into the region speculating on the harvests. A lot of money was made by all concerned and soon almost the entire area had been cultivated. World War One accelerated the demand and nobody ever believed that the bounty would end. Then nature took a hand.

The Southern Plains are a semi-arid region whose weather goes in cycles. This gold rush of development occurred in a wet cycle, a time of plentiful rain. Unfortunately, that was to end. In 1930, the rain stopped, and would not start again for six years, longer in some places. The crops withered and died and there was nothing left to anchor the soil. The naturally occurring high winds of the area picked up the fine powdery dust and launched it into the atmosphere. Repeated dust storms occurred including one that darkened much of the eastern half of the country to include Chicago and even Washington D.C.

By the time the rains fell again, the destruction was total. Approximately a quarter of the effected area's population packed up and moved west. Many found themselves in squalid labor camps in California's Great Central Valley, harvesting crops for absentee owners under serf-like conditions. Those that remained in the Dust Bowl set out on a long and exhausting journey of recovery that lasted decades.

The Bible reference got me to thinking about the concept of "Free Will". The creator, for better or worse, put human destiny into the hands of human kind. As a species we are free to choose our own path. With freedom comes responsibility. Responsibility by definition is understanding and accepting the consequences of our actions.

Deuteronomy lays out punishments for they that do not "heed the word of the Lord". As a Christian, I do not believe that the Lord is still in the "Smiting" business. I don't think that he sits up in heaven and launches thunder bolts or other nastiness's at those who anger him. That was the reason for Christs death on the cross. His death absolved all of us, but I do believe we are capable of punishing ourselves for our own sins, particularly the sin of greed. To rape creation in the interest of profits, beyond what is needed for survival, is a sin against creation, it follows that a sin against creation is a sin against the creator. The Creator, in his benevolence, has left it entirely in our hands. We commit the sin, and we create the punishment: over use (the sin of greed)=environmental collapse (punishment)

In non christian terms, it should be clear that the environment is a giant house of cards. Every species, every ecosystem, each aspect of the Earth represents a card. Each card draws support from the cards around it and in turns returns that support. It is possible to remove a card and maintain the integrity of the structure. You can remove a second and a third and the house will probably remain standing but in so doing, each card shoulders more and more of the burden. Sooner or later, with enough cards removed, the structure will collapse. The same occurs if you radically change or shake up a given ecosystem. If you continually overwork the land, trying to squeezed every last dollar out of it, at some point the consequences of greed will manifest themselves in the shape of environmental calamity, like the Dust Bowl. The land is our friend as long as we use it wisely. When we misuse it, it becomes our enemy. Action and reaction.

The Dust Bowl has many lessons for us today. We need to seriously examine the consequences of our lifestyles and our actions in maintaining that lifestyle. We should be aware of the long term effects of the increasingly radical steps being taken to keep pace with our energy consumption, for instance. Things like tar sands petroleum extraction in Central Canada where huge tracks of land are literally boiled in order to get oil out of rock, poisoning ground water and destroying pristine forests in the process.

We should be aware of Mountain Top Removal mining for coal in Appalachia where entire mountain peaks are literally bulldozed into the valleys below destroying vegetation, fish, habitats and everything else in the path of the cascading rubble from up the hill. Whole streams with there surrounding ecosystems are buried alive. These ecosystems have been the center of the spiritual and economic life of the region for centuries. On top of that, all this displaced soil remains unstable for some time. When the rains come, there is a very real danger of mudslides. In South America, we have already seen thousands killed by mountains made bare by overuse, answering the call of gravity during the rainy season, moving onto and burying whole villages. The freshly bulldozed soil and rock from mountain top removal presents the same sort of danger.

Of course the legislators from these areas are all for this type of development. This is entirely understandable. If you look at it from the dark side, the extractors are the ones with the money. A lot of campaign dollars flow in through them. If you look at it from the side of the angles, it means jobs and prosperity for these areas, but at what cost?

I think it is possible to generate jobs and prosperity and not kill the planet at the same time. There are green alternatives to excessive extraction as a source of wealth and energy. Unfortunately a lot of very rich people have vested interests in this extraction and it is in there best interests to see it proceed.

Overuse through greed exacts a heavy toll. Instead of dust clouds over Oklahoma, we may be seeing mudslides in Kentucky. Instead of respiratory problems in the Texas Panhandle, we may be seeing illness from poisoned streams and wells in West Virginia. Different times and different locations but the same dynamics of greed to disaster are in play. In all of these instances, the wages of sin is indeed death.