A stray dog bit me. I demanded that all my neighbors’ dogs should have their teeth pulled.

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When my son was about 4 weeks old, safely asleep inside the house in his crib, I went out to sweep the carport, which was also the main opening into the back yard patio. A stray dog was standing there on the patio giving me a strange look, and I was in the breezeway, so I approached it with the broom still in my hand, gave it a shake and said, “Scat!” thinking that would be sufficient to send the mongrel packing. He bared his teeth and growled at me menacingly. In.my.own.home.yard with my baby mere feet away!!! 

I still cannot find words for what welled up in my new-mom heart at that moment as I flew at that creature with absolutely no regard for my own safety and with every intent to dispatch him to the Rainbow Bridge (my arse!) if necessary, but he saw my mama grizzly crazy eyes and beat feet. I went inside and trembled from the adrenaline pumping through my veins and was awestruck at the enormous emotions overtaking me. I would have killed that dog with my bare hands if I had to. I knew I could if I needed to. I’ve never gotten over the wonder of that realization.
 
The threat was real. He was a bad dog, on the hunt for trouble. I did the instinctive, if dangerous thing: I protected my child (even if he was in no real danger) and I met the force of that bad dog with superior force and not a little righteous indignation. I did it right then. I didn’t shelter in place and call the dog catcher. I didn’t call for a community meeting to demand that all my neighbors’ dogs have their teeth extracted. I acted with what was in my immediate power to do.
 
We have the power to defend our children… and the right … and the responsibility. It falls to us who are good to do something that’s hard and good, if not nice: Use armed force to defend our children in their provably “unsafe place” called school. Let children know that we have their back RIGHT NOW, when it counts. This has to happen before any more finger-pointing or policy talk or phone calls to the dog catcher. Bad dogs exist and hoping that nurture and official policy against dog-bites is the solution will not save one life.
 
Besides, truthfully telling kids there are bad guys in the world is the perfect way to teach them about heroes. Because we need heroes right now, not politicians.
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Statisticians: Modern Fortune Tellers

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I was quite young when I first came across the phrase, “Have you stopped beating your wife?” in the context of how to frame a question for a failing answer. That broad concept jarred my innocent assumptions: “Why would you want to do that?” And once having eyes opened to the manipulation of it, I began to see it everywhere. I’ve been observing this since high school.
 
This tactic used to be the realm of the salesman but I began to see it in journalists’ interviews, and then in the way everything in the media was artfully worded for a desired emotional impact. And yes, it was. It HAD to be, or else people wouldn’t buy it.
 
Today the impact of phrasing has drifted into “scientific polling” and we’ve disdained the poets for science that isn’t science within cultural surveys of all sorts. People sift, sort, and filter through the answers to find what they were planning on finding, by dint of the questions and how they were framed. “Why would they want to do that?” Indeed, why?
 
Soon, if not already, your workplace will have you take a “survey” to see how racist you are. It is not science, no matter which lauded institution of higher learning touts it. It is art, and an extremely complex and clever one. But its sophistication does not make it an accurate picture of your soul.
 
Manipulation is the devil’s playground, and it’s why we are reminded in the bible that he is the accuser of your soul, and you mustn’t give him that authority. Besides, it’s where all the money is made. There is HUGE money in this latest attempt to have vast numbers of people self-negate in order to feel better about the horrible mirror that such manipulations hold up for them to see. This is a false framing of the problem, a false burden of sin, and a false salvation for your soul. All dressed up as systemic compassion as an answer to the oppression that the accuser brings to the world.
 
For sure we are sinful and in need of salvation. We know our own soul. To trust a statistician to reveal it to you is to go to a gypsy to have your fortune told, to be promised that she will unlock the mystery of your self to you. It’s witchcraft.
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Epistemic Mirrors

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I’m sorry, but we can’t love eternal, evergreen Truth and “like” Salon. Or Fox News, HuffPo, NYT or NPR etc. Best to see oneself as an observer of such fare and not a consumer of it.

In fact, we can’t love Truth and trust ANY people who sell information– often cloaked as entertainment– purely for profit.(NPR hosts do it for love, sure, but they have to keep the BMW payments current.)

Playing with the Truth is the devil’s only real power; he can’t create a single thing. I don’t think he turns away from such an effective and long-proven weapon against the human soul. I think he makes it fun! with lists! and memes of outrageous! tragic! righteous! heroic! exclusive! and mostly, a/musing.

We naturally tend to heap our “likes” on the cultural information that reinforces our self-image– especially if it makes us feel morally fit. If we’re honest, it’s more real-time comforting to us than God’s divine assurances of our loveliness and acceptance in Christ’s atonement, because that was so five minutes ago.

Every “like,” “share,” and “comment”; every click of the mouse, is reinforcing to ourselves who we are. Every selfie is our attempt to convey who we are, and if we are honest, we know we are “selling it” to our best advantage. And we think folks who get paid to do such things are above “selling it” to us for their best advantage? Do you know who they are when they’re not selling ideas to you? Do you care?

Look, we don’t have movies because we want a calm and contented world-view, we want escape. And we have made-up “reality” shows because we want to experience otherness… CHANGE. We positively ache for newness every morning but we substitute it with mere news: who died, who offended, who sang, who is our new champion of the moment? It’s in our DNA. It’s a powerful and attractive force.

But we don’t seek the newness of God’s mercy. Nor the joy of His Truth, or the beauty of His creation– a force that wants to awaken us to CREATE instead of CONSUME. God’s in the creation business and your spirit, if you’re a Christian, is hungry for it. The enemy is in the distortion business and your human soul is satisfied with the empty calories of it. You’re soaking in it even now, in this stew-pot of likes and shares and selfies.

The layers of editors, salespeople, CEOs, managers, accountants and crony politicians behind everything we consume in the big publications, newscasts, and commercials is more than we can know– so we choose not to. We shut down our brains where we most need to employ them. But it’s our duty, if we love Truth above our cultural preferences and intellectual conceits, to be skeptical of the dietitians of our information consumption.

To be in the world and not of it, we must step away and observe it without consuming it. Let’s make sure we’re not existing in a hall of epistemic mirrors, enthralled to the selfie we find there.

The non-linear thinking bureaucrat [updated]

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I’ve now worked side-by-side with the passive rot in the worst agency in a poor southern state for two years. It’s been an eye-opening experience and not in many good ways. It’s not that everyone is lazy, incredibly. Most are working hard– in circles of mayhem. Let me explain.

Yesterday I learned that order, discipline, and authority are considered “whiteness” even when a black person uses such to supervise his team. No really! Anything that looks like  order is actually viewed as oppressive, privileged, and white. And the push back is LOUD and intractable. Accountability is aggression. Not everyone is like this, mostly just supervisors of any color. They are supervisors by dint of surviving the revolving door of attrition, not out of much merit. At the higher levels of the department’s budget and finance processes are people who cannot reason above a 1st grade level, but they will make you believe you are the idiot because they have a college degree of some sort. And they know how to navigate the sea of bureaucracy.

It’s a stormy sea. The turnover rate at the top is 50%, new execs run screaming within six months, nothing is written down, there is no flow chart, no org chart, no tracker for contracts, and zero follow through on anything. Not because they are lazy, they just can’t get their hands around the enormity of the chaos and paperwork.  You will be told repeatedly that things can’t happen because “there’s a process.”  I’ve learned that this translates to, “I need to see if I can figure out what it says,” or “I have no idea where it is,” or “I gave it to someone else to handle and they haven’t gotten back with me and Hell if I’m following up.”  This will go on for months until something breaks.

I told my boss that it was like living in the sci-fi short story of the valley of the blind. “I am beaten with sticks,” I complain. “The blind have me outnumbered and out maneuvered because they live in this blind chaos like it was their natural state of existence. Like fish who don’t know they’re wet. I stumble at every step, expecting the ground to be level, like an idiot.”

Addendum: I need to unpack it even more, because it’s not like I’m surrounded by BAD people, I’m surrounded by many good people who have been badly informed, betrayed by their schools and colleges, and yet they want to do good things for others– and are ultimately hampered by the need to get things organized so that nothing falls by the wayside. Over burdened, they lash out at the perceived fault: the need for order. It’s a non-linear emotional existence, such as a family would provide and a State entity simply cannot function that way. And those so entrenched in an emotions-based ethos will fall back to it in a trice, and will in turn try to impose order on those who will not cooperate with them. They get the same push back and are despised for even trying. It’s rather a hopeless approach to solving human needs.

The Fake Spin Cycle of Fake News

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boob-toobIt’s not really a “news” cycle nowadays, since very little of it is news. It’s more of an entertainment cycle. And today’s viral star is Fake News.

It doesn’t matter what news items flow into and through our daily glances, true or not, it grows stale and mouldy like yesterday’s manna. We don’t really remember the warehouse fire of X days ago, unless there is an emotional bond. We don’t really remember the horrific highway crash of last winter because we’ll blindly hug the bumper of the car in front of us this winter, unless or until it becomes personal.  So news, real or faked, doesn’t have the emotional hook into us. Our appetite for this sort of “newness” is voracious as we skim the facts and ask, “What else ya got?”  The advert media outlets oblige us 24/7.

But I’m perfectly skeptical of the “Fake News” news stories, the Buzzfeed survey results, the hand-wringing and fake-shaming going on. It’s a pantomime behind a screen. This is all about restoring the Alphabet Network’s –and thus the Elite’s– devastated credibility. The slight-of-hand trick is working, the surveys are pristine and respectable if you don’t question what the weighted factor is, and they are all vying for our trust so they may continue their merry mayhem of race-baiting, hand-wringing, and showing you how much you need them in order to live another day. They will save you, inform you, watch over you, tell you why that news story in that big city could be a problem in your podunk village and why it matters, and how diverse they are even though there’s not 1% mixture of non-white people in said podunk burg, and anything that happens anywhere could happen to us here! Oh noes!

Turn it off. All of it. It’s the only way to be sure you’re not giving eyes to the fakirs.

Everyone’s Cuba Curious

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I went to Cuba about 20 years ago, and stayed for a week.

My welcome to Cuba was a threat from an armed guard that they would send us back home. I almost believed, at that moment, it would be for the best, but I persisted in convincing him that someone important was waiting for us beyond the wall. Later we found out they were excited by the packs of crayons that the x-ray machines picked up in our luggage– school supplies for our guests– that looked too much like ammo to eyes not accustomed to seeing neat boxes of crayons. The medicines we brought with us were most likely the deal closer.

I went out into the small villages, I visited their clinics, spoke with their doctors, walked newly-paved streets with bright curbs that merely delineated one parcel of hovels from another. Once, I slept in the only bed in the house of my guests. I have no idea where they slept that night. I washed myself from a basin on a pile of bricks in a cement block pile enclosure. I met hundreds of Cubans, spoke with them, ate with them, sang for them, prayed with them.

It’s been around 20 years since I left, weeping bitterly that I had to, so hard had I fallen in love with Cuba. The land is so fertile that the fence posts bloom, but there was no food to eat. The despair is as thick as the wafting smoke from their marijuana, and drowned in their rum. There is nothing to do so people marry, divorce, bed-hop, play dominoes, watch television in black and white, smoke, argue, and tell jokes. They told the best jokes about Castro, all of which escape me since I had to translate for others the entire trip. It makes for such a blur of memories that only impressions or singular moments stand out: a glass of agua ardiente with the local clinic’s doctor who seemed hopeful for more visits such as ours, a stroll through a garden, a mentally disabled child in a battered metal crib in a dank concrete room– a “home” for such; singing hymns for a crowd of people crammed into a small house in La Havana, filling the porch, spilling out into the street and other porches; an old woman with tears in her eyes, grabbing my arm, thanking me, thanking God for me, for my small gift of my voice opening up the big Gift of God’s love for Cuba.

How my heart breaks for them, knowing what full-on freedom would do to these children– for they are, in effect, all children now– if that day ever comes. Six generations of poverty, malnutrition, stunted education and isolation are not overcome in a moment of release. To think for oneself is a privilege never allowed them. They might still need a father-dictator, unfortunately, just a better one than Castro. But that was twenty-odd years ago, in far-flung villages. Havana’s elites and streets are still a wild mixture of anger, hope, and caution. The gulags are not yet full.