The Grieving that Lingers for Life

Memorial Day and Veterans Day are special times of grieving for me. It happens on many levels. First, I grieve the loss of good friends. Second, I grieve the burden borne by their families and loved ones–as well as countless others. It is these endless stirrings that led me years ago to write and produce a 2-hour drama as a tribute and a fundraiser. Preparation for that production led me to Washington, DC, for three days to take photographs on the National Mall, some of which I would use in production.

While I was there over that period, something unexpected happened. By that time, the trilogy of the Vietnam memorials (the Wall and the two bronze sculptures) was in place. It didn’t take long for a person with half an eye to see that something was different about the Vietnam memorials. They spoke of war with an entirely different vocabulary. The glory was gone. The classical allusions to imperial power of Greece and Rome were gone. There were no screaming eagles with bared talons, no chariots, no horses in full gallop with fire-breathing nostrils. Perhaps for the first time, the memorials created to give expression to the experience of Vietnam put a human face on war.

To prove to myself I wasn’t imagining things, I took the better part of a day getting to every other piece of bronze and marble sculpture I could get to on foot and by Metro, including Arlington. The only thing that comes remotely close (that I found) is the Iwo Jima bronze, but its focal point is more the flag than the figures themselves.

Going back to the Wall, then, and to the Women Veterans of Vietnam sculpture, cemented what I had come to see and the role I have played ever since in giving verbal expression to the human experience of war and its costs.

When we speak today of freedom and the human costs of war we are always walking in occupied territory where objectivity and subjectivity have been put into a blender along with the deepest human emotions. The going must be slow and careful.

As each year I seek to give voice on behalf of the Vietnam generation, and now the Iraq/Afghan generation, I find the reality of the human experience, not how we may have idealized it or politicized it, to be the genuine article.

I think of my boyhood friend Wesley who, with less than three weeks to go, gave his life to retrieve the body of a mortally wounded medic he likely did not even know. Wes died for a set of remains and thus became remains himself. His family could only take small comfort that Wes had been so unselfishly loyal to a fellow soldier and his unknown family back in the States, but they could never convince themselves that Wes’ sacrifice had been for the cause of freedom.

And my late friend Jack who had countless human lives on his hands from the ordnance fired from his Cobra had absolutely no way of differentiating “the enemy” from the elders and the children who might have been inside those grass-roofed houses that went up in flames. He struggled with how to think of himself as a moral human

being all his days. Talk of fighting for freedom could enflame him because there was such a chasm between the rhetoric of the time and what he saw and did.

It’s true, of course. Freedom is not free. The price is high, indeed. But for me, we essentially had that fight back in the American Revolution. And for me the Civil War was not primarily about state’s rights or slavery but over the definition of humanity and citizenship–and we didn’t come close to settling it with 600K lives lost. Since then, WWII included, I think America’s wars have been primarily about security.

And security from attack by another nation state or from terrorism by a homicidal ideology is very different from freedom as established by the Constitution and the laws of our nation. Security is maintained by vigilance always and by fighting occasionally when and where we must. But freedom, for me, is maintained only by the full exercise of citizenship by an educated and invovlved people who in their hearts and minds are willing to take the effort and pay the price of doing so. That’s not free either, and it certainly does not happen unless WE do it 24/7/365.

Karen Zacharias is right. The Congress is tasked with having the discussion and making a DECISION about where and when and how and what for to send men and women of the armed forces into harm’s way. But Congress are not our rulers. They are our servants. It comes back to us.

For me on Memorial Day, Independence Day, Veterans Day and other days, the mourning returns not only over the loss of life but more frequently over the loss of discussion and sense of the bigger picture of citizenship here. One of my spiritual mentors once admonished to “watch our language”. I think he’s right. When we use the term “freedom” in place of “security” it tends to close the door to discussion. To question then seems disloyal. When responsible discussion stops, freedom ceases. When our nation’s alliances and interventions in the world in the name of security or freedom are colored by narrow economic interests that control the debate, we become both less secure and less free. The military cannot and will not fix this. It’s not their job.

Only the locus of freedom, “we the people”, can fix this. We do this by using our eyes and our heads and our voices. As the most empowered people the world has ever seen, the opportunities we have are nearly limitless–unless we choose not to excercise them at all. Or unless we think it’s only the job of the military “over there somewhere”.

The British churchman Tarney once observed that “the church that ceases to think ceases to count.” Seems like it’s true for our nation--or any nation. We only get one chance to do that while we're on the sunshine side of one of these.

This has been my attempt to think out loud, not for my benefit but for the benefit of all.

May the next person now come along to help us all think better than me. Amen.

R.

When You Come to a Fork in the Road...

When you come to that fork in the road, take it!

The people of Egypt have come to that fork in the road. If only it were as simple as the the choice between these two very similar ones.

So much hangs in the balance. Nearly 40% of the people of Egypt cannot read and write. A vast number, however, are aware that life is different in some places in the world. They want things to be different where they live.

Moneyed interests will react to change with fear. Fear of losing what they have now. Fear of reduced wealth and power in the future.

Unless tamed by a humble and generous heart, such interests will be a powerful obstacle to overcome.

Corrupt elements such as the police and government bureaucrats will see change as a direct threat, not only to their income but perhaps to their very lives. They probably won't be out there saying "Yea and amen!" to the anti-government demonstrators unless it becomes the only way to save their own skins.

The now vast number of people without such power and wealth are out of patience. Food prices are outrunning them. The chance to keep up and better their lives is eluding them. They want education. They want elections. They want a job.

They want freedom. So they say. It's something we have but often can't be bothered to exercise or give thanks for.

Some know what they want. Others are just plain naive. Things are never all just one way. But changes are coming. The balance of power in the entire Middle East is in flux.

Israel is affected. Everybody is affected. There could be war, civil war, or stalemate. There are many forks in the road.

Here in the USA, we may find this new development in Egypt oddly remote from daily life and concern for our economy. But wait...! We're smack in the middle of it.

Our country had given vast amounts of military and economic aid to the government of Hosni Mubarak in order to help maintain this Arab nation that has a peace treaty with neighbor Israel. That stabilizing influence leaves our fingerprints all over a government that did not do much to trickle things down to the ordinary people. Human rights, freedom of speech and the press, freedom from torture--these things did not go forward under the three decades of President Mubarak's rule.

That's a problem for us.

I can still hear the voice of Judy Collins on a track of one of the vinyl LP records of her songs that I have from about 1969. It's the chorus of the theme song from the musical Marat/Sade. The full title of the story is something like "The Incarceration and Execution of Jean Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Prison at Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade." It's a story of the struggle of peasants and a few noble folk for basic human rights during the French Revolution, one such movement led by Jean Paul Marat who was executed:

We've got nothing, always had nothing.

Nothing but holes and millions of them.

Living in holes, dying in holes,

Holes in our bellies and holes in our souls...

Marat, we're poor, and the poor stay poor.
Marat, don't make us wait anymore.
We want our rights, and we don't care how.
We want a revolution......now!

Pray for the people of Egypt. Pray for the people of Israel. Pray for the people of Palestine.

Pray for peace, freedom, justice. Pray for hope. Pray for grace.

Roger

In Praise of Samuel I. Berek

It was a big old frame building along the Union Pacific tracks on East Factory Street in Fremont, Nebraska. That was before Fremont had the ZIP Code 68025.

The building was painted a dark forest green although a bit dilapidated. Just below the eaves in big white letters was painted "JAKE BEREK IRON AND METALS".

Sam was the son who had taken over the scrap metal business from his father Jacob who had died before I ever got to go there. The office was dingy and littered, but there was a coal burning stove that kept it toasty warm in cold weather.

And inside near the window to the street was a big old stuffed chair of a color that defied description. On the one armrest of that chair sat an old round woman with gray hair. Jake's widow. Sam's mother. She said little. And when she spoke, it was with a heavy foreign accent.

Sam and his mother were Jews. My family, Lutheran to their DNA, had inherited much of Luther's animosity toward Jews. I won't attempt to describe it here. It wasn't overt, but I could sense it in my Father's speech and manner. That's the subject for another time.

And in our vernacular, we never called the Berek business a scrap metal business. The term "recycling" hadn't been invented yet. No, the Bereks ran the "junk yard". The scrap metal we sold them, old iron from obsolete farm machines, the guts of old cars scrapped out for the running gears to make farm wagons, old radiators and plumbing, water tanks, etc., that was all junk to us.

I liked going there and unloading the junk from the Ford pickup. We'd first pull onto the scale to get weighed, then unload. It was such fun to toss everything off and hear the clang as it landed on the pile with other people's junk. Then we'd get weighed again and go into the office to get paid. The Bereks always gave my brother Robert and me a candy bar, often a Baby Ruth bar. We liked that, of course, and said a shy "Thank you". Sam and his Mom always fawned over us as kids, almost more than relatives did.

I'm sure my Dad thought it was their way of making the stingy (in his eyes) prices for scrap metal more acceptable. Ingratiate the kids, chisel the parents. That's how everyone I knew regarded the modus operandi of Jews, be they jewelers, clothiers, furniture sellers, car dealers or junk dealers.

Sam always wore a top hat with a narrow rim. It was a way of keeping his head covered as a Jew that would not offend his entirely Christian customers had he worn a yarmulke. I didn't know that then. I didn't know about the Holocaust of Jews, the Showa, back then either.

World War II wasn't a decade behind us then, and I didn't know. Maybe it was because we were ethnic Germans. For that very reason, we should have known, even as little kids.

Sam was a community fixture in Fremont, and he did a bit of public speaking whenever he got the chance. He loved to talk to high school students and recognize them for academic achievement. Independence Day was one of his favorite days of the year. For decades, he organized the Fourth of July parade and fireworks display at the Moeller Field ballpark where the annual Fremont 4-H Fair was also held.

Sam loved to praise America for her freedoms. Sam saluted and respected the flag more fervently than anyone else I had ever met. To say that Sam was patriotic would be a gross understatement. For years I regarded Sam as a bit of an eccentric, somewhat of an extremist in his loyalty to America. He was in awe of this country but not the fanatic kind of flag waver I've since come to know in America.

DUH!

I wasn't astute enough or informed enough to observe whether Sam had a serial number tattooed onto his forearm. Or whether his mother did. But one was certainly tattooed onto Sam's heart. He knew his people's history, the horrors of what my German blood relatives had done to his people, what Stalin and his Russian Communists had done. Sam knew he lived in a different place, a promised land of sorts, where he and his family had freedom and could never be treated this way.

And he thanked God for the soil he lived on, free of persecution and protected by the Constitution of the United States of America and its First Amendment. He wasn't ever going to take that for granted, and he would do his best to prevent his fellow Americans from ever doing so as well.

I think Sam, God rest his soul, would be appalled at the timidity, flawed vision and fear that Americans seem to exude today. He would be aggrieved at our lack of understanding of the U.S. Constitution, the things we take for granted, the trust we have in weapons and lack of trust in the strength of our own freedoms. He would be mortified at our cynical attitude about voting, our indifference to human and civil rights.

And if he'd heard someone say "they hate our freedoms" as a justification for war, he would instantly have countered, "Perhaps they do hate our freedoms. But do we actually love them?"

And Sam would not stand for America's rush to judgment of the Islamic Center planned for New York City. Sam would see that hysteria as the thing long visited on his people now taking root here.

He would not stand for it. And he would wave the Stars and Stripes, read the Constitution aloud on street corners, and send fireworks into the night sky until America awoke.

Thank you, Sam. Thank God for you. I'm proud to have met you and heard you speak. Thanks you for all you did there in Fremont, Nebraska. I will never forget. Never. Nie wieder (never again).

Amen.

Roger

Living In The Past

OK. So I've borrowed the title from a Jethro Tull album.

All around I see signs of wishing for a return of the past.

A friend e-mailed me a collection of World War II posters. They weren't campaign posters for a political party. They weren't about an upcoming election, the promotion of a new product or to announce the

concert appearance by American Idol stars or the latest gaggle of ice skaters on tour.

It was a different America. The people in the pictures were all white. None were overweight. Ideal. If we were honest about the "freedom of speech poster", we wouldn't want to hang with 75% of the ideal people in the picture. We wouldn't want them in our cars or homes today. Why? Because their clothes, fingertips and breath reeked of cigarette smoke.

I remember family Christmas gatherings that rotated around the homes of aunts and uncles. I always hated it when it was our turn to host Dad's side of the family. My uncle Elmer smoked cigarettes, and he would do so right in our living room. It was expected that hosts had to accommodate the smoker, not the other way around. We had this metal ashtray on a stand that you could set alongside whatever chair Elmer was seated in. It had a bowl on top with rests for the smoldering white paper tube of dead plant leaves. Once the butt was finished, you could push a button to open a little trapdoor in the bottom of the bowl so that the butts and ashes would drop into a larger bowl below.

Outta sight, outta mind. Or not. My uncle Rudy liked to smoke a cigar after a meal. Whoa, baby! To a family not accustomed to smoke at all, those dog turds were like setting off poison gas canisters in your house.

Now we wonder what to do with our elders. It's a growing problem, especially since they don't look like so many of the youngsters that will someday be responsible for producing all the goods and services and revenue it takes to run this country. And many of these youngsters don't look so hot. Huge numbers are overweight, obese, have type II diabetes--in elementary school.

They don't come from families where brothers would lie about their ages in order to get into the armed forces when a world war was going on. They think "meals" consist of opening a package of something whenever the urge comes, walking to the convenience store, hitting the vending machine at school. They haven't actually sat down at a table where prayer preceded the munching, all electronic devices were extinguished and adults and youngsters who had been together all their lives engaged in the two most basic activities of survival besides breathing: taking nourishment together and renewing their familial bonds. Or at least their associations.

The lofty concept of freedom is not secured or nurtured by war. It cannot be. It can exist only in fully formed and functioning human beings. Don't get me wrong. Fully formed and functioning human beings can be of any race, creed or color. All it takes is, as my uncle Obert used to say, "some fire in the pants".

How's the battle going on that front today?

Roger

Uncle Sam Wants You

We often say that we owe our freedom to our soldiers. Some of our honored veterans of military service are in this picture of the recent Living History Day at Milwaukie, OR High School. Thanks, sisters and brothers!

We owe our freedom to our military?

That may be true of Gen. Washington's Continental Army which lost most battles but won the campaign by being an insurgency, not much of a military force. It may be true of WWII.

As a Cold War veteran during the Vietnam era, I think that our military--especially those in Iraq and Afghanistan today--contribute to our safety and security. That is, provided that the net result of these wars is not an overall increase of extremism and terrorism. The jury is still out on that.

But only we can keep ourselves free as a people. We do that by vigorously exercising the rights and responsibilities of citizenship: informing ourselves, educating ourselves, expressing ourselves, asking questions, seeking answers and solutions, and communicating regularly with our neighbors as well as our representatives and leaders in government. It also requires us to hold our sources of information every bit as accountable as we do our leaders and our own family members. There is no substitute for honesty. Anywhere.

That requires us to actually know something about what is going on. That requires us to invest some sweat equity to acquire actual information and to process that into some kind of knowledge. That requires us to do more than simply hold opinions which are plentiful and free-of-charge. How well are your fellow Americans doing that?

Take this little self-test as a starter. Then see how your friends and neighbors do.

Test your knowledge with 12 questions: http://pewresearch.org/politicalquiz/quiz/index.php

Still think we are a free people? Are terrorists the only ones who hate our freedoms? Do we deserve the service of the people in harm's way on our behalf today?

As Jesus said, "Watch and pray."

Pax,

Roger

Find The Cost of Freedom

"Find the cost of freedom, buried in the ground.
Mother earth will swallow you, lay your body down..."

The words above are from a Crosby, Stills and Nash song. Another day, another time. And before them, Janis Joplin had sung that "Freedom's just another word for nothin' left to lose..."

Freedom is a dangerous word. It's what your adolescent dreams of and what your teenager asserts by violating your rules, common sense, wisdom and domestic tranquility. They are certain that (their) best parents in the world are oppressors who need to be fought with guerilla tactics. Sometimes gorilla tactics.

Ever thought about how the word freedom gets used? Between '03 and '08, it was often used like a spear to impale an enemy we did not really know as well as our own citizens who wondered if we as a nation were doing the right thing. Or doing the right thing all wrong.

How free are you? How'd you get that way? When 90% of the people under the age of 35 have decided to tatoo themselves, did they freely make that choice? Wasn't it those who didn't tatoo who really expressed freedom, the freedom to not follow the crowd?

Independence Hall, Philadelphia, PA. July 4, 1776: white men met for several days and compiled their lists of grievances against King George III of England. They actually had little to say about their vision for a new country except to emphasize their "unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." They asserted that any legitimate government shoudl derive its authority from the consent of the governed.

For all their visionary wisdom, the Colonies' brightest and best could not have conceived that these rights should apply to people of color--any color but white. Oh, and how about the consent of the governed? Slaves were more than governed by the ruling authority. When had they given their consent? What were any such persons to make of the writers' "firm reliance on the Protection of Divine Providence?"

And how about the charge that King George had endeavored to incite "the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions?" Did they just think that--or did they know that. Wounded Knee hadn't happened yet. But a thousand little ones already had.

A grievance against King George was that "he has endeavored to prevent the population of these States" and that he wouldn't open more land to appropraiton for settlement. As if the land had ever been ol' George's to give away in the first place.

I guess the people already living here weren't people. And neither were the African slaves brought in to do the work of the tobacco, cotton, sugar and rum trade.

When it's good for the economy of the wealthy, all manner of ideas about humanity can be invented. And the people who did so in our Declaration of Independence weren't a bunch of pagans or atheist God-deniers. They were either deists or Christians. We use God to back up our perverted ideas about humanity all the time. But are they the truth?

Jesus said knowing the truth would make us free.

Were the representatives in congress in Philadelphia free? Were they already free in their minds, thus enabling them to declare themselves free on paper? The Continental Army did not yet exist. No formal battles had been fought. And when they were fought, they were usually not very favorable to the Continentals. Lord Cornwallis surrendered to an insurgency that had become more touble than it was worth to the Crown. But that was years away.

To be a part of that insurgency, people were willing to die and did so. Did their death make them free? Or were they already free, thus willing to die? When they were ultimately successful, most of the colonies had absolutely no idea what to do next or how to form and be a nation. It came close to ending very badly.

How many Americans did the Vietnam War free? And from what? By the time that conflict in SE Asia came about, the United States of America had become a big, ponderous political system, though still a relative lightweight by comparison to today. Such systems are like a monstrous machine with exposed chains, sprockets and gear trains. People get caught in them all the time. Does getting caught in the system make anyone thus caught up free? Whom does it free? Leaders from responsibility and accountability? Citizens from responsibility to learn, think and act? Have we actually made Janis Joplin's words come true?

What truth do you know today makes you free? And do you just think that truth, or do you know it? Has it been tested in the face of someone you regard as unhuman? Does it stand up to the humility test?

Humility is always a mandatory safeguard when national pride is on display. It's like the fire extinguishers and buckets of water I hope people have for their fireworks tonight. It's like a seat belt in your car. If you aren't wearing it, it's far too late to put it on when you really need it.

Have a humble American birthday today. Find a humble truth that frees you. And hang on for dear life.

Shalom,

Pastor Roger

King of the Jews?

Hi, PDX!

Roman Governor Pontius Pilate asked Jesus if he were king of the Jews ( Mt. 27:11). We have a problem with kings here in the U.S. We think we settled that in 1776 or 1789.

I have news. We want a king. Desperately. And we act as though we had one.

The area pastor has a food pantry at his church. He sees poor, hungry people all the time. And he said that government was all about big money and special interests. So far, I agree. But then he went on, essentially saying that he wouldn't be able to change a thing, that the only person he can have a political discussion with was a sibling in another state where he vacations once a year.
I heard capitulation, giving up without a fight. Now I sadly disagree.

We are in a war that threatens to bankrupt us and unravel balances of power that help prevent wars. Supposedly the war is to save us from enemies who "hate our freedoms" and supposedly have the power to take them away from us. Think about that premise a minute. Think about it all day. What "freedoms" would those be?

Recently I talked with a contemporary who grew up in Chicago during the Vietnam War. He quite calmly described his family as "white racists because that's what most (white) people were back then." His parents were as loyal as any Americans he knew. They pledged allegiance to the flag. They were as honest and as Republican as they could be. Christians, too. But they were torn down the middle. Their son was about to graduate college, and the draft awaited him.

They had a problem with the war and had very mixed feelings about having their son serve. They talked about Canada and told their son that if he went there, they would regularly visit him because they would not want him to come back across the border. They knew where that led.

The son of friends had gone to Canada. Then that young man's father died. He came back to the U.S. for the funeral. He was apprehended at the church and not even allowed to attend. He was sentenced to five years in prison. In prison the young draft dodger became known as a "pussy". The prison rapes began almost immediately. They continued for five years. I can't imagine what his anguished mother felt like, powerless to stop it. PTSD. Prison-trauma-stress-disorder.

The above was already well underway when my friend and his parents had their talk. They would sooner cut off their hands than have the same happen to their son.

"Now I have to stop you," I said. "I have a question. Maybe you know the answer, or maybe you don't care to say. But I must ask. In this whole process did your parents ever write one letter or make one phone call to representatives in Congress or to the President?"

None that he knew of. That speaks volumes. First class postage back then was only 6 cents, air mail 10 cents. Other than myself, I have yet to meet another person who wrote a single letter back then--either in support of continuing the Vietnam War or in support of a timely end. Not one. What precious freedoms were exercised here?

So I ask, what freedoms have enemies, terrorists included, ever taken away from us that we don't fall all over ourselves on a daily basis to surrender? Think about that a minute. Think about if for the rest of your life.

Could it be that we have completely deluded ourselves into thinking we live in a democracy when really we want to live in a kingdom? After all, if all the decisions are made by someone else we can freely complain and blame someone else for everything. And not do anything because we don't think we can.

Not the country I swore with an oath to put my life on the line to defend.

What kind of king do we want Jesus to be? And how does the "Jesus creed" of loving God and our neighbors as ourselves (thank you, Scot McKnight!) call us from inertness and blame to action and responsibility?

Ready for a little freedom exercise anyone? No enemy can take away from us what we have already surrendered. Without a fight.

Shalom,

Pastor Roger