As the Citizen Among You

The alien who resides with you in your land shall be as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord. Leviticus 19:34

President Obama was at my daughter's workplace yesterday. She took these pictures herself, the one below just after he reached out to shake her hand. The President is out acting as Cheerleader-in-Chief attempting to rally our country out of the doldrums.

Lord knows, we do need a rally.

There is a place for hoping that our high-tech sector can help put more people here back to work. That would be a mega hope.

Mini hope needs exist all around us. Here are three examples from real life of the past three days:

Tom and I met for the first time at Tuesday evening’s Bible study. We always have soup and bread before we launch into Scripture and, for the past few weeks, Rob Bell’s wonderful little short films that I just can’t diminish by calling them DVD’s or videos. He sat at a table by himself in his black jacket with extra hardware, keys, bicycle lights and jeans about 6 inches too large and bunched at the waist. Wet spot on the seat of them… Since he was new to the group, I asked if I could join him with my bowl of noodles and bread. “Sure, no problem,” he said. He had lots to say, but it came out in a kind of mumbled stream which I did my best to decipher. As we ate, a little yellow bug ran out of his stocking cap across the table at me. I smashed it as promptly as I could without making a scene. Little yellow bugs are Tom’s closest companions. He was very attentive during Bible study, enjoyed Bell’s film. After a smoke on the patio, Tom went back out into his world and I to mine.

A woman I know named L. was going to Salem this past Monday to testify at the Legislature about the need to maintain services and housing for mentally ill folks. Knowing how L. gets trapped inside of sentences that she enters but can’t seem to exit, I can only wonder what message she could have brought them, though none more powerful than her own honest presence. Intelligence and chaos rule her life.

What were Tom and L. like when they were school age? What got them to where they are now? How much money are we saving by keeping Tom homeless, and how much would we “save” if we made L. that way?

An insurance company has told a mother of two students at my wife’s school that they will no longer pay for the meds these little kids need in order to be something other than nearly asleep with depression or else unable to sit still and be quiet for more than 5 seconds. An insurance company wants to “save” money by helping to manufacture replacements for Tom and L. when they are no longer with us.

Letter after letter to the paper complains that Portland is a homeless magnet because we are too kind and the police not aggressive enough even as incidents of suicide by cop and murder by arrest are up. Stories from my writer friend Karen Zacharias http://www.patheos.com/community/karenspearszacharias/ affirm what we must know if we open our eyes: that people living tough lives are all around us and within us. They are still in NYC even if people who visit Disneyfied Times Square no longer see them there. They are in rural Nebraska, small towns in the South and in Eastern Oregon, in this small city we call home.

And so is the kingdom of God.

Roger

2010: A Bigfoot Retrospective

There was a TV series in the late 50's or early 60's that I used to enjoy. It was called Wagon Train. As I think back, it had some intriguing storytelling, actual drama set in the 1800's during the great settling (or unsettling, depending on your native or immigrant status) of the Great Plains. It wasn't mile-a-minute dialog in an overstaffed, overequipped crime lab or DA's office. Ho-hum.

One episode of the show was titled "The Great Beast of the Cimarron." Apparently, a variant of the legend of Bigfoot was well established in middle America (now western Kansas and northern Oklahoma) before the white folks ever arrived in droves.

Up here in the Pacific Northwest, we live in Bigfoot Country, Sasquatch Land. There have been some pretty convincing photgraphs and footprints over the years. I've also worked alongside people who know for a fact that some of the photos were staged by field mechanics of a helicopter logging company based in southern Oregon. While the big Sikorsky's were out working, gorilla suits, masks and wigs were donned by the mechanics at their service trucks. Then, 35mm black-and-white pictures were shot to be intentionally fuzzy and blurred. At some point later, a picture would be sent anonymously to the editor of a small-town newspaper.

That was before the Internet, YouTube, and blogs like this.

I wish the past decade had gone very differently. I wish we could suddenly hear the alarm clock, wake up and find it all a bad dream. I wish we could say the footprint of the "zeroes" or the "aughts" had all just been a poorly designed doormat or a bogus print in the mud made by a cast rubber foot, a hoax.

And speaking of Cimarron country, I wish a prominent Oklahoma Senator's disbelief of global warming were the hoax that he claims human impact on the planet to be.

Ten years ago tonight we sat in our living room looking out at the snow in the back yard and watching black-and-white TV to see 2000 rung in around the world with no Y2K disasters. I was glad to leave the 90's behind. One of our cars had been stolen that year. Work that decade had been extraordinarily draining. As I parent, I felt like I had been beaten to death at times. A member of the family had experienced things I wish did not happen to anyone, anywhere, anytime.

But we both had jobs, health insurance and a lot of hope that things would be better as we exited a decade, a century and a millennium. [Now actually, the new millennium did not happen until January 1, 2001; and looking back on 9-11 it's obvious that we would make a better breaking point with 2001. But nobody else thinks or counts that way, so I'll concede.]

I wish I could say I had the same hope and optimism I had ten years ago. I'm aware of too much missed, too much wasted, too many bills coming due in the future that we refused to face in the ten years past. And if they honestly knew the scope of that, our kids might justly say to us, "Mom and Dad, older generations, we don't want more of what you had. We want different."

So do I. I'm ready to EXIT the failures of the past ten years. I'm ready to begin anew. Soberly, but anew. I hope you are, too.

Happy New Year!

Roger

Porno, Or No?

Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it. Proverbs 22:6

I don't know what to think.

About two years ago, my author friend Karen Zacharias (http://karenzach.com/) asked me to do some research. I needed to find area relatives of a helicopter pilot KIA in Vietnam in the mid-60's. A living buddy wanted to contact the family. I went to the public library to search several weeks' worth of newspapers on microfilm 'til I finally found the obituary listing all the surviving family members.

Those newspapers from the so-called "free love" 60's, a time regarded by many as a time of vanished morality... Well, to put it mildly, the newspapers were shocking in their modesty. The lingerie ads from the big department stores were first of all B&W, no color. Secondly, they were all stylized line drawings, not soft porn photos of women in seductive poses. Now the ads from Kohl's, JC Penney, even mundane stores like the local Fred Meyer, feature full color shots of women and their wear that is almost equivalent to Playboy features of not so long ago.

But that's almost nothing compared to what Ms. Vicky puts in her store windows at 3x life-size.
Tell me, what's a person to think? What are little kids to think, teen girls? Specifically, what are boys and young men to think? Are they to be completely inert to it? Do the ads and photos communicate: THIS is what I want you to see in me. This is ALL I want you so see in me.

Then, why manufacture the "garments" at all?

But don't women have the "right" to wear things that make them feel feminine, glamorous? Of course! But perhaps it's wise to keep in mind that things send messages about us. Sometimes the messages received might be very different from the ones we think or intend. They might even scare us if we knew.

I wonder if store windows like this do precisely that: send a message that might not be all that wholesome. Or safe to send. Is it porno, or no?

I think the secret's out.

You can't see it in the detail of the photo, but the whole display is for a line called "Cheeksters". Yeah, words all over the bottom of the underbritches. So why put 'em there if they won't be seen by anyone but the wearer before donning them? Hmmmm...?

But wait! There's hope! The whole add campaign is themed on the color pink and those life-saving, world-changing concepts of peace, hope and love. Kinda brings to mind Apostle Paul and 1 Corinthians 13:13: And now, faith, hope and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.

Maybe Ms. Vicky's keeping her faith a secret. One can always hope. It's going to take lots of love to shepherd our young through the world we have created for them. May they and their parents find peace. I hope. Amen.

Pax,

Roger