The Broadcast

Before a word is spoken, we've said volumes. 
(~ provoked by a recent conversation among younger folks)

We often assign great significance to the words we say and much less to everything else. Most of what we convey is nonverbal, though, as we broadcast a wealth of information about ourselves. There are facial expressions and gestures, tone and pace, posture and dress, focus and engagement; they all speak volumes straight from our soul, and we're perhaps unaware of how much we've revealed. 

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To flesh out the context a bit, remember the last angry person you saw, or the person who is frustrated with your not meeting their expectations. Or picture the one who flaunts their wealth and privilege.

The cover of a book written
for teen audiences

Think of the one who exaggerates their appearance, doing their best to look physically appealing or available.  None of those memories require us to review the words they spoke. Each expresses a measure of health or brokenness, virtue or its absence. We see and are aware of such traits independent of any verbal content.

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Little that we say is remembered by anyone.  That's painfully true, but the persona we broadcast is memorable to all; it's their take-away, their mental record.  While non-verbal communication is wonderfully imperfect and incomplete, it's still worth noting that we have indeed spoken volumes.  We've spoken by the opportunity we took to listen, by the patience we invested in hearing, the grace we offered via expression, the kindness we gave by gentle tone and unhurried pace, the encouragement we offered by interest and inquiry, ... and the respect we demonstrated by appropriate attire. The way we dress; that's the subject that popped up in a recent conversation.

At the Rio Olympics - Italy vs. Egypt

 - can you spot any cultural difference?

Young folks today discussing 'modesty' in their manner of dress ... are they talking about the same thing the early church was dealing with? Perhaps, but probably not.  Biblical references were mostly addressing fancy excess while today we're dealing with overt sensuality.  Those are cultural as well as character questions that challenge us.

We all struggle with such issues, of course.  We want to live in a manner that doesn't trouble our conscience.  The often unasked question, what statement do we hope to make?

Before a word is spoken, we speak volumes; apart from what we say, we send our message. Modesty in how we dress is perhaps more helpfully understood as just a part of that larger broadcast.

There's a long list of virtues we're encouraged to understand and develop as part of our identity, our character, our 'broadcast' to the world. "Let your light so shine ...." 　 How do we get that one right?

The deep, dark ...

Among the things we know the least about -- the deep, dark ocean depths.  Important but missing pieces of our understanding will be found there, at least for scientists.

Deep ocean currents are simplistically understood, but we've never been there. Ocean currents circle the globe and deep segments take centuries to finish the trip.  They move more than just water - the energy transfer by ocean currents is greater than all the wind and storms and heat absorbed by the atmosphere.

Recent discussions about climate change have focused on atmospherics and greenhouse gas accumulations with associated temperature change, but ... the oceans absorb much more energy than the air does.


Around 90% of excess (over-balance) heat from recent decades is now stored in the ocean.  Around 60% of it settled in the upper ocean, the top 700 meters or so.  Another 30% resides much deeper.  "Though the atmosphere has been spared from the full extent of global warming for now, heat already stored in the ocean will eventually be released, committing Earth to additional warming in the future." (ref)

The problematic part is that ocean currents are mechanical constructs, they are energy-driven conveyer belts that happen to stabilize our climate.  Now, though, their patterns and rates will change as the currents adjust to additional (over-balance) energy.  Notice how currents carry the climate to northern Europe and to Central and North America, and from the western Pacific and Indian Ocean down to Antarctica.  Climate is beginning to reflect the newly energized conveyer belt and we'll have to adapt.  Crops will need to be altered eventually, energy needs will change, and the rules for life will adjust.

While the doom-cryers warn of drought and melting ice, we can expect the ocean scientists to bring us some missing pieces, perhaps soon.

The newly deployed Deep ARGO sensor suite can, now for the first time, reach the ocean floor.  A clever fleet of automated devices, they descend and measure along the way, drifting with the currents, then once a month, they surface and report their data.

We've known for some time that the deep ocean is changing, but the data on temperature and chemistry is sparse.  The information emerging, particularly from Deep Argo, will broaden our understanding of what is actually happening.

While there is much discussion about global warming's cause, the important reality is perhaps in front of us.  Heat energy added to our oceans now affects us.  Heat conveyed from the warmest zones will melt polar ice and will warm the glacial land regions.  Rain patterns will change.  Forests will migrate, and arable regions will morph.  There's no comprehensive model yet to tell us where the changes will be most significant, only that it is on the table to be addressed, and that our children and grandchildren will see the effects which, once begun, will persist for centuries..

While we live our high-speed, short-attention-span lives with wind and weather in view, the greatest energy accumulation will continue to be in the oceans, and the greatest effect on climate will be driven from there.  It won't happen overnight, but it will happen over decades, perhaps just a few.

We dump about 14 billion pounds of trash - most of it plastic - in the ocean every year. Industrial, agricultural, roadway and residential runoff have changed the ocean's chemistry.  About 1.2 million barrels of oil are spilled into the ocean each year from pipelines and transport vessels.  Such things along with the 90% of over-balance heat don't just disappear.  The balance of life, heat, and motion in the oceans has changed, and we will live with the effects for centuries.  I expect the oceans will be the finale to our inquiry.  Reasonable discussion regarding objective facts will help, of course.

The American Experiment - Unique and Improbable

Only half of the Mayflower’s passengers and crew survived

 to see their first New England spring.

Squanto taught the Pilgrims, weakened by malnutrition and

illness, how to cultivate corn, extract sap from maple trees,

catch fish in the rivers and avoid poisonous plants.  He

helped forge an alliance with the Wampanoag, a local

tribe, which would endure for more than 50 years

and tragically remains one of the sole examples

of harmony between European colonists and

 Native Americans.

In early America, we'd had enough of empires and oppression, and in the new land we saw a doorway to liberty.  We imagined a life far away from kings and their appointees where we could live and plant and harvest, where we could be a community that wasn't ruled by an elite who caged us and lived like leeches off our labor.  That was our hope, anyway.

Too, there were many who came to the new world who'd had enough of religious rule.  That hierarchy had merged with national governments and ruled with a heavy hand.  The brilliant light of God's grace had been pushed back behind ancient walls of stone, so His followers left as pilgrims, as refugees, fleeing to a new life in a new land.  That was our hope, too.

The American experiment - it was an attempt to merge it all into a new nation conceived in liberty, and dedicated to equality.  That's why we've fought so hard for so long, that this nation, under God, would be free, and that government would be of, by, and for the people.

For God and country.  We hoped those two would merge into a place of peace, justice, and a good life for us and our children.  The years have been filled with a tension, however, that continues unresolved.

"Augustine is suspicious of the kingdom of man because it is ultimately an endeavor by fallen humans to dominate and conquer one another, as Scripture shows we are wont to do. 

Yet it is difficult to miss the virtue in the American experiment – a father at last knowing the joy and dignity of self-employment, an immigrant settling into a safe neighborhood where her children attend a good school, a sharecropper’s grandson earning his graduate degree. I suspect I am not alone in the ability to rattle off such stories with ease. I suspect that many brothers and sisters in Christ also join me in finding much to admire in the courage and tenacity of General Washington’s citizen soldiers as they froze at Valley Forge or in Rosa Parks’s firm stand against segregation on a Montgomery bus, or in the text of the Declaration of Independence or other founding documents. 

But to a citizen, these are more than just stories. In the same way that the gospels manifest the values of the Kingdom of God to its citizens, these stories carry the values of an American citizen, of a patriot."   ~ Albert Gustafson

For good and for ill, every nation presents its citizens with a set of stories, but not every story is noble.  

Remembered less often, from Manifest Destiny and the Trail of Tears to Abolition and the Civil War, the ideology of racial dominance was as common in the pulpit as it was in Congress and the press.  We were repeatedly told our superiority was real.

Today, conservative and liberal agendas are similarly politicized, weaponized rather than resolved.  Much remains in our national thinking that falls far short of what is good and right.  

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We would not expect a ravenous Wall Street player to be thoughtfully focused on the needs of individuals at the bottom of the ladder. Similarly, we cannot expect nations focused on financial dominance, as most are today, to do anything but strive for economic advantage at every level, within and across borders and with little regard for collateral damage.   

It's perhaps delusional to expect a nation to be uncorrupted by power and wealth, and it is equally naive to expect ethical objectivity in the stories it offers.  If we find ourselves agreeing with the commercial news media, the political headline, the simplistic statements of politicians, chances are we're parroting the ideology rather than the principles.  That's the kingdom of mankind.

There is indeed a light that shines, a nobility of heart and life that rises far above such things. An example, we're told, is perhaps most visible in the openness and acceptance of little children.  There's more beyond that simple beginning, of course, but we should remember that a life shaped by wealth, where achievement is defined by having and winning, such a life lacks most if not all that's offered by our Father.  

None remain unaffected.  But our goal is visible, and though the way crosses hostile territory, it can be reached.


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Furious Freedom, there's more to the story.
Issues: family, equality, discrimination, favoritism, influence by wealth, corruption, abusive labor practices, fair trade, poverty, fair wages, opportunity, affordable and quality education, healthcare, crime and incarceration, refugees, immigrants, the finance industry, the GAP, propaganda and polarization, extractive economics, human ecological and environmental impact, materialism, corporate greed, globalization, the sanctity of life, ... more?

Values: truth, fairness, a place for all, freedom from harmful government and businesses, ethical clarity ... more?

Toppers

When you're at the top, you see yourself and others through the lens of personal normalcy. I'm normal, but those down there ... they're not.

Toppers commonly minimize the privilege and favor they've enjoyed; they presume they've earned and fully deserve their comfortable lives.

Toppers in western culture are likely to look down on the less privileged as less diligent, less willing to work.

An objective analysis reveals that those at the top are not more intelligent or hardworking than normal folks. They are privileged, though, and tend to be ethically ambiguous. (ref)(ref)

Toppers rarely understand how little they have in common with 90% of humanity, the normal folks.

Normal folks in the world today live quite simply on perhaps $3000 per person/year or less. Many live on less.  Most don't have savings for college or for old age. Or air conditioning.  In the U.S., 20% of our own children live in poverty and most are trapped there, just like their parents and grandparents were.

Toppers live on perhaps $25,000 per year per person or more. Or much more. They have more than they need ... and they need not pray, "give us this day, bread."  There has always been that problem with wealth. It can cloud principles, warp reality, and obscure the pathway we perhaps should follow.

Wealth makes life easier in some regards and harder in others.  It doesn't, by itself, make us happy.  (link: a multi-factor Pew Research Center report on life and happiness)

Regarding modern thinking about wealth and its place in the definition of a good life, “The character at the heart of 20th century economics presents a pitiful portrait of humanity ... But human nature is far richer than this.”  Professor Kate Raworth is a Senior Visiting Research Associate and lecturer at Oxford University's Environmental Change Institute.

National GDP is a measure, but of what?  Is it of national integrity, of justice, of a healthy nation?  We might need to change our thinking and the way we live. It may sound corny, but we are all better off when everyone is better off.  Imagine what that might look like, where everyone had at least enough; a healthy diet, a safe neighborhood, a good education, and opportunity to grow.

Perhaps the most difficult question we face ... am I perhaps like that rich young ruler/politician who walked away sad ... ?


What's next?
Most Powerful Good
Helping Without Hurting
Breaking Gridlock

Escape Plan

Reality is a furious assault against life and reason.  You need an escape plan.

Every day, everything grabs at you to draw you in, pushing you to keep up with the flow, and shouting in your face to force your concurrence.

Living unprotected in this world is deadly.  At the end of life, how much of what's good will we have missed?  Much of life can be spent on nothing, lost in confusion and alone.  Much of life, but perhaps not all.

If you want a life that's worth the effort, you have to understand the direction the masses are going.  You have to have an escape plan.  And a refuge.

Find God, and you'll find shelter and hope and help and strength.  (That's the objective, non-religious analysis without any biblical quotations.)  Life will kill you, it will suck everything good out of you and leave you to die if you don't escape.  If you can shelter underneath God's hand, that's the starting point to survival.

That's why we have churches.  Not every group that calls itself a church really qualifies, but the real ones are a refuge for us, especially when we've been beaten and bruised by the world's ways.  The number of wrong choices that living the world's way can bring is astronomical.  The worldly norm of misinformation and prejudice, selfishness and bias, twisted thinking and amorality, all empty like a sewer into our minds.  We have no escape, no refuge unless we make our way to God and the place he has set aside just for us, the gathering of those who follow the path God has laid out for them.  They will welcome us, gather us in as family, and help us along the way.  Some will be wiser than we are, they'll help us understand, and they'll teach us about the journey.  Some will be stronger than we are, and they'll teach us to grow and stand strong.  Some will be personally familiar with the valleys we've crossed, and they'll lead us by the hand out into the light.  We won't have to walk alone any more.  That's the real church.

Find God.  Take the shelter he offers.  That's the safe place, the rear echelon where combatants are cared for, equipped and fed, and it's the base camp from which they advance into life where everything they do matters.

That's the refuge He offers.  Don't stop until you find it, the real refuge.

Our Troublesome Foundation - the Declaration of Independence

The sole purpose of our 1776 declaration -- to cut our ties with Great Britain and take our place among the independent nations of the world. 

Thanks to its famous preamble, however, the document quickly came to mean much more.  All men are created equal, with unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness -- ideas of freedom and equality planted in the heart of the newborn nation.  

Was that our intent?  There's much that perhaps clouds the answer.

• The declaration was written by a slave owner and accepted by the 13 colonies, each of which allowed slavery.  
• It was written at a time when the transatlantic slave trade delivered 60,000 Africans per year to the new world.  
• We eventually fought an uncivil war among ourselves over the right to own slaves, and we killed 620,000 of us. 
• It was written when we were at war with native Americans who refused to cede their land.  By 1900, their population had been reduced by 80% or more.

None of this happened quickly.  Generation after generation, millions of men, women, and children faced cruelty and death.  They've not yet recovered.  Africa lost more than a century of population growth, and native Americans lost almost everything.  The cruelty and human suffering cannot be adequately described though there are thousands of individual accounts of the atrocities in historical records.

August update: White supremacists gather at the statue of Robert E. Lee, Charlottesville VA.

We've tried hard to live up to the declaration of equality,

to understand what it means to be the same, human,

but there's so much more that needs to change
in our collective understanding.  Today's
 polarization is similar to that at the
beginning of the civil war.  It is
 arguably ... identical.

Today, we treat that promise in the declaration as though it has always been the true heart of the nation, yet prejudice, discrimination, and inequality, all are intentionally maintained among us, and again we see supremacists rising up.

At the root of it all, we find the concept of self-supremacy or superiority, a corrupt heart that values self and some but not all.  

The root problem is broadly unacknowledged as public sentiment prefers to blame others rather than acknowledge any personal flaw.

Liberty and Equality
The principles are self-evident truths.
The task we face is difficult.
The solution is not in law but in living for something besides ourself; "love as I have loved you;" (just practical instruction.)  Such caring is expensive, and it changes things.

The founding fathers left us a difficult challenge that we've struggled with for more than two hundred years.

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How has it played out?

Racism is understood in every scientific venue ... race as biology is fiction; racism as a social construct is real and it rises exclusively from ignorance, selfishness, and fear.  Race isn't the root; it is self.

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Remembered ... 15 million men, women and children who were heartlessly torn from their homeland on the African continent.   They were forced to cross the Atlantic in slave ships; and they then lived and died under an inconceivably brutal system of slavery in the Americas.  UN Secretary-General's Remarks in General Assembly on the International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade

War -- America was born fighting Indians.  Because a significant number of Indians consistently rebuffed demands that they cede their lands and because Americans were determined to acquire them anyway, the United States constantly pursued war against Indians.  

In 1779 the United States declared war on the Iroquois to punish them for raids they had undertaken to roll back colonial settlement.  The object, in George Washington’s words, was “the total destruction and devastation of their settlements.”  When the Continental Army invaded, the Iroquois decided not to risk the loss of life that would result from defending their towns and instead evacuated them. This allowed U.S. troops to burn dwellings and crops, but as Chief Old Smoke later explained, “we lost our Country it is true, but this was to secure our Women & Children.”(Ref)  The number of Iroquois directly killed by the American army was around two hundred (including some women and children), though as many as a thousand died from disease and starvation in refugee camps. Out of a population of 9,000, the death toll from all causes was probably around 15 percent. Had the Iroquois decided to defend their towns, it would almost certainly have been higher.

All told, from the late 1770s through 1815, U.S. forces burned hundreds of Indian towns in New York, western Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Tennessee, western Virginia, the western Carolinas, Georgia, Alabama, and western Florida.  In most instances, Indians’ intelligence-gathering systems alerted them to impending attacks and so U.S. forces found towns emptied of most inhabitants. 

Sometimes, however, U.S. forces managed to achieve surprise. When they did, they demonstrated little restraint. In an attack on the Indian town of Ouiatenon on the Wabash River in Indiana in 1791, for example, a Kentucky militia fired on Indians in five canoes who were trying to escape. The official report stated that militiamen “destroyed all the savages with which five canoes were crowded,” without stating the sex or age of the Indians. Almost certainly, many were noncombatants. 

In 1782 a Pennsylvania militia surprised a group of about one hundred Christian Indians at Gnadenhütten in eastern Ohio.  In a chilling example of what sociologist Michael Mann has termed the “dark side of democracy,” the militiamen voted on whether or not to kill their captives.  When the majority vote was tallied, the militiamen proceeded to slaughter men, women, and children alike.(Ref)  The militia tied the Indians, stunned them with mallet blows to the head, and killed them by scalping.  In all, the militia murdered and scalped 28 men, 29 women, and 39 children.  Two Indian boys, one of whom had been scalped, survived to tell of the massacre.  

In 1810, Tecumseh reminded future President William Henry Harrison, "You recall the time when the Jesus Indians of the Delawares lived near the Americans, and had confidence in their promises of friendship, and thought they were secure, yet the Americans murdered all the men, women, and children, even as they prayed to Jesus?"

After 1815, the United States intensified its efforts to expand. To do so, it adopted a policy, formally institutionalized through the Indian Removal Act of 1830, moving all Indians from east of the Mississippi River to Indian territories.

It hasn't played out well for many, and today we continue to struggle with the issue.  All are indeed created equal.