Gulf Oil Spill

Equivalent to the Exxon Valdez disaster fifty times over, the oil pollution in the Gulf is causing damage, some of which is irreversible and some that will be decades in correcting.  Millions have lost their livelihood, their communities, and their water.  Those still in the area are often hopelessly lost in poverty; some are rising up in revolt.  It's been going on, year after year, the equivalent of the Exxon Valdez, every year for FIFTY years.

Wonder where?  Nigeria, the Niger Delta, and the Gulf of Guinea.

The company at fault is not BP.  It's Royal Dutch Shell and the corrupt local government.  Folks have been jailed, beaten, tortured, and some just murdered, for protesting the destruction of the region.  No longer fit for farming or fishing, polluted beyond usability, the land and surrounding waters are their home and life, stolen from them by greed and big oil.  The warm Delta waters are a key spawning ground for tuna and other important species in the Gulf of Guinea.  The region's pollution exacerbates an already dramatic decline in those fish populations.

So here in the U.S., the Deepwater Horizon oil spill has caused extraordinary damage and expense.

Folks in the Niger Delta sympathize with our Gulf residents and the oil spill problems, but they shrug and wonder why the world-wide media attention.  The same thing has been happening to them for fifty years and no one cares, no one helps, no outcry, no global interest, nothing. 

From the The Guardian, "We reached the edge of the oil spill near the Nigerian village of Otuegwe after a long hike through cassava plantations. Ahead of us lay swamp. We waded into the warm tropical water and began swimming, cameras and notebooks held above our heads. We could smell the oil long before we saw it – the stench of garage forecourts and rotting vegetation hanging thickly in the air."

"The farther we travelled, the more nauseous it became. Soon we were swimming in pools of light Nigerian crude, the best-quality oil in the world. One of the many hundreds of 40-year-old pipelines that crisscross the Niger delta had corroded and spewed oil for several months."  See the LINK here to The Guardian's article.

Down these mean streets a man must go ...

"Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid.  ...   He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor - by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it.  He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world. ...   If there were enough like him, the world would be a very safe place to live in, without becoming too dull to be worth living in."        Raymond Thornton Chandler (1888 – 1959)

You're missed, Dad.  Every day, especially the difficult ones.

Difficult times, conflicts of ethics, of clarity, of trying to understand and reach for the right goals; I remember well your grace and perseverance, your willingness to learn and change, but especially your tender heart toward others, all the way to the very end.  The world was a better place where you touched it.

A composer, conductor, a college professor with hundreds of students who loved him as an interim father; later a federal program administrator, a church elder ... and in his last few years, he taught piano lessons.  He had thirty or so students, children mostly.  After he passed away, an elementary school teacher told us how one of dad's students had said he wanted to be like Mr. Dickerson when he grew up.  The kid had minimal musical talent, but he knew he'd met a good man.   

Father's Day - 2010

Volatile Voltaire

Revered and sometimes ridiculed, he was a writer and philosopher who helped shape the world. He's commonly referred to as the father of the Enlightenment.

Voltaire wrote poetry and prose, history and philosophy, about civil rights and fair governance.  Too, he spoke out emphatically about Christianity, Judaism, and Islam as well.

Voltaire was a self-professed theist; his anti-church writings were focused on the practices of the church in his day and over the years. In his "The Philosophical Dictionary", he recounts the  bloody centuries of religious intolerance and the millions who died from it.  At the end of the writing, though, he declares to the spirit that has explained it all to him, "Well, if that is so, I take you for my only master."

Neale Donald Walsch is author of the
series Conversations with God.

Today's culture shares Voltaire's disdain for the narrow-mindedness that can rule a religion and the exclusivist mindset that typically persists there.  Public discussions equate such judgmental thinking with bigotry and suggest that bringing up a child in that context is abusive.  That same religious thought-path we tolerate in the west is carried a step further to violence and slaughter elsewhere in the world.  Both Voltaire's and today's observations are relevant; you'll note they are unrelated to the legitimacy of one's faith or an honest pursuit of knowing God.

How then shall people of faith go forward?
Curious what comes next?

Voltaire died today in 1778 after a long life in an extraordinarily corrupt world. The revolution in France came a decade later, perhaps precipitated to some degree by Voltaire's writings. The revolution spread across Europe and portions of Latin America.  I wonder what Voltaire would think now of how things have progressed; or more appropriately, how many things remain unchanged.

Memorial Day

There are no words to describe the sacrifice so many have made.

In our hearts, we know their offering was not lightly given.

Most went, not because they were told to, but for deeply personal reasons; perhaps because they chose to do their part, to do what needed to be done for the sake of others.

We who made it home remember all too clearly, all of it.

The loss of their presence among us is greater still, and we remember each one.

The memorial is fifty miles from here;

it's been there for thirty years.

Someday, I'll go.

Freedom of speech, of faith, of assembly, freedom of press, of tweet, of blog ...

Blog record, first half of 2015

I was surprised to find that this blog/journal might reach farther than just my friends.

Times have changed, issues have changed; now perhaps more than ever, we share ideas and concerns on a grand scale.  Our community is larger than it once was, and our perspective can be broadened by sharing our lives.  Such opportunity can be good in so many ways.

We are extraordinarily fortunate to share in such freedom.

Children Learn

Children learn from what they see, don't they. Today, they see perhaps the most divisive era yet in American history. They see anger and judgement, accusation and slander, and vicious separation. They see nothing of nobility or virtue. Nothing at all anywhere in the public arena.

When, by rhetoric and example and media exposure, we teach our children to fear and hate their fellow man, when we teach them that he is a lesser human because of his origin or beliefs, when we teach that those who differ from us are a threat to our freedom or our job or family, then we sow the seeds of a lifetime's conflict.  They will see not through the eyes of consideration but of conquest and with a goal of competition and mastery. 

At the end of it all, we look at our brothers and sisters as aliens, those with whom we share a world, but not a life, those bound to us in common place, but not in common purpose. We learn to share just our common fear - our common desire to retreat from each other - a common impulse to meet disagreement with force. In all of this, there is neither virtue nor justification.  It's the heart of fear.

We've got to see that our own children's good future cannot be built on the misfortunes of others. We have to grasp that this short life can neither be ennobled nor enriched by class or conquest.

Learn.  Change.  Share the lessons learned with your children. What a load will be lifted from both generations.

It's perhaps the most difficult of tasks to see our own bent thinking, our unreasoned bias, our preferential filtering of information.  Impossible.  Until it's done, of course.  Then, at least, we can see clearly.

Personal note: we both grew up in Texas; it was the whole world to us.  It was the width and breadth of our understanding, and it never occurred to us that there was more.  Working outside the country shattered our worldview, our personal philosophy and theology, and required us to thoughtfully rebuild it all, for which we're thankful.  We needed it.   
Ro.12.2 Don't conform.  Instead, by the rebuilding of your mind, be changed so that by inquiry you may recognize the will of God along with all that is good and just and magnificent in this life.

And thanks, of course, to Nelson Mandela whose life and words were more noble than most, and to RFK who challenged us to think about such things.