If Ye Love Me

If Ye Love Me

Thomas Tallis

John 14:15

Integrity

Barack Hussein Obama has integrity. Willard Mitt Romney has none.

The word "integrity"comes from the word "integer" or "whole number."A whole number. Not a fraction. Not divided.

In order to have integrity, a person must have a quality of wholeness, of not being divided against himself. He cannot speak out of both sides of his mouth. He cannot compartmentalize his life and have separate truths for each compartment. He must be centered and speak from that center and speak as a whole man.

Mitt Romney is not an integer. He is not undivided. He has no wholeness. He has cut himself like a pie into so many pieces that the eye could not see them all, the ear cannot hear them all. He has taken every position on every issue, always depending on which he calculates will win him a vote. I wonder how many votes his lack of integrity has cost him. Enough? I can only hope.

NOTE: This was written BEFORE ROMNEY staged his FAKE  food collection for the sufferers of Hurricane Sandy. This done in Ohio, in a part of the state that was not affected, but which he needs to win. The rally was originally scheduled as a Victory Rally. Same time. Same place. New name. He sent his staff to buy $5000 of food to give to attendees to make it look like they were giving more to enhance the appearance of his event. Is anything about this man honest?

Who "they" really are

Colonel Wilkerson: My party is full of racists.

George McGovern

NOTE: Senator George McGovern passed away Sunday, October 21, 2012.

Former Senator George McGovern (D-SD), 90, has entered a hospice near his home in South Dakota and, in his daughter's words, is nearing the end of his life. This man is a national treasure who has never received the full respect that he deserved. He was a B-24 bomber pilot who flew combat missions over Nazi Germany and a true hero in World War II. He was a minister, a history and political science professor, and a Congressman before becoming the first director of President Kennedy's Food for Peace program. Sen. McGovern has remained active in the fight against world hunger all of his life. He served two terms in the House and three in the Senate but is perhaps most remembered for his unsuccessful bid to prevent President Richard Nixon's re-election in 1972, running on a platform of ending the war, cutting defense, and granting amnesty to draft evaders. The 1972 election took place after what would become the Watergate scandal had broken but before the populace had awakened to it and before Nixon had been disgraced. Nixon won in a landslide. I remember during the campaign I was separated from my husband, whom I loved almost more than life itself. He told me I could come home if I promised to vote for Nixon and not McGovern, that he would have no McGovern supporters in his house. As much as I loved him, I had to say no. I cried for weeks, but he never knew this. But my vote was not for sale. 

McGovern is primarily remembered for his activism against the Viet Nam War and his work to end it, with many people forgetting even his bravery and heroism in WWII, and, in our polarized society, with some still holding his anti-war stance against him. He co-sponsored the McGovern-Hatfield Amendment to defense appropriation bills in 1970 and '71, which, had it succeeded, would have ended the war by cutting off funds. He addressed the Senate and said the following:

"Every Senator in this chamber is partly responsible for sending 50,000 young Americans to an early grave. This chamber reeks of blood. Every Senator here is partly responsible for that human wreckage at Walter Reed and Bethesda Naval and all across our land—young men without legs, or arms, or genitals, or faces or hopes. There are not very many of these blasted and broken boys who think this war is a glorious adventure. Do not talk to them about bugging out, or national honor or courage. It does not take any courage at all for a congressman, or a senator, or a president to wrap himself in the flag and say we are staying in Vietnam, because it is not our blood that is being shed. But we are responsible for those young men and their lives and their hopes. And if we do not end this damnable war those young men will some day curse us for our pitiful willingness to let the Executive carry the burden that the Constitution places on us." Afterward, a fellow senator told McGovern that he was offended. "That is what I meant to do," McGovern replied. 

Send your positive energy, your thoughts, your prayers or daimoku to this remarkable man as he makes this transition. We are losing a giant.

    NOTE: Senator George Stanley McGovern died Sunday, October 21, 2012.

Following Einstein's Rules

My favorite lesson to be learned from Albert Einstein is number 5, "Make mistakes." I learned how important this step is to creativity and how liberating it is when I went to MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as a Visiting Scientist in the late 1980's. I remember my surprise in my first brainstorming session in a class in MIT's stellar Department of Linguistics. We were really brainstorming. People were shouting out the most ridiculous ideas, the dumbest suggestions, the most far-fetched possibilities with no inhibitions and without embarrassment. At first I was stunned. I couldn't believe my ears. But soon the ideas came faster and were better, more clever, and before too long we had a very good hypothesis for the solution to our problem. 

MIT, of course, ranks in the top 10 institutions of higher learning in the world. My regular school, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, ranks 42nd in the world. That's nothing to sneeze at. I'm talking the whole world. But at Carolina, we would have been embarrassed to offer the bad ideas that we had to go through in order to get to the good ideas in that class at MIT. We would has sat more quietly, holding back, waiting until we felt more sure of what we had to say. I was never in on a brainstorming session at UNC where any of the ideas were as bad as those at that first session at MIT or where such an elegant solution was reached in such a short amount of time. The reason? At MIT, the students were not afraid of making mistakes. They were not afraid of being wrong. They knew that you have to go through a lot of garbage before you find gold and they joyfully did so. 

I felt liberated. I had been set free. It was okay to think big, think wild, make mistakes, try things out, try things on. My whole approach to learning changed as a result of being in the environment at MIT. While I love Carolina and I learned a great deal there about linguistics and had wonderful professors, I learned my most important lesson at MIT. It's okay to be wrong. In fact, in linguistics, you want to make a claim about language that is strong enough that you might be wrong, that someone may know a language that disproves your claim. And you need to know that you have advanced knowledge by doing that, by discovering something about language that is NOT true. 

All of the linguists I admire do this type of research and publication. They make strong, explicit claims about the nature of language, just begging their audiences to come up with counter-examples. Those counter-examples may be re-analyzed and resolved or they may shoot their theories down. Either way, you have learned, and you have taught. 

Because of my experience in the brainstorming session in the class at MIT, I was able to be creative, to imagine a theory of Albanian verbs and their subjects and objects that far exceeded what I had planned to do in my dissertation prospectus. As a result, my dissertation was a thousand times better than it would have been, and MIT published it as the third in their series of Occasional Papers in Linguistics. I surprised my professors back in Chapel Hill when I mailed them their copies of my draft, pleasantly surprised them. My work was cited by many linguists coming after me. 

Hard work becomes fun when you follow Einstein's rules.

despair

i feel despair again. and complete utter aloneness. not loneliness. aloneness. i cannot sleep, but I am tired.

Stand Your Ground

Trayvon Martin

If you are stalking me with a gun, I will feel threatened. If I feel threatened, I have the right in 23 states to stand my ground and to use deadly force against you. When you realize I intend to use deadly force against you to protect myself, you will feel threatened, too. Will you then have the right to stand YOUR ground and use deadly force against me, your victim? And if you, the instigator, have a gun and I don't, you will win, and I, the victim, will end up dead. Will you go free on grounds of self-defense under the Stand Your Ground law? In other words, if you try to murder me and I fight back, will your act of murder suddenly become an act of self-defense? This is madness.

Could this be what happened to Trayvon Martin? The 17-year-old African American male was being stalked by a man with a gun. He must have felt threatened. Somehow there was a confrontation between the two, but we don't know if Zimmerman confronted the young man he found so strange and threatening or if Trayvon confronted his stalker. But the man had a gun and Trayvon had Skittles, so Trayvon ended up dead. Now the stalker, George Zimmerman, claims that he felt threatened because Trayvon confronted him. Even though Zimmerman was the aggressor, he can apparently claim innocence under the Stand Your Ground Law.

But if this is what happened, Trayvon was only exercising his rights under the Stand Your Ground Law. You might say he had a right to kill Zimmerman. But think about it. Since he had a right to kill Zimmerman, under that insane law Zimmerman has a right to kill him back. But Martin had a right to kill Zimmerman because Zimmerman was threatening Martin because Martin was threatening Zimmerman because Zimmerman was...Wait. This is circular reasoning. This is absurd. This is ridiculous.

It was better when nobody had the right to kill anybody.

This is nothing but incitement to vigilantism, creating a dog eat dog world. This law was brought to us in North Carolina, Florida, and 21 other states by ALEC and the NRA. Jeb Bush signed the bill into law in Florida with an NRA official standing by his side for the photo op.

Now the Right Wing Hate Machine is busy spinning away slandering the dead child. It's okay that Trayvon was murdered because his tweets on Twitter aren't up to snuff. It's okay that Zimmerman shot him dead because he was suspended from school for having an "empty marijuana bag." I heard he even wrote the letters "WTF" on his locker at school. That's certainly grounds for capital punishment with no jury and no judge and no attorney and no court and no constitution. What does any of this have to do with making it okay for Zimmerman to murder Martin? And why is Zimmerman a hero to some lost souls for killing Trayvon?

And none of these facts can tell us that Trayvon was the instigator because we have all heard the tapes. We know that Zimmerman hunted Martin down with his gun. What we don't know is whether he caught him and if he did, what ensued. But does it matter? Does it matter if Trayvon fought back? I think not. Surely not. It may have reached a point at which Zimmerman felt he had to kill or be killed, but wouldn't he have put himself in that position by stalking Martin with a gun? Didn't Trayvon have a right to STAND HIS GROUND?

There is no circumstance under which it is okay for an armed adult to shoot dead an unarmed child.

Speaking of the tapes, we hear the police tell Zimmerman to stop following Trayvon Martin, and we know he did not stop. We hear Zimmerman say what sounds like, "[Expletive] coon." But one of his friends is all over TV explaining that "this is the difference between a 'c' and a 'g.'" He says it's "GOON." And he says that's a term of endearment. Yeah right, you can tell from Zimmerman's tone of voice and stalking actions how endeared Trayvon was to him.

I spent years teaching high school in predominately black schools. After obtaining my Ph.D. in Linguistics I taught in the English Department at Howard University in Washington, D.C. I lived in a racially mixed neighborhood on Capital Hill in the SE section of Washington. I have heard countless stories told by the victims of profiling and harassment by police officers. My young African American male students told me of having been stopped for driving too nice a car or being in a nice neighborhood, even if it was the neighborhood where they actually lived. I loved my students and my heart was broken by the hardships I saw them endure for for driving while black, walking while black, breathing while black, being while black.

President Obama implicitly acknowledged this whole package when he stated the other day that if he had a son, the son would look like Trayvon. Meaning he would have to have had THE TALK with him. The talk about holding your tongue with police, no matter what they say, acting respectful, no matter what they do, making no sudden moves, just trying to stay alive in any encounter. And now it isn't just the police. It's Neighborhood Watch volunteers. It's anybody. It's everybody.

It's open season.

And of course President Obama was attacked by the meanest spirits of the Right Wing, including Presidential candidate Newt Gingrich. This was so obviously ugly and unfair that I won't even take it on. You know, even those of you who say you don't. You do. You know.

It is so clear to me that Zimmerman should be charged with murder. I am not saying he should be convicted. He has a right to a fair trial and to be proved guilty beyond reasonable doubt. But he should be sitting in jail right now. I hear there have been death threats against him. I can't say I'm sorry. I hope he never gets a good night's sleep the rest of his life.

A law that give me the right to kill you, which then gives you the right to kill me is insane. Maybe America has gone completely, not just partially, insane. As the play from the Sixties said, "Stop the world, I want to get off."

                                         Phil Ochs "Too Many Martyrs"