As many of you know, I have supported Obama from the beginning and now I see that he has a real chance of winning. But he is up against a very well organized Clinton campaign. I urge you to volunteer, send money, do whatever it takes to help Obama win the Democratic Party nomination.
Here are my reasons for supporting Obama:
1. Because he is both African-American and Caucasian, and spent at least a few years in Indonesia, he represents a new face to the world. We are no longer a superpower, or the lone superpower. It is essential that we show the world that we are no longer governed by a narrow-minded minority who have very little knowledge of the real world and are only interested in world domination.
2. He is inspirational. The Clintons and much of the media have done everything to make this seem inconsequential, but inspiration is not a small matter. If you create cynicism in a democracy, which is what Rove and the Clintons do regularly by nasty campaigning, you create more than minor trouble. You undermine the essence of democracy, which is that people will believe in their ability to vote, elect and participate. Inspiring people as a leader means causing people to believe in themselves and their ability to create a movement independent of the candidate. Obama is not creating a “cult of personality,” as one pundit put it, but instead is creating a movement of persons, especially young persons, who are entering and revitalizing the political process.
3. Obama grasps how to lead and he has plenty of experience. I have never bought H. Clinton’s “experience. Being the spouse of a president is not at all the same as being president. My husband was VP of a major clothing company. Does that make me qualified to do that job? I don’t think so.
Mike Huckabee said about why people are voting for Obama instead of Clinton: "People don't want someone who can fix the carburetor. They want someone who can drive the car."
4. If Hillary Clinton is elected, we will never know what part Bill is playing in the presidency. This is dangerous. Gail Collins wrote an excellent column in the Times about the “chaos” of their relationship.
5. I attended a wedding last summer of one of Obama’s young staff persons and the daughter of an acquaintance. Lest you think I have a personal connection to the Obama campaign, you would be wrong. I was only there to help serve the Eucharist in this particular Episcopal church. Obama’s staff person is African-American, and the bride is Caucasian. I was moved beyond anything I had expected by these two persons and their families, especially his family. His father had raised him and his brothers by himself. His aunts were there, and one of them read the passages from Amos about justice flowing down like a mighty stream. I saw, in those moments, why it is more important to elect an African-American man than a woman. We have not healed from the years of segregation in this country, in every part of this country. We have the right candidate. Now is the time to begin.
6. If you want to know more, I urge you to read his books, but especially his first book, written before he was running for office: Dreams from My Father.
Wednesday, February 13, 2008
Saturday, February 9, 2008
Changing Light in Vintage Paperback
Changing Light is out in a gorgeous paperback from Vintage, on sale February 12. I'm working on a screenplay, my first, an adaptation of the novel. I now watch movies with the script in mind. Juno is partly such a good movie because the script is very tight, and the characters do not so much change, as reveal more and more of themselves as the film goes on. The Good German is a bad movie for many reasons but among them, the script is very bad. Words are placed in the characters mouths as if they were robotic history lessons. But I don't really know what I'm talking about.
Martin Luther King Day
Some thoughts on The Rev. Dr. MLK:
Isaiah: “I will give you as a light to the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.”
He was 5” 6 ½” tall. When he was 26, he weighed 166 pounds. That year, 1955, in early December, Martin Luther King Jr. gave the speech that turned out to be a sermon at the Holt Street Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, calling for a boycott of the Montgomery buses. It put him on the map. He had only twelve years and a few short months longer to live.
Toward the end of that speech, he hit the cadence that would make him a famous orator:
“And we are not wrong; we are not wrong in what we are doing. If we are wrong, the Supreme Court of this nation is wrong. If we are wrong, the Constitution of the United States is wrong. If we are wrong, God Almighty is wrong. If we are wrong, Jesus of Nazareth was merely a utopian dreamer that never came down to Earth. If we are wrong, justice is a lie, love has no meaning. And we are determined here in Montgomery to work and fight
until justice runs down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.”
Martin Luther King took the words of the prophet Amos and brought them up into the 20th century, into Montgomery Alabama in the year 1955, and made them new by making them the foundation of his actions, the underpinning of his moves. “Until justice runs down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream,” would be so familiar from his mouth that by the end of his life they may as well have been his words He gave those words breath by betting his life on them.
The news spread to the corners of the earth: a young American man who had gone to India to find out about Gandhism, read about how the sprit of the Mahatma was breaking out back home: a band of Negroes were refusing to ride segregated buses in a small American city. It was the beginning of the civil rights movement.
A little over a month later, on January 26, King was arrested in Montgomery for the first time. He was taken to jail, terrified. A crowd of his supporters surrounded the jail that night and King was released. That night, there were seven mass meetings in Montgomery, because so many people wanted to hear King speak. The pressures on King were enormous: his phone rang all day and all night. African American callers wanted to know about his arrest or to complain about how the strike was going. At least one white caller threatened his life.
King got up in the middle of the night and sat at the kitchen table, his face buried in his hands. He admitted to himself that he was afraid, that he had nothing left. He said out loud, without speaking the name of any God, “I’ve come to the point where I can’t face it alone.” And then he heard an inner voice telling him to do what he thought was right. He felt he said relief and a new kind of courage. It was the first transcendent moment of his life. It was, says his biographer, Taylor Branch, for King, a moment that confirmed his belief that the essence of religion was not “a grand metaphysical idea but something personal and grounded in experience.”
On that first evening at the Holt Street Church, and in the next years of his life, Martin Luther King preached nonviolence.
“I want to be known in Montgomery and throughout this nation that we are Christian people,” he said. “The only weapon we have in our hands this evening is the weapon of protest. ...There will be no crosses burned at any bus stop in Montgomery. There will be no white persons pulled from their homes and taken out on some distant road and murdered. There will be nobody among us who will stand up and defy the Constitution of this nation.”
Martin Luther King understood something that I think is the very essence of Christianity. An essence that many of us have lost or forgotten over the centuries when we, as a church, have collaborated with the powerful: at the heart of Christianity, at the heart of Jesus’s words and life, is a complete, sophisticated, unnerving and undeniable understanding of power from the point of view of those under its heel.
"To substitute violence for power can bring victory,” said Hannah Arendt, “ but the price is very high,”
The powerful make the same mistake over and over again: they believe that violence and the threat of violence are power. But they are not. Violence is only a poor substitute for power. The more violence you need, the less power you have.
If anyone understood this, it was Jesus. Recently, I watched Bernard Scott, a scholar of parables, interviewed in the Saving Jesus series, unpack the line in Matthew in which Jesus encourages his disciples to “Go the extra mile.” Scott says that Jesus was probably referring specifically to a Roman imperial command that if a Roman soldier was walking on the road carrying his gear, he could, at any time, conscript a local resident to carry it for him. But only for one mile. This was of course oppressive, infuriating and disruptive to the lives of the citizens of the Galilee. But, as Scott points out in Saving Jesus, Jesus said to his disciples, not only should you agree to carry the gear, you would insist on carrying it yet another mile. On the face of it, this is a very stupid idea. Why, when you are already oppressed by being forced to carry a heavy Roman shield for a mile, would you make it worse by adding another mile? But, here’s the really interesting part: when you offer to go that extra mile, you are suddenly in the driver’s seat. It is your decision to carry the gear another mile, your active choice. Likewise with giving “the shirt off your back.” Someone demands you give him your coat. Oh, certainly, you reply. And how about my shirt, too? Do you see the subtle shift in authority?
King and Rosa Parks and the other leaders of the civil rights movement, took a similar approach in Montgomery. If you won’t let us sit wherever we want to on a bus, then we’ll simply stop riding the bus. And this, not unexpectedly, will push the city bus system to the brink of bankruptcy. It’s a way of turning power upside down.
Until Bernard Scott pointed it out, I had not seen this. I had understood that non-violence had Biblical roots of course, but I hadn’t understood how specific were Jesus’s words. I thought giving the shirt off your back and going the extra mile were about being nice to people who hurt your feelings. I’d turned them into platitudes. But now I see that Jesus, who must have known quite a lot about oppression, had figured out a creative way to face down those who oppress and bully. Turn the tables, Jesus suggests, but oh so subtly. Take back the ground that has been ceded. Because the goal is not to win, but to free. The goal is to free yourself, and everyone else, too.
And always, always, stay on the side of nonviolence. Because the alternative is all too familiar to us: violence for violence, anger for anger, shackles for shackles, death for death. I once asked a private detective who found himself in very sketchy places why he didn’t carry a gun and he replied, “Because I would use it.”
To refuse to resort to violence is actually more dangerous to an oppressor than to violently react, because nonviolence changes the rules; nonviolence cuts at the very heart of what oppression rests on. We have before us thousands of examples: from Gandhi to the Danish resistance of the Nazis during WW II. To Nelson Mandela’s years in prison. To the life of Martin Luther King, Jr.
One of my favorite stories about creative nonviolence is about Rabbi Abraham Heschel who marched in Montgomery with Martin Luther King in 1965. Being Jewish in the South at that time, and wearing a full beard and yarmulke was almost as dangerous as being African American. Heschel arrived at the Montgomery airport, exhausted and hungry.
He asked a waitress for breakfast. The woman said snidely, “Well, I’ll be damned. My mother always told me there was a Santa Claus, and I didn’t believe her, until now.”
Would you have some water? the rabbi asked.
Yes.
Would you have a few eggs?
Yes.
Well, would you heat up the water and cook the eggs in it for me?
Why should I?
Because I have done you a favor, Heschel said.
What is that?
I’ve proved to you that there is a Santa Claus.
She broke into laughter.
Given many choices in this situation: anger, a snide retort, or backing down with seething resentment, Heschel chose another route. The essence of his gentle, creative and non-violent exchange is not only a subtle turn of the tables so that he had the authority but also an acknowledgement of that waitress’s fear in the face of his otherness. Yes, he said. I am like Santa Claus (at least to you), and she broke into laughter. And so non-violence frees not only you, but it may possibly free your oppressor. She made him the eggs.
And non violent resistance doesn’t mean being a wus, as you can see from Heschel’s example. And it doesn’t mean sitting around chanting “give peace a chance.” It demands that we be active, creative, innovative . Because someday us nice liberals are going to be faced with a real live dangerous dictator and we’d better be ready with more than a smile and a cupcake.
I am not suggesting here that we all take to the streets today, as King and his followers did in 1955. It may be the time for civil disobedience and it may not be. That is another story. What I am saying is that we have in Jesus’s words and in his way of living, a text for the nonviolent resistance of oppression. It’s time to reclaim it.
Martin Luther King Jr followed Jesus. He reclaimed non-violent resistance for us in the fifties and sixties, and added to its weight and dimension. I have a dream, he said. I have been to the mountaintop. As he lay dying on the balcony in Memphis, he said to Ben Branch, a musician, “Make sure you play Take My Hand.” So, take his hand, folks. Have a dream. Go to the mountaintop. Becuase, if he was wrong, then Jesus was a Utopian dreamer who never came down to earth. If he was wrong, justice is a lie, and love has no meaning.
.
Isaiah: “I will give you as a light to the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.”
He was 5” 6 ½” tall. When he was 26, he weighed 166 pounds. That year, 1955, in early December, Martin Luther King Jr. gave the speech that turned out to be a sermon at the Holt Street Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, calling for a boycott of the Montgomery buses. It put him on the map. He had only twelve years and a few short months longer to live.
Toward the end of that speech, he hit the cadence that would make him a famous orator:
“And we are not wrong; we are not wrong in what we are doing. If we are wrong, the Supreme Court of this nation is wrong. If we are wrong, the Constitution of the United States is wrong. If we are wrong, God Almighty is wrong. If we are wrong, Jesus of Nazareth was merely a utopian dreamer that never came down to Earth. If we are wrong, justice is a lie, love has no meaning. And we are determined here in Montgomery to work and fight
until justice runs down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.”
Martin Luther King took the words of the prophet Amos and brought them up into the 20th century, into Montgomery Alabama in the year 1955, and made them new by making them the foundation of his actions, the underpinning of his moves. “Until justice runs down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream,” would be so familiar from his mouth that by the end of his life they may as well have been his words He gave those words breath by betting his life on them.
The news spread to the corners of the earth: a young American man who had gone to India to find out about Gandhism, read about how the sprit of the Mahatma was breaking out back home: a band of Negroes were refusing to ride segregated buses in a small American city. It was the beginning of the civil rights movement.
A little over a month later, on January 26, King was arrested in Montgomery for the first time. He was taken to jail, terrified. A crowd of his supporters surrounded the jail that night and King was released. That night, there were seven mass meetings in Montgomery, because so many people wanted to hear King speak. The pressures on King were enormous: his phone rang all day and all night. African American callers wanted to know about his arrest or to complain about how the strike was going. At least one white caller threatened his life.
King got up in the middle of the night and sat at the kitchen table, his face buried in his hands. He admitted to himself that he was afraid, that he had nothing left. He said out loud, without speaking the name of any God, “I’ve come to the point where I can’t face it alone.” And then he heard an inner voice telling him to do what he thought was right. He felt he said relief and a new kind of courage. It was the first transcendent moment of his life. It was, says his biographer, Taylor Branch, for King, a moment that confirmed his belief that the essence of religion was not “a grand metaphysical idea but something personal and grounded in experience.”
On that first evening at the Holt Street Church, and in the next years of his life, Martin Luther King preached nonviolence.
“I want to be known in Montgomery and throughout this nation that we are Christian people,” he said. “The only weapon we have in our hands this evening is the weapon of protest. ...There will be no crosses burned at any bus stop in Montgomery. There will be no white persons pulled from their homes and taken out on some distant road and murdered. There will be nobody among us who will stand up and defy the Constitution of this nation.”
Martin Luther King understood something that I think is the very essence of Christianity. An essence that many of us have lost or forgotten over the centuries when we, as a church, have collaborated with the powerful: at the heart of Christianity, at the heart of Jesus’s words and life, is a complete, sophisticated, unnerving and undeniable understanding of power from the point of view of those under its heel.
"To substitute violence for power can bring victory,” said Hannah Arendt, “ but the price is very high,”
The powerful make the same mistake over and over again: they believe that violence and the threat of violence are power. But they are not. Violence is only a poor substitute for power. The more violence you need, the less power you have.
If anyone understood this, it was Jesus. Recently, I watched Bernard Scott, a scholar of parables, interviewed in the Saving Jesus series, unpack the line in Matthew in which Jesus encourages his disciples to “Go the extra mile.” Scott says that Jesus was probably referring specifically to a Roman imperial command that if a Roman soldier was walking on the road carrying his gear, he could, at any time, conscript a local resident to carry it for him. But only for one mile. This was of course oppressive, infuriating and disruptive to the lives of the citizens of the Galilee. But, as Scott points out in Saving Jesus, Jesus said to his disciples, not only should you agree to carry the gear, you would insist on carrying it yet another mile. On the face of it, this is a very stupid idea. Why, when you are already oppressed by being forced to carry a heavy Roman shield for a mile, would you make it worse by adding another mile? But, here’s the really interesting part: when you offer to go that extra mile, you are suddenly in the driver’s seat. It is your decision to carry the gear another mile, your active choice. Likewise with giving “the shirt off your back.” Someone demands you give him your coat. Oh, certainly, you reply. And how about my shirt, too? Do you see the subtle shift in authority?
King and Rosa Parks and the other leaders of the civil rights movement, took a similar approach in Montgomery. If you won’t let us sit wherever we want to on a bus, then we’ll simply stop riding the bus. And this, not unexpectedly, will push the city bus system to the brink of bankruptcy. It’s a way of turning power upside down.
Until Bernard Scott pointed it out, I had not seen this. I had understood that non-violence had Biblical roots of course, but I hadn’t understood how specific were Jesus’s words. I thought giving the shirt off your back and going the extra mile were about being nice to people who hurt your feelings. I’d turned them into platitudes. But now I see that Jesus, who must have known quite a lot about oppression, had figured out a creative way to face down those who oppress and bully. Turn the tables, Jesus suggests, but oh so subtly. Take back the ground that has been ceded. Because the goal is not to win, but to free. The goal is to free yourself, and everyone else, too.
And always, always, stay on the side of nonviolence. Because the alternative is all too familiar to us: violence for violence, anger for anger, shackles for shackles, death for death. I once asked a private detective who found himself in very sketchy places why he didn’t carry a gun and he replied, “Because I would use it.”
To refuse to resort to violence is actually more dangerous to an oppressor than to violently react, because nonviolence changes the rules; nonviolence cuts at the very heart of what oppression rests on. We have before us thousands of examples: from Gandhi to the Danish resistance of the Nazis during WW II. To Nelson Mandela’s years in prison. To the life of Martin Luther King, Jr.
One of my favorite stories about creative nonviolence is about Rabbi Abraham Heschel who marched in Montgomery with Martin Luther King in 1965. Being Jewish in the South at that time, and wearing a full beard and yarmulke was almost as dangerous as being African American. Heschel arrived at the Montgomery airport, exhausted and hungry.
He asked a waitress for breakfast. The woman said snidely, “Well, I’ll be damned. My mother always told me there was a Santa Claus, and I didn’t believe her, until now.”
Would you have some water? the rabbi asked.
Yes.
Would you have a few eggs?
Yes.
Well, would you heat up the water and cook the eggs in it for me?
Why should I?
Because I have done you a favor, Heschel said.
What is that?
I’ve proved to you that there is a Santa Claus.
She broke into laughter.
Given many choices in this situation: anger, a snide retort, or backing down with seething resentment, Heschel chose another route. The essence of his gentle, creative and non-violent exchange is not only a subtle turn of the tables so that he had the authority but also an acknowledgement of that waitress’s fear in the face of his otherness. Yes, he said. I am like Santa Claus (at least to you), and she broke into laughter. And so non-violence frees not only you, but it may possibly free your oppressor. She made him the eggs.
And non violent resistance doesn’t mean being a wus, as you can see from Heschel’s example. And it doesn’t mean sitting around chanting “give peace a chance.” It demands that we be active, creative, innovative . Because someday us nice liberals are going to be faced with a real live dangerous dictator and we’d better be ready with more than a smile and a cupcake.
I am not suggesting here that we all take to the streets today, as King and his followers did in 1955. It may be the time for civil disobedience and it may not be. That is another story. What I am saying is that we have in Jesus’s words and in his way of living, a text for the nonviolent resistance of oppression. It’s time to reclaim it.
Martin Luther King Jr followed Jesus. He reclaimed non-violent resistance for us in the fifties and sixties, and added to its weight and dimension. I have a dream, he said. I have been to the mountaintop. As he lay dying on the balcony in Memphis, he said to Ben Branch, a musician, “Make sure you play Take My Hand.” So, take his hand, folks. Have a dream. Go to the mountaintop. Becuase, if he was wrong, then Jesus was a Utopian dreamer who never came down to earth. If he was wrong, justice is a lie, and love has no meaning.
.
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