It's Christmas Time, Once Again.

The Christmas holiday is here again, and we are once more bombarded by a seemingly infinite number of media messages exhorting us to buy, buy, buy. I will spare you the obvious comparisons of what the holiday has become to what it is supposed to be about – that’s been done elsewhere, in many ways, and sometimes quite well. Certainly, Christmas has changed, and there is always a rerun of “It’s A Wonderful Life” or “Miracle on 34^th Street” to remind us of that.

I remember when my now adult children were actually children, back when Christmas presents were the big deal. As a single father, living in near poverty, I nonetheless took a rare $1,000 Christmas bonus and spent it all on my kids. I bought the latest and greatest of whatever they had their hearts set on, as much as I could, without going into massive debt. The joy on their faces was worth whatever temporary relief I might have had from paying off an extra bill, or buying steak instead of hamburger. Besides, when things are tight, it’s important that kids feel like everything is okay, even when it’s not. Dishonest? Maybe... I called it ‘damage control.’ And it felt more like Christmas.

Now they are all adults, and Christmas has changed. We’ve done a ‘secret Santa’ single gift exchange for years, keeping costs down for all of us as our family expands with new spouses, grandchildren, etc. We’d draw a person’s name from the hat on Thanksgiving, and spend no more than $100 total on that person, whether it was on one single gift or five. It was fun, saved us money, and we all enjoyed sitting around and enjoying the joy and surprise of each person, in turn, opening their goodies. Smiles... laughter... a few tears, even. Felt more like Christmas.

Last year, we broke some new ground, thanks to my son’s wife, Julie. She suggested that we each donate the money we would have spent on someone’s ‘stuff’ and donate it to a charity that person would want to support. We all drew names, then contacted our person later to find out which causes they supported, and which organizations they favored for us to give to. We looked into the suggested charities, made our choice, and donated the money in that person’s name.

On Christmas day, we gathered as usual, but we had no packages in our hands... just a single envelope from each of us. We sat around after the meal, opened the envelopes, and each talked in turn about why we felt connected to the particular charity we had chosen, the values they cherished, and the importance of the love and compassion behind the worldly actions. This father was gifted with the sight of his adult children each expressing why they felt certain charities were important, and what inside of them connected to what that particular charity did. There were smiles... laughter... a few tears, even.

This year, we’re adopting a project of two of Julie’s friends, who are going to help rebuild infrastructure in a small village in Sri Lanka that been decimated by civil war... schools, health care facilities, houses. They will carry our small wad of collected funds to aid in the effort, and even though it’s just a drop in the bucket compared to what is needed, great and powerful oceans of change are composed of many tiny drops in many, many tiny buckets. We’ll sit around together after our Christmas meal and talk, and share. We’ll enjoy each other’s company, and feel joy that we have this bit of time together amidst the demanding rush of the material dross. We’ll enjoy the young grandchildren, eyes sparkling, full of happy noise, and feel the magical presence of life being renewed once again, unending, bringing the promise of better people, better choices, better outcomes than what we see today. We’ll feel hope, compassion, and love. And gratitude. Always gratitude. Feels more like Christmas all the time.

Man In The Mirror

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PivWY9wn5ps

Every once in a while, I remember to watch this old music video again... “Man In The Mirror,” by the gone but certainly not forgotten Michael Jackson. The song, by itself, is excellent – an emotional and articulate call to look at ourselves and make the changes within that we wish to see made manifest in the world. What makes the video so moving is the juxtaposition of historical images that capture so clearly the conflicting emotions we all struggle with... fear and anger, love and compassion, baseness and nobility. No one is immune from this human predicament; no one is above the fray, no matter how we try to remove ourselves. We all feel all these things, even if we do not express them, or even admit to ourselves that we do. The various levels of human consciousness, or, if you will, the various evolutionary pieces of our brain, dictate that these feelings will forever exist within us, in conflict.

So what do we do?

An answer, I believe, lies in the model of the human being put forth by an Indonesian spiritual leader, Muhammed Subuh Sumohadiwijojo, or “Bapak,” as far back as the 1930’s... he envisioned the human being as composed of Life Forces, starting with the Material, then Vegetable, then Animal, then what he called Ordinary Human and finally True Human. Without going into great detail, I’ve found this hierarchy, or ‘layering’ of forces to be instructive in looking at what part of me is making choices, or reacting to a given situation. Each choice or situation then teaches me about myself, slowly, over time, with my errors being as valuable as my successes.

Bapak had a great saying, which I have remembered for many years... “Are you sitting on the chair, or is the chair sitting on you?” In other words, who is in charge? Is it you, the True, or Noble Human Being, making choices, or is it something lesser – a lust for the material thing, a desire for too much pleasure and comfort, a desire to dominate, be right, or ‘win’ that is making the call? The True Human, I have come to see, (a little) makes choices from a place above these others, quietly, from a perspective unavailable to the other ‘lower’ forces.

This perspective cannot be taught, for the mind – a material thing, after all – cannot hold it. It is not a ‘learned behavior,’ in an educational sense of the word. There is no degree in it, nor is there a course of study available at any university to teach a person how to become a True Human Being. The school we are all enrolled in is this world, and unfortunately, most of us have become too entranced, too enamored with our distractions to hear the Teacher’s voice. We stop going to class. We forget our homework. We drop out. The Man In The Mirror’s image becomes blurred, out of focus... and sometimes, the mirror even breaks, leaving us truly shattered in every sense of the word.

I suspect we come back to this amazing and terrifying school, over and over, lifetime after lifetime, until we graduate, until we understand who we are and what we’ve been given. I am more conscious every day of the incredible gift of this life, and of the opportunity it affords me to ‘make that change’ that will make choices from a quieter, more Human place. I still see myself affected by all the forces – the chair sits on me still – but at least I can occasionally see when it does and laugh at my foolishness. Condemnation is pointless... forgiveness of self and others the homework for the day. The Teacher is so patient, loving us all, for we are only human... and then, just barely, sometimes.

Enough for now. Time to go to school.

The Paths of the Heart and Mind

The paths the heart and mind travel when left untended can be both strange and revealing. I was Googling a location, trying to find out where I’d be filming the next day. The map opens up to the entire United States, and there I see, tucked away carefully near the east coast, right where it’s always been, the state of Pennsylvania. I zoom in, find Williamsport, my father’s old hometown, and suddenly my need to find the filming location evaporates. I find the town, type in his old address, and find myself floating, as it were, over the home he lived in where he grew up so many years ago. I remove the street names to just see house and trees, and remember the shape of his house and the back yard with the giant pine tree (now gone) and it’s little garage.

Memories suddenly flow through me like water, a flood of images, sounds, smells, feelings... waking up at 4:00 AM to go fishing with my Dad, the time I stayed there with my grandma right after my week at Boy Scout Camp, the taste of salt on a fresh cantaloupe, fooling around with some neighbor kids for hours as a hot summer’s evening wandered to a close, the chirping of the crickets that grew like a symphony, the mustiness of the garage that held hundreds of my grandmother’s dusty antique collection, the solemn ticking and sonorous gong of the little clock on the mantle, the memory of scraping my elbow raw sliding down a ramp on my bike... My God, I realized... it was all still there, somewhere within. All of it.

I have thought of none of these things for many, many years, but clearly, they all lie complete but hidden, waiting to be called up by some mysterious mechanism, some fantastical device that stores every impression we gather during our time here on this orb. Nothing is lost, though much is consciously unrecalled through lack of use of the neural pathways. Doctors doing brain surgery discovered that the oldest of memories could be completely recalled by touching areas of the brain with a cryonic probe... not just details of what happened, but the sounds, the smells, the sensations. The human being, it seems, is a fairly unique, highly accurate recording device that is always on.

To what end? From an evolutionary point of view, how does this serve us as a species? It doesn’t. Not really. Oh sure, having a concept of ‘the past’ gives us an advantage that allows us to build on a series of successes or failures that over time culminate in what we call ‘civilization,’ but the results of this particular experiment aren’t in yet. The ability to store such precise sensory data isn’t necessary to create a civilization so much as abilities like refraining from killing each other off, creating and using tools, communicating effectively, working together for common purpose, etc. Remembering what the subway station smelled like at 59^th St. when I was 10 isn’t one of those critical pieces of information upon which hangs the future of our species. But it’s there, nonetheless, tucked away between the feeling of buying my first comic book and the salty taste of the 5 cent pretzels sold by the little vendor outside PS 152 in Brooklyn after the winter weather broke up and the spring crocus poked up in my front yard. Then there was the coal chute that...

The present calls. Like some time-traveling Superman, I swoop up from 1950’s Pennsylvania, leaving the pleasant valleys, trout streams, gentle, rounded hills smoky with mist in the early morning sunrise, and memories of another, more innocent time – and tap in the address of the film location. Time to go to work. An interesting experience, this. I’ll always remember it.

Two Little Words

I Am.

When you stop and think about it - I mean, truly give it serious contemplation - this is the most powerful, most profound, and most mystical of statements. It is the name that God (Allah, Jehovah, Yahweh) says is His name, when asked by Moses as to what He should be called. It is also the final definition of our Selves, when we look deeply into the dark well of our soul, seeking the answer to the awful questions of who we are, why do we exist, and what – if anything – does any of this mean.

I Am.

It is declarative. It is final. To fully possess the knowledge of ‘I Am’ is to be released from bondage of this world, to be enslaved no more by the mad, swirling maelstrom of the material. To know the Self - the pure, unsullied, clear-eyed, connected, radiant being that we all are – is to be unmoved by opinion, untainted by fear, unassailable in the strong citadel of your Being... immortal, quiet, and utterly at peace.

I Am.

Of course, I’m not there yet. I still like hearing that someone found pleasure and quality in my writing, or my acting. I am still subject to want and need, to worries, to lack of trust, to simple pain. I still feel loneliness when the cold winds blow at midnight, or in the small, hard, grey hours before the dawn, the bed empty except for a little white cat curled close up against the small of my back. I am, after all, only human, and am subject to the myriad indignities of physical existence.

What I’m beginning to understand, (apparently rather slowly,) is that it’s all right. My awareness seems sometimes like an old, wooden oxcart, torturously rumbling over an ancient, stone-filled road... the cart bounces and creaks, thudding heavily on the uneven pathway as it rolls ungracefully along. Often I must stop again and again to fix the rickety old wheel, but somehow I manage to keep going. I curse the cart, the road, the wheel, the journey itself. Stupid. Futile. Irritating.

Slowly, though, little by little, I find I’ve become used to the rocky road – the potholes I once chided have become familiar friends, the repairs a normal, routine task, and the travel itself filled with the joy of Being. Then I start to look at the countryside around me instead of fretting about the cart holding together, and, like a small child who’s eyes widen upon seeing their first spring leaf, am struck mute by it’s unabashed beauty, in both the individual and the whole. The trees, even though bare in winter, are vibrant and alive. The air, though cold and damp, is sweet and nourishing, bracing my lungs, clearing my mind. My fellow travelers have become teachers instead of irritants, each one magically placed before me to illuminate an as yet unlit corner of my being.

I do not need to be anything more than what I Am at this Very Moment, the Now... which is all there really ever is. The old injuries, betrayals, fears, and worries I lug in my cart like so much garbage can be jettisoned, and look! The wheel doesn’t shatter so easily any more, as it now bears the load for which it was made. The concerns about the journey itself – Will I ‘get there?’ What will happen? What will it be like? Am I ‘good enough?’ Will I be loved? – become foolish, as the inner peace of Being slowly becalms the inner waters once roiled by those angry, demanding, untutored servants, Heart and Mind.

There is time. There is journey. There is Love. The statement of our existence, like one small candle that lights the entire universe, shines it's undeniable truth. I Am.

And so, my friend, are You.

Tell Us What You Know, Mr. President

Sending more troops to Afghanistan can be justified from many points of view... bringing the war to a swifter end, bolstering an unstable government, bringing the battle to al Qaeda, going after bin Laden – but there’s a little voice inside that keeps nagging at the outside edges of my being, saying, “Is this trip really necessary? Is it truly important that the U.S. be there? Are we actually in that much danger?”

Clearly, our President thinks so, deciding to send an additional 30,000 troops to that sad, war-weary country, with the proviso that we leave in a couple of years... and we all know how meticulously deadlines are followed. However, Obama, unlike his odd little predecessor, is not a war-monger, nor does he appear to be one who is easily fooled or led.

Therefore, the question occurs... if our President truly believes that it is imperative we continue this seemingly endless conflict, at great cost of both our families and our treasure... what does he know that we don’t know that makes him believe so?

Raising this question is necessary because we’re being asked to send our loved ones to die in yet another country that clearly doesn’t want us there, for reasons that are becoming less and less clear. It’s necessary because, simply stated, war is extremely expensive, and we could well use that money at home. And finally, it’s necessary because war is failure – failure of wisdom, failure of patience, failure of awareness, failure of spirit. It should be the last resort, and never the first response, of any nation – and certainly of a nation that views itself as a great one, and while self-defense can be understandable as a justification for retaliation, it's been rather a long time since our actions in Afghanistan seemed remotely like self-defense.

Obama said, during his campaign, that his administration would be open and forthcoming, to contrast the hysterically paranoid tone of the previous one. I believed him, and I still do. Nevertheless, many of us - tens of millions of us - are uneasy continuing this war, and so the question needs to be asked, before anyone else’s son or daughter comes home in a box, before another billion is spent, before our belief in what we stand for is eroded any further... What do you know that we don’t, Mr. President? Tell us what you know.

Because I’m not convinced we need to do this.

Drive, He Said

The long, dark nightmare of the Bush Administration is over, and while we’re cleaning up the mess, I’d like to suggest that we allow ourselves a brief moment to sit back and ponder what lessons there are to take from what we’ve all just been through. We clearly are at a turning point in our nation’s history, and not just because we elected Mr. Obama as President. We’ve also seen some of our most cherished principles challenged, and our beliefs about ourselves confronted with some ugly realities. While ‘absolute’ statements may be premature, there are some important inferences we can draw from the years since the Reagan era, which will be useful to recognize when coping with the difficult times ahead.

Neo-Conservatism is dead. Like it’s old arch-nemesis, Communism, it needs to be quickly relegated to the trash heap of history. A mutant, non-viable offspring of classic Conservatism, it was a creature spawned on ideology rather than common sense. It’s underpinnings, a semi-religious fervor for Adam Smith’s ‘free market,’ was one of it greatest weaknesses. As the last few years have so well demonstrated, we can now see that no such creature truly exists. No market can ever stay free in the truest sense, because those who become successful in it immediately limit competition, raise barriers to entry, control the market through heavily-lobbied legislation, and over time become the well-entrenched oligarchies we see today in energy, finance, etc. This situation occurred in the late 1800’s with the Trusts, and it took – yes, the US Government to finally break them up, just like it took the US Government to bail our collective fannies out of this crisis. Without the regulations, oversight, and penalties necessary to control market forces, what rational person would assume that all of this would not happen again?

The myth of the ‘purity’ of the free market, so seductive to generations of reactive right-wingers, has been revealed to be a poor basis for a political philosophy, though not necessarily as an economic one. That distinction is critical. An economic system is just that – a system for handling our material needs... not a religion, not a philosophy, not anything other than a method for people to regulate the exchange of goods and services. Under certain conditions, the market is an excellent engine to drive production. However, under other conditions, it rewards cronyism, creates oligarchies, and denies basic subsistence to those not well equipped to operate within its confines. Though an excellent producer of wealth, it is, in social terms, a poor distributor, as anyone who’s observed the US healthcare system can attest.

Remember - any human system, capitalist, socialist, or otherwise - is inherently imperfect, subject to the full, rich palate of self-indulgent vagaries the human character possesses. As such, periodic adjustments to this factor or that policy are always necessary to ensure the health and stability of civil society. Neo-Conservatism, by eschewing political flexibility for a rigid, blinder-encumbered ideology, found itself unable to adapt to the needs of the society it purported to serve.

The metaphor of the automobile may prove an ironically apt one. Free market capitalism can be compared to a powerful engine that can crank out prodigious quantities of goods and services, but in and of itself has no steering mechanism. Up until recently, that function was accomplished by the abiding political philosophy of the times - a moderate, liberal, humanitarian overview that has prevailed since Franklin Roosevelt. Simply stated, it was that the price of living in a free society is that a portion of the resources generated by that system must go to assure that the needs of society as a whole are met, and that markets, in order to function for optimum stability, must be regulated. The counterbalance, or steering wheel, if you will, for the engine is this political philosophy as expressed by the will of society through its elected government. Every force needs an equal and opposing force to balance it, and whether one looks in physics or in society, the principle holds.

The popular emergence of Neo-Conservatism (as opposed to classic Conservatism, which was once a useful counterweight to the fiscal excesses of those wishing to be re-elected) in the 1980’s removed the steering wheel from the vehicle. Unaided by any moral guidance other than voracious greed, the automobile predictably wound up in a ditch, awaiting the government tow truck. This scenario is still playing itself out, and the full consequence of the unfettered markets of the last eight years has yet to be fully understood, much less repaired.

Nevertheless, even as rationality is slowly reinstated, it is of paramount importance that we take this historic opportunity, while the paucity of the free market as a political system stands fully exposed to public view, to reconfigure society in such a way that amoral market forces can never again be allowed to determine the welfare of our citizens, but rather be harnessed so that social stability is, and always will be, the order of the day. In other words, don’t toss the engine, but by understanding its nature and its proper role in society, it can be controlled in such a way that the benefits of it’s energy are enjoyed by all. By educating future generations to both the dangers of unregulated markets and the benefits of careful steering an able vehicle, we will have gone a long way towards completing the Driver’s Training course we apparently still need.

Do The Math

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will soon discover, if he hasn’t already, the corner into which he’s painted his country – for by brandishing the threat of a small handful of nuclear weapons in a world where the major players, especially the United States, already have tens of thousands, he has put his country on a mathematically untenable path, the long-term consequences of which far out-weigh the short-term political benefits.

North Korea, busily firing its little rockets into the sea, has done the same, though it is closer to its unintended consequences than Iran. Unless the saber rattling is mostly for domestic consumption, it’s hard to imagine a more foolish course for Kim Jong-Il to adopt than his current one. Public bluster is one thing, but execution of an implied threat is another. Should North Korea launch a nuclear strike on its southern neighbor, U.S. bases, or even Japan, it would leave itself open for a nuclear retaliation several hundred times as large, at the very least, one that it could not survive. Simply put, once a small, rogue state plays it’s nuclear card, the game is over. The world community would not condemn a nuclear response against such an act, and would, in fact, have a clear duty to defend itself in kind. Any country that defended itself in kind would feel no opprobrium after such retaliation. The Western world, now returning to rationality after a brief foray into political extremism, can once again be counted upon to not “go nuclear” first, but such restraint on retaliation would be removed should a small state use its few warheads in what could only be called a suicidal display of defiance.

A little simple math might be helpful. Current estimates put North Korea’s entire nuclear stockpile at 6-8 warheads. A single US Ohio Class submarine can currently carry 24 independently targeted missiles, each with five Multiple Independent Re-entry Vehicle (MIRV) warheads, each capable of striking a different target. Assuming only one such sub is stationed just off the coast of North Korea, should Kim Jong-Il launch a nuclear device, 110 North Korean targets would be obliterated within a scant few minutes. The logic of the math of this scenario is inescapable – the consequences of North Korea using its few nuclear weapons would assure it’s own destruction, utterly and completely. By joining the nuclear club, Kim Jong-Il has painted himself into a corner. He can’t possibly use the weapons he’s worked so secretly to create without assuring his own immediate destruction. With this perspective, the weapons’ value is not in its use, but in the threat of it’s use. If that threat is not credible, the weapon has no value, and in fact, becomes a liability. This is exactly the situation in North Korea today.

Similarly, Iran’s leadership now finds itself facing the same question. A single or even small multiple Iranian nuclear strike on Israel or US bases would signal that all restraints are off, all diplomacies suspended, and that nuclear consequences on the aggressor would be acceptable by the world community, as sad and unfortunate as that scenario would be. Though a larger country, Iran’s math would work out much the same. Ceasing to exist in a moment of madness and misdirection, the price Iran would pay for a few small strikes at an enemy, however devastating, would be too dear for any sane leader to contemplate. Yet, Ahmadinejad follows his current course.

This is obvious, to rational people, but it is clear that neither Kim Jong-Il nor President Ahmadinejad have much care for the consequences to their citizens, nor engage in a long-term understanding of the precarious nature of matters they’ve created for themselves. However well nuclear braggadocio may play on the domestic front, it has the opposite effect on the world stage. China, now a strong business partner with the West with a considerable investment in international stability, has nothing to lose and everything to gain by ridding itself of its troublesome “little brother,” though a certain amount of self-righteous public noise would have to be made. The Islamic world would also put on the face of bewailing the collapse of Iran, but with the exception of various highly vocal radical groups, most of the Middle East, including the Arab countries, would secretly be rubbing their hands with glee should Iran step off the precipice. Leaders of most countries, no matter what their ideologies, innately understand the value of civil stability, both for their own political futures, and that of the world community as a whole. Therefore, the isolation that rogue states bring upon themselves as a result of their actions results in an untenable political position, heady in the short term, but unsustainable over time.

Libya’s return to international cooperation and it’s accompanying benefits serve as an example when errant states correct their behavior. Though not yet a model citizen – Libya is still a transit and destination country for men and women from sub-Saharan Africa and Asia for purposes of forced labor and commercial sexual exploitation - it’s leader, Col. Muammar Qadhafi, has made great progress in normalizing relations with the west, having renounced terrorism in Dec. 2003, discontinued it’s WMD program and allowed international inspections. Economic sanctions have been lifted, business investment has increased, and the US and Libya have exchanged ambassadors in January of 2009, normalizing relations for the first time in years. The message here is simple – if Libya can do it, so can North Korea and Iran.

If these two states have indeed painted themselves into this corner, it is easy enough for them to get out - though at this point, it is easier for Iran than North Korea. The taste of crow is never enjoyable, but at least it’s a dish that everyone has tasted, including the U.S. In either case, the consequences of continuing down their current paths falls most heavily on them, not anyone else, and should these states make the error of nuclear engagement, their ‘allies’ would vanish in the mists, privately glad they’re gone. If these two countries do the math, sanity and peace might yet prevail.