October 2005 Archives

There's a reasonable expectation that intelligence agencies should be possessed of a certain degree of intelligence. The graphic pictures of U.S. military personnel torturing prisoners in iraq and Guantanamo Bay outraged Americans and brought condemnation from all corners of the civilized world.

The stories that came out of Badgdad's Al Grahib prison gave a boost to the iraqi insurgency, proof of the brutality of the American invaders that could be paraded across the screens of Al Jazeera. We've never heard that any reliable intelligence information ever came from the degrading interrogation practices employed at Al Grahib, which shouldn't be a surprise: torture has never been a particularly effective intelligence-collection technique (many of the detainees at Al Grahib were taxi drivers at the wrong place at the wrong time when a military sweep came through). Torture's real purposes are usually much baser: revenge, humiliation and base cruelty.

Lesson to the White House: Unless you want to stroke the insurgency (and get more U.S. soldiers killed), lay off the torture.

Unfortunately we have a White House that doesn't learn lessons very well. The U.S. Senate voted 90-9 last week on a John McCain-sponsored amendment to ban the use of "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment" of detainees held by the United States government. President George W. Bush is now actively lobbying the Senate to add a loophole that would allow U.S. intelligence agency to continue torture.

Yes, that's right, the President of the United States ("Beacon of the Free World," "The Light of Democracy," etc.) is officially going on record as a supporter of "cruel, inhuman and degrading" treatment of prisoners. It's a sign of a certain kind of inhumanity, or at least insensitivity, that Bush even had the guts to approach the author of the anti-torture amendment asking for the CIA exemption, for McCain spent much of his Vietnam War service being tortured in a North Vietnamese prison.

What kind of intelligence is needed to know Bush's lobbying is yet another gift to the propaganda arm of iraqi insurgency? It looks like we'll be getting to that 2,000th solider soon.

We now know that while Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein didn't conspire together, they did have one thing in common: their power was funded by our dependence on their oil. But even as Saddam's show trial begins, televisions are watching America's new national security enemies: Katrina and Wilma. Al Qaida's 9/11 attacks and the Saddam Hussein's dictatorship were "powered by" oil industry fortunes and short-sighted global energy policies, the same policies now bringing us global warming and monster storms.

Before making landfall in Mexico's Yucatan and pounding Florida, Hurricane Wilma was declared the most powerful Atlantic hurricane in history. That we got to a W-name itself is cause for concern: the first tropical storm of the year gets a name starting with "A" and so forth through the alphabet. This summer has been the most active hurricane season since record-keeping started 150 years ago. We've seen so many storms that weather officials have now run through the alphabet: meteorologists are now having to track Tropical Storm (now Depression) Alpha 350 miles north of the Bahamas. In 2004, five devastating hurricanes ripped across Florida, each one coming so fast on the heels of the last that few of us could even name them a year later. As I write, Wilma is pounding Western Florida, one of the fast-growing regions in the country. And of course Katrina devasted New Orleans and the Gulf Coast just two months ago.

Global climate change is here. After decades of political hemming and hawing, only the most slimy of oil industry apologists (and Presidents) could argue that global warming hasn't arrived. We've built a national culture built on inefficient burning of fossil fuels. Developers put more and more people on unprotected sandbars built, maintained and insured by tax dollars. Someday is here and our weather is only going to be getting worse. We could be preparing for the inevitable adjustments. We could be investing in conservation, in renewable energies. We could change our tax codes to encourage sustainable housing: not just getting new development off beaches but also building urban and semi-urban communities that reduce automobile dependence.

Instead we spend billions of dollars on our oil addictions. We're now waiting for the announcement of the 2,000th U.S. military casualty in iraq. Administration officials used Katrina to rollback environmental protection regulations in Louisiana. The arctic ice cap is rapidly melting away (the North Pole is now ice-free for part of the year) but oil industry officials point to the good news that we will soon be able to put year-round oil rigs in the ice-free seas there.

How many Katrina bin Laden's and Saddam Wilma's does it take before we get the news.

It started when I began bookmarking the more interesting Quaker posts I ran across over the course of the day. That turned into the sidebar on the Quaker Ranter homepage, which then turned into the Quaker Blog Watch page. Now, as an experiment, I'm making it available as a daily email:

Enter your Email:

More info here: Quaker Blog Watch by email

I do recognize that this site has mutliple fan bases. While I was on paternity leave a colleague emailed me to ask when I would post more pictures of Baby Francis. I looked and saw that it had only been ten hours since I had uploaded the last picture to my Flickr account. Aaayyee!, the danger of increasing expectations! Well, you can now get a daily email containing any new pictures of Baby Francis or Big Kid Theo: go to either of their homepages for the sign-up form (they share one subscription). One small step in self-indulgent parenthood, ain't technology great?

How to tell if your child is obsessive-compulsive:

Theo is very precise about lining his toy cars up just so on the windowsill. This is the window that looks out into the street, which means his car parking is routinely interrupted by his shouts of "V! V!" (S.U.V.) and "uh-uh-Ss pup" (U.P.S. truck).

We've had a couple of visits lately:

That's my high school friend Rui with Francis; Rui's daughter Kia holding Francis while Jorge and Ann look on; a week later Jorj read to Theo and his own son Jacob while Sue talks with Julie (unseen) in the kitchen. Earlier in the day Jorj pointed his camera back on us.

Here's Theo learning how to ride his own bike (courtesy the townwide yard sale earlier this month) and Francis with a sleep smile and grimace:

Update, 10/18: Today was Theo's first day of preschool. Here's the photoset

The tragedies were reflections not on the power of nature but on the power of our human disregard for one another.

When the ramparts of New Orleans burst and flooded its streets and homes, I was at a hospital preparing to welcome a child. As my partner and I celebrated new life we saw images of people trapped in attics, heard tales of loved ones swept away as they sought to protect their children. We watched other new parents and their vulnerable children caught without food, water or services in a city suddenly unable to operate.

The tragedies show our human disregard. The trapped were almost all African American. They were almost all poor. Stories on the news--shot-at helicopters, mass violence in the Convention center--reflected America's racist imagination more than reality. The levees failed because our political leaders ignored the recommendations of government engineers and scientists and slashed spending on storm protection. Even the hurricane itself was supercharged by a century of burning fossil fuels, our disregard for nature and our stonewalling over the reality of global warming.

A favorite image of pacifists comes from a line in the Book of Isaiah, that part in that talks about beating the swords into plowshares. But surrounding passages have been echoing in my ears lately. Like this one:

Bring no more vain oblations; incense is an abomination unto me; the new moons and sabbaths, the calling of assemblies, I cannot away with; it is iniquity, even the solemn meeting. Your new moons and your appointed feasts my soul hatest; they are a trouble unto me; I am weary to bear them.... Wash you, make you clean; put away the evil of your doings before mine eyes; cease to do evil. Learn to do well; seek judgement, relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, please for the widow. Isaiah 1:13-17.

The righteous indigation that followed the images from New Orleans is fading. Life is returning to normal in Washington DC and the high costs of recovery (and the continuing costs of Bush's wars) will be shifted to the poor. We cannot stay silent to the vain oblations of our government. It is time to do well and protect the poor. It is time to relieve the oppressed and demand justice for the human decisions that led to broken levees.

This isn't all finger-pointing: we each need to seek a self-judgement about our American lifestyles that have fuelled global warming with its consumeristic disregard for consequences. We need to depend upon each other more, seek a community deeper and more interlaced than that offered by Walmart and McDonalds. We are all part of one another, part of the earth and brethren to our human family. We need to gather together as a people who know that government and consumerism alone can never address our society's deepest needs and that vain oblations alone will do nothing to put away the evil of our doings. We need to get angry and sing a song of change. We need more Isaiahs.

An amazing thing has happened in the last two years: we've got Friends from the corners of Quakerism sharing our similarities and differences, our frustrations and dreams through Quaker blogs. Disenchanted Friends who have longed for deeper conversation and consolation when things are hard at their local meeting have built a network of Friends who understand. When our generation is settling down to write our memoirs -- our Quaker journals -- a lot of us will have to have at least one chapter about becoming involved in the Quaker blogging community.

By Johann Christoph Arnold

"If we had an outbreak somewhere in the United States, do we not then quarantine that part of the country? And how do you, then, enforce a quarantine? ...One option is the use of the military... I think the president ought to have all...assets on the table to be able to deal with something this significant." - President George W. Bush, news conference, October 4, 2005

For years, health officials have warned that a virulent strain of avian influenza could rapidly spread the globe, killing millions. Headlines about such an outbreak now seem to pop up daily, and there is reason for increasing concern. But President Bush's recent request to Congress, asking for the authority to call in the military as part of the government's response to such a disaster, is wrong.

To start with, calling in the troops would set a worrying precedent, and not only because it would be yet one more step to a fully militarized state.

We already have public health systems at both the state and federal levels, which, though weakened by years of underfunding, could still be quickly strengthened and expanded by an infusion of congressional aid. These agencies have been operative for years, and the people who direct them are trained and experienced in dealing with infectious disease.

This is more than a medical issue. Have we learned nothing from the recent spate of natural disasters that has wracked our shores? Have we not considered that in the end, disease, pestilence, and floods might be an inescapable part of life?

I am not suggesting that we should stand idly by. I myself have children and grandchildren and friends whom I dearly love, and would be the first to call for professional medical assistance should such a disaster strike my family or community. But aren't we a little audacious in thinking, in the aftermath of two terrible hurricanes, that we can somehow avert or prevent such a tragedy?

Quarantine and isolation may indeed be a necessary part of our response, but let us not forget that families and pastoral caregivers must also be part of the equation when many people are dying. Does our government really care for human beings, or does it worry more about the devastation such a pandemic could wreak on the global economy?

If widespread death is truly imminent (some sources suggest that 150 million people could die of avian flu) wouldn't it be better to prepare ourselves by paying at least some attention to the fact that we all must die one day, and that dying is going to be terribly lonely, and frightening, if we are quarantined? We need to concern ourselves with this issue because one day death will claim each one of us.

If we die alone, under the control of the military, who will provide the last services of love for us, and who will comfort the loved ones we leave behind? Are we going to sit back while we are denied the chance to lay down our lives for each other, which Jesus says is the greatest act of love we can ever perform? A military response will not bring out the best in people, but only magnify the fear and anxiety we already have about death.

Why are we so terribly afraid of dying? Only when we are ready to suffer--only when we are ready to die--will we experience true peace of heart. Dying always involves a hard struggle, because we fear the uncertainty of an unknown and unknowable future. We all feel the pain of unmet obligations, and we all want to be relieved of past regrets and feelings of guilt. But it is just here that we can reach out and help one another to die peacefully.

Once we recognize this, the specter of a worldwide flu epidemic will not make us fear death, but give us pause to consider how we can use our lives to show love, while there is still time.

Again, enforced isolation is wrong: sick and dying people are often lonely as it is, even in situations where they have a family and friends. How will they feel when the government forces us to treat them like lepers? How will they find comfort, if they are not even allowed to talk about what is happening to them?

We should see it as a privilege to stand at their bedsides at the hour of death, not a danger--even if this means that we are eventually taken by the same plague. That is why I feel military intervention would be such a tragedy.

Johann Christoph Arnold (www.ChristophArnold.com) is an author and a pastor with the Bruderhof Communities (www.bruderhof.com).

Theo and I on the old bike this summer. More photos

Last Thursday my Francis-inspired paternity leave ended--two weeks paid for by my employer, two weeks or so of vacation time. It was good to have off though I must admit I spent more time corralling two-year old Theo than I did gazing into newborn Francis's eyes. I heartily recommend taking Septembers off. One of my more enjoyable tasks was the almost-daily bicycle rides with Theo. Sometimes we went across town to the lake and it's playground, Theo going up and down the slides over and over again until nighttime threatened and I had to insist on coming home. Other times we took long rides to local attractions such as last post's Blue Hole. The bike so symbolized our special time together that it seems almost proper that it was stolen from the train station on that first day of commuting, apparently the latest victim of my South Jersey town's bike theft ring. When I walked in the door that evening, Theo came running yelling "diya-di-cal!" but there was nothing I could do. Summer's over kid.