Monthly Archives: August 2008

Brady Center Says Texas Teachers with Guns are law breakers

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I knew it wouldn’t be long before the Harrold Independent School District’s decision to allow armed teachers would generate news far beyond their small corner of Texas.  This morning’s Fort Worth Star Telegram reports that
Attorneys for a Washington, D.C.-based gun-control advocacy group have the tiny school district of Harrold in their sights.

But the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence says school officials may be violating state law.

“When I first read about this, I couldn’t believe it was legal,” said Marsha McCartney, president of the Texas chapter of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. “It turns out it wasn’t.”

Of course officials for the Harrold ISD disagree. When I first read and blogged about this story a few days ago, I though back to my colleague Rev. Christine Robinson reflections in her blog iMinister following the shooting TVUUC in Knoxville last month:
Of all the comments I read in news blogs yesterday, 98% were offering prayer and sympathy, 1% had been deleted as crass and hateful, and one…exactly one, suggested we ought to do something about guns. One minute later someone flashed back, “no law would ever prevent a man like this from getting a gun.” In other words, all control is completely hopeless.
The iMinister didn’t think so – that all control is completely hopeless – and I agree with her.   Although it is true that you can not ever completely prevent individuals bent on committing violence from getting their hands on weapons of violence, you can make it very difficult and you can shape society’s attitudes that it is not acceptable.  Right now, our society’s attitude is that violence and guns are very acceptable and that there is moral way to be violent and an immoral way to violent.  Changing that is going to be a long, hard road, but the journey, as the saying goes, begins with a single step.
Rev. Robinson again:
This is the 5th church shooting in the past year or so; there have been more shootings like that in schools. Churches and Schools are the open places of our society. If we must close them down, disallow backpacks and guitar cases, be suspicious of the stranger or the angry…we will all lose far more than if we just start cracking down on guns.
The Star Telegram reporters this morning inform us of the following:
School violence The rates at which teenagers were victimized by crime, both violent and nonviolent, declined both at and away from school between 1992 and 2005.

Fourteen homicides at school were reported in 2005-06, the latest year for which data was available.

About one homicide or suicide of a youth at school occurs per 3.2 million students.

Students are about 50 times more likely to be a homicide victim at nonschool events.

Source: Education Department

Our goal is to make our society, especially our open places such as schools, safe havens.  To do that we must practice and teach de-escalation of violent encounters. It’s not easy.  I am convinced however, that in the end our best defense against the violence in our society is not a cold war of deterence on a personal scale, but practicing peace on a personal scale, teaching it to our children, legislating it, making it every step and every breath.   Eventually means and ends must cohere.  As MLK said, there is both negative and positive peace.  Negative peace, the absence of active violence isn’t enough. We seek the presence of a spirit of sisterhood and brotherhood.  This beloved community can’t exist if we are all carrying weapons, afraid of what might happen.  I’ve moved to Texas, but I don’t want to relive the wild west and have to quick draw at high noon.

Better News This Morning – Jury does the Right the Thing

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This morning’s Fort Worth Star Telegram  reports that a Tarrant County jury needed less than hour to recommend a life without parole sentence for Jeff Dodson, convicted of killing a  store clerk. Like the majority of people who make it to death row in the United States, Dodson had mental health issues, a difficult childhood, and his crime involved the use of alcohol or drugs.

This morning’s questions are:

Do either life imprisonment or the death penalty really get at restoring any sense of justice or are both just retribution?  Capital cases raise the issue of restorative justice for us once again.

And if Jeff Dodson can get life without parole, why can’t Jeff Wood?

As we ponder these questions, however, this morning’s news leaves me feeling hopeful that even if we can’t save Jeff Wood, there are better days coming in Texas.

Both prosecutors and defense attorneys David Richards and Jack Strickland said that the fact that Dodson’s brother, Theodis, received a life sentence may have factored into the jury’s decision.

Strickland said that juries also seem to be less inclined to impose a death sentence than they were several years ago, especially when there is only one victim.

Maybe not the glowing abolitionist talk that I would want to hear, but as Gandhi said,

Every small step in the right direction should be viewed as a monumental achievement.

Especially when dealing with massive systemic change, such as removing the British colonial imperial occupying force from your country or ending capital punishment.

The Law of Parties

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How I wish the Law of Parties was all about having a good time with your friends.  It’s not.  If you are party to a capital crime in Texas, say you are sitting in a car while a friend of yours decides it would be a good idea to kill the gas station attendant while he’s inside buying drinks and snacks, you can be sentenced to death and executed.

Since I’ve been in Texas there have been two scheduled executions and there are two more scheduled for the coming week, including Jeff Wood, a Law of Parties case. Jeff Wood’s case resembles the example I described above.

Please click on the link above, Jeff Wood’s name, and read about his case and join me in contacting the Governor of Texas, Rick Perry,  and the Board of Pardons and Paroles to ask them to stop the execution of Jeff Wood, scheduled for August 21.

Save Jeff Wood is on facebook.

There’s also information at Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty.

An eye for eye only ends up making the whole world blind.

- Mahatma Gandhi

“Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends.”

- Gandalf the Grey in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings

There’s a pale horse comin’
I’m gonna ride it
I’ll rise in the morning
My fate decided
I’m a dead man walkin’
I’m a dead man walkin’

- Bruce Springsteen, “Dead Man Walkin’”

Texas, you’re big and small town, foreign and friendly, slow and frenzied,  beautiful and … barbaric.

Being American with a Straight Face

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Tip of the hat to Mary at Tensegrities for not allowing me (and others) to miss Stephen Colbert and Jane Mayer dishing out a stinging satire on the (literally) torturous Bush administration as they discuss Mayer’s book The Dark Side: The Inside Story of how the War on Terror turned into a War on American Ideals.

It’s been hard to be an American with a straight face at times over the last eight years. Listening to/reading the Commander-in-Chief give Russia some what for over the Georgian war took some discipline to stifle the you’ve got to be kidding response. I don’t know how the press corps listened to it with a straight face.

Bush said that Russia, with its air, sea and land attacks in Georgia, had damaged its relations with the United States and other Western powers.

“Bullying and intimidation are not acceptable ways to conduct foreign policy in the 21st century,” the president said. “Only Russia can decide whether it will now put itself back on the path of responsible nations or continue to pursue a policy that promises only confrontation and isolation.

“To begin repairing relations with the United States, Europe and other nations and to begin restoring its place in the world, Russia must respect the freedom of its neighbors,” Bush said.

I’d wonder how the President could say this with a straight face, but then I’ve been listening to him for almost eight years now.

The Blogs of Texas

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I’ve been looking for other things besides local produce since arriving in Texas.  I’ve been surfing for local blogs on favorite topics such as progressive politics, popular culture and liberal religion.  I’ve begun to find some.

Here are some of my early discoveries:

The Red State

Burnt Orange Report

Texas Kaos

North Texas Liberal

Rhetoric & Rhythm

Rhetoric & Rhythm is my favorite so far. How can I not love a blog that has this as a subheader/tagline: “Politics, movies, jazz, baseball… These are a few of my favorite things….” A recent post picked up and commented on an item from Political Wire reviewing lists of Obama’s and McCain’s favorite songs.

Barack Obama
1. Ready or Not Fugees
2. What’s Going On Marvin Gaye
3. I’m On Fire Bruce Springsteen
4. Gimme Shelter Rolling Stones
5. Sinnerman Nina Simone
6. Touch the Sky Kanye West
7. You’d Be So Easy to Love Frank Sinatra
8. Think Aretha Franklin
9. City of Blinding Lights U2
10. Yes We Can will.i.am

John McCain
1. Dancing Queen ABBA
2. Blue Bayou Roy Orbison
3. Take a Chance On Me ABBA
4. If We Make It Through December Merle Haggard
5. As Time Goes By Dooley Wilson
6. Good Vibrations The Beach Boys
7. What A Wonderful World Louis Armstrong
8. I’ve Got You Under My Skin Frank Sinatra
9. Sweet Caroline Neil Diamond
10. Smoke Gets In Your Eyes The Platters

My newest religious blog discovery is Buddha Frog. Check out the post on Happy Bunny. The Everyday Mystic is another local blog I like, but I discovered it a while ago, now I just live near the source.  Both of these blogs offer email subscription, which is nice.

I’ve joined Equality Texas and Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty. Equality Texas doesn’t have a blog but does offer the option to subscribe to RSS feeds for both news and action alerts on their home page.  TCADP offers the Texas Abolition Blog.

I’m sure I’ll discover more, but I’ve only been here ten days.

And the silicone chip inside his head gets switched to overload

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The state chairman of the Democratic Party in Arkansas was fatally shot at Party HQ in Little Rock on August 14th in a crime that bears disturbing resemblance to the TVUUC shooting.  The gunman, Timothy Johnson, walked in, and asked to see Bill Gwatney and then shot him.  Johnson was disturbed and had recently lost his job.  In the wake of Knoxville and the TVUUC incident, this is even more disturbing than it normally would be, which is very disturbing.  One is horrific, two is a  nightmarish coincidence, but a third would be like some one declared open season.  Please, no third.

I couldn't have been the only one who saw Bowling for Columbine, right?

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I like my new local paper, the Fort Worth Star Telegram. I still have the Boston Globe bookmarked, but I’m proud of myself that today was the first day I read the FWST first. The pull of that Globe sports section is tough, though. After two articles in the Start Telegram this morning, I was thinking: Was I the only one who saw Fahrenheit 911 and Bowling for Columbine?

In a story the Star-Telegram picked up from the Washington Post, Spencer S. Hsu and Carrie Johnson report on the Bush Administration’s attempt to pass further domestic spying measures that would “Turn Cops into Spies.”

Under the Justice Department proposal for state and local police, published for public comment July 31, law enforcement agencies would be allowed to target groups as well as individuals and to launch an investigation based on the suspicion that a target is engaged in terrorism or is providing material support to terrorists.

Results could be shared with federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies.

Criminal intelligence data starts with sources as basic as public records and the Internet, but also includes law enforcement databases, confidential and undercover sources, and active surveillance.

This reminded me of Peace Fresno, the peace group in Fresno, CA that was infiltrated by a law enforcement officer from the local sheriff’s department.

Another front-paged articled from the Star-Telegram had this incredibly disturbing headline – remember Tina is an elementary school teacher: Texas School District OKs Pistols for Staff. Are they completely insane? What happens the first time an out of control students wrests a gun from a teacher? Have fun explaining that one to the parents of the kids that die in that incident. Again, I am so proud to be a Unitarian Universalist. In the wake of the Knoxville tragedy, our response was not “LREDA issues demand for DREs to pack heat or “the UUMA demands congregations recognize need for ministers to carry guns in the pulpit.” We live in a violent society, but bringing the guns into the classroom is not going to the make the classroom any less likely to have a random act of violence occur and will in all likelihood escalate the violence should one occur. Just because one is trained in the use of a firearm, and has a license to carry it -which would be true and required of the Texas teachers in the Harrold Independent School District - does not mean one is trained in managing stressful encounters or knows how to act under extreme stress and pressure, the exact situation for which one is supposedly carrying the firearm in the first place. The classic example is the Amadou Diallo shooting in New York City in 1999. Diallo was an unarmed African immigrant shot 41 times by plainclothes NYPD cops while pulling out his wallet to show ID.

Going back to my last post, I have to let the Boss tell this one in American Skin (41 Shots):

Is it a gun? is it a knife?
Is it a wallet? this is your life.
It ain’t no secret
It ain’t no secret
No secret my friend
You can get killed just for living
In your American skin

And how do incidents like the Diallo shooting impact our living? Bruce gets to that in the verse.

41 shots
Lena gets her son ready for school
She says “on these streets, Charles
You’ve got to understand the rules
If an officer stops you
Promise you’ll always be polite,
that you’ll never ever run away
Promise Mama you’ll keep your hands in sight”

This fear that has gripped us on a personal and national scale is a weapon in the hands of those who have us be scared. Scared people are easy to control, to form, to mold. Scared people stop thinking rationally and stop looking out for what may in be their best own self interest as long as they feel safe.

Scared people live in fight or flight response, tense, waiting for balls to drop, instead of living by their best values, seeking to be their best selves. Scared people, as Bono sings end up becoming the monsters they fear so as to protect themselves from the monsters they fear:

They say that what you mock
Will surely overtake you
And you become a monster
So the monster will not break you

It’s already gone too far
Who said that if you go in hard
You won’t get hurt

U2 “Peace on Earth” from All that You Can’t Leave Behind

What lessons do we teach our children by having teachers carry guns? That it’s a violent world or a violent culture? They already know that. The lesson we teach them by having teachers carry guns is that an appropriate response to an unpredictable violent world is more violence and that’s the exact opposite of what we should be teaching them.

And we certainly don’t become safer by spying on each other. We will just become more prone to not trusting each other, looking over our shoulder, being more afraid and more stressed out. No people should live like that and if anyone wants us to, the question we should be asking is why?

The Sacred Scripture of My Inner Soundtrack

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Counties don’t count for much back in Massachusetts.  They exist, but most everything you need done is done by local city or town government and counties could probably be done away with except for the politically appointed jobs they create.  Counties are a different story here in Texas. Counties are prevalent. The are present. They are in your consciousness.  I’ve crossed county lines numerous times already between Dallas County, Tarrant County (which is where we live) and Denton County.  Some of the times I crossed county lines I wasn’t even lost.  Different counties even have different immunization requirements for registering for school.  Every time I’ve crossed a county line during the last few days, I hear Bruce Springsteen singing in my head (I’ve got to unpack the CD’s) from the River’s “The Price You Pay” :

But just across the county line, a stranger passing through put up a sign
That counts the men fallen away to the price you pay,
and girl before the end of the day,
I’m gonna tear it down and throw it away

That’s the end of the song, A song that ends with triumphant hope, throwing out of the way anything that would hold you back. It’s a song that in its own way explains why I’m here.

Now they’d come so far and they’d waited so long
Just to end up caught in a dream where everything goes wrong
Where the dark of night holds back the light of day
And you’ve gotta stand and fight for the price you pay

I think like this a lot. Then I realized I think like this about rock and pop music the way so many people surrounding me here think about Bible verses. There’s a Bible verse for every situation, some folks around here would probably be too glad to tell me. And I could just as easily quote the soundtrack in my brain. This, I have to admit and accept is my scripture. John Lennon said, after all, “I consider it poetry, I just sing it.” Serious pop music is more than poetry, it’s folk music in the deepest sense – the music of the people in our global media culture and at its finest you can find within it human dreams, hopes, aspirations, and thoughts on the mystical and the divine, the political and the philosophical. Pop music can be shallow, but it can also be deep. It’s secular, but can also be sacred. For every circus clown, there’s a Walt Whitman and for every industry manufactured one-hit wonderbread there’s an Emily Dickinson. Well, maybe not for every single one, but there are enough of them.

I’ve been thinking about this since Knoxville, and its been reinforced through our move to Texas. Psalms aren’t the first things to cross my consciousness or quotes from the Gospels or any other world scripture, nor wise sayings from Emerson or Channing, not even Mary Oliver. Nope. What rises first for me is material from my own inner canon: Springsteen, U2, Lennon, Marley, Indigo Girls, Dylan, The Alarm, Martin Sexton, and others. One can’t just go quoting Bono and Dylan at bedsides and roadside accidents, as you may be making references that will fly over the heads of the bereaved and the afflicted, although maybe someday who knows? The psalms were new once.

I look at this with the opposite world view of Rob Fleming (Rob Gordon as played by John Cusak in the film adaptation), the protagonist of Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity, who asked himself, “Am I miserable because I listen to pop music or do I listen to pop music because I’m miserable.” I tend to think that the music has graced my life, and ask “Am I blessed to see sacred connections because I listen to pop music or do I listen to pop music because I am blessed to see sacred connections?”

I’m coming home with a stone, strapped onto my back.
I’m coming home with a burning hope turning all my blues to black.
I’m looking for a sacred hand to carve into my stone.
A ghost of comfort, angels breath – to keep this life inside my chest.
This world falls on me with hopes of immortality.
Everywhere I turn all the beauty just keeps shaking me.
I woke up in the middle of a dream, scared the world was too much for me.
Sejarez said, “don’t let go, just plant the seeds and watch them grow.”
I’ve slept in rainy canyon lands, cold drenched to my skin.
I always wake to find a face to calm these troubled lands.
This world falls on me with dreams of immortality.
Everywhere I turn all the beauty just keeps shaking me.
Running – end – earth – swimming – edge – sea – laughing – under – starry sky
This world was meant for me.
Don’t bury me, carry me.
I wish I was a nomad, an Indian, or a saint.
The edge of death would disappear, leave me nothing left to taint.
I wish I was a nomad, an Indian, or a saint.
Give me walking shoes, feathered arms, and a key to heaven’s gate.
This world falls on me with dreams of immortality.

- Indigo Girls “World Falls” from Nomads, Indians, Saints

Stranger in a Strange Land

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And I really don’t mind sleeping on the floor
But I couldn’t sleep after what I saw
I wrote this letter to tell you the way I feel.

Oh I wish you were here
Oh I wish you were here
To see what I could see
To hear
And I wish you were here.

- U2, “Stranger in a Strange Land”

Texas was once its own country.  It’s the only state that joined the union as an independent nation.  (Technically, I suppose one could argue that following the American Revolution all of the original 13 British colonies that formed the first American government under the Articles of Confederation were each independent states or countries and joined the union/adopted the Constitution as such, but I am not going to argue this point with a Texan.)

Moving to Texas has been like moving to another a country.  It has had a dreamlike quality to it.  Everything is strangely familiar, yet somehow off and different.  The only experience I have to relate it to is all the time I’ve spent in Canada, where Tina’s family is from, and to where they and we return quite often.  Everything is the same there – the language (except where they speak French and even that has strange parallels to moving to Texas), the houses, the streets, the cars, the cell phones, the talk (politics, sports, pop culture, gossip, family, the weather, health) the stores (for the most part), sports.  And yet for all the similarity you know you are in a completely different place.  The way people act, talk, think, their mannerisms, their way of doing business, their customs and their culture is different.  In Canada, I am easily marked as an American.  I am more brash, louder, faster, more direct, less prone to engage strangers, I think hockey is a bore, my O vowels sound different, I don’t obey traffic signals while walking (and sometimes while driving).

I haven’t yet been asked outright  if I am from out of town  by a Texan, but I’m positive some folks must have been wondering.  I am in a hurry compared to most people.  Nothing gets done quickly here.  Opening bank accounts took over an hour.  Don’t get me wrong. This was a pleasant experience in many ways. It was social. We were offered cold soft drinks, had a great conversation with the Asst. Manager and Head Teller and got a free home tool kit and a piggy bank for Zack. Yet from our perspective it took f-o-r-e-v-e-r.  This type of personal business errand back in New England would have been far more impersonal, but we would have been in and out of the bank in 15 minutes, 20 tops, especially when you figure in that we were the only customers in the bank. Even had we not been, we would have been treated the same way with the refreshments and conversation.  Our first trip to get groceries took two hours, not counting the hour getting lost coming home to my own house because the wonderfully social woman checking us out engaged me in a conversation, was the checker and bagger and stopped to include Zack on a number of occasions. I was certain the woman behind me in line must be getting steamed that my turn through the register was taking forever and I apologized when I was finally finished.  It took her five full seconds to comprehend what I was apologizing for as she hadn’t taken any notice of it whatsoever.

We must seem downright cold to people. I am not used to people just coming up to me and starting conversations in the supermarket or hardware store out of the blue.  It’s friendly and for the most part, quite pleasant. It does however slow you down when you’ve already put in five hours of painting on the new house and you just want a 3-inch roller and a brush for the trim and to get back to finish working because you’re so tired you could fall asleep where you stand and the ten minutes of social conversation and neighborly advice on paintbrushes is keeping you from just being done, clean, showered and fed.  You just can’t “run errands” errands in Texas. You “leisurely stroll” errands.  Don’t try to get a lot done, just budget the extra time in and accept it. Even Canadians would find it slow.  It’s deceptive too. You start off Saturday afternoon with four or five things to do, then it’s time to be at your dinner engagement and you find you’ve only done two or three of your five things because each errand was so much slower than your New England inner clock ever imagined.  Eventually, I think I will come to like this, but trying to get myself moved into a house where I must have a proof of address and a bank account to get the next thing and I must have car insurance and a car inspection to get a Texas driver’s license, the social hospitality aspect slowing down the average speed of just getting things done has really taken some getting used to this week. (The exception to this was our experience at the Apple store, which by comparison was shorter, but our salesperson was originally from Seattle, so that made sense.)

For all the southern Texas neighborly-ness, Texans drive like insane, possessed people.  They make Boston drivers seem like little old ladies on a Sunday afraid to approach the speed limit in a residential neighborhood.

We do not have the budget to eat out a lot, but are foodies at heart and really enjoy it, except we do not live in the heart of Fort Worth or Dallas. We live in the Metroplex which as far as we can tell seems to have banned fine dinning and legislated that only mediocre to horrible national chain restaurants will be allowed to buy or rent space in the ubiquitous strip malls.  We have found an independent deli near our house that also makes great smoothies.  The search goes on for locally grown produce.  It’s sad that we live on land that was once farms and go to supermarkets that sell produce from New Zealand and Chile (and we wonder why gas prices are so high).

Bucking the trend of the wonderfully hospitable, however lengthy, in-person customer server experience was what I am coming to refer to at the TELECOM WAR.  Only two Cable/Internet/Phone Companies sever our neighborhood (sigh, I STILL can’t get FIOS!).  Charter and ATT have been, unbeknownst to them in an Olympic sized competition to see who could provide the least bad customer service and thus wring money out of me.

In one corner, the company we were told to stay away from, the incumbent and neighborhood bully, known for poor service, Charter.  Charter offered a competitive price for a bundle of phone, Internet and TV, BUT they couldn’t start service until the person with the current service canceled.  The interesting part? That person was not the person we bought the house from as they had ATT.  The person with the Charter service at my new address just started it in June and according to the people we bought our house from, have and had no connection to the property. Did this make any difference to Charter? If you said no, You guessed right.  Ultimately I had to fax a couple of pages from the purchase and sale agreement of the home proving I owned the property, who it was purchased from and no one involved was this third person that Charter claimed had to cancel service before they would come set us up to the wired world.

In the other corner, with higher speed TV, higher prices, but possibly fewer hurdles, the up and coming challenger in these parts with their U-verse package, ATT.  Hey, I like ATT, right? They handle my iPhone.  Folks at the Apple store talked them up (but then again they handle the iPhone exclusively- I’m not blind).  So, having trouble with Charter, I go to their competition.  Lovely conversation (as was the one with Charter – again, these conversations are pleasant and L-O-N-G and chatty), but when the time comes to put the order through – OOPS, it seems there’s an ATT delinquent account associated with my Social Security Number that must be paid first. Impossible.  I get through to ATT accounts.  The account in question is to an address I used to live at, but for dates BEFORE I lived there and to a phone a number that is one digit short of being a ten digit phone number.  The ATT accounts person tells me there is no problem with any account associated with my SSN.  Thanks, I could have told them that. I get pumped back to customer service and have to repeat the order, but the same issues happens all over again – don’t these departments have the ability to communicate with each other? I guess not.
After three hours on the phone  ATT will not start phone service. I decided to wait them both out and see which one resolves their issue first.

Sunday afternoon, Aug. 10 Charter won.   They called to confirm they could start service Tuesday the 12th.  Even if ATT had “approved” me they wouldn’t have started until Aug. 19th.   Funnier still? A bill comes to our house addressed to this mysterious Charter customer informing him in bold letters on the front of the envelope “Change of Address Requested.” The only problem is, he doesn’t live here.  Even funnier, on Monday, the 11th, the day before Charter is scheduled to install our service, a Charter tech comes to remove the mystery customer’s Charter cable box and is baffled there’s no box. So I tell him the story so he won’t think I’ve swiped the box.  I’m posting this blog entry over my nice Charter high speed Internet service while ESPN is running in the background on my new Charter cable TV. Thank you, Charter.
On the positive side, the folks who came to clean our carpet from United Carpet Clean were fantastic, friendly, on time, and didn’t try to sell us services with didn’t need.  We bought a refrigerator from Home Depot and it was delivered and installed, also in a most friendly manner and on time.

We are still obviously from out of town. We don’t say y’all. We get lost regularly. We’re still looking for things like fair trade coffee and the locally owned, non-franchised restaurant, and locally grown produce.  Yet, it’s good to be home.

I  laid down on the empty floor of my new house yesterday, practically in tears and if Zack wasn’t around and I wasn’t worried whether or not it would have upset him, I think might have just started sobbing.  That’s how happy I was to be HOME. Home in Texas.  I have felt displaced over the last month, living with family, with members of my congregation, with no place or no space to call my own.  It didn’t matter much every day, but over time, it has certainly grown on me and the stress from it has certainly accumulated.  I can only begin to imagine what true refugees go through.  I can’t even begin to imagine what it’s truly like to be homeless.  It’s renewed my commitment to do what I can combat both.  Even a monk in his or her cell or on his or her matt has some space or some little space of their own, that is full of and committed to their energy.  Each of us should and can have that.
The kitchen is fully unpacked and functioning, as is Zackary’s room, the guest room and the living room (from where I blog this evening). Tomorrow I work on the bathrooms, our bedroom and the library/sitting area.  There’s an ozone alert here for tomorrow.  I need to finish setting up home base so I get back to nurturing spirits (including my own) and healing the world.

Our doors and hearts are open to readers of the NY Times

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This past Sunday, the Unitarian Universalist Association ran a full page ad in the New York Times.  I like the ad, but it’s the type of ad that needs to run in small town weekly newspapers, not the New York Times.  For all the money it took to put that ad in the New York Times, I’d like to have seen the UUA divide that money and run the same full page ad in dozens, if not hundreds of smaller town newspapers across the country.