An Odd Shifting Of Capitalism

My buddy, Alan, sent me a link to yesterday’s NEW YORK TIMES OP-ED article “So Much Fun. So Irrelevant.” I have enjoyed reading Friedman’s articles. He ladles thoughts out in fashions that have made me glad for years even though I’ve spit out the bad taste of a few. This one, in particular, left an unexpected tang in my mouth.

It was in the third from last paragraph that I caught sight of a thread of thought I hadn’t expected to spot. “Right now, though, notes Levin, America is focused too much on getting “average” bandwidth to the last 5 percent of the country in rural areas, rather than getting “ultra-high-speed” bandwidth to the top 5 percent, in university towns, who will invent the future.” While, I am one of those who almost desperately favors linking all of us together, it was the scent of that thread of thought that pulled me completely off the path. Now, I’m certain that Mr. Friedman had no reason to catch sight of thread I’m playing with like my cat plays with hers. So, I’m not critiquing his work but I am trying to pull attention to what was not noticed.

Bear in mind that I am a ‘I wish had been an academic’ looking at the quote of Levin and feeling cautious. My caution is seated in being raised on a ranch where I learned to take what the educated had made like tractors, fence stretchers, pickups and the rest of those kinds of things well past what had been intended for and longer than expected. Out of those experiences with wires, pliers, nails and a hammer grew an almost joyful willingness to work in psych emergency. No simple 1, 2, 3 steps are available when dealing with people on the streets, in homes, alley’s or parks when they are immediately suicidal, psychotic, hyper manic or have a weapon in hand.

I knew all of the basic steps and the standard end results expected of me in every emergency intervention for a county mental health system. More important, were the fundamentals I learned on the ranch. No matter how well I went prepared out on horse back, sitting on the tractor or breaking ice in the tank, I knew that occasionally something would go wrong. A knife being put to my throat fit oddly to keeping myself in the saddle when dad’s horse finally gave in to the locoweed he’d eaten a few days before. Both were well outside the realm of my expectations! My surviving both fits better to what  Henry Petroski continuously pushes forward. We move closer to “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang” style than to beliefs that we are able surely and linearly discover those needed next advancements and so keep ourselves going evenly.

Mr. Friedman I still want scientist and academics working and I along with you want money well channeled toward them. However, I want the natural cognitive dissonance that Leon Festinger pointed out being realized from within the conflicts shared among engineers, academics, scientists and the rest of us. It is here that I saw that distortion of capitalism. So, my caution is focused on a seeming tranquilizer. I do not want the public, in any fashion, assuaged by the academic world, either; I want us stimulated and not just positively!

My first bumpy drive across the field

With one arm uncle Jerry picked me up to put me on the old Massey-Ferguson tractor while pointing down the gentle slope of our alfalfa field to where I was to stop. The field was on the far east side of two thousand acres of farm and ranch land. Setting right next to a little lake dug out twenty or so years earlier, the alfalfa was, most of the time, doing well. Back behind us and on up the hill was our grassland.

Where he’d put me wasn’t in the metal seat but on the right sided runner where the clutch was. He put me down on the peddle to see if I had enough weight to push it down. Back then, I wasn’t close to getting it down. I was probably between kindergarten and first grade, headed back to school in a couple of months. So then, Uncle Jerry urged me to get on up into what now wouldn’t be a big metal seat as he put his right foot down on the clutch. Pushing it onto the slim metal runner he pulled the throttle down just a touch while also turning the key to start the tractor. The old tractor he towered over and whose rear tires had moments ago towered over me coughed a little smoke out of the muffler, itself sticking up well past the engines gray cowling.

Wrapping his hands around mine, he squeezed and stressed that I hold on tight and aim the tractor on down the incline toward where dad was using the Farmhand fitted to an, even older, Case tractor. Dad had spent the late morning dropping the farmhand down on to the ground to run another line of alfalfa my uncle had raked up a little bit before. As the Farmhand filled dad would be watching to decide when to pull the lever forcing the tractor’s hydraulic system to pick the Farmhand back up. He then ran that batch of alfalfa over to the stack-yard where he was building another haystack.

My uncle gently lifted his foot up and as the Massey-Ferguson started moving he jumped back to keep the heavily weighted rear tire of this small tractor from running him over. Alone on that nosy little beast that felt so big, I kind of kept the thing aimed in the direction my uncle already had us aimed. It was only in first gear which even at full throttle wouldn’t have moved me at more than 3 to 4 miles an hour. So, I got to sit on that big but now little old thing so long. Fortunately, I’d listened well and when it was time to turn the key I kept my left hand urgently on the steering wheel and laid against it while reaching down to the key. Turning it the ‘old girl’ lurched to a halt. Bouncing forward and off the seat I hold onto the steering wheel knowing my toes couldn’t reached the runners on either side of the transmission casing.

Looking back on this now I see something I’d not noticed before. I had no faith in my uncle. I had been sat down on the machine scared out of my gourd. All I knew was that I’d been told to do something I’d watched him and my dad do for all of those truly few years of my life. Much of my playtime had been spent mimicking them with toys held in my hands.

I had snuck onto the few tractors dad and uncle Jerry always parked near the house to play at doing their work or anything else. Never before had I fantasied about actually doing this. Pushing me past my brief reticence to finally play out what I had imagined, my uncle urged his hesitant nephew to do what I’d wanted. All of my daydreaming had been preparing me for something I was a little too small to have carried out. Uncle Jerry, by demonstrating trust in me, set in motion a whole new level of exploration.

Hatred

Hatred of others suppresses the self. I’ve fallen victim to this problem. Keeping my attention squarely set on their faults has successfully blinded me to my own. Yet, like everyone else, I have distracted myself from my ‘self‘ by my hatred of them.

My refusals to see myself is easily spotted in my hatred of what others have done. But what about those times when I’m merely uncomfortable with something? What about those times I’ve cussed a driver for nearly hitting me while crossing the street? Or how about frustrations with how another person retells what I said but in fashions that misrepresent me?

I agree that my feelings were justified. In some fashion, I had been treated wrongly. What I have found uncomfortable was realizing that my complaints too often had served as a distraction. By whining about the last time I’d nearly had my foot run over by a driver insisting on not waiting for me, I had also been trying  to keep people at a distance from my simple wrongs. Using that true wrong as a means to hide my own wrongs is a subtle but true thing we all do.

Suppression of ourselves grows out of our refusals to know humility by progressively  owning our own faults without shame. This simple social action successfully hides facets of ourselves from ourselves.

Graffiti Artist Saves Church from Closure

I found, Graffiti Artist Saves Church from Closure, while doing a gleeful prowl about in newspapers and journals via the web. It was Birger Menke‘s article focused on Stefan Strumbel’s artistic work in Mary, Help of Christians, Church that snagged my attention. Stefan’s work isn’t close to what I prefer, but I own the necessity of his art, or as I prefer, iconography, to help firmly seat my desires in worship. For me the icons distributed about my church and the few in my home are windows through which I look out and away from the lie which I have learned to see as myself.

Stefan’s work, also, appears to have drawn many back to what they seemed to had left. His artistic works drawing people back toward a necessary part of their walks with God, I find important. While his artistic talents, in a secular mindset, are lovely and potentially inspiring to some, I see something pushing much deeper.

The beauty I desire is not isolated in those windows of art. Nor is it in the words, tones or rhythms of the chants or songs. I’m sorry priests and pastors but sermon’s have only a small potential of God use as a beacon. Architecture is, as well, not the source God reaching into our lives. We though need the concert of visual, auditory and tactile things to be fed with God’s presence. Those abilities God created and by engendering us the talents can with our permissions be brought into a concert becoming oddly capable of drawing our attention out and away from our facades.

So then, if the right icons or art, if you prefer, coupled with songs/hymns/chants and then sermons are followed by a good get together shouldn’t we then be seeing God? I think not! Becoming able to look out those iconic windows of a church has only part to do with artistic skills. My becoming able to catch hints of God’s smiling at me as I open the liturgical doors of my life isn’t in properly speaking or even hearing those words. My becoming able to experience the presence I seek is found in my laying down my natural preferences. Humbly accepting that my preferences have no hold of bondage on God is a necessary step.

Next comes a willingness which is truly frightening. By not picking my preferences back up but sitting down among those things I have learned and done I have set a new course for myself. Then patting my my hand on the ground and so inviting God to play with me and my toys I am learning to let God reshape me rather than fitting that One into the lie I call myself.

Jesus continue…

…walking with me away from my ‘self’.

my hope is?

Our hopes spell out the shapes we want life to take. Our wishes display what we want for and expect from everyone else. Our expressions of those hopes color how others see us. Of course, catching sight of those other’s hopes color how we see them.

We, all, have known at least one person whose aspirations felt foreign. My disjointedly liking extreme psychiatric emergency work put me face-to-face with such. Many of my diagnoses of a complex of et of symptoms weren’t favored just as I didn’t favor theirs. In my kind of crew we all desire to pinpoint the problem better than everyone else? Oh, the contentions that rises out of hope to get a leg up on that other person. My favored and still least tidy of such conflicting professional hope was with a psychiatrist.

I had conferred with my supervising psychiatrist just before midnight and had agreed to not hospitalize a client. My being in that person’s home, also certain that he didn’t need inpatient care, put me in a different setting than my supervisor. When I told our client that I wouldn’t hospitalize him but would see him in the morning, he foisting a sure card on me. Threatening to take his life I laid the hand down and sent him to the hospital. That psychiatrist and I a couple of days later talked. She built her objection to my choice as a court case. At its’ core was the contention that the patient had bilked me. I knew a few minutes on into early morning that he was playing a game. My supervising psychiatrist’s hope was that I would get her point and not give in so easily the next time. Seating her objection in the unlikely chance of her being called to court over this feed my ire. Tossing my own professional licensure back at her and that I was the only professional seeing the patient I shut the conversation down.

Our mutual but not shared hope was to come out on top in the argument. Winning, that time, lays out how contentious hopes can become even with an MD. Leaving her office a contentious side of myself sauntered up beside me and snidely asked, ‘What makes you think you shouldn’t have played your cards? The agency would have been grateful for the money.” Having fed my hope to beat a psychiatrist in our version of tit-for-tat I also suffered knowing it might have been worth more to have played the game out. I guess that hopes are not what fairy tales have laid out.

Another seed had been laid in the field of my life.

Doubt built…

…to defend your own stance is not true doubt.

Peace…?

Peace is not located in myself. It is not located in you or all of us. Peace is something which we create, moment-by-moment among us. It does not exist on its’ own. Peace is ephemeral, quickly evaporating from between myself and that other when I chose to not share it.

Rocks in the stream bed of tolerance.

Nonbelievers are rejecting only us and not God. Any nonbeliever’s refusal to accept my and my kinds’ reality is seated in their…disrespect of what they see coming from us. I am well aware that from our side those people are then rejecting God. More to the point, though, those who call themselves Evangelical Atheists have become the intellectual crescendo of my point. Their seeing no valid reason to accept our idea of ‘faith’, they do not see this as a rejection of God. From their stance they are keeping at an arms length what they see as our destructiveness. It is not their hatred of us, as they see things, but our hatred of humanity that fosters their point.

On that extreme end of atheism while they actively avoid seeing the good we do, they also wholeheartedly point out religions’ atrocities. Christopher Hitchens in “god is not GREAT” makes his point well. His brother, Peter, in “The Rage Against God: How Atheism lead me to Faith” laid out well his brothers avoidance of the good that Christians do. Michael Krasny’s “Spiritual Envy” lays out the same conflict with Christopher from another direction. While Michael agrees with Peter that we do many good things he also agrees with Christopher on our history having many atrocious wrongs scattered across it. Like Christopher, he sees no reason seeded in Christian’s bed of good to believe in Jesus.

By asking us for reasons to accept what they have no experience of I see a potent reason to search the closets and corners of our lives. Searching for “reasons”, meant to establish faith in nonbelievers I see as our avoiding the core of the problem. Rooted in this conflict resides a question for the believers. Are we failing to live out our faith? Could it be that our own motivations to give them reasons serves as a smoke and mirror? Why is it that I do not chastise myself for having so poorly lived my faith that they find no motivation to walk with the Risen Christ with me?

…learning to tolerate…my own commonality

Every effort to discover the roots of a client’s problems is followed by coy all the way over to direct b-mod efforts to draw their attention toward their “true” problems. However, for the therapist those can also serve a covert purpose. One which my early supervisors warned me about. Client’s psychosocial problems can serve as a distraction from our own stumbling blocks. Wouldn’t those under-the-table uses of a client’s information create lawsuits? No, not in the fashions I’m pointing at. Smokescreens are meant to keep the audience distracted. My point points at myself. My type of profession can become so caught up in what patients and clients show us that we miss seeing the same in ourselves. I’d swear that Freud’s ribs are hurting from laughing over our escapades.

Keeping eyes on our clients’ struggles and so not seeing our own are a fundamental mistake and all of my type make it. Behaviorists make it right on down to depth psychologists digging into the ore of human thoughts and feelings. No shame is needed in the mistake itself. Our problem resides in repeating our using client’s struggles to distract us from our own. As I’ve said before, my brothers and sisters in Christ play the same simple theme in their lives. Eyeing the wrongs of others is essential fodder enabling us to keep our eyes off of ourselves.

As that realization grew within my professional self, my sense of being a son of God began crawling toward a humility I had never imagined. Sighting my surreptitiously distracting myself from me with a client’s “shit”, dumbfounded me. Every Christian, I knew, had diluted their walk with God by hiding themselves behind the smoking rubble of other’s lives. I had known no uniformity in how that was lived. I knew Christians who had been as violent as I dealt with on the streets where clients lived. I knew Christians who in their domestic violence sent loved ones to ER’s. I knew Christians who kept simple and common disagreements going until their opponent gave up.

Of those examples the most common fashion of hiding from self I dealt with was found in those who verbally used other’s problems to hide behind. Not a one of those family and work situations where everyone else  truly had problems were my clients clean. My most common clinical struggle was in discovering a suitable fashion help him caught sight of his own faults. Having to do that repeatedly kept bruising my own shin. My deepest struggle, across those years, was learning to tolerate my clients involuntary unearthing of my own commonality with them.

—tomorrow—