healthcare debate

I am glad that during the coming weeks our nation’s healthcare system will be overhauled. I do not wholly support big government, but I’m growing more and more to see unchecked capitalism as evil. Capitalism must run on people acting to their own best interest, which would work fine for a nation of people grounded in love for their fellow man. But let’s face it: we are a nation most firmly grounded in making our own lives as comfortable as we can and keeping away from the riff-raff who interfere with that goal.

Capitalism on a small scale seems like it could work; I actually like it on paper. But capitalism married with globalism is the dangerous terrain we now tread. Big corporations sell products they make as cheaply as possible, which is to say, as environmentally and irresponsibly as possible. But they also sell the lies of consumerism; creating in us a sense of need for their products and the sense that having what they’re selling at tremendous savings will make us happy.

If capitalism has caused us to be self-focused, and unconcerned about our communities, global capitalism has intensified this trend. We now have the capability to live our lives independent of communities, but also to neglect people we never even see, by employing them at sweatshop salaries or by eating the under priced food of their land, both at minimal savings to us. The more globalized the world becomes, the richer we in the developed world become; yet the less cognizant of the effects of our actions.

In our own country, the problem of inequality still plagues us. Again, I get to see the disparities first hand, even as I walk from my healthy, educated home to the homes of my students who have been failed by the poor educational and intimidating health insurance systems. I don’t think equality is just goal for the poor or minorities of our country. We will all be better off the more equality we can achieve. Huge disparities in health or in education like we now see will ultimately create unrest and derision among us.

That a broadening of the government for something like expanding healthcare coverage takes money out of people’s hands and puts it into others’ is okay with me. Living in Little Village, Chicago as a middle classer, I get to see a lot of people who are very rich and a lot of people who are very poor, and I always have the sense that if the rich just knew what the poor endure, they would live differently. But the rich continue to focus on themselves, and I don’t see that trend curbing on a large scale.

So I welcome the news that more people will get healthcare, even if it is at my own expense. I think this government shift that includes healthcare to those cannot get it in on their own is good for all of us.

bellies et cetera

I wrote this on the early morning November 21st. I'm delaying posting it until we officially announce that Beth is pregnant. Beth is pregnant! It is half prayer/half journal entry.

I got a letter from my Grandma Stipp yesterday. I wonder how many more of those I'll get.

Thanksgiving is Thursday. I'm thankful for coffee this morning. I'm thankful for the abundance that I often thoughtlessly consume. I'm thankful for the baby doubling itself in size in Beth's belly as she lies there peaceful in calm. I'm thankful for the lady whose belly it is that bears the next fruit of our love and your love. I'm thankful for the bellies that once carried Beth and me and the bellies that birthed those innocent, unscathed bellies 50 some years ago. I'm thankful for my grandma, whose belly has seen it all, and now functions partially to strengthen her belly laughs, which are straight from the heart, which is to say straight from the belly.

And the belly that bore hers? Whew. I never knew that person - I think maybe I barely remember her. Grandma Remole. I remember Grandpa Remole, who likely rubbed and held that belly in the days before my Grandma's birth and in a time far different from ours.

What did he do for work during the day, the night he came home and planted the seed that kept giving life and that even now is germinating 10 feet from where I sit? Was he tired that night? Hot with passion? Trying to prove himself or please his wife?

Did he drink a cup of coffee the next morning as he sat and thought, and sang a hymn of thanksgiving?

creating a new budget

I'm trying to create a new budget. I'm starting from scratch because I feel led to give more away to the world's very poor, and i've felt led by God to make my budget with the image of a starving child staring me in the face.

So I watched this video.

Then I wept.

Then I watched another video that was less emotionally disturbing mainly because the presenter has such entertaining eyebrows. I think the presenter speaks to my budget making, too. I'm not sure what the eyebrows speak to.

I don't know how my budget numbers will end up, but they will be made with a new heaviness.

classroom quips, 9-12-07

Ismael: hey Vince, spell I CUP

Vince: I (long pause) C (long pause) O...

rethinking city life

We as Americans are an uprooted people. We are disconnected from our families and from any place on earth. This is resultant from and contributive to the exploitive attitude toward the earth and the people around us that characterizes our nation. This is why we middle-classers go to college and then move wherever we want without much consideration of going back home to the place and the people who raised us. This is a brand new phenomenon in world history – that people leave their families during their youngest and most useful years of life and set off on their own. And it is a bad phenomenon. We need one another. Our families need us. My family needs me. My kids need their grandparents, and someday these kids should be using the strength of their youth to care for their grandparents.

Also, we need the earth. We as a people have no idea how to get food from the land. The art of husbandry has been lost on us. We are at the mercy of agribusiness to look after us and they couldn’t care less about us. I was thinking on the way to work this morning that our vast urbanization can’t be sustainable. More than half of the world’s population now lives in an urban area, meaning they don’t grow their own food. I don’t think this can last. I think the urban thrust will eventually lessen as our mental and physical health deteriorates. (I’ve read that studies that have shown that living in the city is actually clinically depressing). The urban setting is so thoroughly un-natural. I walk around and think “acre upon acre of concrete and story upon story of dwelling can’t be what God intended this land to be used for?”

So I feel a need to be in a place less scathed by man. And I feel a need to learn to grow some food because I don’t trust agribusiness. I want my kids to have the option of being farmers if they want to. And I feel the need to be near my family. And there’s one other thing.

I have a longing to go to a place where my family will live for the next 500 years. I want to settle down, and dig roots deeply. I want to buy a house to live in until I die and pass it off to one of my granddaughters to upkeep its land eat its fruit with her husband, or something. I know it’s not likely, but I don’t think the city is much of a place to pass on.

things are bad; light shines through

Things are bad.

Light shines through.

As i think about blogging, and trying to categorize and catalog some thoughts, many of them fall into these containers. The two theses are fed daily by experiences and by the media I consume, and I believe them both deeper by the day.

Things are bad. A mother of a student came into my classroom for the first time since her son joined my class in October. She explained that she sees him only on weekends because she works during the week, and that she already knows all about him. She knows he's impulsive and hits other kids. She has trained him to fight because she knows that we teachers wont protect him. She knows he can't sit still and pushes kids down the stairs on purpose. And she explained that she doesn't punish her son, because, well, he's her son. Also she was trying to hide something.

Light shines through. I spent the afternoon with a 26 year old man and his two year old son, who see each other only 4 court-mandated days a month. The rest of the time the boy stays with his mom, who's strung out on drugs. Taking them home after playing with my kids and their toys, the little boy shouted out in a tone of perfect contentment, "Papi."

Wendell Berry illustrates Things are bad, Light Shines through more beautifully than i've ever seen it in ¨Jayber Crow."

(enjoy this by reading it slowly)

Faith is not necessarily, or not soon, a resting place. Faith puts you out on a wide river in a little boat, in the fog, in the dark. Even a man of faith knows that...we've all got to go through enough to kill us. As a man of faith, I've thought a considerable amount about a friend of mine (imagined, but also real) I call the Man in the Well.

The now wooded, or rewooded, slopes and hollows hereabouts are strewn with abandoned homesteads, the remains of another kind of world. Most of them by now have no buildings left. Everything about them that would rot has rotted. What you find now in those places when you come upon them are the things that were built of stone: foundations, cellars, chimneys, wells. Sometimes the wells are deep, dug to the bedrock and beyond, and walled with rock laid up without mortar. Virtually every rock in a structure like that, if it is built right, is a keystone; it can't move in or out. Those walls, laid underground where there is no freezing and thawing, will last, I guess, almost forever.

Sometimes the well is the only structure remaining, and there will be no visible sign of it. It will be covered with old boards in some stage of decay, green with moss or covered with leaves. It is a perfect trap, and now and then you find that rabbits and groundhogs have blundered in and drowned. A man too could blunder into one.

Imagine a hunter, somebody from a city some distance away, who has a job he doesn't like, and who has come alone out into the country to hunt on a Saturday. It is a beautiful, perfect full day, and the Man feels free. He has left all his constraints and worries and fears behind. Nobody knows where he is. Anybody who wanted to complain or accuse or collect a debt could not find him. The morning that started frosty has grown warm. The sky seems to give its luster to everything in the world. The Man feels strong and fine. His gun lies ready in the crook of his arm, though he really doesn't care whether he finds game or not. He has a sandwich and a candy bar in his coat pocket. And then, not looking where he is going, which is easy enough on such a day, he steps onto the rotten boards that cover one of those old wells, and down he goes.

He disappears suddenly out of the lighted world. He falls so quickly that he doesn't have time even to ask what is happening. He hits water, goes under, comes up, swims, or clings to the wall, inserting his fingers between the rocks. And now, I think, you cannot help imagining the way it would be with him. He looks up and sees how far down he has come. The sky that was so large and reassuring only seconds ago is now just a small blue picture of itself, far away. His first thought is that he is alone, that nobody knows where he is; these two great pleasures that were his freedom have now become his prison, perhaps his tomb. He calls out (for might not somebody chance to be nearby, just as he chanced to fall into the well?) and he hears himself enclosed within the sound of his own calling voice.

How does this story end? Does he save himself? Is he athletic enough, maybe, to get his boots off and climb out, clawing with fingers and toes into the grudging holds between the rocks of the wall? Does he climb up and fall back? Does somebody, in fact, for a wonder, chance to pass nearby and hear him? Does he despair, give up, and drown? Does he, despairing, pray finally the first true prayer of his life?

Listen. there is a light that includes our darkness, a day that shines down even on the clouds. A man of faith believes that the Man in the Well is not lost. He does not believe this easily or without pain, but he believes it. His belief is a kind of knowledge beyond any way of knowing. He believes that the child in the womb is not lost, nor is the man who's work has come to nothing, nor is the old woman forsaken in a nursing home in California. He believes that those who make their bed in Hell are not lost, or those who dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, or the lame man at Bethesda Pool, or Lazarus in the grave, or those who pray, "Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani."

Have Mercy.

classroom quips, 9-6-07

I teach special ed. to 4th and 5th graders. My students say funny things.

Here's one from 9-6-07.


me: You'll understand when you're 27.
Luis: Man, we wont be 27 'til like 2009!