Inspiration

I need a little bit of inspiration in my life.  So, I read up on The Washington Post's coverage of the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington.  One quote I really liked was by historian Richard Hofstadter in Dan Balz's column on the unfinished business of the March: "America is the only country that believes it was born perfect and strives for improvement."

We certainly aren't perfect, but I love us for trying, bless our hearts.  Let's keep on striving to make our Dreams reality, even really big dreams like racial harmony and peace on earth.

Envy

One of my biggest sins is envy.  I envy other people's lives, possessions, looks, careers, ability to successfully apply eye make up, and pretty much anything there is to envy (someday I'll do a post about how Facebook exacerbates this problem, but that day is not today).  Likewise, I think that one of our biggest political sins is envy. 

We envy our political opponent when he/she wins, and thus do everything we can to convince ourselves that they are evil or voters just didn't really understand what that person stood for.  We are convinced that somewhere, someone is gaming the system and getting more than their "fair share," and that thought convinces us that all people accepting any form of assistance from the government are reprobate bums.  We tell ourselves that rich people are tax cheats and exploiters of the middle class, and justify raising their taxes while keeping our own low. 

We envy success or passion or any number of admirable qualities, forgetting that the envy just makes us less likely to achieve things we want.  Envy can be debilitating because it causes us to waste time and energy worrying about other people.  I don't really have a solution to all this (if I did it wouldn't be one of my biggest sins), but just thought it worth discussing.

Do you agree or disagree?  How does envy manifest itself in politics or your life today?

Faith

Recently I've been thinking about faith.  What does it mean to have faith?  A lot of it, in both a religious and political context, has to do with hoping for things that we can't see.  It takes faith in the system to cast a ballot and trust it will be counted.  It takes faith to believe in a God you can't see.  Faith is a prerequisite to both democracy and religion, but it seems to be undermined by a lot of forces in our society. 

Faith in the media is undermined when pundits on the left and right shout at each other instead of focusing on the truly important stories.  Trust in our elected leaders is undermined when we can't let them operate in broad daylight because then they won't be able to talk freely.  When people we have judged to be guilty walk free, we lose a little faith in the impartiality of our justice system. 

This isn't to say that bind faith is needed.  I believe God gave us brains and rationality so we could use them, and of course a healthy dose of skepticism is, well, healthy.  Political tyrants and religious cult leaders alike feed off the passive believers.  But the opposite of blind faith is equally as dangerous, it's a stubborn refusal to trust others, to trust God (and His timing), or to hope.  That kind of cynicism is a cancer on the body politic.

Emily Dickinson wrote that "hope is a thing with feathers," and our society needs more of that flight-enabling quality.  I need more of it, too.

Political Science

I can't remember if I've shared this before on the blog, but here's one of my favorite political songs, simply because I can't make the words of the blog post I want to write now.  Hope it brightens your Monday and makes you laugh a bit.

Randy Newman, "Political Science"

My Most Irrational Fear

Lately I feel like I haven't had much new to say about politics or religion, so I haven't been posting much. I feel like everything I want to do or say has already been done 38 times before (giving me more in common with the House Republicans than anyone would have ever thought - zing!*).  Perhaps it's second term blues, looming work craziness, or any other various reasons, but I feel off kilter.

So tonight, I wish to share with you my most irrational fear.  And it is this:



That's right, I have a serious problem, folks.  I have a fear of dropping things in gutters.  For realsies.  Constantly, I have a paranoia that I am about to drop something valuable into the sewer, never to see it again.  It manifests itself in strange ways.  If I have my keys or purse with me, I will literally move these items to the other side of my body to shield them from falling into the sewer.  Even if I am several feet away from the gutter opening.  This probably stems from me dropping a Peter Rabbit movie into the rain gutter (ACCIDENTALLY!) when I was younger than 5 years old.  But since then, it has simply become one of my irrational quirks of personality.  It's why I sometimes think of myself like Jane Austen's Mr. Bennet: "...so odd a mixture of quick parts, sarcastic humor, reserve, and caprice..." that the experience of (slightly more than) three and twenty years would be insufficient to understand my character.

Now please, could someone suggest a good blogging topic?

*Seriously, the House has voted 38 times to repeal Obamacare.  If someone can explain to me what the point of that is, I will gladly pack up my pencils and go home from blogging forever.

Thanks, Mary and Liz!

So often the contributions of women are not appreciated or remembered.  That's why I really loved this post on the LDS history website about Mary Whitmer.  I can't really tell why it moved me to tears, but I loved knowing about her contribution that literally held things together.  175 years ago today, not too many years after Mary Whitmer hosted Joseph Smith, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott essentially started the women's movement in America by holding a convention on equal rights in Seneca Falls, New York.  Things have gotten much better for women since then, but I'm grateful for the contributions of the Marys and the Elizabeths to get us where we are.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton is one of my heroines.  In honor of the anniversary of the start of the Seneca Falls Convention today, I'll share this quote that I got from Twitter:

Thanks, Liz!  Thanks, Mary!

Criminal Tragedy

Per the most reliable source available to me as a non-lawyer (Wikipedia), second degree murder is a murder that is not premeditated.  Murder is further defined as the unlawful intentional killing of another human being.  However, in the US we have chosen to add a secondary category of "manslaughter" which, when referring to "voluntary manslaughter" is killing without premeditation.  The biggest news story this weekend was the Zimmerman trial verdict.  George Zimmerman shot and killed Trayvon Martin on February 26, 2012 in Sanford, Florida.  Zimmerman had called 911 and was told to NOT follow the suspicious person he reported to police.  Martin was unarmed.  These facts are not in dispute.  What was hotly contested over the course of the trial was whether Zimmerman was guilty of murder or manslaughter, or whether he acted in self-defense.

In the US, we have laws requiring that a suspect's guilt be proved beyond a reasonable doubt.  In my mind, there's no doubt that George Zimmerman was an idiot.  And while I can't judge his motivations, it's certainly possible that the only reason Zimmerman viewed Martin as a threat was the fact that Martin was black and wore a hoodie (and IF that's the case, it's despicable).  But to focus on this one case overlooks a larger important point.  Since the events of February 26, 2012, over 30,000 people in the U.S. have died at the hands of a gun.*  That's an average of 3 per hour.  The rate of death in the U.S. by gun is exponentially higher than every other industrialized nation.  In the category of industrialized nations, America's gun death rate of 10.6 per 100,000 is followed by Finland at 4.6 - less than half!  It's no coincidence that the U.S. has 88.9 guns per 100 people.  The next closest country, India, has FOUR per person.

It's a tragedy that Trayvon Martin is dead, but it is CRIMINAL that we are not doing anything to reduce gun violence in this country.  George Zimmerman successfully argued self-defense and was declared not guilty.  But whether or not he spent time in jail, the truth is that gun violence is a preventable problem.  We can blame politics, blame the media, or blame George Zimmerman,  but it's a colossal problem that is bigger than any one case.  We need to explore "stand your ground" laws, "concealed carry" gun laws, and other laws on the books that contribute to this problem.  We need to examine our hearts, and banish any latent racism we find therein.  It's going to take all of us.

*We don't have published statistics yet for 2012 or 2013, but as over 30,000 people were killed with guns in 2010 and 2011, I feel like this is a rational assumption.