We saw “The Hurt Locker” over the weekend and I came out of the theater thinking of enrolling in a non-violence training program.  I found the movie to be among the saddest I’ve ever seen.  It centered on an explosive ordnance disposal (EOD) team in Iraq whose mission was to find and either disarm or detonate improvised explosive devices (IED) set out as traps against American forces in the country.  The soldiers performing this frightening task were all members of the non-commissioned force and all seemed to come from the lesser educated parts of our society.  The movie steered clear of politics but I find it near impossible to not think about the fabricated reasons for our presence there.

There would be many fewer IED’s in Iraq and Afghanistan if our armed forces were not there and these hideous weapons kill scores of innocent citizens of these countries every month.  When will it stop and who will stop it?  I am becoming more and more convinced that adherence to non-violence principles is the only way and who better to learn them from than Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King.

“I cannot teach you violence, as I do not myself believe in it.  I can only teach you not to bow your heads before anyone even at the cost of your life.”  Mohandas Gandhi

Mom and Pop McGee lived in a ground floor apartment on Highland Avenue, also in Jersey City.  I remember their apartment as being dark and dingy and that it smelled of stale booze and a hint of urine.  I didn’t like going there.

Aunt Sue’s house on Ridgewood Avenue in Glen Ridge always smelled of cookies or cakes baking in the oven.  It was a beautiful house, a brick center hall colonial with plenty of room and beautiful gardens.  During the fall the smell of burning leaves there was always a treat.  I loved that house and the rooms I used to explore.

The house I grew up in on Ege Avenue in Jersey City, and was always ashamed of, brings no particular smell to mind.  However, when Mom washed the sheets and hung them on the line to dry I used to put my face in them and feel the cold cotton and breathe the clean smell with delight. 
 

Now, being the external approval junkie that I am, I love comments.  I even love them when they disagree with a point of view I might hold so please comment if only to let me know that your receiving my occasional missives.

A few weeks ago I noticed that there were three banks right next door to each other, occupying beautiful buildings on South Street in Morristown, New Jersey. I thought it odd and began to wonder why. This morning I took a photo of three banks in one image on South Street and, admittedly, I had to widen the lens a bit but it’s amazing to me that they would be so close together. After taking the shot I began to wonder how many banks there were on South Street and the Morristown Green. How does 14 sound? Peapack Gladstone Bank, TD Bank, Capital One Bank, Somerset Hills Bank, Bank of America, PNC Bank, Citi, Provident Bank, HSBC Bank, Wachovia Bank, Valley National Bank, Union Center Bank and 2 Chase Bank branches are all there in this short ¾ mile stretch.   

A few years ago Rosie and I were doing some Christmas shopping in a high end jewelry store. I remember feeling a bit low when I noticed an attractive, confident looking middle aged man at the other end of the counter. He was very well dressed and I noticed that he had on a beautiful pair of ankle length boots. A familiar feeling of “not-good-enoughness” welled up in me and I wanted a pair of boots like that. They might just do it…..might just make me OK. As we were leaving the store I happened to look down at my feet and was astounded to see that I was wearing the exact same boots. I told Rosie and we laughed at my age-old self condemning reflex which, thankfully, has been dissipating albeit very slowly for a long time.

I’ve always loved clothes but I have to admit that my primary motivation when buying them has been to look better than I think I do and to show the world that I’m good enough. Frequently I’d see someone who looks well put together and buy similar clothes thinking that they’ll complete me but some time in the next day or week or month I’d see something else and the nonsense would begin again.

This feeling of inadequacy and its attendant need for some kind of disguise has been lessening over the last few years through my attempts at awareness of my thoughts. The simple action of paying of attention to the things running around in my head has somehow restrained my former automatic responses. I continue to see people who look real sharp and my reflexive thought is to try to be like them but I act on the thoughts less and less.

Sounds like a silly statement; don’t we all know what we know? Actually, in this society it’s getting harder and harder for me to believe that what I know is true. How can it be true when the powers that be know the opposite? Can I be right when I’ve lived most of my life in self doubt?

I remember a conversation I was having with a couple of friends about 2 years ago. I was obviously ranting about some terrible trait of our American society when one of the others said “you can’t blame all of the world’s ills on the U.S.” I can still feel the shame I felt when he said that and I stopped talking. We were at a New Year’s celebration so I just joined another pocket of conversation. Clearly I haven’t forgotten that exchange and have thought about it often over the last 24 months. I guess I was, in a way, pinning the world’s problems on us and my sense is that I wasn’t too far off the mark.

I hear a lot about our American values and how we are the shining city on the hill and it rings false to me. We certainly are not the cause of all the ills in the world but are certainly not a shining beacon either.

Back to I know what I know; I know that the poor people who bought houses they could not afford are not the cause of the current financial debacle. I believe that a primary was the requirement of the moneyed classes to achieve a greater return on their investments than was offered by historically low interest rates. This pressure provided opportunity to the “financial engineers” to securitize more and more debt in more and more complicated ways. The thinking was that if you wrapped some prime meat around some scraps and fed it through the grinder a few times you’d come up with a product that looked pretty good. Turned out not to be true so why not blame it on the poor who have been told forever that the key to the American dream is home ownership.

We are told that Goldman Sachs paid back the bail out money but that turns out not to be completely true. Their bets against billions of dollars worth of collateralized mortgage obligations were paid off by us, the taxpayers, through the cashier’s window called AIG. Why didn’t these Goldman guys know that AIG couldn’t pay? They had access to the financials. AIG is a public company. My sense is that they (Goldman and others) knew they were “too big to fail” and that their boys in Treasury and the SEC would ensure that congress would agree to back them.

We were told that we invaded Iraq because of Osama Bin Laden when we all know that our only interests in the Middle East are oil and Israel.

Probably sounds like I hate my country but that is certainly not the case. I love the freedoms afforded me because of an accident of birth but I fear that, as corporate power increases, those freedoms will diminish. I am often asked how I would like to have a government bureaucrat involved in my health care decisions. My answer is that I always, always prefer government bureaucrats to corporate employees whose company’s primary obligation is to their shareholders and whose basic function is cost containment and risk avoidance.

I love the freedom that allows me to write and publish this kind of writing and I also consider it my responsibility to do so. We private citizens must either speak up or suffer the consequences of diminished freedoms as the distance between the poor and the powerful grows too wide to overcome.

"Whatever you do may seem insignificant to you, but it is most important that you do it."...Gandhi

Recent reminders of the evil that men do and the resurrections that sometimes follow have been appearing to me often these past few weeks. We watched “The Secret Life of Words” on Saturday evening which deals with some of the horrors perpetrated on women during the Bosnian wars. The woman portrayed in the movie seems to have had her humanity almost stripped from her but, thankfully, allows her remaining courage to reach out and achieve a kind of redemption.

I’m reading “Strength in What Remains”, a true story by Tracy Kidder about a young man who lived through the genocide that took place between the Hutu and Tutsi people in Burundi and Rwanda and who, through perseverance and the generosity of others, gets to the USA and becomes a doctor. He eventually goes back to Burundi and establishes a clinic…..another beautiful redemption story.

I was feeling down and angry when I started writing this. I was looking for a way out of those feelings knowing they were not productive and might just lead me toward a “what’s the use” attitude. Movies like “The Secret Life of Words” and “Adam”, another beautiful example of people overcoming tremendous odds and books like “Strength in What Remains” are necessary for me to stay afloat, heading in a right direction.

I have been incensed about the outsized power of major corporations and banks in our society. I believe that our government has ceded its responsibility to these inhuman entities. I say inhuman because they make decisions about people’s lives and never have to face those whose lives they interrupt and often destroy, with their decisions to foreclose on a mortgage or deny a surgery. When I was a youth we lived in a country which had an economy; now it seems we live in an economy which uses the laws of that country to its sole advantage.

These are difficult times, wars everywhere, bigotry reigns, nations trying to build nuclear bombs, religions fighting for supremacy, profits at any cost, unfair distribution of wealth, eye to eye communication dying and being replaced with texting and tweeting, etcetera, etcetera. It’s enough to put a cynic like me in perpetual rage, casting aspersions everywhere and accomplishing nothing. I’ve even begun to be angry at President Obama but thankfully I listened to his health insurance speech last night and my faith in him was rekindled. I’ve read Tracy Kidder and seen those movies and I love the many quotes of Gandhi that I try, albeit failingly, to live by. Today I’m going to do those seemingly insignificant things because they are important; important because they help me to feel hopeful and they do send ripples out in ever widening circles that may do some good. At least I know they’ll do more good than a diatribe.

True or False

I have no emeralds.
I was told this about them by a woman
who said someone had told her. True or false,
I have held my own palmful of bright breakage
from a truth too late. I know the principle.

Some 20 years ago when I first read this my only conscious thought was the true or false question. Not until some time later did I realize that it didn’t matter because I have no emeralds either. I believe this poem is one of the things that has helped me to treat those I love as best I can so I never again have to confront a palmful of bright breakage

I attend an early morning group a few times each week with others who share my desire to not drink alcohol. We meet in a beautiful, old mansion that has been used for the last few decades by the local Unitarian Church. We rent a beautiful room from them for our meetings and they also allow us to use their very ample parking lot.

For the past few weeks there has been a car parked on the street outside the building and in order to pass it to get to the parking lot one has to go into the oncoming traffic lane. Now, admittedly, this is not a heavily used road but this car does present the potential for an accident. I have known whose car this is and I have been incensed that the owner could be so inconsiderate. I have also assumed that this person was avoiding the gravel parking lot in order not to have her shoes damaged while walking from the lot to the meeting.

I have been wanting to say something to her but I was afraid that I might look foolish confronting such a trifling problem but every time I saw that car I got a bit hotter. One of my father’s favorite lines was; “we’ll have no privileged characters in this house” as he was castigating one of us about some item of behavior he didn’t like. So I pretty naturally get my dander up when I see someone acting like a “privileged character” even though I’m sure I violate the rule often.

This morning as I was walking from the parking lot to the meeting the parker was coming from her car and I said; so you’re the one whose car forces me to go into the oncoming lane when I come here (not admitting that I have known all along whose car it is). She said; “I don’t want to ruin my shoes” and I could feel my anger rising to the point that I went mute. She than said, sarcastically, “good morning sunshine” and I don’t think I replied.

That mute thing happens often when I’m in a verbal confrontation. I say that I’m afraid that I’ll get too aggressive and that’s partially true but my real fear is that I might lose the argument and look foolish. Feeling that I might look foolish is terrifying for me. It brings up all my shame issues and I feel like that shy, overweight little guy who thought he was a coward. I know now that he was wrong but every now and then I cause a situation like this morning and I’m 9 years old again and looking for a place to hide.

There is a spiritual axiom that says; “When I am disturbed, no matter the reason, there is something wrong with me”.

Cynical people are considered to be deeply distrustful, not in one area or another but in general. I have been called a cynic by many and I wear the title proudly when it comes to the corporate rulers of our country but I am definitely not a cynic in the broad sense of the word. I have faith in myself and, more often than not, in human nature.

George Bernard Shaw said that “the power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who haven’t got it”. Now I can’t claim that my observation regarding the takeover of our country by major corporations and banks is completely accurate but I believe it. I am a bit more than a casual observer of the goings on in Washington and I know that our representatives are being influenced by those they are supposed to be monitoring. Why is the FDA run by big food and pharma people? Why is the SEC run by retired stock brokers?

I know why! It’s because the elected folks in Washington have ceded their responsibility to the industries they’re supposed to be regulating while telling us that these businesses are so complicated that the only people who can control them are those who construct the complications. What utter nonsense. If it’s too complicated to understand, simplify it. If it’s too big to fail shrink it. What’s so difficult?

Regarding health care, why not a single payer system? I know why! It’s because the insurance and drug companies own Washington. They say they love capitalism but they really don’t. The capitalism I’ve been a part of for more than 40 years thrives on competition and these cowards are afraid of competing with the government because they know they’ll get their clocks cleaned. These insurance companies (I refuse to call them health care companies) are not even insurance companies. They are a group of rate setters whose perfect world would be zero claims. That’s why they don’t want you if you’re sick. That’s why they lie about the Canadian system where all people have access to care.

I’m going to continue to rail against these greedy people who call themselves our representatives and to look for ways to change the direction of this once wonderful nation. We used to be able to recognize our sins and make corrections but as we give up our rights to these corporate behemoths the changes we need to make will become far beyond our reach and we will go the way of all previous empires.

“Each well struck golf shot strikes a balance between the conscious and the unconscious. This balance seems to occur and doesn’t appear to be able to be summoned; it must simply be allowed. All we can do is set the stage.” I wrote this last year while thinking about the ingredients of a good shot and the critical importance of the set-up; the position of the ball relative to the feet, the grip, the flex in the knees, the spine angle and most of all the state of the mind.

Golfers often say that the game is a microcosm for life and perhaps this is what they mean. Golf results are dependent on preparation and state of mind and so is life.

I found early in life that state of mind was almost always dependent on preparation. I remember the days when I attended class actually having done my homework. I was confident on those days and looked forward to pop quizzes or questions from the teacher. The other days, days when I hadn’t done the assignments, were uncomfortable and fear filled.

I’ve also learned that preparation, necessary though it is, doesn’t guarantee the result we’re looking for. We’re simply in charge of the process and the results are absolutely out of our control. Preparation is that thing that increases the odds of a favorable outcome. So as a former Boy Scout I think I’ll try to live by their motto, “Be Prepared”.

One of the many benefits that I have received as a result of being ashamed of myself is that I shudder at the thought of ever being intrusive…..although I’m sure that I often am. The idea that someone would tell me that I’m invading their space or interrupting them scares me, for that person would be recognizing me as a kind of boor, which is among the many unflattering names I’ve called myself during this lifetime. The other side of this ridiculous coin is that if someone intrudes into my space or interrupts me I get an interior feeling of rage which, thankfully, I almost never express. It feels like the intruder believes that I am irrelevant, that I can be ignored, that I have no value, also beliefs I have held about myself. But these beliefs are mine and no one else is allowed to know these things about me and when it seems that they do I want to hurt them.

I attend an Iyengar Yoga class on Tuesday mornings and have been doing so for years. I enjoy this class and find it helpful to my physical and mental well being. Most of the people in the class have also been attending for a long time and it has become a comfortable place with most of us occupying the same floor space week after week and year after year. We arrange our spaces with a yoga mat, a bolster, some blankets, a belt and a few blocks for support during some of the standing poses. My friend John and I are normally the only men in the class which is quite pleasant from both a visual and competitive point of view.

This morning a new guy joined the group (hopefully for only one week) and squeezed himself between me and the person next to me. I immediately didn’t like him which is a typical feeling I get when someone new joins a group that I’m a part of. I was prepared to ignore him but thought that might be a bit obtuse so I said good morning. He is a very tall man and thin with a mustache and his shorts were very brief and he was being intrusive so I liked him even less.

The class began and I forgot about him for a while but then he started taking my “stuff”. First he took one of the blankets that I had gotten for myself and then decided that he could use the belt I had gotten for the class. Now understand that these implements are not mine per se but I had gotten them from the storage shelves and intended to use them for certain poses.

The class was ruined for me. I wanted to say something to him but didn’t know how. I felt like he believed me to be irrelevant and he occupied my mind for the entire class. An aim of yoga is to go inward but my focus was on this tall, skinny, mustached, invading creep who was taking my toys.

Chronologically I’m a long way from being two years old but sometimes my thoughts are right there in the first year of pre school. There’s a lesson here that I’ve learned before but I’ll just have to learn it again.

Actually, maybe it should read I don’t believe. There, I said it, I don’t believe in god; that is I don’t believe in your god or your god. I believe what I believe and what I believe is that the gods of convention have been manufactured by the powerful to keep the people afraid and controllable.

I was raised in the Catholic Church and I believed in it’s tenets for much of my life but I had never actually thought about that which I was taught. As I moved through life and began to question I remained faithful to the Church but, over time, it became more and more difficult. I found myself questioning things like the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, the virginal status of Mary and the divinity of Jesus. None of it made sense to me and, actually thinking of Jesus as a man and not a god made him a much more attractive figure for me. The gospels say that he was a man who roamed the near east preaching a message of love. He was castigated mightily by the powerful of his time because his message was so attractive to the people struggling under the collective thumbs of the powerful.

Now, about what I believe. I’ve spent most of my life trying to be like other people, trying to believe what they believe, to wear what they wear, to read what they read, to drive what they drive, in short, to be anything but Philip J. McGee. I married to become a part of a “better” family when the family I was born into was terrific. I believed that if I could earn enough money all would be well. I never reached the monetary stratosphere but I certainly had enough but, alas enough was never enough. I spent most of my youth being profoundly ashamed of myself and never questioning why. Actually I didn’t question much. I just went along basically doing what I was told and believing what I was taught. I remember being told that an altar boy once took a consecrated host home and cut it with a knife which caused it to bleed profusely and I have to admit that I believed it.

I don’t remember when I finally began to question the basic tenets of Catholicism but I believe it was around 20 years ago and it had to do with the question of choice regarding abortion. Initially it made sense to me that abortion should certainly be legal when the pregnancy was the result of rape or incest or when the mother’s life was in danger. And as I thought about it more I came to believe that, although I deplored abortion, a woman’s decision was none of my business. It is her body and who am I, particularly considering my gender, to question what she does with it. And, horror of horrors, I also believe in euthanasia.

After many years of introspective thought I finally believe in myself and my connection to all other beings and I intend to promulgate that belief. I believe that violence is always wrong and is always the result of fear although I don’t deny that I am capable of it. After all, I am certainly capable of fear so why not it’s child. I believe in the fundamental goodness of mankind and I want to spend the rest of my life learning more about that goodness.

I am a small business person and, although I’m only a sample of one, I’m sick and tired of hearing conservative politicians talk about how the Obama tax plan will hurt me. I have no problem paying taxes because when I pay them it means that I’ve made a profit. Over the years it’s become clearer and clearer to me that major corporations only want us small business types around so they can push some of their expenses off on us.

Each year the so called “Health Care Industry” which has nothing to do with health care but is actually a group of insurance companies whose goal is to pay as few claims as they can get away with. As a small business the increase sought by our health insurance carrier each year over the last ten or so years has been about 18%. Now I don’t know for sure but I suspect that doesn’t happen to major corporations. My suspicion is that we, the small business community, make up for the increases not pushed onto the major corporations.

As a small business person I’m in constant contact with the people who work in my company and I care about them. I know that without them I would not have a business nor would I be able to live the life style that I do. I am grateful to them and I am told they are grateful to me and my partner as well. My partner and I do not earn the monstrous multiples of the average salaries of our workers. We’re not heroes but we would consider it unconscionable to earn 50 times the wage of our lowest paid worker.

We are entrepreneurs and capitalists, not socialists. We simply know that every success we enjoy has been the result of people in our company doing a good job for our client base.

I love what the Obama administration is attempting to do. I do not consider it insidious to attempt, through tax law, to modestly redistribute the wealth of our country. I do not consider the word entitlement to be a curse. I want the economically disadvantaged in our world to have a “preferential option”. I’m a red blooded, liberal, American business person and I say to our President; go get ‘em Mr. President, I’m rooting for you.

“What if they gave a war and nobody came?” was a popular slogan of the movement against the American war in Viet Nam during the sixties. It was and still is pilloried as a stupid, sentimental piece of drivel by the right. To me it’s always been an interesting thought. I know that it’s highly unlikely but what if two heads of state declared a war on each other and no soldiers showed up? Would the two top dogs square off and have at it? Would they perhaps recognize that no war was going to happen and wake up and reach an understanding? The two most influential proponents of non-violence in the 20th century were Mohandas Gandhi and the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. Would they have showed up for the war? Somehow I imagine that if there were thousands or millions of Gandhi’s and Kings war would be no more.

There is a disgraceful situation happening right now in Mexico. There is a drug cartel which is terrorizing the people, killing some 6,000 of them over the past year with guns largely imported from the United States, while exporting billions of dollars worth of illegal drugs north to our country. This cartel, just like the one that decimated Colombia a couple of decades ago is on the verge of controlling Mexico. They are outgunning the police and buying whomever they need to enable them to continue their murderous operations.

We have been waging a “War on Drugs” for many years but that “war” focuses only on the suppliers. We burn poppy fields and marijuana farms and use our military to help foreign governments against the cartels. And, if we are successful in one country they just pop up in another. It has become a deadly game of whack-a mole.

We are a capitalist country and yet we seem to ignore the demand side of the drug equation focusing only on the supply side. On the demand side we simply and insultingly tell people to “Just Say No”. One could argue, if one were a cynic, that we don’t want to interrupt the demand side. It looks like it’s OK with us.

What if there were drugs for sale on the streets of the USA and nobody wanted to buy them? What would happen to the cartels? They would have no market and they would go away. Is this another simplistic, sentimental question or is it worth looking at?

President Obama talked brilliantly about the need for education improvement in our nation and I couldn’t agree more. I know lots of beautiful, smart inner city kids who will have a much better shot at staying drug free if their educational opportunities are improved. And if they remain drug free and their children have drug free parents they will also stay clean and, over time, the market for drugs will dry up and become less attractive to the criminals who are always looking for ways to profit from offering the poor in spirit a way to get high. There just might come a day when no one wants an illicit, mind altering drug.