The Grift is On

I took a break in the middle of my workday to do some much needed grocery shopping. Though cloudy outside, the temperature was pleasant and it was nice just to get out for some air.

I parked at my favorite grocery store and exited my vehicle. 

I was lost in thought – which I have to confess is rather typical. 

A man came up to me. He was shorter than I am, he was smiling and looked slightly bewildered.

“Excuse me, ma’am. I’m not asking for money, I’m just lost. Can you tell me where I am?”

“Well, you are on Broadway in the city of O-----.”

“Could you tell me what part of town this is? I am from South Africa and I don’t know the area.”

“I’m sorry, but I don’t know what this neighborhood is called,” said I, longing to be helpful, but also trying to extract my grocery list from my pocket. “How did you get here?”

“I took a cab from San Francisco Airport. Look, here is my receipt!” The gentleman said, holding out a handwritten receipt made in the amount of $500.00.

He put his flip-phone into my hand, “Could you speak to my attorney?”

And thus began the grifters’ confidence game. I’ll briefly outline the rest of the encounter. The “attorney” spoke to me, saying that he wanted me, “the mark,” to ask his “client” a few questions because he, the “attorney” was having trouble understanding his “client’s broken English” (a problem I was not experiencing; the “client” spoke clearly and without any accent, and the phone reception was astonishingly clear for the “attorney,” who I can only assume was in a parked car, nearby). The second question is the one that clarified the entire situation for me:

“Can you ask him if he completed his assignment?” 

I posed the peculiar question and the man replied by opening the shoulder bag he carried, revealing what appeared to be a huge wad of cash.

At that point, I spoke into the phone with no particular inflection to my voice, “I am handing the phone back to your client. You can assist him from here on.”

Having handed the phone to the “client,” I made purposely for the door of the grocery store. 

(I may seem distracted, but I didn’t fall off a turnip truck.)

//

This is The Classic Grift, my friends, as depicted in “The Sting” and “Paper Moon” and any number of other films and TV Detective shows; these guys were "confidence men." It is so classic, it even has it's own name; it is called "the Pigeon Drop."

I’m taking the time to tell you about my experience because we are living in remarkably difficult times. People are pushed to desperation; we’re all distracted and extremely busy trying to keep a standard of living, if we can. The UN has reported that the United States has the most inequity of any developed nation; U.S. policies benefit the rich and exacerbate poverty. More than 40 million citizens live in poverty, in this great country of ours. Desperate people might well go along with the type of patter I was treated to today, and give up their precious money as “collateral” or “security” towards a potential for great riches.

But let me just say, the bills you see in the bag are not real; the stacks of bills are just plain paper.

And let me just say, don’t offer to drive any “lost client” anywhere, especially not to the nearest ATM.

And let me just say, don’t get into a car with any “lost client” and his “attorney” or some “cab/Uber/Lyft driver” who might show up on the scene.

And let me just say, there is the possibility of any number of really, really bad scenarios that can spin out from what seems like an innocent encounter with a lost waif in a parking lot. And all of the really, really bad things would happen only to you.

The best thing you can do is speak in an easy, friendly manner, turn and walk away casually, but purposefully, toward the nearest open door. Once inside, report what is happening and/or call the police. Don’t waste time trying to take a photo, just get yourself away.

Of course, by the time you report it, the individuals will have made their escape…

//

Addendum.

This entire silly episode of my life started in the most innocuous fashion. I thought the guy was asking for directions, until it became apparent that the man and his confederate on the flip phone were angling for something else. 

Will this experience stop me from giving directions to people who request them on crowded sidewalks and in busy parking lots because this happened? No, I will not stop doing so.

Why did I write about it? Well, I learned about such scams on a rainy Friday in Junior High School, when the social studies teacher decided to show an old black and white film that talked all about and depicted such scams, followed by a class discussion. I don't know if that film still exists (perhaps social studies teachers have a newer film to show!). 

Can you find out about scams on the internet? Yes. But most people would not take the time to look into it because most people are of the mind that "It couldn't ever happen to me," "I would never fall for that," "I'm too intelligent to be tricked." 

And that, dear friends, is precisely why I wrote about it. We all believe we are so intelligent and so on guard at all times that we could never fall for some scammer's tale. We would never be so gullible.

But even the most vigilant of us are basically trusting individuals, happy to step into the breach to help strangers with minor difficulties. Grifters capitalize on the best part of human nature to gain confidence; this is why they are called "confidence people." Once they have hooked your natural good will, they then dangle a carrot called "greed." 

It is a simple psychological game such people run, and it is unfortunate how successful the game can be. This game does not seem intrusive, not at all, unlike the continual barrage of robocalls from the non-existent "Microsoft Refund Center."

I had my early lesson in critical thinking over 40 years ago, and this incident happened only a few days ago. I'm glad I had the lesson back then, and was able to recall it when a stranger flashed what looked like (but most certainly was not) a bag full of money at me.

I walked away. 

Rise Up And Ride

~ to celebrate Lawrence Ferlinghetti on his 100^thbirthday

We gather
We gather around
and while around We gather
We reflect in the moment
Our reflections remotely interior
reflections that ripple on our surfaces
with experience and emotion
expectation going unspoken
passing traumas unconfessed
tattooed on every cell of blood
that roams the living heart
teased by inner drums
to dance

We gather
We gather around
and while We gather
Our reflections speak
riffing off Our rippling shores
through Our interior drumbeats
and Our drumming fills the space
with that intricate ostinato called
Our Shared Humanity

The Prophet
softly approaches
reading the crowd
feeling the bed of drums
and the spaces between each beat
the World of hurt and of love
the crashing of the seas
the winds of time
motes of the dust of an hundred years
—and more, perhaps—
bounce in the City Lights,
and out of the depths
of these waiting primordial rhythms
he speaks

Friends, Poets, Countryfolk,
quothe he,
There is nothing I can say
that you are not breathing right now
into the outermost continuities of space
—Our collected vibrations are heavy
their mass carries weight yet gives light
unto those of us who are trapped in the night
the collective sighs of We gathered Here
join with those of a Nation and a World
clamoring to settle into any groove
that will kick the beat forward

I say to You
“Kick it forward”
and I’m not talking about any can
but can-do
though any can will do
and be suffered to be cycled
and can be recycled
if you will
into the latest new case for Now

Because Pandora opened the can
all that spilled out is a reckoning
that can only be assuaged
in the timeless Era of Jazz
in the balm of the Beat
in the work of weaving

among hearts heaving
in the joy of healing
in the heat of the night

I say it again
“Kick it forward”
and that means You
You’ve got to swing into the groove
of that bed laid in long ago,
now is the time for listening
to hear rags and blues glistening
in singing and dancing
with canons and fugues
that RISE UP

Round while We gather
be here and hear, Dears,
hear the beating of All Your Drums
gather your precious song of Humanity
Kick it all forward into your swing
and into it find your groove;
join the ostinato traffic lane
and enter the wave dancing
RISE UP
and once arisen
RIDE!

© 2019 by Elisabeth T. Eliassen

Final Walk - A Good Friday Meditation

After the dust and palm frond waves,
no steps seem more daunting,
even though each one forward paves,
despite bullies and faithless taunting,
a way, of being and living, that saves.

Servant leadership nixes vaunting
whose lie of pride and wealth behaves
so conspicuously mean and flaunting
— but all who would deny, poor knaves,
might ultimately be left empty and wanting
once redeeming love frees all of us slaves.

Good Friday is a day intended introspection rather than guilt. A newspaper headline about this day might read, “Man Acting Suspiciously Executed in Name of Empire,” and that brings it forward a few thousand years, doesn’t it?

I mean, why kill someone like the man from Nazareth? Why not sentence him to jail? After all, he did advise people that they should give Caesar what was due.

Well, it is all about the meta-message, and that was in part about upending the social strata. But that wasn’t the whole story.

Jesus tried to communicate to people that nothing about their lives was inevitable, unless they allowed it to be so. Oppression at the hands of functionaries of the Empire was the least of the difficulty. Tribalism and taboos; orthodoxy and the inevitable hypocrisy that accompanies that way of being and thinking; the creation and maintenance of ghettos—and by that I don’t just mean the ghettos that are imposed to shut people in (those are very real and devastating), but the ones we willingly create to shut people out. Jesus was trying to let us know that the fastest way to redress societal ills is not to blame, condemn, and fight, but to mitigate, ameliorate and serve.

Said another way, whenever we complain, act out or wait for someone else to solve a problem, we’re not writing ourselves into the solution; further, we are diminishing ourselves. This is not at all to say that organization and protest can be minimized to “complaint” or “acting out.” Jesus and his followers were construed to be rabble-rousers, but when they went into communities, their intent was to serve, and serve they did.

Some tried to say that what Jesus and his followers were doing was illegal, and if there was indeed a real trial, Jesus would have been convicted based on court legalities. In truth, what Jesus suggested is that to do the right thing, we are sometimes forced to act outside human law, especially where it is constructed to ensnare and weaken people in ways that serve no positive societal purpose (a real example: A court demanded a million dollars in bail for the release of a transient accused of arson. What purpose did that serve? There was no one to come forward for the man; the bail might even have been as low as $10K, and this man would have been stuck in jail.) or that are divisive toward the community.

When I reflect on the gospel message, I see that Jesus is saying we cannot use “the system” as an excuse. If “the system” needs fixing, we have to do it ourselves, even if our DIY is a “work around.” The can is kicked forward because the task of dismantling and reassembling the Tower of Babel is too daunting. So, what happens in the meanwhile? Nothing? Status quo? Complacency? All we like sheep, awaiting a new shepherd?

No. The message is clear and irrefutable: There is no easy way out of the thicket of wrongs and the legalese of inequity, but love finds the way. Love can only find the way if we have compassion and if we truly care about and are empowered toward just outcomes. This is such an outcome driven world, and yet so few people invest in the good outcome unless “good outcome” means wealth and status.

Jesus took the final walk trying to awaken us to a desire for the “right outcome.” If we want “right outcomes,” we need to invest self into the equation. Denials and excuses don’t cut it in the Kingdom of Heaven, which is here, inside each of us, and all around us in this life we are living, right now. The charge to “love thy neighbor” is a call to be and do the controversial (loudly or even secretly, if necessary), to buck the system, to do the right thing, the just thing, the very best thing.

Don’t let the dream die. Go in peace, my friends, to love and to serve.

© 2018 by Elisabeth T. Eliassen

To Be or Not To Be ... Anthropocentric

Are we for or against ourselves? 

Perhaps the better question is: If we are for us, when will we start acting like it?

If the questions above seem outrageous, out there, or confusing, let me pause for a moment to offer some brief foundation on which to pin these questions.

I was born in 1961, in Berkeley, CA, a city known for radicalism and protest, then and now. My parents took us on marches. We belonged to the Co-Op. We participated in early ecological efforts. (If anyone can now remember the 1971 oil spill on San Francisco Bay, my mother took my sister and me on AC Transit to San Francisco, so we could all help in the rescue of birds and beach cleanup. This was a very low-tech process at the time. I remember lots of hay being spread about, to absorb the oil. While the beaches and bay were eventually cleaned, despite the efforts of hundreds of people, many birds perished.) We had family friends who had opted out and gone “off grid” by retreating to communes. My parents were more on the side of opting in.

Being a child of the television era, I was acutely aware of the news. Among my very earliest memories is of watching the funeral of JFK on our small, black and white Motorola portable TV. Time inched forward through strikes, assassinations, War, famine in India and Ethiopia. I knew that a war had been declared, by our President, on poverty in our nation. I knew that the Peace Corps, Red Cross and other groups were actively working to help people in other nations stricken by illness and famine. I knew there was war against illiteracy. Unrest was all around. Sometimes, I did not feel safe, but I always felt that most people were working to make the world a better place for everyone. That is a little about my background and those events that informed my understanding of the world.

Today, I look back and see that the Progressive ideas, which had their roots in three and more generations before my birth, have largely failed. We can look at the history that has been written since and find a few overarching reasons for these failures: Military Industrial Complex and rampant, unregulated Capitalism. Progressivism and citizen activism have been undermined by those moneyed interests that prefer maintaining hegemony over influence and power to partaking of an equal share in human rights and justice.

War to bolster hegemony and claim on resources has cost more lives and more money than could ever be imagined. Unrelenting capitalism has enslaved entire populaces to create and exchange worthless junk, designed for rapid failure, that quickly becomes refuse, littering our world with toxicity that threatens to endanger the health and safety of all living beings.

What few people seem to realize, here in 2018, is that the world economies are no longer tied to nations, but to corporations that wield enough wealth and power to actively avoid the attempts of any governmental body that would control them. My proof of this lies in the movement toward privatization of the security sector, and to some extent in the numerous recent wars/conflicts that seem to have been unilateral manipulations by certain governments, but which have profited corporations engaged in “rebuilding efforts”.

It is apparent to me that nationalities and governments no longer hold the keys to human destiny, and this is why terror organizations and nefarious cyber disruptors are currently so successful.

It is also apparent to me that no one at the top is interested in civilization or social wellbeing.

What shocking things to say!

If only humans could be accused of being anthropocentric! But, alas, we cannot.

If we were truly anthropocentric, we would realize that anthropocentrism is a state that must be cultivated. The principal flaw of capitalism is that it can only survive when people buy. But if the world is populated by a few haves, the rest being have-nots, ultimately means that that having is an endgame. If the captains of capitalism don’t get to work cultivating larger groups of haves (people who will be capable of buying because they have knowledge, jobs and health, affordable housing, adequate access to food and water), the “free-for-all” marketplace will die, along with great swaths of the world’s population.

After that, all that is left is warlord military might à la Mad Max. And then, you capitalists, watch out!

The solution, to my mind, lies in a benevolent anthropocentrism, one that buys into a central notion that to keep the world going, you need smart, cultured, engaged, and empathetic people of all shapes, sizes, colors, ages, genders and cultural affiliations; caring people. Such people know that the earth and all life must be stewarded, and that this cannot be accomplished by stealing, cheating, lying or bullying, but by cooperation toward a common good for everyone and everything. We need to demilitarize the populace. We need to find the root causes of violence, isolation, depression, misanthropy; we need to weed them out by healing, hybridizing and nurturing wellbeing, by loving. We need to dismantle predatory thinking and practices, and replacing them with innovation that breeds life and purpose. We need to cultivate citizenship and personal responsibility that is manifest in every action built from the bottom up, and (as business consultants never tire in speaking of) resonated in the tone from the top.

Evolution, that is I am talking about, folks. We need to evolve. We desperately need to become something we clearly right now are not. We need to become truly human and anthropocentric in the sense that being good to the world around us is the path toward both meeting all our basic needs and providing spiritual fulfillment.

It is a simple idea, in the words of T.S. Eliot, “costing not less than everything.”

Or, as Voltaire has his eponymous hero ultimately declare, “repondit Candide, ‘Oui, mais il faut cultiver notre jardin.’”

When The Truth Is Not Enough

This is a story. It happens to be a true story. It could have happened in your community. I hope it did not. I heard this story fourth-hand, and do not know any of the people involved or even where it took place.

The family car was stolen off the street, near the home. The owners filed a police report, while joy riders drove the hotwired car down some byway until it ran out of gas. The place where the car was eventually abandoned was located in another county, whose police found it and traced it to the owners and the filed stolen vehicle report. The auto was duly inspected, towed to a tow yard in the county where it was found. The owners of the stolen vehicle, upon being informed that it had been recovered, dropped their child off with a friend, went to their local police station to handle release paperwork that would allow them to retrieve the car. Thus, the case was closed in the county of residence.

The couple took public transit and a cab to the tow yard in the other county, signed a release form and paid the towing fee. Thus, the case was closed in the county of recovery.

While they were driving back to pick up their child, the wife found solicitation letters (junk mail) wedged in the space between the passenger side seat and the door. The mail was of various shapes, sizes and colors, from various consumer outlets, and addressed to various other people than themselves.

The notion occurred: This must be evidence pointing to who stole the car!

Instead of picking up their child and returning home, the car owners took the mail to the police station and spoke with the ranking officer at the walk-up window. They told the officer their story and showed the officer the mail, saying they felt they were doing their civic duty by reporting this evidence.

The officer listened to the story, but did not touch the mail they were offering.

“Chain of evidence rules and procedures say that we cannot accept this mail; there is nothing that indicates the mail is evidence of any particular thing, per se. It would be best to take the mail to the Post Office.”

The couple was incredulous. They started telling their story again. Apparently, the officer hadn’t been listening closely, and did not understand the import of what they were trying to say.

The officer listened to the repeated story, letting consideration and a silent pause clear the air before replying.

“We have no way of knowing how this mail got into your car or if it was even placed there by the perpetrators of the auto theft. Was the mail put in the car in this jurisdiction, or in the jurisdiction where it was recovered? Was the mail picked up off the ground near the car in the tow yard and just placed inside it on an assumption? These questions do not offer clarity about the mail and do not indicate a link to the auto theft. As your stolen property has been returned to you, the case is now closed. Please take the mail to the Post Office, where they will know how to appropriately handle it.”

The couple looked at one another. Surely, this was wrong. The couple asked to speak with a supervisor. The officer went away, but came back very shortly.

“The sergeants and lieutenant are out on calls. I am the ranking supervisor, at this moment.”

The couple couldn’t believe it. They were obviously being stonewalled. They started again: This mail had to be evidence of whoever stole the car.

“Aren’t you going to do your job?” The couple said.

“I really cannot receive this mail; please take it to the Post Office.”

Back behind the window, co-workers could hear the entire exchange. They looked at one another, over their piles of files and reports. One sighed. Another decided to intervene, so they could all get back to work. That officer silently left the office, circling around to the public lobby, where the couple stood, waving the junk mail and elevating their insistent voices.

“I’ll take it. I’ll make sure it is handled appropriately.” The officer escorted the couple to the station door, waving at them as they left. When the couple was out of sight, this officer walked the mail down the street, and dropped into the mailbox on the corner. At least the addressees will receive their mail; sale ends next week. Upon that officer’s return, the entire office breathed a healing sigh, and resumed their very real and pressing work with relief.

The couple that had brought in the mail later filed a complaint against the officer who told them the mail could not be accepted as evidence. The complaint was followed by an internal procedural investigation.

To bring further clarity to this story, you need to know that the couple whose car was stolen was white. The officer they encountered at the police station, when they took the mail there, was a non-Caucasian female, nearing retirement age; she had been training a female cadet at the time of this encounter. The officer who put the mail into the mailbox was a white male who had been a civilian office worker with the department for only a few years.

***

Appearances are sometimes deceiving, and usually never the end of any story.

When we presume we know better, we are apt to find ourselves in the position of the fool.

The ranking officer had explained the situation, but the couple, who had no law enforcement training, for some reason did not trust her to have appropriate knowledge, did not trust her explanations. What she told them did not conform, either to what they had seen on TV or their expectations of what should be done. They heard what she said, but they didn’t like it. The way they saw it, they had gone out of their way to provide important evidence that would lead to arrest and conviction of the perpetrator of the auto theft.

The well-meaning co-worker de-escalated the situation, but probably should not have; doing so undercut the authority and knowledge possessed by his supervisor in the eyes of the couple. Ultimately, this fueled the couple’s dissatisfaction to where they made the leap that this ranking officer had shirked her responsibility.

The car had been retrieved; the case was closed; the junk mail presumably was delivered to the homes of the addressees. That should have been enough of an outcome for anyone.

The rules are the rules; procedures are procedures. If we don’t follow the rules and procedures, then of what value are they? Can we assume procedures are illogical just because we don’t understand them? Yes, sometimes we do discover that rules need to be changed; by all means, we must review all rules that truly do not make sense, and either repeal them or refine them. Perhaps rules regarding the chain of evidence are not among those in dire need of revision.

That is one issue. More than this, and primarily, I wonder what irreversible damage is done when judgments are color- and gender-coded? Actually, I less wonder than know. The short answer is that citizenship is diminished for All, and this is problematical when All is We The People.

This story, Citizens, is but one example of the struggle we face in our local communities, our counties, our states, our regions, the nation – and the world.

I hope this story provides you food for thought.

(Chew your food well and completely before swallowing, or indigestion is apt to follow.)

© 2017 by Elisabeth T. Eliassen

All Those Expendable People, Where Do They All Come From?

In the wake of the court decision in the Florida case of George Zimmerman, who shot and killed Trayvon Martin, I wish humanity could “wake up” and realize that all people are in need of and deserving of respect, no matter where they come from, what they look like, how intelligent or not they may be. The planet is not likely to survive very much longer, unless respect is bred and nurtured so that all people know they are needed and wanted.

There are so many people of various religious or social orders who feel they can say they are better than other people and that people who don’t believe what they believe or who don’t come from where they come from are outsiders, even worse, people who are no better than dogs. Such people are the vilest of hypocrites.

You are to treat the resident alien the same way you treat the native born among you—love him like yourself, since you were foreigners in the land of Egypt.  (Leviticus 19:34)

We all live on a fragile planet that would work for us better and longer if we were good stewards. The place to begin is for us all to realize that all life is integral, and perhaps even more symbiotic than the material lifestyles we fret about and foster.

Do not mistreat or oppress a foreigner, for you were foreigners in Egypt. (Exodus 22:21)

Since the beginning of human existence, there has been injustice and inequity. Throughout the ignoble and iniquitous social history of humanity, women, children, the aged and ill, people with varying preferences of all sorts, foreigners and travelers, the highly intellectual, the mentally incapacitated and those who have been crippled or maimed, have each been over-run exploited, exiled, oppressed, trafficked or enslaved. In these cases, race might or might not be a factor, but most certainly, domination, generally by power hungry males of the species has been the common factor involved.

The LORD watches over the foreigner and sustains the fatherless and the widow, but he frustrates the ways of the wicked. (Psalm 146:9)

The same moral dilemma exists now, as ever. Is it right to oppress and suppress any group of people? Rhetorically, we know the answer to be NO, OF COURSE NOT. Every exemplar throughout time has advised that it is better to be good. Every monster throughout history has laughed in that person’s face and sentenced that person to death, invoking the “I can do anything I want because I am stronger than you are, so I don’t have to be good” logic of the sociopath.

If you come with us, we will share with you whatever good things the LORD gives us. (Numbers 10:32)

How can it be explained to controlling people, unscrupulous dictators, corrupt business leaders, hypocritical gurus and demagogues that human beings are the biggest natural resource on the planet? And in no way do I mean in terms of expendability. This is the cardinal error of the control monger, the bank executive, the authoritarian, the mob boss; the common thread of thinking, based on common actions and the results of such actions, is that people are expendable, that it is okay to use them, abuse them, even to use them up and dump them.

…when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are an expendable, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of "nobodiness"--then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. (Letter from a Birmingham Jail, Martin Luther King, Jr.; I changed “a Negro” to “an expendable” and added emphasis.)

Here is a truly radical statement: If we each cared about ourselves enough to extend that caring to everyone and everything around us, the entire world would be better off.

Imagine no possessions

I wonder if you can

No need for greed or hunger

A brotherhood of man

Imagine all the people

Sharing all the world... (Imagine, John Lennon)

Simplistic? A Pipe Dream? Or could it be an environmentally sound economic plan?

Right now, there is an amoral rationale among a jockeying and ever smaller group of people we might call “the Elite”—certainly these people think of themselves as such, and all the power they have and the decisions they make that affect your life and my life and the lives of people all over the world—who don’t seem to be related to us by anything other than an overwhelming powerlessness—follow the formula that says: use it up, use it all up, now and until there isn’t anymore. This is the formula of expendability. Natural oil reserves, once gone are gone forever. The drill, baby drill and frack, baby frack ethos has created a daisy chain of natural disaster waiting to happen—doesn’t anyone remember that the liquids in the ground are like joint lubricant? Pump it out, use it up, it's gone.

By the same token, we are sold and fed foods that are bad for us, so that we become unhealthy and in need of expensive medical care and drugs that frequently have known or unknown side-effects and unforeseen consequences. We are taxed on income and further taxed on homes, on transportation, infrastructure, indeed we are taxed because we are alive. This is more in the unbroken chain unsound economics; once we are pumped out, used up and gone, what next? Homelessness and worse is the answer to that question for a lot too many people.

I could be a bit in the nutty side—I’ll just go right ahead and admit that—but I think that we could build a better and more equitable community if we work the stewardship angle, where we do the very best we can do for ourselves and other people. If we keep the water clean, and make it available for everyone; if we grow natural food and make it available for everyone to purchase for their families; if we educate people for the sake of educating, rather than money; if we develop urban farming and new housing alternatives, not just here (wherever “here” is for you), but everywhere, we can create jobs that help the environment. Heck, even if all we did right now was to hire people to answer phones, we would improve the quality of life.

Do you see where I am headed? Right now, it is all about shooting down, cutting, eliminating, taxing, spending, expending, ravaging and stealing, diminishing, extinguishing.

Maybe the world would be different if we understood economic growth to be about all people equally (and responsibly) engaged in creating, making, growing, educating, earning, upholding, maintaining and sharing. If such a model were to emerge, it must work top-down as well as bottom-up; all need to be willing, invested and engaged. People: This is how you maintain your tax-base as an infinite resource, not just for earnings and for upkeep, but for GOOD!

If we lived in that kind of world, a man like Zimmerman might not have felt threatened or tweaked by the presence of a man named Martin, and we would be celebrating life, rather than arguing and rioting over laws that do not protect, legal decisions that allow people and governments and corporations to kill and steal, a way of life that makes us all expendable.

… time itself is neutral; it can be used either destructively or constructively. More and more I feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than have the people of good will. We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people. Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co workers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right. Now is the time to make real the promise of democracy and transform our pending national elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood. Now is the time to lift our national policy from the quicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock of human dignity. (Letter from a Birmingham Jail, Martin Luther King, Jr.

Now is, and has always been, the time; not just here, but everywhere.

If not now, when?

© 2013 by Elisabeth T. Eliassen

Waiting for the Barbarians—21st Century Update

NOTE: This is not an original work by me, but it is an homage to the work of the modern Greek poet C.P. Cavafy. This monumental poem of his is about society and politics. Current events called this poem to my mind, and made me reconsider it in a new light. If you exchange the word terrorist for the original word barbarian, there is almost a direct parallel. I have made further tweaks, to make the poem modern--the opposite of Cavafy’s, which was set to reflect an ancient time. The word fear does not show up in the original or in this refiguring, but fear is the undercurrent that rocks this poem.

ÐÑ

                                           Waiting for the Terrorists

What are we waiting for, glued to our iPhones,
                       Twitter feeds and social media?

      The terrorists are due here today.

Why isn’t anything going on in the senate?

Why are the senators sitting there not legislating?

      Because the terrorists are coming today.

      What’s the point of senators making laws now?

      Once the terrorists are here, things will be too chaotic to legislate.

Why did our president get up so early,

and why is he sitting in the oval office,

ready to make a statement?

      Because the terrorists are supposed to be coming

      and the president has been waiting to receive their leader.

      He’s even got a document to give him,

      loaded with criminal charges.

Why have our generals come out today

Wearing their uniforms and armed with loaded guns?

      Because the terrorists are coming today.

      [The order is “shoot to kill”;

                 there will be no trial.]

Why isn’t anyone telling us what is going on?
Where are the reporters of the news media?

      The terrorists are coming today!

Why this sudden triumphant joy, this confusion?

(How joyful people’s faces have become!)

Why are the streets and squares filling so rapidly,

With everyone going home chanting slogans and yelling epithets?

      Because night has fallen and the terrorists have been murdered by our military.

      And some of our men just in from the farthest borders claim,

      Along with the government, that there are no terrorists any longer.

Now what’s going to happen to us without terrorists?

For our government, terrorists were a kind of solution.

ÐÑ

Source of the original version of this poem:

C.P. Cavafy: Collected Poems 
Translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard Translation Copyright © 1975, 1992 by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard (Princeton University Press, 1975)

Increasing Facelessness in the Facebook Generation

More and more of our customer service needs are being addressed by circuitous automated phone message jungles or internet queries that can either be in the form of live texting or email exchange. We hear that soon there will be no actual people collecting tolls on toll bridges. There are fewer and fewer local offices where one can pay local utility bills. Many cities and towns no longer have a local department for the handing of fees for fines or citations; these are being funneled to distant addresses.

What does this mean?

In “the age of connectedness and connectivity” we are losing contact with actual people. This does indicate that machines are doing more of our work for us. This also indicates that there are less jobs available to be filled by the living and breathing. But, more importantly, there is less human interaction now, and what we have of that becomes more and more fractured and lacking in the personal and personalities that make life interesting. 


Finding simple information becomes a frustrating, Kafkaesque nightmare, in which one must repeat the same question over and over again to different people who answer the phone, or in which one loops through the automated message system, only to get dumped out at the other end, without ever finding the option that meets the need. Clearly, the world of the Frequently Asked & Answered Questions is a limited world of shallow concerns, the very least that providers are willing to be responsible for; any concerns beyond the FAQ, no matter how real, clearly is beyond the average human ability to solve, and therefore must remain unaddressed—for to address the concern not covered by FAQ means taking responsibility for having knowledge pertaining to unique situations. In a self-help, self-service world, nothing is unique, many real flaws and problems are not acknowledged, and we are expected to live our own lives and solve our own problems, whether help is available or not, whether we can pay for it or not.

The scripts for orderly human communication have been thrown away and they are not being replaced. The internet revolution is training us all to scream into the vastness of the universe, without expected to be answered or even heard. Eventually, no one will ask questions, because they will know it to be a colossal waste of time. Or, question asking will become the newest reality TV, where we all be voyeurs while some human becomes inhuman because s/he has been shut away from real human interaction. If such a thing ever comes to pass, will we laugh? Will we cry? What will we do?

The fabric of society has been unraveling for some little time, now, and the yarn is now bunched up in a gigantic, un-biodegradable heap. Institutions and departments and offices and businesses talk past each other, if they talk at all, developing irrational territorial practices that do not fit together, and passing blame when things, systems and people do not work or work well. We call these instances “cognitive dissonance” and we call them “dysfunctional” and we call them “disorganization”, but whatever we call it, and however much we roll our eyes and complain, here we are: it is upon us and we have to live with them all and their inevitable, frequently insoluable, consequences.

Recently, while dining at a restaurant with my family, I witnessed another family and child dining in an atmosphere devoid of interaction. [I have seen it before, and I know I’ll be seeing more of it.] After ordering the meal, each parent completely ignored the child, being entirely engrossed in something displayed on individual smart phones. When the food came, I felt sure that the gizmos would be put away, but I was wrong. The parents silently shoveled the food into their mouths while staring at, and interacting with, the screens of their phones. The child was left to play with her food, humming to herself.

I wondered to myself how children are supposed to learn conversation and etiquette, or indeed any methods of social give-and-take, when their parents, if they possess the knowledge of these things, do not pass the legacy on.

Our “smart phones”, I propose, are making us all “dumb people.” We “connect” only on the basis of the most shallow aspects of vox populi. We answer the rings of our phones while dining out, even though the technology is designed to collect messages for us. We react and overreact to text messaging, because it doesn’t carry the nuance of voice or enough depth to provide context or meaning.

We have technology, but we do not have to understand it. We believe that owning and using it gives us status and power. In reality, technology has made us slaves to aspects of human existence that do not promote beauty, culture, meaning or understanding, but that offer instead frustration, ubiquity and anonymity.

Orwell’s “Big Brother” was a single face of totalitarianism; our modern computer technology is a bit more frightening, in that it offers us whatever face we want to see, so long as we don’t expect it to speak to us, teach us, inspire us or help us to cope with an increasingly dysfunctional existence. Our gizmos draw us into complete and utter self-absorption and they suck our brains into an oblivion every bit as devastating as drug addiction.

If we become aware that we need an intervention, to be freed from the addiction, there is no one to call for help, there are no responsible parties, there is no liability, and we laugh it off, saying “no harm, no foul”.  But it is foul, and we are being harmed in ways we cannot begin to understand.

This, as I see it,  is the great existential crisis of the current generation.

Our Culture of Violence

The following letter to the Editor appeared in the editorial page of the San Francisco Chronicle on April 10, 2010:

Dangerous hardware abroad in the land

The current discussions around the Second Amendment are disturbing and crude. Think about a natural human response to frustration: anger. Natural, but also irrational.

Next, think about road rage, the most common daily occurrence of a natural but irrational response. Is it logical to suppose that gun-toting road-ragers will have enough self-control to not draw their weapons? Such a scenario is not far-fetched and in fact happens now with frightening regularity among people who are illegally armed. The United States is not a wild frontier society but a modern, urban, civil society.

Giving every citizen the opportunity to own and carry a loaded gun is an invitation to divest society of civility, reducing it to something more brutish, base and irrationally deadly. People who want to carry guns must also want to intimidate and have power over others; why else feel the need?

We should be very worried about people like that. They say it is for self-protection; I say they and their hardware are a danger to us all.

Elisabeth Eliassen

I wrote that letter in response to the local news accounts reporting that NRA members and other pro-gun activists were showing up at local coffee dispensaries wearing holstered (and unloaded) hand-guns, in support of open-carry legislation.

Times have not changed much since April of 2010. Certain kinds of people want to be wed to fire arms. Is this about mystique? (Are guns the latest fashion accessory? Has it become as hip to sport a gun as it is to wear a Bluetooth or MP3 player earbuds?) Or is this purely about displaying power and intimidation? It cannot be about personal protection; if we look at the statistics regarding accidental deaths due to the unintentional discharging of firearms, I wonder how people can feel safe with even an unloaded gun in the home.

There are many people who have a professional reason to use or own handguns. Most of these people work in the service of our communities, as security, law enforcement or military officers. Woe to us that we need to have such security, but I am grateful for the service of these individuals.

I bet that most of the rest of us should not ever need a handgun to do what we do in our day-to-day lives. Who needs a gun to work in industry, to shop, cook, nurture children, do laundry, tend the garden, take out the garbage or even have a cup of coffee at the local café?

Guns should be an anachronism in civil society. Instead, guns seem to have become part of, along with notions of might, power and violence, an inescapable rhetoric.

There are so many films, television programs, electronic games and books that portray violence in a glorified manner that it would be impossible to list them all. Think about it: the only way the comic book good guy superheroes can vanquish the bad guys is by means of violence.

Even philosophy is not free of violence: Nietzsche posited that humanity could only bring about change in the world by means of violent revolution, and that the remaining human beings would be called superman, overman, or perhaps man, the next generation. (Would this be a positive evolution of humankind? I think not. I think it would be a movement to the next kind of oppression. But that is for another discussion.)

Overcoming is frequently described as violent change, not as a calm resolution by means of a conversation over coffee, much less courtroom advocacy or philosophical dialogue.

Winning is frequently described as beating, killing, crushing, smashing, destroying, eliminating or annihilating.

The truth is, we, as a society, have never been properly taught how to have civil discussion. What we have been taught (by television programs, electronic gaming and films that titillate by means of gratuitous violence, brutality and gore) is that we can say whatever we want, whenever we want, to whomever we want. You hear it in grocery stores, in coffee shops—it doesn’t matter where you are, you hear people speaking with anger and violence in their tone of voice.

Basically, our culture has taught us that venting rage is okay. But this is violence, too. Verbal abuse, it is called in some situations, can be as wounding as a gunshot. And people who suffer verbal abuse are frequently left with the gaping wounds of trauma and post-traumatic stress.

As a society, today we are no longer taught the value of silence. We are not learning to accept, to listen, to consider, or to discuss. We are not learning to manage our anger or find productive solutions to our problems. “The System” is blamed, but the darkness is within us. If we don’t get what we want now, we have a license to complain, at the least, or at the most, to yell. Discretion? What is that? I want, I, I, me, me… A culture of narcissism, solipsism and rage is what we are experiencing in the Twenty-First Century, and the universal symbol of the rage portion of that cultural program is a loaded gun.

Rage like this is irrational. Of course, it is more irrational to move from having a license to yell to taking license to shoot people with a handgun. People are not rationally moved to yell at someone, or beat someone, so how could it ever be that a person could rationally be moved to fire a gun at another person?

So the next question is this: why are average people, who don’t need these items professionally, allowed to purchase handguns, much less automatic rifles and other weapons?

The answer is simple:  we live in an insane society.

Let us pray that someone, somewhere, will wake up from this ragemare of insanity and remember that life is sacred, and spread that notion like an infection upon the lands. Let us all be infected with the love of life that wills cooperation. Let us learn to slow down and talk, without yelling. Let us think before we speak, lest our words be misdirected or misunderstood. Let the sayings from an old book echo throughout the world:

They will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation will not take up sword against nation, nor will they train for war anymore. — Isaiah 2:4 & Micah 4:3

Until that day, what we have is a culture of violence, and it is raging a war of us upon us, and the death toll of the innocents continues to mount.

*

[image: Swords into Ploughshares, http://www.geni.org/]

The Right To Be Ugly

We live in a country that has many inalienable rights. Apparently, one of those rights is to be an ugly American.

People running live action video feed of another person's private activities. Woman destroys artwork because she thinks it demeans Jesus. Motorcycles and cars with tips welded on their mufflers, in order to drastically raise the decibel level and make your hair stand on end. Cars that block parking lot circulation so that their sole occupants can wait for someone to pull out of the parking slot closest to the entrance to the grocery store. Drivers who have their car stereo systems roaring at the highest volume and deepest bass rumble, so that everyone within a two block radius is forced to hear it. The garbage that is dumped on sidewalks, beaches and parks, sometimes within 8 feet of a receptacle. Runaway computer viruses that anonymously destroy equipment, while hijacking the victims' contact lists. The one-sided cell phone rants, where everyone else, standing in any line, anywhere, is a captive audience. Tailgating drivers, speeders, speed-weavers, stop sign runners, double-parkers, three-point-turners in school zones and those drivers who abandon their cars in passenger loading zones, despite the clear directives of posted signs. Bullies, bigots, bashers and trashers. This is, I hope you realize, only a partial list; you have your own list of minor to major irritants.

When did we become such rude, arrogant and narcissistic pigs?

The reason I ask this question is because the bad behavior seems to get worse as the days go by.  Celebrities, politicians and religious leaders lead the fashion trend and tend to model this behavior more than the average person; bad press is better than no press at all, I suppose. The constant need to fill 24 hours of network television on hundreds of channels heightens the visibility of the trend by creating an endless stream of trashy entertainment content, for our viewing pleasure or horror. Certainly, this all provides more that we can all natter on about. "Did you see what they did?" and "Did you hear what they said?" If you don't remember the 1998 film, The Truman Show, it is worth a watch now.

What is it all about? How about alienation?  In The Sane Society, Erich Fromm posited:

We consume, as we produce, without any concrete relatedness to the objects with which we deal; We live in a world of things, and our only connection with them is that we know how to manipulate or to consume them.

It seems as if we have moved beyond this to something even worse, a lack of concrete relatedness to the people who drift through our daily lives. Whatever the cause, there seem to be a lot of people who really only act and care about what they are doing in any given moment; consequences, intended or otherwise, don't seem to come into the thought process at all--it could be overstating to suggest that there might be a thought process involved. Meanwhile, there are other people who get their jollies from being intentionally irritating to every person within reach of their chosen mode of ugliness. What an alienable use and waste of inalienable rights and freedoms! What a waste of mind, body, spirit! What a waste of life!

I have to be honest and say that I really enjoy thoughtful people, people who think about and care about the consequences of their actions, people who are not out for everything they can get, people who will drive around the block just because they know it won't take any longer than making that dangerous three-point turn that will have them backing up into a crosswalk. I find it a blessing to be standing in a line, if it must be so, with people who are able to smile, pass the time civilly, and make a dull moment into something fresh.

If I have to live in a world that gyrates to the beat of thoughtless boobs, I say a prayer of thanksgiving for all of you thoughtful and beautiful people who redeem ugly moments, created by ugly people, with a smile and a relaxed "we're all in this together" attitude.