Lady Macbeth is a Racist: Newspeak, Self-Censorship and Withdrawing Sanction

 

A good deal of the literature of the past was, indeed, already being transformed [ideologically]. Considerations of prestige made it desirable to preserve the memory of certain historical figures, while at the same time bringing their achievements into line with the philosophy of Ingsoc. Various writers, such as Shakespeare, Milton, Swift, Byron, Dickens, and some others were therefore in process of translation: when the task had been completed, their original writings, with all else that survived of the literature of the past, would be destroyed.

--George Orwell: Principles of Newspeak

 

Simply put, if you are . . . for Constitutionally limited government, free market capitalism, equality under the law, and freedom for all Americans, then you are a racist. If you are for unlimited government and increasing dependency on the Democrat Party, then you are not a racist. Any questions?

-- Kyle Becker: The Politically Correct Guide to Racism for Idiots 

 

I saw that there comes a point, in the defeat of any man of virtue, when his own consent is needed for evil to win—and that no manner of injury done to him by others can succeed if he chooses to withhold his consent. I saw that I could put an end to your outrages by pronouncing a single word in my mind. I pronounced it. The word was “No.”

--Ayn Rand: John Galt’s Speech, Atlas Shrugged

 

There has been much discussion on the internet of the Progressive Democrat’s tendency to avoid constructing an argument or to shout down a painful truth by accusing others of racism. On the punditry level, such accusations has gone from the ridiculous to the outright idiotic as black Democratic Party hacks have gone from accusing libertarians and conservatives of racism for criticism of the president for his ideology and policies to accusing us of racism for the use of certain otherwise neutral words in our political speech. It has come to the point where one can neither criticize Obama for his general ineptitude, foreign policy or domestic policies, nor use certain words (“golf,” “apartment,” “anger,” “socialist” and “crime” all come to mind) in reference to any administration official whatsoever, without being accused of being a racist.

In the political arena, we know the purpose of this tactic: it is to silence and isolate the opposition without the bother of actually constructing an argument. Such demonization is a shortcut to winning through intimidation, in order that certain ideas become impossible to talk about at all, ensuring the Democratic party an unearned hegemony over public discourse. In short, it is Newspeak in the Orwellian sense:

The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of IngSoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought -- that is, a thought diverging from the principles of IngSoc -- should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words.

--George Orwell: Principles of Newspeak

Thus the accusation of racism in response to political speech in this fashion is the tool of the demagogue, pure and simple.

Even more troubling is the use of the tactic by progressives against their “friends” during personal and public conversations on any topic in which someone lets a political (but not necessarily partisan) statement slip out. Here again, the purpose of the accusation is to demonize someone who does not agree on some issue, and to 
silence opposition in order to evade an unwanted truth.

Since we live in a society that conflates accusation with guilt, such an attack is difficult to recover from, because it is impossible to prove a negative. It is a powerful technique of the political left, placing their enemies on the defensive, and allowing the demagogues to claim the moral high ground while conducting themselves in the most vile manner, in an impressive display of irrationality and bullying. 

Such attacks serve to impoverish the language of discourse, and leave rational people scratching their heads over whether they can talk about the ‘pot calling the kettle black’ or calling a ‘spade an f***ing shovel’. The self-righteous censors thus achieve their object of making discourse on certain topics impossible, and setting boundaries on what people who disagree with them are able to say, right down to the nouns themselves: black, dark, spot . . .

Did I say spot? Yes, I did. Because according to one self-righteously progressive former friend, Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth is a racist. In a personal conversation relating to a rather bitter and nasty remark she made toward another of her “friends” in the context of Obama’s second inaugural, “spot” is a racist term. After I allowed as to how the statement was unlike my  former friend’s usual happy and sunny disposition, she commented to me: “‘Methinks the lady doth protest too much.’” To which I responded:
“I don’t think I am ready to “out, out that damned spot.’”  She then enquired about the health of my sense of humor. Seeing that she didn’t really “get” my reference to her quote from Macbeth, I told her I didn’t have a sense of humor, apparently—since my poor attempt was not understood—excused myself and went about my day.
 
Later, I was totally blindsided when, in connection with a different discussion that she initiated, she wrote about the “racist comment” that I had left on her Facebook Timeline. Having already been accused of “protesting too much,” I pointed out that the reference was to Lady Macbeth’s mad scene, and when my former friend insisted it was a racist reference (I suppose about Obama, even though he had not been a topic of the conversation), I did not bother to continue the conversation.

For those who do not know the reference, as I suspect the progressive bully did not, here is the reference from Macbeth, Act 5 Scene I, in which the lady goes mad for having murdered the king:

LADY MACBETH
35 Out, damned spot! out, I say!—One: two: why,
36 then, 'tis time to do't.—Hell is murky!—Fie, my
37 lord, fie! a soldier, and afeard? What need we
38 fear who knows it, when none can call our power
39 to account?—Yet who would have thought the old
40 man to have had so much blood in him?

Doctor
41 Do you mark that?

LADY MACBETH
42 The thane of Fife had a wife; where is she now?—
43 What, will these hands ne'er be clean?—No more o'
44 that, my lord, no more o' that: you mar all with
45 this starting.

The spot she is seeing in her madness is the blood of murder on her hands. My reference was simply an attempt to defuse the rapidly deteriorating conversation by responding to the reference to Lady Macbeth with a reference of my own.  As one of my friends said, upon seeing the exchange between me and my once friendly bully: “Good thing you didn’t refer to Othello. That would have forever blackened your name.” 

The response to this kind of bullying is often self-censorship. The individual so attacked and publicly vilified so unfairly will often begin to think before speaking, to spend time trying to avoid all of the trip-wire words and phrases that might result in another accusation of racism. This is a useless exercise.

Make no mistake about it, the purpose of such tactics is to demonize and isolate anyone with a voice who would oppose the progressive ideology, in order to try to render her ineffective through the art of the smear. It doesn’t matter what words liberty-loving libertarians and conservatives say, the progressive ideologue will twist them or outright lie about their import, diverting attention from the actual topic of conversation into the denouncement of a personal attack. The purpose—overt or covert—is to silence dissent from the statist/collectivist/progressive world view. (For more on this see David Horowitz’s pamphlet, Barack Obama’s Rules for Revolutionaries: The Alinksy Model).

Now here I hasten to add that not everyone who makes the politically correct racist accusation is, in fact, a leftist ideologue. Many are the useful idiots, who buy the moral high-ground without understanding the basis of the tactics involved. Nor do they necessarily aspire to the ultimate goal, although they usually have some inchoate sense of helping to bring about utopia. A sense of being wronged, of being entitled to something someone else has, that they want and have not gotten often fuels such an attitude, as it has in my former friend’s case. She angrily accused me of having “got yours” and of all manner of violent intention and lack of charity now that I had it. None of this has any basis in reality, but it does bespeak anger and resentment improperly directed at me. To put it bluntly, my former friend is playing the politics of envy for her own purposes, and is likely a useful idiot rather than a leftist ideologue.

But whatever the reason for such accusations as this, the purpose is the same: to silence those who disagree and threaten the leftist Vision of the Anointed. And it often works. Ask yourself how often you have bit your tongue rather than respond to some diatribe in a university classroom, how often you have erased a comment after trying to craft it in order not to be misunderstood, and you will begin to recognize how often you may have censored yourself.

Although the progressive left is not above an overt attack on the First Amendment ( and we have already heard the warning shots across the bow), it is far easier to get people to censor themselves rather than to suppress them by external force. The power of social condemnation is great, and many otherwise vocal Americans would rather be silent than to risk it for little purpose. After all, we reason, it is unlikely that my speaking up will change any minds in this place at this time.

I vehemently disagree. Of course, it doesn’t do much good to continue an argument on someone else’s Facebook Timeline, blog or in their home and on their turf. However, in public, whether it be in a college class or PTA meetings, it is important to speak up, peacefully but firmly. Silence can be taken for assent, and we must not give  up our sanction to such unreasonable and downright evil tactics as demonization by accusations of racism.

In her novel Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand’s protagonists call this “the sanction of the victim.” This is the ideas that evil in and of itself is powerless and unreasonable, and must not only take from the good to survive, but needs the moral approbation of the victim in order to triumph. By silently accepting an accusation of racism and allowing it to shut us up, we are giving that much more power to false accusation. By apologizing for our principles arrived at rationally, we are allowing unreason and emptiness to take the moral high ground. How then can we complain when that emptiness and meanness brings down all that is creative and productive in our world?

It is also true that if you speak out, it is likely you will soon hear from a number of other people in the room who were thinking the same thing, but frightened to say it, each one feeling alone and isolated, which is just what the irrational accusation was intended to accomplish. Nothing defeats a bully tactic better that straight up, reasoned confrontation that brings principled people together. Hearing others refuse their sanction to patent nonsense encourages good people to speak up. It benefits all people of principle to encourage one another, for the culture wars are nothing less than a battle for our liberty and our civilization. We must fight it with more passion and conviction than our enemies, who take it very seriously indeed.

In my situation with my former friend, I knew it would be fruitless to continue in an “was not, was too” fashion there on her Timeline. I also recognized that we are not and cannot be friends. Friendship requires shared values and mutual respect—a sanction of one another’s goals at some level, and a genuine desire to bring out the best in the other. It is not a mark of friendship to tolerate another’s wrongs or weaknesses, and to accept less than the best in that person. I have known for some time that the shared values I used to enjoy with this friend have disappeared, and that her political ideology precludes any agreement. 

For the longest time, I did not understand why many of my friends and compatriots in the battle for liberty and reason would make announcements such as: “If you voted for Obama, then please unfriend me.” I thought that it was still possible to keep the lines of communication open. It has now dawned on me—too slowly to spare me pain—that there is no communication with those who substitute platitudes for principles and demagoguery for reason, that this is not about the ordinary disagreements of normal American politics, it is a battle between two incompatible world views, one of which will destroy the other.

Now I understand my friends’ actions. I will not tolerate a so-called friend who turns on me and demonize me so readily, because that is not the behavior of a friend. I cannot continue to give my sanction to irrational ravings and untruthful accusations, because I myself will lose my mooring to reality. There can be no compromise on principle, and there can be no surrender of my values without the loss of all that I have learned and all that I hope to accomplish in the future. 

I will not sit idly by while accusations of racism pervert and destroy discourse, silencing the good for the sake of the weak. 

 

Technorati Tags: Courage,Politically Incorrect,Moral Sanction,Newspeak

Of Bullies, Trolls, Curmudgeons and Aspergers

“ ‘The Kid’ never races anybody. He just sits there and scares the hell out of ‘em.”
--- Paul Stookey, Paultalk

"Who is more foolish? The fool, or the fool who follows him?”
--Obi Wan Kenobi, Star Wars: A New Hope

Yetzer ha-Ra: That Troll hole sure looks interesting . . .
Yetzer ha-Tov: Stay on target. Stay on target!Yetzer ha-Ra: Maybe we can have a productive conversation, he can’t be ALL bad!            Yetzer ha-Tov: Negative, Captain. That Troll’s female hatred index is 78%,  and the diction analysis indicates a high level of cruel cynicism. Recomend aborting the diversion and heading straight for an Objectivist bulletin board.  Yetzer ha-Ra: Poor troll, there’s probably just a scared little boy inside. You can bring out the . .
Yetzer ha Tov: Do NOT feed the troll! Do NOT feed the . . . . Damn. She’s gonna . . . there it goes! Libertarian Trolls are NOT rational. It’s gonna be ugly . . .                                     Ship: Ping! Brrrrwahahahahahaharhrhrhrh! Pow!
Yetzer ha-Ra: Beetle-bomb!                      Yetzer ha-Tov: Captain, impulse engines still operating. What are your coordinates, Ma’am?
Ship: (Coughing slightly and waving smoke away). Where is that Objectivist site, again?  I think maybe a fuel change is in order.  Earl Gray. Hot!

---- Fragment of Internal Dialogue

 

On the internet, bullies are people who derive a certain sense of power by sneering and whining, deliberately targeting those who take a discussion seriously or literally, and taking conversations off-track. In short, petty cyber-bullies—often called trolls—will do anything to keep a conversation from evolving in order to keep themselves at the center of attention, even as the circle of that attention becomes smaller and smaller. 

Outside of the cyber-world, the way to stop a bully is to call him out. A bully is generally  a coward with an aversion to picking on someone who will fight back. Running in and slashing at others, then retreating like a hyena is the typical bully style. This is why I taught my son that the manly thing to do is never to start a fight, but always finish it. Decisively.  

But in the cyber-world, where people have been intimidated by a false definition of censorship, and where the only person with any freedom of speech is the bully himself, what most often happens is that bullies are not confronted or removed. Instead, conversation at a site or page dwindles to just the few bullies, who jockey and sneer at imaginary foes, and the utility of the place is lost. This is a problem for site owners and administrators, who have often spent a good deal of time building a place for a certain kind of conversation, only to have it devolve into endless and meaningless bickering over tangential details, while the point—and the pleasure—is lost.

Although we all know that “feeding the troll” is pointless, most of us from time-to-time foolishly do it anyway, whether out of a misplaced sense of respect for the humanity of the little shit, or the transparently naive hope of breaking through to have a real conversation. And sometimes, we hope that by so doing, somebody else on the page will be drawn out of their silence and the page will become what it was. This seldom works, and the page generally continues its bully-induced slide into silence and obscurity, until even the troll moves on to greener cyber-pastures. 

At a Libertarian-sponsored site, the conversation was about the threat to the Second Amendment. The post was a quote from a Colorado State Senator who announced that with some bravado that he would rather die than give up his weapons. The Curmudgeon joined in, hinting darkly that there is no remedy to the present tyranny, and that bravado and courage itself will wither in the face of omnipotent police brutality. The Troll made his move: “I sneer at all those who . . .”
Dominance established. The original poster never piped up again.

 

As an administrator of the site, I though that perhaps a suggestion to the Troll that he should take his sneering to the source of his anger would bring the conversation back on track. Curmudgeons can be good discussion partners, but trolls never are. I then tried to bring the conversation back to the Curmudgeon’s salient point. The Troll was not having it. He responded with a hurt little boy tone, and I fell for it, against the better angels of my nature. They were saying: “He’s a troll. A TROLL! An unmannerly, babyish,  woman-hating, mom’s-basement, never-had-a-grown-up-relationship, T-R-O-L-L! TROLL!” Being low on estrogen and testosterone both, I ignored the warning.

Beetle-bomb! Shards of hope and sparks of action falling into the netherworld of Cyberspace. Neither the Curmudgeon nor the Troll will ever take any kind of purposeful action. The first wants to impress people with his cynicism, and the second, to prove what a tough guy he is by how badly he treats anyone who crosses his path.

 

There has been precious little dialogue in this group, and what is there dominated by the Curmudgeon and the Troll almost exclusively. Other members drop in, make announcements, and drop out. Why be bullied? It is difficult for members to confront the bullying, because they have no power to stop it.

Smart other members.

The current characteristics of the group alone tell the story. The group has become the Troll, with “ain’t it hopeless” choruses from the Curmudgeon, and a few— mostly ignored—attempts by new members to start a conversation. I have been dropping in to make announcements and to see if there are any libertarians who have mistakenly thought it was a place to discuss libertarian ideas with an eye to actually doing something. But as every idea that does not belong to the Troll or the Curmudgeon lands on the ground in a burning heap, and every suggestion for some kind of action is sneered off stage, the place has become  cobwebbed and dull, leaving the taste of dust and ashes in the mouth. 

 

“Don’t bother with Liberty, folks,” these types announce by the subtext of their behavior. “It can’t be defended, all is lost, and there is no point fighting for it. You’ll just fail and thinking otherwise shows how stupid you are. What we need to do is close the curtains, sit here in the dark, and keep ourselves from getting hurt. Because the animating contest of freedom is a hopeless illusion, and the power of the state is omnipotent. Anyone who thinks otherwise is either naive, deluded or posturing, and will be driven from this group by mean and petty sniping and malignant hatred.”

I bring this up, because I have seen other libertarian site administrators frustrated by the same or a similar senses of life imposed on their discussion groups, and more malignant, those who hate libertarians for whatever reason, and set out to deliberately hurt and destroy them. I have seen anti-Semites ruin the image of the Ron Paul Campaign for Liberty, and Nazi hunters crying anti-Semitism on Libertarian sites where it doesn’t exist. I have seen conspiracy theorists bully anyone who wishes to have a rational conversation virtually shut down all discussion over a minor reference, obscuring the actual point of the conversation because they lack the faculty to look critically at their own dogmas.

Site, page and group administrators are frustrated because if we are paying attention, we know the destructive end of such behavior is the same every time. A perfectly good site becomes useless, and someone’s (often many someone's’) work was all for naught. And yet, we often tolerate it. We sigh in exasperation, complain about the solipsistic immaturity of a certain group of Generation-Xer American males, and try to laugh it off over a beer with friends or take comfort in participating in more rational forums. But we TOLERATE what is not tolerable.

Why do we tolerate it? It is the use of subtle force by others to dominate, bully and harm the work of others. But when a site administrator does edit, block or ban someone wreaking such havoc, they immediately respond with the indignant cry of the cyber-bully: Censorship!
And many libertarians, having been brought up with an education that failed to teach them the (not so) subtle difference between liberty and libertine, immediately take it up.

In tones dripping with entitlement they cry that the administrator is a fascist pig, an authoritarian, and that they have the right (god-damn-it) to bully, disrupt and destroy whomever and whatever they want, because THEY are RIGHT, and more than that, they are MORALLY SUPERIOR to every being that has ever walked the earth before them. (Because of us the seas stopped rising, poverty ended, and heaven was brought to earth. “WE are the ones we have been waiting for . . .” and all of that bullshit). In other words, they have a serious case of the Vision of the Anointed. Good will toward others and simple manners were never part of their curriculum.

Many administrators, especially old-school libertarians, are caught off guard by this, and if one is not fully grounded in libertarian thought (and even if one is!), it is easy to be cut to the quick by the sheer virulence of the attack. It is usually delivered complete with a tone of dripping sarcasm and righteous indignation.

 

Being an Aspergian, I am almost always caught off guard by this, because no matter how often people are cruel and nasty to me, I never expect it. This, along with my tendency to be overly literal, and to fail to see the language pragmatics that warm Neurotypicals off, makes me an excellent target for bullies.

In any case, as a helpful guide to Aspergian and other Libertarians of Good Will, these people are wrong and most of them—particularly the bullies—know it. Censorship is a function that only a government can perform. Private individuals may indeed keep order and regulate the environment of their own private property, or do so on the behalf of other owners and stakeholders, in order to preserve the purpose of the site, forum or group for all.
But private property owners cannot and do not wish to stop the dissemination of speech or behavior that they dislike altogether. Only a government, with its monopoly on physical force, can do that. The disgruntled bully can always start his own forum, build his own platform, or hold forth on a public street corner, although in the last, he cannot abuse or detain the public.

 

People of good will follow the rules and regulations of a private property owner gracefully, as a matter of respect and good manners, and if they do not agree with them, they feel free to excuse themselves and go elsewhere. Being themselves self-respecting and effective individuals, they are capable of creating their own platforms for free-speech, and if they err on the side of passion, create a misunderstanding, or take a disliking to someone, they are amenable to the direction of the owner or administrator of the forum, and either correct themselves or move on.

But bullies are seldom self-respecting, effective individuals, and thus need to get and hold the attention of others in any way they can. Thus, they scream about their over-arching rights while ignoring the rights of others. And the libertarian movement seems to attract a large number of them. I believe that there are some philosophical reasons for this, but that is another blog.

The point here is this: although libertarians of good will are naturally hesitant to block or ban someone who is pissy, sarcastic, disrespectful of others, and subjects others to personal attack, it is right and responsible to do it. And it is appropriate to warn others who come crying “censorship” that such behavior will not be tolerated. In such cases, it might be a good idea to explain why it is not censorship, but if we find ourselves being called “fascist” and other names, it is a good bet that the name-caller is also a bully trolling for a response.

 

Finally, when a forum has been allowed through neglect or appeasement to become a place in which fruitful discussion can no longer take place, or when administrating it has become a tiresome and painful chore, it is time to move on. In my case, I should have done so long ago, before I got sucked in by my own naivety and desire to discuss something important to me. Bullies do not discuss or share. They attack and troll for a response, feeding on the pain of others, and like Dementors, they suck the joy out of everything. Curmudgeons are generally not malevolent themselves, but they believe that the world is. They are incapable of kicking around an idea because they have already decided that action is futile and nothing that anyone else thinks about can possibly be worth discussing.

As an Aspergian, I often get played for the fool because I don’t read the subtleties of the words or language pragmatics that NTs see right through. I tend to take longer to learn from painful experience. However, as an Aspergian, I do have empathy. I do feel pain and I see it in others. I just do not always know what to do about it. Although it is painful to be treated like crap by bullies and trolls, and although I often have the sinking feeling that I did it to myself again, I know this is not entirely true. Bullies and trolls are responsible for their behavior and I firmly believe that what goes around comes around. Although as an Aspergian, I am not really capable of delivering a proper and cutting retort--I always think of one in the middle of the night--there are others who are and will do it. In any case, their unhappy, unwholesome view on life, the universe and everything is punishment enough, and brought on by their own selves, leaving me free to enjoy the benevolence of more healthy people, elsewhere.

 

In the meantime, I refuse to give up on Liberty. It may be a struggle because of those who hate and fear it, and sometimes we may be called upon to fight and lose, and fight again for our freedom, acting from Liberty makes me feel happiness and wholeness. And for me, that makes it worth the work.

 

Technorati Tags: Aspergian World,Libertarians,Internet,Property,Trolls

A Line in the Sand

When liberals talk about "gun culture" . . . It isn't about the guns really, though gun control culture is worried about having that much personal autonomy in the hands of people who don't share their values and like their independence, it's about rural America. And rural America, like guns, is another symbol that stands in for traditional America.
--Daniel Greenfield, Sultan Knish Blog: Gun Culture and Gun Control Culture

Molṑn labéis ( Molon Labe) is a classical expression of defiance reportedly spoken by King Leonidas I in response to the Persian army's demand that the Spartans surrender their weapons at the Battle of Thermopylae. . . So what does molon labe mean? Well, it is an invitation -- and a challenge -- all rolled into one. From the original Greek molon labe means: "Come and take 'em."
-- JD Longstreet, Right Side News Blog: Americans Won’t Give Up Guns, Law or Not

Technorati Tags: Liberty and Tyranny,Constitution,Individual Rights,Second Amendment

As we end the year here in the rump end of flyover country, we have been talking about the new and even more insidious threats to our liberty and our way of life.  

Americans of a certain bent are fond of talking about “wars” that are not shooting wars. From the Obama administration we have heard that if we do not like our tax money going toward someone else’s contraception, we are perpetrating a “War on Women.” Ronald Reagan brought us the “War on Drugs” (which has become a shooting war down on the border), and LBJ brought us the “War on Poverty” all those years ago. We do not appear to be winning either of these ersatz wars. I am sure there are other “wars” that are not wars out there, and as a Libertarian, I am deeply suspicious of “wars” on inanimate objects or conditions, because they are generally used as an excuse to limit our liberties.

In rural America, however, we have known for some time that the executive branch of the federal government has plans to wage a war on our way of life. It started in 2008 when presidential candidate Barack Obama told his supporters at a San Francisco fundraiser about rural Americans bitterly clinging to “guns and religion.” (www.youtube.com/watch?v=DTxXUufI3jA). This war isn’t only about guns and religion, both of which the progressive leftists of the Obama administration despise, it is also a war on rural small holders and is being waged by the government against us with bureaucratic weapons such as land use policies, sweeping EPA regulations, and farm bills such as SB 1050, which set the stage for regulations on what we can sell and even what we can consume from our own farms and ranches. 

But the war on “flyover country”—that vast interior of the North American continent that is terra incognita to the progressive city dwellers on the coasts—is heating up because of the fear this administration has of law-abiding, armed citizens. Their maps are not labeled “Here there be Dragons” in fancy, medieval print; rather they say: “Here there be GUNS.” And as Daniel Greenfield pointed out at the Sultan Knish Blog (quoted above), those guns are a symbol to the progressives. They represent  people who do not need or want federal government help, and who often refuse it, knowing from bitter experience that when the Feds come marching in, local interests are no match for the interests of outsiders such as environmentalists and bureaucrats. In the rump end of flyover country we understand that government “help” really means government interference, the destruction of our local economies, and ultimately, tyranny by a metro-majority that doesn’t know a thing about our way of life, fears it, and wishes to force us to conform to an alien and un-American standard.

The shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary in suburban New Jersey is the incident that Obama, his progressive administration, his media sycophants, and the metro-dependent control freaks have been waiting for. Never mind that the shooter was not a legal gun owner, and as Daniel Greenfield wrote, was not part of what the ubiquitous they call the “gun culture.” They were all indecently salivating to confiscate guns before the little bodies of the innocent were even removed from the classroom. Never let a good crisis go to waste, as their mentor Saul Alinsky liked to say.

Since the 2008 election, Americans have been anticipating that Obama and his minions would be coming for our liberties. Some of us paid attention to what he said before he was elected, and we knew who his mentors were and what political philosophy they bequeathed to him. During November and December 2008, gun sales rose dramatically, and ammunition fairly flew off the shelves of gun shops and sporting goods departments. In Spring 2009, many of us formed and joined Tea Party organizations  and 9-12 groups, banding together to protest the economic consequences of Obama’s socialist political creed. Some of us woke up to the threat to our liberties for the first time. As election day 2012 neared, gun and ammunition sales picked up again, following the same pattern as in 2008. We were aware that with the need of re-election behind him, Obama’s campaign against liberty would likely pick up speed.

On the Tuesday before Sandy Hook, the Catron Kid and I were in Cope Reynold’s Southwest Shooting Authority in Arizona to purchase some ammo and look over a new rifle for shooting coyotes and other small varmints on the ranch. (In rural America our guns are tools, and are most often used to protect livestock from predators. They are rarely drawn against another human being. It is not necessary because we value one another’s life, liberty and property way out here). You may recognize Cope’s name and establishment, because his gun shop has become famous or infamous (depending on your politics) for the sign he posted on his shop’s door:

(See story at The Blaze).

As we looked at the coyote rifle, and as I mock-aimed an AR-15 and an AK-47, feeling them out on my shoulder, we talked about the possibility of an “assault” weapons ban. At that point, Nancy Pelosi was talking about reviving the ban that had been rescinded in 1994, with some new and worrisome restrictions, but not including outright confiscation. The Catron Kid wondered aloud if, should we be threatened with confiscation, we ought to hide our guns. SWSA employees responded that at that point, we would be facing civil war. We talked briefly about how Arizona would respond, and I allowed as to how we should have bought property at least 11 miles west, over the border in Arizona. The conversation turned to why Jews, Blacks, American Indians and Mormons should not be against gun control, and then we make our purchases and went on with our day. As we continued our errands, I realized that I reacted to the thought of civil war differently than before. I did not deny the possibility, nor did I feel regret that I might oppose my own government, because I now believe that my government has made me its enemy. It was another line in the sand that I had crossed in my own mind, like joining the Tea Party, registering Libertarian, and signing the Articles of Freedom. For the record, I will defend the Constitution against all enemies, but I prefer to do my fighting with the pen and at the ballot box. A shooting war is the last thing I want.

Four days later, when the news of Sandy Hook broke, and almost immediately the press began attacking the Second Amendment, we went on the offensive in the social media, correcting the obvious ignorance of the press and the administration, and making it clear why a so-called “assault” weapons ban would not have prevented Sandy Hook or anything like it. It was in a post on a social media site in which someone opined that patriots cannot be serious about the “need” for the Second Amendment, that we certainly can’t be thinking in “these modern times” of protecting our rights against our own government. And she referenced civil war. A commenter replied: “We are already in a civil war,” elaborating that the culture wars against the founding American values, against our liberties and against rural America amount to exactly that.
 
“We are already in a civil war.”
That statement rings true to me. It is not at all the same as during the late 1850's because this is not a regional battle, like the one that the Mason-Dixon Line defined. Neither is it about the false ideology of “state’s rights”--we know that only individuals have rights, and that governments have delegated powers--although I think it is time long past due for the States to enforce  the Tenth Amendment against the Feds. Nor is the object to deny freedom to others or to institutionalize racism. The culture wars—the war on our way of life here in flyover country—is about our individual rights, the ones that are threatened by an out-of-control federal government.

We are already in a civil war.
But it is not a shooting war. And I would rather that it never become one. However, this government has been whittling away at our rights and attacking our values for a very long time. Obama is only the latest and greatest threat in a century-long series of executives determined to stamp out individual liberty, make our Constitution meaningless, and aggregate power to himself.

Each of us, those who value life, liberty and property, must ask ourselves where is the line past which we must resist, physically if necessary? Each of us needs to know for ourselves where is the line in the sand. Where does tyranny stop? And at what point are we willing to give up our lives in order to preserve liberty for ourselves and our children?

As JD Longstreet (quoted above) wrote in Right Side News Blog:

To those on the political left and those pushing gun control -- in the childish naivete -- You need to understand two things: One -- Americans are NOT going to give up their guns! That's one. Number two is this: If you really want to begin a civil war in this country, continue your efforts to take those guns and you will most certainly have one, and I do not think you have any idea, any inkling, of just how ferocious and brutal such a war can be.

We know that Pelosi’s new, draconian measures are not about gun safety. We know that these power-mongers inside the beltway are using the deaths of 20 children for purposes of their own, and those purposes are aimed at our liberties and our ability to defend them.  We know that Diane Feinstein and Harry Reed are both hypocrites—both are or were gun owners who had concealed-carry permits—and they wish to deny the same to us. And we also know that in the advancement of tyranny and totalitarian rule, the confiscation of guns comes before the violation of free speech. An unarmed citizenry has no opportunity to resist the loss of freedom of speech and press and assembly. We know that these rights are already under threat by the Feds, who use pretexts such as security and political correctness to work their nefarious designs. We know that for many of us, the line in the sand may well be confiscation of our rifles. As Longstreet continues:

The government will, as Charlton Heston famously stated, have to "pry the weapons from their cold dead hands." Heck, the government might actually get away with a couple of such encounters before the backlash begins.
But it will begin -- and when it does, there will be hell to pay. In the end, it will be the end of the United States as we know it.
Understand. There are some states that will move to secede rather than obey federal laws that force their citizens to disarm. Other states will arrest and incarcerate federal officers attempting to disarm that states citizens within the physical boundaries of that state.

Understand. These things are already being discussed in states and counties where governments and sheriffs understand their primary duty is to protect the rights of the citizens who elected them. There are many places in flyover country where state and local governments understand that Tenth Amendment pushback against the overweening power-mongering of the federal government is long overdue. Arizona is one.  There are many states and counties in which constitutional sheriffs (CLEOs) take the SCOTUS Printz v. United States (1997) decision seriously, in which SCOTUS held that:

. . . Congress cannot circumvent that prohibition by conscripting the State's officers directly. The Federal Government may neither issue directives requiring the States to address particular problems, nor command the States' officers, or those of their political subdivisions, to administer or enforce a federal regulatory program. It matters not whether policymaking is involved, and no case by case weighing of the burdens or benefits is necessary; such commands are fundamentally incompatible with our constitutional system of dual sovereignty.

I agree with Longstreet that the Feds are dangerously out of control, and that their cheerleaders in the media and among people in the street are not thinking with their brains, nor are they aware of the cold reception of their totalitarian agenda (for our own good, of course) by the people who live outside of their vivid blue enclaves. The use of emotion by politicians and the media to whip the populace into mob action against citizens, unjustly and unrighteously threatening to violate a fundamental right by confiscation of firearms from law-abiding citizens, will create a response, but not the one the perpetrators envision. Mob rule is contrary to our values, our Constitution and our way of life. There will come a point of firm, determined resistance.



We do not want civil war. We did not seek this war upon our values and our way of life. We want only to be left alone to live our lives. Many of us fervently wish that those who disagree with the Constitution as written, and who dislike our liberty, would remove themselves to a country that has laws and customs in keeping with their progressive values. As Sam Adams wrote:

If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.

These were strong words at the time, and they are strong words now. There is a point at which there can be no more discussion and no more debate about the encroachment upon our liberties. We have been coming close to that point over the past four years, as ordinary Americans have been waking up to smell the bitterness of a government that has long ago lost touch. We know that our elected servants believe that they are the masters, and want to discard the Constitution for a tyranny by the majority,  thus forsaking forever the republican values of liberty and individual rights written in that charter by which they were elected. We recognize that this government is now led by an executive who is unfamiliar with our values and our way of life. He has shown nothing but contempt for us, lying to us by whim, and using every event to dismiss our Constitution and erode our liberties. That he was re-elected by a narrow margin of the popular vote does not give him any other mandate than that assumed by every President of the United States: “to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.”

There is war upon our way of life, against our liberties and our individual sovereignty. We did not seek this war, and thus far we have patiently used peaceful remedies to avert it. This attack is upon the heart of our values as Americans, and rural America is the place where it has begun, but it is not where it will end. This is a battle that we did not seek. But this is a war that we intend to win, in order to secure the lives and liberty of our children and their children. We intend to win it peacefully.
But we will win it at the cost of our lives, if necessary.

To those who intend to force me to surrender my arms, I say: μολὼν λαβέ!
And I am not alone.

Slowing Down: Thanksgiving at Freedom Ridge

I blinked, and Thanksgiving has come and gone, special baking done, leftovers packed and sent back to school with the Catron Kid, and quiet has now descended on Freedom Ridge Ranch.

Last I looked, it was September, and the High Holy Days just finished. We were looking forward to Sukkot, and suddenly we are on Standard Time, the leaves have fallen, the Sukkah is long down and the days are alarmingly short. How did the fall days get away from me?

The election, that’s how. From the day after Yom Kippur until election day, I was caught up by the needs of the Gary Johnson Campaign. As the New Mexico State Director for Gary Johnson 2012, I felt as if I was swept away for the month of October, with the High Holidays serving as the deep breath before the final lap. The rest of the week of the election was spent in Albuquerque, too, doing the post-mortem on the campaign with senior campaign officials, and the Libertarian Party of New Mexico, along with spending time with my new primary dissertation advisor, getting myself primed for The Next Big Thing.

I intend to write about the last weeks of the campaign—I really do!—but I need to let it all settle. It was exciting, maddening and exhausting. I learned so much, and I need to let it all settle before I decide which lessons are lasting.

I arrive home on Veteran’s Day, and by the following Thursday—Rosh Chodesh Kislev, for I seem to have missed Cheshvan entirely!—we were in Show Low, the Engineering Geek and I, shopping for Thanksgiving. On Friday morning, I began my baking, and then after a weekend adjusting to not needing to be glued to the computer, it was Elisheva’s All Kitchen, All the Time Station right up through Thursday. After several months of neglecting my family in order to be mom to various and sundry Gary Johnson volunteers, I felt the need to s-l-o-w down and bake and cook, and bake  and cook some more. We also deserved some time to talk, to study, to do a slow dance in the kitchen to a Hank William’s Jr. tune, and read to one another in bed in the morning until the sun comes over the mesa. So I cooked for five days of leftovers, and made everything from scratch: from crescent rolls to pumpkin pie. (I made my own filling for those from the pie pumpkins we grew in the garden).

The weather has been wonderful. Short, late fall days of sunshine with those heartbreaker turquoise blue New Mexican skies, that fade into deep blue as the sun goes behind the mesas by four in the afternoon. Afternoons at 60 degrees are followed by cold, star-filled nights that cry out for a fire.

Since he had a late class on Wednesday in Albuquerque, the Catron Kid had driven down early on Thursday morning, and rode El Chapo in the early afternoon, when I chased everyone out of the kitchen—everyone, including dogs and cats.We ate our Thanksgiving dinner as the sun slipped behind Power Line Mesa, slowly and with great attention to the goodness of our fortunes. Elections, war, and scandal notwithstanding, our little family is truly blessed and we know it.

After dinner, we settled down to watch Monumental, Kirk Cameron’s film about the Pilgrims. We were reminded that  this election and the challenges it will bring to our freedom are grave difficulties, the door seemed to be slammed repeatedly on the Pilgrims, they did not give up, cry foul or fall into despair. They persisted in believing in their 500 year plan. And since we have a bit more than 100 years to go on that, we should be strong and resolute as were they.

Friday, the Engineering Geek and I took an afternoon’s lazy drive up into the mountains behind the Little Colorado over in Arizona. We worked our way up into the caldera that holds Crescent Lake, and then descended again along a Forest Service Road into Greer, enjoying the bikers and trail riders of that mountain resort town, while we talked of the future plans for Freedom Ridge and hopes and dreams and half-baked ideas that may shape the days to come.

Yesterday, we took a Shabbat walk with the dogs and our walking sticks in hand, we climbed to the top of Freedom Ridge, our mesa to the east and marveled at the view of the Red Hill and its attendant volcanics, and the San Francisco Mountains to the southeast.

And today, Sunday, I ironed shirts for the EG and the Catron Kid; I packed him up some quart-sized zipper bags of turkey and the trimmings and holiday eggnog to take back with him to his little apartment in Albuquerque. I watched as he drove away, straining to see the movement of the white car against the dark volcanic pressure ridge extending from the Red Hill as he turned onto the county road two miles away. Thanksgiving 2012 is a wrap, but in two weeks he will be home again for the long winter break, just in time for Hanukkah.

I have some work to do to get my Comprehensive Exams back on track because of all the changes in my committee since EN, my original advisor, retired. We have chores to complete while the weather holds, here at Freedom Ridge Ranch. And our renters at the Los Pecos House decided to relocate to warmer climes, and so we have our contract with them to conclude and the house is on the market once again—for sale or rent. There’s lots to do, as always. But nothing that requires the kind of immediate response and dedicated time that managing even a small campaign team requires.

Although it does look like I am being tapped as an alternate for the Libertarian National Committee . . . but more on that after we watch the sun drop down behind Power Line Mesa, and after we feed the animals and gather any eggs laid since this morning by our fine-feathered hens and after we feed the dogs, enjoy a turkey dinner and a glass of wine together, here on Freedom Ridge Ranch. Where the mountains are high and the tumult is far away . . .

 

Technorati Tags: Times and Seasons,Meanwhile Back at the Ranch,Thanksgiving

Yom Kippur: The Day of Decision

“This is the Day of Decision . . .”

“ . . . in the camps and streets of Europe mother and father and child lay dying, and many looked away. To look away from evil: Is this not the sin of all “good” people?”

“Turn back, turn back from your evil ways; for why should you choose to die, O House of Israel?”

--Sha’arei T’shuvah: The Reform Machzor

 

Our lives are fleeting, like a leaf that rides on the river of time, for a while, and then subsides, while the river flows on. This is one theme of Yom Kippur and the High Holy Days in general, timed as they are in the month of autumn, from the dark of the moon to its waxing. This year the Engineering Geek and I felt this acutely, as our daily household has shrunk to just the two of us, with both children up and out.

This gives us both pause about where we are in our lives, with more years behind us than ahead, but it also confers a certain freedom, and one way that we expressed it was to choose to spend Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur differently, cutting ties to the synagogue where the children were raised. We went to the small, eclectic and egalitarian shul in Flagstaff, taking a hotel room in order to experience Yom Kippur free of the distraction of long distance driving. Of course, in the odd way of the Jewish world, where smaller degrees of separation abound and bind across continents, we found connections with the president of the congregation, another member who remembers me as a very pregnant cantorial soloist, and the rabbi herself, with whom I share a mentor, a study partner, and a course of study.  

And for the first time in our ten years of marriage, the EG and I also were free to really spend some time on the Day of Atonement studying the Machzor—the High Holy Day Prayer Book—free of distractions. This was a boon we had not counted upon, and it worked out because the little shul has an organized morning service followed immediately by Yizkor (the Memorial Service), after which there is a long break until Neilah, the evening service just before breaking the fast. Not wanting to put ourselves in places of commerce nor to go back to the hotel, we went instead to Buffalo Park—a huge open space under the San Francisco Peaks—and there we found a lone marble bench facing the mountains, cloud-shadowed beyond a field of yellow daisies, where we prayed the afternoon service for ourselves, stopping to discuss and comment upon it along the way. And as is always true for me, themes that match what is going on in my inner and outer life fairly jumped out of the pages of the Machzor, demanding to be confronted.

Yom Kippur is, as the prayer book says, a day of decision. The image is the Book of Life being open at the Seat of Judgment, as every human being chooses between good and evil, life and death:

You open the book of our days and what is written there proclaims itself, for it bears the signature of every human being. . . This is the Day of Judgment . . .”

But the problem for many Jews is that we have taken a concept of judgment from the dominant culture, one that is foreign to our own world view. This idea is that human beings should eschew judgment altogether, that it is wrong to make a judgment—which I cannot help but point out, is a judgment itself. For because human being have the capacity to make decisions, we must necessarily make judgments between good and evil, between right and wrong, between life and death. Judgment is not an option, and it is also not something to be feared:

Your love is steadfast on Judgment day, and you keep your covenant in judgment . . .

You penetrate mysteries on Judgment Day, and you free your children in judgment . . .

You uphold all who live with integrity on Judgment Day . . .

On Yom Kippur, we take the time to ponder, to burn away the clouds of mystery, and to make judgments about ourselves, determining where we have failed in judgment and where we have gone beyond our own boundaries, in order to restore integrity to our lives.

Beyond our own lives, we must make judgments about our world. We cannot say: Who am I to judge this policy, this action, these people and their behaviors? We Jews know what the sin of silence and the sin of indifference mean.To refuse to judge evil as evil, and evil doers as evil doers is to allow it and to become a part of it. There are no innocent bystanders. And those who claim to desire peace but refuse to confront evil cannot create peace, rather they will bring death and destruction upon themselves and upon those who excuse them, for to excuse the guilty is an injustice waged upon the innocent.

In the praying of the services, in the thoughts that the words in the Machzor inspire, and in our discussion of them, I have made some decisions for myself, or I have set the standards and benchmarks for decisions that I expect to need to make this year. Over the years of my upbringing and education, and on into young adulthood, I had developed the habit of self-censorship in response to a great many things, and over the last 11 years I have made a concerted effort to rid myself of this habit, for it is a dangerous abdication of the mind and heart. I will continue to root this out of my life, and replace such fears and hesitations as I may have with reliance on making judgments that are just and true. This year, more than ever, as our world spirals out of control and our civilization seems bent on suicide, this emphasis on truth and justice as the basis of judgment becomes more important than ever, and that integrity is something I want to restore in small ways as well as large, and in my personal as well as any public life I might have.

There are other conclusions that I have come to in order to fulfill my desire to mend my errors and to  be proud of what I have written in my book of life, and perhaps I will share more of them at another time, but I know that confronting untruth will be my greatest challenge. The Hebrew word for truth is EMET and the Hebrew word for justice is TZEDEK. EMET and TZEDEK will be my words for 5773. These are big words, and knowing my own weaknesses regarding them, I take pause before them. They require great  courage and discernment both, and i tend to err on both. And yet I long to come closer to these marks. I may not have the power to change the world that seems to be hell-bent on destruction, but creating an island of order and sanity within the chaos is a worthy goal.

 

Technorati Tags: Judaism,Times and Seasons,Yom Kippur

Shabbat Shuvah: The Foreign Gods of Today

Technorati Tags: Times and Seasons,High Holy Days,American Exceptionalism,Torah Study

“The Eternal said to Moses:

You are about to sleep with your fathers,

and this people will rise up and go astray

after foreign gods, where they will go to be

among them, and break my Covenant . . .

and many troubles and evils shall befall them.”

Devarim 31: 16, 17

As Jews, we are now in the midst of the Ten Days of Turning, the days between Rosh Hashanah, when we celebrate the Birthday of the World, and Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the most solemn holy day of the year. The Sabbath that falls between these two holy days is Shabbat Shuvah, the Sabbath on which rabbis and maggids (preachers) commonly give a sermon on the art of turning and returning to the path of righteousness.

When the Engineering Geek and I took a few moments for Torah Study on Shabbat, with all of what had happened in the past weeks in mind, we noticed a part of Parashat Vayelich that the Women of Reform Judaism’s Torah Commentary remained silent about. Devarim  (Deuteronomy) is set as Moses’ last speech, with some interpolations that move the story along. In Vayelich (He Went), Moses learns that he has reached the end of his long life, and that he will die before the people Israel enter the promised land. The Women’s Commentary therefore focuses on what this means for Moses, and the reasons given and implied for his death at the moment of his people’s freedom.

But given the stark choices that confront us all in the world today, and the contradictory and craven behavior of our Executive  Branch in the face of the renewed attacks on the United States through our embassies--attacks used to threaten our most basic freedoms--the Engineering Geek and I focused on the passage that the commentary passed over. In it, a prediction is made by the Eternal. The people will cross over, and they will build lives in the land, and become complacent (“. . . they shall have eaten their fill and waxed fat. . .”, 31:20), and that is when they will be vulnerable to turning away from their heritage and their purpose, and follow after foreign gods that they have not experienced. When this happens they will, the story predicts, forsake the Covenant, and bring upon themselves many “troubles and evils.”

In encountering this story, we ask ourselves, what are foreign gods in the context of our identity as Americans today? Most of us do not literally bow down to idols of wood and stone made by our own hands. And many of us bow down to no gods at all. Further, this passage is about what happens when many members of a society make a choice to change their basic beliefs about their civil identity, and forsake the heritage given them by previous generations.

In Hebrew, the United States is known as Artzot ha-Brit shel Amerika, ( ארצות הברית של אמריקה) the Land of the Covenant in America. This is a recognition that our unique identity is forged not by blood ties, but that who we are is based on our choice to abide by a set of ideas that are protected by an contract, the Constitution of the United States.

On September 11, 2001, many of us were rudely made aware for the first time in a generation that our ideas about who human beings are and what we define as the good life in our civilization were under attack; that another set of ideas opposes ours, and that proponents of those alien ideas are willing to make war upon us, and to fight and die to see that their ideas prevail in the world. On that day, as the towers fell, we instinctively drew together, and the day after, we put up our flags and remembered that we were Americans.

As the EG and I talked about all this, we realized that we Americans had grown complacent indeed, and that we have been in the process of forsaking our Covenant of respect for individual rights, thereby giving up cherishing the uniqueness of each individual, and had begun to turn away toward concepts foreign to our native values. This hankering after dependency and collectivism, the easing of responsibility and individual liberty, was possible because we forgot the origin of the wealth and innovation that made our comfort and ease possible. In so doing, we were turning to foreign gods, ideas that are in opposition to our Covenant, and cannot possible co-exist with it.

Islamic thought, with its focus on totalitarian submission to a theocratic state, has developed from premises alien to our enlightenment values, and is driven by a civilization that is not at all complacent or passive. Islamic teaching emphasizes the necessity of bringing the whole world into submission to ideas that are incompatible with our own. Our Western forbearers have resisted these idols before, at Tours with Charles Martel, and twice at the Gates of Vienna. 

But now, with our Covenant weakened by dreams of collectivist utopias, we see our leaders actively chasing after alien ideas, appeasing our enemies with apologies, and proclaiming a willingness to surrender our basic rights to foreign gods. We must rethink our liberties, they say, in the face of the Ba’al of the Riot and the Mob. It is our children whose birthright of freedom is to be sacrificed to satisfy the insatiable fires of the barbarian hordes.

And yet, there are those among us who have sounded the alarm that there can be no compromise with those who wish to supplant our values with their own, and no surrender without the total loss of our American identity. Like the prophet in the Haftarah for Shabbat Shuvah, they tell us:

“Asshur shall not save us . . .neither will we call anymore the work of our hands our gods . . .”

“Give not your heritage up to reproach, that the nations should make you a byword; Should they say among the peoples: Where is their G-d?”

We cannot make treaties with the alien thought of Egypt and Libya and at the same time retain our own unique identity. Foreign ideas and values cannot be assimilated without destroying our own. Oil and water do not mix, and nobody can compromise with poison and live.
It is one or the other, and we must not listen to those who would so lightly surrender our liberty, our values and principles to those who would destroy us. 

It is amazing how the struggles of old, couched in religious language, are relevant still, and tell the same stories that we experience, although we tell of them differently. 
Just as Israel of old had to choose or be broken on the contradiction between her identity and that of the idols, the same is true for us today. We must choose rightly or be broken on the contradiction between our own values and those of Egypt and Libya and the whole of the Muslim Brotherhood with its Islamist nightmare. Liberty and submission cannot be combined. Individual rights will not co-exist with the Ummah, the collective nation of the Islamic State. 

It is my hope that in this season of turning we gather the courage to say what is real, and  to acknowledge the truth in our hearts. And that we do not close our eyes to the troubles and evils that are about to befall us, and that we recognize that they are a consequence of the fact that we are in the act of forsaking our Covenant, the one that has made us the envy of the world and an inspiration to among the nations.

We need to wake up and to recognize how greatly we have prospered by the values and principles bequeathed to us by our founders, so that we can preserve our liberties and bequeath our inheritance—the Covenant of Rights and Liberties—to our posterity.

This remains my hope in the face of growing darkness.

Rosh HaShannah: The Turning of the Year

New Mexico Sunflowers in Rock Garden

     "I have set watchmen upon thy walls, O Jerusalem, they  shall never hold their peace, day or night."  Isaiah 62:3

This morning we awoke to a sunny and cool, early fall day, mists rising from the ground, and the sky in the south and east milky white in contrast to the deep blue New Mexico sky to the northwest. After a week of wind, clouds and rain, we were happy to see the sun. As the Catron Kid went riding on Chapo, the Engineering Geek and I started out of the front gate with three of the dogs, anticipating a Shabbat walk along the western fences of Freedom Ridge Ranch. The cool morning turned into a warm and sunny day as we climbed up the mesa to the northwest, greeting the other two horses, grazing up there in the high pasture.

We noted how the year is turning, talking about some of the things we want to do this coming year on the ranch: putting a windmill and solar combined tower up along the ridge behind the house, divide the high pasture, and divide the front pasture, get the solar completely installed, and take more walks like this one, enjoying the beauty of the place.

Early fall on the Continental Divide is different in appearance from what I grew up with and even from what we experienced in the East Mountains. Here, instead of bold oranges and browns, with the grass of soft wheat color, we see water in the stock tanks, and pooling in the draws and washes, a gift of the late days of a good Monsoon. The grass is green from the water, and the sky soft blue, like spring in more conventional parts of America. The boldest colors come from the yellow Black-Eyed Susans and New Mexico Sunflowers, the orange and pink of Globe-Mallow, and the blues and purples of various clovers, gilias and penstemons, and the rare orange-red of Indian Paintbrush on the high mesa tops and along the washes in the canyons. Fall steals into this high country on the heels of the late summer wildflowers, color dotting the gray-green of the range subtly, as the days grow shorter and sunshine replaces the late-afternoon Monsoon rainfall. The days grow shorter, the shadows deepen and the nights grow even cooler.

And with the turning of the year, we mark the New Year for Years, Rosh Hashannah, which falls on the first day of the seventh month in the Jewish Calendar. As the heat of summer fades, we welcome a new beginning just before the harvest: 5773. As we took our walk, we savored the peace around the Sabbath noontide, and we did not speak of our fears and concerns, heightened this week by the world's slide into chaos, and threatened Israel's complete isolation as it deals with the threat of annihilation.  It is easy, way out here, to move with the turn of the earth, the comings and goings of the herds and flocks, and the blowing of the wind. It is quiet, and the nature of the place and its solitude knows not of human strife, chaos and wars. New Mexicans outside the three cities we have in the state are accused of being provincial, and we are, being far removed from the goings on beyond our mesas and mountains. "The mountains are high," we say, "And the king is far away."

But even without television (we have one, but we don't get broadcast TV --or radio--in our canyon), we do hear of what is happening "out there," although it seems far away. So inevitably, when we returned from our two hour hike up the mesa and around and down, and turned to the Haftarah, the perils our country and our people face stared up at us from the printed page, the words of a prophet writing  more than two-and-a-half millennia ago. There is nothing new under the sun in the affairs of men, I thought, though that idea comes from a Megillah we will read later in the fall, at Sukkot.

Perils for Israel, deserted by the President of the United States, her Prime Minister snubbed and denied a meeting even as the her people prepare for war, and the Jewish People across the world face new threats from a very old prejudice. We fear for the safety of that tiny country where our prophets and kings once walked. And we fear for the integrity and safety of our own country and its people, and for our people everywhere.

But this Haftarah that complements Parashat Nitzavim in Torah, is the last of the seven haftarot of consolation. And in it, Isaiah--writing to a people in exile--speaks of victory and restoration. And so it speaks to us now, and to our great concern in the midst of a world sliding once again into chaos. It says to us, war and destruction are not outside out experience, and yet we are still here. We have stood on the edge of danger and peril before, and yet we are still here, able to reason in the face of our fears, to annul the plans of our enemies as necessary:

Who is it coming from Edom, with crimsoned clothing from Bazrah?  Glorious in apparel, stately in greatness of his strength? I who speaks in victory, mighty to save. . . .

. . . I have trodden the winepress alone, and there was no man with me;      Yes, I trod them in my anger and trampled them in my fury, and their lifeblood is dashed against my clothing, and I have stained all my raiment. For the day of vengeance that was in my heart, and my year of redemption have come.        And I looked and there was none to help, and I beheld in astonishment and there was none to uphold. Therefore, my own arm brought salvation to me, and my fury, it upheld me.  (Isaiah 63: 1; 3 - 5)

This year, as Rosh HaShannah approaches, and greetings come to us from Israel, we hear a message very different from earlier years. Then we heard greetings that were upbeat, anticipating the happiness and contentment to come. "It's gonna be a good year!" Now we hear echoes of Isaiah from Latma, from the IDF: "We are not afraid. We are ready, we are standing guard. The Eternal is riding with us. Others tried to destroy us, and where are they?" 

As we come again to the turning of the year, we find ourselves deeper into the Fourth Turning and closer to the crisis. The outcome of the crisis and the shape of what follows very much depends upon the decisions that we make about how we will face what is coming and what we choose to do. It is a fearful Rosh Hashannah this year, knowing that Israel stands alone, threatened with nuclear holocaust; remembering the High Holy Days of 1973 (5733) when Israel was also fighting for her life, alone, while Jews the world over spent Yom Kippur listening to clandestine radios in services, hands clenched, hoping and praying for her survival. This year, once again, we will find ourselves praying for the peace of Jerusalem, hoping against hope that Israel will be able to remove the growing threat without starting World War III.

Halvai! 

And in the coming year, may all of us find those points of light, those moments of happiness and those days of contentment in our lives, and those transcendent moments of joy and beauty in the world, that remind us of why we hope and why we work to make each moment, day and year of our lives fruitful and full of goodness and plenty.

Kayn y'hi ratzon!



And may 5773 be a good year for us.