LITMIR.BIZ

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      Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his brother were driving one evening in the mid-1950s from Atlanta to Chattanooga. The oncoming drivers evidently didn’t know to dim their lights when meeting a car, and A.D. King, who was driving, became furious. At one point A.D. said, “The next driver who refuses to dim his lights, I’m going to give it right back to him; I’ll leave mine on bright and blind him and we’ll see how he likes it.” Dr. King said, “Oh no, don’t do that. There’d be too much light on this highway, and it will end up in mutual destruction for all. Somebody’s got to have some sense on this highway.”31

      Someone has got to have sense enough to dim the lights.

      I teach college seniors the Socratic method of group discussion. They learn to listen respectfully when someone speaks and then respond with civility. Cutting off or drowning out or ridiculing a person with whom they disagree earns an “F” in participation. To see how not to have a group discussion, I tell them to turn on particular television shows where panel members yell at, shout down, and put down each other.

      Dr. King also said in the same sermon to his Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery:

      Force begets force, hate begets hate, toughness begets toughness. And it is all a descending spiral, ultimately ending in destruction for all and everybody. Somebody must have sense enough and morality enough to cut off the chain of hate and the chain of evil in the universe. And you do that by love.

      Another Valentine’s Day can remind us, on this dark, narrow, rancorous highway of life, to lower our voices, dim the lights, and try a little love.

      February 7

      Last week I thought of Daniel Boone and Jeremiah Johnson. I also thought of George Washington’s shoeless army trudging through the snow at Valley Forge. “How,” I thought, “when they were so cold and so wet so much of the time, did they ever make it?”

      I was roughing it, farm-sitting for my organic-farmer son and daughter-in-law while they were out of state at a sustainability conference. In the depths of January, in their tiny farmhouse with its wood-burning stove, composting toilet, and no television, a cold, steady rain beating down, I toughed it out. With unmitigated respect for their simple, no-frills, anti-materialistic lifestyle, this city slicker was missing the comforts of home.

      Then I thought of Haiti. And I thought of our next-door neighbor who will live every day for the rest of her life wondering if and when her cancer will return. Suddenly I thought: “What a spoiled ingrate I am, with Haitians having gone from poor to destitute or from alive to dead, and my neighbor from healthy to full of cancer, and here I sit feeling deprived, and for only three days. How pathetic!”

      Rabbi Arthur Waskow writes about the Jewish Feast of Sukkot (Tabernacles), when observant Jews build fragile huts (sukkah) with leaky roofs and live in them a week to remind themselves of the flimsy, temporary shelters their ancestors erected while wandering for forty years through the wilderness. Rabbi Waskow suggests than in our time, when we put our faith in steel-and-concrete structures like Pentagon buildings and World Trade Centers, Sukkot can remind us: “We are in truth all vulnerable. We all live in a sukkah. There are only wispy walls and leaky roofs between us.”32 And I would add, fault lines beneath us.

      Earthquake, tornado, or flood victims could have the effect of making us more grateful for the common treasures we take for granted, like clean water, food, or a roof.

      February 8

      It is easy for us near the bottom or in the middle of the food chain to scapegoat “rot at the top” for the country’s ills. We shake fingers at the leaders of Enron, or Ponzi operators who squander the life savings of many, or hedge fund managers or banks that lose billions and then get bailed out by Congress and become richer than ever. Some who have broken laws and get caught may even serve time in a prison for very important people.

      Journalist Michael Kinsley insists that the real scandal is not as much what is illegal up there in rarefied air, as what is legal; meaning, CEOs and CFOs who, breaking no laws, after doing a mediocre to catastrophic job get showered by the company’s directors with tens of millions of bonus dollars—sometimes to keep them on, sometimes to dispatch them post haste. Some of those people at the top do nothing illegal, but lie to or stomp on anyone to advance themselves another rung up the success ladder and make their fortune.33

      Port Royal’s naturalist, Wendell Berry, drawing on nature makes this point: “Rats and roaches live by competition under the law of supply and demand; it is the privilege of human beings to live under the laws of justice and mercy.”34

      Is there anything that has a greater claim on us than consuming, than getting ahead? Is there any law higher than the law of supply and demand? If what moves us most—wherever we find ourselves in the social hierarchy—is out-competing others, and that instinct is decoupled from duties of justice and mercy, we just may have made our bed with the rats and the roaches.

      February 9

      A friend of mine described a profound insight he had while driving from Louisville to Nashville. It was February, and a major ice storm had struck the area the night before. For many miles, both sides of I-65 were strewn with broken and damaged trees.

      As my friend looked over the debris, he observed a pattern. Many of the trees were leaning. All those trees were situated in a grove where the trees around them had caught the tilting trees and held them. The grove kept them from snapping and falling.

      All the trees that had snapped and broken off at the trunk, and all the ones that were lying on the ground uprooted, had one thing in common—they had either been standing on the perimeter of the forest or they had been standing alone.

      He mentioned this to me and another person over lunch. The other person, who was a biologist, told him that if he could only have seen beneath the surface, he would know that the roots were also connected. The interlaced trees were bracing each other below as well as above ground. When the rains came down and turned to ice and the winds beat upon the forest, the intertwined trees were able to stand.

      Several weeks after that lunch conversation, I serendipitously came across these words from psychologist and philosopher William James: “Our lives are like islands in the sea, or like trees in the forest. The maple and the pine may whisper to each other with their leaves, but the trees also commingle their roots in the darkness underground, and the islands also hang together through the ocean’s bottom.”

      Going it alone is high-risk, perilous behavior. Interdependence—not dependence, not co-dependence, and not independence—steels us for the ice storms of life. Being in community enables us to stand. Sometimes community alone saves us from being uprooted, breaking, or crashing to the ground.

      February 10

      “Hope is rooted in the spirit”—Mark Hertsgaard 35

      The ground was so saturated from rain that, when I pulled on the dandelion plant, the entire taproot slid out. The slender white root was eleven inches long! Human hope, like the dandelion, has deep roots. Hope reaches down to our core. It is our nature, as is the nature of every living thing—from bacteria to whales, from the sequoia to the dandelion—to do everything it can to live and thrive. Albert Schweitzer summed up his reverence for life philosophy in one sentence: “I am life that wants to live, surrounded by life that wants to live.” We are hardwired for hope.

      “Hope is chosen by the heart”—Mark Hertsgaard

      Unlike the dandelion, we humans vote daily, consciously or unconsciously, for or against hope. Every year around fifty thousand Americans, in a population of over three hundred million, complete suicide. Many more of us choose risky behaviors—poor eating habits, under-exercising, tobacco use, alcohol abuse, road rage, tanning booths, distracted driving—that fight our innate hopefulness. Scripture says: “I set before you life and death, blessings and curses: choose life.”36 Hope is a choice.

      “Hope is guided by the mind”—Mark Hertsgaard

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