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archives | newquaker.comSaturday, March 13, 2004
Is it writing about politics to bemoan a presidential administration that purports to have its path lit by evangelical Christian principles but just can't stop deceiving the American public? The Philadelphia Inquirer reported again today that Medicare's chief actuary, Richard Foster, was prevented from going public with his scary cost analysis of Congress' revisionary new Medicare law. Or at least that's what Foster declares. What was supposed to cost $395 billion will very likely cost $534 billion. Foster, a respected, nonpartisan official in the Department of Health and Human Services, calculated the higher number. The Bush administration had those figures prior to the Congressional vote, but did not release them until after the law was passed—and, says Foster, actively prevented him from giving the higher figure to the public before the vote.
It isn't writing about politics to expose a costly deception? That's good. Then I won't have to repeat John Kerry's overheard words that his opponents are "the most crooked, you know, lying group I've ever seen." That might be construed as writing about politics. This is not a partisan matter, not an issue of Republican versus Democrat, but what is true and who will affirm it.
posted by Merle Harton, Jr. 11:53 PM
Thursday, March 11, 2004
In the shade of Martha Stewart. A lie is like a fabric. The lie and the truth cannot coexist, side by side, so the lie must be woven large enough to cover the truth. Alas, it doesn't take much to unravel the lying fabric—as my daughter L. found out. Yesterday she pulled a Martha Stewart, and got caught.
Here's how I learned truth, and of the fabric that was supposed to cover it. It was about 1:00 PM at the College and my direct line rang from the outside: it was the high school attendance officer calling to tell me that L. wasn't in school. What! No, she didn't report to her first-hour class, nor to her second-hour or third-hour classes. That's impossible, I said. She left early for class (I didn't drive her that morning) and either walked (the weather was nice and it's just a few blocks to school from our house in the village) or rode with a girlfriend. Well, she's not in school and the school considers her truant. Now I was worried. I called L.'s cell phone—no answer. I left a message. I text-messaged her. No response. A few worried minutes later I called the school back: No, she hadn't reported to her fourth-hour class. Okay, so now I'm really concerned. I pull out my personal phone book and start calling her friends. Only one answered, the one I thought she had ridden to school with, but she was home sick and hadn't talked with L.. She promised to call another friend for me. Then the game began.
My secretary took a call and transferred it to me. It's your high school principal, she said. Hi, Dr. Harton, this is [name withheld], the principal. I'm sorry, but we've had a problem with our automated attendance system and I want to assure you that L. has been in school. Apparently she went to the nurse's station and was mistakenly recorded as absent. My sigh was an audible sign of relief; I thanked him for calling and we hung up. Wait a minute. That man was polite and accommodating. That didn't seem like the high school principal I know. The [name withheld] I know is a short, aloof, suspicious, supercilious man who wouldn't call me to apologize even if he discovered that he's accidentally run over my daughter with his SUV. I promptly called the attendance officer at the school and asked if she knew that the principal had called me. That's strange, she said. The principal is in a faculty meeting—he couldn't have called me. She puts me on hold and calls the nurse's station; no student reported to the nurse's station today. Hmm. Very clever. I thanked her. My cell phone rang. It was L.; she was home now, as if nothing unusual was going on. The truth had been hidden beneath a fabric, and now was the time to unravel it. I angrily confronted her with the facts, and she crumpled like an empty cellophane wrapper. I called the school back and told the attendance officer that L. had been playing hooky and that she would be coming to school tomorrow, but without a note. She would have to take whatever punishment was appropriate for the offense.
Later that evening, after dinner, I casually said to my daughter as we washed the dishes: "I thought the principal was a nice touch." She wasn't amused and stopped talking to me for the rest of the night.
posted by Merle Harton, Jr. 11:26 PM
Sunday, March 07, 2004
Jesus, Christian. The Jewish weekly newspaper Forward reports that the debate over Mel Gibson's Passion narrative is getting hotter and hotter within the Jewish Orthodox community. One outspoken Orthodox rabbi, Rabbi Steven Pruzansky, religious leader of Congregation Bnai Yeshurun in Teaneck, NJ, has gone so far as to put the film's Jewish critics in the category of rodef, or pursuer, a rabbinic term meaning someone who threatens Jewish lives. "If there is any Jew-hatred that results from this event," said Rabbi Pruzansky, "it won't be from the movie but from the Jewish overreaction to it."
As the Jewish communities bicker among themselves about how they ought to respond to such narratives of Christ's passion, we should expect that this is not the end of their debate. Jewish critics of Passion stories are audiences who do not see Jesus as a part of Jewish history; because of their blindness, they must always ask the so-called question of "Jewish guilt." They do not comprehend Jesus as the Messiah, as a perfecting of Israel, but somehow as standing apart from their religious history entirely. It is not we, as Christians, who have any need to ask this question at all, for our true understanding of the Messiah really ought not to allow us to throw stones at these people.
posted by Merle Harton, Jr. 1:41 AM
One of the social effects of being an enemy is that we are inclined to cast them as something other than fully human beings. This makes it possible for us to kill them; this makes it possible for us to treat them without commiseration, and thus without human compassion. We can't look upon them as like ourselves: they must be so unlike us as to be other than fully human beings. And so evil men, like all enemies, also become other than fully human beings and the divide between good and evil gets wider as a result of this hard distinction.
We might say this applies to many of the monsters of our history, but we can certainly see this more clearly in the case of Osama Bin Laden. Like his captured contemporary, Saddam Hussein, we chase this man with clarity of purpose. He must die for his leadership of al-Qaeda and the deaths in the 9/11 Twin Towers terror. We refuse to accept that he is anything but evil; he is resolutely our enemy and we must embrace the thought that he is something other than fully a human being—so much so that we find it incredible that a friend could say that Osama Bin Laden was ever a "normal person."
In a BBC News report on Thursday, Abdurahman Khadr, a Canadian recently released from American custody at Guantanamo Bay, admitted that he and his family were not only members of al-Qaeda but also friends of Osama Bin Laden and his family. Khadr, now 20, was captured in Afghanistan in 2001 and now lives with his family in Toronto. He was raised, he said, as a suicide bomber. He and his brothers were sent by their father, an Egyptian-born Canadian, to train with al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, where he grew up playing with Bin Laden's children. For him, Bin Laden is a normal father and person. Said Khadr: "He has issues with his wife, and he has issues with his kids, financial issues, you know, the kids aren't listening, the kids aren't doing this and that."
If, as Christians, we find ourselves unable to muster human compassion for such men as Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden, we ought at least to balance our wrath with the knowledge that neither of these men is the real enemy we seek to overcome. Destroying these men will not bring an end to evil, nor to terrorism, nor to the hatred that has poured fuel onto the new asymmetrical battlefield. "For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms," said Paul to the Ephesians [Eph 6:12]. Until hearts are changed, the battlefield will be unceasingly strewn with efforts to fight what is spiritual by means of what is not, with the bodies of soldiers who fight an enemy they cannot see. The Quaker apologist George Barclay wisely said: "One man cannot inflict enough bodily suffering on another to make him change his views, especially in matters that are spiritual and supernatural" [Apology, Prop. 14:4]. The first hearts that must be changed are ours, for until then we cannot be good examples of the very fully human beings we want our enemies to become.
posted by Merle Harton, Jr. 12:01 AM
© Merle Harton, Jr. All rights reserved. Biblical references are NIV® unless otherwise noted.
