In Honor of Brett Kavanaugh, SCOTUS - Official Town Drunk Washington DC - Catholic Values

I was reminded of some article I wanted to write for a year or two now.

And it is more of a pet peeve and it goes back to the young buck who tried to fire me in my old job because he had a mandate to get rid of me, a whistleblower of sorts to HR about sexual harassment to myself among others and because I was over 50 and the benefits budget for healthcare apparently more so tiered to more and higher actuary figures, high premium tiers for old people. 

That said, the young buck was raised in upstate Westchester county type country and gleaning facts here and there, the bottom line is that Jack was educated from 1st grade to college degree in private Catholic education. 

Nothing wrong with that. But I have noticed this lately of a lot of politicians on the right DO NOT have what I consider traditional Christian values even though the religions checked for them next to a preference or a poll finding box is marked as that of "Christian" and or "Catholic".

Jack the supervisor made a comment to me one day, eating lunch at my desk about the smell. I explained to him that I was eating a tin of sardines in mustard which I did not think smelled. If you want me to eat sweet smelling food, don't ask me to work and to eat in on my lunch hour. Besides it was in the drawer with some crackers in a small tin and I had no money to buy the five dollar baloney sandwich in the company's Manhattan cafeteria, the cheapest item on the menu btw. I would usually go to this nearby fast food Chinese joint Kip's and get a Won Ton soup for a buck and a quarter and eat it outside in a small cubby hole urban park next door summer and winter. Oh the glory of Manhattan wages frozen since Reagan!

Aside from the ascetics of the thing, his look when I announced it was canned fish, I will remember the strange look on his face, to the day I die. One of disgust and of his pseudo-Patrician nose up in the air. How third world of you Mike?

A few more words of poor communication, more from his Catholic college educated side, than from my many self-helped book and college Psych courses labeled as or related to human communication. 

I finally asked if he had ever eaten sardines or canned fish. And again the disgusted look like I was the one covered in shit and he did not approve of my presence. This all in a face to face, my desk top across to a workstation where he was opening Fed EX packages containing certified checks and stock certificates. This is an area a lot of companies cash "The Cage" where raw cash or negotiables like bearer bonds are kept behind locked doors w/o windows.  The "Cage" tag no doubt goes back to 19th century banks, and brokerage houses where such a secured area was usually behind metal bars and locked doors. Of course in the old days, such places also handled gold bars etc. ...

This is where my own life experience kinda went back to being a kid of five and accompanying my father to the supermarket and seeing cans of Underwood Brand sardines in mustard sauce in wrapped cellophane wrappers and the likely price too was like a dime. Ancient American History.

The thought that his kid never had sardines, fish in a can, "Yuk" he said and or gestured in body language was something sad. Something I had shared with my dad was not something this kid shared with his dad. I was ignorant and his son/dad experience of taking Jack out on the golf course at the country club and caddying for dad in the same way he no doubt ever went shopping in a supermarket with anybody other than mom or the illegal nanny. 

Anyway to get to a point where I realize how old and useless this millennial thinks of me and in the line of the new Wharton Global Spreadsheet that reduces humanity to negative assets on that global spreadsheet in corporate American and corporate "Global" earth. 

That something as simple to me as a can of sardines and crackers reminds me of the lack to (of) empathy the ruling class have in dealing with a work force, my old job in fact now outsourced to India, disappearing from the landscape and making dysfunction everywhere, both coasts and flyover country in between, of people educated in private little Catholic colleges in upstate New York and charging tuition little different than Harvard. 

The gate/wall around the gated community extends to the gate around the country club next door and extends to the White Burb Catholic Educated minds of the people who have never eaten fish in cans such as sardines?

I always thought that it was po' people food like sardines, fish, that Jesus multiplied for the mixed crowds, mostly poor, in the desert?

This as an awful long prelude to a point in the news where the White Suburban Catholic Educated (Values) WSCEV Budget Director Mick Mulvaney, an asshole from South Carolina, where else but from where the Civil War started, -  

John Michael "Mick" Mulvaney thought that it was compassionate to chop "Meals on Wheels" from the Trump mean spirited GOP budget. And also how an after school snack for po' kids was also not cost efficient on the Wharton Global Humanity Destroying Spreadsheet. Mulvaney - 1st grade through Georgetown University - Catholic educated and with good Catholic "Values".

Compassion is in the eyes of the beholder. No doubt the guards at Auschwitz thought that they were being compassionate to the Jew getting off the cattle cars from the central cities of Europe. 

Good German Christian and Catholic Values practiced then and greatly unappreciated now as well with "Mick" Mulvaney's Compassionate Catholic Values Budget.

 https://lastcivilizedyank.blogspot.com/2017/03/mick-mulvaneys-compassionate-catholic.html

Compassion needs no apologies.

Compassion needs no apologies.

I must say that the visit of President Barack Obama to lay a wreath at the Hiroshima shine dedicated to the victims of the first use of nuclear weapons against humanity came off rather artificial and plastic back here in the states.

Despite the time difference of thirteen hours I was awake to see a live media feed from Japan. It did not happen. 

The Corporate Owned Media filtered the event. And every News “team” on TV later that day filtered the moment, when they showed snippets of the events mentioned two propaganda talking points. One being that Obama was not going to apologize and the other was that Obama was not going to second guess the Truman decision to use the Bomb.

The whole event staged and filtered through Corporate Owned Media was to avoid putting a human face on our enemy of 75 odd years ago. The racism of the Japanese Empire was still battling the racism of the American Pacific Corporate Empire.

But in spite of a bland speech by Obama that I had to find on You Tube, there was a man who had been a surviving victim of that use of science in a laboratory experiment against humanity 71 years ago, one Shigeaki Mori, who as an eight year old boy on his way to school got thrown off a bridge into a river by the initial shock wave of the blast. Who was protected from death by the river water in the following firestorm to follow the blast.

As I said, there was a human face to the enemy 71 years ago and we were still by the ruling elites in the media and the Pentagon still hiding that face of humanity just in case we little people might decide that nuclear weapons and nuclear war is not a viable future option of the American for profit Military Industrial Complex.

When Obama embraced and hugged nuclear war victim Shigeaki Mori, he was embracing a man who spent many thousands of his adult life hours researching and correcting Japanese records recording the events of the first use of nuclear weapons on his native Hiroshima in August 1945.

Aside from the Corporate Owned Media not giving the enemy a face 71 year ago all the way to today, Mori documented the existence of 8 American victims of the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima. They had been POWs captured from crashed American airplanes in the area just prior to the atomic blast.

That America never confirmed or tried to research the existence of these dead eight American victims, service men, MIAs, of nuclear war. 

It was the man that Obama hugged that gave a face to his enemy of 71 years ago so that they would not be forgotten and their names inscribed at the Hiroshima Memorial Shrine.

Compassion needs no apologies…

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GOP Anti-Christianity Challenged By Words of Pope Francis – Mean Spirtied GOP going to Hell?

Taking Food Stamps out of the mouths of the poor and elderly, the recent trend in mean spirited Red Neck Khristianity along with trying to take healthcare availability from millions of uncovered by healthcare Americans, does not gel with the recent words of newly elected Pope Francis regarding love and true compassion to the poor.

TV Phony Baloney Khrist Evangelical GOP panderers - meet Mystical Jesuit. 

Foodstamp-slashing House GOP should read up on Pope Francis

 Wish those House Republicans would spend some time studying the interview Pope Francis gave to the Italian Jesuit journal La Civita Cattolica that was published online by America, a U.S.-based Jesuit publication. 

 They might learn a few things about compassion, priorities and how to be real Christians.

 Francis thinks the church, to its detriment, is “obsessed” with its battles against abortion, gay marriage and contraception. “The teaching of the church is clear,” he said. “But it is not necessary to talk about these issues all the time.” 

 God bless that man. 

 But Francis didn’t just rock the world with unexpected words of conciliation about those hot-button social issues, he also said the church must be less rigid and must listen to the “feeling of the people, especially the poor.”

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Brian O’Hanlon – SMX – Homily March 26-27

Again, down under, an interesting homily from the St. Mary’s in Exile (SMX) community in Brisbane, Australia.

Faith community versus belief community is mentioned as well as the future of the faith in terms of a community living the word (God) through justice, compassion and love…

Brian O’Hanlon – SMX – Homily March 26-27

I was fortunate enough through the enthusiasm of my wife, Angela, to discover this community a long time ago – 1988 I think, and I have been a fairly regular attendee ever since.  Certainly I have been a constant attendee since, to borrow a term from the Irish, “since the troubles”, the troubles of exile. 

Peter in a homily towards the end of 2010 when restating his vision of this community, emphasised that we are a faith community not a belief community. A faith community is one developing a spiritually of Justice Compassion and Love. More recently he restated the value of the mystical contemplative tradition in Christianity traditionally suppressed throughout history. This implies  a letting go of, a freeing up from,  much if not all of our classical conditioning of religious tradition,( Recently at a friends wedding-a nuptial mass, I was sitting next to a women , who at the end of the ceremony commented “ that was scary- I have not been inside a catholic church for 25 years, yet I just knew how to do everything), or there could be a shifting of the core of our traditional stories and belief systems; if this is so what do we have left, what do we replace it with? What do we develop as the core of our own practice. According to Fr Richard Rohr OSM the oppositional mindset that was set in place after the reformation of the 16^th century, and after the enlightment of the 17^th and 18^th centuries meant that the ancient tradition of gaining spiritually through meditation was lost. We lost the older tradition of praying beyond words. I want to propose that this is what we can develop, praying beyond words, meditation-a vehicle for our spiritual pathway.

For a long time I have thought that the Book of James was the most useful, social and practical of the gospel writings; James warned against taking the Pauline view of Christianity to an extreme where Paul urged his followers to put their faith in Christ (i.e. what to believe, one who would deliver them).  James called his listeners to action, “Faith without works is dead, be doers of the word and not hearers only.  Religion that is pure and undefiled is this – to visit orphans and widows in their affliction and to keep ones-self unstained from the world” – to keep ones-self unstained from the world – what is this? Christians are very good at relieving the struggling and suffering of others-there are helping missions in every part of the world, just look at the community support provided during our natural disasters, out of this faith community Micha arose, and I am sure that nearly all of us are caring for family, relatives or friends; visiting the widow in her affliction, and as well there does seem in our community a growing interest in the spiritual/contemplative tradition, through the transformative experience of meditation, a way of remaining unstained from the world, our pastors refer to it in various ways, the Eckhart Tolle CD’s are taken home each week, and many books referring to the subject are sold, at  the drop in shop, the existing meditation groups are regularly attended. 

Jesus, it now seems, was primarily a teacher, a sage who bequeathed to his followers principles by which to live, not a body of eternally fixed doctrine that he expected people to believe. 

The teachings that Jesus bequeathed to us focused not on believing but on doing.  Even before the term ‘Christian’ (originally with a derogatory meaning)  came into use, the first Jesus-followers were attempting to practise the kind of life he taught.  They called it ‘The Way’. 

An ancient book called ‘The Didache’ (a Greek word meaning ‘teaching’) throws considerable light on this. 

It is interesting to find that the Didache has preserved the primitive label, ‘The Way’.  This is how it starts off: ‘There are two ways , one of life and one of death, but there is a great difference between the two ways’.  In its short description of the Way of Death we find listed all the commonly acknowledged human crimes and misdemeanours that are condemned in almost every culture.  But the emphasis of the Didache is on the Way of Life.  Listen to how it continues:

The way of life is this: First, you shall love God who made you; second, love your neighbour as yourself, and not do to another what you would not want done to you...

This Cultural Christian - Best of 2010

This Cultural Christian - Best of 2010

Quaker Cross - a Symbol for Compassion?

Who will be the next Pope?

John Boehner - a Man of Color

Pew Forum Test on Religion

Death of Civility in America - MSM

In the Shadow of the Kaaba – 130 Liberty Street NYC

Of all the articles in last year’s:

This Cultural Christian – Best of 2009

Only one article from 2009 shows up on this year’s Best of 2010, which is Death of Civility in America – MSM.

It should be noted that last year’s Best Of List was chosen per my own personal tastes.

This year’s listing of the past year’s Best has been chosen in numerical order and per tastes of readers, assembled from Stats on Google’s Blogger table.

Avatar or Symbol for Compassion

I had written something recently about coming up with a symbol for Compassion. Symbols are also called avatars these days.

I had suggested using the so-called Quaker Star, which is little more if you analyze it, little more than a common design on a quilt patch. The colors on that particular design were black, red and a cream white background.

That Quaker Star pattern had been used in the past for humanitarian workers in the Franco-Prussian War 1870 and conscientious objectors who worked in battlefields as medics in WWI. The small cloth patch had been sewn onto clothing or used as an armband to signify the unarmed nature of the person helping others in distress.

As such I think the design has some history associated with it with the idea of compassion. I think the Quakers might object if their exclusive design and color scheme were wholly lifted out of their place of meaning. I use the suggestion of the design as tribute to charity done to humanity in the past and present under their quilt pattern star.

I came up with a simple black and gray color scheme on a blue background. The circle is of course the planet, the world and beyond. The black at the center is darkness and uncertainty. The gray is certainly a movement into light, black mixed with white, not seen, moving into gray.

The only thing I might change in the symbol above but cannot technically do so at this time would be to make the outside dark ring to be one of white on the blue background.

The white or the light is a metaphor in religion. God as an abstract concept is sometimes called the Beatific Light – or “joyful” light – also beatific vision. If you think about it, pure white light is the exact opposite end of the total darkness of the void of space and the whole of the universe as we presently understand it from a scientific point of view.

Life as we know it exists in the light of a star, our sun, and shining on this one known living planet.

Compassion as described by the Dalai Lama means not wanting other people to be harmed, or causing no harm to others. In many ways that definition coincides with the idea of empathy or putting one in another’s situation or shoes and seeing the world from another point of view.

There is also the Charter for Compassion that tries to integrate globally the ancient Golden Rule to treat others as you would be treated yourself.

So many times, I have explained that to people and so many times I seem to get a blank stare in response. I have to wonder sometimes if the revolutionary soul of Jesus of Nazareth came from an evolutionary place in time and space where all humanity in all worlds and all galaxies find a home together – and he returned there. Perhaps that world is a real place that already exists in the Heaven and Paradise of myth.

I have to look at Jesus who wanted to change the world and the world promptly put him in his place. I have to wonder if like Luther, he could "do no other" than what he had to do while he was a presence here on this planet.

I also have to wonder too. If the compassion of the Creator to his creation - Us and Nature on Earth, whether the revolutionary message, or magic place of recognition of the divine spark within, continues to be hidden to so many of the human race – hidden because of ignorance – hidden out the fear of reaching for that light within?

Perhaps the human race is not ready to take a giant leap of faith toward the evolution of self and soul to live in peace and compassion together here on this mere spec of dust in space.

Until that day, when ever that is, those of us with the divine spark must keep the fire of light, even as a mere ember alive, waiting for that glory day of “thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”

As such, I welcome all to adopt your own sign of compassion, and put it within your reach in your mind, in your thoughts, on a flag. Or in the window to your own soul and not unlike a lit candle of peace, love and compassion that it hopefully symbolizes but acts too, from you living examples, as a beacon to others to one day find.

the beginning of a new human race

I invite you to see the video, reading along with the words and consider becoming charter members of something bigger than any one or all of us – to see the world differently, to act accordingly and in a truly human fashion – full of Compassion.

That in decades to come – these words, this belief, could become the foundation of –

the beginnings of a new human race.

(thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven)

Charter for Compassion

Hates Crimes - Pennsylvania - Compassion

A long awaited Hates Crimes Bill recently made it through the Pennsylvania state House Judiciary Committee.

Pa. House panel approves hate-crimes bill

Two years after a court threw out language that extended the state's hate-crimes law to protect gays, women, and the disabled, a bill to reinstate those protections has cleared its first hurdle in the General Assembly.

With the Political Incorrectness typical of the national Republican Party – it is reflected in the Country Club locker room rhetoric of a local state Representative:

An opponent of the bill, Rep. Tim Krieger (R., Westmoreland), said justice was "supposed to be blind" and not recognize the status of the victim or the accused. The bill says "some people are more equal than others," he asserted.

The bill is likely to pass in the House and faces a tough uphill battle in the Republican controlled Senate.

The remarks of Representative Krieger seems to reflect sentiments of some in Indiana County, next door to Kreiger’s neck of the woods Westmoreland county in a small community that had a cross burning over the weekend.

Family: Black player targeted in western Pa. cross burning

State police are investigating a cross burning in western Pennsylvania outside a home of a white family who have taken in a black child who plays for the local high school football team.

State police say they still don't know who burned the six-foot wooden cross that Joe and Mary Walbeck found charred in their yard early Sunday. The Walbecks live in West Wheatfield Township, Indiana County, about 50 miles east of Pittsburgh.

James Carville, a famous political consultant to Bill Clinton among others has been quoted as saying that Pennsylvania is "two cities (Philadelphia and Pittsburgh) separated by Alabama."

I know that there are many decent people in between Philly and Pittsburgh who would not or could burn crosses. In fact I think this incident in Indiana County is a throwback to the past. It does not take too much imagination to see someone jealous of this young man and his athletic abilities trying to scare him. The irony in all this is that few if any noticed the cross burning until it was all over. Yawn! The days of raw aggressive hate in this nation are over and gone into recession?

And then again, ugly hate spills over as in the 1998 torture and killing of a gay Matthew Shepard in Wyoming.

The Hack Republican Rep. Virginia Foxx stood on the floor of the House of Representatives in DC and said that the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crime Prevention Bill was not necessary because Matthew’s death was not a hate crime. She called that Hate Crime bill a “Hoax”. That Shepard was not killed because he was gay. He was killed as the result of a botched robbery attempt.

I don’t know if or how she framed, distorted the lynching of James Byrd Jr. in Texas in 1998? It must have been a doozy and oozing with non-compassion for her fellow humanity. That is if she, true southern belle that she is, even bothered to find the time to mention the murder of an African-American.

Where is your compassion Virginia Foxx?

Where is your compassion Tim Kreiger?

The shrinking festering core of the Republican Party lacks compassion. Until that party finds humanity and love and respect of humanity other than its phony anti-choice rhetoric, the nation cannot heal itself and be rid of the masked unofficial fostered policies – is it hatred – of the GOP.

Where is your Compassion?

Charter for Compassion - an Interfaith Road?

This past week we observed the fiftieth anniversary of the flight of the Dalai Lama, the head on a Buddhist sect, and his followers out of their native Tibet and into the neighboring country of northern India.

Tibet of course got annexed by China. I will pass on the judgment of the godless giant and talk about interfaith beliefs.

I put a Tibetan chant on above in honor of a faith in exile. I hope that China one day opens its hearts and minds to the Compassion preached by this man.

I believe that there are interfaith approaches which in some ways talk about talking over the back fence like neighbors. I am also reminded of the line from the poetry of Robert Frost, the American poet, about how “good fences make good neighbors”.

In an increasingly religion-less secular world I am listening to this chant, listening to words I do not understand, in Sanskrit, and hoping to gain a little calm in my life to seek the enlightenment spoken so often about in Buddhism. I am not worshipping the Buddha. Few in Buddhism consider their prophet, their main saint, to be a god.

Surfing the tube last night I landed on the PBS show “Bill Moyers Journal” and happened to hear Dr. Karen Armstrong talking about her attempts to form a global “Charter for Compassion” with others who would forge this document that recognizes the “Golden Rule” as the basis of all world religions and put it back into daily use and cognizance globally both in a religious and secular sense.

Armstrong, who taught for a time at London's Leo Baeck rabbinic college, says she has been particularly inspired by the Jewish tradition's emphasis in matters of faith versus practice: "I say that religion isn’t about believing things. It's about what you do. It’s ethical alchemy. It’s about behaving in a way that changes you, that gives you intimations of holiness and sacredness.” She points out that religious fundamentalism is not just a response to but, paradoxically, a product of contemporary culture. "We need to create a new narrative, get out of the rat-run of hatred, chauvinism and defensiveness; and make the authentic voice of religion a power in the world that is conducive to peace." (Wikipedia)

Perhaps the road to interfaith cooperation and beliefs lay in recognition of common grounds.

Instead of talking over the back fence so to speak, perhaps we should be going into each other’s gardens and seeing and feeling and talking about what the next guy with the other religion or beliefs sees and feels as they share in the same visit.

Her use of the word “Compassion” is what triggered my combining these not so differing points of view (?) of the Dalai Lama and Dr. Armstrong.