Modern Inventions Some modern inventions are so dangerous, we choose not to use them. Developed in the 1940s, for instance, the pesticide DDT and other persistent organic pollutants were either banned or restricted in a 1996 world treaty negotiated in Stockholm. Exemptions exist so countries can use these compounds to control mosquito populations where malaria is a problem, but otherwise we have decided their benefit is not worth their harm. Nuclear weapons haven’t been used since the United States bombed Nagasaki and Hiroshima in 1945. So far, although over 13,000 of these bombs remain in the world, no one has chosen to wreak such disaster upon the world again. We’ve…
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Meaning and Purpose in Grief Work
We Must Create Meaning While leading a group about grief, I mentioned that, as part of the process of moving on, “we must create a sense of meaning.” I meant this in two ways. First, we must make sense of what happened. Was God involved? If so, how? What does the event tell us about fairness, and how important it is that life be fair? Is someone to blame? Do we need to forgive that person, or do we need to forgive ourselves? Do we want to forgive, or will doing so betray our values? Is there something we can learn from our loss, or was it a random act…
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If Knowledge Is Power
Knowledge and Safety “Knowledge is power,” he told me. “Some people shouldn’t have it.” He spoke the quip casually, quickly moving on to another part of his story, but the words stayed with me. This man, a patient at the hospital, had been sober for twenty years, even through the deaths of a daughter as a young woman and his son at the age of four. He rebuilt a life that had been tattered by addiction, incarceration, and despair, but the cruelty of strangers, the betrayal of loved ones, and the loss of dreams had taken its toll. He knew that some people could be trusted with the tender parts…
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Listening to Be Changed
When We Disagree In trauma circles, they say, “Don’t ask, ‘What’s wrong with you?’ Ask, ‘What happened to you.’” In other words, all those people who seem crazy and wrong—the addict, the mentally ill, the homeless, the timid, the broken-hearted, the person imprisoned by cell walls or greed or an unacknowledged emptiness of heart—are not crazy or wrong. They are wounded. But what if that person is Republican, or Democrat, or Libertarian, or Socialist? What if he worships a different god than we do, or no god at all? Do we dismiss him as deluded, ignorant, or even evil? Does it make sense to wonder what happened to make her…
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Boundaries, Love, and Our Planet
Light that Knows No Boundaries Throughout the night, my neighbors’ lights blare from their house, spilling into backyards, trespassing into bedrooms, streaming into space. Light respects no boundaries. I can curse and cajole to my heart’s content, yet nothing will turn the glare aside except a wall or a shield. Even eyelids are not enough to protect us from the artificial glow that blights the world. So much brighter than any flame or distant star, the glare we have created confuses birds, leads turtles astray, and disrupts the hormones of every mammal, including ourselves. None of this matters when our fear of demons and criminals is used against us to…
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Celebrating Independence
The American Mythos Here in the United States, we value independence. The mythology that we are self-sufficient, free-thinking, rugged individualists has been used to sell trucks, guns, beer, and insurrection. We fought a war against England to guarantee our right to govern ourselves, and no one’s going to take that right from us. “Live free or die,” as they say in New Hampshire. [This 1809 quote from General John Stark became the New Hampshire state motto in 1945.] It’s that kind of sentiment that we celebrate on the Fourth of July. This is not all bad. Values are important, and we in this country do have shared values. We stand…
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Protecting the Noncompliant
A Longing for Respect On my morning walks, I often pass by a van parked in our neighborhood. Occasionally, the man who lives in it is awake, and we chat. He’s survived outside for years, having lost his home when he lost his last job. Because he gets food stamps, he eats okay, but his phone hardly ever functions, and he scrounges money to buy gasoline. Who knows where he gets the cash to buy the meth he depends on “to keep warm”? The other day, I found him pacing beside his vehicle, looking disgusted. He told me that someone had snuck into his van while he slept and stolen…
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Racism, Sin, and Love
Original Sin? Slavery has been called America’s “original sin.” Barrett Holmes Pitner used the phrase in his article, “US Must Confront Its Original Sin and Move Forward,” published by the BBC. The University of California, Davis, offers a class called “Slavery: America’s Original Sin,” and the same words make up the title of a book by Jim Willis, America’s Original Sin. Barak Obama used the term in his Race Speech in March 2008, and Paul Krugman used it in a 2020 opinion column. These are just a few examples. According to John Patrick Leary, the phrase is an unfortunate one. He explains that we can’t atone for an original sin.…
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Little Bighorn and Healing from Our Past
The Beginning of the Great Sioux War In 1876, the United States started a new war with the Sioux Nation. They had been fighting off and on since the 1850s, but this was the final series of battles. Though the natives defeated Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer at the Battle of Little Bighorn, slaughtering over half the troops who fought with him, a year later, in 1877, the United States military defeated them. Even though the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie guaranteed they could remain in the Black Hills in perpetuity, the Indians surrendered their lands and retired to the reservation. [1] So when did the hostilities start? Did this…
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MLK and Restoring Justice
Speaking Out for Justice As we celebrate the ministry of Martin Luther King, Jr., we like to repeat his dream that one day his four children “will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character,” and that one day, even in Alabama where the racists are vicious, “little black boys and little black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and little white girls as sisters and brothers.” [1] He speaks of a glorious future when equality and freedom will flourish, from coast to coast and in every state. His words are poetic, passionate, and they fill us…