Could ISIS be onto something important?

I have watched with horror as the events spilling out of Paris last weekend have developed this week. The accounts of the brutal attacks and loss of life were horrible, difficult to watch.

In the wake of those attacks, the well named worldwide web has prompted many of us to be aware of similar attacks by terrorist groups which we had, for the most part, simply ignored previously. A devastating attack on Beirut the day before the Paris attacks was comparable in terms of deaths and horror. The attack on a Kenyan university a few months ago also swam back into focus with similar casualties and horror. Many of us who care about our world have had our unconscious Eurocentric lenses brought squarely – if painfully – back into focus.

We have also had to become honest about our fears of attacks on our home shores. The US House voted last night to restrict and tightly screen refugees pouring out of the open wound once bounded by European drawn national borders in places named Iraq and Syria. This comes on the heels of 27 US state governors declaring that their states would not accept any middle eastern refugees, statements with little legal basis but with enormous potential political capital in exploiting the paranoia of a fearful public.

I wish the situation was as clear as many would like to make it. Yes, the US is a nation of immigrants with a history that is closely connected to our greatness as a people and as a culture. No, there probably isn’t a huge chance that refugees fleeing the brutality of life under ISIS will prove to be ISIS operatives once within US borders. But the memory of the 9-11 terrorists, living among us and striking at us using the training we provided them and our own airliners, is still fresh in the memories of many Americans. Where does one draw the line between a raw paranoia whipped into a frenzy by ratings seeking media and a reasonable concern for national security?

There is also a religious element which lies just below the surface here. Many US residents operate out of a presumption of superiority of the particular brand of the Christian religion they hold which tends to express itself in an uncritical but common equation of Islam with violence and terrorism. This blissful ignorance willfully avoids the reality that most of the actual terrorism committed in this country has come at the hands of those acting in the name of the supposedly superior religion. Indeed, Olympics bomber Eric Rudolph found his deadly vocation in a movement called Christian Identity.

No Room at the Inn

A common meme currently making the rounds on social media displays a couple of renditions of the argument that were the infant Jesus and his family seeking refuge in the US today as they are reported to have done in two different Gospels, they would be out of luck. The Gospel of Matthew reports the Holy Family having sought refuge in Egypt from the infanticide launched by a King Herod tipped off by his own soothsayers of Jesus' birth, the slaying of all Hebrew infants a means of eliminating any potential rivals to the throne.  Had Egypt responded to the Holy Family’s request for temporary asylum as has the governor of my own state, we probably would never have heard of Jesus.

A second version of that meme compares the US to a more heartless version of the little town of Bethlehem with no room in the inn for an at-term pregnant mother and her husband. Without even a stable, an infant could not have survived a birth in the harsh elements of early winter Judea.

Of course, both versions are designed to appeal to Christian compassion and the long held value of hospitality in the Christian tradition. They are also designed to bring into focus the role of varying degrees of xenophobia in Christian ideation and how such thinking and resulting behaviors are antithetical to the heart of the Christian tradition with its commandment to love one’s neighbor as oneself. And if there is any doubt about how far the term neighbor stretches, Jesus’ Good Samaritan parable features a culturally despised political enemy as the one who proved neighbor to the man in need.

The Holy Family’s flight into Egypt as refugees from Herod’s homicidal paranoia and the current flood of refugees from places that were once called Syria and Iraq bear some striking similarities. They are both flights to escape terror, torture and death. Matthew’s story is set in a Judea in which a client king had been placed on the throne by the world’s controlling empire of the time. Herod was responsible for keeping the peace in the Roman province and was keenly aware of this role even as he was widely reviled by his own people. 

In the current story, ISIS came to power in the wake of an invasion by the world’s current imperial power. A destabilized Iraq, an imploding Syria and a wealth of weaponry left behind by the invading imperial armies when they exited Iraq provided the raw materials for the rise of a self-proclaimed caliphate based in high visibility torture and the terror which results from it. Clearly, Jesus’ family did not play a direct role in their own need to flee Judea. They were merely the collateral damage of imperial machinations over which they had no control or ability to influence. The same is true of the refugees hemorrhaging out of the former Iraq and Syria.

Bu here the similarities end. In Luke’s story, Joseph and Mary were given shelter of sorts, albeit shelter designed for non-human animals. There amidst the lowing cattle the Christ child would be born. In Matthew’s story, the flight into Egypt occurred with no checks at the border, the family being able to return to their native Judea after the danger to their infant son had passed.

The US House and the governors of our states, when placed in the roles of the owner of the stable in Bethlehem or the officials in Egypt in charge of their borders, come up pretty short. Ironically, it is often these self-proclaimed followers of the Christ child who are most vociferous in their desire to keep out those currently in his position of extreme vulnerability.

Wrestling with the Shadow

I have struggled with my own responses to the attacks on Paris. I watched with equal parts horror and glee as the French announced its response would be “merciless.” Within 24 hours, that response became clear with the bombing of the city that supposedly serves as ISIS headquarters. The anger in my heart leapt with joy as the news of the bombing was announced. They deserved it, my Shadow gloated.

At the same time the sorrow already in my soul deepened as the lives of ever more people bearing the same divine image I and everyone else bears were lost in a hail of fiery explosions. No one deserves to die like that, particularly civilians already suffering under the tyrannical reign of ISIS.

Yet, I find myself in a quandary. On the one hand, I recognize that we cannot bomb our way out of this cesspool of violence and inhumanity that our own short-sighted actions essentially spawned in the first place. Indeed, if anything, the rise of ISIS from the ashes of Iraq serves as the consummate argument against using military force to resolve international problems. Violence always has a way of begetting more violence.

On the other hand, the leadership of all these groups from Al Qaeda to Boko Haram offer no indications that they are open to negotiating. If anything they appear inclined to engage in ever more deadly high visibility attacks like those which shook two world class cities this past week. How does the world deal with the immediate danger they pose without the use of coercive force and the violence which flows from it?

Even as we wrestle with the immediate dangers posed by terrorist organizations, it is the long range concerns they present that must not escape our attention. An essential question to be considered is what makes an operation like ISIS attractive to recruits from around the world? What could possibly prove so compelling to a young man or woman at the beginning of their lives that they would be willing to strap on an explosive device and detonate it in the public square? Clearly, the threat of violence and death are simply not deterrents for these true believers.

It is important here to note that every religion has had true believers willing to kill and die for their faith. While Islamic fundamentalists have been the recent focus of the world’s attention given their role in terrorist attacks, in truth the only real difference between the Christian fundamentalists of our own Bible and Beretta Belts, the Jewish fundamentalists of the West Bank settlements and the Islamic fundamentalists we so deeply fear is their degree of extremism – largely driven by the degree of insularity of the echo chambers in which they thrive – and their access to power.

Pathologies of Modernity – the Message from ISIS

Last night while flipping through the channels trying to find something non-jarring before bed, I stumbled across a provocative appearance by former Undersecretary of Defense for Political Affairs Wendy Sherman on MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell show. Sherman spoke of the role of opposition to modernity in attracting young recruits to the ISIS movement.

Sherman cited Pew Research reports from a number of countries where Islam is prevalent which found that while young residents of those countries were comfortable with the technology that modernity has provided them, they simultaneously fear modernity due to its threat of losing the sense of self. Movements like ISIS and Boko Haram readily provide a sense of identity, however limited and artificial it might be, to people who have largely been the losers in the globalization project of modernity.

I believe that ISIS may well have a few points here that we need to consider.

One of Sherman’s more salient points was how disrupting the infrastructure of ideologically-driven terrorist groups must be a focus of world efforts to combat them. Modernity’s free market fundamentalism has constructed the world as a global marketplace with little concern for what is being sold to whom.

The manufacture and export of weaponry worldwide has escalated even as that weaponry has increasingly been used against the people and nations it was allegedly produced to protect. The majority of ISIS’ current stockpile of armaments was either produced in the US or marketed by US companies. What might the example of ISIS with its ready access to the weapons we produced that they are using to terrorize our world suggest to us about the need to revisit this rather uncritical aspect of modernism?

There are two other points regarding fundamentalist groups like ISIS and its epic clash with modernity that merit consideration. First, virtually all fundamentalist movements include in their ideological core elements of patriarchy in varying degrees of pathology. Frankly, the argument that women must cover their own bodies whether they wish to or not because men cannot control themselves otherwise has never been a terribly compelling argument and could only arise in a culture in which unearned male privilege to define a culture was presumed.

In many ways, fundamentalists of all stripes have something to fear and much to learn from modernity with its liberationist and egalitarian values and its confrontation of repressive sexual mores. Repression validated in the name of tradition and religion still remains at its heart repression.

On the other hand, modernity has its own pathologies that not just fundamentalists find unbearable. While women have been freed to express themselves as they see fit, their bodies have simultaneously become commodities for marketing and thus consumption.

The free market fundamentalism of neoliberal modernity has also produced an enormous disparity and resulting social inequality that perpetually threatens to dissolve its societies into chaos. Entire cohorts of young workers today face underemployment on a good day and unemployment on most days in increasingly stratified societies in which a tiny elite enjoy the good life while the rest struggle. Their despair provides the fuel propelling a descent into the darkness of nihilistic identity groups across the developing world and in its expanding pockets within the techno-industrialized world.

While modernity has freed its citizens from the superstitions of religion and the constraints of the tribe, modernity has resulted in the very atomization and alienation that creates a ready supply of potential recruits for ideologically proscribed tribes that will readily provide identity and existential purpose. These young jihadists of all stripes are not simply confronting us from the outside. We are producing many of them in our own backyards.

A New Consciousness for the Brave New World

US culture has never been known for its ability to delay gratification or to see the big picture. Pragmatism with its preference for immediate action is the dominant philosophy in the US even at times when gradual, deliberate and thoughtful policy has clearly been the better path. But the ease with which cosmopolitan urban centers can be attacked and the flood of refugees which appears to be only the harbinger of even greater flows of desperate people fleeing inhospitable regions ought to suggest to us that business as usual can no longer work.

While Albert Einstein was known primarily for his work in physics, he also was an astute observer of and commentator upon human nature and societies. Einstein often noted that “No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.” We stand at the threshold of a new world. Postmodernity has made us very familiar with the failings of modernity. But it is neither a new revealed religion, as it so often is treated in the academy today, nor is it a solution to the problems it so readily brings into focus.

We must develop the new consciousness needed for this brave new world we have no choice but to face. If we are smart, we will take seriously the messages that ISIS is sending us about how we should construct this new world. Though their medium is abhorrent, we ignore their message to our peril. 

All images taken from Google Images All images taken from Google Images

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Harry Scott Coverston

Orlando, Florida

frharry@cfl.rr.com

harry.coverston@knights.ucf.edu

If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding.

Most things worth considering do not come in sound bites.

For what does G-d require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your G-d? (Micah 6:8, Hebrew Scriptures)

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Brother Ass Shakes Hands With Sister Death

Francis of Assisi saw the world as the place G-d’s goodness was recognized. He was intentional about recognizing the relational aspects of all Being. That included his own body, which he called Brother Ass, and the end of life which all created beings face whom he called Sister Death. Francis recognized these as aspects of our own finite lives that all of us eventually must acknowledge.

Abusing Brother Ass

For most of his life, Francis sought to live a life of strict poverty, denying his body food and comfort, engaging in a self-denying asceticism that sometimes shocked even the beggars he served. Francis treated Brother Ass much as Italian peasants treated their donkeys, driving them with fear and thrashing them with whips. His desire to follow Jesus in all things including his suffering was consummated near the end of his life when he received the stigmata on his hands, feet and side like that of his Lord, which would continue to bleed until his death.

As Francis neared the end of his life, he voiced misgivings for his treatment of his body. His abuse of Brother Ass was a rather jarring inconsistency with an incarnational theology which saw the divine in all aspects of Creation and treated it with deep respect. Confessing to a fellow friar an uneasy conscience about the way he’d treated his body, the sage brother attending the ailing Francis asked him if his body had not served him obediently in everything he’d asked of it.

The saint admitted that it had been obedient in all things, “sparing itself nothing, rushing almost head-long to obedience; shirking no labor and refusing no discomfort.” The brother then asked Francis, “So, where is your generosity toward your body, Brother Francis?” At that point Francis repented and apologized to Brother Ass.

At the end of Francis’ life he would often refer to the coming of Sister Death. As Francis lay dying, naked on the earth as he had requested, having embraced Franciscan poverty to its furthest extreme right to the very end, he had the attending brothers add these lines to his magnificent Canticle of the Creatures in homage of Sister Death:

All praise be yours, my Lord, through Sister Death, From whose embrace no mortal can escape. Woe to those who die in mortal sin! Happy those she finds doing your will! The second death can do them no harm.

Francis insisted that death was not alien to human experience, something of which to be terrified and to seek to escape through whatever means possible. Rather, death was simply another dimension of a human experience in which G-d was present in every aspect. Like every other aspect of the Creation in which the divine is mirrored and immanently present, Sister Death is to be respected and embraced.

Brother Ass Seeks His Due

I’ve thought about these two aspects of Franciscan theology a good bit the past couple of weeks. When I retired in September, I told myself and a handful of trusted friends that I had retired in part to engage in some badly needed healing. Truth is, my extrication of myself from my career in higher education was much more painful than I had anticipated. I incurred an awful lot of wounds in that process, particularly during the last two years at the university.

Letting go of the anger, the bitterness and woundedness has been an ongoing process in the three months since I finally left my former life in academia. I am grateful for the time I have had to pray, meditate, garden and wade through a lifetime of papers, art, photos, books and mementos which have accumulated in my office and library. I am just beginning this process but it is a bittersweet joy to engage this clearing away of those things which once were important but no longer serve a useful role in my life and making way for those things which will surely come to take their place. Indeed, this process is proving essential to the badly needed healing I had anticipated.

What I did not realize was that my healing would be physical as well as emotional and spiritual. I knew I had not taken very good care of Brother Ass during my lifetime as a driven lawyer, then seminarian, then graduate student, and finally college instructor. I worked long hours, often ate a poor diet, drank way too much and collapsed into bed too many nights well past the time I was guaranteed a good night’s sleep.

I was told by friends who have recently retired that I would experience a great sense of tiredness once I finally retired. That has come in spades. I find myself sleeping 9 hours regularly and sometimes taking naps in the afternoon. My physical labors come in spurts with enough energy to work 3-4 hours in a yard that is finally taking shape after such a long neglect. My attentiveness to the interior of my house lags behind but I have begun piling up books by topic on my library floor awaiting scanning and ordering on my shelves, and culling books which no longer form a part of my ongoing interests, soon headed for the Friends of the Library store.

Until I retired, I had always found reasons not to go to the doctors. My blood pressure medicine would run out and I would beg for refills and promise to come into the office “just as soon as I am finished with ___( insert urgent project du jour here). Dental appointments would be set and then reset as “something came up” each time.

And then, suddenly, my dance card began to empty, my calendar became increasingly bare. Now I had no excuses for not attending to the physical problems I had become expert at both avoiding and denying. Like Cinderella hearing the clock strike midnight, I was suddenly brought face to face with Brother Ass, having endured all the abuse I had heaped upon him over 62 years of hard living, suddenly demanding his due.

Replacing my front tooth was my first project. The porcelain cap on the tooth had come off just after my return from Europe in June and I had gone four months needing a replacement. My former dentist had not been in the network of insurance covered providers and with retirement I no longer had the luxury of paying the difference. The new network dentist not only repaired my front tooth so I could smile again, it was a fraction of the cost quoted me by my former out of network dentist. One down.

Next was getting my aching knee some attention. About two years ago I wrapped my ankle around Oscar, my dachshund, and in an attempt to keep from stepping on him, swung my knee around quickly only to encounter the immovable object of a coffee table stacked with oversized books on Greek art, Celtic civilization and Cuba. The result was a torn meniscus that cannot be repaired and has sometimes proven debilitating.

I take several supplements that supposedly help the inflammation and, truth be told, I can tell the difference when I periodically stop taking them. A referral to a local orthopedic surgeon resulted in several cortisone injections into the knee and the news that I’d need a knee replacement soon. Unsatisfied with that diagnosis, I asked for a second opinion. My current specialist has provided a series of lubricating injections into the knee that thus far seems to be helping defer what may be an inevitable date with a surgeon’s knife. I am walking a couple of miles daily and working 3-4 hours in the yard without much pain. So far, so good.

I thought I was finished. But that was just the beginning.

My primary care doctor had recommended I get a colonoscopy five years ago. Knowing the pain and indignity such involved, I had found a host reasons to avoid that procedure. But with my empty calendar confronting me, I finally agreed to set the appointment.

Truth be told, I had every reason to have the procedure done. My father had had a close call about three decades ago with a colon cancer that had completely blocked his intestinal track and nearly killed him. I will never forget his physician calling my sister and I into a consulting room and telling us, “You need to know that your chances of getting colon cancer in your lifetime just went up 50%.” Adding to that a mother who had died of breast cancer, taking chances on my own diagnosis of cancer was not a game of Russian Roulette I need to be play.

For some reason, my PA had ordered both colonoscopy, which looks at one’s intestinal track, and endoscopy, which looks at one’s esophagus. The specialist prefaced his discussion of my results with the statement, “It’s a good thing you decided to come in when you did….” Gulp.  Turns out my colonoscopy was clear. Good news and somewhat expected given my vegetarian diet. The endoscopy, however, revealed Barrett’s Syndrome, scar tissue from a history of acid reflux with the propensity to develop into a deadly form of cancer. Surprise!

It’s quite possible to have damaging acid reflux and not be aware of it. The doctor said the scar tissue had been caused about 20-25 years ago. This would have been right in the middle of my time as an attorney where my hard driving professional life and hard drinking private life could well have produced the acid backup into the esophagus to damage those cells.

I am now taking a medication to prevent further damage to the esophagus and my doctor is telling me that during my next endoscopy he can laser off the Barrett’s cells. When the laser burns heal, new esophageal cells will replace them. “You’ll have a brand new esophagus,” he said. At that point, any threat of cancer will be ended.

During my scope results appointment my internal medicine doctor inquired about my ear. I’d had a rash on the top inside of my left ear for a couple of years that periodically would go away completely but at other times becomes crusty and bloody. I had looked it up online and decided it was a form of seborrhea along with a patchy spot next to my right eye. My doctor was not convinced and referred me to a dermatologist.

The dermatologist took one look at the two spots and, like my internal specialist, began with “It’s a good thing you decided to come in when you did…” As it turns out, both spots were developing skin cancers. He removed both, sent them away for biopsy and scheduled me for Mohs surgery to remove the margins. That surgery is tomorrow.

So the bad news was that the dermatitis I had been battling with diet and ointments was actually skin cancer. The good news was that both were basal cells, stage 1. As the scheduling assistant told me when setting up my surgery date, “If you’ve got to have cancer, these are the best kinds to have.” Thanks, I think.

Blessings in Disguise

My thoughts go back to Francis as I consider how badly I have treated Brother Ass over my lifetime. Considering how dependably it has served me, even when being asked to be constantly overextended and pushed beyond its limits, I probably owe it a good bit more consideration than I have shown it. Unlike Francis, who died in his late 30s, blind and exhausted, I am getting a second chance to live in a manner which honors Brother Ass and demonstrates generosity and gratitude. I’m taking that seriously.

It’s ironic how events in your life which seem to be tragedies sometimes turn out to be blessings in disguise. My DUI accident in California prompted me to stop drinking for a year to reevaluate the way I used and abused alcohol. Without that wakeup call in California, I could have well been on my way to esophageal cancer if not alcoholism.

Similarly, prior to the train wreck that prompted my departure from the university, I would always have found excuses not to go to the doctors. I would have ignored signs of ill health even as the rash on my ear periodically bled and my aching knee required up to four ibuprofen at a time just to be bearable, a regimen which is not good for one’s kidneys or blood pressure.

Indeed, my primary concern prior to retirement was hypertension. Ironically, within two months of retirement, my blood pressure was down 20 points to normal. I lost nine pounds. My medication has been decreased and the doctor is considering taking me off medication entirely if the current trend continues. Amazing what time to walk, sleep and the ability to regulate your diet and consistently take your medication and supplements can do for a body! And what might that say about the way most of us live to work?

Greeting Sister Death

While Brother Ass has been my focus the past three months, I also have thought a good bit about Sister Death. The word cancer causes a chill to run down most 21^st Western spines with good reason. Memories of my father’s close brush with death and my mother’s agonizing years of chemotherapy and radiation immediately came to mind when the dermatologist began with “It’s a good thing you came in today…” Indeed, a cousin my age had died at 24 from a melanoma that spread so rapidly that he went from healthy jock playing in a local baseball league to dead in just 18 months from diagnosis.

I cannot say that I am unafraid of dying. Death is the great unknown and the fear of annihilation of whatever essence of me there might be rumbles around in the background of whatever equanimous understandings I might ultimately verbalize about dying. Social theorist Ernest Brecker described it well when he said, “The idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else; it is the mainspring of human activity—activity designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny for man.”

Yet like Francis, I do see Sister Death as part of the compact that every living being has made as a condition of existence. Like Francis, I hold to a belief that death is not so much an extinction as a consummation of life. And as Franciscan theologians have long taught, I believe that all Being comes from G-d, finds its ground of Being in G-d and ultimately returns to G-d. When the time comes, I pray to be able to joyfully embrace Sister Death.

Of course, I cannot rationally explain that. I also cannot avoid Brecker’s assessment that this might well be rationalization on my part. But I have had a number of experiences of what I would call the holy throughout my life that suggest to me that something more lies beyond the world we experience and attempt to control through our reason, quantification and technology. While the latter are the currency of post-Enlightenment understandings of truth, I have long known that there are limits to those understandings. Indeed, my life is a testament to both that currency and its limitations.

My immediate concerns are not that I will die soon. My Barrett’s is inactive and unlikely to develop into cancer even without further treatment, particularly given my lifestyle and dietary changes. My skin cancer could recur but I will walk out of the 6-8 hours of Mohs surgery cancer free. As most of my doctors have said to me, I not only do not look my age (most guess I’m in my 40s) - the beneficiary of youthful looking genes from both parents -  I’m also in pretty good health for a 62 year old. For that I am deeply grateful.

What I am concerned about is trying to ascertain what the remainder of my life is going to be about and how to live into whatever purpose that life might have. While I’m not totally convinced that each of us has a single purpose we come into life to meet, I do believe that purposeless existence is essentially a waste of the gift of life.

I have seen this first year of retirement as a badly needed sabbatical with time to lick my wounds and heal emotionally, spiritually and physically. But I have also seen it as a time of discernment. At 62 I’m not free to pick up and leave for a new calling as in the past. And, truth be told, I’m not even sure where I need to apply my energies at this point.

My departure from teaching left me with a very bitter taste in my mouth for the endeavor to which I have devoted most of my life. While I miss my students and the public scholarship events that once excited me, I don’t want to teach classes or present public scholarship just to have something to do or in pursuit of the pittance these events pay. And I still feel the need to exorcise the demons of years of learning and experience that demand to be expressed in some kind of published writing, the writing of these blog posts being a first step in that process.

So I still don’t know what I want to do with my retirement. I want to invest my remaining time and energy in something that will actually mean something and hopefully can make the world a little better place. But nothing has really captured my imagination thus far.  It is not surprising that I write these words at the start of the Advent season which began Sunday. Like Advent, this season of my own life is a time of watching and waiting.

When Sister Death comes, I want to embrace her warmly, leaving behind all regrets for a life not well lived. I want to hear “Well done, good and faithful servant,” whether that comes from G_d or simply from within my own heart. I’m in no rush to meet Sister Death. But I am praying that when she does finally come, I will be ready to embrace her.

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Harry Scott Coverston

Orlando, Florida

frharry@cfl.rr.com

harry.coverston@knights.ucf.edu

If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding.

Most things worth considering do not come in sound bites.

For what does G-d require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your G-d? (Micah 6:8, Hebrew Scriptures)

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The Day the Boomer Dream Died

The chances are that if you were born in 1957 or before, you remember only too well what you were doing on November 22, 1963. I was in the fifth grade at Bushnell Elementary. That afternoon we had gone across the street to the cafeteria we shared with the high school to watch the newest craze in education, a science program broadcast on television!  An early prototype of later, slicker shows like Comsos and Bill Nye, the Science Guy, the nerdy local host was teaching us that day about how cold liquid nitrogen really was, freezing a hot dog in a smoking beaker and then shattering it with a hammer.

That was pretty exciting stuff even for elementary kids in Central Florida who had grown up watching rockets clear our horizon headed for space from nearby Cape Canaveral to the east. It was the time of the Cold War and science was seen as the means by which the US would defeat those pesky Soviets once and for all.

Suddenly, the television emcee stopped mid-sentence. He put his hand to his ear to better hear what an unseen prompter was whispering to him. When he looked up, his face was ashen, its smiling demeanor from a mere couple of seconds before vanished.

“We are getting reports that President Kennedy has been hit by a sniper.”

What do you mean the president’s dead?

At that point, I noticed that the teachers who had accompanied us to the lunchroom that day were all standing, faces as grim as the television narrator. The local NBC affiliate announced it was switching to national news, the television was switched off and we were all lined up to walk back across the street to our classrooms.

My 10 year old mind was racing. A sniper? What was that? Wasn’t that some kind of snake? The president has been bitten by a snake? In the middle of Dallas?

By the time we were seated in our classroom, a deathly quiet fell over the ordinarily noisy elementary school halls. Within minutes, a teacher from the sixth grade class came down the hall to our classroom , her eyes red from the tears still trickling down her face. She softly announced, “The President is dead.”

I lost my breath. Dead? What do you mean dead? From a snake bite? Couldn’t they get him to the hospital quickly enough to get him some anti-venom?

It was then that the teacher explained that he’d been shot in the head, we didn’t know who did it, that the Vice-President was OK, had taken the oath of office and was headed back to Washington. And then she said something I’ll never forget: “He was so young.”

School was dismissed for the day. It was a Friday and a long, somber weekend lay ahead. My father and mother came home early from work. And in our kitchen, I saw my Father weep for the first time in my memory. “They’ve killed our President,” he sobbed into my Mother’s shoulder. She also wept silently as she gently rubbed my Father’s heaving back.

My younger brother and I stood there dumbfounded.

What did this mean? How could the President of the United States be killed? Who would do something like that? Why would someone do something like that? I don’t understand.

John John Salutes His Daddy

The slain President had lain in state in the Capitol over the weekend. Thousands of Americans had filed by to pay their respects.

Then, amidst the incredible sense of loss that held America unable to make sense of this murder, we watched in horror on Sunday as the accused slayer of the President was himself shot and killed in the basement of a police department in Dallas. This occurred live as we sat eating Sunday dinner with some family friends.

Suddenly, America had become completely up for grabs. What would happen next? What could any American believe in at this point?

Monday was the day of the funeral. It was a cold day in Central Florida. A friend of my father’s had been killed that weekend, crushed by a truck he was unloading that suddenly rolled back onto him pinning him against the wall. His poor grief stricken widow had no local family to be with her in her loss. So, my Father went with her. He asked me if I wanted to go. I really didn’t. I was already having a difficult time making sense of the world. So I opted to stay home with our Nanny and my baby sister.

All three networks were broadcasting President Kennedy’s funeral procession. The gravity of the occasion was made even starker on our black and white television. All of America watched transfixed as the horse-drawn caisson made its way from the Capitol to Arlington National Cemetery.

As the procession passed the Kennedy family, John Kennedy, Jr., then only a toddler, stepped forward, dressed in his little suit and saluted his father’s coffin. Behind him a black shrouded stoic Jacquelyn Kennedy stood staring straight ahead surrounded by the grieving Kennedy family. That image is burned into the memory of virtually everyone who saw it and will remain with us for the rest of our lives. It was American stoicism at its finest..

Kennedy would be buried in Arlington amidst the dead from America’s many wars, himself a war hero from WWII even as he had fallen in a hail of bullets from a fellow countryman. An eternal flame would be lit at his resting place which would become a pilgrimage spot for thousands thereafter. At the bottom of a hill lined with white headstones atop which sat an antebellum mansion of a slave owner, an early champion of civil rights would be laid to rest.

The World Simply Changed

From the perspective of this and many other Baby Boomers, the world simply changed that sunny day in Dallas. While the secret details of John Kennedy’s personal life exposed since his death have revealed a less than savory individual character, his presidency was a time of great hope for America. Under Kennedy, we had stared down the Russians over Cuba. The nuclear bombs which we Floridians knew only too well were a mere 30 minutes away were dismantled and removed. America was already well on its way to the moon, the many launches from nearby Cape Canaveral visible on our horizon in Central Florida within seconds of lift-off.

Kennedy’s presidency offered us hope that the end of segregation in the Jim Crow South was coming and that the long, expensive Cold War with the Soviets might even be brought to an end. Jackie Kennedy, the President’s stunning First Lady, had invited American television crews into the White House for a tour, signaling an openness of our government and its willingness to engage the average American.

All of those hopes and dreamed ended that day in Dallas.

What we had no way of knowing as we watched John Kennedy laid to rest was that within the next five years his own brother, Robert, would follow him to Arlington Cemetery, another victim of an assassin’s bullet. We couldn’t have predicted that Martin Luther King, Jr., the leader of the movement to actualize Kennedy’s dream that African-Americans be treated as first class citizens, would also fall to an assassin’s bullet.  My aging grandfather would put down his morning newspaper and mournfully shake his head proclaiming “In America we stop people with ballots, not bullets.”

But that America was dying along with its leaders. In its place would come an uglier, more cynical America in which brutal force and deception would become the currency of international relations and cynical ad hominem advertising would become the currency of selecting our leaders.

The latter would become clear by the next election when a little girl plucking daisy petals would be overshadowed by a mushroom cloud in Lyndon Johnson’s infamous and highly effective election eve commercial. It would reach its maturity in the 1980 election when Richard Nixon’s subtly racist Southern Strategy would metastasize into the raw racism of George HW Bush’s Willie Horton ads. And that cynicism nears its apotheosis in the current circus purporting to be a Presidential election in which the unabashed xenophobia and religious extremism that Kennedy had fought so hard to restrain have come screaming out of the closet and into the television studios.

We had no way of knowing that JFK’s successors would quickly rescind Kennedy’s plan to gradually withdraw from Southeast Asia and would instead expand US military involvement there into a bloody, protracted and demoralizing undeclared war. Before it was over, Vietnam would mortally wound America’s Camelot era optimism and poison its democratic soul. It would leave America with an open, festering wound on our national psyche that has not healed despite desperate, costly and largely unsuccessful attempts to exorcise the demons of Vietnam in places named Grenada, El Salvador, Somalia, Afghanistan and Iraq.

We had lost our ability to trust one another

For Baby Boomers who had been raised in an optimistic matrix in which anything was possible - even the sky was no longer the limit with our space program - Kennedy’s assassination marked the end of that dream. No President had been assassinated in the living memory of the vast majority of Americans (William McKinley was the last previous assassination in 1901) and the very notion that a president could be killed was virtually unthinkable in 1963.

“Who would do such a thing?“ we thought.

The answer to that question would prove even more troubling. While the Warren Commission appointed by Congress and led by the sitting Chief Justice of the SCOTUS revealed a carefully tailored consensus report that cited Lee Harvey Oswald as the sole perpetrator of the event, rumors of conspiracy arose almost immediately and continue to hold varying levels of currency among skeptical Americans.

Was Kennedy the target of a Mafia hit? Did a cabal of conservative corporate leaders who saw their interests in danger from the Kennedy social and economic programs act to protect those interests by getting rid of the threat? Had Fidel Castro and Nikita Khrushchev managed to avenge their humiliating loss in the Cuban Missile Crisis by neutralizing their American nemesis?

The fact that such conspiracy theories held any traction at all among Americans points toward the greatest casualty of November 22, 1963. In that hail of bullets in Dallas we Americans had lost our ability to trust one another and our own government. And no one experienced this casualty more than Baby Boomers just beginning to come of age.

I have often wondered what our nation and the world might look like had Kennedy survived that awful day in Dallas. I would like to believe the bloodbaths of Vietnam and Selma might have been avoided. I would like to believe that the cynicism which has poisoned the very soul of this once great nation would not have proven victorious.

Deep in my soul there is still that spark of innocent hope and optimism that a 10 year old Baby Boomer once felt as he watched rockets soar into space across the horizon and heard moving speeches offered by a brilliant and capable president who was not afraid to call Americans to “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” How might things have been different had John Kennedy lived?

My heart aches I recall the events of those dark days of November so many years ago. And my soul grieves this day as I think about what might have been but never was.

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Harry Scott Coverston

Orlando, Florida

frharry@cfl.rr.com

harry.coverston@knights.ucf.edu

If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding.

Most things worth considering do not come in sound bites.

For what does G-d require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your G-d? (Micah 6:8, Hebrew Scriptures)

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Florida Bear Slaughter: The High Price of Anthropocentrism

I am sickened as I read the lead story on the front page of Sunday’s Tampa Bay Times. The page is dominated by a photo of a man with a gun in the back of a pickup truck hovering over the lifeless carcasses of two black bears. If there was any mercy in this slaughter, these two bears never knew what hit them. A hunter from the Tampa area said of his trophy, “"One shot and down it went."

Amazing how that works. Unarmed animals incapable of defending themselves simply fall down dead when they encounter another animal trained to shoot the weapon it is carrying. No muss, no fuss.

My great aunt, the outspoken Kansas suffragette, temperance supporter and segregation opponent, was fond of saying, “People call hunting a sport. But there’s nothing sporting about shooting down unarmed animals. Give the deer a gun and teach them how to shoot back. Now, *that* would be a sport.”

By Monday, the official total had risen to 295 including at least two cubs. Some of the bears were lactating mothers which means that the cubs those mothers nursed may likely die as well. The two day bear hunting season will ultimately prove to be a veritable slaughter.

Hunting as a way of life… and death

While I have never been a hunter, I grew up in a place where hunting was the norm. Every young boy was trained to shoot a gun as quick as their daddy had time to take them out to the woods to teach them.

Even so, I knew from the beginning that I would never be a hunter. On my 12^th birthday, my Dad gave me the option of him buying me a gun or taking my friends and I to a local swimming pool for my birthday party. I did not hesitate in choosing the pool even as I knew it would break my Dad’s heart that his son would not be a hunter.

It wasn’t that I wasn’t good with a gun. In fact, I was. On one of the two days I ever went to the woods with my dad and brother armed with a shotgun and a pistol, we had grown bored from the lack of animals to shoot and my Dad decided that, given the coming Christmas season, we could shoot down some mistletoe from the top of the tree to take to our Mom. Both my Dad and my brother had shot and missed. I took the pistol, eyed my target, aimed the gun and shot. The mistletoe came plummeting down, first shot.

In all honesty, my deadly accuracy scared me. An aim like that could be easily applied to any other living being. I didn’t want to be an agent of death, regardless of whose, especially when that death was avoidable and unnecessary.

I knew that my aversion to killing was not shared by my classmates who, by the time they reached high school, excitedly anticipated their weekends in the woods spent with lots of guns and gut-rot cheapo beer. Though I never shared that excitement, I came to accept its inevitability as each fall arrived.

But I never lost sight of its deadly potential.

My junior year in high school, a group of my classmates were out for their usual fall ritual bloodletting and beer drinking. During a lull in the action, they had begun to consume the copious quantities of beer they’d brought with them. One of them decided to prop his shotgun up against a fallen tree trunk. The gun began to slip in the wet clay beneath the log and when he grabbed the gun barrel to keep it from falling, it discharged, blowing off the back of my classmate’s head.  

By the time I graduated from high school, I had come to a realization that hunting was a part of rural culture that I would never understand but begrudgingly had come to accept. Bernie Sanders is right on this point about guns: the use of guns in rural areas like his home state of Vermont and the Sumter County of my youth is not the same as the misuse of guns which have inappropriately and increasingly been imposed upon the public square. One size will never fit all when it comes to this question

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Deadly Gross Mismanagement

It is less the actual hunting of these bears than the reasons for its authorization that trouble me. The impetus for the slaughter of black bears has come primarily from the increasingly tense interactions between the residents of the exurbs steadily encroaching on the remaining wildlife refuges not yet fallen to the developers’ bulldozers and the wildlife who once lived there. Animals pushed from their native habitat are increasingly prone to return to now “developed” lands with human animal residents to try to find food.

Called “nuisance” animals by their human animal counterparts (one has to wonder what description the wildlife would use to describe the newcomers who forced them from their habitats), that description ironically points to the legal principle of “coming to the nuisance.” That common law doctrine was historically used to estop law suits against existing practices on adjoining properties when people voluntarily came to that location aware of the practices.

When I was in junior high, a family bought the large tract of cow pasture to the south of our place. At the end of the dirt road which separated our properties was the home of another neighbor who had for years raised a handful of pigs on the edge of his property. The new neighbor had built a beautiful home along his property line – right next to the pig pen.

In what my saintly mother, who was decidedly not prone to say ugly things about anyone, called “the absolute height of gall,” the new neighbor came to our existing neighbor and demanded he remove the pig pen. While the new neighbor had no right to make such a demand, the existing neighbor was kind enough to hear him out without erupting in outrage. And within a short time, the pigs went away. Rather than get into a protracted legal battle which he couldn’t afford, our pig farming neighbor simply caved.

At a very basic level, the human animals who have invaded the habitats of existing animals have no moral ground upon which to see those pre-existing animals as nuisances, much less to demand their removal when they return to find food. But this slaughter of wildlife is but one example of a deadly competition for control playing out between a single species of animal which has come to be dominant in the biosphere and all other contenders which now are at the mercy of that self-absorbed species. Perhaps the worst part of this open season on bears is that it simply encourages more of the thoughtless development which gave rise to the problem in the first place.

The programs which authorize hunts such as we are seeing in Florida this weekend are euphemistically called “wildlife management,” a poorly disguised attempt to legitimate what is clearly a wanton slaughter of non-human animals. Yet there is no small amount of irony in the specter of a human animal whose urban sprawl has given rise to this problem in the first place presuming the need to manage the rest of the animal species. Urban sprawl - and the multitude of problems that have stemmed from it - all evidence an inability of the human animal to manage its own species in a healthy manner.

Upon what basis would it presume to manage the others?

 Worshipping the Idol of Anthropocentrism

The ursucide of Florida occurs in a much broader context of interactions between the human animal and the rest of a biosphere that has grown increasingly vulnerable to its assaults. The effects of anthropogenic climate change have already begun to force major numbers of animals from native habitats into more hospitable climate regions if they actually exist.

But the response to climate change is part of a much larger picture in which animal extinctions have far surpassed their natural rates of occurrence. The Center for Biological Diversity reports “Although extinction is a natural phenomenon, it occurs at a natural “background” rate of about one to five species per year. Scientists estimate we’re now losing species at 1,000 to 10,000 times the background rate, with literally dozens going extinct every day.”

While such extinctions often occur off the radar of most human animals’ consciousness, far more high profile examples of killing of endangered wildlife has recently filled the news. A Minnesota dentist who illegally shot and killed a magnificent lion drew the fury of horrified readers around the world when it was reported. Last week a Texas hunter killed a black rhinoceros bull in a much more complicated situation (the bull had proven lethally aggressive toward other calves of this critically endangered species and the hunter provided $35,000 for the conservation fund to protect the remaining rhinos) only to encounter an airline who refused transport the head of the dead animal back to Texas.

The Texas hunter has sued Delta Airlines for that refusal charging it with discrimination. The specter of a wealthy oil heir suing an airline which refused to transport the carcass of a critically endangered species around the world is not a terribly surprising example of the entitlement the 1% in America have become accustomed to expecting. But to sue on the same legal basis as the plaintiffs in the Brown v.The Board case prosecuted their action against the Topeka School District is almost too absurd for even this lawyer to imagine.

What is most troubling about these high profile cases of animal slaughter in the context of a rapidly shrinking fauna is what it signals to the rest of the world. The Chinese love affair with an SUV has played a major role in clogging 50 lane Chinese freeways and making the air in much of urban China unbreathable. But it arose in the context of an American culture industry whose images of driving gas guzzling, road hogging, atmosphere clogging vehicles have repeatedly preached to the rest of the world, including the odd combination of free market fundamentalism and authoritarian governance that is today’s China,  that such were the marks of the good life. What chance does the remaining animal population stand against a human population who sees the good life in practices which inexorably cause extinctions?

The assumptions of a human animal species that its desires are the only important considerations in the world regardless of their impact on that world arise from a highly narcissistic ideology called anthropocentrism. But the Hebrew prophets had a much better word for it. They called such behaviors idolatry.

You Can’t Eat Money

The assault on the animal kingdom by its human species is ultimately an exercise in self-destruction. We are part of that kingdom but only part. But if the rest of the kingdom falters and declines, so shall we.

We live in a consumerist culture whose shallow values fuel addictive spirals of ever more consumption, served by an entertainment industry whose products numb our senses and prompt us to seek ever greater thrills. At heart we recognize the shallowness of our lives and seek meaning in any manner we can. But there can never be enough trophy animals on our walls to fill the gaping holes in our very souls.

In a 1972 collection of essays entitled “Who is the Chairman of This Meeting?”, Canadian filmmaker and First Peoples spokesperson Alanis Obomsawin restated a Cree Indian proverb which well sums up the crisis facing our relationship to the biosphere around the world:

“When the last tree is cut down, the last fish eaten and the last stream poisoned, you will realize that you cannot eat money.” 

Our greed threatens to consume not only the other species of the biosphere, it ultimately threatens to consume us.

This is the lesson we must learn in Florida. Urban sprawl is deadly to the very natural world many of us came to Florida to enjoy. Displaced animals are not nuisances, they are simply hungry and homeless. Any nuisance they may pose arises in the context of a myopic approach to development and a callous disregard for the natural realm. These animals deserve our thoughtful consideration, not more of the deadly misuse of our power.

If we human animals feel the need to manage animal species, we need to begin by demonstrating our abilities to manage our own. And we need to do so soon.

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Harry Scott Coverston

Orlando, Florida

frharry@cfl.rr.com

harry.coverston@knights.ucf.edu

If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding.

Most things worth considering do not come in sound bites.

For what does G-d require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your G-d? (Micah 6:8, Hebrew Scriptures)

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