Liberty and Pride

"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing."

-- Edmund Burke

On Saturday, June 28, 1969, police staged what was supposed to be a routine raid in the ongoing persecution of gay men and lesbians in New York City. The site was a bar in Greenwich Village known as the Stonewall Inn. On that summer night, rather than succumb again to shame and denigration, patrons in the bar began to fight back. The riots that ensued were the birth of the modern movement for gay rights. Each year the LGBT community marches on the last Sunday in June to commemorate and remember this historic event, now known simply as "Stonewall."

Much has happened in the forty-one years since Stonewall. We've moved beyond the era of repression and bar raids, suffered the ravages of the AIDS epidemic, witnessed the lifesaving miracle of HAART treatment for HIV, seen sodomy laws struck down by the Supreme Court, gained the right to marry in six states, and seen laws protecting us from discrimination pass in many states and municipalities.

Yet much remains to be done. The forces of hate and ignorance are alive and well as lesbians and gay men continue to be targets for violence and murder. Eighteen years after "Don't Ask Don't Tell" was adopted, over 13,000 men and women have been discharged from the military for being homosexual, and hundreds continue to be discharged every year. While we can marry in six jurisdictions (Connecticut, District of Columbia, Iowa, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont), this right was taken from us in two states (California and Maine) after hard-fought and expensive battles.

What we've experienced over the past four decades has made it easy for the movement to lose momentum. Some of our boldest voices were lost to AIDS. Veterans who survived the epidemic suffer from post-traumatic stress and burnout. Many younger gay men and lesbians have grown up in a more accepting and tolerant culture, blunting the urgency and desire to become politically active. The repeal of marriage rights in California and Maine left one young gay man I know shocked and angry. Only after this major setback did he understand the need for ongoing vigilance and activism.

If all LGBT people and our straight allies took two simple actions, we could transform society.

1. Find an organization involved in LGBT issues that you believe in and sign up to make monthly contributions of money or time. The amount needn't be extravagant - continued support is more important than a one time heroic measure.
2. Speak up on behalf of equality whenever the opportunity arises.

Motivated by another Gay Pride celebration on a beautiful, hot, sticky NYC day, I am recommitting myself to these actions. I invite my readers to join me in working to gain full equality for the LGBT community.

Tuesday Haiku - June 22, 2010

Selected Tuesdays are going to feature photos and haiku by yours truly. Here's the first!

dead and fallen tree
cradled in your brothers' arms
under the vast sky

Setting or Rising?

In my last post, I wrote about the role of government and regulation in preventing disasters such as the financial meltdown and the BP oil spill. In this post, I want to tackle a smaller (but I believe related) issue, which is how we care for and manage the local world that we inhabit and share with others.

I was at my local coffee joint the other day, and a man came in and ordered an iced coffee. Upon receiving it from the barista, he moved to the counter to add milk and sugar. He put the milk into the coffee with extreme carelessness, stirring and sloshing the dark brew all over the counter. He grabbed three packets of artificial sweetener, tearing them haphazardly over the cup, spilling crystals onto the coffee on the counter. He snapped the lid back onto the cup and stormed out of the store, leaving a sticky mess behind for the next customer who wanted to doctor his or her drink.

The next customer came along, saw the mess, and set his cup down some distance from the coffee spill. He took some napkins and cleaned up the mess, as well as the rest of the area. After he was satisfied with his work, he carefully prepared his drink and left. As he departed, he noticed me watching him and gave me a sly smile.

In his classic work Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior, Chogyam Trungpa describes two very important concepts. First is the concept of basic goodness, the idea that at the core of our existence is a fundamental openness, cheerfulness, and intuition as to what needs to be done. Basic goodness manifests itself in our ability to enjoy things like the color yellow or the taste of a peach in an unconstructed and direct way. Basic goodness also shows up in the way that almost any situation is workable. A messy house can be cleaned, a wrong turn can be righted, and we can mourn and recover from a loss. Our situations may not be what we want, but we can work with them.

Another concept presented by Trungpa is the notion of setting-sun world. This is a worldview that embodies a type of depressed pessimism. In part, it is a refusal to be open to the reality of basic goodness, to the workability of our lives. It manifests in many ways, one of which is an unwillingness to take responsibility for the situations we create or encounter.

The careless man who made and abandoned his mess was living in a setting-sun world. Not only did he leave a mess for those who came after him, but he denied the workability of his situation, sacrificing a bit of his own dignity and power by doing so. The man who tidied up after him showed patience and equanimity. He was living in what Trungpa calls the land of the Great Eastern Sun, which is perpetually rising.

The goal of the spiritual warrior is to help create an enlightened society. We do this by embracing our basic goodness and working with our situation. The smallest actions ripple far beyond what we imagine. Picking up a piece of litter someone dropped, cleaning up our own coffee spill, working through our problems with a sense of faith and trust in the workability of things - all of these are revolutionary acts.

As for the connection to our larger global problems, Mohandas Ghandi said it quite succinctly, "You must be the change you wish to see in the world."

Owning Our Messes

Two years after giant Wall Street banks brought the global economy to the brink of meltdown, we are again witnessing the logical ends of anti-regulatory market fundamentalism. This time we are watching helplessly at thousands of barrels of oil pour into the Gulf of Mexico each day. In the June 3, 2010 issue of Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Paul M. Barrett does a masterly job of discussing the connection between these two cataclysmic events. The upshot is that we have been hearing for decades from our leaders that industry and markets are to be trusted in ways that our government is not, because government doesn't work. This idea has led us to relinquish oversight of industry to the supposedly superior forces of the market, which led quite predictably to the situation in which we now find ourselves.

The logical flaw behind the story of the effectiveness of unfettered markets is so obvious that one wonders how we fell for this story in the first place. The fiduciary responsibility of a corporation is to its shareholders, not the common good. Markets exist to serve corporations and investors (again shareholders), not the common good. The anti-regulatory fundamentalists claim that this doesn't matter, because corporations and markets will act in their own long term interests, which are supposedly aligned with the common good.

However, people across our great land frequently and regularly act against their long term interest for short term gratification (e.g. running up large amounts of credit card debt). Why should we be surprised when corporate leaders do the same, often encouraged by their shareholders? The idea that markets can govern themselves is as specious as the idea of drivers in a city being able to get to where they're going more quickly and safely without any traffic rules or regulations.

The goal facing us now is threefold. First, we must articulate clearly the case for intelligent regulation. Such regulation should be as lightweight as possible, and should seek to align corporate and market incentives with the public good. Second, we must push our leaders to act deliberately and decisively to enact meaningful regulatory measures. The third challenge is longer term: we must articulate in ways that resonate with the public the fact that government is more trustworthy than corporate interests because it is accountable to the public via the political process. Of course this brings up issues regarding the elements that distort our political process, but I'll save those for a later post.

Let's get to work!

The Source of Silence

My father passed away on Thursday, March 18. The outpouring of love from my hometown was overwhelming, healing, and potent. I returned to New York full of gratitude for family and friends.

I am an introvert. This means that I spend energy to be with people, and recharge when I'm alone. So even though I was grateful for the contact with family and friends, I was completely worn out. I was craving solitude and quiet in ways that I have never experienced before.

Yesterday, I went for a walk in Central Park to seek out some peace and quiet. None was to be found. Leafless trees provide very little buffer against the sounds of the city, and my walk was similar to a walk on the street.

Today, I went for a walk in the park along the Hudson River. The day was cool, very cloudy, with threats of rain, so the park was almost empty. The traffic sounds from the west side highway were quite audible, yet they receded as the lights turned red, and my pace began to slow. Still, I didn't feel like I was finding the solitude I was craving.

As I walked slowly out onto the pier at Christopher Street, I realized that a constant swarm of thoughts was running through my mind. The narratives were wild and frenzied, with recriminations and doubts about the past mixing with worries and fantasies about the future. I worried about what I had forgotten to do in the week I was away from the office, what I would eat upon returning home from my walk, what work would be like next week, and how my life would unfold when I am retired and old.

The chatter was a buffer, an attempt for a sad and lonely son to avoid encountering his feelings about the loss of his father. However, it was also toxic. I realized that my wild mind was causing me to miss the solitude and quiet that I desperately needed.

So I calmed down, felt my feet touching the ground, looked at the play of light upon the river. Again and again, I returned to myself, until I was in the moment and real.

I walked north along the river, tears in my eyes, the wind at my back, and saw the buds of spring life etched above me against the gray sky.

Damning Data

The data are rolling in, and the results are conclusive: abstinence-focused sex education doesn't work. A recent study shows that teens who pledge abstinence are just as likely as non-pledgers to have sex, and less likely to use contraceptive methods when they do so. The US has the highest teen pregnancy rate in the industrialized world, and roughly 1 in 3 sexually active girls get pregnant in their teenage years. We simply have not been giving young people the set of tools they need to take care of themselves and ensure that they don't face unwanted pregnancy.

The policies that led to this situation were formulated during the Bush years and were guided by ideology rather than reason. Take a look at the states with the highest pregnancy rates, along with who they supported in the 2000 and 2004 elections.

1	Nevada	Bush	Bush
2	Arizona	Bush	Bush
3	Mississippi	Bush	Bush
4	New Mexico	Gore	Bush
5	Texas	Bush	Bush
6	Florida	Bush	Bush
7	California	Gore	Kerry
8	Georgia	Bush	Bush
9	North Carolina	Bush	Bush
10	Arkansas	Bush	Bush

The correlation between conservatism and teen pregnancy is due to the fact that conservatives are enamored of poor policies rooted in religious dogma rather than sound social science.

The really maddening part of this is the denial conservatives have regarding the source of the problem. We've spent $1.5B over the last 8 years on abstinence education programs, during which time teenage pregnancy rates started to rise, and their response to the data is to argue for more abstinence-focused education. Like many conservative policies, they've hooked a pithy catch-phrase to the push, claiming that abstinence is the only form of birth control that is 100% effective because you can't get pregnant when you abstain. What they don't say is that it is the least effective approach when used improperly.

My favorite definition of insanity is doing the same things over and over again and expecting different results. Oh, those crazy conservatives!

Again at Starbucks

I've decided it would be fun (and maybe good for me) to find some humor in the refined orders that I mentioned in my last post. I may write a quick post now and then when I notice eccentric orders at various eating and drinking establishments. I think they point to a need for control rather than being about how things taste (can people really taste whether the milk mixture below is correct or whether there are 2 vs. 2 1/2 pumps of hazelnut syrup in a drink?)

Today's order by a slightly disheveled man at the Starbucks at 23rd street and 8th avenue:
Grande decaf extra-hot semi-dry cappuccino with half whole milk and half 2%.
He then asked if this was the first one that the barista had made today. :-)