(“when the water is up to the mouth....[one learns to swim well]”)
a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle, Massachusetts
Sunday November 23rd, 2003
I would have to be the first to admit that I don’t really know all that much about the scientific basis of Global Warming. I believe that it’s happening because so many people who do seem to know what they’re talking about tell me that it’s happening, and I also know that there is still some dispute (although not much) about whether or not it is being caused by the emission of carbon dioxide (and other greenhouse gasses) by our fossil fuel-driven industrial society, or rather reflects some sort of “normal” geological climate change. I realize there are still some questions about what it really means to our society and the environment. Mostly, though, I’m just not really sure about what I ought to be doing about it. Like most members of my generation, I’m familiar with the notion of “Thinking Globally and Acting Locally.” But when confronted with a problem on the scale of Global Climactic Change, what does one do in one’s own neighborhood to make things right again? I’ve been so concerned about this I even went out and bought a book, written by two PhD’s -- Paul and Hazel Delcourt -- entitled Living Well in the Age of Global Warming: 10 Strategies for Boomers, Bobos, and Cultural Creatives. I’m a Boomer, and I share many of the qualities of a “Bourgeois Bohemian” (which is what the acronym “Bobo” stands for), and I certainly fit the demographic profile of a “Cultural Creative,” so when this title popped up on my Amazon “Recommended Picks” list I clicked with my mouse and waited for enlightenment to arrive on my doorstep.
The problem is, when the book finally did arrive it wasn’t at all what I had expected. Rather than telling me anything useful about what I might do to help stop global warming, it basically offered meaningless advice about how to end up a “Greenhouse Winner” rather than a “Greenhouse Loser,”while its “10 strategies” essentially boiled down to two. Strategy number one: move to the mountains (actually, there were several variations on this particular theme). And Strategy number two? -- buy a boat. So, needless to say, I was more than a little disappointed (even though I’ve been looking for an excuse to buy a boat for years); since when all was said and done, this book might have done a lot more good in the fight against global warming if it had remained in the form of a tree.
But the experience did get me thinking again about my feelings of helplessness in the face of the prospect of catastrophic global climate change. Growing up under the shadow of the Cold War, I’d always sorta assumed that the end of the world, when it came, would be in the form of a nuclear holocaust: one big Armageddon-like blow-out, followed by (at least for anyone who managed to survive) a long, nuclear winter -- or as Jonathan Schell once described it, a Republic of Insects and Grass. Little did I dream that our actual situation would more closely resemble that of the Frog in the Teakettle -- the temperature around us slowly increasing over time, but we never really notice because the change is so gradual...until the next thing we know the kettle is boiling and our goose is cooked. It’s difficult even to talk about it without sounding alarmist, like Chicken Little or the Boy Who Cried Wolf. But just because a problem is so big that it’s hard to conceptualize doesn’t mean that it’s a fairy tale, or that we can safely ignore it. Because if we wait until the problem is so obvious that it is undeniable (and in the opinion of many, we are there already), it may also be too late for us to do anything about it.
Some of you may remember from Neighborhood Sunday the Danish proverb I allude to in the title of my sermon: “ Når vandet står i munden, Lærer man vel at svømme” -- “When the water is up to one’s mouth, one learns to swim well.” The Danes seem to be taking global warming a lot more seriously than we do here in the United States...perhaps because despite being among the world’s leaders in per capita boat ownership, they also recognize that they live in a country surrounded by water -- 406 islands and one low, sandy peninsula, on which the highest point is less than 200 meters above sea level. And thus they are also among the world’s leaders in things like wind turbine technology (Denmark currently generates approximately 27% of its electricity this way) and other sustainable and efficient “green” technologies, and are using this technology not only to reduce their own greenhouse gas emissions, but are also exporting it to Eastern Europe in order to generate even greater offsets under the terms of the Kyoto accords. 80% of the wind generation capacity in Denmark is owned either by private citizens or through small, neighborhood collectives, while government subsidies for this form of energy are scheduled for elimination in 2004, since the cost is now competitive with that of other new energy sources. Når vandet står i munden, Lærer man vel at svømme....
On a slightly different note, as most of you probably know (since the media coverage has been overwhelming, at least in the media sources I routinely view), yesterday was the 40th anniversary of the assassination, in Dallas, Texas, of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy. And I was a little surprised to learn that not only am I now among the minority of living Americans who can actually remember where I was and what I was doing when I learned that Kennedy had been shot, but that also (as of my last birthday), I am now myself older than JFK was at the time of his death. So the torch has indeed passed to a new generation once again. And as I’ve been thinking about this, I’ve also been reflecting upon some of the better- (and lesser-) known aspects of Kennedy’s political career: his legendary “charisma” and clever, charming wit; his reputation as a legitimate war hero, and the near-crippling physical disabilities he kept secret from the public; his now well-publicized sexual peccadilloes with women like Marilyn Monroe; the closely-contested (some might even say stolen) media-driven election which elevated him to the Oval Office, and which, in many ways, sowed the seeds of his defeated opponent Richard Nixon’s subsequent Watergate paranoia, and thus might even be said to be at the root of our nation’s present polarized political acrimony; his Keynesian-inspired tax-cuts (which many conservatives now point to as justification for their own supply-side economic theories); the Bay of Pigs fiasco, and his subsequent interest in counter-insurgency in places like Vietnam; his trip to Berlin; the Cuban Missile crisis; his mixed-record on Civil Rights; the creation of the Peace Corps, and his visionary support of the Space Program. Academic historians generally rate Kennedy as a somewhat mediocre President -- not the best or the brightest, but certainly not one of the worst either. Yet his death continues to maintain a powerful hold on the American imagination, like an icon of the end of an earlier, more optimistic era.
What I’ve found myself thinking about mostly though is what things might be like if the American people embraced the problem of Global Warming with the same spirit of optimism, and service, and idealistic self-sacrifice characteristic of the early days of the Peace Corps and the race to the Moon. We are, after all, still the richest and most powerful nation in the history of the world; we represent approximately 4% of the world’s population, yet produce 25% of the world’s greenhouse gases, and given our legendary “Yankee ingenuity,” are no doubt perfectly capable of achieving an annual 5% reduction of our greenhouse gas emissions over the next ten years with little or no loss of productivity, simply through increased efficiencies, the intentional development of alternative, renewable energy sources, and the widespread adoption of a handful of lifestyle changes, many of which would actually lead to better health and an improved quality of life for the majority of American citizens.
But these things aren’t going to happen if they are simply left to “the invisible hand” of the marketplace, especially a marketplace where we continue to subsidize old, inefficient “dirty” technologies, while compelling new and innovative. sustainable “green” ones to sink or swim on their own merits, even while still in their infancy. Moreover, by producing and perfecting these sustainable technologies now, we may be able to export them to the developing world in time to head off the uncontrolled production of greenhouse gasses in those countries, while at the same time demonstrating that it is indeed possible for them to enjoy a much higher standard of living at a much more modest environmental cost.
The problem of Global Warming is a lot more complicated than merely higher mean temperatures and rising sea levels. Even the rosy scenarios anticipate significant changes in weather patterns, agricultural productivity, flooding and the like, while the worst-case scenarios predict catastrophes of near-Biblical proportions. Furthermore, even a sustained, systematic, unified global effort to ameliorate the problem may not be sufficient to reverse the trend for another 100 years or more. But rather than merely throwing our hands in the air, closing our eyes, and holding our noses, there are some practical steps we can all take in order to become part of the solution rather than part of the problem.
The first of these steps is self-education. There’s a lot more that we all can learn about Global Warming, both with regard to the big picture, and also in terms of the hands-on things we can do in order to avoid contributing further to the problem ourselves. Unitarians are sometimes teased about believing in “salvation by bibliography,” but in this case in particular, knowledge really is power, and is the foundation for meaningful action. Here are two book that I feel ARE worth the paper they are printed on. The first is High Noon: 20 Global Problems, 20 Years to Solve Them. This is a relatively new book, written by J.F. Rischard, a vice-president at the World Bank (so it’s not exactly the kind of tree-hugging liberal pabulum I ordinarily like to read). The second is Jon Naar’s Design for a Livable Planet, which is filled with all sorts of practical ideas about things you can do to reduce your environmental impact on the earth. This is a fairly old book, but the good news is that there are lots of used copies available for about a buck plus postage at Amazon. Increased awareness leads naturally to the second step, which is making as many of these lifestyle changes as we can, and then committing ourselves to making even more. I don’t want you to think that simply turning out the lights when you leave the room and driving a more fuel-efficient car is going to make all the difference in the world. But it’s a start, and it certainly doesn’t hurt.
The third step involves participating in the education of others, as well as creating networks of mutual encouragement and support...so that as communities we can begin better to understand the full dimensions of our involvement in the problem, and can help one another in our efforts to make more comprehensive changes to address it. This is one of the places where churches like ours, as learning and teaching organizations, can make an important contribution. And finally there is the step of Activism and Advocacy: working to create changes on the level of public policy, which in this particular case is going to be essential if we hope to have any kind of meaningful impact on the overall situation in the long term.
Of course, there are some who believe that because the problem of Global Warming is so complex, only a solution which relies upon “the invisible hand of the marketplace” can possibly be effective. And I agree with this view...to a point. But because the problem of Global Warming is likewise one of those instances where “Bad money drives out Good,” so long as “bad actors” are allowed to avoid paying the true environmental costs of their activities, skimming off the profits while compelling the rest of us to pay for cleaning up their mess, well-intentioned competitors are always going to be at a disadvantage. If we wish to see some sort of workable, “market-based” solution to the problem of global warming, we need to make it profitable to do the right thing, while taking the profitability out of doing wrong. And we do this through rational regulation, backed by the authority of law.
Moreover, as the World’s Leader in the production of greenhouse gasses, it only stands to reason that the United States should take the lead in working toward their reduction and eventual elimination. For America to opt-out of the Kyoto accords because we claim that compliance would put our industries at a competitive disadvantage against those of countries like Bangladesh is absurd. America ought to be showing the world a better way of doing things, rather than throwing our weight around in a vain attempt to keep things just the way they are. So long as the “invisible hand” is seen to be thumbing its nose at the rest of the world, holding down the less-fortunate while propping up the fortunes of a privileged few, it will only work to divide the world further between the “Greenhouse winners” and the “Greenhouse losers.” A rising tide may well float all boats, but that only matters if people can afford to buy a boat. The alternative of throwing the weak to the sharks is morally acceptable only in some sort of alternative universe where the fundamental laws of human decency no longer apply.
And finally, I think it is essential for us to remember that as part of that “four per cent,” ALL Americans are seen by the rest of the world as belonging to that privileged few. It may well be true that our freedom, our economic prosperity, our so-called “opportunity society” in general, are the envy of the world, so long as that prosperity is perceived as denying opportunities to others, we will be despised as selfish, short-sighted bullies rather than admired as the generous, compassionate, creative and innovative hard-working human beings we all like to imagine ourselves to be. The time has come, and indeed may be long overdue, for Americans to live up to our flattering self-image, to “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival...” not only of liberty, but of the planet itself. And “the energy, the faith, the devotion which we bring to this endeavor...can truly light the world,” not just metaphorically, but literally as well.
Sunday, November 23, 2003
Sunday, November 16, 2003
ARE WE THERE YET?
a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle, Massachusetts
Sunday November 16, 2003
It seems like this past week has pretty much run the “full spectrum” of ministry for me. This morning’s child dedication service has been scheduled for a month, but you can never tell when someone is going to be critically ill in the hospital, and then there was also a couple who wanted to talk with me about possibly officiating at their wedding next summer, while on Wednesday it seemed like I spent the entire day on the bus to and from New York City with Bob and Ernie and Tom and the folks from Religious Witness for the Earth, so that we could learn more about what we might do to help prevent Global Warming. But it gives me particular pleasure to share the service this morning with our Coming-of-Age candidates and their mentors.
I think I was probably about 13 or 14 myself when my family stopped attending the Unitarian Universalist Church in Palo Alto, California on a regular basis. Sometimes when I tell this story I like to make it sound a little more dramatic than it probably was, but basically my father (who first started attending University Unitarian Church in Seattle after hearing the minister there, Aaron Gilmartin, speak at an Adlai Stevenson rally in 1956) decided that he’d had enough after a handful of long-haired, bare-footed anti-war activists came down from Berkeley to conduct the service one Sunday morning because our regular minister was still in jail after being part of a group who the previous day had tried to stop a troop train bound for the Oakland Alameda naval air terminal which they thought was filled with soldiers on their way to Vietnam. And although it was never really clear to me whether it was their politics or their grooming (and hygiene!) that my father really objected to, after that Sunday he simply stopped accompanying us to church, and what at one time had been a delightful family activity (often including pancakes afterwards) became just another chore for my busy mother...so when we moved back to the Seattle area again a year or so later, we just never got back into the habit.
Which was fine with my two younger brothers, both of whom still like to sleep late on Sunday mornings. But I was just getting to the age where I was starting to become curious about spiritual matters, so I was thrown back on my own devices, which basically consisted of whatever I could find on TV (which, thankfully, in those days wasn’t much), and a Gideon Bible stolen out of a motel room during a High School debate trip, and an occasional pass past the booktable at the Eastshore Unitarian Church, which was only a few miles from our home, and just so happened to be about half-way between my house and my girlfriend’s, where I would sometimes ride my bicycle on Sundays, timing my ride so as to arrive at the church just as the services were letting out. And to make a long story short, I eventually ended up going to Divinity School and spending a total of 17 years in college and earning five liberal arts degrees, all because I missed out on going through the regular coming-of-age program in my home church when I was younger.
So parents, take note and be forewarned -- if you want your children to end up as architects or investment bankers (like my younger brothers), or perhaps in some other respectable profession, instead of becoming outspoken, overly-educated, poorly-dressed political radicals like myself, either let them sleep late, or else make certain that they get the whole course of treatment here, rather than simply letting them catch the bug and then allowing that spiritual “dis-ease” run its course. And while I could list a whole lot of other reasons why it’s best to bring them to church than to let them sleep, remember also that it doesn’t hurt to take them out to eat afterwards either. Because the really important thing is that you are doing it together, as a family.
In any event, I want to take advantage of this opportunity to speak directly to the youth of our church this morning, since you are a very important of our larger church community, yet we don’t really see you here on Sunday mornings as often as we might like to. And this is only normal: teenagers are naturally a lot more interested in one another than they are in hanging out with a lot of geezers like me, as all of us who were ever teenagers once ourselves will readily remember. In America, at least, adolescence is that period of our lives when we stand on the threshold of adulthood, exploring for the first time an identity and a relationship to the world which is NOT fundamentally defined and constructed by our parents. And in this transition from Dependence to Independence, there typically comes a phase of rebelliousness, or “Counter-dependence,” when we test for ourselves both our own limitations and those limits we sometimes believe have been arbitrarily imposed by others. And when we have finally sorted out all those issues, and feel at last like we know who we are, and what we stand for, and what we can and want to do with our lives, there’s an even bigger challenge ahead of us, which is the realization of our Interdependence -- the acknowledgment that we all rely on one another in more ways than we can possibly know, and the task of learning how best to become responsible members of a much wider community.
So if you sometimes hear your parents, or some other adult complain that “youth is wasted on the young,” I hope you will have the presence of mind to remind them that it is also “never too late to have a happy childhood.” Because remaining “Young at Heart,” even as we grow in years, is something we should all aspire to all our lives. And this is something far different from compensating for advancing age through immature behavior. Remaining perennially young at heart has to do with retaining that child-like fascination with discovering new things, and being able to delight in them. Which is, of course, profoundly different from simply acting childishly. Childish individuals never seem to learn to take responsibility for their own behavior. Nothing is ever their fault; someone else is always to blame. And yet somehow they never seem to get what they deserve either.... But people who can remember how to remain young at heart all their lives are grateful for every new day. They just seem to know, intuitively, how to take innocent pleasure in simple things, and both their innocence, and their pleasure, are contagious.
There is a second quality I would encourage you to cultivate as well, and this is the ability to be “Wise Beyond Your Years.” Someone once told me that the biggest difference between Life and School is that life gives the test first, and teaches the lesson afterwards. The older we become, the more lessons we must learn through trial and error, and failure often becomes our greatest teacher, because it FORCES us to look at ourselves in a more “critical” light. One of the key struggles of becoming an adult is determining how we will respond to failure and disappointment. Do we respond childishly: growing frustrated and throwing tantrums, blaming everyone and everything but ourselves, and then expecting sympathy? Or do we pick ourselves up, take a good long look around us and within ourselves, figure out what we did right, what we did wrong, what we might have done differently, and then try again? Talent is great (as far as it goes), but no one is ever so talented that they never come up short. Persistence and tenacity are the indispensable keys to our eventual success in almost every endeavor; simply “sticking with it” until, over time, we learn how to work both smarter AND harder, and with more efficient effort, avoiding the big mistakes and leaning from the little ones, while concentrating on doing those things most likely to give us the best results.
The trouble is that life generally doesn’t give us enough time to make all the mistakes we need to make in order to know everything need to know. And so we also need to learn how to learn from the mistakes of others, and this is what I mean by becoming “Wise Beyond Our Years.” The great blessing of youth is that it feels as though we are discovering the entire world for the first time, seeing it with fresh eyes as though it has never been seen before. And yet, we are what’s new; the world itself has been around for a long time -- long before any of us were even born -- and it will continue to be here long after all of us are long gone. A lot of folks have been here before us, and their wisdom -- the lessons learned from countless lifetimes of triumphs and failures -- is a gift to us, a legacy from our ancestors that can save us all a lot of suffering if only we can discover for ourselves how best to draw upon it.
The good news is that the same quality that allows us to remain young at heart also helps us to become wise beyond our years. And this quality is our capacity for Empathy, and Compassion...the ability to feel what another person is feeling and to sympathize with them, without losing touch with who we are and the differences or boundaries between us. It’s the most important lesson we can learn: how to live in that place where our Independence and our Interdependence come together, so that we know that we can depend on those around us, and that they can depend on us...how to love and be loved, how to be a part of the whole, and yet whole within ourselves. So practice it as much as you can. Learn to put yourself in the other guy’s shoes, try to see things from their perspective, imagine what it would be like if you were them. Or better yet, learn how to ask others what they are thinking and feeling, and learn how to listen to what they say. No matter how smart or clever you may be, everyone you meet knows something that you don’t; and if you can just learn how to listen, how to pay attention to what they are really saying, they just might teach it to you. And then you will be able to share in their success, or at least avoid making the same mistake twice. And this will make you wise beyond your years.
I know I’ve said a lot this morning, and a lot of it has probably sounded both really obvious and maybe a little cryptic too, but there’s one last thing I want to say to you this morning, something which almost goes without saying. But one of my favorite books is called “Wherever You Go, There You Are” -- which is a clever way of saying that you can travel anywhere in the world: to New York or Hollywood, Paris or Rome, even Zanzibar on the Far Side of the World...but when you get there, it’s still the same old you. So learn how to Be Here Now, and to be somewhere else later, and you’ll do fine. My old girlfriend, the one whose house was on the other side of the Unitarian Church, used to call this being “Intimate With the Moment” -- being totally alive in the here and now, without thinking so much about what happened yesterday, or what’s going to happen tomorrow. And yes, there’s a difference -- an important difference -- between living IN the moment, and living only FOR the moment...but I’m afraid you’re going to have to figure that one out for yourselves, just like all of the rest of us. But while you’re working on that, I just want you to know, on behalf of everyone in this Church, that we’re glad you’re here, and we’re on your side. We’re all very proud of who you are, and we’re all very excited to find out what kind of persons you are going to become.
PRAYER (by Bonnie Greer & Chris Eutizzi, RN)
Margie's Prayer (final version)
Divine Love. You have given the gift of Nurture to humankind. We pray now that you would help us to take the time to nurture our own bodies, and minds, and spirits. We have all lived long enough to realize that unless we pause in the busy-ness of our days, we have little left to give to others from our stretched, and stressed, and impoverished souls. We know that we are spiritual beings, and that the spirit cannot die. So help us to feed all that would make us whole. And may our time of quiet energize us to accept life as it comes to us.
Spirit of Life, we ask for Strength, for Wisdom, for Courage, for Healing that we may use our days to show our appreciation for the many gifts we receive from Your presence in our lives. We thank you for the gift of friendship, and pray that You would encourage us, and heal each one of us, wherever we most need Your healing touch. We ask especially that You would heal Margie of her discomfort and her pain. Take away her worry and her anxiousness, and help her to look to You for everything that she needs.
God our Creator, we know that this life is just a brief moment in time. Help us to live "eternally-minded," knowing that our greatest pleasure and desire in this world is to be reunited with You. We praise You for the love that binds the McCormick family together. Thank you for Bill's devotion, commitment, and abiding love for Margie. Margie's enduring love for Bill has been a constant source of comfort and joy in her life. Thank you for the dedication that Bill and Margie have for their children, Erin and Shelley, and for all the loved ones in their lives. And thank you for Margie's warmth and love. ---------Nov. 20, 2003
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle, Massachusetts
Sunday November 16, 2003
It seems like this past week has pretty much run the “full spectrum” of ministry for me. This morning’s child dedication service has been scheduled for a month, but you can never tell when someone is going to be critically ill in the hospital, and then there was also a couple who wanted to talk with me about possibly officiating at their wedding next summer, while on Wednesday it seemed like I spent the entire day on the bus to and from New York City with Bob and Ernie and Tom and the folks from Religious Witness for the Earth, so that we could learn more about what we might do to help prevent Global Warming. But it gives me particular pleasure to share the service this morning with our Coming-of-Age candidates and their mentors.
I think I was probably about 13 or 14 myself when my family stopped attending the Unitarian Universalist Church in Palo Alto, California on a regular basis. Sometimes when I tell this story I like to make it sound a little more dramatic than it probably was, but basically my father (who first started attending University Unitarian Church in Seattle after hearing the minister there, Aaron Gilmartin, speak at an Adlai Stevenson rally in 1956) decided that he’d had enough after a handful of long-haired, bare-footed anti-war activists came down from Berkeley to conduct the service one Sunday morning because our regular minister was still in jail after being part of a group who the previous day had tried to stop a troop train bound for the Oakland Alameda naval air terminal which they thought was filled with soldiers on their way to Vietnam. And although it was never really clear to me whether it was their politics or their grooming (and hygiene!) that my father really objected to, after that Sunday he simply stopped accompanying us to church, and what at one time had been a delightful family activity (often including pancakes afterwards) became just another chore for my busy mother...so when we moved back to the Seattle area again a year or so later, we just never got back into the habit.
Which was fine with my two younger brothers, both of whom still like to sleep late on Sunday mornings. But I was just getting to the age where I was starting to become curious about spiritual matters, so I was thrown back on my own devices, which basically consisted of whatever I could find on TV (which, thankfully, in those days wasn’t much), and a Gideon Bible stolen out of a motel room during a High School debate trip, and an occasional pass past the booktable at the Eastshore Unitarian Church, which was only a few miles from our home, and just so happened to be about half-way between my house and my girlfriend’s, where I would sometimes ride my bicycle on Sundays, timing my ride so as to arrive at the church just as the services were letting out. And to make a long story short, I eventually ended up going to Divinity School and spending a total of 17 years in college and earning five liberal arts degrees, all because I missed out on going through the regular coming-of-age program in my home church when I was younger.
So parents, take note and be forewarned -- if you want your children to end up as architects or investment bankers (like my younger brothers), or perhaps in some other respectable profession, instead of becoming outspoken, overly-educated, poorly-dressed political radicals like myself, either let them sleep late, or else make certain that they get the whole course of treatment here, rather than simply letting them catch the bug and then allowing that spiritual “dis-ease” run its course. And while I could list a whole lot of other reasons why it’s best to bring them to church than to let them sleep, remember also that it doesn’t hurt to take them out to eat afterwards either. Because the really important thing is that you are doing it together, as a family.
In any event, I want to take advantage of this opportunity to speak directly to the youth of our church this morning, since you are a very important of our larger church community, yet we don’t really see you here on Sunday mornings as often as we might like to. And this is only normal: teenagers are naturally a lot more interested in one another than they are in hanging out with a lot of geezers like me, as all of us who were ever teenagers once ourselves will readily remember. In America, at least, adolescence is that period of our lives when we stand on the threshold of adulthood, exploring for the first time an identity and a relationship to the world which is NOT fundamentally defined and constructed by our parents. And in this transition from Dependence to Independence, there typically comes a phase of rebelliousness, or “Counter-dependence,” when we test for ourselves both our own limitations and those limits we sometimes believe have been arbitrarily imposed by others. And when we have finally sorted out all those issues, and feel at last like we know who we are, and what we stand for, and what we can and want to do with our lives, there’s an even bigger challenge ahead of us, which is the realization of our Interdependence -- the acknowledgment that we all rely on one another in more ways than we can possibly know, and the task of learning how best to become responsible members of a much wider community.
So if you sometimes hear your parents, or some other adult complain that “youth is wasted on the young,” I hope you will have the presence of mind to remind them that it is also “never too late to have a happy childhood.” Because remaining “Young at Heart,” even as we grow in years, is something we should all aspire to all our lives. And this is something far different from compensating for advancing age through immature behavior. Remaining perennially young at heart has to do with retaining that child-like fascination with discovering new things, and being able to delight in them. Which is, of course, profoundly different from simply acting childishly. Childish individuals never seem to learn to take responsibility for their own behavior. Nothing is ever their fault; someone else is always to blame. And yet somehow they never seem to get what they deserve either.... But people who can remember how to remain young at heart all their lives are grateful for every new day. They just seem to know, intuitively, how to take innocent pleasure in simple things, and both their innocence, and their pleasure, are contagious.
There is a second quality I would encourage you to cultivate as well, and this is the ability to be “Wise Beyond Your Years.” Someone once told me that the biggest difference between Life and School is that life gives the test first, and teaches the lesson afterwards. The older we become, the more lessons we must learn through trial and error, and failure often becomes our greatest teacher, because it FORCES us to look at ourselves in a more “critical” light. One of the key struggles of becoming an adult is determining how we will respond to failure and disappointment. Do we respond childishly: growing frustrated and throwing tantrums, blaming everyone and everything but ourselves, and then expecting sympathy? Or do we pick ourselves up, take a good long look around us and within ourselves, figure out what we did right, what we did wrong, what we might have done differently, and then try again? Talent is great (as far as it goes), but no one is ever so talented that they never come up short. Persistence and tenacity are the indispensable keys to our eventual success in almost every endeavor; simply “sticking with it” until, over time, we learn how to work both smarter AND harder, and with more efficient effort, avoiding the big mistakes and leaning from the little ones, while concentrating on doing those things most likely to give us the best results.
The trouble is that life generally doesn’t give us enough time to make all the mistakes we need to make in order to know everything need to know. And so we also need to learn how to learn from the mistakes of others, and this is what I mean by becoming “Wise Beyond Our Years.” The great blessing of youth is that it feels as though we are discovering the entire world for the first time, seeing it with fresh eyes as though it has never been seen before. And yet, we are what’s new; the world itself has been around for a long time -- long before any of us were even born -- and it will continue to be here long after all of us are long gone. A lot of folks have been here before us, and their wisdom -- the lessons learned from countless lifetimes of triumphs and failures -- is a gift to us, a legacy from our ancestors that can save us all a lot of suffering if only we can discover for ourselves how best to draw upon it.
The good news is that the same quality that allows us to remain young at heart also helps us to become wise beyond our years. And this quality is our capacity for Empathy, and Compassion...the ability to feel what another person is feeling and to sympathize with them, without losing touch with who we are and the differences or boundaries between us. It’s the most important lesson we can learn: how to live in that place where our Independence and our Interdependence come together, so that we know that we can depend on those around us, and that they can depend on us...how to love and be loved, how to be a part of the whole, and yet whole within ourselves. So practice it as much as you can. Learn to put yourself in the other guy’s shoes, try to see things from their perspective, imagine what it would be like if you were them. Or better yet, learn how to ask others what they are thinking and feeling, and learn how to listen to what they say. No matter how smart or clever you may be, everyone you meet knows something that you don’t; and if you can just learn how to listen, how to pay attention to what they are really saying, they just might teach it to you. And then you will be able to share in their success, or at least avoid making the same mistake twice. And this will make you wise beyond your years.
I know I’ve said a lot this morning, and a lot of it has probably sounded both really obvious and maybe a little cryptic too, but there’s one last thing I want to say to you this morning, something which almost goes without saying. But one of my favorite books is called “Wherever You Go, There You Are” -- which is a clever way of saying that you can travel anywhere in the world: to New York or Hollywood, Paris or Rome, even Zanzibar on the Far Side of the World...but when you get there, it’s still the same old you. So learn how to Be Here Now, and to be somewhere else later, and you’ll do fine. My old girlfriend, the one whose house was on the other side of the Unitarian Church, used to call this being “Intimate With the Moment” -- being totally alive in the here and now, without thinking so much about what happened yesterday, or what’s going to happen tomorrow. And yes, there’s a difference -- an important difference -- between living IN the moment, and living only FOR the moment...but I’m afraid you’re going to have to figure that one out for yourselves, just like all of the rest of us. But while you’re working on that, I just want you to know, on behalf of everyone in this Church, that we’re glad you’re here, and we’re on your side. We’re all very proud of who you are, and we’re all very excited to find out what kind of persons you are going to become.
PRAYER (by Bonnie Greer & Chris Eutizzi, RN)
Margie's Prayer (final version)
Divine Love. You have given the gift of Nurture to humankind. We pray now that you would help us to take the time to nurture our own bodies, and minds, and spirits. We have all lived long enough to realize that unless we pause in the busy-ness of our days, we have little left to give to others from our stretched, and stressed, and impoverished souls. We know that we are spiritual beings, and that the spirit cannot die. So help us to feed all that would make us whole. And may our time of quiet energize us to accept life as it comes to us.
Spirit of Life, we ask for Strength, for Wisdom, for Courage, for Healing that we may use our days to show our appreciation for the many gifts we receive from Your presence in our lives. We thank you for the gift of friendship, and pray that You would encourage us, and heal each one of us, wherever we most need Your healing touch. We ask especially that You would heal Margie of her discomfort and her pain. Take away her worry and her anxiousness, and help her to look to You for everything that she needs.
God our Creator, we know that this life is just a brief moment in time. Help us to live "eternally-minded," knowing that our greatest pleasure and desire in this world is to be reunited with You. We praise You for the love that binds the McCormick family together. Thank you for Bill's devotion, commitment, and abiding love for Margie. Margie's enduring love for Bill has been a constant source of comfort and joy in her life. Thank you for the dedication that Bill and Margie have for their children, Erin and Shelley, and for all the loved ones in their lives. And thank you for Margie's warmth and love. ---------Nov. 20, 2003
Sunday, November 9, 2003
A DOG THAT QUACKS LIKE A DUCK?
a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle, Massachusetts
Veteran’s Day Sunday November 9, 2003
There’s an interesting article in this week’s Newsweek magazine on “God and Health,” which reports (among other things) that people who attend church at least once a week live, on average, eight years longer than people who don’t attend church at all. And notwithstanding the old joke that it only SEEMS longer, when you read a little more closely you discover that regular churchgoers are also 78% more likely to have quit smoking, 39% more likely to have stopped drinking, 54% more likely to exercise regularly, and 131% less likely to feel depressed. So there’s nothing particularly miraculous about these statistics: regular church attendance is simply a good habit which tends to encourage a lot of other good habits. But there are no guarantees; I can’t promise you that by choosing now to spend an hour every week here in this room with me you are assured of an extra eight years at the end of your life. You have to read the small print at the bottom of the prospectus: past performance is not predictive of future results. Still, you’ve got to like the odds...especially since it requires such a modest initial investment, and pays additional dividends almost immediately.
Of course, there are some activities in life that are inherently risky, no matter how well prepared or equipped one may be. There’s a headstone down in the cemetery at the bottom of the hill here that Parker and I often walk by as we are out getting our recommended 40 minutes of moderate cardio three times a week. It belongs to Captain John F. Kazanowski, U.S. Army Special Forces, born June 4th, 1938 (which would make him a Gemini), died October 7th, 1969. I don’t really know that much more about Captain Kazanowski, other than that his middle initial stands for “Francis” and although he was born in Carlisle, his family apparently no longer lives here. And I also know (because I can do the math) that he was 18 years old in 1956 (the year that I was born), and only 31 when he was killed in action in Kontum, South Vietnam, two weeks prior to my 13th birthday. And I was likewise able to find out (thanks to Google) that he was married, that he died as a result of small arms fire, that his body was recovered, that he apparently served in the Reserve as well as in the Special Forces, for a total of eight years, and his name is located on panel 17W, line 47 of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall in Washington D.C. I have no idea what he looked like, or what his political sympathies were. I can guess about his religion (or at least the religion of his parents), but it would still be just an educated guess. I don’t know anything about his interests or hobbies, or what his friends thought of him; I don’t really even know whether or not he was a good soldier. But someone doubtlessly knows all these things, and as a historian I could potentially discover them all as well, if I were simply willing to take the time and make the effort to do the research. What I can never know, and what no one can ever know, is what kind of man John Francis Kazanowski would have become had he lived beyond the age of 31; what he would have done with his life at age 47, for example, (the age I am now), or at age 65, had he not been killed in action. I know this as well: it was in no small part because of the experiences of people like Captain Kazanowski, who fought and died serving our country in Southeast Asia when I was still a child, that I decided when I turned 18 to pursue this profession rather than his.
I also suspect it’s no big secret to any of you how I feel about the current war in Iraq. But I want you all to know that I’m not opposed to this war simply because I’m just another knee-jerk, bleeding-heart liberal peacenik. I’m also an historian, someone who has actually even taught military history at the University level, so I understand that there are times when wars are necessary, and even justified. And I also have a great deal of respect for our men and women in uniform, who are unquestionably and without a doubt the best trained, best equipped, most powerful and professional fighting force in the history of the world, and who have volunteered to risk their lives by putting themselves in harm’s way, on the orders of our Constitutionally designated Commander in Chief, in order to defend this country’s security and interests in the world. So at the end of the day, even though I AM basically just another knee-jerk, bleeding-heart liberal peacenik, when I express my doubts about the legitimacy of this war, and question the President’s motivations for starting it, I am in no way doubting or questioning the integrity of our men and women in uniform, who are simply attempting to do their duty to their country and their fellow citizens, just as I am attempting to do mine. And although there are times when I wish that some of them (General Boyken, for instance) would concentrate a little bit more attentively on the specifically military aspects of their duties, and leave the theology to people like me, this is not one of those situations where I take any sort of pleasure or satisfaction whatsoever in being able to say “I told you so.” Because these are real people’s lives that are at risk here. And when we forget that, we all fail in our duty.
I want to pause here and say just a word or two about the title of this sermon. I first heard this phrase (or something close to it) during a radio interview with reporters Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind, who are the authors of The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron. And immediately my ears perked up, since (having attended both the University of Washington and the University of Oregon), I have at various times in my life been both a “Dawg” and a “Duck” -- as well as an Oregon State University Beaver, two types of Viking, and a Crimson (whatever that is)...and thus there have been moments (generally brisk Saturday afternoons in autumn) when, not only have I been confused about which hat to wear, but I’ve also been uncertain about whether I should bark, or quack, or simply slap the surface of the pond loudly with my tail before diving to safety beneath the water. Of course, this particular interview I was listening to had nothing to do with college football. Rather, the reporters were recounting how one Enron accountant had described his job of making prepaid commodities futures contracts (which are essentially debt and therefore liabilities) appear as earnings on the company balance sheet -- “making a dog look like a duck.” Because as we all know, if it looks like a duck, and sounds like a duck, it’s supposed to be a duck. But they weren’t ducks. They were dogs. And as we all well know, when somebody finally got around to letting the dogs out, the whole thing came crashing down...and a lot of people got bitten. And now a lot of these same people want to know why Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling and all their crooked corporate cronies aren’t in the hoosegow (instead of merely the doghouse)...but you know, that’s not going to give people back their pensions, or their health insurance, or their homes or their livelihoods. Revenge is a very superficial form of payback. It’s much better when the people who have suffered actually get paid back what they have lost -- what in my line of work we call “Restorative Justice” (as opposed to “Retributive Justice”).
Of course, there are some folks who would still argue that a lot of the fuzzy bookkeeping done at Enron technically wasn’t illegal...it was just misleading and (perhaps) immoral. So while it’s understandable why people may wish to express their moral outrage, anything like jail time, much less actual restitution, is simply out of the question. And this isn’t the only area of public concern where we are being asked to split hairs between the “intentional cultivation of a misperception” and an outright lie. So long as our leaders, our public servants, can keep the dogs all muzzled and their ducks in a row, we have no business scrutinizing their actions or questioning their decisions...it’s just a lot of nay-saying, or fear-mongering, or partisan political “spin.” It may even be unpatriotic, and a danger to our national security.
But for my own part, I’m a lot less concerned about the possibility that the Bush Administration may have attempted to intentionally deceive the American people about their reasons for going to war with Iraq (which, by the way, I’m pretty certain that they did), than I am worried about the likelihood that they may have unintentionally deceived themselves as well. And this, to my way of thinking, is a much bigger problem...because it’s one thing to know what you are doing, and to lie about it to others, and quite another to THINK that you know what you are doing, but instead to be rushing headlong toward disaster because you’ve been lying to yourself, and living in a state of denial. And this is an insight that goes well beyond our contemporary political situation; it’s a danger that we all need to be aware of, because it happens so easily, even to the best of us. And it’s not just confined to negative things either; people also deceive themselves about the positive things in their lives, or so exaggerate their concern about what “might” happen that they never get to enjoy what IS happening. Learning to tell the difference between “what if” and “what is” is not always easy, but it’s important, not only because it allows us to distinguish between “what might have been” and “the way things really are,” but because it also allows us to consider the question of “what next” from a place of relative certainty rather than one of wishful thinking.
Personally, I’m a great believer in the power of optimism. I believe that it’s important to have faith in what you are doing, to have hope for a positive outcome, and to be confident that you can trust that you are making decisions based on the best possible information available, having carefully both calculated the potential risks and the possible returns. And of course you need to take everything you hear with a grain of salt, and double-check everything that you can; because not only are there dogs that quack like ducks, and ducks that bark like dogs...their are also wolves in sheep's clothing, and foxes hoping to guard the henhouse, and you’ve got to be on your toes to see through their disguises, to see them for what they really are, and not merely what they tell you they are, or what we wish them to be. “Trust, but Verify” I believe the old Russian proverb goes. And the higher the stakes, the more important it is to be certain of the facts before you act.
I know that there are a lot of people in this country, the families and friends of men and women in uniform in particular, who honestly feel that we somehow break faith with our troops in the field whenever we question the policies (and politics) that have put them in harm’s way. In order for our soldiers and sailors and airmen and Marines to be able to do their jobs, they need to know that the nation stands solidly behind them, and that they have a clear mission, one that can effectively be achieved through the use of military force, as well as overwhelming material superiority, and a clear exit strategy when the mission is accomplished. This is the “Powell doctrine,” which was put into effect during the First Gulf War -- the 100 hours of ”Operation Desert Storm” -- and at the time was widely praised as having brought an end to the so-called “Vietnam Syndrome.”
But when there is no clear military objective, much less a well-thought-out mission and exit strategy...when we can’t even be certain that our leaders are telling us the truth, much less independently verify what they are saying; when asking questions is portrayed as unpatriotic, and ideological bravado has been substituted for the objective analysis of reliable intelligence, we are headed, as a nation, toward a world of hurt. The constant trickle of casualties which we seem powerless to prevent (an experience some might compare to being “pecked to death by ducks”) is only the thin edge of the wedge. Casualties are never good, but if it is obvious that they are contributing in a tangible way toward an eventual victory they can generally be borne. Simply SAYING this, however, does not make it so, and no one sees this sooner or more clearly than the soldiers in the field themselves. The first sign of declining morale will be a drop in the rate of re-enlistments, especially among members of the Guard and Reserves. Another place to look for signs of trouble is in the internal domestic politics of our nominal allies. And I’m not talking here so much about Great Britain, or even France or Germany or Russia. But look at countries like Turkey, and more importantly, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. The President has declared that he wants to turn Iraq into a model of Islamic democracy, which can then become a template for emerging democracies throughout the region. And I hope that he is right. And I hope that he can pull it off. But what I fear is that instead we will see increased levels of authoritarian repression in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan (not that it could really get much worse), as the ruling elites there attempt to control ever-growing popular resentment of the on-going American military presence in Iraq and Afghanistan, while the Turks and the Kurds (and the Syrians and the Iranians) continue to maneuver in order to take advantage of the chaos and promote their own political interests and aspirations. And should the pro-American ruling elites in Saudi Arabia or Pakistan somehow fall from power, that’s when the problems really begin. Because Pakistan truly does possess nuclear weapons. And the American economy truly does depend on the free flow of Saudi oil.
And, of course, underlying all of this is the fact that we must base our policy decisions on “what is,” and not on “what might have been.” No matter how desperately we might have wished otherwise, we no longer really have the option of simply pulling out of Iraq and leaving things to sort themselves out on their own. Our military is committed (some might even say over-extended), we are losing the initiative, and although the “exit strategy” is obvious to everyone, one honestly has to wonder whether or not the President, having thumbed his nose at the international community on numerous occasions, is actually capable of creating the kind of international coalition his father knew was indispensable in order to succeed in situations of this kind. And with the Presidential election now only a year away, you can be confident that the political discourse in this country will only grow increasingly acrimonious, as young American men and women continue to risk their lives, and shed their blood, in foreign lands.
[extemporaneous conclusion: civility, dialog, and the power of prayer]
READING: from A World Transformed by George Bush and Brent Scowcroft (1998)
Trying to eliminate Saddam, extending the ground war into an occupation of Iraq, would have violated our guideline about not changing objectives in midstream, engaging in “mission creep,” and would have incurred incalculable human and political costs. Apprehending him was probably impossible. We had been unable to find Noriega in Panama, which we knew intimately. We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq. The coalition would have instantly have collapsed, the Arabs deserting it in anger and other allies pulling out as well. Under those circumstances, there was no viable “exit strategy” we could see, violating another of our principles. Furthermore, we had been self-consciously trying to set a pattern for handling aggression in the post-Cold War world. Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the United Nations’ mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression that we hoped to establish. Had we gong the invasion route, the United States could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land. It would have been a dramatically different -- and perhaps barren -- outcome.
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle, Massachusetts
Veteran’s Day Sunday November 9, 2003
There’s an interesting article in this week’s Newsweek magazine on “God and Health,” which reports (among other things) that people who attend church at least once a week live, on average, eight years longer than people who don’t attend church at all. And notwithstanding the old joke that it only SEEMS longer, when you read a little more closely you discover that regular churchgoers are also 78% more likely to have quit smoking, 39% more likely to have stopped drinking, 54% more likely to exercise regularly, and 131% less likely to feel depressed. So there’s nothing particularly miraculous about these statistics: regular church attendance is simply a good habit which tends to encourage a lot of other good habits. But there are no guarantees; I can’t promise you that by choosing now to spend an hour every week here in this room with me you are assured of an extra eight years at the end of your life. You have to read the small print at the bottom of the prospectus: past performance is not predictive of future results. Still, you’ve got to like the odds...especially since it requires such a modest initial investment, and pays additional dividends almost immediately.
Of course, there are some activities in life that are inherently risky, no matter how well prepared or equipped one may be. There’s a headstone down in the cemetery at the bottom of the hill here that Parker and I often walk by as we are out getting our recommended 40 minutes of moderate cardio three times a week. It belongs to Captain John F. Kazanowski, U.S. Army Special Forces, born June 4th, 1938 (which would make him a Gemini), died October 7th, 1969. I don’t really know that much more about Captain Kazanowski, other than that his middle initial stands for “Francis” and although he was born in Carlisle, his family apparently no longer lives here. And I also know (because I can do the math) that he was 18 years old in 1956 (the year that I was born), and only 31 when he was killed in action in Kontum, South Vietnam, two weeks prior to my 13th birthday. And I was likewise able to find out (thanks to Google) that he was married, that he died as a result of small arms fire, that his body was recovered, that he apparently served in the Reserve as well as in the Special Forces, for a total of eight years, and his name is located on panel 17W, line 47 of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall in Washington D.C. I have no idea what he looked like, or what his political sympathies were. I can guess about his religion (or at least the religion of his parents), but it would still be just an educated guess. I don’t know anything about his interests or hobbies, or what his friends thought of him; I don’t really even know whether or not he was a good soldier. But someone doubtlessly knows all these things, and as a historian I could potentially discover them all as well, if I were simply willing to take the time and make the effort to do the research. What I can never know, and what no one can ever know, is what kind of man John Francis Kazanowski would have become had he lived beyond the age of 31; what he would have done with his life at age 47, for example, (the age I am now), or at age 65, had he not been killed in action. I know this as well: it was in no small part because of the experiences of people like Captain Kazanowski, who fought and died serving our country in Southeast Asia when I was still a child, that I decided when I turned 18 to pursue this profession rather than his.
I also suspect it’s no big secret to any of you how I feel about the current war in Iraq. But I want you all to know that I’m not opposed to this war simply because I’m just another knee-jerk, bleeding-heart liberal peacenik. I’m also an historian, someone who has actually even taught military history at the University level, so I understand that there are times when wars are necessary, and even justified. And I also have a great deal of respect for our men and women in uniform, who are unquestionably and without a doubt the best trained, best equipped, most powerful and professional fighting force in the history of the world, and who have volunteered to risk their lives by putting themselves in harm’s way, on the orders of our Constitutionally designated Commander in Chief, in order to defend this country’s security and interests in the world. So at the end of the day, even though I AM basically just another knee-jerk, bleeding-heart liberal peacenik, when I express my doubts about the legitimacy of this war, and question the President’s motivations for starting it, I am in no way doubting or questioning the integrity of our men and women in uniform, who are simply attempting to do their duty to their country and their fellow citizens, just as I am attempting to do mine. And although there are times when I wish that some of them (General Boyken, for instance) would concentrate a little bit more attentively on the specifically military aspects of their duties, and leave the theology to people like me, this is not one of those situations where I take any sort of pleasure or satisfaction whatsoever in being able to say “I told you so.” Because these are real people’s lives that are at risk here. And when we forget that, we all fail in our duty.
I want to pause here and say just a word or two about the title of this sermon. I first heard this phrase (or something close to it) during a radio interview with reporters Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind, who are the authors of The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron. And immediately my ears perked up, since (having attended both the University of Washington and the University of Oregon), I have at various times in my life been both a “Dawg” and a “Duck” -- as well as an Oregon State University Beaver, two types of Viking, and a Crimson (whatever that is)...and thus there have been moments (generally brisk Saturday afternoons in autumn) when, not only have I been confused about which hat to wear, but I’ve also been uncertain about whether I should bark, or quack, or simply slap the surface of the pond loudly with my tail before diving to safety beneath the water. Of course, this particular interview I was listening to had nothing to do with college football. Rather, the reporters were recounting how one Enron accountant had described his job of making prepaid commodities futures contracts (which are essentially debt and therefore liabilities) appear as earnings on the company balance sheet -- “making a dog look like a duck.” Because as we all know, if it looks like a duck, and sounds like a duck, it’s supposed to be a duck. But they weren’t ducks. They were dogs. And as we all well know, when somebody finally got around to letting the dogs out, the whole thing came crashing down...and a lot of people got bitten. And now a lot of these same people want to know why Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling and all their crooked corporate cronies aren’t in the hoosegow (instead of merely the doghouse)...but you know, that’s not going to give people back their pensions, or their health insurance, or their homes or their livelihoods. Revenge is a very superficial form of payback. It’s much better when the people who have suffered actually get paid back what they have lost -- what in my line of work we call “Restorative Justice” (as opposed to “Retributive Justice”).
Of course, there are some folks who would still argue that a lot of the fuzzy bookkeeping done at Enron technically wasn’t illegal...it was just misleading and (perhaps) immoral. So while it’s understandable why people may wish to express their moral outrage, anything like jail time, much less actual restitution, is simply out of the question. And this isn’t the only area of public concern where we are being asked to split hairs between the “intentional cultivation of a misperception” and an outright lie. So long as our leaders, our public servants, can keep the dogs all muzzled and their ducks in a row, we have no business scrutinizing their actions or questioning their decisions...it’s just a lot of nay-saying, or fear-mongering, or partisan political “spin.” It may even be unpatriotic, and a danger to our national security.
But for my own part, I’m a lot less concerned about the possibility that the Bush Administration may have attempted to intentionally deceive the American people about their reasons for going to war with Iraq (which, by the way, I’m pretty certain that they did), than I am worried about the likelihood that they may have unintentionally deceived themselves as well. And this, to my way of thinking, is a much bigger problem...because it’s one thing to know what you are doing, and to lie about it to others, and quite another to THINK that you know what you are doing, but instead to be rushing headlong toward disaster because you’ve been lying to yourself, and living in a state of denial. And this is an insight that goes well beyond our contemporary political situation; it’s a danger that we all need to be aware of, because it happens so easily, even to the best of us. And it’s not just confined to negative things either; people also deceive themselves about the positive things in their lives, or so exaggerate their concern about what “might” happen that they never get to enjoy what IS happening. Learning to tell the difference between “what if” and “what is” is not always easy, but it’s important, not only because it allows us to distinguish between “what might have been” and “the way things really are,” but because it also allows us to consider the question of “what next” from a place of relative certainty rather than one of wishful thinking.
Personally, I’m a great believer in the power of optimism. I believe that it’s important to have faith in what you are doing, to have hope for a positive outcome, and to be confident that you can trust that you are making decisions based on the best possible information available, having carefully both calculated the potential risks and the possible returns. And of course you need to take everything you hear with a grain of salt, and double-check everything that you can; because not only are there dogs that quack like ducks, and ducks that bark like dogs...their are also wolves in sheep's clothing, and foxes hoping to guard the henhouse, and you’ve got to be on your toes to see through their disguises, to see them for what they really are, and not merely what they tell you they are, or what we wish them to be. “Trust, but Verify” I believe the old Russian proverb goes. And the higher the stakes, the more important it is to be certain of the facts before you act.
I know that there are a lot of people in this country, the families and friends of men and women in uniform in particular, who honestly feel that we somehow break faith with our troops in the field whenever we question the policies (and politics) that have put them in harm’s way. In order for our soldiers and sailors and airmen and Marines to be able to do their jobs, they need to know that the nation stands solidly behind them, and that they have a clear mission, one that can effectively be achieved through the use of military force, as well as overwhelming material superiority, and a clear exit strategy when the mission is accomplished. This is the “Powell doctrine,” which was put into effect during the First Gulf War -- the 100 hours of ”Operation Desert Storm” -- and at the time was widely praised as having brought an end to the so-called “Vietnam Syndrome.”
But when there is no clear military objective, much less a well-thought-out mission and exit strategy...when we can’t even be certain that our leaders are telling us the truth, much less independently verify what they are saying; when asking questions is portrayed as unpatriotic, and ideological bravado has been substituted for the objective analysis of reliable intelligence, we are headed, as a nation, toward a world of hurt. The constant trickle of casualties which we seem powerless to prevent (an experience some might compare to being “pecked to death by ducks”) is only the thin edge of the wedge. Casualties are never good, but if it is obvious that they are contributing in a tangible way toward an eventual victory they can generally be borne. Simply SAYING this, however, does not make it so, and no one sees this sooner or more clearly than the soldiers in the field themselves. The first sign of declining morale will be a drop in the rate of re-enlistments, especially among members of the Guard and Reserves. Another place to look for signs of trouble is in the internal domestic politics of our nominal allies. And I’m not talking here so much about Great Britain, or even France or Germany or Russia. But look at countries like Turkey, and more importantly, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. The President has declared that he wants to turn Iraq into a model of Islamic democracy, which can then become a template for emerging democracies throughout the region. And I hope that he is right. And I hope that he can pull it off. But what I fear is that instead we will see increased levels of authoritarian repression in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan (not that it could really get much worse), as the ruling elites there attempt to control ever-growing popular resentment of the on-going American military presence in Iraq and Afghanistan, while the Turks and the Kurds (and the Syrians and the Iranians) continue to maneuver in order to take advantage of the chaos and promote their own political interests and aspirations. And should the pro-American ruling elites in Saudi Arabia or Pakistan somehow fall from power, that’s when the problems really begin. Because Pakistan truly does possess nuclear weapons. And the American economy truly does depend on the free flow of Saudi oil.
And, of course, underlying all of this is the fact that we must base our policy decisions on “what is,” and not on “what might have been.” No matter how desperately we might have wished otherwise, we no longer really have the option of simply pulling out of Iraq and leaving things to sort themselves out on their own. Our military is committed (some might even say over-extended), we are losing the initiative, and although the “exit strategy” is obvious to everyone, one honestly has to wonder whether or not the President, having thumbed his nose at the international community on numerous occasions, is actually capable of creating the kind of international coalition his father knew was indispensable in order to succeed in situations of this kind. And with the Presidential election now only a year away, you can be confident that the political discourse in this country will only grow increasingly acrimonious, as young American men and women continue to risk their lives, and shed their blood, in foreign lands.
[extemporaneous conclusion: civility, dialog, and the power of prayer]
READING: from A World Transformed by George Bush and Brent Scowcroft (1998)
Trying to eliminate Saddam, extending the ground war into an occupation of Iraq, would have violated our guideline about not changing objectives in midstream, engaging in “mission creep,” and would have incurred incalculable human and political costs. Apprehending him was probably impossible. We had been unable to find Noriega in Panama, which we knew intimately. We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq. The coalition would have instantly have collapsed, the Arabs deserting it in anger and other allies pulling out as well. Under those circumstances, there was no viable “exit strategy” we could see, violating another of our principles. Furthermore, we had been self-consciously trying to set a pattern for handling aggression in the post-Cold War world. Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the United Nations’ mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression that we hoped to establish. Had we gong the invasion route, the United States could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land. It would have been a dramatically different -- and perhaps barren -- outcome.
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