The only good thing to come out of this past week’s series of horrific images of refugee children being taken away from their parents and caged by American immigration officials is that it’s shoved the situation in our faces in a way that is impossible to ignore. What may get lost in the moment is that the situation at the Mexican border is the tip of the iceberg – an iceberg that humanity’s ship is steaming for at full speed.
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          It’s public information, though not being paid much attention to, that immigration from Mexico by Mexican citizens has been on a steady decline, while immigration from refugees from Guatemala and points south who are using Mexico as a conduit to the US is on a steady increase, especially among those attempting illegal entry – slightly more than half at this point. The reasons are also public knowledge – unstable or corrupt governments, civil wars, massive unemployment, mass starvation or near-starvation, total breakdown of fragile infrastructures. People risk sending their children north unaccompanied at the risk of their getting caught, killed or sold into modern slavery for one reason – to give them a fighting chance to survive. At least in their cages, they’re eating.
 
          Take the situation global - over 200 million people displaced by Middle Eastern and African civil wars, crashed economies and “disrupted food chains” looking for someplace to go. Europe is being flooded. Italy is getting heat from the rest of the E.U. for turning away a shipload of refugees. America isn’t the only bad guy this week - small comfort.
 
          The real issue, the big picture, like it or not, is that the world is simply getting too small to sustain the human race or, to put it more correctly, we’re getting to big for it to keep feeding us.  The developed world, who are using most of the planet’s resources (that would be us) have finally begun to level off their population growth. The rest of the world, especially the poorest, don’t have access to a drug store full of birth control options and couldn’t afford them if they did. They also don’t have access to a lot of things we take for granted, like toilets.  If they did, the Ebola virus wouldn’t exist. We’ve got most of the food, they’ve got most of the people. Do the math.
 
          What the situation at the Texas/Mexico border tells us is simply that there’s no way we can shut this situation out. And if Ebola solves somebody else’s population crisis, they’ll take us with them. There’s no wall high enough. The rest of the world isn’t going to sit there and starve while we check our Facebook pages. The entire human race will make it though this or none of us will.
         
         Anyone who wants to fact check any of the above is free to use Google. Like I said, nobody’s trying to hide it. The answer isn’t in the stats and never will be. The answer is right in front of us, where it’s always been - in the part of the human soul that looks at a refugee child crying and sees their own son or daughter.
 
          We’ve got a lot of work to do.
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​Everybody can’t wait for 2016 to be over. It’s been a bad year for iconic celebrities, people who represent a particular era for those who shared it with then – David Bowie, George Martin, Carrie Fischer, Debbie Reynolds, Glen Frey, Muhammad Ali, Patty Duke - dozens more. We never met these people really, but we identify with them. They represent us, both as a generation and individually. And if death can get them, famous as they are, we all feel a bit more vulnerable. So a lot of us are thinking that if we can somehow sweat it out until this “dangerous” year is over we’ll all be somehow safer. That may be a comforting thought, but, unfortunately, it has very little going for it.
 
Death doesn’t know what a year is. The remorseless process of decline, decay and recycling the left over material has been going on for billions of years all over the universe (which is itself expanding towards inevitable burnout).  The process seems unlikely to stop when the ball drops.
 
What’s a year anyway? The approximate time it takes a single small planet to orbit its star. That was figured out by some very clever people a long time ago, and they used the information to help organize their time -but the rest of the universe could care less. Pluto takes 248 of our years to orbit the same sun we do and there could be planets out there that take a million to orbit theirs. So why does it matter? It matters because it matters to us. It’s our earth, our sun, our lives. This is where we live and this is how we manage it.
 
We are more than our biology. The body-soul split that many formal religions have espoused over the years isn’t supported by the physical evidence, but it still gives a pretty good picture of how we actually live our lives. Our sense of identity isn’t located in our hands, legs or kidneys. It’s in a symbolic “heart” that has little or nothing to do with the organ in our chests that keeps the blood pumping. We are what we imagine ourselves to be.
 
And a year is a year because that’s how we experience it. There are inexplicable trends in the way things go. Some years are better than others, for individuals, for a country, for a sports team, for the human race. We can analyze it all afterwards to try to explain why, what forces are involved, but that’s just to make ourselves feel better. There’s more going on here than we get or are likely to. If organizing it by years helps get us through the night, especially New Year’s Eve, so be it.
 
Hopefully next year will be a little kinder to us all.

             If hindsight can tell us anything about the “surprise” election of Donald Trump, it can tell us this – don’t mess with human belief. Belief isn’t about facts and figures, it isn’t about conclusions reached after careful deliberation - it’s not even about observable reality. It’s about what works for us.
 
          Our deepest held beliefs, the things we feel most - who we fall in love with, our sense of right and wrong, which sports teams we root for – are for the most part unexplainable. Something out there hits us and a part of us responds “that’s me”.  And that sense, once acquired, is hard to shake. Religious belief is obviously so, especially for people whose sense of reality from birth has been molded by it, but it applies to other beliefs as well. It takes a lot of bad behavior on your loved one’s part to make you stop loving them. If you’ve never been a thief it requires a pretty high level of desperation for you to grab someone else’s money and run. Your team can lose all season and you’ll be back in the stands next year convinced that “this year we’ll do it”.
 
          What happened in the election was that Donald Trump was able to inspire belief in his followers and Hillary Clinton wasn’t. It’s as simple as that.  Trumps’ message, hammered home over and over again, was straightforward an uncomplicated: “Your political leaders have sold you out to foreigners – your jobs, your neighborhoods, your security.  Elect me and we’ll take our country back.”  The “foreigner” definition got spread pretty wide, taking in religious and ethnic “others” of all sorts - in short, anybody who’s not us. Almost exactly a quarter of the country locked into that message the minute they heard it. All the confusion, frustration and anxiety of the past two decades, especially the world since 9/11, was explained and solved in a single sentence: “They did this to our country and it’s up to us to fix it.” Once that moment of connection was made, additional information was neither welcome nor relevant. It didn’t matter that none of the experts (the ultimate others) thought that Trump’s simplistic solutions (“a fifteen minute meeting in the oval office”) would work, or how many women he groped. He was the man with the message and the message transcended the man.
 
          Poor Hilary was obviously more “qualified”. But to the true believers, this just made her one of them. The true believers wanted a “non-politician” for the most important political job on earth and Hillary Clinton was the living embodiment of everything they despised. And, worse, while she was able to inspire confidence in her supporters, she was not able to inspire belief. Her message wasn’t simple. She honestly faced the world for the complicated mess it is. The true believers didn’t want to hear it. And even her own supporters were followers not believers. She didn’t have the armor and shield of the message bearer to protect her from the non-stop attacks the other side kept throwing at her. It’s the same problem secularists have with fundamentalists. The fundamentalist’s message is simpler and stronger. When the battle lines are drawn, open mindedness loses out to someone with God on their side. In the end, confidence wasn’t enough. Belief was. It always is.
 
          Half the country didn’t vote. You can bet that the believers did, every one of them. That silent half, whether they meant to or not, have validated Trump’s message – that the American people have lost Faith (capital F) in their political system. He was right about that. Unfortunately being right about that doesn’t mean he knows what to do with the presidency now that he’s got it.
 
          What we do about it now will require more faith then we’ve ever had.

      I had two interesting things happen today. The first was getting the news, the minute I turned on my computer, that Bob Dylan, a guy who dropped out of college so he could go hit the open mics in Greenwhich Village, had just been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Since the first thing I did after I dropped out of the Catholic Seminary (though I did hang around to graduate), inspired by this same Bob Dylan, was to go hit the open mics in Greenwich Village, I was of course interested.

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​       The second thing happened a few hours later while I was waiting for the bus. A couple of Watchtower ladies were sitting at the bus stop next to a rack of little magazines, one of which bore the intriguing title “Did Jesus Really Exist?”. I took a copy, thanking the ladies for contributing to my chances of salvation (I need all the help I can get) and paged through the magazine while I waited for the bus. It turned out to be the usual attempts to document the actual flesh and blood existence of “Historical Jesus” from various sources, some more reliable sounding than others. I was still reading when the bus arrived, and that’s when the two interesting events smacked into each other and the question hit me: Does Bob Dylan really exist?
 
          Dylan has some advantages over Jesus in this regard. We know for a documented fact that Robert Zimmerman was born on May 24th, 1941 in Duluth, Minnesota, USA. He’s been photographed and recorded to an almost ridiculous extent. On top of that, he’s still alive and breathing. I’ve even seen him myself on several occasions, once from about ten feet away (after some serious pushing). But that’s not what we’re really talking about here. Robert Zimmerman clearly exists. But in many ways Bob Dylan, the fictional character he created in Greenwich Village some twenty years after his biological arrival, is as hard to pin down as Jesus.
 
          To get down to basics, nobody knows for sure when Jesus was born and the Bethlehem story has come under some fire lately. That being said, his birth is the turning point of our entire time measurement system. It’s 2016 because people decided to start measuring time from when they thought he was born. And let’s not even talk about Christmas. If evidence suddenly emerged that Jesus of Nazareth, Mary of Galilee’s flesh and blood baby boy, was actually born on September 22nd, there’d be a major financial meltdown – Macy’s would be out of business.  My point is that the biological facts don’t really matter. What matters, and why there are still magazines about Jesus at a Philadelphia Bus Stop two thousand plus years later, is that, whenever and wherever he was actually born, his ideas are still inspiring people. The same thing goes for Dylan.  If it came out that Robert Zimmerman was actually born on May 23rd and somebody made a typo on the birth certificate, it wouldn’t change a damn thing. 
 
          One of my favorite early Dylan Songs is one called “Long Time Gone”. In it he tells the story of how he ran away from home young and traveled around the country singing songs and working in carnivals. It’s a great song. There’s not a word of historical truth in it, but it’s still a great song – Bobby Zimmerman creating the fictional character Bob Dylan who just won the Nobel Prize, and whose work is still inspiring people. You could say the same thing about the Gospels, and somebody needs to.
 
          The Sermon on the Mount didn’t happen on a mount. I’ve seen it. It’s a great big hill and nobody standing on top of could have been heard by anybody more than ten feet away. Bob Dylan had actual microphones at those open mics - Jesus didn’t. The word that the poor would inherit the earth and that we were all responsible for each other was delivered to small groups on street corners and in houses with dirt floors. Those words inspired the people around him and turned the world upside down long after he was dead. The same thing goes for Dylan (and will keep going long after Robert Zimmerman passes on). There was a biological Jesus of Nazareth. You don’t get this much smoke without some kind of fire. And there is a biological Robert Zimmerman. But it’s what they inspire in other people that matters, not the raw facts.
 
          Jesus exists and, fortunately for us all, so does Bob Dylan.
 
 
 
 

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          Good Friday means a lot of different things to different people. Historically, it’s the day assigned to commemorate the grisly execution of a troublemaking preacher who was seen as a threat by the religious and civil authorities of his day and whose luck ran out during Passover. They were dead right about him being a threat. They were dead wrong about what they did about it. The most famous death in human history did more to propel his troublemaking ideas worldwide than they could ever have imagined.
 
          To a great many believers, it means a great deal more than even all that. To those who see Jesus of Nazareth as God incarnate, it means an entirely new twist on religious belief and the whole idea of who or what God is. The Greek and Roman mythology of Jesus’  time had plenty of stories about Gods taking human form, doing wonders and miracles (usually destructive) and impregnating countless mortal women with their semi-divine offspring. The Jesus story is different. In the Christian version, the creator willingly chooses to take on the full burden of creaturehood – cold, heat, hunger, thirst, diarrhea, ear infections, hives, pain, fear, frustration and finally, the big one – death itself – and a brutal death at that, at the hands of the very creatures he supposedly came to save from themselves. Breaking his eternal silence, he uses a human tongue (with a human need to swallow between every few words) to preach a message of love, forgiveness and human equality and seals his credibility by forgiving his killers from the cross with his last breath. That’s a lot to take in. Most people, even believers, don’t try too hard. They fall back on the official story “He died for our sins” so as not to have to take in the enormity of the idea. A God who suffers, who chooses to suffer, who chooses to become his creation, is very different from the idea of a disembodied spirit running things from a safe distance.
 
          Whether you believe it or not, the introduction of such a powerful idea into human thought cannot be underestimated. It changes who we are. If the barrier between the source of all things and the things themselves no longer exists, then anything is possible and we are more than our biology. Most official religions have worked hard to suppress this central truth, or to cloud it in fancy imagery that dilutes its punch. The trick, the game if you will, is to treat Jesus as a one time thing, as opposed to a revelation about the actual nature of things. The nature of things is that all living things suffer – humans are no exception – but what we choose to do about it makes all the difference. We can deny our mortality, fight back, enslave each other to feel powerful, pile up wealth as a protective wall – or we can accept our shared situation, band together and do all we can to make our brief lives as fulfilling as possible. This is the central idea behind all the religions that have managed to survive over time, and the central conflict that has faced the human race since we crawled out of the caves.
 
          This is a Good Friday to remember it.  Jesus died, but he never left.


     

         Once again, events on the political front are turning into “philosophy with live ammo”.  The ongoing success of Donald Trump and his popularity with millions of voters, while confusing and more than a little scary to many conservatives and just about all liberals, is completely understandable given the current state of world and (especially) our national affairs. Mr. Trump is filling a void.
 
          It happens in nature all the time – a stroke of lightning burns the air away and the surrounding air masses slam together to fill the gap - warmer waters in the Gulf of Mexico draw down cold air from the Arctic – it’s pretty much what runs everything. Human beings aren’t that much different. We are more than our biology and we need more than our biology. What every one of us needs in order to take our next step, almost in order to take our next breath, is a unifying sense of meaning that defines our place in the world and how we’re supposed to act in it. It’s not about religion. Religion was created (by humans) to fill part of this need. It drives everything we do, from the clothes we wear to our ideas about right and wrong to whether we pick up a pizza slice with our hands or use a knife and fork.
 
          Everything we do defines us and we create a mental/emotional structure around ourselves to support the definition. When church and state were linked at the hip, and everybody in the tribe was from the same ethnic group, this was easy to maintain. We knew who we were and what was expected of us, by our neighbors, the police, the king and even our God. It’s not so easy these days. What’s an American anyway?  We’re split down the middle politically, we’re ethnically and religiously diverse and faced with an economic disparity that is no longer supported by our culture. In ancient times, the king and the nobility were supposed  to be richer than the common folk. In America that wasn’t supposed to happen, at least not in the mythology that defined us. When we lose our sense of ourselves, especially if we feel that someone has taken it away from us, we get scared, and we get mad.
 
          Now for some of us, defining ourselves by our sense of diversity works. Feeling that we’re part of an all-inclusive global community feels just fine and is in sync with the world around us. This is very much my own reality, supported by the urban multi-racial, multi cultural world I’ve spent most of my adult life (and made my living) in. For someone who sees their own ethnic, religious and economic identity being chipped away at by foreigners who take their jobs, rich CEOs who export whole industries to other countries and murderous terrorists who hate their country and their religion, it’s not so easy. If my sense of identity is “White American Christian with a job” it’s not hard to get the feeling that somebody who was supposed to be looking out for my interests has sold me out. This leaves me with what might be called an “identity gap”. Donald Trump is filling this gap. Last night he spelled it out.
 
          In his speech after sweeping several Super Tuesday primaries, Mr. Trump pitted his “Make America Great Again” slogan solidly against the “Make America Whole Again” slogan his likely opponent had spelled out just a few moments before (in front of the same TV audience).  His exact words were “Make America whole again, what does that even mean?”. He knows perfectly well what it means, and so do his supporters. “Whole Again” means “Diverse and Happy With It”. “Great Again” means “White Christian Again”.  His assertion that he can bring back the money that’s fled overseas with a half hour meeting in the oval office, while flying in the face of reason and why the money fled (non white Muslims work for less) makes perfect sense if you see the whole thing as a case of mythological identity – they’ll come back when they see they’ve got their White Christian country back.
 
          His supporters have, with some justification, lost their belief that the American political system represents not only their interests, but, more importantly, who they are. They want their sense of themselves as Americans back, and feel that restoring it will bring their jobs back too. Blaming the “enemy” (Muslims, Democrats, Barack Obama and anybody who likes him) for the loss of both is the oldest trick in the book and Mr. Trump knows how to play it very well.
 
          None of his opponents, either in his own party or on the Democratic side, have been able to conjure up a competing mythology of identity. They’re going to need to, regardless of who wins the nomination or the election, even more if he does.

I try not to get involved in direct political commentary, but Ted Cruz’s acceptance speech after winning the Iowa primary was a bit too over the top to ignore. What happened in the real world was that, when it came to people actually voting instead of just answering pollsters’ questions, Mr. Cruz had knocked Donald Trump off his perch - a potential game changer for the Republican Party.  But that’s not what he talked about. For anyone who didn’t see it (and many, many people did), Mr. Cruz opened his remarks with “Let me first say, to God be the Glory.” - not "Thank you to the voters of Iowa” not “Thanks to all the hard working volunteers who helped me do this” but a direct reference to the Almighty as the real power behind the process.

Now we’re used to this sort of thing from actresses and actors accepting Academy Awards and Golden Globes. For them it’s a little different though – what they’re really saying is “I didn’t create my own talent, I have it as a gift” – with a little nod to the role of dumb luck in their being up on the podium instead of one of the other nominees. What Ted Cruz did was different.
 
          As his remarks continued to reiterate during his carefully crafted speech, he repeatedly credited his candidacy, and the people who voted for him, with being on the side of (and getting  significant help from) the Lord God Almighty. Statements like “The promise of scripture” and “Our rights come from our creator” underscored this theme.
 
          While sparing his Republican opponents from any direct suggestion of their not being in Divine favor, he made no bones about labeling Barack Obama and both of the potential Democratic candidates for President with being on the side of the Antichrist. Linkage of the American way of life with the will of the Lord, and identifying Mr. Cruz’s potential opponents in November as a threat to both, was overt and consistent. What this kind of rhetoric does, and what it is meant to do, is to move the political battle into its most primitive form, bringing it back to the days when church and state were completely identified, and when an offense against the Gods by the king was likely to bring punishment down on the whole country. The remark about “our rights come from our creator” with its skewered invocation of the Declaration of Independence left little doubt about where Mr. Cruz was coming from.
 
          One of his last statements before the cameras deserted him to catch Hillary Clinton’s valiant attempt to reframe a tie as a marginal but comforting victory, was perhaps the most telling. His reference to “The Judeo-Christian values that built this great nation” laid out the battle lines clearly. While Jewish influence on the actions of America’s founding fathers was indirect (and has not been widely celebrated), and the empire America broke away from to create itself was a Christian one, the invocation of “Judeo-Christian” means just one thing in the context of this campaign. What it’s all about is this: it’s the real Americans against the Muslims. He never said it overtly, but Muslims are clearly neither Jewish nor Christian, hate both, and hate Americans most of all. The attempt to protect American “values” and “way of life” from the assaults of Muslims and Democrats alike (very much alike) has been a consistent theme on Mr. Cruz’ side of the debate. The Democrats' tolerance of Islam is portrayed as bordering on treason or, to put it in the underlying context, heresy.  Mr. Cruz's attempt to anoint himself as the designated angel of deliverance moves what was intended by our Founding fathers to be a civilized exercise in freedom of choice (in a country founded on the principles of religious tolerance) onto the primitive and dangerous ground of “my God is tougher than your God” that our Founding Fathers got out of Europe to escape. 
 
          Whether Mr. Cruz honestly believes what he’s saying, or is just pandering to the Evangelical vote, this kind of religious demagoguery has no place in an American election. Hopefully, the American people, believers and unbelievers alike, will see it for what it is and reject it.