We need to start living and voting with the love and compassion of Jesus

"Breaking News" flashed across every news station a moment ago with the sub-title "Bush comparing Obama to Nazi appeasers" and "Bush suggests Obama wants appeasement for terrorist." Here are a few startling facts that are not well known and should be a concern... 

"The 2006 budget showed that US military expenditures were twenty-one times larger than diplomacy and foreign aid combined, and that the United States was dead last among the most developed nations in foreign aid as a percentage of gross domestic product. One wonders what would happen if good-hearted Americans realized that a mere 10 percent of the US military budget, if reinvested in foreign aid and development, could care for the basic needs of the entire worlds poor." 

"Even if you take all the rest of the world's weapons sales and put them together, they don't match US weapons exports. My country can boast that we produce 53.4 percent of the worlds weapons. Most Americans are either uninformed about these figures, apathetic, or perhaps they believe that McNamara was more rational than President Jimmy Carter, who in 1976 saud "We can not have it both ways. We can't be the world's leading champion of peace and the world's leading supplier of arms."

"It gets worse. In 2003, 80 percent if the top buyers of US Weapons (twenty of the twenty five top clients) were countries that our own State Department labeled undemocratic or countries known for their failure to uphold human rights, such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia. In 1999, the US weapons industry supplied arms to 92 percent of the conflicts in process anywhere on the planet, and in a stroke of elegant fairness, often supplied both sides in conflicts. Perhaps most shocking and awful of all:between 1998 and 2001, the United States, Great Britain, and France earned more income from selling weapons to developing countries than the gave those developing countries in aid"

(all of these passages in quotes are take from 'Everything Must Change' by Brian McCalren with annotated sources in the back of the book.)

What if we had a President who stood up against this and perhaps wanted to talk conflicts out, through diplomacy, rather than immediately going to war and perhaps saving us from the deaths of nearly 1,000,000 Iraqis and 4,000 Americans among the countless others who we have supplied arms to. If we as people have any compassion and love for the rest of the world we have to stop voting for policies that contradict the love, humility, meekness and forgiveness that we are taught through Jesus.

We would be in a far better place than we are right now not only in our country but also in our world. I read this passage in a book im reading right now and it fits perfectly in describing this moment  "The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him." -Tolstoy

Blowin' in the Wind

In my recent spike in political interest I started to focus on the wrong solution(but with good intentions of course). I started putting my faith into governing bodies in the form of an individual candidate that true authentic change for the better could happen. Not that one person can't bring change for the better, but that the means through which that change is brought by the individual is the key to what my focus should be on. What I mean be this is putting my faith and energies into a changing wind. Here is a powerful image by Jim Wallis to hep convey this idea: 

"If we look back, we realize that political systems(not to mention business, military, and even religious systems) have, in spite of their high ideals and noble ambitions, frequently been driven by the winds of expediency, self-interest, fear, greed, and pressure. So, looking around today, we see politicians wetting their fingers and raising them to see which way the political wind is blowing-to see what voters want so they can remain popular, raise donations, and secure reelection. Wisdom and honesty tell us that we aren't going to change politicians much in the future. They're always going to be wetting their fingers and testing the wind. So, Jims says, there's only one hope: we're going to have to change the wind.

 Changing the wind would mean changing public opinion, which requires changing the values that guide people individually and as groups, which in turn requires changing the vision of what is both possible and desirable, which ultimately means changing our framing story. In other words, changing the wind means doubting, rejecting, and defecting from our old framing stories, and instead, discovering and adopting-in a word, believing- a new framing story. That, once again, is exactly where I believe Jesus steps into human affairs, challenging us simply to believe his good news (Mark 1:15), and to believe him as the bearer of that good news (John 6:29, 35; 7:38; 10:37; 14:1)."

War

"All wars are civil wars, because all men are brothers. Each one owes infinitely more to the human race than to the particular country in which he was born"

-Francois Fenelon

A life of Activism

While sitting at Rachels restaurant today I had a very intriguing and encouraging conversation with a couple that actually live a few streets down from us in downtown Covington. It is a couple that both myself and Rachel have been particularly drawn to for a while because they both frequent our restaurants and downtown Covington quite a bit and have a unique freedom to their style, so one day we got to talking and realized that we lived by each other and have since taken part in small talk from time to time when we would run into one another. Today was a different day. I decided to bring my cup of coffee over to their table and sit down and get to know them on a deeper level. We ended up talking for a quit a while and it was one of the most challenging and real conversations I have ever had with, more or less, complete strangers. 

It turns out that they have been political activists for about five years now and so we talked about that and about different things all relating to humanity, war, love, peace, civil rights, human rights, the constitution, and etc. Then they asked me what I was passionate about, because they could obviously see I was somewhat like them. So I started telling them that over the past two years my eyes have been opened to a new world, the entire world and not just America, I have begun to realize that we are all people and all deserve love regardless if we are Christian, Muslim, Hindu, American, Iraqi, Chinese, etc. I then started telling them how I have started to become passionate about social justice and politics and that I am trying to figure out how to merge the two. I told them that I have been discovering an emerging view of Jesus that I had never been exposed to before and that this new view of how Jesus came to live a life to show us how to have peace and justice and equity is something that is driving this passion in me.  So we went on for a  while longer before wrapping it up and exchanging contact information and we went our separate ways. On my walk home my mind was racing with everything that we had been talking about. And the thought that a life of activism is something that we owe our friends and family and neighbors(both domestically and globally) was stuck in my mind. To wrap this up, the common denominator that both of us said lead to our desire for activism is EXPOSURE, we were all exposed to more truth that had not previously been shown to us in our little worlds that we came from. And so the main thing that we both said was essential for change is AWARENESS, and that awareness is the backbone of our activism. We as people and as citizens need to be aware and educated on and about the governing bodies that we put our faith in ( whether it be the U.S. Government or the Church). Once you have the information you can choose what to do with it, but I know  that I personally can't ignore it.

the power of words

Today I have been reflecting a lot about the power of words and opinions and the affect, whether good or bad, they can have on you and particularly the affect they can have on a relationship(of any level) when those words and opinions are disagreed upon. The reason why I've been thinking a lot about it is because over the past month or so I have started to voice my opinions and beliefs more, either through the internet like this or in person, and my opinions and beliefs have changed a lot over the past year and in the opposite direction than most. I almost started feeling apologetic about them today, but I thankfully stopped and realized that I couldn't afford to let my voice go unheard. Why, you might ask? Because my opinions and beliefs have changed due to the exposure to other viewpoints and information that I had never been exposed to before, or perhaps I was too scared to expose myself to them for the freedom that came in that also carried the potential for what I have been feeling today. But I feel as though I have had a blindfold removed from my eyes and I want to share this new view that I am experiencing. So I will end with an oft quoted poem from Robert Frost to sum this up.

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth.

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same.

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

The first general election campaign ads of '08

I just watched the first John McCain ads for the general election on youtube, the first one is titled "TV ad" and the second one is titled "Man in the Arena". If John McCain plans on playing up and running on his Vietnam War experience then I say he be asked about the Human Rights aspect of his "service to our country". Is he so extremely proud of fighting in a war that had no threat to us? To protect us from no enemy threat by killing innocent people? I am by no means attempting to belittle his POWMIA experience, that took tremendous courage and strength that I could only hope of having, but there should be a since of character about ones actions and a since of what to be proud of and what not to and a Vietnam War experience should not be an experience to be proud of.

Media slant

Mass media is an uncontrollable force that will no doubt change the landscape and direction of the presidential election at any given time. Fox News is by far the most slanted of the mainstream media outlets. Last week Barack Obama came on the big three major news networks to dismiss controversial comments about his former pastor Jeremiah Wright and I watched clips of all three of them and Fox News, by far, was the most divisive and had more framing and leading questions then the other two. The only thing we can do to combat this is to use mass media ourselves. Anyway possible to voice the truth, as we see truth, we must. All three media outlets failed to give McCain the gauntlet for his endorsements from and ties to equally as controversial pastors John Hagee and Rod Parsley, who have both made anti-catholic, anti-muslim, anti-gay sermons and a plethora of others in various forms and capacities. Let us not miss our opportunity for real authentic hope and change in the form of a person who genuinely loves people.