Be Strong, Mr. President

The Tea Party crazies in the House and their lead-from-behind “leader” Speaker John Boehner have a simple choice to make: do they want to raise the debt ceiling or do they want to force the United States Government into default on its previously incurred debts?  If by their childish intransigence they force a default, the economy will be dealt another severe blow, postponing a return to 6% unemployment for a few more years.

If Speaker Boehner backs away from this fight, he will have lost the little remaining faith his Tea Party caucus has in him.  They might even vote him out of the Speakership if they retain the majority after the 2014 elections. If he sticks to their guns and forces a default, he and the Crazies will have cost the Republican Party any chance it may have had of winning the Presidency in the next two or three elections.  He will have made it clear that Party is more important than Country to these bomb-throwers.

Meanwhile, the Republicans in the Senate are having to deal with their own Tea Party-inspired madness.  Ted Cruz wants to shut down the government rather than implement the Affordable Care Act. His fellow Republicans have told him what a dumb idea that is, but he is clearly more concerned with playing to his fanbase than actually governing.

In the end, all rational Republicans have one hope of coming out even slightly okay in this whole mess.  That hope is Barack Obama.  They need him to stand his ground against the hostage-taking Tea Partiers.  In this way, the voting public will see how utterly Unpatriotic these Tea Party Patriots are.  They just want to burn the whole thing down if they can’t have it their way.

At the next mid-term, the Republicans will lose seats in the House and will continue as the minority party in the Senate.  And the fault will lie with the Tea Party Caucus.  Maybe the national leadership of the GOP will be able to start exercising a bit of control over the monster they unleashed.  But to do that, they would need to have a spine—something I have seen little evidence of thus far.

Speaking of spines, President Obama needs to do what he has said he will do.  He needs to stand firm and NOT negotiate over the debt ceiling.  This is the biggest fight of his Presidency and he needs to be strong.

A Question About Farm Subsidies

    This week the House voted to cut food aid to needy Americans by $40 billion over the next ten years. Back in July, the House passed a farm bill that raised subsidies to farmers and agricultural corporations by billions of dollars.  If there is a clearer example of the hypocrisy of the Republican members of the US House of Representatives, I would be shocked.  These are the so called “deficit hawks” who believe the government that spends least, governs best.  Yet they voted to give more money to rich people, and in the process drive food prices higher?

    Someone please explain. (And by “someone,” I mean Mike Dawson, Richard Dawson, or anyone else I know who tends to vote Republican.)

Lean on Me (RTB 2013)

Once again, Reach the Beach kicked ass.  The Rosie Ruiz Fan Club came thiiiiiiiis close to not running the race this year, but at the last minute several adventurous runners stepped up and filled slots on our team in the place of teammates who had to drop out.  It really was touch-and-go up until a week before the race.  I had started to make peace with the idea that we would not run this year, but I was not very happy about it.

We tried something new this year and it really worked out well for us.  We joined a newly-created category of team called Freestyle.  The 12 members of a freestyle team are able to choose which of the 36 legs they run without having to stick to a predetermined order.  We get to choose how we cover the 205 miles from Cannon Mountain to Hampton Beach.  We came to this category out of necessity this year.  Several of our runners were recovering from injuries and were not sure of how many legs they could run.  Being a freestyle team allowed us to fill in for those runners if it turned out we needed to.

Happily, both of the recovering runners were able to handle all of their legs.  Nobody got stuck taking more than three turns on the course.  As a team, we were all over the place in terms of pace.  Some legs were long and hard and run through a pounding rain.  Others happened in the middle of the night on no sleep.  Some were short and flat and fast.  Our pace ranged from 10:00 per mile to 5:50 per mile.  Altogether, we ran the race in 26 hours and 47 minutes, for a pace of 7:49 per mile.  We had no idea about how many other teams were in the Freestyle category until we got home and looked at the results on the Reach the Beach website.  Turned out we came in third out of 156 teams.  Holy Shit.

Personally, this year’s RTB was great.  I met some new friends, got to reconnect and spend an intense amount of time with some old friends, and I got to make friends with some trees.

If you are a runner you know that most of the endeavor is mental.  If you have trained, then getting through the tough stretches is all about playing mental games and tricks on yourself.  My legs this year included two long and hilly stretches in the dark.  I knew going in that I was not going to be fast, but I also knew I could get through the hills without dying.  Nobody likes running on hills, but I have recently moved to Ithaca, New York and I have to run on hills no matter which direction I go from my front door.  So I figured I might as well do some of the hilly RTB legs.

My first foray out of the van around 10:00 pm had me going up three big hills in a span of 5.11 miles.  Two of the three hills were well over 200 feet high.  It was dark and it was difficult, but I did it.  My next leg, (Leg 19), at around 3:30 am, had me again going up three big hills, this time over a span of 8.3 miles.  There was a 350-footer, a 150-footer, and a 400-footer to close it all out.  The first two hills were hard.  The last was near-impossible.  It was still dark and it was still difficult and my mind was having a hard time getting my body to the end.

The final mile-and-a-half was straight uphill and I didn’t have much left in the tank.  I tried my usual trick of giving myself a goal that was visible and then making that the focus of my run.  I told myself, “Just get to that telephone pole on the right—that is your goal.  You can surely make it that far.”  And then once I reached that telephone pole I would choose the next goal and go from there.  Normally, this trick gets me through to the finish of any hard run.  Not on that second leg of Reach the Beach.

I found myself picking closer and closer goals, and yet I was still tempted to shut down and just walk the last half mile.  I had to come up with a new trick quick or my body was going to take control and start walking.  At this point in the course, I was on a road in the woods.  There were no houses, just trees as far as I could see—which was not very far given the low-powered head lamp I was wearing.  I am not sure where it came from, but inspiration hit just before I shifted from run down to walk.  I looked ahead, identified a particular tree on the roadside, and mentally reached out to it.  I introduced myself and asked for its help.  I asked it to loan me some of its energy and help pull me up the hill.

Generally, I am not a spiritual person.  I don’t believe in God or a soul.  I don’t credit stories of spirits and life energies.  I am a firm believer in science.  And yet, I found myself asking the trees for help.  Crazy, I know.  Yet there it is.

I chose wide, tall trees, figuring they were strongest and most likely to be able to help me fight gravity and despair.  And they did not let me down.  I could feel the boost they gave me.  I started to feel stronger and picked up the pace just a bit.  I started to feel a bit selfish—making it all about me me me.  So as I neared the top and the end of my leg, I told the trees I would repay them by doing what I could to help them whenever I could. I told them I would print two-sided.  I would recycle everything I could.  I would become a better steward of the land.

I made it to the top of the hill and collapsed into the van.  I did not tell anyone about talking with the trees.

In the cold light of day the next morning I knew that my mind made it all up.  It was effective and it got me through my second leg without walking, but I know I was not really communicating with the trees and they were not really lending me a hand.  Right?  In any case, do me a favor.  If you are tempted to share this post with anyone, do so digitally.  DON”T print it out on paper.

How is a bullet better than poison gas?

Imagine how you would react if China launched their version of cruise missiles at Israeli military targets because the Chinese Government did not approve of the way the Israelis had conducted a military operation in the West Bank.  You would probably be outraged, right?

Now tell me why the United States has any standing to launch a punitive attack against Syrian forces in the wake of their likely use of chemical weapons on Syrian rebel-held territory.  How has it come about that we have appointed ourselves in charge of punishing nations who do things the global community of nations disapproves of?

If the world is outraged by the use of chemical weapons in Syria, the world should do something about it—not just the United States.

And while I am ranting, how are chemical weapons different from more traditional ways of brutally killing your own citizens?  The Syrian regime of Bashar al Assad has killed between 20,000 and 40,000 rebel fighters.  The rebels have killed near 30,000 Syrian soldiers and police.  By all accounts, more than 100,000 civilians have been killed in the fighting. 

How are the deaths of those 100,000 children, men, and women any more acceptable than the deaths of the 1000 killed by a chemical agent last week?  This distinction between conventional weapons and chemical weapons is stupid.  Weapons are weapons and dying is dying. 

President Obama and those who support a limited strike on Syrian military capacity say they are sending a message that the use of chemical weapons crosses the line.  I would agree that a limited strike does send a message.  But I would also argue that supporters leave the second half of the message it sends unstated.

“The use of chemical weapons crosses a line—that the use of old-fashioned bullets, landmines, mortars, and shells does not cross, so you should feel free to rain those more traditional weapons down on civilians all you want.”  Is this really the message President Obama—and the rest of the world—wants to send?

I have no solution here.  In an ideal world, the UN would be unanimous in its condemnation of the Syrian regime and all of their actions against civilians.  It would also deplore any rebel actions aimed at civilians.  The UN has proven time and again to be a terribly flawed and mostly powerless institution when it comes to preventing violence.  

But this is far from an ideal world and bad actors have forever, (and probably will always), use whatever means at their disposal when they are feeling like they are out of options.  For the United States to have any credibility, we need to either stand up for innocents EVERY time governments use any weapons against them or we need to be much more cold-hearted and practical and respond only when our self-interest as a nation is at stake in a real and strategic way.  Our selective moral outrage drives me crazy and only serves to lessen our credibility around the world.

A weapon is a weapon, whether it be a suicide bomb strapped to the belly of a 12-year old girl, a drone-launched missile fired at a Land Rover in the desert around Marib in Yemen, a smallpox-infected blanket left as a gift for relocated Native Americans, or Sarin gas deployed against a town in Syria.  The people who die, die.  One way is not any more morally reprehensible than another to me.

I hope in the coming days President Obama will see the futility of any sort of military strike against the Syrian regime.  But I doubt it.

Pick-Me-Up

            There are two villages called “Birney” in Southeastern Montana.  One is on the Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservation and it is called “Indian Birney” by everyone.  The other is ten miles south of Indian Birney and it is off the reservation.  It is known by all as “White Birney.”

            I spent several summers in Indian Birney, sleeping either on the floor of an old doublewide trailer or in the desanctified nave of an old Catholic Church.  During my second summer in Birney, the group of teens I was with helped build a traditional powwow arbor on an unused patch of land just off the main drag.  As we built it, I knew that my kids were getting an experience few of their peers back East would be able to understand.

            They got to go up into the pine forests on the rocky hillsides of the reservation and help choose which trees to fell for use as support posts for the double ring of the arbor.  Then they helped strip the branches, dig the post holes, plant the posts, tamp the dirt, tack chicken wire overhead, and lay the pine boughs across the top for shade.  It was backbreaking labor and my sixteen wealthy teenagers from the East Coast could not get enough of it. One of my favorite pictures from that summer is of a sixteen year-old girl from the Upper West Side of Manhattan.  She is holding a worn and dirty work glove in her teeth, examining the bloody blisters on her hand, and smiling from ear to ear.

            It rained a lot that summer, forcing us to delay and cancel many workdays.  As the final day of our program approached, we began to seriously think the arbor would not be finished in time for us to participate in the first powwow held in Birney in many years.  Our penultimate day on the reservation was a fifteen-hour work marathon that left us all simultaneously exhausted and exhilarated.  As the last of the long lingering twilight drained from the sky to the west, we got it done.  The arbor was complete.

            Some of the tribal members who were working with us had spread the word that there would be a powwow in Indian Birney the next day.

            Saturday morning dawned grey, cold, and wet and a feeling of depressed anti-climax settled over us all as we began to pack and get ready for the following day’s drive to the airport in Sheridan, Wyoming and the ensuing flights to points East.  We all kept one eye to the sky, but the sky just kept raining on our arbor.

            My friend Mike, who lived in Birney, just kept telling me and the kids not to worry.  He said the sky would clear, the sun would shine, and the powwow would happen.  As morning turned past twelve and into afternoon, the rain kept falling steady as a drum on the church roof.  The atmosphere grew more and more disappointed inside as kids played Hearts, took pictures, and copied down each other’s phone numbers for when they got home.

           

            At three o’clock the rain stopped falling.  By three-fifteen the clouds were breaking up.  And by four we were practically dancing as we set up tables, brewed coffee, and changed into our fancy clothes for the powwow.  By five o’clock more than one hundred cars had arrived and there were hundreds of Cheyenne tribal members there to christen the new Birney Powwow Arbor.  Elders showed up and thanked my kids in the Cheyenne language, people brought out tons of food from their trunks likes clowns from a circus car.  When the buffet tables were all set, we had enough food to feed everyone twice.

            My kids participated in giveaways, grass dances, and circle dances set to traditional drumming circles pounding out the heartbeat of a culture determined to survive.  Everything stopped at one point and my kids were asked to line up in the center of the arbor.  Each of them was then presented with a beautiful hand-beaded gift from the tribe as a way to say “thank you” for all their hard work.

           

            Here it is fifteen years later and whenever I allow myself to really remember the details of that afternoon and evening and late into the night, I cry.  It was one of the most authentically touching moments of my life and whenever I need to feel good about the future and about humans’ ability to bridge cultural divides, I dive into my memories of that summer and that particularly magical night.