April 25: Extermination Camp, Geneva Convention, Powerless

The train had arrived on a siding by a prison which was originally constructed as an extermination camp for Russian prisoners of war.

The guards peeked inside Billy's car owlishly, cooed calmingly.  They had never dealt with Americans before, but they surely understood this general sort of freight.  They knew that it was essentially a liquid which could be induced to flow slowly toward cooing and light.  It was nighttime.

Billy has been on the prisoner-of-war train for ten days, traveling across Germany to different internment camps.  He hasn't slept for a good portion of that journey, and the cuisine along the way has been sparse to nonexistent.  To put it simply, the Germans are not really following the rules of the Geneva Convention.

I appreciate organizations that fight to insure that people are treated fairly and humanely.  The United Nations.  ACLU.  Labor unions.  The rules of the Geneva Convention regarding prisoners of war have existed since 1929.  That doesn't mean that those rules have always been followed in times of war, but those standards of conduct exist to hold countries accountable.

I work for two large organizations--one a healthcare system, the other a university.  At the healthcare system, I am not a part of a labor union.  In fact, the healthcare system has done everything within its power to dissuade its employees from unionizing, and those tactics have worked, over and over and over.  At the university, I am a member of the faculty union.  I am accorded certain protections because of that union membership, including seniority and class assignments and promotion.

Really, the Geneva Convention and labor unions exist for the same reason--to help people who are not in a position to help themselves.  To protect the powerless from the powerful.  To make sure that everyone--rich, poor, white, African American, man, woman, gay, straight--is treated with respect and understanding.

Of course, the United States--and the world at large--has been swept up in a tidal wave of xenophobia recently.  Refugees from war-torn countries like Syria are not seen as human beings.  They're seen as would-be radicals and terrorists, ignoring the fact that the five million people who have fled Syria are victims of state terrorism. That is not an alternative fact.

I'm not saying these things because I'm Democrat or liberal or anti-Trump or pro-Bernie.  I'm saying these things because I'm part of the human race, and I think that every life is important.  Sure, there are radicals in the world.  Extremists.  Terrorists.  But, if I turn my back on a person in need because of fear, then the bad guys have won.  I refuse to let that happen.

Saint Marty is thankful tonight for love and compassion.

January 6: Better or Worse, Margaret Avison, "New Year's Poem"

On this sixth day of January in the year of our Lord 2017, the members of the Congress of the United States of America certified the results of last November's presidential election.  Donald John Trump will be the next President of the United States, for better or worse.  Not that there was any doubt.

Now, you are probably expecting me to go on some rant, being a dyed-in-the-wool liberal.  I am not going to do that.  That does not mean I am defeated or resigned.  That does not mean that I accept any of the tenets of a Donald Trump presidency.  I can't do that.  For the next four years, I will have to watch the lunacy unfold and hope against Armageddon.

I am an American.  I have a daughter who will face inequality in the work place.  I have a son who needs expensive ADHD medication from an unchecked pharmaceutical industry.  Ditto my wife with bipolar meds.  My sister has Down's syndrome and survives on Social Security disability.  I don't think that all Syrian refugees are Muslim terrorists, and I don't think that all illegal Mexican immigrants are rapists and murderers.  I believe Black lives matter, and I believe that law enforcement lives matter, too.

I believe that you don't have to agree with me, and I will still love and respect and accept you.  I hope you will do the same.

That is Saint Marty's New Year's hope for everyone.

New Year's Poem

by:  Margaret Avison

The Christmas twigs crispen and needles rattle

Along the window-ledge.

             A solitary pearl

Shed from the necklace spilled at last week’s party

Lies in the suety, snow-luminous plainness

Of morning, on the window-ledge beside them.   

And all the furniture that circled stately

And hospitable when these rooms were brimmed

With perfumes, furs, and black-and-silver

Crisscross of seasonal conversation, lapses

Into its previous largeness.

             I remember   

Anne’s rose-sweet gravity, and the stiff grave

Where cold so little can contain;

I mark the queer delightful skull and crossbones

Starlings and sparrows left, taking the crust,

And the long loop of winter wind

Smoothing its arc from dark Arcturus down

To the bricked corner of the drifted courtyard,

And the still window-ledge.

             Gentle and just pleasure

It is, being human, to have won from space

This unchill, habitable interior

Which mirrors quietly the light

Of the snow, and the new year.

November 3: No Puritan, Parasites, Syrian Refugees

The creator is no puritan.  A creature need not work for a living; creatures may simply steal and suck and be blessed for all that with a share--an enormous share--of the sunlight and air.  There is something that profoundly fails to be exuberant about these crawling, translucent lice and white, fat-bodied grubs, but there is an almost manic exuberance about a creator who turns them out, creature after creature after creature, and sets them buzzing and lurking and flying and swimming about.  These parasites are our companions at life, wending their dim, unfathomable ways into the tender tissues of their living hosts, searching as we are simply for food, for energy to grow and breed, to fly or creep on the planet, adding more shapes to the texture of intricacy and more life to the universal dance.

Most of the creatures on this planet do not worry about poverty or unemployment or the price of crude oil.  They don't care whether Donald Trump becomes President of the United States (God help us) or Hillary Clinton.  Universal health care.  Syrian refugees.  Terrorism.  The majority of the buzzing, flying, crawling residents of this little planet are oblivious to such things.  For them, it's simply about survival:  eating, resting, and breeding.

The word "parasite" has become a pejorative term.  If I call a person a parasite, it's not because I consider that person particularly resilient or resourceful.  I'm not marveling at his or her ability to survive in harsh conditions, making lemonade out of lemons, so to speak.  No.  In human terms, a parasite is somebody who profits from the misfortune of other human beings.  Slumlords.  Dictators.  Republican presidential candidates.

I am not climbing onto my soapbox this evening.  There are too many people on soapboxes right now in the United States.  If everybody in the world looked out for each other--fed the hungry, clothed the naked, friended the friendless, loved the unloved--things like terrorism and bigotry and homophobia would be figments, phantoms.  We wouldn't have to worry about refugees because there wouldn't be a need for refugees.  No homeless shelters.  No soup kitchens.  No Republicans.  No Democrats.  No parasites.

As Dillard points out, the Creator of the universe loves diversity, all of the creepers and dancers and slitherers and flyers and dancers.  Loves snakes and parasites, poets and politicians, Syrian refugees and illegal immigrants.  The Creator loves all creation.  Even Donald Trump.

Saint Marty needs to be reminded of that every once in a while.  God's love does not discriminate. 

God loves him.  God just wouldn't vote for him.