Monday, July 29, 2024
In bed at 9 p.m., awake around 4 a.m., and up at 4:30. I let Lilly out at 6.
Prednisone, day 78, 15+5, day 14 (and last). While lying in bed, I noticed that the pain in my hip was considerably worse when I lay on my left side than it was lying directly on my hip on my right side. I don't know whether this might have been a one-time occurrence or is typical. . . I took my 15 mg. at 5 a.m. and a 650 mg. Tylenol at 5:30 and another at 12:30.. Breakfast was a bowl of cherries around 6 a.m. (The cherries have caused a terrific spike in my blood glucose; lesson learned.)
Feeding the hungry. "There are so many people in the world so hungry that God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread." — Mahatma Gandhi. Yesterday was the tenth Sunday after Pentecost and the gospel reading was the tale of the feeding of the five thousand. Jesus was said to have fed 5,000 of his followers with 5 loaves of barley bread and two fishes. Indeed, the few loaves and fishes he distributed produced 12 baskets of leftovers! Brother Booker Ashe, the founder of and my predecessor managing the House of Peace had a theory about this gospel story. He said that what really happened was that the people in Jesus' audience saw him giving away the little available food, they took out and shared the food they had squirreled away in their clothing and bags so that everybody got something to eat with much left over. His theory was that seeing Jesus' generosity led the followers to stop being selfish and to become sharers. I am thinking of this gospel story and of Booker's reading of it as I think of what has been happening in Gaza for the last 9 months, i.e., Israel using starvation of Palestinian civilians as an instrument of war. Of all the genocide and war crime charges against the State of Israel, the one that is most damning is that of depriving the civilian population of food and clean water, producing famine or near-famine conditions. Yoav Gallant, the Defense Minister, announced shortly after October 7th, "I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly" and so it has been. In his recent speech to Congress, Benjamin Netanyahu lied in saying
The prosecutor of the International Criminal Court has shamefully accused Israel of deliberately starving the people of Gaza. This is utter complete nonsense. It’s a complete fabrication. Israel has enabled more than 40,000 aid trucks to enter Gaza. That’s half a million tons of food, and that’s more than 3,000 calories for every man, woman and child in Gaza. If there are Palestinians in Gaza who aren’t getting enough food, it’s not because Israel is blocking it, it’s because Hamas steals it.
It's the old story: Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes? Dp we believe the countless news photos and videos showing desperately hungry Palestinians chasing food trucks or holding plates of some sort toward servers at food distribution sites, the World Health Organization, Doctors Without Borders in Gaza, and all the humanitarian organizations striving to provide some relief to the civilian population in Gaza, and countless reporters or do we believe Benjamin Netanyahu who also said
The ICC prosecutor accuses Israel of deliberately targeting civilians. What in God’s green earth is he talking about? The IDF has dropped millions of flyers, sent millions of text messages, made hundreds of thousands of phone calls to get Palestinian civilians out of harm’s way.
Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes? Yet so many American legislators in the room stood and applauded his lies. What does this say about "who we are"?
Perhaps the lie that most offended me was Netanyahu's attempt to identify the State of Israel and its fascist current government with the Jewish people, to equate opposition to Israeli political and military policies and practices with antisemitism.
Antisemitism is the world’s oldest hatred. For centuries, the massacre of Jews was always preceded by wild accusations. We were accused of everything from poisoning wells to spreading plagues to using the blood of slaughtered children to bake Passover matzos. These preposterous antisemitic lies led to persecution, mass murder and ultimately to history’s worst genocide, the Holocaust.
Now, just as malicious lies were levelled for centuries at the Jewish people, malicious lies are now being levelled at the Jewish state. No, no. Don’t applaud. Listen. The outrageous slanders that paint Israel as racist and genocidal are meant to delegitimize Israel, to demonize the Jewish State and to demonize Jews everywhere. And no wonder, no wonder we’ve witnessed an appalling rise of antisemitism in America and around the world. My friends,
Whenever and wherever we see the scourge of antisemitism, we must unequivocally condemn it and resolutely fight it, without exception.
The greatest cause of antisemitism in the world, especially for diaspora Jews, has become the State of Israel and its fascist, criminal government led by Benjamin Netanyahu.
I started out with Gandhi and Jesus and ended up with Netanyahu. Not a good sign.
Transience. I watched a video of Joni Mitchell singing Both Sides Now when she was young and in her prime and thought we are all fireflies, daylilies.
World's second-largest religion? Christians remain the world's largest religion at 31% of the world's population, with Muslims coming in second at 24% and Hindus at 15%. Within Christianity, Catholics claim pride of place with about 1.28 million followers, followed by Protestantism with 920,000 unless you count the Anglicans/Episcopalians, in which case they are the largest with about 1.5 million believers. In any case, I used to hear it said that the Catholics were the largest and that the second largest were the ex-Catholics, or 'fallen away Catholics, i.e., people like me. Why are there so many ex-Catholics? Why are there so many ex-Catholics with hostile feelings about their former religion? Some thoughts:
1. I think of Sinead O'Connor and her experiences, indeed all of Ireland's experience, with the Irish Catholic Church.
2. I think of the popes and cardinals and bishops and their sorry history.
3. I think of Humanae vitae and A Syllabus of Errors and Vehementer Nos:
4. I think of thousands of pedophiliac priests all over the world harming mostly boys but also girls, many for life. How long has this been going on? How long has it been tolerated and hidden by the Church? How many victims have there been? We will never know.It follows that the church is by essence an unequal society, that is, a society comprising two categories of persons, the pastors and the flock, those who occupy a rank in the different degrees of the hierarchy and the multitude of the faithful. So distinct are these categories that with the pastoral body only rests the necessary right and authority for promoting the end of the society and directing all its members toward that end; the one duty of the multitude is to allow themselves to be led, and, like a docile flock, to follow the pastors.
Joe Biden, a day late and a dollar short, again. He is calling for an 18-year term limit and an enforceable code of ethics for the justices as well as a constitutional amendment banning a general criminal immunity for presidential crimes. Biden has long resisted efforts to impose reforms on the Supreme Court. Now that he is a lame duck and now that it makes no difference what he proposes and now that reform of the radical right Republican Court is politically impossible, Joe gets on board the reform movement. Thanks, Joe. You promote court reform like you arm the Ukrainians, not like you arm the Israelis.
Blogging/journalling. It was two years ago tomorrow that I opened my Blogger app and typed in "Am I here?", wondering whether the site was still active and useable to record a journal. It was and as of today I haved posted 728 entries. Almost all are daily journal postings but a few are ad hoc others, like the suffered-over eulogy for Tom St. John. I started posting on blogger back in December of 2007, when "W" was still president, after his catastrophic 'shock and awe' invasion of Iraq and before the catastrophic collapse of the financial and housing markets in 2008. Mostly I posted comments I had written to articles in the Washington Posst and wanted to save for one reason or another. It's depressing to look back at most of them.
For example, just last April 26th, David Ignatius published a column titled "Is the sun slowly setting on U.S. power? That depends on us." He wrote:
The United States might be stumbling toward a decline from which few great powers have ever recovered. It has many of the tools of national recovery but doesn’t yet have a shared recognition of the problem and how to fix it. That’s not a quote from a MAGA or progressive leaflet. It’s a summary of a startling new study by Rand that was commissioned by the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment. It should serve as a loud wake-up call for America in this crucial election year.
The Rand study, which has the anodyne title “The Sources of Renewed National Dynamism,” will be published Tuesday. . . Unless Americans can unite to identify and fix these problems, we risk falling into a downward spiral. “Recovery from significant long-term national decline is rare and difficult to detect in the historical record,” the authors note. Think of Rome, or Habsburg Spain, or the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires, or the Soviet Union. “When great powers have slid from a position of preeminence or leadership because of domestic factors, they seldom reversed this trend.”
He wrote that column this year, onlly 3 months ago. On June 7, 2007, more than 17 years ago, he published a column titled "Stovepipe America" in which he wrote:
America's politicians behave like a college faculty, constantly warring over petty differences and relentlessly putting self-interest ahead of that of the community as a whole. Our great federal agencies are risk-averse and slow-moving behemoths -- better at following rules than at innovating and solving problems. We are "stovepipe America" -- with each segment of society caught in its own narrow channel while the country's big problems go unsolved. , , , We are a country that is not solving its problems -- that cannot summon the will to break down the obstacles to fixing what is wrong. This has to change, or America will enter a period of cyclical decline.
I wrote a comment then, as follows:
Was I wrong?". . . or America will enter a period of cyclical decline"? Or? As an American who was born on the eve of the country's entry into the Second World War, it's pretty hard not to accept the fact that we are in the cyclical decline right now and still on the downslope. For the last half of the last century, this country was universally considered "the leader of the free world." To the extent that that is still true, it is only by dint of the overwhelming destructive power of our military establishment. Whatever moral leadership we retained at the end of the century, Messrs. Bush and Cheney squandered in Iraq. Maybe the next president will regain some of that moral leadership, but one would have to be quite an optimist to believe that the damage done by the current regime will be undone by the next regime. As Mark Anthony said of Caesar, "The evil men do lives after them." We'll be paying for our recklessness in Iraq, in more ways than one, long after I've departed this life. Domestically, our manufacturing strength has been decimated by globalization. In my city, the loss of manufacturing jobs to Mexico, China and elsewhere has had a devastating effect, especially in minority communities. The crime rates in certain neighborhoods reminds one of Baghdad or Beirut during the civil war. The loss of well-paying factory work has led to a sense of hopelessness that is manifested in all kinds of ways, all bad. We have moved from being the world's No. 1 creditor nation to being the world's No. 1 debtor nation. Our dependency on other nations for everything from manufactured goods to debt financing has put us in such a vulnerable position that we must maintain a military budget as large as the rest of the world's military budgets combined, or very nearly as large. Is it any wonder that so much of the world considers America the greatest threat to world peace? No, the news isn't all bad; there is still much to be grateful for about living in America but one would have to be wilfully blind not to recognize that the country is in a period of decline and vulnerability. Turning that situation around will require great leadership and willing followership. ASU President Crow is clearly correct about the seriousness of the problem of "stovepipe" thinking and institutional organization, but how likely is it that real change will occur in large private institutions. Look at General Motors, Ford and Chrysler and the health care sector of the economy. As for the federal government, don't Katrina and Iraq say it all?
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