A friend recently asked me to explain my own spiritual/religious beliefs. My response:
I suppose I'm pretty spiritual too. I certainly feel energy as trust, or fear or any number of underlying feelings that we have, which includes phenomena like remote viewing which the CIA experimented with, later the NSA, on subjects including survivors of intergenerational ritual abuse (I don't know whether you've heard about my years of bringing survivors and advocates to my classes, and close involvement with survivor activists, where early on I wandered into an active satanic site with a human grave marker, sacrificed animal, and all kinds of stuff two blocks from home). I often find myself having thoughts that others, particularly my wife, often express. So...for starters, esp is acceptable to me.
My father was a non-practicing Jew from Minnesota, my mother a WASP from Louisiana. I was sent to Protestant Sunday schools by my mom to "learn about the Bible," and I knew believed (as you can see below accepted for myself) that "God is love," until I reported to my mom that my Sunday school teacher, a Batelle scientist, had drawn a picture of the Nautilus nuclear sub and told us it was God's work (my mom was a pacifist; I think married my dad during WWII in part because he was 4-F for nearsightedness, my mom did all the driving, my dad rode a bike or took a cab to work). In college (U of Michigan) I joined a de facto Jewish fraternity, where it was made clear by brothers during initiation and from Jewish sorority girls who wouldn't date me that since my mom was Gentile, "my parents wouldn't approve of my dating you," while of course I didn't get a bid from my grandfather and uncle's Sigma Chi because my name is Jewish. So that kind of took care of my formal religiosity (and Jill fell out with the Catholic church in Poland after first communion).
The summer after my first year of college, I got a scholarship to get my start on becoming a Chinese language and literature major. (I knew I wanted to become a lawyer like Clarence Darrow, and law schools didn't care what I majored in. In fact, my major got me into Harvard Law School, where Jerome Cohen had moved from Berkeley after becoming the first US law prof to specialize in Chinese Communist law; and where my third year of law school was paid by an NDFL scholarship, which in turn got me my legal internship in the State Dept.'s legal advisor's office for East Asian Affairs. And I recall thinking at the time that Laodze's Daodejing was my first spiritual guide. I also embrace Buddhism, which as the Dalai Lama puts it compassion becomes the highest value across formal religions.
As I turned toward Asian Studies, I had the feeling that the spirit of love I embraced came from a Chinese general. Decades later, I discovered that Japanese WWII supreme commander Isoroku Yamamoto had been shot down, later found lying strapped to his aircraft seat holding his samurai sword, nine months to the day before I was born, April 18, 1944. I also accept that the spirits of people with whom I have lived, such as my parents, live on in me, as I expect to see my will to love informed and strengthened in those who live after me, and sometimes procreate too.
As to life after death for myself, who knows whether it will take any form in which "I" become aware of this life of mine, or disappear? As to earthly immortality, I concluded long ago as I sang in nursing homes that any of us is lucky to live latter years aware that we have made a significant difference for the better in at least one other person's life. I know I have that, and also that I have been blessed to live many interesting, in many ways rich and sometimes reckless lives in one lifetime, which I expect to be doing once more in a year when Jill and I move to Durango. I have experienced so much, I have enjoyed so much love and respect and appreciation: I am so lucky simply to have lived at all, and yes, I can even imagine enjoying another lifetime of consciousness even if that part of me turns out to be unaware of our history together. Call me an agnostic believer:-) l&p hal
Sunday, April 23, 2017
Monday, April 17, 2017
US Military Policy on Patriot's Day
US Military Policy on Patriot’s Day as Containment
April 17, 2017
We now have retired generals in
charge of the Defense Department and the National Security Agency, veterans of
combat and war games strategy, and a Secretary of State who apparently respects
military advice and to synchronize it with political foreign policy. I look on the recent series of military
events—dropping a Mother Of All Bombs on Afghan resistance underground central
command center, bombing a Syrian air base to uselessness, and I join others in
speculating, setting off self-destruct mechanisms in missiles North Koreans
have tried to launch. Each is a case,
two overt and one covert, of a measured signal that—as Vice President Pence put
it yesterday in South Korea—we will take measured means to teach you, or in
Afghanistan’s case force you, to desist.
I can imagine that the Secretary of State carried that message to
President Putin when they recently met, to pass the message that the US held
the Syrian government responsible for all nerve gas attacks, and would take “whatever
measures necessary” to respond to any further gas attacks. And I can’t help thinking that someone,
perhaps even Trump during his recent visit with the Chinese president, has let
North Koreans know that the US with not allow North Koreans to succeed in
launching any missile that could even reach Japan. And voila, the US vice president happens to
visit South Korea just as the North Koreans are celebrating the birthday of Kim
Il-Sung, and the missile no doubt to cap the North Korean’s celebration of
defensive strength went poof. Whatever
covert messages the North Koreans may have received, I imagine they’re aware
that the US government—including a president who by now openly accepts and
respects his newly minted senior military and foreign policy advisers—will officially
stay silent or deny any claims to have destroyed the missiles North Korea goes
to such lengths to launch, and dare the North Koreans to admit they are
militarily so weak.
Whatever gets worked out
diplomatically will be led by Secretary Tillerson, who appears in these early
moments in office to be working in close partnership with his military
counterparts. I’m not a fan of
punishment and violence, but practically speaking, I find myself respecting the
discipline by which today’s US government sets limits on its tolerance, its
containment of violence. Love and peace,
hal
Thursday, April 13, 2017
Corporate Restorative Justice
United Airlines CEO Oscar Muñoz Follows Restorative Justice
Script
April 13, 2017
Just as I’ve been writing and
reflecting on the process of victim-offender reconciliation as described and
experienced in mediation, I heard a major corporate CEO follow the script
mediators aspire to have offenders follow.
It is the incident of a paid and booked Vietnamese-American being
wrestled out of his seat and off the plane to make way for an airline crew.
What crucial stages does the offender
go through? First, s/he apologizes
directly to the victims and their families.
Then, having heard and acknowledged the harm done, s/he makes
amends. Yesterday in media interviews, in
an NPR interview, I heard United Airlines Oscar Muñoz literally do that, first saying,
“I’m ashamed,” then apologizing to the victim and his family in particular and
customers generally, and offered cash “amends” to those affected, promising
that no such incident would ever happen again (http://www.wbur.org/npr/523668043/united-scrambles-to-recover-from-ousted-passenger-fiasco). Somewhere, somehow, Mr. Muñoz
has learned the textbook elements of mediation.
It’s worth noting that a private-sector for-profit corporate chief
executive believes that accepting responsibility and making amends for harms
one does, pays. Love and peace, hal
Monday, April 10, 2017
Interaction of Political and Cultural Change
Interaction of Political and Cultural Change
April 10, 2017
I have just returned from a
conference on “Critical Intersectionalities of Crime and Social Justice” at Old
Dominion University in Norfolk, VA.
Profound thanks to the graduate student association of the Department of
Sociology and Criminal Justice managed to bring in keynote speakers from as far
away as Italy, and provide all the meals I as a participant needed to feed
myself from beginning to end, with free registration. What a remarkable feat, and how much I got to
share and learn with old friends and new ones, including making music
together. Thanks again.
I have a habit of asking myself
what substantive conversation most profoundly disconfirmed stereotypes on one
hand and helped me affirm further define for myself and those I’m having
conversations with the roles I choose to play as an economically privileged
white man privileged to have managed to avoid even traffic tickets, let alone
legal felonies I have committed. At this
conference, that moment came during discussion at a session on police violence
against people of color, notably murder of African-Americans, going
unprosecuted and unpunished.
When a white friend and
experienced mediator and I proposed transcending getting legal justice, black
people in the session responded that if we had grown up being black, we would
be angry and want convictions and punishment to show us white folks that black
lives matter. Then as now, I agree. My principal responsibility is to change my
own kind, whose racist political domination has driven mass incarceration
represents the US Constitution’s exception to the 13th Amendment’s
prohibition on slavery…for penal servitude.
In his essay “On the Jewish
Question,” Karl Marx argued that, as attempted by the Chinese Communist Party,
first the underclasses had to gain political power over their oppressors, then
in self-interest come to a cultural transformation, a state of “human
emancipation”—the revolution to end all revolutions. I propose that the two social movements can be
built simultaneously, symbiotically.
When I first got to know
survivors of inter-generational ritual murder and cannibalism historically
coinciding in the US with the rise of the Ku Klux Klan who in rare cases sought
legal retribution against those who had raped and tortured them from infancy, I
learned that it is not my place to judge victims’ choices for legal justice,
for punishment of their torturers. It is
instead my duty as one privileged to have grown up safely to respect their
decisions, recognize rather than try to change the pains they have suffered
which I have been privileged to avoid, and respect their primary authority to
decide to pursue prosecution as fully as their anger demands and the justice
system allows. Opening ways to transcend
the anger, pain, loss and injustice suffered by people of color depends white
people’s political recognition, in practice, that arresting, detaining,
convicting and punishing, let alone shooting and killing is as wrong and
unacceptable when white people do it, especially those given legal authority to
use force and confinement, to use violence, in the white supremacist system of
enforcing law-n-order. You can’t move
people to change the system until there’s enough recognition by the dominant
political class that the system is inherently unfair and provocative of the
violence it seeks to oppose, and instead joins and leads. Of equal importance, you can’t persuade
people to give up on systematic punishment, from children by adult “caregivers”
to law enforcement, or for that matter in war, until the oppressors acknowledge
that “the system” is inherently unjust.
Speaking from my own position of privilege, it is my responsibility not
to speak for black people, but to spread and amplify their voices, their feelings,
their demands for justice on their own terms.
That’s one of the responsibilities I accept. It’s real, and it’s not my place to change
“those people,” but to try to change my own kind first and foremost, to get us
to give up on the punishment we do and support, as the prevailing, self-serving
punishers…my other responsibility. Members
of oppressed classes are capable of commitment to non-violent change rather
than punishment, among my leading role models in cultural transformation of
violence, as in my own country, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Harriet
Tubman…just for starters. I also have
come to respect and support the primary right of victims to obtain justice on
legal principle, on their own terms. The
primary responsibility to persuade my own kind, let alone people of color, that
mediating resolution of conflicts and violence in all our relations, rather
than punishing those we hold power over, is in my own economically, white,
male, adult practical self-interest, whether I’m a perpetrator or a victim. I also have admiration for black sisters and
brothers who somehow respond to the injustice of their individual and
collective pain, oppression, anger, loss and fear, to transform violence itself
in their own communities and in mine.
May political and cultural transformation proceed hand-in-hand, victims
and offenders playing their own roles in getting harm and injustice recognized,
let alone transformed. I come to the
project of social change as a member of the offender class, primarily responsible
for transcending the impulse to establish order by punishment itself…driven by
awareness of the damage that systematic domination does itself. Once more, many thanks to the student
organizers of the conference, and to learning from and being moved by those
over whom I have been born to hold privilege and pass judgment, to
oppress. Love and peace, hal
Sunday, April 9, 2017
"If You Can't Afford a Lawyer"
“If You Can’t Afford a Lawyer”
April 9, 2017
I have long known there are
differences between public defenders’ offices which represent clients more
thoroughly than many private attorneys at lower-end prices (e.g. Colorado
public defenders trained hired and managed at the state level, as I have observed
from the time my son-in-law became one, through his present position as a
district who has worked to reduce jail populations and levels of sentencing to
prison), and those who focus on plea-bargaining (as I observed to be common
practice every morning I appeared in and around courts in Boston as a student
public defender).
Just now on NPR I listened to
this week’s hour-long radio episode on Reveal Radio, at
https://www.revealnews.org/episodes/if-you-cant-afford-a-lawyer/
. It features the public defender of
New Orleans,
Lousiana, Parish, who with his staff has decided to decline all serious
felonies so that within their increasingly limited budget (funded by Louisiana
by declining traffic fines during flood disasters), they can provide effective
counsel to as many lower-level clients as the US Constitution demands…which
means that those face more time with higher bail are left in jail without
counsel, period. He welcomes the federal
suit by the American Civil Liberties Union challenging the constitutionality of
holding federal detainees who have no counsel in federal court. Meanwhile, the parish jail, under court order
to limit the local jail population, have sent detainees to other parishes,
including one at a northern corner of the state, whom a public defender cannot
manage to visit personally and so does so via the prison phone, whose security
is questionable.
To make things worse, the state
requires that those who accept public defenders have to pay $40 up front both
to have the public defender appear in court, and another $45 up front that is
forfeited if the defendant is found guilty of anything.
The program moves to follow a
public defender and a defendant in a parish where all cases are plea-bargained,
the price the defenders pay for giving detainees a speedy trial, followed up
with confirmation that this continues to be common practice as I found it to be
in 1963-65.
It is nice to find a public
defender who refuses to fail to fully defend his clients. It is a tribute that he acknowledges the
suffering he has caused those he refuses to represent, where the work involved
in preparing an adequate defense expands considerably. The program traces the efforts of one private
attorney who accepts a one-dollar fee to obtain the defendant’s alibi for
multiple attempted murder charges (photos of him out of town).
When you consider what it costs
taxpayers to detain needlessly and force innocent detainees to bargain for “lower”
but still serious prison time, the program and those it gives voice to make a
pretty good case that providing adequate assistance of counsel saves taxpayer
dollars.
I seriously recommend the
podcast of this program to anyone who wants to understand how seriously those
who cannot afford bail are often innocent, probably far, far more so than those
on death row who have been exonerated by concerted legal effort. It makes a stronger case than I’ve
encountered in any textbook for the realities of criminal defense for the
indigent, and the hope it inspires (in me at least) that even underpaid, seldom
noticed public defenders and their constitutional rights allies may have the
potential to make a huge part of incarceration in the US go away, including the
innocent in far outnumber the murder exonerations which gain so much public
attention. Love and peace, Hal
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