This morning I was reading Sojourners’ February issue… Inside is an excerpt from Jim Wallis’ new book entitled, “God’s Politics: Why the Right has it Wrong and the Left Doesn’t Get it.”

He synthesizes the divisions in this country as not simply blue and red, but more across the spectrum. There are those who are truly red, and those who are truly blue, the leftists and the rightists. And there are the people in the middle, so talked about in the recent election — who didn’t know what to do, how to vote — and theoretically, according to much of the media, decided to vote based on ‘moral values.’ Wallis gives props to a fourth group, which is the group I find myself in.

I am of very liberal politics when it comes to poverty, social justice, pacifism and war, oppression, the environment. And I am of very conservative values: I value life above all else, I value love over trysts, I rarely take foreign substances into my body… The people on the left don’t understand me — including my colleagues, friends, my family — because of my Christian ‘moral values’, and the people on the right don’t understand the bumper stickers on the back of my car that prominently say, “Bush ‘04 Eat the Poor,” and “God is not a Republican or a Democrat.” (They often yell out the window, or flash me the finger, or pass me across the double yellow line, albeit my old van can’t get up to speed too efficiently any more either)

In the 2005 index of environmental sustainability, the United States was 45th of 146 nations.

We treat ourselves as the sovereign folk of the world — but obviously, we’re just gluttons throwing our trash into the ditch, and mucking up the air.

Not like this is a surprise. It is disgusting how all environmental legislation can retreat down the tubes after such a good siphon had developed.

According to an article in the NY Times of Jan. 24 by Felicity Barringer, the report is based on 75 measures, including death rate in children from ‘respiratory diseases, fertility rates, water quality, over-fishing, emission of heat-trapping gases and the export of sodium dioxide, a crucial component of acid rain.’

Russia is ranked 33. Who would have thought, with the pictures that have been in the media of the pollution in the western part of Russia, that we would be so far behind them in all of these categories. Apalling, really.

Jeshua Erickson is a master and a hack, a songsmith and a dreamer. His songs make me shiver down to my little hairs and at the same time look into the mirror with disgust. He makes me question the role I play in the suffering of the world, and the role I play in the lives of others. All with a few words and a few chords.

Swords into Plowshares is Jeshua’s masterpiece until now, but, God willing, not his only. As a songwriter, Jeshua is an orchid in full bloom and a spring sparrow feeding us his words: He gets it, and he chews it up, and he opens our mouths and he opens our ears, and he pours in this mash of truth. His fingers find a way to pull out what they need to, and his voice strains against its strings. And his words hit the place deep below the gut where everything counts twice.

The day after Martin Luther King Day, Jan. 17, the NY Times ran an article by Elisabeth Bumiller titled, “Bush Cites Religion as a Pillar for Dr. King…”

Truly, after reading the article, if I had known nothing about George Bush, I would be proud to have him speak on my behalf. Because I know that he probably didn’t write the speech, I don’t give him entire credit, but I am impressed with the words that came out of his mouth, especially in this time that I am so upset by his diatribes about ‘freedom’ gleaned from the philosophies of Israeli nationalist Natan Sharansky.

Bush said of Dr. King at the JFK Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, “He believed and he knew that the image of God we share is a source of our dignity as human beings and the basis for our equality. He believed and he knew that the teachings of Jesus stand in eternal judgment of oppression. He believed and he knew that the God who made us for freedom will bring us to freedom.”

I am caught in the miry deep of much work this week and last — and so here I am, trying to escape, only to get blogged down.

(That is not entirely my clever pun… You’ll have to visit my mother’s blog at cynthiagustavson.modblog.com and read her first entry to understand that pun’s history!)

I am not disheartened this week. I really thought I would be — because I have often been the last several months.

I read the New York Times every day, and rather amusingly dissect it with my dullened scissors, searching for articles that I need to process… and my blog is the place that I process most of that, while (hopefully!) at the same time, somehow communicating with folks about my fears, angers, hopes and loves…

I wasn’t disheartened this week also because of a blog I read at my good friend Jeshua’s site — jeshuaerickson.com/blog — He talks about hope… And I feel like I have the right to be hopeful. And I am hopeful…

This was the week of the Bono-Bill Gates-Bill Clinton symposium on Africa’s poverty. This was the week of Iraq’s election. This was the week of true possibilities for reconciliation between Palestine and Israel.

Here’s to hope.
G’night.

I guess I don’t understand what happened in the Holocaust. I don’t understand how people could either survive the way so many did, through the hell of those times, or how folks on the other side could get on with their ‘everyday’ lives while knowing about the horrors, or even working in the camps. (Though I do understand how the Germans felt who didn’t necessarily know or realize the horrors or details of the concentration camps, because my government also keeps me in the dark about the atrocities for which we are responsible.)

I just heard on NPR the story of a woman who was in Auschwitz. She talked in a way that only survivors of the Holocaust can speak. I have only met three survivors personally, but they all shared a kindness that I can’t quite describe, but that you probably understand if you, too, have met a survivor.

I will tell the positive message she gave in her story to me, and the message I was given by another Holocaust survivor — a woman in Nahariya, Israel, about 6 years ago My telling these stories is meant to be a testament to the courage of the survivors and of those who died in the camps, so I hope you are able to read it as such: