In light of my recent reading on the drug war, especially in West Baltimore, I really think that I need to read The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood by Ta-Nehisi Coates. This is a trailer for the book and is worth a viewing.

Coates acknowledges that his father was not a good man, but still, actually having a father (flawed as he was) made all the difference in his life.

I was talking with Bryan, and this walked out of my mouth. He really liked it and insisted that I should write it down. So, here goes.

When we talk about the Christian life, we usually think of a single path that we are all walking. As Christians, we share this path, and we help each other stay on the path, as we walk towards our destination. This is a true metaphor, but I think that there’s another way to look at this.

The Christian life is an explosion of light, starting at the center and radiating out in all directions. Each of us are called to follow a different ray of light outwards into the darkness. Now, we all participate in the source of the explosion, but we’re also traveling in very different directions.

This is okay.

In fact, this is good. And, it is vitally important to understand.

So much of our understanding of Christian unity is based on the idea that we will slowly change to become like each other. I think that, rather, our Christian unity is based on the idea that we will slowly embrace each other as we pursue the same God differently.

At one point, I would have fretted about all the denominations in the Church. “This is an attack on Christian unity!” I would have said. Now, I shrug without concern. Are these denominations learning to embrace each other as we pursue the same God differently? Then I’m cool with it. Indeed, let’s have more denominations that work this way! Let’s push out into all the different ways that we can be followers of Christ and put all of them on display before God and man!

This also affects what it means to be a leader in the Church. The job of the elder is to equip Christians for the work of ministry. But what is that work? What ray of light is he following? Because each Christian has a different calling, an elder must work on equipping them differently, perhaps even in opposite ways.

Bonus James Jordan reference: This seems to fit with Jordan’s insistence that life is cruciform, radiating out to the four corners of the world.

Tonight I was stopped by state police at a checkpoint and asked to present my papers. I mean “license and registration”. And while I tried to figure out where the insurance card was, the officer strolled around my car, playing the flashlight over the vehicle. Apparently my papers were in order, because they let me go.

I hadn’t committed a crime, nor were the police investigating one. Rather, they were just doing a “safety check”. What does that mean? “Checking” to make sure that I have the proper documentation? “Checking” to make sure that I was sober? “Checking” to make sure that I wasn’t violating some law somehow?

What if I had turned around and gone the other way, instead of passing through their checkpoint? Would they have pursued to “check” that I wasn’t fleeing from some sort of crime?

I suppose it could be worse. I know someone who has been pulled over while walking by police and forced to show his identification papers.

Yesterday was July 4, when we celebrate men who had the chutzpah to think that this sort of thing shouldn’t happen to free men. On the other hand, we decorate the tombs of the Founders and yet tolerate this sort of behavior.

Nay, not tolerate. Request. Ask for. Plead for. We grovel at the feet of the almighty State and beg, “Please, great State, save us from the drunkard and the drug fiend and the Al-Qaeda boogie man and the non-conformist with his uncomfortable ideas. Just keep us safe, and we will do whatever you say. We will carry special cards and take off our shoes and submit to strip searches on demand and whatever else you say. Just make sure that I don’t have to bear any sort of responsibility for my safety or the safety of my family. Please, take care of that for me.” We demand this sort of treatment, and so we get it.

Is this what you want? Is this the sort of America that you want to hand down to your children? A place where you need photo ID to walk down the street? A place where you have to fear the police looking over your shoulder, even though you are a law-abiding citizen? Personally, I was hoping for something better, but maybe I’m alone in my little delusions about freedom and liberty and all that stuff that we run up the flagpole and salute.

Once upon a time, being an American meant that you were a free man, and that you embraced both the privilege and responsibility that came with that freedom. Are you prepared to do that? Do you really want to be free?

Just checking.

On the one hand…

I’m sitting here, staring at our freedoms being eroded, and I find myself wondering why I’m celebrating today. Increasingly, we are a nation that wishes harsh rule from above, so long as it preserves our “way of life”. Oh yeah, and then we point the fist of the State at our neighbors to make sure that they stay in line with our way of thinking.

On the other hand…

I can still type up a message like this without being arrested.

So, anyways, Happy [This statement was censored by Homeland Security due to content potentially supporting homegrown terrorism; further investigations are pending.]

Tuesday night I was awakened from a sound slumber by a thunderclap over my house. It sounded like an explosion in the sky. I jolted out of my sleep, dazed and confused.

Wednesday night I decided was going to be a catch-up night for sleep. My plan was to settle in relatively early and sleep through the night. I specifically said that I wouldn’t be awakened by thunder.

Wednesday night I was awakened from a sound slumber by a thunderclap over my house. And then the dog got me up, claiming that she needed to…er…relieve herself outside. And then she realized that it was raining and wanted to get back inside so she could pee on the dry floor instead.

Sigh.

Thursday morning I was a bit groggy. As I staggered around, getting ready for work, I considered what had happened. I thought of various “spiritual” reasons. You know, learning humility and all that. And that may be true. But I came up with another possible reason.

Sometimes I’ll hide around a corner and wait for one of my children to walk nearby. Then I jump out and scare him. Invariably the child jumps and screams and then we laugh together.

I wonder if God was pranking me on Wednesday night.

It was pretty funny….

“Then the LORD God said, ‘It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him.’” (Genesis 2:18)

I had an odd thought about this verse during worship yesterday.

So, Jesus is the second Adam, right?

And the Church is the Bride of Christ, right?

Then, maybe…just maybe…this verse is one way of interpreting all of history. It is not good for the Man to be alone, so the Father is making a helper fit for Him.

Last night, I made a decision. I was taking the night off. I wasn’t going to worry about the urban poor, or the war in Iraq, or people destroying their lives with drugs. I wasn’t going to think about political corruption or abuse of power or tyranny. It was Sunday, and I was going to take a Sabbath from it all.

So, we broke out Caylus, which we haven’t played in nearly a year. We also mixed up rum and cokes and played music without any social commentary. We eventually put on Crystal’s fun music playlist, which let us do the head-banging part from “Bohemian Rhapsody”, because that’s high culture right there. We also discussed the humor value implicit in this verse; indeed, I laughed so hard that I was crying.

Yeah, it was a good night, even though Gabrielle totally schooled us at Caylus. (Next time! Next time!) I’m finding that there’s a certain discipline in learning to set down issues and walk away from them for a bit. They’ll be there when you get back.

But if we have faith in a good God, we can also believe that He will take care of them, even when we’re not.

Recently, I read the book Our America by LeAlan Jones and Lloyd Newman. This book drew from the two recording projects that these two boys were involved with:

Ghetto Life 101

Remorse

You have to register on the site to listen to these pieces, but it’s free! (They are also available here and here.)

Ghetto Life 101 was just a trip around the projects, which was harsh enough, but Remorse was about the murder of Eric Morse, a five-year old boy who was dropped from a 14-story building in the projects by two older boys because he tattled on them. Now, when I say “older”, I mean “ages 10 and 11″.

And the book had pictures, too, taken by a friend of these two boys. So they roamed their neighborhood with camera and recorders, asking people about their lives and about how the murder affected them.

Troubling material.

It was all the more troubling because of the constant presence of the false gospel of success. “You’ll get out of here,” people said. “You’re smart and good-looking. You’ll go to college and be better than this.” Your knowledge will save you. Your intelligence will save you. I would think that, in a place as bleak as these tenements, this false gospel would have expired. I guess not.

But, as I read between the lines of this book, seeing what was said and what was assumed, I discovered something profound.

LeAlan Jones never met his father.

Lloyd Newman’s father is a drunkard.

The father of one of the murderers was locked up at the time, imprisoned for domestic abuse.

The theme that knit together these heartbreaking stories of pain was a deep father-hunger.

In his book Ten Things You Can’t Say In America, Larry Elder makes the case that what is destroying the black community in America is illegitimacy. I remember my mother citing some study that showed that things began to go wrong when the illegitimacy rate hit 25% in the black community. She would then go on to point out that the illegitimacy rate among whites had hit 25%. And that was 15 years ago.

As Isaiah said:

Woe to the wicked! It shall be ill with him, for what his hands have dealt out shall be done to him. My people–infants are their oppressors, and women rule over them. O my people, your guides mislead you and they have swallowed up the course of your paths.

(Isaiah 3:11-12)

And yet…

The Spirit of God is at work in our nation. Over the last several years, I’ve seen a growing emphasis by Christians on masculinity and fatherhood. It’s a messy process, to be sure. There’s a lot of work to do and, let’s face it, men aren’t always civil and polite. And yet, that is exactly what we need: men who are willing to be men, acting with courage, forcefulness, and fortitude in order to take up their place as servant-leaders in the home.

It doesn’t look like much. Mostly changing diapers, insisting (once again!) that your son get to bed on time and not talk back to his mother, and trying to teach your children to listen to what God has to say about life while they mostly ignore you.

Yeah, it doesn’t look like much.

But it is changing the world. Because, if you look around, it is this very thing that so many lack.

Happy Father’s Day, eveyone.

From CNN.com:

A college student who branded a date’s body with a scalding piece of metal as payback for never calling her after they had sex was sentenced to five years in prison Friday.

Kristina Caban, 23, had no comment as state Supreme Court Justice Michael Obus sentenced her for what he called a crime that was “not remotely justifiable.”

Assistant District Attorney Nicole Blumberg told Obus that Caban was the “mastermind behind the plan” to sear the torso of Samir “Sammy” Sara, then 23, for having sex with her once in 2004 and never calling her again.

Caban enlisted new boyfriend Robert Testagrossa to help brand a four-inch-high “R” on Samir’s abdomen in October 2006, the prosecutor said. She said Caban lured the former lover to a hotel room, where Testagrossa and another man grabbed him.

Blumberg said the men used a Taser to immobilize Sara in a room at the Chelsea Inn while Caban laughed at his distress and kicked him while he was down.

Yeah, that’s really bizarre.

But you know what’s really bizarre? The headline. I quoth:

“Woman brands thoughtless date with hot iron”

Having sex with a woman that isn’t your wife and then not calling back is a bit beyond just “thoughtless”. Actually, it’s sinful.

I’m just sayin’….

So, there I am, working on my computer, when I get an instant message from Bryan. “Your blood pressure seems a bit low,” he says. “Maybe this will help.”

Great. Now I’ll have to blog about it. So here goes….

A Chicago suburb has just banned visible window-mounted air conditioners.

From the Chicago Tribune:

In an effort to improve Addison’s aesthetics, the Village Board in March passed an ordinance that prohibits window-mounted air conditioners on walls that face the street or on side windows within 12 feet of a street-facing wall.

My bedroom faces the street. Since we don’t have air conditioning upstairs, I’ve placed a window unit in my window to cool down my bedroom. If I lived in Addison, that would make me a criminal.

And for what reason did the village of Addison make this ordinance? Were they pulling a Berkeley and trying to save the environment from leaking coolant? Were they trying to impose some sort of energy efficiency on the citizenry? Not that I’d be pleased with these sorts of reasons.

Oh no. The answer is far worse.

Village officials said the ordinance is geared toward window-mounted units that tend to look shabby, especially when spaces around the units are jammed with cardboard or boards. Also unsightly, they said, are the slap-dash braces made of two-by-fours that support some units on outside walls.

(emphasis mine)

Yep. The government of Addison said that the window units were ugly. Therefore, “ugly” is now illegal. And, tell me, why is “ugly” now illegal in Addison?

[John Berly, assistant village manager said,] “The front yard is what the public sees. The condition of the front is a major factor in determining property values, and it reflects the community norms of acceptable maintenance.”

There it is. Property values. That constant bugaboo.

So, what’s the expected outcome?

[C]ontractors have advised the village that the cost of cutting a hole in a wall and installing a rectangular sleeve and an air conditioner would range from about $600 to about $1,000 depending on the type of wall construction and the complexity of the job.

[A local landlord Vito] Mossa said profit margins in apartment buildings have been trimmed to the bone in recent years because of stable rents but rising costs for heat, taxes, insurance, water and garbage removal. Retrofitting for legal air conditioners would cost too much, he said.

“I would probably just tell [tenants] they can’t put an air conditioner in the window. . . . I’m going to lose tenants,” Mossa said.

(emphasis mine)

Let’s parse this out, shall we?

Who is most likely to be using window-mounted air conditioners? People who can’t afford central air conditioning or aren’t in a position to have it installed. In other words, renters and home-owners who are poor. Also, who is most likely to have “unsightly” improvised home repairs? That’s right; poor people. So, who is this ordinance going to affect the most? (All together now.) Poor people.

But, it’s okay if they leave, right? I mean, do we really want those sorts of people in our neighborhoods? Look what they do to the property values. It’s better for everyone, or at least, it’s better for property owners. And then, our neighborhood will be a better, happier, more prosperous place, right?

But will it?

Vito Mossa doesn’t think so. He thinks that he is going to lose tenants because he can’t afford to install air conditioning the way that the Village Council has demanded. So then what happens? In order to attract tenants, he will have to lower his rent. Assuming he can afford to do this, what quality of tenant do you think he will get? Most folk will want the air conditioning, so he will only get tenants who are too poor to afford the nicer apartments. Of course, the lower rent will mean that Mossa will have even less money to put into maintenance of the apartment building. Plus, the lower quality of tenant will probably attract its own trouble.

But what if Mossa can’t afford to lower his rent? Well then, eventually he will have to go out of business as a landlord. So then, what happens to the apartment building? Mossa will have to sell it, but how will he accomplish that? Eventually he will either have to sell at a loss, or he will have to sell to someone with enough money to pay for all the additional air conditioning updates. Do you think that this buyer will be a nice local landlord? I rather think that it will be a real estate holding company of some kind, who will probably be just another “absentee landlord” that the Village Council is already complaining about.

And what if he can’t sell? Do you think that he will be able to rent apartments in a building that is on the market? Again, only the really desperate would rent in that sort of situation. Or perhaps the building merely stands vacant. But, as I know from personal experience, a vacant building is a drag on a neighborhood, attracting all sorts of trouble.

And what about Mossa? His business is destroyed, and probably his personal finances, too. Where does this leave him?

But, hey, in the end, the village of Addison drives away all those nasty poor people and preserves their property values for good, decent people! Hooray! Another win for the middle class!

Another win against those awful poor folk.

Of course, the really sad thing is that this won’t work. In the end, Addison will probably be left with a worse situation than they started with.

So, I don’t live in Addison, right? I live in Peoria. Why am I so exercised about this?

It’s because I see the same pattern playing out right here in my neighborhood.

Last week, Code Enforcement came through the neighborhood, doing a “clean sweep”. The agent was fairly lenient on us, since she admitted that the purpose was mostly to focus on tenants, not on home owners. That didn’t save my neighbor, who managed to pick up a substantive fine for having front stairs in need of repair. Do the stairs need repair? Yes they do, and my neighbor (who I will call D) knew this. In fact, she had been saving money all year so that she could get them repaired over the summer. They are concrete, so you need to wait until the summer heat for best effect. But now, she has to pay a fine. Where is she going to get that money? That’s right: from the money that she saved to repair her steps.

D is a home owner. In fact, she’s lived in the University East neighborhood for a number of years. On top of that, she is raising her five grandchildren by herself, while working a job in the public school system. She’s not exactly made out of money. And yet, she was being responsible, trying to take care of her property as best as she could. She has covered her stairs, trying to decorate them to make the best of a bad situation. But it did not save her.

And then I hear people in the neighborhood who are happy about this. Indeed, they call Code Enforcement to inform on their neighbors. Then they vigorously defend the right of Code Enforcement to trespass onto other people’s property in violation of the Fourth Amendment. They want the city to keep putting pressure on renters. They want to enforce a certain standard of living on this neighborhood, using the power of the government to accomplish it. And their goal? The preservation of their property values. They want to force this neighborhood to be a nice, upscale neighborhood, without any of those “unsightly” rental properties.

Yay! Another victory for the middle class! Another win against those awful poor folk.

But what have we won, really?

Is this how to accomplish our goal of living together peacefully as neighbors? That is our goal, isn’t it? A neighborhood? But how can we form a loving community if we found it on the suffering of the poor? How can we form a trusting community if we enforce it with anonymous calls to government agencies? How can we form an open community if we are constantly watching each other for infractions?

Are we looking to form a neighborhood? Or are we just looking for a nice place to live, regardless of who pays the price?

It occurred to me recently that a major objection to a narrow construction of the Bill of Rights is that it would interfere with various compelling government interests. For example, it’s not possible to wage the drug war or crack down on violence without violating the Fourth Amendment.

Hmm. Is it possible then, that these are areas that our government wasn’t designed to do? Like, maybe the Bills of Rights is getting in the way because it’s supposed to get in the way?

I just posted about the Washington D.C. checkpoint, which is in response to the large amount of violence in that area. So, here’s my question. Where does all that violence come from?

Now, there are always wicked men who “eat the bread of wickedness and drink the wine of violence.” (Proverbs 4:17). And yet, I wonder…how much of this violence is connected to the drug trade? For example, my understanding is that nearly all the murders last year in Peoria were drug-related. Sadly, I don’t have any specific numbers on hand, though I would be quite interested to hear how I could go about proving or disproving this. I’m going to guess that this isn’t a particularly controversial point.

So, let’s say that I’m correct, and much of the urban violence that we suffer is the result of competition for the illegal drug trade. Can someone explain to me again why we’ve created a Prohibition on drugs? Why should the government be taking any sort of responsibility for the substances that people put into their own bodies?

And, on top of this, look at the various ways in which our fundamental rights are being violated in the ongoing “war on drugs”. (Watch this piece for an example of what I’m talking about, or just refer to the Washington Post article about the checkpoint.) Is this a price worth paying?

How is this justice?

From the Washington Post:

D.C. Police Chief Cathy L. Lanier announced a military-style checkpoint yesterday to stop cars this weekend in a Northeast Washington neighborhood inundated by gun violence, saying it will help keep criminals out of the area.

Starting on Saturday, officers will check drivers’ identification and ask whether they have a “legitimate purpose” to be in the Trinidad area, such as going to a doctor or church or visiting friends or relatives. If not, the drivers will be turned away.

…

The checkpoint will stop vehicles approaching the 1400 block of Montello Avenue NE, a section of the Trinidad neighborhood that has been plagued with homicides and other violence. Police will search cars if they suspect the presence of guns or drugs, and will arrest people who do not cooperate, under a charge of failure to obey a police officer, officials said.

(emphasis mine)

Ahem. I quoth:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

I thought that this was supposed to be a law that we were all supposed to follow or something.

Okay, so I’m in favor of the legalization of drugs and all that. But, setting that aside right now, this story is really funny.

Zack the Weed Man. Funny stuff.

I’ve been thinking about blogging about the situation in Texas. It’s a ticklish situation, but it needs to be addressed. Happily, I don’t have to; James and Stacy McDonald have taken up the task instead. So, all I have to say is, “Read these posts.”

Well, except something my wife pointed out.

The original raid was prompted by a single anonymous phone call, right? (Which, by the way, turns out to have been fake.) So, on the basis of a single anonymous phone call, the police are allowed to raid what is essentially a small town? That would be like the police raiding every house in the University East neighborhood on the basis of a single anonymous drug tip.

I thought that kind of thing only happened in “bad” countries. Hmm.