Democracy v. Theocracy

The Supremes have decided in a case from Maine that if public money is directed to providing some support for private schools, than it must also be permissible to direct tax payer support for tuition to religious schools. 

Justice Sonia Sotomayor dissented, saying 

"This court continues to dismantle the wall of separation between church and state that the framers fought to build."

 and 

“… In just a few years, the court has upended constitutional doctrine, shifting from a rule that permits states to decline to fund religious organisations to one that requires states in many circumstances to subsidise religious indoctrination with taxpayer dollars.”

Which, of course, got me mulling over my own engagement over the years with the issue of the separation of Church and State. The first instance I can recall of a personal encounter with the issue took place during a school assembly in in which we were all directed to stand and recite the Pledge of Allegiance, and to include the phrase, one nation under God. That must have been 1954, because that was when President Eisenhower signed an act into law mandating the inclusion of the phrase. I stood mute during the recitation of the Pledge that day in the school assembly, and I never recited the Pledge again. 

I do not recall the chain of events leading up to my adamant rejection of "under God". I imagine that somewhere in my studies I had come across the idea of the separation of Church and State and that I had wholly embraced it as an unbendable bedrock principle of the Constitution. 

What I do remember is that religion played no part at all in the daily life of my immediate family.  I recall no discussion of the subject of religion in our home ever. The closest I came to such a discussion was in my late teens when my mother mentioned that she had no belief in an afterlife -- "when you're dead, that's it" she said, expressing a fundamental atheist view of life which by then I shared completely.

My religious views might possibly have developed in a different direction had my father survived World War II. He came from a large family of Irish Catholics in Nebraska.  I don't think my father was religious, but his sister, at least, was a very devout believer and, had I more opportunity to know that side of the family, I suppose I might have absorbed some level of religiosity. But, I didn't.  Which, of course, did not mean that religion played no part in my life. The U.S. is still the most religiously oriented nation among those which like to consider themselves advanced. There was really no way to avoid that fact.

Aside from a single day's attendance at a Sunday School gathering, my first memorable brush with religion came during a high school dance when I met a very pretty girl whose father was the choir director for a large Presbyterian church in downtown Seattle.  Let's call her Gwen.

Gwen and I never talked about religion, and I don't know what sort of interest she had in the subject. She was expected to go to church every Sunday, and I had no qualms at all about accompanying her. The music was nice. We sat respectfully through the service, and that was it.  We rode her horses together, went to the movies and did the other things teens do including finding secluded parking spots to neck.

On one such occasion we got together with one of my good friends and his girl friend and headed out in my car with a six-pack of beer to a parking spot in the woods not very far from downtown Bellevue. Things were just beginning to get interesting when a flashing red light brought the party to a sudden end.

The officer escorted us to the little police department building in the old part of Bellevue where we were each directed to call our parents to explain what we had been up to, and to tell them they had to come to the police department to have us released to their custody.

Well, there was no legal penalty attached to the parking in the woods incident, but my relationship with Gwen no longer seemed viable.  I recall her expressing some desire to go on seeing each other, but I couldn't see it.  I think I was just too intimidated by the idea of working through a resolution of the issues with the choir director. 

So I moved on to my college years and new romances.  My ideas about religion took on more of an intellectual flavor, possibly as a result of exposure to some history courses.  From that time I recall a discussion, I think it may have been in a psychology class, in which a young woman made a spirited defense of a religious explanation for some social issue.  I raised my hand and proceeded to rain destruction on her argument with what I deemed to be irrefutable logic. The bell rang ending the session shortly afterward. As we all filed out of the classroom, I noticed that she was crying.  I failed to take the opportunity to apologize for my insensitive behavior, and I've regretted that all the years since.

These days when some acquaintance starts talking about their religious beliefs I nearly always nod and say nothing. More often than not, the gist of the one-sided conversation has little connection with traditional religious dogma, but the specifics are immaterial for me.

There was an occasion not long ago when I was tempted to articulate some details of my personal philosophical stance. A woman went on at some length about her spiritual beliefs and then sought to get some response from me about my thoughts on the ideas she had espoused. I found the length of her train of thought had severely tested my patience and I told her I saw no rationality or value in what she was saying.  Her irate response was "Don't you believe in anything!" It didn't seem worthwhile to continue the conversation at that point.

The mixing of religion and politics is a horse of a different color for me, and I'm happy to argue the issue.  Politicians who pander to any religious constituencies are unlikely to win my vote unless their opponent is someone whose political orientation and behavior calls forth immediate revulsion based on a resemblance to those in the parade of despots we have seen over the last century.

Trump, with astonishing hypocrisy, regularly predicts a return to Christian religious values.  Polls routinely say that is not correct.  Fewer Americans each year express affiliation to any of the traditional religious sects. Similarly, a majority also continues to support Roe v Wade and common-sense gun controls.  In the short term, of course, those preferences expressed by most people only matter in a working democracy.

Memories of the Rainforest

 

The Amazon Basin

A couple times a year some news item from the Amazon Basin brings forth memories of my own time there, now more than sixty years ago. Unfortunately, reports from the Amazon in recent times are most often alarming, and even horrific. Most recently, the headlines have been about the murders of the journalist, Dom Phillips and the indigenous expert, Bruno Pereira, who had been investigating the plundering of natural resources and the displacement of indigenous people. I believe the two men had been traveling at the time along the Javari River.

In 1960 I made a brief trip from Leticia in southern Colombia to the town of Benjamin Constant, Brazil, which is at the confluence of the Amazon and the Javari River. About all I can clearly recall now of that visit was the heart-stopping high speed ride there through a flooded forest in a canoe powered by a big outboard motor.

The Northwest Amazon

Most of the time I spent  in the Northwest Amazon was actually far to the north of Leticia along the Río Miriti-Paraná, a small tributary of the Río Caquetá. Getting to the Catholic Mission outpost which my four American friends and I used as our basecamp required hundreds of miles of travel on small river boats, first downstream on the Amazon, then upstream on the Japurá/Caquetá. The final portion of the journey was in dugout canoes powered by small outboards with additional paddle assistance to get through the rapids of the Miriti-Paraná.

The indigenous peoples of he entire Amazon Basin have suffered a very long history of exploitation through debt peonage connected to rubber and timber harvesting, and mineral extraction. In the last half-century huge portions of the vast rainforest have been clearcut to make way for soy plantations, forcing the culture-destroying displacement of many indigenous people.

At the time of my visit the Yucuna people around the Miriti-Paraná still seemed to have a pretty firm grip on their traditional ways with only minimal intrusions from the military, religious and commercial institutions of the countries claiming sovereignty over the area.   Manioc cultivation on small slash-and-burn plots was supplemented by hunting and gathering to provide what seemed to be an adequate diet and a stable lifestyle. A few people had firearms, but poison dart blowguns and archers' bows were still much in use. Family coca plots were common, but I only saw the drug used for social and ceremonial gatherings.

Padre Norberto, who oversaw the Miriti-Paraná Catholic mission seemed to be a genuinely caring advocate for the local people. He engaged in no condemnation of traditional religious beliefs and ceremonies and his religious and teaching efforts seemed well received by the people in the area. The Padre was instrumental in gaining our group's access to attend and film an important annual Yucuna dance ceremony, along with a generally friendly reception when we visited with families along the river.

I wrote a few letters home to my own family about life around the Miriti-Paraná, but I kept no diary at the time. At this distance from those days, my memories are fragmentary and rather dream-like. One incident a do recall vividly is a forest stroll near the mission in which I was asked to accompany a group of children who were around six or eight years of age. I recall the children being barefoot and dressed very simply in shorts.

The children on our field trip led the way along narrow forest paths and seemed to take great pleasure in pointing out and naming plants and birds along the way.  At one point a fallen log was split open to reveal a harvest of fat, squirming grubs; the children ate some and offered me some as well. I declined the offering, which prompted considerable giggling.  I think the children guessed I would likely not accept their offer, and that in doing so I would betray the incapacity of non-indigenous people to do something as basic as feeding oneself from the natural bounty of the rainforest. I took it as a good lesson.

---

Some Amazon Links:

* The Lost Amazon: The Photographic Journey of Richard Evans Schultes by Wade Davis (My brief review of the book)

* On Fábio Zuker’s “The Life and Death of a Minke Whale in the Amazon: Dispatches from the Brazilian Rainforest” (A review at the Los Angeles Review of Books)

* Tristes Tropiques by Claude  Lévi-Strauss (My brief review of the book)

* Seattle to Bogota (in a Piper Tri-Pacer)

* A lucky flight out of the jungle (in a Grumman Duck)

My Idaho

 

A Day in the Life

Dinner Time 

Day's End

*Falconry and Coursing Dogs

The Battle for Idaho

 

Three of the men who were arrested after being found in the back of a U Haul van near a Pride event in Coeur d'Alene. Photograph: KXLY/Reuters

As reported in The Guardian, only one of the thirty-one in the van aiming to attack the gay pride parade was an Idaho resident.  That is symptomatic of the trend in immigration to the state -- much of Idaho's rapid population growth is fueled by right-wingers who are contributing to the increasingly bizarre political climate.

* * *

It is a sad thing for me personally to see Idaho portrayed in weekly headlines as a haven for hate spewing, gun-toting extremists.  I was born there and retain great affection for the State.  My family took me to Seattle when I was just two, but I grew up listening to endless stories about hunting and fishing in Idaho.  With that family history in mind I returned to live in Idaho in 1977.  

We lived in Glenns Ferry in southern Idaho.  Our two daughters started school there and one of their teachers was a cousin.  I had a variety of jobs in my years there which included truck driving, bucking hay, maintenance of the county fairgrounds and working in the commercial trout farms near Twin Falls.  During the winters when work was hard to find much of our diet was venison and small game, and I stalked coyotes for their then-valuable pelts.

Our time in Idaho coincided with the saving of the populations of the great birds of prey which had been decimated by pesticide poisoning.  The captive breeding techniques which kept Peregrine and Bald Eagle populations viable were developed mainly by Idaho falconers.  I flew prairie falcons and goshawks and I knew Morley Nelson who led the effort to establish the Snake River Birds of Prey National Conservation Area.

As in most of rural America our neighbors were politically conservative.  They were also generous to a fault and tolerant of our city-bred liberalism.  In the 1970s Richard Butler built a neo-Nazi compound in northern Idaho, but I never heard anyone express a favorable opinion about that aberrant group, and there were no people carrying assault weapons to public gatherings.  

It is disheartening now to see the capture of government in Idaho by the extreme right, but I think the war is not yet lost.  I was pleased recently to see an editorial in the oldest and biggest newspaper, The Idaho Statesman, praising the work of the January 6 House Committee and calling on the State's Congressional Delegation "to speak out and denounce the Big Lie".

Windy Day Refugee

 

Take Your Pick

 Primary elections are underway in New Mexico and they are pretty ugly.  Between the distortions and outright lies I'm inclined to vote "No" and hunker down until November.  On the Dem side, the race for Attorney General is particularly ugly.  One of the two will likely win the office given the State's Dem-leaning electorate, but whoever takes it will be damaged goods.

Luckily for the Dems, the Republican primary candidates are flailing away at each other with equal vigor.  The leading R candidate for Governor, a former TV weather guy, has brought forth a story of serious moral and ethical lapses by his main rival, even though she has no chance of catching up to him in the primary race.  She, in turn, is accusing him of being insufficiently Trumpy regarding crime, climate change, abortion restrictions and border blockades.

The weather guy has started shifting his sights to the current Dem Governor.  He may get some traction with talk about crime, but the State's record level of oil production and an unprecedented budget surplus make charges of financial mismanagement look pretty anemic.  Also, it is hard to avoid the thought that the R candidate for the governor's job is going to be saddled with policy positions about guns and abortion that most New Mexicans and most Americans do not support.

The current Governor, Michelle Lujan Grisham, is making low-key appearances to brag about new legislation providing universal preschool, child care assistance to any parent in the State who needs it, and tuition-free post-secondary education opportunities for every resident kid in the State.  She looks pretty calm and confident. Also interesting is Lujan Grisham's name appearing on lists of potential 2024 candidates should Joe decide against a second term. Looks like something he should definitely be thinking about according to this FiveThirtyEight article: Americans Are Unusually Lukewarm About A Second Biden Term.

Stop Killing Children

 School shootings are a subset of homicides perpetrated by young people who are fundamentally suicidal. Successful prevention is possible, and it focuses on that profile rather than on situational specifics which are always different from one event to the next. Simplistic tactics like door locking procedures or arming teachers do not work, in part because they will always be practiced unevenly. Take a minute to read about the research behind those ideas in an article on FiveThirtyEight by Maggie Koerth: We’ve Known How To Prevent A School Shooting for More Than 20 Years.