Rights.

In the United States recently there have been three cases of groups of people doing controversial things. The most noticeable one at the moment is that of a group wishing to build a Community Center near the Ground Zero site in New York City. The group is predominantly Muslim and as a result people are connecting them with the hijackers of 9/11/2001 and the majority of citizens of the USA are against the building of the center. While this position is moronic, the Cordoba Center and Al-Qaeda being identical is like saying Bishop Tutu and P.W. Botha were part of the same ideology because they were both Christians, people are idiots.

Another group, a 50 member church in Gainesville, Florida, ridiculously named the Dove World Outreach Center is planning a "Burn a Qu'ran Day" on 9/11/2010. It should be noted that Gainseville, Fl is about as redneck, hick, and ignorant a place as you can find in the US of A, possibly more frightening than Alabama, but even their Mayor is opposed to this event. However, it has been publicized to such an extent that the Pope has condemned the action, and Afghans have burned the preacher of the church in effigy.

The third group, the Westboro Baptist Church, believes that the deaths of military personnel abroad is a result of God's condemnation of America for tolerating homosexuality and other "filth." As a result they have taken it upon themselves to picket the funerals of servicemen with signs and yelling about this sort of stuff. If you ever want to be really appalled go to their web site, it is truly astonishing.

This blog post is about rights, and I have brought up these three examples in order to talk about rights. In the USA it is without a doubt that all three of these groups have the legal right, protected under the law, to carry out these activities. The freedom to publicly assemble, speak, and practice your religion are all protected under the Constitution of the United States.

The question that clearly springs to mind at this point is whether these activities should happen or not?

I'll start my reply to this question with an outline of what rights are. A right is an ideal, it is not a real thing. You can't touch it, feel it, weigh it. It is a thought, a concept. When Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence that, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." he was talking a bunch of tosh. The very idea of rights are relatively recent. For the vast majority of history, pretty much anywhere in the world, the concept of owning someone else was taken for granted. Owning someone is entirely inconsistent with the concept that everyone has rights. When a husband is beating up his children it seems quite clear that if The Creator has given these children the right to life, liberty and happiness then those rights are useless things without meaning.

Rights are ideals by which a society judges itself, but those rights only matter when they are upheld in practicality through the application of power. The United States was a signatory to the Geneva Convention, has as a founding document the above stated belief in human rights, and through Congress authorized combat in Afghanistan, yet hundreds of men with their inalienable rights have been deprived of liberty and the pursuit of happiness without recourse to trial despite the clear claims of every human rights organization in the world that this is illegal and a violation of rights. When the power in the USA, that of the government and military, decided that certain people did not have rights, then they did not have rights. There are many other examples of such actions. I myself have been illegally stopped and searched in direct contravention of my rights by a sheriff in Michigan, but we both knew that if I kicked up any fuss he was going to beat me up, put me in jail and make up a charge (probably assaulting an officer).

Rights are ideals for a society to live by, but societies don't always live by their ideals. In the above three cases I find one of the proposed activities (the Cordoba Center) to be largely a laudable one, a good thing. The majority of my fellow citizens disagree.
The second activity, that of burning Qu'rans is in itself entirely harmless, it's just burning paper. That a bunch of idiots in Gainseville Fl are cheering themselves up by burning something shouldn't be news. What is upsetting and egregious about the whole thing is that it has been done to upset a billion people around the world. That's what I am against, the sheer rudeness of telling the media about it, and the idiocy of the media to think that the information should be passed on. In the USA I would guess that the split on burning the Qu'ran or not would be close to 50/50, but that's just a guess.
The third activity, that of protesting military funerals is almost universally derided, but has been allowed to stand in a court case.
Should these activities be allowed to happen? In a democratic society should not the majority view be the guide to what should and should not be allowed? Should my opinion actually be the decision for what is right or wrong?

The idea of a right is that it supersedes public opinion. That is that if you have a right to do something, you can do it even if every other person in the country is against it, and even if your government would like to pass a law preventing you from doing it you can still do it.

So, if you believe in the rights under the Constitution then you believe that all of these activities should be allowed to go forward. Now, you are allowed to have an opinion about whether the activities are good activities or bad activities. You are allowed to state your opinion on the matter. But here is the sharp point of the matter. If you believe that your opinion should make any difference at all in whether the activity happens or not, you are against the concept of rights. If you think being offended by the activities should influence whether they happen or not, you are against rights.

This is the hardest thing about tolerance, the hardest thing about having the ideals of freedom. it means that you must support the ability of people to do things you despise to the point that your opinion is irrelevant.

This is very far from an ideal thing, which is the problem with ideals. Any idealism is less complicated than reality. Any right that you can think of will have unpleasant consequences when put into practice, and when faced with these complications. But I think these consequences, the cost of rights, is well worth the fantastic rewards that come from being able to live in a place whereby the mob do not decide what your life will be.

A Gig.

Last Friday my present band and I (The Tomfooligans) played our inaugural gig in the backyard of Dave's (rhythm guitar) house. We had fourteen songs, and we played to perhaps 25 people, and I believe most people had a pretty good time. The most important thing was that Dave, who had never played in a band before, had such an exciting time that he stayed up for hours after even Christina and I had left (somehow I am always the last to leave), the exact same experience I had after my first gig. So, it was a success.

My view on the gig was somewhat different from everybody else's. I had a nice time, I'll do it again, but I wouldn't consider it a magic, life affirming experience. It was a gig, we did OK, there was no embarrassment and I think a number of the people who watched us would turn up again providing there was no cover and they knew someone in the band. So why was this not a great experience for me? Other gigs have certainly been great, and some of them have been of equal or lower quality, some of them have been for small numbers of friends. Some of them have been with the same songs in the same venue as the week before.

I think there are a couple of possibilities for my reaction. The first may well be that right now I am inaccurately describing how I felt. I think I probably had a pretty good time while playing, but the rest of the event was less fun than a bar in Portland. Being nice to granny who has told me that the band is God's will takes some of the joy out of an event for me. Having everyone leave by about eleven doesn't help either. But I think actually playing on stage is still really fun, except when I make mistakes.

The second may well be the role that I have in this band. I play mandolin and sing back-up vocals on some songs. I have no more input on the sound of the band or the songs we play than anyone else. I am not the front man, and what I am playing is harder for me to play than anything previously, it takes up more concentration. I think this means that I am not playing a role for the audience, and pretending to be a musician is much of the fun of being a musician. Doing something harder, that requires more attention, and produces a less direct reward will probably reduce the fun of something.

The final reason is probably that the music is not entirely to my liking, in truth, I find it something of a joke band. There are four other people in the band who want to play something between punk and heavy metal, just with irish tunes. Then there's me, trying to play a folk melody through the song to give it some varnish of respectability. It isn't what I would choose to listen to myself.

The above seems something of a negative post, which is a shame. It's good for me to be in a band, it's good to play gigs. this was a positive event, something that made my life better. And the most important thing about it all is that it gives me the reason, and therefore the motivation, to get better at the mandolin. I still think in five years I should actually be able to play the thing properly.

I'll put up a couple of tunes once I work out how to do that.

Mistakes.

I've made a few, but then again...

Pretty much every time I've been angry it has been a mistake, but I'm not sure I could have done much about it. Instinct and my nature probably took over. There are things that are just inherent mistakes based on having a personality.

On the other hand I pride myself on being rational about making decisions, and part of rationality is evaluating the decisions that you have made. So, I was thinking about mistakes today, while almost terminally bored and stuck here with gout and another leg injury.

There have been two decisions that I made after serious deliberation, that now make up most of my time, that I consider to have been mistakes. These two are getting a dog, the Face of Evil, and moving to Texas.

I think the choice to get a dog being a mistake would be argued by my wife, as she is fond of the dog but doesn't have to do anything to take care of him. It's a bit like how I like other people's children very much for an hour or two at sporadic intervals. In fact it is very much like having children indeed. The dog was obtained so that we could have something to love, so that I wouldn't be lonely, and um, that's it really.

I treat the dog marvelously, much better than most dogs are treated. Regular long walks, lots of treats, affection, drives in the car, expensive medical care, friends to see and play with, all of that. The result is that from time to time Larry is sweet, and beautiful, and fun, and makes things great. I am not lonely because his presence is so intensely there that when he is not around I have the strong impression that I have misplaced something. But most of the time he is a chore, like doing laundry. Right now he has been at the vets, getting his fourth surgery, for a little over a week. It has been an improvement, and I will admit to having some hope that he would die under anesthetic so I would be freed of the burden without it being my fault. Yes, very much like having a child, which generally (according to scientifically obtained data) makes people less happy, and any parent who pretends that they have never thought of strangling their child is lying.

Moving to Texas was a mistake because it is not an adventure, it is something to be endured. I had good things in Portland, I miss that band terribly, and the other friends I had too, although I think none of the people I actually spent time with read this blog.

The reasons for coming here were fear of being poor, the chance for Christina to advance in her career, and for the feeling of adventure in a new place. However poor we were going to be is richer than I have been in my life, and cowardice is an awful reason to do anything. The move has cost us tens of thousands of dollars anyway, but different jobs would have done that anyway, so financially right now we are probably about even. This was not expected.

Christina is in the exact same job that she was before, but having been lied to by her boss, and with a hiring freeze going on, no prospects for advancement and being generally mistreated by her co-workers. She is looking for other work. I think at this point the smart thing to do would be to not worry about a career, just pack it all in and start thinking in different terms. The thing about money is that whatever amount you have becomes the concept of a necessary amount, and anything less than that seems too hard to bear. Which is cowardly bullshit that I am prone to produce in myself.

It's hard to explain exactly how non-adventurous this has been. This is mostly because the basic issues are solved in the same way. We own a house, we shop from grocery stores in the same language with mostly the same stuff in them, our bank is the same, our news and entertainment options are basically identical. The difference is that the people here are different, which should be the essence of the adventure. But turn on Fox News and you get the cultural context, talk to a suburban mother and you get the intellectual level, watch Monday Night Football and you get an idea of the arts. Live music is classic rock covers. Parties are hamburgers and domestic, yellow beer. Community events are high school sports. It is a wasteland. Here's the thing, King of the Hill is not actually a joke, it is a highly accurate portrayal, I am not joking, not even a tiny, little bit.

When mistakes have been made it is best to acknowledge them, and use the information to make better decisions in the future. Unfortunately I bet I still have to take care of the dog for another ten years.

The Grind.

The title of this post may well seem ironic to those who know how little I work, but that's not what I'm talking about. The Grind I am talking about is that feeling of constantly pushing the rock uphill. The rock consists of the life we wish to lead, the comfort, the companionship, the beauty, the interest. The uphill consists of the constant chores, the unexpected car breakdown, the negativity of people, the ignorance, the hostility, the bad news, the illness.

There are repeated times when I just feel like I want to give up. I don't want to be civil to those who say Barack Obama is trying to destroy America, I didn't even say that about George Bush. I don't want to have to put up with the news that in Afghanistan people still stone to death a young couple for having sex. I don't want to have to see the flat lie that "God is the only way to love" on a billboard when going for groceries. I don't want my neighbors to ignore me forever because they are upset when I point out that they haven't done what they promised. I don't want to have the bill be twice as much as the estimate, or have the rental company try to steal my money, or to feel the chemicals change in my brain and know that through no fault of my own I'm going to be fighting back tears that day. There are repeated times when I just don't want to take care of myself anymore, when I don't want to do it anymore, when I want someone to do it for me.

The Grind is when you get to those times and realize that giving up just makes it worse. Those things don't go away by themselves, they just get worse. Everyone else is fighting their own version of The Grind, often a harder fight than I have. No-one is actually going to take care of you when it comes down to it, it's really you and your place in all of this. The Grind is reduced by facing it, admitting it, thinking about it and doing something.

Hope is vital. Without hope all there is are ashes and misery. Not only does hope help you, it helps everyone around you. If you don't fight against The Grind, if you don't try to be better than the misery, the hatred, the ignorance, the stupidity, who is going to do it? If you aren't going to be optimistic, to look for solutions, to smile and have fun, who is going to do it. The fight is the right, the best choice. It is a responsibility to continue that fight for ourselves and for those around us. The Grind will always be there, but what makes a person good is simply working against it.

Most of the people who read this blog have fought against The Grind with the added weight of mental illness, whether depression, or bipolar disorder, or being part of a family that deals with that (which really does count). Everyone is still fighting it, still trying, still making the world a better place. I applaud you for it.

Self-Review.

I spend most of my time alone. I practice with a band one evening a week, and other than that most of my interactions with people are store clerks or just with my wife. Yesterday evening was a nice exception as we spent some time with our neighbors. As a result of this I spend a fair amount of time most days on a computer, looking around for things to occupy my mind. I probably spend too much time on internet forums, but they do provide a real sense of interaction with people.

So, while trying to while away the hours one evening recently I started reading back through this blog. My main intention was to use it as a benchmark of where I was mentally a year or two years ago, to see how much I have changed and how. I ended up over the following couple of days reading the entire blog, every word and every comment.

What did I discover? The first thing is that I actually believe that this writing has had worth, which was a surprise. I had thought that this was largely me ranting somewhat incoherently, without much of a coherent position, and often cringingly whiny in nature. I actually was interested in what I had written and thought it made the points that I had wished to make rather well. As a series of essays I have read many worse attempts.

The second thing that I have discovered is that I have changed remarkably little during these years. The posts in the first few months could have been written in the last few weeks. I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised by this, after all that's what a personality is, but subjectively I had thought that the last few years had been full of change and action in my life. I suppose I should trust my brother Peter's words a little more, "Wherever you go, you are still you."

The third thing that I have discovered is that more people than I had thought read this blog, not necessarily right away, and not for the reasons that I write it. I think the majority of the readers read this blog as a family or friends connection, for emotional reasons rather than intellectual reasons. I would actually be surprised if anyone had changed their positions about anything that I have written about as a result of my writing. But that's people. That's how they operate, based on emotional ties, family, friends, feelings. I also think that reading this blog is helpful for those who need a bit of adult conversation, whether surrounded by children all day long or surrounded by ignorant rednecks.

So, I was encouraged by this reading. It is nice to feel that I have been doing something worthwhile.

Home.

When I was a boy I knew what the word "Home" meant. It was a house in which I and my family lived. Through the course of my adult life I have since lived in approximately fifteen different places in 22 years, four cities in three states. During my life I have so far visited twelve countries for periods longer than a week, and several more for shorter periods. The house in which I am presently I have lived in for less than a year. In a sense the definition of home is the same, in that when I say I going home I am going to the house in which I live with what essentially consists of my family, in my wife. On the other hand this constant migration has changed the definition as well.

For all the nineties when I talked about home I meant England. It was where I was from, it was what I knew, it was the place that was instinctive for me. Home was a place that I had left, but my belief was that it would always be there as home. The thought was that thirty years later I could walk into a country pub and feel comfortable, that I fit, that I was English. Whenever I would visit upon seeing the green of the hedges and fields through both the scratched portal of the airplane's window and the grey haze of fog and cloud a feeling would come, both sad and proud, a swelling in my breast for my homeland.

However, as the years deepened and my returns continued it became apparent that my accent had changed to such a degree that the English thought I was an American. There is nothing so certain an identification of a person in people's eyes as their accent. Although I thought of my home as England, the English thought of me as a foreigner. As nine years passed in Michigan, even with my accent changed beyond recognition in my homeland I was still continually asked, "Where are you from?" A more perfect way to ensure that you know that you are not at home than this question I have yet to meet.

So, where I lived I was asked where I was from, and when I was where I was from the natives were certain I was from somewhere else. Eventually I decided to move to Portland, Oregon, and reached some sort of compromise. For a start, a majority of the people living in Portland are from somewhere else, even if that somewhere else is simply a different part of Oregon. Different parts of Oregon are indeed, very different from Portland. The other part of Portland that helped a compromise was that the values of the people there were very much akin to mine. A belief in helping people, of peace, of thinking and talking, about drinking beer. A collegial atmosphere to a very large extent. The weather was also very familiar to me, lots of grey days, green vegetation, the familiarity of street lights reflecting off the wet asphalt.

However, during the last couple of years in Portland I felt a tingle to move on. There was the feeling of having done Portland, having exhausted what it could give me. There was a feeling of just doing the same things over and over. This is one of the several reasons for the move to Texas, although far from being the most important one. However, I think it may well be an important component of what makes up home, adequate repetition until there is nothing new to you in a place.

Christina and I just returned from a trip to a foreign country in which I felt more at home than in the place that I left. While the local accents on the Dingle Peninsular where often nearly unintelligible the countryside, the pure air, the mannerisms of the country people, all felt easier to me than in the place I presently live. So much so that on our flight home I resolved to treat Spring, TX as a vacation spot we were flying into to spend a few weeks in tropical sunshine, and to a large extent this has worked and it is what I feel. I feel like a tourist in my home.

So what is home? I think there are rings of home. There is a place that you own, that you can exclude people from, in which you can hide and arrange things to your satisfaction. To an extent home is the place where you have control over your environment. The next step is that the area is familiar to you to the point beyond thinking. Home is the area within which you can operate on autopilot, the antithesis of foreign. Then there is the home that comes from being part of a group, being part of a culture with shared values, experiences and understanding. This home comes when you don't censor your speech because you aren't worried about offending people. To an extent it's the group of people with whom you can share the ridiculing of others as an acceptable activity. For me, making fun of Sarah Palin denotes a certain amount of home.

Our vacation to Dingle solidified something for Christina and I. Our plan has failed. Texas is not where we want to be, and therefore we must leave here. It can never be home because the very act of surviving here is not natural to us. We share almost nothing with people who live here, even those who are pleasant and friendly and do no harm. It is impossible for Texas to be home in the fuller sense of the word. While on vacation in Ireland we were asked repeatedly where we were from, and both of us found it very hard to say we were from Texas.

So we need to find a place where we can have our own house in which we can hide securely, we need a form of living that feels natural for us, we need sunshine to ward off depression, and we need the people to be like us. We need to find a home, and I'm a bit sad and disappointed in myself that I seem to need the last criterion, that of people somewhat similar to myself.

Chapter One

Once, or twice, or upon a thousand times the sun gently nudged its way above the mountain, spreading its roseate glow upon the mountain's snow, the enveloping woodlands, and a dew-laden meadow replete with wild flowers. Upon a camp stool sat a man of seemingly middling years, his long and silver hair unbound and cascading down his back. His eyes were closed and he seemed to be relishing simply the feel of the first rays of sunlight upon his face, like a flower reaching for the light. He exhaled slowly, not quite a sigh, and opened his eyes to look around him. He saw the brilliant jewels of light coruscating from the droplets of dew hanging like pendants from the long grass. He saw the wild flowers in their riot of colour strewn haphazardly across the meadow. He saw the first wisps of the fog in the valley rising into the rosy air.

He smelled the dampness of the grass, he heard the buzz of insects and the melodic territorial calls of the birds in the woods. He felt the linen of his shirt in the softest scratching against his shoulders as he breathed. He tasted that strange but familiar flavour that is the dawn air.

He turned his head in a slow arc, surveying the scene before him, breathing in its essence, filling himself with the moment. A decision made he stood quickly and took two strides towards a small easel resting there. Taking brush and ink he wrote in swift and sure strokes a poem:

My life came like dew,

disappears like dew.

All of everything

is dream after dream.

Once finished the man took the brush and cleaned it in a stream of water he poured from a flask on the easel, and carefully replaced the brush in its holder.

"Shadow, it is time. Help me with my armour." His words were sudden, deep and assured, startling in the peace of a meadow. A grey figure, unnoticed until this time, seemed to step out of the fog and obsequiously ushered the warrior into a tent in which stood on a mount a suit of black and gold lacquered leather armour, tied with scarlet ribbons, and crowned with a mustachioed helmet with the face of a demon.

The warrior in black and gold walked down through the dewy meadow, down towards the fog. He could hear rustling and rumbling from within the grey concealment of the mist as he approached. Ten paces from the fog's edge he stopped, drew his sword from his scabbard and threw the scabbard into the long grass to his left. With his sword point concealed amongst the pastels of meadow flowers he took a deep breath. As he released it the fog suddenly rose and dispersed, like a curtain to a stage.

Twenty paces away was a small river, shallow enough to ford, the water tinkling like bells among the stones. Behind, suddenly silent, motionless, stood a horde, a vast array of warriors and wizards, knights and bandits, demons and assassins. The warrior beckoned with his left hand, a flight of arrows leapt into the air, blackening the pale blue sky. A bellow of ten thousand voices, both human and not, howled its fury and the horde charged.

The battle raged throughout the day, the warrior dancing with effortless grace, the bloody, vomiting horror that were the consequences of his movements in macabre contrast to his dance. He passed through the horde removing limbs and heads, opening bodies, weaving destruction with an unearthly speed and power. He could not be touched by giant's club, or wizard's lightning, or assassins dagger. When the ranks broke and fled to regather themselves, the river ran thick and red, tumbling through the dam of piled corpses. When the horde tried wave upon wave of arrows through the raven haunted sky the warrior gestured, and the arrows were caught in a sudden wind and blown back towards the cowering masses. When the first blush of dusk lit the sky around the mountain peaks there was none left to face him, they had fled, or were dead.

The warrior turned with the effort of a thousand years of toil, and looked back up across the meadow from which he had come that morning. His armour was hacked, rent, smeared with gore, scarlet ribbons fluttering loosely in the evening breeze. With faltering movements he reached with his free hand and slowly, so slowly, removed his helmet. His silver hair was plastered with sweat to his brow, his eyes sunken and haunted. He held his demon-faced helmet in the crook of his arm, and trudged back up the hill, limping from the pain in every joint and every muscle.

At his camp he looked briefly at the poem from that morning, and slumped onto his camp stool, a picture of exhaustion. A greyness slipped from the tent, tentative and cautious, more abject than humble, everything in it attempting to escape notice. It sidled up towards the warrior who sat silent and motionless apart from the hoarse pants of his shallow breathing.

"Halt!" came the sudden cry, and the greyness stopped, the black sharpness within its hand held quivering in the evening air.
"Shadow, I know who you are and what you have done. I know that you gathered this horde to meet me today. I know that you have the powers of secrecy, and silence, and move in the background. I don't even know your name, but I know you, Shadow. I knew all of this and I permitted it."
"Shadow, I have lived a long time, a very long time. I have been a warrior, more than that I have been warrior for what seems like a thousand lifetimes. I have fought man, beast, noble, peasant, assassin, demon, wizard, witch across ages. I have fought fear, and love, compassion and falsehood, and stood true to honour throughout. I have always won, although never without hurt. But I am old, I am so very old."
"Today I decided I would have my last battle, to test myself as a warrior does against the greatest foes that could be assembled. I thank you for that Shadow, you did well. And now it is time for me to test myself against the one foe I have not met, the last test. You wish to kill me Shadow, I know that. You could not beat me in this game of ours, this last act is of my choosing, it is what I permit, not what you can do. "
"So do it."

And the Shadow did.




The poem above is a one word changed adaption of the death poem of the samurai Toyotomi Hideyoshi, 1536-1598