Ponderings

If a Type A person is aware of and attentive to details, I confess to being a Type Y. Occasionally I do attend a detail but the experiences are rare and precious.

As I sat in my car with the police bubbles dancing in my review mirror this morning, I couldn’t help but think that the world is designed for Type A people. When the officer approached my car, I had to admit that I had absolutely no idea why he stopped me. Completely without guile I had no requisite adrenalin rush and no timely tears. Which was only the beginning of the problem.

My sin, he deadpanned, was rolling through a stop. Although I am typed way down the list, I am not stupid so I didn’t offer the words that came quickly to mind. This is, after all, St. Louis. And everyone rolls through stop signs; if you pause too long the people behind you start honking.

When he said, “Driver’s license and insurance,” I realized problem number two. I have both, but not in the same place and not with me. I know exactly where the current insurance card is sitting and I shared that with the officer. It is on my desk with sermon notes scribbled around it. As he continued to glare at me, I realized that the encounter is not going well.

Taking my old insurance card (the best I could do in the moment) and my license, he said, “I’ll be back.” He went back to the flashing bubble mobile and I sat in my car and began to assess the situation. One thing I noted was location; parked in front of the elementary school cafeteria his flashing lights were bound to attract the attention of every child in the school. Drawn to his lights, they were no doubt also witnessing their pastor in the criminal position. Are the lights really necessary? Do they provide traffic safety for the stop or are they merely a means of humiliation? Another learning was the slow crawl of time when in a position of humility. Although probably only minutes, it seemed like it took him hours to write the tickets.

Yes, tickets; one for the failure to make a complete stop, one for the failure to have on my person the current insurance card. Turns out that because the stop sign was in a slow speed zone (near the school) the fine actually doubles. That I was traveling well within the speed limit is apparently irrelevant. I have no idea yet what the insurance card on my desk will cost; that requires a “court appearance”. Ouch.

Which brings me to the inevitable conclusion that being a Type Y person in a Type A world is expensive. The financial consequences of this personality type don’t end with traffic court. When I failed to read my calendar recently and miss a doctor’s appointment, I learned about something called a “missed appointment fee”. In fact, the missed appointment fee is almost double the co-pay!
Clearly the appointment schedulers and traffic officers are gifted with a Type A personality, or at least closer to A than Z. Given their success at collecting fines from us Type Y folk, I can only conclude that the Type A’s have garnered the positions of power in our culture and are profiting from the disparity. The list of “fees” for Type Y people can be extensive and range from “late fees” to burned coffee pots. (Note to Type Y persons: Thermal coffee pots with no burners are the solution to this problem.) The toll of life for a Type Y person in a Type A world is high. Persecution is the systematic mistreatment of one group by another, and one wonders at what point an inconvenience becomes a mistreatment and a societal preference morphs into persecution.

Given that the processing of the experience in a Type Y world yielded a topic for my weekly Ponderings, I suppose I cannot claim the experience as a total loss. Still, this is a pretty expensive column!

As we embrace the new day with a historic election in the rearview mirror, we are left with a cacophony of emotions.

The margin of victory in this election was considered huge with Obama garnering 53% of the vote. With McCain at only 46%, the margin is clear enough to dispel any sense of disbelief but it is a far cry from unanimity. Only just last week we were witnessed crowds gathered at rallies chanting in opposition peppered with hateful and frightening rhetoric. As the new day dawned with sounds of jubilation, these voices may have been dwarfed but they are not gone. Where does this energy go when the party is over? And what of the millions of Americans who were appalled by this frightful display but were still compelled by McCain’s vision of politics and economics? Obama pledged to be their president as well; will he succeed?

In the rubble of the morning after, I am proud to have received an email for David Plouffe addressed to the “first 100,000”. From the outset, I found hope in the message of my UCC brother. His lineage and name were hopeful, but even more his words and the way he shared them. Obama’s ability to inspire, his commitment to creative thinking, his passion for people were and are remarkable. In the tumultuous days of the Primary season with so many candidates I could take a more public and vocal position even as a minister. When the field had narrowed back to our two party system, I felt the imperative to attempt neutrality. (Admittedly my attempt was never mastery.) Yet as I stepped aside, I watched a groundswell step in. The involvement was utterly astounding and was a testament to the power of a people inspired. An enormous effort built on a platform of hope.

Perhaps the soundbyte most stunning for me was the mention of Reagan’s revolution “25 years ago”. It seems like yesterday that ‘Reaganomics’ was sweeping the nation and would-be socialists like myself were decrying the implications. Yet a quarter of a century has passed and the sun still rises in the east. To be sure the implications of deregulation are felt profoundly in this new day and the pattern that has shaped the ensuing years will continue to reverberate for decades of not generations. But the ensuing years also brought the birth of my two children, their toddler years, their elementary years, and now the teen years. As my children come into adulthood, they do so with Ronald Reagan as only a figure in their history books. The cycle of life continues to unfold.

For this one brief moment, however, the world stopped and caught their breath. A child from the wrong side of the tracks with a single mom, an absent dad, and a foreign name was elected President of the United States. All things are possible. And with that astounding bit of promise, we can get on with the business of the day which is that of healing.

On November 5th, in the year of our Lord 2008, the sun will rise on the righteous and the unrighteous alike. In the early morning light, brave hearts will absorb the remnants of a historic battlefield, an election like no other in our lifetimes. The only remaining world superpower, bruised and bloody but still standing, will have elected a new president.

The only certitude as the new day dawns is the presence of winners and losers.

The pollsters are working double time not only collecting data but trying to interpret the data so as to successfully predict the winner. The lottery may be a safer bet. The American people are incredibly frustrated and amazingly fickle. Again we find ourselves divided down the middle with race and class playing outsized roles as the young college kids vie with Joe six-pack for the heartland.

Although the contentiousness of this election cycle seems unique, historians remind us that there is nothing new under the sun. David Mc McCullough’s brilliant work, John Adams, made even more accessible by HBO’s dramatization, was a prescient reminder that the constitutional democracy that we assume to be normative was in fact a bold experiment just two centuries ago. Even in its inception, the dark underbelly of human avarice was palpable, an underbelly which has developed thick calluses over the ensuring decades. Winners were chosen not necessarily on leadership skill but more substantively on political connectedness; not for the good of the whole but for the advancement of self-interest. This grand experiment that we call American democracy was never pure, but it was effective.

Given the ‘kitchen sink’ mentality that now passes for campaigning, even the effectiveness of the system comes into question. In an age of instant communication where the primary messages are barbed pointed fingers, what was designed to be a discourse of ideas has devolved into a propaganda contest. To be sure there are important ideas and fundamental values at issue during this, and indeed every, election cycle. Although there are substantive similarities between the positions of the two presidential candidates, they represent two distinctive trajectories for our nation and, with slightly more than half of us in support, our nation will follow only one of them. Such a victory rings hallow.

As a theologian, I am struck by the disconnect between our better human impulses and the system into which we have settled. What was once a bold experiment has become an antiquated institution. With the bypass equipment of digitization, we have ended up with something that more closely resembles Frankenstein than our Founding Fathers. We are a people desperately in need of a new generation of creative minds to begin to discern patterns of governance for a digital age.

As the election draws ever closer, so too the inevitability of the grief work on November 5th for half of us. May the half that is celebrating have the wisdom to also include prayers for healing. May we all, winners and losers, pause on Wednesday morning with prayers for renewed vision.

It’s never good news when your community makes the CNN daily headline, and today was no exception. An HIV scare at a “suburban St. Louis high school” has caused the nation to catch their breath, once again looking at St. Louis in disbelief.

After reading the article at CNN, I was pretty confused. The information was inflammatory but scanty. I flipped to the Post Dispatch website (stltoday.com) for a more detailed report. Silence. Some silences feel more ominous than others. There were no headers on the story so I searched for “HIV” and found a story from last week about HIV testing at Normandy High School. Apparently the story had already come and gone from the front page of our consciousness.

The actual infection rate at the school is unknown, what is known is that health officials for undisclosed reasons believe that many of the students may have been exposed to the infection. Health officials are therefore encouraging widespread (confidential) testing to limit further exposure and to offer proactive treatment.

HIV/AIDS was a deadly plague that came of age at the same time as I, some twenty years ago. Then we knew it to mean almost certain and gruesome death. Over the years, scientists have found no vaccine and no cure but huge strides have been made in both the prevention of the disease and the treatment. It is now a chronic illness that, with access to medical care, can often be successfully managed.

A disease that is spread through body fluids, the most vulnerable populations continue to be those without access to prevention and treatment. Without access to even basic information and health care, the disease has ravaged huge swaths of the African continent. So too this pernicious disease continues to ravage the poorest neighborhoods of our American cities.

Normandy has some of these neighborhoods. The median household income in Normandy is just half of what it is county wide. Poverty is prevalent with 65% of the high school students and 80% of the junior high having eligibility for the federal “free lunch” program. Given the susceptibility of economically vulnerable populations, the HIV scare in Normandy should not be a surprise. What is surprising is how in the matter of two decades we have ghettoized a hideous public health scourge.

HIV/AIDS continues to be a major public health conundrum with no simple solutions. Comprehensive sex education would go a long way to preventing the sexual spread of the disease and needle exchange programs have proven to reduce the spread of the disease among IV drug users; tragically both of these interventions have been stalled by so the called Christian community. We have denied education and preventative measures to our children in an attempt to force compliance with a particular moral code, a ruthless choice that is literally killing our children.

WWJD? Consistently Jesus moved beyond the simple mores of the moral code to offer real healing to the people. In his name, we can do no less. The very least we can do is offer the best of our education and prevention tools to all of our children, including condoms and needles, today. Tomorrow is too late.

As our congregation shifted from one governing structure to another, our then-president’s (Wynn Miller) mantra was “breathe”. Even as we teased him unmercifully about the advice, we were aware that the simplicity belies a deeper truth. As I listened to the presidential debates last night, I thought a little breathing might have been helpful.

Given the avalanche of bad news that awaits us each time we read the paper, we probably could all use a little breathing.

Pondering the news, I find myself wanting to offer some sage advice. I want to have a plan of action or at least to see some semblance of a path. In an election season, clearly we have much to do in terms of campaign activity. Yet in many of our families, we will cancel each other’s votes at the polls. Although I have a very clear vision of the best choice, I am humbled to realize that people of good faith are campaigning on both sides. Perhaps clear, my vision is nonetheless limited.

The same is true for any of the issues we face as a people, as a local community and as a nation. Good people of faith see the same issues from different perspectives and reach different conclusions. All the more troubling is the realization that I could be wrong. Even if I had sage advice to offer, which I don’t, I would be loathe to offer it.

Which brings me back to breathing. Being mindful of the breath that enters my lungs, I slow down. Remembering to exhale, I begin to relax. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and the world didn’t end when it collapsed. Jesus didn’t have answers for the Pharisees so I can quit trying. Breathing, slowly and mindfully. What are my choices today? What are my options for making a positive difference in the world today? What are the values that I bring to this day? What candle is in front of me at this moment?

Centered and breathing, I can light one candle. And lighting one candle is all we are ever expected to do.