Like In The Movies

"Life was shit," has been my intro to describing an experience of the last several years.  It is much easier than the alternative, longer version, which begins, "I was happy," and expresses more succinctly not only the truth but the more interesting bits of someone else's experience.  My experience.  An episode that lasted and was held together with words like, "life is shit."  It hits to the heart of the matter I think.  From the standpoint of the present tense I am proud, no, understanding of what just happened.  I have something to say now.  The older our generation gets the more entitlement we feel we deserve for quiet rooms and fear-struck audiences to hear out the 'wisdom' of the events and general knowledge we got from school or relationships or the drifting, socially acceptable, relative truth we picked up from the majority.  I am being facetious of course.  I am one of those people.  But I have an argument to back my case and I think it is worthwhile to hear out.  I'll not make this a forum for lecture, however, I would rather say these thoughts aloud where gestures and questions can carry on their work between us.  Even philosophers who define every important word they use cannot communicate an idea accurately to their peers.  Best not to pretend.

I took a frightening test online yesterday - life expectancy generated by Reuters.  The punchline is that I have fifty years to live, and I'll add 'if I'm lucky'.  A third of anything can be tragic or ecstatic.  In the case of a life lived I think it has the bittersweetness of both.  If I hold to my best guess this is all that we have, us noble human beings, and noble we most certainly.  Kings and pawns are both made out of the same carefully hewn marble against a mathematically and beautifully simple board.  Humans and the universe operate on a similar principle.  The compromise for complexity in our race is that we are bound to be a short-lived phenomena, either expelling ourselves through ignorance or being extinguished by the natural order of destruction and regeneration.  That we can understand that is one of our unique qualities.  I think we could cherish that a little more.  But my argument is not for the universal so much as the local and more current existence.  The fifty years I may have left.  I don't want to put words into anyones mouth so I will suppose in generalizations.

While living a morally, righteous and healthy lifestyle is what I often say I want, it of course isn't.  Those things are just principles that can be used when necessary to protect an otherwise debaucherous (a word?) life I really want.  If I haven't said so I am on a break from Agape Community along with the other interns.  I chose my vacation alone in Providence.  When I left I gave everyone a hug and visualized that the next time I saw them I would have a conversation about how much I miss being on the farm in simplicity and nature.  "Oh the glorious things I longed for while I was gone in the crazed, unnatural city."  I don't think this is going to happen.  Unless I am mugged and raped on the streets before going back I think I will have to admit that I love being here.  I know the reaction already for it has already come up with my subconscious.  We in the West cannot continue to live the way we do.  Not so long from now things will become just as radically different as they have in the recent past because we no longer have the resources natural and unnatural to continue.  I am not afraid of that happening.  In fact, I hope for it.  At Agape the idea is that we all need to move back into the woods and live naturally and simply.  We don't eat meat because it is unkind to animals, yes, but also because history says that we are not designed with teeth or organs to digest the food properly.  This is where one of my arguments comes in:  I don't buy it.  And it's a simple as this.  We are not now what we once were.  We are evolving just as much and often more than the life around us.  I can believe in the possibility that humans were once herbivores, but I also believe that at a given point we found it beneficial to eat something other than fruits and vegetables and beans and berries.  The claim is also that we are conscious enough to realize we can live without harming what is around us.  While this is true - that all beings are engineered to stay alive - I am also a piece of the natural order, one in which I cannot change to any significant degree.  This is just an example of so many pointless topics.  At some point in history there was a man or woman who thought up the idea to have definitions for who humans were and what they 'ought' to do... mythologically speaking.  This, I believe, is the root to every organization/religion/government that sets out to order human life.  We are not ducks lined up in a particular fashion that is perfect.  Nor are we going anywhere where those rules apply.  I am tearing through the farce like a wrecking ball to an already crumbling building, clearing the way so as to see the whole scenery behind.  This is all done inside but I have gained the confidence to admit it via weariness rather than ego.  Existence is not perfect, most would agree, but not because of any fallacy on our part.  We are because we must have been and we need to start living our lives that way.  The special, observable seat we sit in allows us to make life better for ourselves by helping others and so I do not promote total anarchy.  That said, life will happen as it happens, unaided by us.  Can we effect anything? I don't know... I try so hard, but I don't know.  I will say that admitting who I am is best thing I have ever done.  I think if I can effect someone I would do so by letting them out of the asphyxiating bag of religious belief, of social normalcy.  Say it understandingly and without fear!  I am this this gender, attracted to this gender.  I am destructive to others. I want to change - I want not to change.  I have been a greedy, untrustworthy, debaucher and I am unafraid to say so.  This is not about pride. This is about clearly seeing where you have come from and accepting the life that comes from that.  Admit that you crave sex or masturbate, steal, lie, cause others pain.  It is not about the liberty. It is not about the pride. It is about living without the weight of unnecessary (and unnatural) guilt.  People will either fail or succeed in the eyes of those who try to categorize rules so that we can fit into their standards.  There are no standards - there is only chaos.  But that is not the end of the story.  Despite truth, there is beauty, there is relationship.  And maybe, just maybe there is something more.

I have been rewatching season three of Californication today in expectation of the coming fourth season beginning in a few weeks.  If you haven't seen the show the main character, Hank Moody, is a writer in Southern California who unapologetically drinks, smokes, man-whores (it's now a verb) while trying to father a child.  Anyone who likes the show has a special place for Hank - we love that he is an asshole who sleeps around.  What keeps us liking him, however, is that he sincerely wants to be a good father.  I get chills when I see him on screen in the warmth of California, smoking a cigarette with nothing to do but enjoy life and drink away the tragedy of what it took to get there.  I honestly want that - like it is in the movies.  But life is most definitely not like that.  And so in the same moment it's not what I want.  Instead I submit to an alternative.  It's not perfect or moral or healthy or anything to do with groups.  It's soaking in what can be for as many moments as possible.  It's dragging on the best experience of our lives for as long as possible.  It's a radical submission because I don't think it happens very often. I would say that it's impossible because I don't personally know anyone who has pulled off a life like that but I am setting off to be the first.  I spoke with a girl here in Providence the night before last who has inspired me quite a bit.  In a sense she admitted the ugly truth of life in the voice of someone who is unwilling to submit to 'the way things are'.  People who have wanted money have found it and those who have sought god have found it.  I will always return to hope in people, tried or not.  There will be love in good people, shock and tingling feelings of a joy that is enough to handle.  I will have my real-life Hank Moody experiences. I will have a cigarette.

Vacation

I awoke in Connecticut on Tuesday with the fashion of a traveler.  No questions asked, just get up, find the shower, find the coffee, read until somebody shows up or wakes up.  In my childhood I might have missed home maybe once or twice but since as far as I can remember there has been a comfort in adventure - knowing that if I can survive in this new environment for today I must be able to survive it another.  But this is just a small trip and one night.  Jerrod, our part-time resident at Agape, is driving me to Providence where I have been waking up the past two mornings.  Kate gets off work at 6:00 and I was in at 1:30 so I drop by a Starbucks and buy myself an overpriced sandwich and coffee.  I figured five hours of surfing the web here wouldn't be so bad but my computer is broken in such a way that I have to hold the power chord down with my coffee in just the right way so my laptop stays charged.  Of course every time I take a sip of mocha I have to rearrange the chord again.  Eventually I drank enough coffee that my cup wasn't heavy enough to do the job, and people behind the counter were giving me funning looks for being so poor and making a home for myself at their table.  So I decided to leave.  My back hasn't been that great lately - an old injury reborn - but I managed to heave my duffel and backpack on in a reasonable manner and head towards Fox Point from Brown.  I was still too early to creepily sit at Kate's doorstep so I walked down hope street till I hit water.  There's a great park with good people on the other side of Highway 195 overlooking Providence Harbor.  I put my bags down and stretched my back.  The scenery was familiar as I had been there several times just four months ago.  I took an hour or so to soak in the moment and the memories.  Four months ago was the last time I remember being unhappy but the time I spent here was actually good by comparison.  I tried to figure out why it is that I feel sad about every memory and place from the past whether it was good or bad or whether I was with a good friend or not.  I got no further than I had with any previous time considering this.  It's one of those problems that even if solved will still leave you sad in the end.  I have been getting back into Nietzsche lately.  He lived his life in a frighteningly similar way to mine up till now.  Though we have our differences he had his philosophies that made life just tolerable enough through inaction, realizing how pain can be used to our benefit.  He once said that he wished that all of his friends and loved ones (which there were few) could be struck with all the tragedies of life, pain and intolerance, suffering.  He had an angsty way of saying he had benefited from overcoming pain and wished for that reward to be with the people he loved.  I think he was close to the point without ever actually having any real joy in his own life.  Before turning from the harbor back to Kate's place I allow myself to see the hurt of memory as it is - a glitch that can't be fixed.  I spent most of yesterday cleaning house, a blessing I must say as I had little else to do, and then rested up with reading and a few shows online.  It looks like today I'll walk around the area looking for possible jobs.  Retail is the easiest to shop for but I'll keep and eye out for shadow jobs in Craigslist.  I need to update my resume.  The last year hasn't been good for resume building as I have had trouble keeping/finding decent jobs with which to write down.  Agape will be of help.  It has sadly been my longest commitment for a long time.  That's quite alright with me today.  I'm leaving the past in it's miserable state and deciding to worry less about where I will be and how I will live.  I may end up homeless and I may end up rich - that will happen as it may - I know I am of enough worth that my life will not end up as Nietzsche's.  I've already had insanity, friends are better.

Easier to Face It

There has been a solitude and quietness in the house today and yesterday that has been missing in the community for the last several weeks.  With quiet comes thought.  Thoughts of the people in the past and present and wonderment of who will be there in the coming years.  I wanted to say some things about the people I have known and the moments we have shared over the years, how they have molded almost expressly who I am, but it's difficult to write about people you know.  Easier to know nothing of what a person thinks of us than to know that we might be hated, or even loved.  So I will pass on the shared moments for now.  Let those be reserved for the times I become an old man and reminisce of good and tragic times.  In loneliness, however, there is no emotional attachment but unto ourselves.

Being alone is not altogether a lonely thing.  In fact we crave solitude when we have had a busy day at work or been around a large group of people, feel exhausted or unclean.  It's a time to collect ourselves internally and externally.  People like me prefer to be alone during particular activities (cleaning, reading and running) while feeling the need to have others around during other actions (sleeping, eating and constructing).  Others might feel the exact opposite.  It's clear that on these occasions we act alone or in groups according to natural instincts of regularity.  But the pain of loneliness is a more touchy subject and one I would like to discuss here.  One word cannot describe the angst one goes through when others aren't around.  We tend to feel at a distance from personal touch, conversation, compassionate love, reason, protection, agreement, disagreement, etc.  It's not that hard to figure out that to solve our emotional distress we must have someone around.  Maybe we need to eat with someone, talk to them, have sex with them, play a game with them.  Fill in the missing links.  It is the WHY that perhaps needs a little understanding.  Humans have had a long history of selfishly presuming they are the center of the universe and that there is an external reason for why we are anything - in this case, social.  But quite a few animals and even plants have been known to survive purely by social networking or symbiotic relationships.  So why do we think we are any different?  Is it the consciousness of knowing we are anything?  What is this consciousness?  Are we any different for having experienced loneliness than would any other solitary being?  This is the reasoning that makes the most sense:

Lee Siegel was a professor of religion and talented magician, an expert on the street magic of India.  In his book, Net of Magic, there is a passage where he says, ""I am writing a book on magic," I explain, "and I'm asked, Real magic?" By real magic people mean miracles, thaumaturgical acts, and supernatural powers. "No" I answer, "Conjuring tricks, not real magic."  Real magic. In other words refers to the magic that is not real, while the magic that is real, that can actually be done, is not real magic."" Magic is not a bag of tricks and when we are told the truth of how a trick is done we are instantly disappointed.  We love to be mystified. Same with consciousness.  We like to think there is mystery to our minds, that it cannot be understood without adding an ethereal component beyond the trillions of cells that make up our selves.  Our consciousness is not as wonderful as we think.  Our minds, our memories, can fool and inflate what we know.  Our consciousness can change blue cars into red and add events and time to anything, even if it only happened moments before.  Darwinian evolution speaks volumes to why we feel the particular way we do that makes us think we're special.  Experiences of beauty, sadness, peace and frustration, like loneliness, can be reasoned with significant clarity.  To be alone insinuates in our minds having broken from a community that is necessary to our survival.  As simple as that?  Science has reworked the notions of existence based on simple decisions made over and over again millions of times to create something that is seemingly complex but at it's root is quite incomplex.  What would that knowledge do for the individual soul figuring a way out of their angst?  Perhaps nothing and something at the same time.  Our emotional response is both a necessity for our present evolutionary state and a nuisance held over from millions of years of selection.  If we were not pulled toward one another in the past we would not have survived as 'sapient' hominids.  Today we have a much greater chance of survival but at what cost to our minds?  Every break we take from our natural direction in history creates glitches in our psyche.  We are not use to pushing so forcefully against what we have been for hundreds of thousands of years or more.  During these months in the woods, working with my hands and living often in direct account of my days work, I have understood much better the reasons for simplicity in our lives.  It only makes sense with the rest of natural history.  If you are hungry, eat, and if you are bored, make or work play.  If you are lonely then endure the residual effects of millions of year knowing that your pain is only there for the sake of your survival and the survival the brief history that will be man and woman.

Margarine vs. Butter

It's the end of the day now and I'm laying in bed looking back and forth from my laptop screen and a luminescent scattering of stars peering in from the window above me. The window is slightly cracked, shut enough to keep in the warmth but open enough to hear the sounds of nature just out of reach.  A distant hum of a passing airliner rips apart the sight and sound of a peaceful night.  My immediate reaction is to be annoyed at the interruption of this peacefulness so far out from anywhere.  How could somebody be so separate from reality as to build a machine that cuts through the tranquility I was experiencing?  All this technology must go - we must go back to the beginning!  But I am just as quickly reminded of my own ignorance.  Without such imagination and technology I would have little hope of being here and of going anywhere.

These are the pieces of confusion I have been trying to fit together since as long as I can remember.  What is the utopia everybody imagines in daydreams and love-lusts? So long I worried about the actions taken in life.  Is my life in line with god's enough to make it to paradise, to heaven?  Will my parents discipline me today even when I try so hard to be perfect for them?  Will my friends today be my friends tomorrow and should I change my life so that all I want comes true?  What is right?  What is truth?  But as it turns out a lot of people have the same existential crises and my own uttering of questions about life become just as annoying as the next persons.  When a visitor to our community pulled out several sheets paper towel for his lunch I gasped inwardly in horror at the outrage of using bleached tree pulp for a minute sum of dribbled soup.  At least, to my comfort, I immediately laughed at myself for being so sensitive to a folly so small.  Where is the line drawn then?  Is it between using paper towels and not buying shoes made from cheap, foreign, child labour?  In a thousand years will it really matter?  Does the current of human nature change for the better when the mass percentage of humanity craves what ultimately destroys itself?  That is a frightening thought.  Some of us are outraged that America is still taking innocent lives in Iraq and Afghanistan.  We are infuriated that the last Republican in office entered these wars and disquieted that the Democrats before and after him made exactly the same decisions.  But if going to war was not left up to congress but to the decision of each individual American would it have been the same?  The masses are not as reasonable as we would like to think.  Stable women and men may have the ability to see goodness in any kind of human but in the end the world is getting larger, more populous and fast-paced, and the opportunity to create hell for others is growing.    My community thinks in non-violent ways about every facet of life and they do a pretty good job of it too.  No murder of any kind, not in war, not in judgement, not even for the non-human.  Live small, simply and local.  Don't raise a fist not even your voice.  This is wonderful and a pleasure to live amongst.  Despite this I do not think that the endeavor to spread this message will ever be taken seriously.  I do not even think that it will be heard at all by most.  Jesus Christ, the man, taught a message of pacifism and peace, sparking a radical following.  Though, within just a few hundred years this small group of people (just as groups are springing up now) became large and the message was lost entirely.  Even today the majority of Christianity, Catholic, Protestant, Schismatic and otherwise is dismally opposed to the voice of their originator.  This is just an example of many revolutions throughout time.  In the United States the view is just as foggy as it is anywhere. The airplane breaking my nightly silence is barely a breath of the problems surrounding us.  We think about how technology will solve our problems.  How can we get a car to run off of the sun?  How can we reestablish the housing market?  How will we pay off our student loans?  But the questions are just as foolish as the makeshift answer that leak from them.  Truthfully, there is no solid answer.  The problems were overlooked before even asking the questions.  Why must we have cars in the first place?  Why do we buy homes too large and too expensive, bought with money nobody has?  Why do we have to work in jobs we hate till we die to pay off an education we never use?  Many see that there is something wrong.  Some of them even understand why.  Fewer still can feel the futility of that truth.  Do we bail or hold on to childish hope?  We don't know.  Of course we don't know if by crossing a street we will be hit and killed by a car either.  I'm not taking the chance.  Hope is for children, but I still wish upon falling stars.  There is no longer adults, only adolescents making the best of a time soon to be over.  I will not bother arguing over pointless questions of religion or politics or economy or happiness.  Not unless I see you as a friend anyway.  After all I am a human nature, one that gets lonely.  One that also rambles.  There is a time for coffee and a time for philosophy.  On occasion they are at a time the same. 

To California Wine

I often would like to have all my daily thoughts transcribed somewhere for me to go back and review fleeting ideas.  Ideas on happiness and contentment, on concerns for people both in my life and outside.  Because when it comes to sitting down and saying something that will be meaningful it's the daily ponderings that really mean something.  But this is not possible and so anything written becomes an idea of a moment and not that of what I really feel or believe.  For those in my life, the interns I regularly participate in work and leisure, the people I see, they know.  My friends, those I love, know more but not the here and now.  So what is it you want to hear I wonder?  I'm not sure.

This current life is different from the last in that I have found a happiness that, though being incomplete, is the best I've found.  That is quite a statement and one I am seeking to understand perhaps to take with me into the next adventure.  The last six years have tremendously evolved to what I see now and could be the most eventful I'll ever find.  Every year has brought with it new opinions on how to be; knowledgeable, worldly, patient, reclusive, inclusive, wise.  If I say I believe something now it very well might change after the new year.  I have never been very knowledgeable nor patient or wise.  It's time this is clear.  I will not tell you this of course because it's not my idea of a good life to explain what I see but understand what you see and feel what I see.  I have become worldly.  It is easy to be so and comforting.  I am learning to be inclusive because I have had to lie my life away to be included and loved.  People are often difficult to love and sometimes impossible.  I do not regret this.  From now on there will be love where it is possible and patience when it is not.

Utter nihilism may be the clearest truth because it admits none.  I have never found happiness in this kind of truth though I strove for it many years.  Instead there is comfort in choosing.  I have chosen to not believe in a god of any kind.  Religion took hold of my early years and would not let go even till now.  I would rather belong to the hopeful in spite of this.  There is no universal morality but the rightness and wrongness we make up within ourselves.  Divided billions of times over the course of reasoning history and I am left with too staggering a figure to contemplate.  Even my own rightness and wrongness is only a guide from passions - an error I will not bother solving.  The expense of my life has been great but I have had little choice in the matter. I sit somewhere in the middle of the consequence of death and trifling in-congruences.  This will have to do.  I cannot make up for what I am culpable - not by this point.

I have experienced things unimaginable.  Not the worst of things but beyond my evolution.  This really does not matter much as it has effected all of us in these last many years.  If we were being watched we would be notable for our lives.  If.  This is why we all speak.  We want to be understood.  This is why we pray.  We need to be redeemed.  From my seat in history this has been tried and failed too many times to try again.  I am not strong enough to tackle a problem far better people have lived.  Their struggle and sacrifice will be my ticket to peace.  This will not be fair but more fair than is realized now.  Stray words mean little compared to our real heartache - the not knowing the most thinking of us are torn by.

Music has been a great healer.  Beautiful, tragic and relate-able voices and chords that bend my heart when it needs to be felt.  Film, too, has found a place within where few things have reached.  This cannot be understood unless you feel it too.  Think of what really makes you satisfied, not overjoyed, but at peace.  Now you know.  There are ugly truths behind what helps us to survive but we cannot help but be the cause of at least some of these.  People, I have found, myself included, are eager and willing to cause others pain in order to secure their well-being.  In the end I do not know anyone who found what they were looking - not for long.  To be simple seems the best of bad solutions.  It is troublesome and unwieldy for those we live among in the Western world.  It is not impossible.  I know because I cannot help but shed anything unnecessary.  This will seem to be cruel.  Perceptions can be that way.  The cruelty of my own parents' rejection was like this in a way.  I do not forgive or even think of them because it was only that way by force of an uncontrollable complexity.  I cannot control this life either.  Like a read book on a table I walk around and look at it from a distance, observing a life written on pages, to be interpreted and misunderstood at the will of the reader.  But I hold this book as precious.

My friends, you are building the main of my life right now and have been for several years.  In return I will put together the pieces you may be missing - because I miss you too.  We will do many things yet.  For some there will simply not be the place or time.  This only means that I am overflowing with your goodness.  I look forward to the eating and drinking and socializing.  I look forward to the joy of seeing you and the pain of knowing you are gone forever.  In the end we will join one another in that place.  This solidarity is the only one we have.  It is beautiful and not sad.  Is this not enough to let me go?  I will join you all someday but not now.  This long walk has been necessary.

To California wine.  To rocks in green pastures.

An Interview with Jim Douglass

This is an interview of Jim Douglass, author of JFK and the Unspeakable, by Brayton Shanley that I transcribed this weekend.

Brayton:          Jim, you have been inspired to live a life of non-violence; be a disciple of non-violence.  How did that happen in your life?  What were the major influences let’s say?

Jim Douglass:  I think it happened because… when I wanted to be a nuclear physicist I realized that I was not only totally incompetent, but that all kinds of questions were around me and I couldn’t answer them.  And I just realized I was in darkness and I left the campus where I was studying, told my parents I was giving up my scholarships, and I joined the United States Army at a time when I would otherwise have been drafted and I couldn’t get back into school because it was between semesters in the nineteen-fifties.  In other words I just went in a direction that seems paradoxical because I joined the Army.  That opened me to a totally new life than the already determined one in relation to the influences of my parents, my schooling and my background and from that point on I decided I would just open myself to God’s will and to whatever I could learn without any decision as to what I was going to do - be a nuclear physicist, be a lawyer.  That’s not the point whether you’re called to be.  And I especially wanted to have after twelve years of schooling, grade school, and high school, and Catholic school I wanted to finally learn what it meant to be a Catholic Christian and a follower of Jesus and I didn’t know… That was the basic point of turning and all the rest, such as meeting Dorothy Day, and beginning to read the Catholic Worker and write for it, that all came out of the basic decision to be open rather than to think I knew what I was doing.

Brayton:          And then there was the turning point when you were teaching in Hawaii?

Jim Douglass:  Yes, that’s the second turning point when I was teaching a course on the Theology of peace.  Dr. King was assassinated April 4, 1968.  Some of my students without my knowledge burned their draft cards, submitted themselves to years in prison, some of which they served, and began the Hawaii resistance.  They asked if I’d like to join them.  In a way as though they were very non-violent about it saying put up or shut up Mr. Professor-of-non-violence.  And I did join their group and went to jail with them and that was the beginning of the end of my academic career but a baptism into non-violence as a way of life.  So through my students and especially through Dr. King I had to go a new way and that also in a long, longer experiment in truth meant understanding Dr. King’s martyrdom as my way to life.

Brayton:          And you continued to connect this with faith this idea of non-violence and faith and Jesus.

Jim Douglass:  Well, Jesus’ teaching was primary for me and the faith has been liberated for my by realizing after some study and reflection that as I see it the greatest follower of Jesus was not a Christian he was a Hindu, Mohandas Gandhi.  So to understand non-violence I haven’t gone so much to doctrinal formulations which are ‘okay’ but to the way, of course the way of Jesus and in our own context the way of Gandhi, the way of Dr. King, the way of Dorothy Day, and Gandhi in particular because I think he more than any other person I’ve encountered just as Jesus was put flesh into the non-violence of God I think Gandhi in his experiments in truth taught us a method, a way of living the gospel and so he’s not only for me the greatest exemplar but also the greatest theologian of non-violence.  And truth is God just as Gandhi said and if we go deep enough into the truth we’re going into the presence and transforming power of God.

Brayton:          Now you gave a lot of your life and time to work in opposition to nuclear weapons.  What inspired you to go there?  Why that?

Jim Douglass:  When I was a freshman at Santa Clara University a very great teacher whom I had for one semester, Herbert Burgh, introduced our class simultaneously to Dorothy Day, the Catholic Worker, the threat of the total destruction of the world by nuclear weapons, and the meaning of the gospel through the non-violence of Jesus.  That was a pretty big integration.  So my understanding of non-violence initially is simultaneous with my recollection that we were and are living in a time when it all can be all that we see around us can be annihilated by the evil that we have invented and put out there.  I can’t do one without the other.  I can’t go around saying I’m a non-violent guy without going to the question and the threat and the dark horror the clout of nuclear weapons, it’s the same thing, you can’t do one without the other.  To this day I believe if we want to be non-violent, and we must be, we need to respond to nuclear war and to all the other different dimensions of peace and justice that are related to it but we cannot ignore that one and on the other hand we also have to recognize that Dr. King’s prophesy and Jesus’ prophesy which lies behind it that non-violence or non-existence is not… it’s better to be non-violent and that would be helpful.  It’s non-violence or non-existence.

Brayton:          So you have a history here.  It very much starts in the sixties with Vietnam and then goes into the question of nuclear weapons.  You write some books on non-violent cross amongst the other books so you’re very much delving into the intellectual and spiritual tradition in these matters and then you’re active, you’re on the front lines, you’re resisting at weapons facilities, you’re spending some time in jail.  And that whole stretch through history.  What did it teach you? Did you ever consider that?  What did it teach you about life and life on earth?

Jim Douglass:  Well if you I think if you begin falling away or you’re trying to understand signs the signs of providence, the invitations of people, the presence of God and of grace it’s going to keep leading you into deeper dimensions of truth and I keep getting surprised where I end up.  But then looking back and seeing, well, that’s where it was leading all the time.  For example today to be writing a book about President John F. Kennedy, I would never have imagined doing such a thing, even writing a book, actually, much less a book on this subject when I began to do writing.  And I could write about the theology of non-violence.  And then when I think back I’m not a historian, I’ve never studied history as a major anything of that nature and to even have the ability to write a history or investigate a crime because there’s a crime involved in this particular history.  I don’t have any of the skills for that.  But then I think back and realize that the thing I wrote before then which was because I had to write it was an effort to see the historical Jesus.  Trying to see the historical Jesus and write about that willy nilly or learning the historical methods.  I hardly had a purpose of writing about the historical Jesus to write about the historical John F. Kennedy, but that’s exactly what happened.  It’s the same methods to understand either.  As you’re going along God gives you what you need and the questions you need to follow.

Brayton:          So you spent the last twelve/fifteen years on this book JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and why it Matters.  Please don’t be insulted by this question but what is your thesis?  Can you tell us in the absence of having read the entire book or the readership getting this interview?  What is the thesis of the book?

Jim Douglass:  I don’t think I could call it a thesis but the revelation of the story which is not my story and it’s not even John F. Kennedy’s story and it’s certainly not a story that got invented by anybody is that a miracle happened.  Let’s put it in another context.  An event that has no good explanation in the terms in which I would ordinarily think happened.  And that is that the most critical moment perhaps in history when two enemies were on the verge of total nuclear war, annihilating what we’re looking outside this window and the lives on this planet.  At the worst point in that crisis they turned to each other and recognized they needed to join together and acknowledged each of them the truth in his enemy.  The truth across the gulf in that instance in the Cold War between two polarized ideologies and two huge power blocks and the greatest and most destructive military forces in history.  And because John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev as enemies overcame their alienation from each other and because they turned to each other in ways that I tried to describe, certainly inadequately, they had more in common from that point on with each other than either had to his own national security state.  So I can find hope in Dallas, Texas where the President of the United States was assassinated because of why that happened.  It happened because he was willing to die for the truth.  It happened because the national security state felt it was necessary to kill him because he was a traitor.  I can take hope in that event because his courage made it possible for us to sit here and hope and work and struggle for a world that continues to be there and so that all of us on this planet still have a say in it.  Because he turned in the traditional, biblical, gospel sense of turning.

Brayton:          So what happened November 22, 1963 according to your research?  What happened on that day?

Jim Douglass:  What happened was that his security was withdrawn.  He was driven into a trap.  He had been set up.  The entire context was being controlled.  Intelligence people were everywhere.  All the major agencies of his government were being manipulated.  Secret service, intelligence agencies, Army, the local police, the doctors were being prepared as his body was being taken from Dallas.  The autopsy was being set up.  The technicians for X-Rays were being prepared in such a way that it would all be lied.  It would all be falsified.  The lie to us as a people was already in preparation so it could be wired across the world as soon as he was assassinated.  A man, Lee Harvey Oswald, who had been an operative for the CIA was ready to go in the sense that he was on his way to his own execution although it is likely that he himself had been trying to prevent President Kennedy’s assassination.  All of those things were happening.  In other words it was the unspeakable.  Something we have not confronted to this day as a people and which is key to our understanding not only of something that went on forty-seven years ago but more significantly of something that is happening right now.

Brayton:          I’ve heard you say that this is proof, this book, that the United States killed its sitting president and that is the unspeakable.  Why is it unspeakable?  Why can’t the truth that is coming from so many quarters, so many questions, so many obvious contradictions, why can’t it just surface?  What forces are holding that from becoming fact?

Jim Douglass:  The forces certainly exist in the government and the corporate world behind it.  They do not want us to see the connections in a way that would allow us to understand that 1963 is right now.  But perhaps also equally significantly, perhaps equally of importance is the unspeakable in us, our reluctance to go there.  For example, a simple question, who paid for the assassination of John F. Kennedy?  A researcher would probably sit down and say okay let’s follow the money and see if we can see if maybe it came from here or there.  Once we understand the profound and overwhelming involvement of our government the answer is very simple.  We did.  We paid for the assassination of John F. Kennedy, we, the citizens of the United States.  Our tax dollars paid for the assassination of the President.  That raises a lot of questions.  It raises questions about complicity, about responsibility, about what I do on April 15, what I do every day of my life in terms of giving over my power to other people to make the decisions about life or death whether it be in Afghanistan or Iraq or on the streets of Dallas when Kennedy was assassinated or across from the Lorraine Motel shot fired to kill Dr. Martin Luther King which was also paid for us, citizens of this country.  We’re basically giving over those decisions to forces of the unspeakable and their unspeakable because we don’t want to recognize that it all comes back to ourselves.

Brayton:          Would it be a personal collapse, annihilation of ego which is based on delusion?  Is it that big, is this force so total that it is paralyzed in falsehood, refusing to see that one and on equal two?  It’s has to be pretty strong, pretty deep.

Jim Douglass:  It is.  It is so deep that the best people in the peace and justice movement do not want to go there.  It is so strong that the people we most trust that we turn on the radio to say, oh this is one program at least that I would listen to and really explore the truth.  You won’t find that program going there probably when it comes to the hardest questions which includes the one we’re talking about right now, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. You won’t find that program or some of my best friends, who I respect profoundly, going there.  (whom I respect. I didn’t say suspect.  I do not suspect them of anything.  I respect them.)

Brayton:          What were you trying to accomplish?  Were you trying to accomplish something?  Do you want to change something about the unspeakable?  Do you think there is hope that this might change the unspeakable? Do you put this in the hands of God as confessing the unspeakable?  Is there any deep motive going on in you that gave fifteen years to this?

Jim Douglass:  My hope is for the ability to see.  My hope is for new eyes.  A phrase that came when Robert Ellsberg and I were working on the introduction to the book was contemplative history.  It’s not as if you study what happened to Kennedy in order to do something.  In order to go out and have a new investigate of the assassination, that’s not going to work because the resources that would go into that are the sources of the assassination. That wouldn’t work.  Why even do it because now that I understand what happened to Kennedy and what he did so that it wouldn’t happen to us in the sense of nuclear war I see things very differently and very hopefully.  So if you go deeply enough into the darkness there’s light.  Or if you reach the point where you’re going to as Gandhi said, commit yourself to an experiment in truth without reservation as to the consequences.  You’re eyes are not only opened but there’s a new possibility.  And the people in the other dimension who discovered nuclear power I think they went in all kinds of ways and then all of the sudden that opened up.  They didn’t necessarily say I’m going to go out and discover that.  If you’re trying to, as Gandhi would put it, really get to the heart of a realization of the power of truth which is the power of God, truth is God, then you have to go wherever the darkness leads you.

Brayton:          So JFK, who I surmise from what you’re saying and what we’ve discussed and reading the book.  That JFK was a unique President, he was a courageous President, he was a morally deep and perhaps influenced by his Christianity, he stood up to his own national security state and his generals, which is somewhat without precedent, he wanted to end the war in Vietnam, he wanted to end nuclear weapons, he wanted to end war, he was tired of war, apparently he was going to be some [reproachment] with Castro through Khrushchev, who was the enemy.  What is the significance of this that he was as the President… so what?  What does that mean?  What does that mean for us fifty years later?

Jim Douglass:  When he was President I didn’t look to John Kennedy as a source of light.  Where President today, Barack Obama, who many people championed when he was running for office and they now feel totally disillusioned because he has chosen to escalate the war in Afghanistan and numerous other ways has moved in many ways that contradict the tradition they think he espoused when he was running for office.  If we look into Kennedy’s history in relation to the eyes, for example, in my case when he was alive, we didn’t expect him to do what he did.  We didn’t expect grace to work in that way.  We didn’t think, depending on what our political allegiances were, whether we were conservative or liberal or radical, whatever we were, whether we were on the Soviet side or the American side, human beings were not expected to have the kind of grace that they did in that crisis.  What I’m trying to say is that we cannot give up on Barack Obama, we cannot give up on ourselves.  We cannot give up on the total transformation of race that is present in the moment.  And that we can discern in ways that we will not discern unless we see how grace has happened.  And grace has happened in the case of Kennedy and Khrushchev in an inconceivable degree.  If we understand that we can understand that the same possibility exists right now for each of us for the vision of Dr. King for a non-violent revolution and for Barack Obama being willing to go the distance, which of course would mean Dallas for him in one form or another.  We should recognize that we need to go to Memphis with Dr. King at the same time he’s going to Dallas.  It’s not right to do one without the other and we need to go to Memphis as soon as possible because it’s the larger non-violent revolution that provides the context of a President to be courageous enough to give his life for peace.

Brayton:          Would you agree or not that Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King, Gandhi, are not encased in evil, they have not joined something that could appear to be intrinsically evil, that is to say the United States government, the whole concept in size and history developed as it has historically, economically, is simply domination, is economic domination military given to that economic domination to protect it, to advance it, to increase it if possible.  All these men, John F. Kennedy, Barack Obama, and Khrushchev are incased in something that appears to be intrinsically evil so that to change it would take a miracle and how do people who might see it that way relate to Barack Obama?  Is it not simply an extension of this…

                        …What do we do with John Kennedy?  What do we do with Barack Obama?  Do we dialogue with them do we pray for them?  Do we vote for them?  Do we finally vote for Barack Obama or what?  This is the question so I’m trying to recreate this because it’s very important for me, Jim, and I’m very interested in where you come down with this?  Have I recreated it enough for a response?

Jim Douglass:  Well kind of the best case analysis to even have a Barack Obama as possible person to dialogue with let’s back up a little bit and say what about Mr. Bush that preceded him.  Or let’s back up further and say how about Nixon or… It’s a question that goes deeper than what might be considered the most hopeful representative of the presidency.  Do we dialogue with someone in a position who we think is not going to be helpful to us and that is pervaded by the intrinsic evil of the system? Sure, why not.  Gandhi would talk with him.  He did – he wrote him a letter.  I don’t the question is who you talk with but what you say to that person and whether it’s possible to do it both truthfully and lovingly at the same time.  The question that is paramount to me in that respect is can we believe that grace can happen anywhere with anyone?  I think Dorothy’s answer to that was, ‘yes’, and for Francis’ answer in terms of where he went and with whom he tried to speak, St. Francis of Assisi, I think the answer was, ‘yes’.  In the Catholic Worker movement we have a tendency to be so rightly sensitive to the power…

                        … We may not allow grace to be there in ways that would help us.

Brayton:          But why bother at all?  There’s only so much time in the day.  If the United States government is too evil, is too far gone, is too well developed, why give hope to that?  Why not give hope to non-cooperating with that and trying to build another world at the bottom or at the middle?  Why give it something when there is no real hope in it?  It’s a paradox because I feel differently about Barack Obama but I still see him encased in the evil and now he’s being mangled, he’s lost control of his own image, his own story.  The right wings have a story now and they’re telling the world what his story is.  So you say, ‘there it is’.  If we’re going to spend time as Christian non-violent people or people who follow Gandhi, Gandhi did say at the end of his life we must all stay together removed from power or politics, anyone who goes into it is contaminated.  How do we not remain contaminated and how do we not go for false hope?  There was a lot of energy around false hope around Barack Obama, naive, false hope, and now they’re disillusioned by the fact that he’s killing people.

Jim Douglass:  But that’s distinct from dialoging with people.  Gandhi didn’t have any great hope that by Nehru becoming prime minister of India things were going to go toward a non-violent future but that didn’t mean he didn’t have his friend Nehru over to dinner the next night.  These are different things.  You can dialogue with anyone without aspiring to a position of power or thinking that the system that person is a part of is going to make a difference.  The reason you dialogue with a person is because of the person and especially if you see that the person has the hope of being way beyond the system that is all around him or her.  So Gandhi’s going to have the people that are repudiating him and betraying him who were his followers.  They’re still going to come to dinner.  And they’re still going to ask him questions and they’re going to change their thinking even in that context because of the way he sees things.  And Gandhi never ceased being a politician.  At the same time as he never ceased saying that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely and seeing it going on with the people closest to him and the revolution that he was leading.

Brayton:          They would come to him – he won’t go to them in terms of power structure.  He won’t go to join them - to talk to them – they will go to him.  They will move in his direction.

Jim Douglass:  That is true but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t write to Churchill or he doesn’t stand… Many people criticize Gandhi at the end of his life because he was very persistent in going to Jinnah.  He went to Jinnah and they thought well this just gives Jinnah more power because he’s waiting for you to come to him.  Gandhi didn’t care how people perceived it.  What he wanted to do was follow the will of God and he felt called.  Of course this was at the last moment to save a unified India.  The last hope was that he could get through to Jinnah which he failed to do.  But he didn’t stop trying because of what his followers thought was giving power to Jinnah and he may have been wrong but that was his way.

Brayton:          Did do we dialogue and pray for Barack Obama so that he becomes more non-violent, that we’re giving him a chance as a human being that we love and understand and maybe even admire so that he will have a chance to become more non-violent.  Most of us did not feel that there was a chance for George Bush.  My own feelings for George Bush perhaps prevented me from perhaps considering such a venture.

Jim Douglass:  Well George Bush while he was in office did good things.  I’m not saying that you’re wrong.  I’m saying that while he was in office he did good things.  And Bono in U2 managed to get him to do some good things and in other areas I think… I’m not a scholar of George Bush… I know he did good things while he was President of the United States, while at the same time he did totally horrific things like everybody else.  He is different sides.  He is a human being.  And if you had a purpose that can somehow support or encourage or allow grace to work through you to redeem that part of that human being where he can go with it and basically because you believe in him – then do it - whether it’s George Bush or Hitler or Barack Obama or anyone in-between.

Brayton:          I agree with that and I think that’s Christian non-violence.  I think the temptation with Obama is that I relate to him, I think I understand him in a way that I perhaps didn’t understand Reagan or Bush or Bush first or Bush second or Nixon and maybe that’s self-righteous too but maybe that’s what got the energy going for Barack Obama.  That the middle left could relate to this guy.  He spoke their language.  Therefore I think that we can get him to be more in the Kennedy mode because Kennedy was like that too.

Jim Douglass:  But recognize that if he were to do that, that’s the end of Barack Obama as the President of the United States.  It’s the beginning of Barack Obama as a transforming vision.

Brayton:          And that’s why some people say and I think it’s very true along those lines that the best thing he could have done was be a four year President.  Get in there and say tell the truth for four years and if he absolutely did something they could impeach him on let them impeach him.

Jim Douglass:  Well, yeah, he would be less than a four year President. 

Brayton:          But to try to be an eight year President would be a mistake.  So, what’s next?  Is there anything next that you would like to tell us about in terms of a book or an idea or a campaign or are your hands full with doing JFK and the Unspeakable?

Jim Douglass:  I’m finished doing that.  I have a book, a story, of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King to complete and in order to do that I found I had to write the story of Gandhi’s assassination, so that’s what I’m working on now.

Brayton:          Good – well, thank you for all you do and all you continue to do.  And stay healthy and clear headed.  That’s what it all takes if you’re going to spend all these years on it. 

Jim Douglass:  Thank you, Brayton.

St. Francis Day

A group of Burundian singers and dancers - they stole the show. 

Paula Green: founder of Karuna Center, school for internation training, CONTACT and winner of the Unsung Heroes of Compassion given by His Holiness the Dalai Lama

Ellen Finnigan: resident intern and probably hardest worker that day

Myako Tagushi

Brayton Shanley: Co-founder of Agape

April writing for her article and several students from Amhurst, MA

Amanda Daloisio: Catholic Worker

Robyn Murray: Combat Veteran spoke about the horrors of her years in Iraq

Ban Al-Mahfoudh: Lived through two of the Iraqi invasions by American forces

Singers from Smith

Maryam Shansab

Martha Hennessy: seventh granddaughter of Dorothy Day

Robyn and Bill

Looking Closer

A walk to the Quabbin Reservoir revealed a quickly changing season.  The ground is neatly covered with a thick layer of foliage.

A distant view of the changing colours.  The camera was running out of batteries and had trouble focusing on the subject.  Ironically so were my own eyes.

I'm finally getting the virus that the rest of the interns kept from me for over a week.

The quote to the left of our sink - The quote in front of our sink is from Thich Nhat Hanh and more or less is about meditating while washing the dishes... Ellen thought it would be funny to quote a man who says to wash slowly when Suzanne is always wanting us to speed up.

One of April's articles about St. Francis Day - Our star journalist

One of many many streams on the way to the reservoir.

Tall panorama of one of our trails

A random pit being filled with metal pipes and barrels... oddly beautiful given the surroundings.

Close up of a bee