My 200th blog

My Two-hundredth Blog

Written by Dan McDonald: aka the Panhandling Philosopher

 

            This blog is my 200^th blog. I am including a photograph of me for free. It probably is no great prize as I tend to like other people’s photographs but when I see my photograph I say something like “OK, you’ve seen it, now let’s move on, thank you!”

Photo taken in a meadow in front of the church where I attend

 

            I’m not sure I gained much wisdom in writing these 200 blogs. But looking back on the experience of writing 200 blogs in 27 months has definitely left me with at least one impression.

            The chief impression I am left with is how forgetful most of my blogs have been. I don’t mean that other readers have forgotten them. The truth is to remember the first blog I offered on my blog spot, I had to scroll back to the beginning. I didn’t have a clue what my first blog was, and I wrote it in February 2013. It has made me to think of thinking, writing, and blogging like eating food. There are few dinners we eat that we can remember months later, but they have had their impact on us even if they are not specifically special or able to be remembered. There are few times when a dinner is so special we remember it for months to come. I am learning that my writing is that way as well.

            This made me think of how as an Anglican, for most of this millennium, I learned a simple table prayer that goes with every meal whether an ordinary meal or a “dine at your finest restaurant” affair. Maybe when we sit down to read a book or when we sit down to think and write a piece for a blog we should think of this as sitting down at a table to take in or prepare food for the mind and soul. Then the same Anglican table prayer would resonate with our activity whether what we read was something common to be read and probably forgotten or something special to be remembered as a great event. We would pray: “Bless O’ Father, these gifts to our use and us to thy service. Make us mindful of the needs of others and grateful for all thy blessings through Jesus Christ our Lord.”

Swordfish at Becco Restaurant – 355 West 46^th Street, New York, New York

            For me, one of the memorable dining experiences was eating swordfish at Becco’s an Italian restaurant in the area known as restaurant row along Manhattan’s West side not far from the theater district. I ate the dinner alone when the person I was scheduled to meet had to postpone. I felt a bit sorry for myself but I did want the experience of eating at a fine Italian restaurant. At first the table next to me was also empty, but soon three ladies were seated there. I tried not to look over at them too much, but I undoubtedly failed because we hardly ever fail at anything so much as when we tell ourselves not to do something. If we want to succeed at not doing something we don’t preach “don’t do this” to ourselves but rather we set our minds on doing something else. Trying not to look at three attractive ladies when you are sitting alone in a restaurant probably didn’t succeed very well. Hopefully my gawking was kept to a minimum. But I did notice how their eating differed from mine. I was trying to absorb the whole of a Becco’s experience whereas they were eating like they would be back and so took ordinary eating portions. They had salads and some pasta and called it a meal. I remember hearing them talk of the show and their dance routines. Evidently they were performers on Broadway. In other words they were simply working folk meeting at a restaurant while I was traveling a long distance to New York City to experience something I had never before experienced.

            My first blog was a review of the movie Ondine. I actually still like what I wrote. Believe me there are things I have written that leave me cringing with things I placed in my blogs. I like writing movie reviews, especially the kind where I review a movie that I came to love that I think most of my readers may have never experienced. There were a couple of other early movie reviews that I can still appreciate when I read them. There was “The Mill and the Cross” which is a movie that imaginatively portrays a sixteenth century artist explaining his masterpiece to a buyer of fine art. The artist is portrayed describing how he places the crucifixion of Christ in a setting in sixteenth century Holland. The setting of Christ’s crucifixion is in the middle of the painting surrounded by a living city with people going about their ordinary lives, scenes brought to life in the movie. The artist explains how Christ’s cross is in the middle of everything where it is hidden by the townspeople’s activities. Christ’s crucifixion right in the middle of everything is obscured only by our being captured in all our daily routines of life. A third movie review I enjoyed writing was written about the definitely not for kids French movie entitled “Don’t Look Back”. It was a psychological horror movie depicting a devastating self-identity crisis in which the main character is presented by the combination of two actresses; Monica Bellucci and Sophie Marceau. Maybe what I offered was less like the fine offering of Becco swordfish and the surroundings of a fine Manhattan restaurant. But hopefully if I may have offered tasty Polish sausage and sauerkraut; or some hearty bacon, eggs, and toast with coffee. Hopefully if what I have written is not memorable it is generally satisfying and leaves the reader at least in a better frame with which to tackle the day’s activities.

            I love to write. It is part of who I am. Writing is one of the ways I process my thoughts. But most of us writers, we have to learn that our writing is seldom the vehicle that dramatically changes our world. I was watching the movie “Entertaining Angels” when I began to consider what I would write about in my 200^th blog. The movie tells a little bit about the story of Dorothy Day. She started out life with aspirations of being a journalist and writer. She presented her articles to newspapers hoping to be published. She hoped to change the world. Eventually she began feeding, housing, and helping the poor while also co-founding a paper called “The Catholic Worker”. Eventually the paper had more than 100,000 people subscribing to it. But a time came when decisions had to be made whether the paper or her community centers helping the poor were going to receive the resources needed to continue to grow. She chose to invest her time and resources in her presence among the poor in Depression era New York City. She invested in Christ’s poor. She determined that it was more important to have direct impact on a small number of poor than to have large subscriptions to a periodical preaching about helping the poor. That is the way food and thinking works. Food and thought are meant to provide us with strength and energy and direction for our daily activities. Dorothy Day wasn’t an Anglican, but if she had prayed an Anglican table prayer, the life’s direction she discovered would likely have been similar for her activity seems like an answer to that prayer: “Bless O’ Father, these gifts to our use and us to thy service. Make us mindful of the needs of others and grateful for all thy blessings through Jesus Christ our Lord.”

 

An autobiographical work of Dorothy Day’s life

 

Is Privilege a curse word

Is "Privilege" a curse word?

Written by Dan McDonald

 

            Politically I spent many years as a die-hard Conservative, some as a wannabe Libertarian, and lately I have been hearing Progressive voices. I guess my present understanding of privilege reflects my hearing all these voices, as well as my attempting to hold these thoughts captive to Christ. I will not claim to be writing the final word on this subject or even the best word. I have some thoughts I will submit to others as each of us tries to think through the issues of privilege.

            In my conservative and libertarian days I would have denied there was any such thing as privilege and especially I would have denied there was anything wrong with people having privileges in the sense of natural advantages over others. There is a difference between equality of ability and equality in personhood. There is a difference in being paid equally for equal work and being paid equally for differing responses to opportunities. I think at some level most of us realize that while they often travel in the same circles, justice and equality are not identical terms.

Yet at the same time I wish to hasten that I have learned much about privilege in listening to progressive voices. Sometimes we limit our ability to hear each other by our particular leaning to the varied definitions we think of when hearing a word like privilege.

Before writing this blog I looked up the definition of privilege on the Merriam-Webster online dictionary. Here were the three definitions:

1)  “A right or benefit that is given to some people and not to others.”

2) “A special opportunity to do something that makes you proud.” Let’s change this one to “a special opportunity to accomplish something for yourself or others.”

3) “The advantage that wealthy and powerful people have over other people in a society.”

I suspect that how we look at privilege will depend upon which definition(s) we perceive as best capturing the reality of how privilege works within a society. In listening to the voices I am more than ever convinced that the dynamics of privilege include all three of these definitions.

Conservatives and Libertarians have the tendency to claim the first two definitions while underestimating the importance of the third. But for the Christian any doubting of the third definition ought to be quieted by a reading of some of the Old Testament Prophets, the Gospels, or the Book of James. Simply put the wealthy and powerful are often described in the Scriptures as being guilty of stacking the deck in favor of clinging to wealth and power at the expense of others. Progressives have made an important case for showing that capitalism has often been employed by the wealthy to funnel the labors of the poor and working classes into the creation of tremendous wealth for a small class of wealthy capitalists. In our past, Western Civilization has conquered people, taken their lands and resources and have enslaved others. It can be argued that in the present, Western governments’ first function seems to be to preserve the system of banking and international finance serving the elite who pays the bills for political campaigns. The case can be made that increasingly our system, whether in appearances or reality, is a system of privilege which serves those within the power structure and has dwindling benefits as one is positioned further from that privilege. Thus minorities often seem to enjoy fewer benefits than those who have been the traditional citizenry of our Western civilizations. Furthermore through our international finance system, an American generally has a higher life style than a third world worker because we are paid in dollars that as the international reserve currency is accorded more benefits than other currencies. This in turn hurts America’s poor as it becomes structurally beneficial to provide off-shore jobs to people whose money is undervalued instead of paying Americans in their dollar currency. This helps to explain why in America we have such a disparity between America’s middle and wealthy classes and our poor classes. The gap between the wealthy, the prosperous, and the marginalized is growing and there is some reason to believe that part of this problem is structural and is built into the system.

That said I believe that alongside such a reality there is a need especially among Christians to also recognize the first two definitions of privilege.

One of the difficulty needing faced by much of American Christendom is that we are meant to be a community. Our participation in the Lord’s Supper, wherein we either partake of the body and blood of Christ in reality or symbolically, helps to define us as being a people who are one in Christ. St. Paul’s teaching on varied gifts within the Church commands us to consider our privileges as gifts meant to be employed not for our individual uses but for one another in the Lord. If I have been given a gift, talent, wealth, or privilege it is not something to be used for my personal advantage only but for the sake of my neighbor and for others in the Lord.

The Apostle Paul spoke of graces and gifts in such a way as to encourage every person in Christ’s body to realize that some form of gift or grace has been granted to each of us whether rich or poor. That one which has received more, from him or her God expects more. But none of us should imagine we are wholly without gifts. This is neither healthy for our own estimate of ourselves, nor is it beneficial to those who will benefit by our gifts and abilities and privileges whether they be large or small.

In the end the one thing I am convinced of is that we live in an American Christendom where divisions including racial and socio-economic divisions have greatly hindered us from being capable of encouraging the use of gifts given to each and also have limited the benefits of gifts most needed by our weak and poor. In truth we are all privileged some little and others much, and we need to be using such gifts of grace to benefit each other and especially to benefit the weakest and poorest in our midst wherever we may discover them. I cannot but help believe that nothing is more detrimental to us than our establishment and toleration of the numerous divisions which we allow to divide the privileged from the needy among us.

We should understand that privilege is a reality and then go about the work of redeeming our reality. This means for the privileged not to be haughty or self-satisfied with our gifts but understanding that whatever gifts we have been given have been given for our service to others and not simply for ourselves. It also means that even if our privileges are small and seemingly miniscule that we ought to build upon them to increase them that when possible we may contribute to the needs of others. The widow who gave her all in a single copper coin gave more than all the wealthy. But also we must seek to overcome the divisions which make it impossible for us to see the needs of others. We cannot imagine that an affluent life dedicated to ease or luxury is the extent of what is expected of us when we have been given much. We give ourselves to Christ only as much as we give ourselves to the weak and needy in our midst.

What is privilege? Is it merely a structure that divides the affluent from the needy? Or is it a gift of grace meant by the giver of all good things to be employed for the good of our neighbor and of the needy so that whether rich or poor the one who is in need has all he needs and the one who has been blessed with the earth's goods is living upon what he needs and is a source of help to those who are needy? Privilege may be a curse word, or it may be a gift of God's grace. I suppose each reader must answer what it shall be.

Ferguson to Baltimore

From Ferguson to Baltimore

Reduced to Uncertainty

Written by Dan McDonald

 

            Last year I found myself thinking thoughts I had never thought before when the Ferguson civil disturbance took place. I think I imagined I knew the truth of the matter when I watched the Ferguson situation mostly through internet connects. These last few days with the eruption of events in Baltimore I am less certain and I desire to be more careful with any attempted analysis. Let me express realities which seem important to me and I don’t always know how to hold them together.

            One reality is that somewhere near four hundred unarmed African-Americans died in police confrontations in the United States of America last year. The figures are rough estimates. There has not been a reliable nationalized statistics of deaths resulting from arrests. The death statistics are collected from newspaper reports and separate jurisdictional reports. There can be arguments regarding the actual number. But if four hundred is close to correct then roughly one unarmed African-American is killed in a police confrontation every day. It may well be true that many of these can be explained by the dynamics of the situations. But can they all? Is this a high enough number of deaths to begin wondering if this should be a national concern?

            In fact perhaps this is the only real important paragraph I have to write today. This paragraph right here right now is the important one of this blog. How do we as people process this reality and interpret it? We all process it with similar means, but the means chew on different perceptions of reality. We understand what was taking place last year in Ferguson and this year in Baltimore by our linking together perceptions, information and logic. That is where everything differs with different people.

            For some the perception is filtered through a history of animosity between people of color and blacks and the police. History matters. For many Americans, there is this idea that America was mostly over its race problems, after all we have elected by large majorities a black American president twice. But there is a history of a people who knew law officials were the people who enforced Fugitive slave return laws, as well as segregation laws. There was a sense of ambiguity between African-Americans and law officials. There was hope that law officers were seeking to police in search of justice. But there was a history of concern.

While I am white, I was sort of raised with a lesser degree of a similar view of law officials within my family. My father had gone to work in the 1930’s at a time when worker rights were evolving in an undefined manner. My Dad, never consistently, but sometimes felt it important to take a union stand. Local industry had a big say in local politics. Strike breakers that came to town to break a union often remained in town and were often recruited to serve as policemen. That led my father to teach us to respect law officials but you always sensed that he wasn’t telling the whole story. He would on occasion talk of a law officer who was someone who sought to be fair. He less seldom commented about the sort of officer who only wanted a badge, a gun, and some authority. Those union busting days had an impact on how we were raised to think of the police.

This is what I mean by how we process these events like Ferguson and Baltimore by perception, information, and logic. I am pretty sure if I were someone who believed that someone unarmed in my race was killed every day by police in the country I lived that I would perceive a situation in my town differently than if that seemed like some superstition held by someone that was over reacting.

Back in the days of Ferguson I was ready to be radical. The thoughts were fresh and seemed to overwhelm everything else I had before believed. Now I am more cautious. I know good policemen. They are human. They have flaws. But they earnestly desire to apply the law with fairness and equality. I don’t want to run such law officers under the bus. Nevertheless I do suspect that some real problems exist within law enforcement. Wherever there is authority there are those who seek to dedicate the use of authority for good and those who are less than noble. That seems to be a reality in every generation and every land.

The only thing I have figured out is that I cannot expect to understand what is taking place without a broader base of perception and information upon which to build my logic that will lead to how I analyze what is taking place in our American cities. One of the things I plan to do soon is to go to a church on a Sunday evening that I pass on my way to work from home nearly every day. I want to sit down with some of the people who I see coming out of the church building and listen to what they feel and experience and what they perceive. Their church membership is mostly black. I am pretty sure that I won’t be able to analyze what is happening in places like Ferguson and Baltimore, until I have listened enough to understand within me the perceptions, information and logic that is presently mostly foreign to me.