On the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, in yesterday’s New York Times, Ross Douthat argues that, now free of any real external threat, western capitalism has definitively won, but doesn’t quite know it yet.

On the right, pundits and politicians have cultivated a persistent cold-war-style alarmism about our foreign enemies — Vladimir Putin one week, Hugo Chavez the next, Kim Jong-il the week after that.

On the left, there’s an enduring fascination with the pseudo-Marxist vision of global capitalism as an enormous Ponzi scheme, destined to be undone by peak oil, climate change, or the next financial bubble.

Meanwhile, our domestic politics are shot through with antitotalitarian obsessions, even as real totalitarianism recedes in history’s rear-view mirror. Plenty of liberals were convinced that a vote for George W. Bush was a vote for theocracy or fascism. Too many conservatives are persuaded that Barack Obama’s liberalism is a step removed from Leninism.

These paranoias suggest a civilization that’s afraid to reckon with its own apparent permanence.

Perhaps we should keep in mind that exaggerating threats can yield exaggerated responses…

(Photo credit.)

i mean it’s no rabbi, priest, pastor, and imam. but it is a cute story…

in december right after 9/11 we had new neighbors moving in down the
street. i took the prerequisite plate o’ cookies down to them and
found some people unloading boxes. i introduced myself and told them i
was a neighbor and had cookies.

i was greeted with cold stares and a warning to take my cookies back.
they weren’t the neighbors. they were the movers and i was told that i
wouldn’t really want to bring cookies to “these” neighbors.

well, nothing like a little warning to make me TOTALLY interested in
meeting someone. so i came down later once “those” movers had finished.

and met this lovely family with two children the ages of my two
younger children. and a sweet mom and dad. and it took me a little
while to figure out what made them “these” neighbors. it think it
might have been the turbans on the dad’s and the son’s heads. but
turbans notwithstanding, they liked cookies.

i invited them to go christmas caroling with us that evening. there
was a neighborhood group going and it was before the time when one
would have thought to call it “holiday caroling”. they politely
refused. they didn’t “christmas carol”. i said that we would sing some
secular songs too. but they didn’t celebrate christmas at all.

oh.

i am not sure what should have been my first clue.

but they did come up to visit the next day to ask about schools and
could i recommend a good preschool for their daughter. at the time my
youngest daughter was attending and i was teaching part time at temple
israel preschool. so i told them all about that preschool and how
great it was for children.

the mom said that she didn’t think they could attend a jewish preschool.

oh.

again, i am not quick on these things…

but i told her that i wasn’t jewish (maybe the christmas caroling
thing had tipped her off). that i was a christian and that it was a
really great place. very warm. loving. accepting of ALL faiths. and i
told her i would take her and show her around.

and i did. and it was perfect for her daughter.

i took her and her oldest child, the turbaned boy, to our elementary
school and introduced them around too.

and then we started carpooling. the greatest form of civility known to
parents and neighbors.

we split up the elementary school trip and some days her daughter would
come to my house at 7:30 and stay with me until i took the girls to
preschool. it worked out wonderfully (and all you parents out there
know that a perfect carpool is to dream the impossible dream…)

she was upfront and honest with me and asked me not to proselytize. so
i looked it up in the dictionary and realized what it meant.

i was upfront and honest with her. i told her that i did listen the
christian music cds in the car. but not loud and i would doubt that
her kids would be singing along to “amazing grace” anytime soon. and i
told her that sometimes we prayed before hitting the car drop off
area. especially if someone wasn’t feeling well or had a big test. but
that i wouldn’t force her kids to pray but i would take requests if
they had them. and she said both of those things (the music and the
prayer requests) would be fine.

she had some bad experiences with evangelicals in the past. “haven’t
we all?”, i asked…

and i wanted to use the big new word that i had learned so i asked her
not to proselytize too. and she told me that sikh’s didn’t actively
recruit.

oh.

why wouldn’t they want me????????? oh well. let the carpooling begin…

one day my oldest daughter (who was in 2nd grade) came home and told
me that she had asked our neighbor on her carpool run that morning why
her son and husband wore the turbans. she said that it was because of
their religion and she explained it all and all my daughter could
remember is that it was all very confusing and wasn’t our religion so
much easier.

i told her that things that seem so simple to a person who has heard
them their WHOLE life (in her case a very long 8 years) might seem
complicated to someone who hadn’t heard them yet. and we talked about
how there were different religions and what that meant.

then my daughter asked the BIG question that evangelicals don’t really
want to have to explain to their kids because we don’t want to ask it
ourselves…”does that mean they won’t be in heaven with us”. and i
said what i felt in my heart. i don’t know. but they are friends and
our neighbors and that is the way it is supposed to be now and maybe
forever and ever. and i hope and pray and i wonder and i wander and i
question and sometimes i can’t answer because the lump in my throat
and in my heart is too big. and that is why we all need a God. because
the questions are too big for us to answer on our own.

and then we sang “amazing grace” and took prayer requests. just kidding.

eventually the neighbors built a house in another neighborhood and
they moved away from the “perfect carpool situation”. sigh. they
regret it. i know they do. i tell them that they should every time i
see them. i miss them being down the street.

i miss carpooling with someone that wasn’t in my usual circle of
friends. someone different, someone to learn from, someone to listen
to that isn’t saying the same thing that all my other friends say.
someone who challenged my faith by having a different world view.
someone who made my children ask questions and me have to search out
answers. i have had other carpools, but that one was different.

i miss her kids singing amazing grace at the top of their lungs and
all their prayer requests (just kidding. they never sang along and i
think i took one prayer request in that whole year which was from one
of MY kids about a lost homework sheet).

what i miss the most is that every time i walked my evangelical
daughter and her sikh daughter through the front door of the jewish
preschool together i could feel that somewhere george washington,
thomas jefferson and john adams all gave each other a fist pump with a
whispered “nice”…

–lea marshall

(Photo credit.)

One of the five pillars of the Islamic faith is that each Muslim, sometime in their life, is to make a pilgrimage to Mecca. Westerners are familiar with the stock footage we see year after year of white-clad Muslims moving around a strange-looking black object in a way that seems foreign to us. If you didn’t know already, here’s the backstory:

The black object is called the “Kaaba” which is literally “the cube.” It is said to have been built by Abraham, the father of all three monotheistic faiths, and his son Ismail, the father of the Islamic people. Abraham found Ismail and his mother Hagar alive and living near Mecca after miraculously traversing the desert following their exile by Abraham’s wife Sarah. Father and son then rebuilt the Kaaba, originally thought to be built by Adam as a monument to one God. It contains a meteorite thought to be a covenant between Ismail and God, and by extension to the whole Muslim people.

When they come to Mecca, Muslims move 7 times around the Kaaba in prayer. They drink water from a well where Muslims believe God saved Hagar and Ismail by making water bubble miraculously from the desert floor. They symbolically reject the devil by throwing stones at three pillars that stand at the site where Satan tempted Abraham to disobey God when asked to sacrifice his son. (Muslim teachings diverge from Christian teachings here this point as they understand the son slated for sacrifice to be Ismail, not Isaac.)

Come learn more at our July 14th dinner “A Rabbi, A Priest, A Pastor & An Imam.”

On this day sixty-five years ago, young Americans were fighting and dying on the shores of Normandy France. The soldiers made their way onto the beach that June 6th in Higgins boats, unique high-walled boats that carried 25 men, sort of a “floating boxcar.”

Conservative author Peggy Noonan wrote about D-Day, and about the Higgins boats in the introduction of her book “Patriotic Grace: What it is and why we need it now.” Noonan tells of one soldier, his fate intricately woven with the fate of the other men in his Higgins Boat, heading in high seas to a conclusion unknown… “it took [his] five little boats four hours to cover the nine miles to the beach:”

They were the worst hours of our lives. It was pitch black, cold, and the rain was coming down in sheets, drenching us. The boats were being tossed in the waves, making all of us violently sick.

Noonan reflects in the remainder of Patriotic Grace on the difficult circumstances we find ourselves in as a people today, and of the rise of the partisan hate-filled din. Says Noonan “we fight as if we’ll never need each other,” yet our very fate may depend on one another.

And so I came to think this: What we need most right now, at this moment, is a kind of patriotic grace-a grace that takes the long view, apprehends the moment we’re in, comes up with ways of dealing with it, and eschews the politically cheap and manipulative. That admits affection and respect. That encourages them. That acknowledges that the small things that divide us are not worthy of the moment; that agrees that the things that can be done to ease the stresses we feel as a nation should be encouraged, while those that encourage our cohesion as a nation should be supported. I’ve come to think that this really is our Normandy Beach… the little, key area in which we have to prevail if the whole enterprise is to succeed. The challenge we must rise to… We are an armada. All sorts of Americans, wonderful people, all ages, faiths and colors, with different skills, fabulous skills, from a million different places, but all here with you, going forward.

Like it or not, we are in each others’ Higgins boats. Our fate, almost certainly shared.

Given that circumstance, perhaps we might use today to consider how we will best keep faith with those young Americans who left their lives that day on Omaha Beach.

Photo credit: Chuck Holon

As President Obama ends his Middle East visit, the partisan cherry-pickers are out in full-force picking the “cherries” from his speech that support their pre-existing bias (for or against), ignoring the full meaning of his words. I suspect it won’t be long until they start pelting each other with the cherry pits (and get ratings while we watch the fracas).

A speech that lasted almost an hour cannot be understood in a sentence or a paragraph.

As Obama says in his speech “…I am convinced that to make progress, we must say openly to each other the things we hold in our hearts and that too often are said only behind closed doors. There must be a sustained effort to listen to each other, to learn from each other, to respect one another and to seek common ground.”

So swing those doors wide open. A discussion between liberal and conservative Americans about what the President has just said must be had, but the discussion must be grounded in an awareness of the whole speech.

It simply cannot be done in a way that honors the ideals of America by picking cherries.

In the busy hubbub of modern life, today too often becomes about sleeping in, shopping, getting the lawn mowed. But forgetting the real meaning of Memorial Day is nearly impossible in my neighborhood because of a neighbor.

We’ll call her Jane.

Jane’s lawn is a memorial to the sacrifice made by our fellow Americans, people like you and me, until they put everything in their life on hold to do what their country asked. And in case you didn’t notice the front-yard-turned-monument spread out right before you when you drive past Jane’s house, her sign downright insists that we STOP.

So, stop I will… to honor the memory of our neighbors killed in service to our country since this American experiment began. Those killed in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Vietnam, in WWII and WWI and those killed more quietly away from the headlines in smaller conflicts that have exacted the same big price.

To my father-in-law who died in Vietnam, and to my mother-in-law who had to raise four children without him, I remember.

In the name of my family members who served and are serving: My grandfather who left a thriving pediatric practice to join the Army in WWII, my father who spent his career in service to the Navy (first as a pilot, later as a civilian), my brother and sister-in-law and cousin who still serve today… I remember.

The Village Square has always been about finding what we agree on in the midst of so much disagreement, and this is it.

Today, as our country remembers, President Obama laid a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington National Cemetery. I’m a D.C. native who’s had many an opportunity in my life to take in the breathtaking awe of Arlington. You simply can’t leave there unaffected.

For every rich and beloved life lost in the sea of crosses on the hills of Arlington, we remember.

Sure, it’s a different scale, but if you really pause to take it in, you won’t be quite the same when you leave Jane’s lawn either.

—-Chris Matthews, Hardball (referring to Pentagon cover memos to Bush on Iraq policy quoting Biblical verse)

I caught an interview on MSNBC of said Bureau Chief, Borzou Daragahi,
about the President Obama’s video message to Iranian citizens on the occasion of the Persian New Year. Obama wished them a happy new year in Farsi.

Mr. Daragahi was kind enough to translate the Farsi for us.

He went on to tell us that by Obama referring to Iran as the “Islamic Republic of Iran”, he was implying that he was not specifically pursuing regime change. The message, according to Daragahi, was more substantive than normal in addressing issues between the two countries – historically our leadership has employed messages like this as either ultimatums or gestures to peel the population off of leadership we disliked.

The interview I heard occurred at 9 p.m. Eastern, so it was the middle of the night in the Middle East for Daraghani.

Yesterday – thanks to Daraghani – we learned that Khamenei rebuffed “Obama’s overture.”

How in the world would I, sitting as a type in my pj’s and slippers, know all this, were it not for Borzou Daragahi?

Like Obama’s approach or not, left of the aisle or right, we have to have journalists flung across the world to tell us this story and other stories. Otherwise, how would we know enough to have diverging opinions?

Just saying.

Like him or not, it’s worth watching Chris Matthews’ commentary on Ireland tonight.

“The headlines [of the killings] from Northern Ireland were just like the bad old days. The story we’re getting is far different… So, you see, a lot has changed because of the Good Friday agreement in 1998. Northern Ireland has a shared government of Loyalist and Republican, Protestant and Catholic. The Northern Ireland police force is increasingly integrated – Catholic as well as Protestant. And the people of Northern Ireland are united in wanting peace and no return to the days and nights of locked doors and killing in the night. No return.

If you want progress in the north, there are real ways to go about it. Tell every relative you’ve got over there that we are united in wanting peace, better yet that you respect any effort to bring reconciliation between the two sides. Right now 95% of the kids from Northern Ireland go to separate schools. Almost two thirds have never had a conversation across the religious line, Catholic and Protestant. But those who do go to school together are inclined to describe themselves not as British or Irish but Northern Irish, a term that unites rather than divides, that breeds hope, for a future Ireland where the whole Isle can live in peace and – yes – for all practical purposes, in unity… without the watch towers and the constantina wire, the check points, the 40 foot high walls that still separate Catholic from Protestant…

I just hope and pray that this peace holds and grows to something better, especially in these very tough economic times. I have my heart in this fight, obviously. My grandmom and grandpa Shields were Irish Catholic to the core… My dad’s mom was a Presbyterian with a brogue to match Mrs. Doubtfire. As a grandson to both, my brothers and I know from birth that peace is possible, even love.“

“When you see the world [through the lens of pure good and pure evil] what it means is that if you’re on the side of pure good… it means that anything you do, no matter how limitless, no matter how brutal or how immoral, is inherently justifiable because it’s being enlisted for the service of the good. And by contrast, anything you do to those on the other side is inherently justified as well because they are pure evil… To say that the world is not divisible into pure evil and pure good is not to deny the existence of pure evil. Pure evil exists, it’s just the exception and not the rule. And to view the world in these clean and clear and absolute moral categories will inevitably lead you astray. It will do worse than lead you astray, it will lead you to abandon the moral principles that you claim make you on the side of good in the first place.”

Whether you agree with this or not, I like this quote because I think it reduces the noise of the fuss between the left and right on faith to the essential ’signal’; it distills the difficulty down to the essence of what the issue is – from a view from the left, anyway.

Stay tuned for my assessments of what the problem might be from the view from the right…