Split personality? What about split persons?

Texted prayer
 

God, whose presence in my heart

   clears my path before I start;

God, whose love within my eye

   keeps my vision leveled high;

God, whose purpose in my feet

   makes my journey straight and fleet;

God, whose life within my blood

   gives me power of tropic flood;

God, whose breath enlivens me

   opens windows, shares the key;

God whose spirit’s everywhere

   reads all thoughts as texted prayer.

A. E. P. (ED) WALL

 Split personality?
What about split persons?
 

Split personalities are just what the doctor ordered if you are writing a movie script or hosting a televised talk show. But Americans especially, and many other folks, are born into a formally declared belief that all persons are created equal.

          That was understood, in the 18th century, to mean that social classes are artificial, that candlemakers and cooks have just as much dignity, and are just as entitled to justice, as any lord, count, bishop, baron or princess.

         The absence of equality in personal wealth, health, housing, employment and personality was known to all.

          Voters, workers, capitalists and citizens of all races include the bright, the beautiful and the ugly. Nations and neighborhoods are populated by the gifted, along with sociopaths, psychopaths, thieves, killers and rapists who have jobs, shop in the supermarket, patronize the movie theater, date daughters and raise their hands when volunteers are called for.

         Some are Christians, some are not, some are Republicans, some are not. Do angry sociopaths interpret Bible verses the same way smiling optimists do?

          Do they hear the promises of political candidates the same way?

          Everybody is created equal. The presidents of the United States and Iran, the creators of Windows and the Edsel, Italian Catholic bishops Chinese Methodists, children going to school in Japan and in Afghanistan, all find that equality is subject to definition.

          Some equality is handed out, like the number of toes ordinarily provided at birth. Some has to be reached for, like the rights due to women. An equality obscured by prejudice, power and politics is everyone’s equal access beyond the sublime to the divine. Just as some believe in no religion, some believe in all religions.

 

 

What about Tom?

Thomas Henry James rolled over for the last time while I was too young to remember him. My grandma’s cat was in her kitchen every morning while she flipped the breakfast pancakes. He knew she would make one small but tasty pancake for him. All he had to do was listen for her to say, “Thomas Henry James, roll over.” Then he rolled over, and Grandma flipped his pancake into his bowl.

            The first cat I remember was with us in Jamestown, NY, when we moved 104 miles away to Coudersport, PA. At age 4 I was younger than the cat. My mom had arranged his adoption by friends in Jamestown, but about a month later he appeared at our door in Coudersport. The saturation love of cats for humans, and vice versa, is a happy mystery, like the Trinity.

            Some may think it is a confirmation of my brain disease that I keep a polished wooden box of ashes in the room that’s stuffed with my computers and books, printers, pictures of upbeat memories, things like that. The ashes recall Abraham, my Titusville/Orlando cat for 16 years.

            Abe was succeeded in Orland Park, IL, by Thomas Henry James II, known to his friends as Tom. He arrived at my condo as a young adult cat and has stayed for more than 12 years. He’s never been outdoors and lives like a cheerful puppycat, although in cat years he may be close to my age, a few weeks short of 89.

            A couple of weeks ago he started acting the way Abe did in his last days, sneaking off to quiet corners, ignoring tuna treats, crying out in loud meows every now and then. After a lifetime of living with cats I chose not to expose my elderly housemate to treatment by well-meaning veterinarians. I thought he was dying.

            This coincided with a loving invitation from my daughter and son-in-law to leave the isolation of my condo and move into their large home one mile away. My five grandchildren who grew up there are sometimes home, but more often away at college or enterprises. The household includes one with a severe allergy to cats, and so any cat is, for good reason, felina non grata.

             My driving is limited to my power wheelchair and my four-wheel electric scooter. Standing up is an adventure. Winter weather keeps me from crossing the street to the mailbox. I wear a Rescue Alert button, but punching a number into a telephone or into a garage door opener can be a challenge.

            Marie and Mark are looking into the installation of a stair lift, because a head packed with dizziness and feet that dance jigs to their own tunes rule out the ordinary use of stairs. The reason for all this is called olivopontocerebellar atrophy/multiple system atrophy, a form of parkinsonism.

            While we’re getting organized for my move into the household of a grandpa’s dreams, I’m formidably anxious about Thomas Henry James II. What to do?

 

 

 

President Kennedy wasn't finished

Fifty years ago today the tolling of a bell momentarily paralyzed the news room. It was the bell on the wire service machine. It signaled a rare “Flash,” a designation reserved for the most urgent stories.

            The staff of The Honolulu Advertiser didn’t want to believe the report on the wire, that President John F. Kennedy had been fatally shot in Texas.

            Three years earlier both Kennedy and his Republican opponent, Richard Nixon, had campaigned in the 50th state of Hawaii. The population was small, but statehood was new, and journalists from all over were happy to dateline their work from Waikiki or Kona. When the votes were counted, 50.03% went to Kennedy and 49.97% to Nixon.

During the campaign I interviewed both candidates when they visited the Big Island, where I was editor of the local daily newspaper. When that heartbreaking flash came on November 22, 1963 I was Sunday editor of the morning paper in Honolulu.

            Almost everybody took the assassination personally. Kennedy was a personal president, in the minds of countless Americans.

            President Kennedy was scheduled to move on from Dallas to Austin to address the Texas Democratic State Committee. I received the text of that address from the White House, framed it as a minor memento of that terrible time.

            The President was not finished. He had planned to speak that night about the linkage of Texas and the Democratic Party in “an indestructible alliance.”

            Alas, alliances come and go. Religions come and go, and so governments. But the mystery of human behavior hangs on.

Does God have pets?

 

           God as Father is at the center of worship for countless believers, even as fatherhood takes a few hits from sitcom laugh tracks, feminist affirmations and happy challenges to notions of centuries past that men held exclusive rights to vote, judge, own property, preach and preside.

            God is Father, fathers are male, it is said, and therefore God must be male.

            One drawback is that some of us picture Father according to the Gospel of Disney, the giver of things we ask for. We don’t usually ask for discipline, training, correction.

            Dads and moms try to steer their offspring from one learning experience to another, first encouraging them to crawl and then to stand up and walk. Along the way dads and moms press their kids to brush their teeth, pass the algebra exam, tell the truth, prepare to earn a living and to pass it on. Fathers and mothers are there when sickness strikes, jobs vanish and games are lost.

            Some fathers indulge aimless whims of their children, and that’s how candles get lit at both ends and children fill playrooms and garages with toys while their minds are on vacation.

            That’s the sort of Father who is expected to hear prayers for a lucky lottery ticket, passing an exam without studying for it, winning a race without training for it.

            But the Father sees each child, like the planet itself, evolve in understanding and competence. The Father’s love is not to affirm a child’s frailty and insecurity, but to provide the steps on a ladder to strength and confidence.

            The Bible, a book of conflicts, tragedy and hope, stirs emotions as no other. Hundreds of churches and denominations claim its authority. This book of the ages identifies God as Father. It is not asleep in the distant past it describes. Scripture, an inspiration for the American Constitution, is awake. Scripture is written in the present tense. It declares the Now. Its Father is always Love.

 

 

            After 88 years on the roller coaster, this I know:

I believe in God,

dweller in mystery,

provider of all that is known

and unknown,

timeless teacher

of uncounted Teacher’s pets.

The unforgettable Trayvon Martin

 

 

         Six citizens drafted into Florida jury duty have underscored the quirkiness of a justice system that counts among its resources executions at San Quentin and forced feeding at Guantanamo. As of 2011 there were more than 2.6 million adults incarcerated in this country, and another 4.8 million on probation or parole. The Florida jury has excused George Zimmerman from being one of them.

         It was right and proper, according to the jury, for Zimmerman to stalk and then kill a 17-year-old African-American boy on his way to the nearby home of his dad.

           The jury heard all of the testimony and reviewed all of the evidence in Zimmerman’s Sanford, Florida, trial. The jury’s good faith and hard work are taken for granted. That doesn’t mean the verdict is happily accepted by everyone.

           There will be some exploitation of it by anti-white individuals, some of whom are white, all pursuing a creeping fashion of social robotics. Others will recognize that Zimmerman was prosecuted by white attorneys, working within the system of government that enabled white soldiers to fight for emancipation, white presidents to broaden and enforce civil equality laws, white judges and legislators to support—if too slowly—the ongoing extermination of official racism.

         In a world populated by humans there will still be prejudice, bigotry, favoritism and political nuttiness. But every slip backward is accompanied by two or three steps forward.

          Much of the world will see the Zimmerman verdict as one of those slips backward.

         Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

         We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.

          Know who spoke those two sentences? Martin Luther King. Everyone remembers him. Now, few will forget Trayvon Martin, who like those anonymous jurors has been drafted into history.   

 

           

Now it is Obamascare

 

 

 

Headlines remind us every day that DUI, driving under the influence, is dangerous. But writing under influence (WUI) risks a crash of the word processor, and that includes WUI of MSA. Multiple system atrophy is a new name for what used to be called OPCA, olivopontocerebellar atrophy. Whatever it is called, there’s still no known cure.

 

Maybe tomorrow. The cure may come at any time. Until then it is an unsolved mystery worthy of Lee Child, John Sandford or Arthur Conan Doyle.

 

Word processors are like typewriters the way pipe organs are like pianos. They can do more things, users can pull out more stops, and the keyboards of both are light on the fingers. My MSA fingers will no longer punch the keys on a manual typewriter, but they don’t have to in this age of electronic invention, a chip off the old writer’s block.  

 

One of these days, they say, writers won’t even have to type because what they’re thinking will be absorbed electronically into a word processor. Copies will go silently to the government spy bureaus, known as Obamascare.

 

The intention seems to be to store all the words written or spoken on electronic devices, a concept pioneered in the United States by Father Divine during the Great Depression. FBI records list him as “George Baker alias God.” He was an African American preacher and advocate for the poor who took the name Major Jealous Divine. He also claimed to be God. Stenographers accompanied him everywhere, recording every word he spoke.

 

I think it was about 65 years ago that I attended a couple of his banquets for the poor. As a newspaper reporter I qualified as poor, but I was there to explore one of the few opportunities for African Americans and other Americans to get to know each other, even a little bit, in the 1940s and 50s. That’s about when I first joined the NAACP, an organization that gained nothing from my membership and a painfully mixed blessing from the membership of Eleanor Roosevelt. Her endorsements were powerful, but limited in geographical, political and racial scope.

 

So, nobody has to be God to be taped by the government. And no, copyright won’t protect you. That is not, however, why I am not writing as much as I used to. This science fiction disease, which intercepts and mangles messages wired from the brain to the fingers, which intervenes in the breathing process like wind tunnel fans thrown into reverse, awaits cure. Maybe the government can take it over and use it against the enemy.

 

Fantasyland North of the 38th Parallel

            A boy with firearms fantasies kills little kids in their classroom, officials of one kind or another shake their heads and say they cannot understand how it happened because the lad had to know how terrible the consequences would be for himself..

            A mom buckles her children into the family car and drives into a lake, drowning them. Observers ask how can that be, because the mother surely knew she could easily have gotten professional help.

            An elected official held in highest regard is found to have embezzled government funds. Then his constituents ask themselves why a smart man anticipating a bright future would destroy his life so foolishly.

            The young and untested Asian leader takes a path perfected by Adolph Hitler and others, leading an army of a million men and women, perfecting his nuclear weapons and loudly declaring his intention to start a war. Then the policy professionals in Washington explain that this man is too rational to risk his own job in such a gamble. Their predecessors knew that Imperial Japan had no way to attack U.S. territories in 1941. When I was in my teens a popular slogan was “Remember Pearl Harbor.”

            President Obama said this week that he’ll put $100 million in the 2014 budget for brain research. This generation knows more about the universe than previous generations knew there was to know, but it does not know how the brain works. Obama’s research program can lead to healing of conflicts, diseases and defects. It can provide answers to those questions asked after every human disaster: How could a person who seems so ordinary do things so deadly and self-defeating?

            How can we be so slow to address this problem head-on? “I do not understand my own actions,” a famous writer said. “For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.” He wrote this about 1,960 years ago, and we don’t understand it any more than Paul did.