Hugh Hollowell

Imagine I own a house on the beach.

It is a nice house, with a beautiful beach view and wide screened in porch just perfect for late night conversations. It is a large house; I have a trusted staff that runs it for me in my absence. I have left detailed instructions on how I want the house run and further, I showed the staff by example when I built it exactly what I wanted done. I said “do this” and “do it like that”.

Being as it is a very nice house, you want to stay there when you go to the beach. I tell you no problem, my house is your house. I further explain I am not there right now to run it but James my Butler is and he will take care of everything.

You move in and all goes well… at first. And then one day you find you are missing $20 from your purse. You are convinced James took it while you were out body surfing.

The next day, James tries to grab your butt while you are walking down the hall and you have noticed he is eyeing your 13 year old daughter a bit too much when she is swimming on the beach.

James has now made your life at the beach not fun, but a bad dream. You feel like you cannot stay there and while you know instinctively that I would never have knowingly put you into this position, you can not help but be a little mad at me for not knowing James was a bad guy.

So you leave. And you do not just leave, but you tell everyone up and down the Beach that whatever you do, do not stay in my house, because James is a rotter. Over time, though, the message gets distorted. It is no longer James that is bad, but the story now is it is the house that has problems even though I fired James quickly. Over many retellings, It is not James that is the bad guy but me, the owner of the house.

Maybe James did not start off as a bad guy. Maybe he was just a bit bent and when he suddenly was in a position of power it went to his head. Perhaps he just could not handle the responsibility. Either way it really does not matter. James has hurt both the reputation of my house and me and because of him, many, many people will be afraid of me and my house and will never know the comfort and joy of staying there.

Now what do I do?

I am fairly apolitical, so fear not, gentle reader; you do not have to worry about this becoming a political rant blog. That is just not how I roll. However, even though I am on a low information diet, I still am inundated with the propaganda from the upcoming Presidential election here in the US.

Have you ever noticed that whenever politicians talk about moral issues, they inevitably mean homosexuality or abortion? As if those were the only moral issues out there.

I mean, really. Yesterday I read a great blogpost about the genocide in Darfur; it was cogent, well thought out and for the first time, I fully understood the root causes of the problem. So of course some ass hat comes along and leaves a comment to the effect that Darfur is nothing compared to the genocide in America because of abortion. Never mind that the post was not about abortion. Or America. No sirree, that did not slow down this guy; he was going to get his point across.

Do not get me wrong:

I think no rational person thinks abortion is a good thing. Even the most adamant pro-choice people I know think abortion is regrettable. I would prefer that abortions did not happen, but I also wish there was not lying, cheating or stealing on the planet, either. And, I realize that if I want to say I am pro-life, I had better be ready to adopt a kid or help out some unmarried mothers. If you just point out what is wrong but do nothing to fix it, you are just bitching.

You know what?

Every day, 18,000 children die from malnutrition. Every day, 850 million people go to bed hungry. It is not like they are dying of AIDS or some other incurable disease. We have the food. We have the stuff to fix the problem, yet we do not, so children die. That might be a moral issue.

Or how about this:

We have a death penalty in this country; almost every person who is for it cites the Old Testament law of “an eye for an eye“. People must pick the parts of the Bible they like and ignore what they do not, because the Bible also prescribes the death penalty for bestiality (Exodus 22:19); adultery (Leviticus 20:10); homosexuality (Leviticus 20:13), being a false prophet (Deuteronomy 13:5), prostitution (Leviticus 21:9) and rape (Deuteronomy 22:24-25). Hmmm, some of those might hit close to home.

Since 1973, 124 people were convicted, went through the appeal process and went to death row, only to be released because they were later proven innocent. 124. And those are the ones we found out about before it was too late. On average, they spent 9 years in prison for something they did not do. Here is a list of people who died at the hands of the state, yet later strong evidence turned up proving their innocence. Ooops.

Would it be hard to say we can only use the death penalty on the basis of DNA evidence? We have the technology. Is not preventing people from dieing wrongly at the hands of the state that is supposed to protect them a moral issue?

The list continues…

• The Homeless
• Education
• Health care
• The aftermath of Katrina
• The environment
• Sending our children to die in a foreign land so our oil supplies are protected
• The Sudanese Refugees
• The plight of the Iraqis now that we have “helped” them.

Oh yes, and maybe while we are at it, we could talk about the morality of allowing 100,000 people a year to die in Darfur at the hands of their own government. If this was happening in a place where the victim’s skin was white there is no way we would put up with this. If you doubt it, ask yourself if this would be allowed in Poland or Germany or France. Nope, the international community would put a stop to it in a heartbeat. But Darfur is over in Africa, so we do not have to worry or even think about those 400,000 people who have died.

Morality is about being Moral, not just about homosexuality or abortion.

I was 16 the first time I ever read anything by Walt Whitman. I was on a search, as I suppose all children that age are, for who I was, what I wanted to be. I, like the neighbor in Frost’s poem, could not forsake my Father’s teachings, for better or worse. In the Transcendentalists I found a uniquely American way of thought (or so I thought at the time), and an identity I could embrace and aspire to.

Over the next few years I read pretty much the entire corpus: Channing, Alcott, Emerson, and of course Thoreau, but the preface to the 1855 Leaves of Grass has always left me breathless.

Here is my favorite excerpt:

This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body… .

The entire preface can be found here; for reasons known only to him he did not include the preface in later editions.

The more and more I think about it, I am less and less concerned about being a “Christian”, at least as it is commonly understood in 21st century America. I think instead, I will focus more on being a follower of Jesus.

Christians do things like meet in beautiful buildings with stained glass windows and plush cushions on the pews and look pious on Sunday morning.

Jesus did things like feed the hungry, love marginalized people (like lepers, prostitutes and minorities) and give people hope.

Which are you?