Tuesday, November 24, 2015

A Prayer for Tenderness



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A Prayer for Tenderness
by Norm Lowry
November, 2015

"It is those who have never accepted life's realities who always think there is an escape.  That's why, for example, many people believe in building bomb shelters.  It does not occur to them that life might not be worth living if conditions for a life worthy of human beings no longer exist."  --Arno Gruen

Ours is a culture of purposeful violence, whose powerful demand compliance, which societally equates with responsibility.  All who choose to be unsubmissive are deemed to be irresponsible and thus subject to sanction, ostracization, and imprisonment.   The problem with this is that our culture of violence is based on lies.  So to be in bed with the powerful in any way, shape, or form entails cosigning the lies, whether one is aware of them or not. 

For those of us who choose prison over gross submission to the lies, living with death, which comes in many forms, is our daily lot.  Two days ago, a close peer died from a severe cancer, exacerbated by poor health care and nutrition.  A coupled days before this, a peer died of a heroin overdose, enigmatic due to the poor grad and dosage generally sold.  A few days prior, a peer confessed to contemplating suicide rather than to face being stabbed by those extorting him, who had already raped him as a preemptive strike.

So along comes a letter from a friend who says, "I'm praying that you will maintain your tenderness…"  You've got to love a precious friend like this!  Here is one who gets it, who understands what it takes to make life work in our hardest moments.  Tenderness; being kind and gentle, is the only solvent which can penetrate the admixture of the submissiveness to violence all around us, whether in your prison or mine. 

In 1957 I saw black people burned in fires and hung from lampposts.  While adults salivated, we children knew this was not supposed to be.  

In 1960, after observing numerous atomic bomb tests, we would hunker beneath our school desks, to practice being "safe" from imminent nuclear attack.  Again, while adults salivated at the thought of besting some contrived enemy in a death match, we children nervously shook our heads at the utter absurdity of those whose place it was to teach us dignity and integrity.  

In 1965 my first friend died in Vietnam.  Danny was 18.  I was 12.  The adults told us it was for the greater good.  We children heard it as a question.

In 1991 I "won" my first lottery.  The adults said I was one of them now and that going to war was an honor.  With tears in his eyes, my did laid his hand on my shoulder, looked me in the eyes, the went off to get drunk.  I sat, confused.  I couldn't get drunk at my age.  I'd never had sex.  But I could go to war.  I gave up desiring to be the typical adult that day.

I did enter the military but I did not go to war.  I resigned after being told we could rape Vietnamese women if we thought they were beautiful, as long as we killed them when we were through with them.  My supposed superiors were baffled that I could not see the normalcy of such behavior.  To them, since war was necessary, they had to offer young men something to make war worth their while--all the sex, drugs, alcohol and murder their hearts so desired.  The trouble was, I wanted none of those things, not even the sex if it was outside of loving, affirming relationship.

The whole scope of violence is predicated on one individual or group inflicting suffering on another or others, in hopes of avoiding suffering themselves.  This is insanity, of course, yet we continue to make it a sanity, or so we believe.

So here I am 45 years down the line, fast-forwarded from 18 to nearly 63.  It's actually been quite an adventure.  While our culture has severely degraded, as far as destructiveness and inhumanity is concerned, many of us have escaped by reassuming our birthright to actual, as opposed to blindly obedient, humanity.  For this, some of us sit in prison and many in graveyards, both far better options than our old, chosen alternative of merely going along. 

Today, overwhelmingly due to the United States, we sit on the edge of a monstrous precipice.  The U.S. Constitution still says that Blacks are only 60% human.  The U.S. nuclear threat is greater than ever, as the U.S. arsenal contains more nukes than most, if not all, other societies combined,  The U.S. war threat is the greatest threat of war on earth, buoyed by the 100+ wars and interventions waged in my lifetime.  Our fragile earth is telling us it cannot much longer sustain our abuses.  The U.S. and its allies (partners in crime?) are publicly hinting at the need for a one world government.  Even the Pope, on his recent visit, stated that we need one world, United Nations, governance--eek!

So what of tenderness  The answer lies in the nature of tenderness, itself.  There can be no genuine or expansive tenderness in violence, for the violent seek to crush tenderness, seeing it to be a weakness.   How else can the rich and powerful hold exclusive reign over "the initiation of wars, the destruction of livelihood, and the poisoning of nature and of other human beings," while excluding themselves, largely, from imprisonment?  "Official statistics on criminality include more poor people than rich because those statistics reflect the ideology of the rich and powerful and do not include all forms of destructiveness."  (Arno Gruen).  Tenderness thrives on nonviolence   The more one commits to a life of nonviolence, the more tender one can become. True nonviolence must be embraced and espoused.  It cannot be imitated for long.  To me, nonviolence is the essence of our Creator, as it stems only from love.  And from love flows tenderness, as gentleness and kindness.

Through the years, I've caught a lot of flak for believing our Creator to be absolutely nonviolent.  Yet since the so-called "ten commandments" are said to be first a reflection of our Creator's essence, each statement would necessarily read more like "I don't murder so you don't murder."  Thus, our creator could not have been the god who told "the faithful" to murder those who did not believe as they.  Sure, some god told the people this.  In fact, the dominant empires of the day had 8-900+ violent gods who would have perpetuated such a ruse.  

Also through the years, I've caught no small amount of flak for my stances of opposition to the American traditions of colonialism, violence, racism, bigotry, poverty-production…injustice.  That I absolutely hated these driving traditions enough to renounce my association with government-registered religion and my U.S. citizenship disturbs most people, who consider these moves to be un-American.  If it is un-American to hate tyranny and love truth, then I'm un-American.  But I ask you, "Is it un-American to love all people boundlessly and indiscriminately, enough so to be willing to model another way of running the world:  absolute nonviolence, even if it costs my life and my all?"

So the most glaring and applicable question remains--do conditions for a life worthy of human beings still exist in the culture in which we live; for me, the United States of America?

What does tenderness say?


Thursday, June 25, 2015

HEALING





HEALING

by Norm Lowry

We live in a culture gone mad, a society so disjointed that we have forgotten both who we and those around us really are.  We have given up our health--physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually--and our ability to heal ourselves and others, all for a distorted sense of power that only destroys.  Few of us seem to be able to claim any happiness at all, only misery, which we blame on someone or something else.  And if asked for the name or names of those with whom we have genuinely satisfying relationships, few if any can honestly provide one name.

So what do we generally do?   We tend to buy into society's love of mental illness; a state where circumstances are fully beyond our control; a state where we can play the victim; a state where we can take medication that will make our pain go away.  But does our pain genuinely go away or do we simply transport ourselves into a state where we can get out of dealing with our reality for yet another moment or two…?

My life has been no different than the many others who have suffered horrendous abuses, tortures, and tragedies.  I've found my obsessions, compulsions, and hatreds with which to build massive walls to keep myself presumably safe.  I've found myself meaningfully classified and diagnosed, professionally, and, I've taken my poisons which raised my seratonin level so I could feel better, for my token moment or two.  Yet where did it all get me?  It left me alone, firmly entrenched behind self-built walls that shut out all meaningful interaction.

One day, while literally depressed out of my mind, I went to see a movie.  I found that while I was watching the movie, my depression was nonexistent.  When the movie was over and I set foot outside, I found that my depression was right there waiting for me.  So I went back inside and watched another movie, another three or four movies to be truthful.  It didn't take extreme brilliance to realize that my thoughts and choices of the day were altering both my feelings and physiology.  I was choosing to depress, then choosing to stop depressing, when I found a more effective way to engage life.   My old, self-protective paradigm was faulty and had become useless to me.  So I went in search of a new paradigm.

That day, at the movie theater, my insanity was exposed for what it really was:  a massive lie that was literally sucking quality life right out of me and, it was my chosen lie.  There  may genuinely be such a thing as mental illness, if there's a genuine pathology that can be found to physically prove it.   And surely medications are at times needed, as they seem to lessen the anxiety of those turning certain emotional corners.  But I was past this basic need.  What I found has completely changed my life.

I found a teacher who taught me six things:

1.  Life can only deeply be engaged by the one willing to accept complete responsibility for all personal behavior.
2.  As neither the past nor what occurred in the past can limit me, only working in the present and toward the future can effectively aid my personal growth.
3.  Relating as ourselves is always fruitful, relating as "transference figures" is never fruitful.
4.  Personal growth is never to be found in excusing behaviors on the basis of unconscious motivations.
5.  The morality of behavior--the distinguishing between right and wrong solidifies the investment in personal growth. 
6.  The more satisfactory our patterns of behavior, the more and better we fulfill our basic needs.  (William Glasser)

Today I no longer live by trying to deny the real world.  I do not try to fulfill my needs as if some aspect of my world does not exist.  I do not live in defiance of the existence of actual problems.  Today, I live to be involved with and to engage people, all people.  I look for quality, satisfying relationships in which I ask others to be real with me, as I am real with them.  I seek to change only me, as it is absurd to think that I can change another, anyway.  I correct myself when wrong and credit myself when right.

In being healed, I am becoming a healer….

5/24/15

Wednesday, March 11, 2015

Resistance as Exile in Prison

 by Norm Lowry

 February 24, 2015

 “The old yellow pus of American cowardice is once again throbbing in the veins of this sorry country. How does it appear? In chauvinism that struts safely in its own land, away from danger. It is easy to talk ‘dangerously' about knocking people down when you are on your own turf, behind an embattlement of thousands of nuclear missiles and an ocean.” - Jack Henry Abbott, with Norman Mailer

 Our ugly and tasteless culture cannot abide women and men with ideals, whose faith alone compels us to purposefully give up our lives of ease, for the betterment of mankind. We are not saints or heroes. We have simply grown sick and tired of the lies and can no longer stomach the fact that it is these lies that allow even we who are imprisoned to live better than two-thirds of all humans on earth. Our society’s chosen lies cover the obvious truths that we are the chief oppressors and terrorists of humanity, the fiscal pillagers of cultures and peoples we deem to be our lesser, the slumlords of humanity - all in the name of our country, our favored gods, and religions.

    Our society’s prisons are filled, not according to demographic substantiation of actual crime, but according to publicly-and-media-driven lies, racism, poverty, and political incorrectness or discomforts. All inmates in American prisons are there to be broken or silenced, no matter the perceived, necessary means or method. Anyone who believes that there is any justice involved in America’s justice or prison complexes is simply deluded.

      My gratitude goes out to all who are, or have been, imprisoned for the love of humanity, or who offer encouraging and inspirational uplift to those of us who are imprisoned. Truly, I could not do this alone, as prison is filled with death and human loneliness. My peers, both inmate and staff, constantly seek to bring me around to their chosen reality - that I cannot stop nuclear weaponry and warmaking, racism and bigotry, impoverishment and community violence, et. al, but they are deceived. In one, I am stopping all of them. If we can create adversity, surely we can disappear it.

 Blessings,
 Norm