Fairness - The Commentary

I had just finished my Master’s in Biblical Studies, and with an emphasis on Near Eastern archeology was on a summer tour working on archeological sites from Turkey to Lebanon to Egypt and from Jordon to Israel. I was so single-mindedly focused on the past then that my photos from that summer in 1969 were all about old, dead stuff, the “digs” and their relics, not the living people around me. I regret that I hadn’t taken a photo of six old men who gathered together every morning at an outdoor table at the coffeeshop on Manger Square in Bethlehem. Yep, that Bethlehem, as in “O Little Town of….” My week at a small guesthouse off the Square from day one included the daily pleasure of sitting with these elders who warmly accepted me into their morning ritual as “that young graduate student” who could benefit from their on-the-ground advice and mentoring. They were right, of course. And I’ve never forgotten it, though I've no idea what happened to them after they bid me well for the rem...

You haven’t really lived if you haven’t experienced a breakup with a romantic or potentially lifetime partner. That’s not to recommend that we should seek out opportunities to do so because we’re otherwise missing out on something exciting. It’s to say that breaking up is a standard part of the history of any human search for love and intimacy. There’s probably a breakup of lovers taking place somewhere in the world at any time of day or night, including right now while you read this. What that means, of course, is that no one is alone when they end a relationship and that no one is the first or sole person to have the feelings they do about it no matter how singled-out they feel at the time. It means that though it’s likely to feel awful, it’s not the end of the world or the end of one’s life.   Sympathy, even empathy, should be easy to come by because the experience is all around us. Only the hard of heart can walk away from a relationship without any emotions. It’s even produced...

Anger is a – maybe the - dominant emotion in our culture today. It's looked down upon if it seems “out of control,” but it's one of the few feelings that men can express without anyone questioning their manhood because of it. But both women and men, if they're paying attention, can be seething underneath. And that anger bursts out at times in over-reactions to practically anything from being cut off in traffic to responding with the most negative possible interpretation of what someone has just said. There are couples who actually stay together in anger . We sometimes notice them shopping together or bickering with each other. Neither partner looks happy. There are other couples where one or both of the partners simmers continuously below the surface. That makes all the little things the other member does annoying - even activities that in the beginning of the relationship seemed cute and adorable. Over the years women had been taught that they're not supposed to expre...

There’s a long history of using guilt and shaming – I mean going as far back as we have a human written record. People and institutions soon became experts at spreading guilt among those they felt needed their control . It’s been quite an effective tool to get people to do what the powerful want - maybe even as effective as fear. And when the two work together, as they most often do, their power is enormous . What makes it so easy is that people can be made to feel guilty in very passive-aggressive ways. Think of those old bumper stickers that bragged: “I BRAKE FOR ANIMALS.” The implication for those following that car was: “What’s wrong with you that you hate animals and don’t have my moral righteousness to display the same bumper sticker?” Or take that fish symbol brandied about on the back of vehicles testifying: “I’m a real Christian.” Ironically, its origin was as a secret insider code in times of Roman persecution. It disguised that a location was a place where Christians met, ...

  “I know this one thing to be true: You do not need to forgive a person who has hurt you in order to free yourself from the pain of negative emotions. You can even reach a place of love and compassion for the wrongdoer without forgiving a particular action or inaction. You are not a less loving or whole person if there are certain things you do not forgive, and certain people whom you choose not to see. Perhaps you are even a stronger or more courageous person if you have leftover anger, whether from one violation or countless little micro-violations, even as you move on. More importantly, it is no one else’s job – not that of your therapist, mother, teacher, spiritual guide, best friend, or relationship expert - to tell you to forgive – or not to.” Those are some of the eye-opening insights author and therapist Harriet Lerner included in her 2017 book: Why Won’t You Apologize? – Healing Big Betrayals and Everyday Hurts as she analyzes what makes a real and healthy apology. And ...

There’s an old saying: “There’s nothing as beautiful as gray hair and a long beard.” It comes from traditional China, not twenty-first century America. You would have guessed that, right? It’s definitely not an expression out of American pop culture. In the US, our view of what is beautiful, especially for women, is a twenty-something-year-old or a “young-looking” thirty-something. Imagine those thirty-somethings worried that they don’t look young anymore! We’re conditioned to be attracted to youthful looks from our first exposure to our culture, and to criticize ourselves as we show the natural results of aging. If we’ve been thoroughly conditioned, we even feel that wrinkles, gray hair, “age spots,” sagging, and drooping are like diseases to fight. That’s good news for the bottom-line of so many of the distributors of the products they want to sell us. Like most views of beauty that have existed in history, definitions of what is attractive are dominated by current economics. Queen E...

There are a number of reasons why Republican “culture wars” today are targeting transgender people (along with people of color in general). The right-wing, egged on by its radical right Christian adherents, is showing us how it’s fixated on transgender people as it struggles to hold onto the power it thought was assured with the election of the former president to protect itself from the progress of larger cultural forces. Hundreds of anti-transgender bills are appearing in state houses around the country because national right-wing think tanks are feeding them to Republican state legislators who’ve hitched their wagons to a regressive, radical, White, heterosexual male-supremacy agenda tied to the former president. And these bills aren’t going away because their assumption is that a radical right-wing Supreme Court Democrats won’t have the will or power to change will uphold anti-transgender laws. Their anti-transgender culture war agenda is, first of all , pretty much all that Repub...