One is his quotation from historian Fritz Stern: "In Germany there was a yearning for fascism before fascism was invented." In other words, the conditions for fascism are laid culturally long before any leader gives it form. Are we laying that foundation now? I think of it every time I hear someone say that we need more "border security." We have done nothing but add militarization at the border for more than a decade. Such comments stem from a seemingly insatiable desire to attain an imagined level of safety and insularity. In the phrase "border security," I hear a dream for ultimate control that, to me, has fascist intonations.

Here is Hedge's summary of how fascism emerges:

The impoverishment of a working class and the snuffing out of hope and opportunity always produce angry mobs ready to kill and be killed. A bankrupt, liberal elite, which proves ineffectual against the rich and the criminal, always gets swept aside, in times of economic collapse, before thugs and demagogues emerge to play to the passions of the crowd. I have seen this drama. I know each act. I know how it ends. I have heard it in other tongues in other lands. I recognize the same stock characters, the buffoons, charlatans and fools, the same confused crowds and the same impotent and despised liberal class that deserves the hatred it engenders.

The image of the "thugs and demagogues" has stayed with me to chasten my too-easy assumption that Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck are too ridiculous to be taken seriously. "We can laugh at these people," says Hedges, "but they are not the fools. We are."

Hedges doesn't mention it, but for me, immigration is the exact location we need to pay attention to. In an interview I did last year with Southern Poverty Law Center's Mark Potok, he pointed to the crossroads at which we find ourselves, 

It's not merely that the country is changing; it's that the die is cast—nothing will prevent this country from becoming a genuinely multiracial democracy in which no racial group dominates. Even if we were to seal the borders today, whites would still lose their majority. 

But something can prevent us from becoming a "genuinely multiracial democracy," and that is if we choose paths of violence and fear on this road. Frankly, this is already happening. 

My favorite line in Kamenetz' essay comes as he is imagining what Kafka would be doing if he was working in New Orleans: "When he wasn’t musing on the seeming absence of God, he investigated industrial accidents for a workmen’s-compensation insurance company."

Our language develops from the world that we inhabit. We speak the words we need to describe our experience. Likewise, the words we speak create and shape our experience of the world. What can we make of people who would need the word “nutritarian” to describe the experience of eating? What is a more basic and more intimate an act than that?  “Nutritarian” is a parody of a word, infused with a bizarre brand of pseudo-science along with a false sense of self-righteousness.  Nutritarians can’t possibly eat. If they do, they don’t taste. They think about eating, while calculating the number of ANDIs (Aggregate Nutrient Density Index) in their food. In other words, they have made the intimate experience of eating into an ideological act and a linguistic nightmare. 

Likewise, green exercise. “Green exercise,” write Drs. Kay Judge and Maxine Barish-Wreden, “refers to physical activity that is done while simultaneously being exposed to nature. Various forms of green exercise include hiking, biking, outdoor sports or beach activities.” Have the people to whom they are writing forgotten what it is like to go outside? Do they need to have as motivation a study by the University of Exeter that “two out of three people have improved self esteem” after performing green exercise?  

Orwell argued that the problem with the English language in 1946 was its tendency to be abstract and unclear. It lacked simplicity and reference to the material world.  Unfortunately, “nutritarian” and “green exercise” are the words of a people far more lost and confused than even Orwell imagined. 

Last night, I was reading about the work of Woody Tasch who is the founder of the Slow Money Alliance. Intentionally drawing on the Slow Food movement, Tasch argues that we need to reconnect money and how we invest it to the communities that we want to see thrive and grow. Too often, he says, we think of the stock market as a neutral place where we can put money and then forget about it, especially if we use its profits for good. But he argues that we need to put our money exactly where our hearts are, acknowledge that growth isn't always good, and invest in small scale economies and ecologies. 

Slow Money's current goal seems so small: they want Americans to put 1% of their assets into local food systems within a decade. 1%. That would be something on average of $30 a month spent on a CSA or at a farmer's market. 

Here's my favorite part of the interview (printed in this month's The Sun):

The way we are going to rebuild [our soil] is by millions of small acts of restraint and care. We're not going to find a technological fix. We're not going to find a globalized-market fix. We're going to find lots of small fixes at the local level.

By Christian Wiman 

Because I spent my adolescence as a particular kind of Baptist, I have a lot of skepticism about conversion narratives. Whenever someone tells a story about religious transformation, my radar goes up; my nostrils expand as if I am trying to detect the scent of falseness. Even so, the question of transformation—how and why and when people really change—is central to me. It's probably why I choose to go to church with a lot of recovering alcoholics. I am constantly searching for ways to understand transformation better.

Christian Wiman’s book of essays Ambition and Survival: Becoming a Poet is one of the most important books for me personally that I have encountered in years. Wiman is the editor of Poetry magazine. This collection includes personal reflections on growing up in West Texas and becoming a poetic nomad, as well as critical reflections on particular poets and poetic experiences. But the entire collection is channeled through the experience of Wiman’s recent conversion to Christianity. That gives every essay in the book—written over a period of eleven years—a particular charge. In each one, I found myself looking for signs and wonders, hints of the transformation that was occurring, a transformation that Wiman describes as “color slowly aching into things, the world becoming brilliantly, abradingly alive.”

As a young poet, Wiman set the world and poetry at odds with one another. His essay “Milton in Guatemala” is about his time, at age twenty, reading Paradise Lost while living on the roof of a house in the jungle. As he struggled with the difficult poem and imagined Guatemala as a place where he could gain the EXPERIENCE  he would need as a poet, he used poetry as a defense against life, as a way to avoid the problem of living. (“I haven’t altogether outgrown these ideas and impulses,” he writes,  “though I am less inclined now to go around in my daily life talking in capital letters.”)

After many years of wandering, the combination of writer’s block, falling in love and being diagnosed with incurable cancer guided Wiman to a perception of the divine and toward a religious conversion. Unlike the religion of his childhood where he was taught to renounce the world for God, Wiman now inhabits a God-infused landscape, where word, world and Word sometimes find a common resonance.

Wiman articulates the anxieties of the world that I live in--its restlessness and homelessness. He finds a language for my own struggle to fully feel and participate in the world. Wiman’s honesty and vulnerability takes me close to the possibility of my own ongoing transformation. 

A while back, CCblogger David Henson made the case here that we are too quick to turn the term “neighbor” into an abstraction. “Everyone’s my neighbor?” he asked. “That’s just another way of saying no one is.”

A group of churches in northwest Denver recently took up the challenge to interpret the word “neighbor” as literally as possible. During the month of April, pastors from more than 20 local churches preached sermons urging their congregations to find out who their neighbors are and what they need. Electa Draper of the Denver Post summarizes the basics:

Get to know at least eight of the households nearest yours. Start by learning names and introducing yourself. Look for opportunities to be helpful. Gather at least once during the summer for a block party.

The needs evident in this part of Denver are many and familiar. Foreclosed homes, out-of-work parents, neglected children and neglected homes, shut-ins, roaming teenagers. It is an area that has been hit hard by the recession, to be sure, but it is also a place where the social ills are ordinary.

What I find remarkable about this program, besides its simplicity, is that it is ecumenical in the most basic sense. The list of participants includes Pentecostals and Lutherans, Catholics and “Bible churches.” There are megachurches and tiny parish churches. For once, the vast spectrum of political and theological difference matters little. The directions are concrete and almost universally applicable, even if they may be a challenge to carry out.

I, for one, immediately began to count the number of people on my street that I know. I had a moment of self-examination as I noticed how I actively avoid some of the neediest families near me. Yes, I do a lot for my community. But I also avoid my neighbors for fear of getting sucked into their dramas. All of these "social ills" are evident on my very own block, and I don't get near them. 

The number of people involved in the Building Blocks program could be as many as 16,000, given the membership of the various churches. If each of those people reaches out to eight others and is able to offer even a small amount of help or a little understanding, the result could transform one small corner of Denver. It’s an idea worth building on.

I walked into the presentation late, stealing a few extra minutes in the kitchen with my friend Lil making fresh coffee. When I arrived, the presenter was discussing a kind of technology that would allow people to walk into grocery stores with little scanners so that they could choose exactly which toilet paper or peanut butter or milk they wanted. In other words, they could program the device with their values and the kinds of choices they wanted to make. Then they could use the device to scan the toilet paper choices available and the device would choose the best one.

Wow. My first thought was the amount of clarity that would be needed to make a device like this work. You would have to settle on a set of values in a quiet moment at home—who am I and what do I truly care about in toilet paper? The beauty of the technology would be that you would not have to bring this coherent, rational, value-reasoned person with you to the grocery story. You only need to conjure her up in the privacy of your own home and then venture out with your device. Do I have a self like this? Am I that secure in what I value in toilet paper? 

I tend to think of myself and my values as more fluid. Some days I am all about saving the environment and other days I am all about convenience. The device would force me to program my best self into it. The upside would be a more coherent set of values. The downside would be the loss of my spontaneous and circumstantial response to the world--my fluid and ever changing identity.