New Moon in June, 2019

New Moon in June, 2019

Wear Orange Weekend is just over. Historical background: Orange is the color that Hadiya Pendelton’s friends wore in her honor when she was shot and killed in Chicago at the age of 15. She died one week after performing at President Obama’s second inaugural parade in 2013. After Hadiya’s death, her friends asked that those of us who want to raise awareness of gun violence and raise the cry for legislation to curb the virus of senseless shootings also wear orange to honor her memory.

Enough history. If you want to support this effort, read a history of the second amendment (a good one is: “The Second Amendment” by Michael Waldman)   and a history of the National Rifle Association (a good one is: “Gunfight—The Battle over the Right to Bear Arms in America” by Adam Winkler). I’m on my way to the library this morning to pick up copies of the recently published “Fight Like a Mother” by Shannon Watts, mother of the nonprofit “mothers for common sense gun control”—www.momsdemandaction.org, and "Guns Down: How to Defeat the NRA and Build a Safer Future with Fewer Guns" by Igor Volsky ( one of the founders of gunsdown.org).

If Jacinda Ardern in New Zealand can lead her country to common sense gun legislation we can do the same in the United States. This is my firm belief. Unfortunately I live in Texas, where a bill was introduced during this most recent legislative session to create a statewide “gun safety awareness month.” The fact that there was opposition to this initiative is frankly beyond belief, but there was—this is Texas, after all. In my darker moments I see all our cold dead hands holding our cold spent weapons.

Recently I’ve been reviewing the writings and sermons and speeches of the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Junior. In a nutshell, he studied the writings and lives of other great leaders whose methods were nonviolent, chief among them Mahatma Gandhi. King often emphasized that three forces fuel the darkness in the world: poverty, racism and militarism. To get concrete here, what we can do to ease the situation, if we care at all, is tithe part of our incomes to worthy causes that fight poverty, educate ourselves about racism (see the prior blog) and perhaps start another War Tax Resisters’ movement.

These are my thoughts this morning, inspired partly by Caroline Serich’s post about the experience of santosa or contentment in yoga practice

: “I became present to a ‘do nothing’ feeling arising in me and ever so gently the awareness of contentedness, realizing that that contentedness is always present, the me of contentedness, although not always connected to it! This me of contentedness was not subject to the political quagmire of today’s world and the dire circumstances of climate change or the destruction of the planet’s biodiversity. It is undisturbed, unequivocally peaceful. And it is also not permission to be disconnected or even detached from world events. Rather it is the underpinning of clarity, the strength to act where action is needed.”

None of us has permission right now to be disconnected, partly because it is impossible.