from Dictionary.reference.com:  

1.  swift and intense force: the violence of a storm.

2.  rough or injurious physical force, action, or treatment: to die by violence.

3.  an unjust or unwarranted exertion of force or power, as against rights or laws: to take over a government by violence.

4.  a violent act or proceeding.

5.  rough or immoderate vehemence, as of feeling or language: the violence of his hatred.

6.  damage through distortion or unwarranted alteration: to do editorial violence to a text.

I have been thinking about this word for several days.  So today let me non-violently meditate upon its meanings as I perceive them.

Perhaps it is that I worry too much, because it seems that he who screams the loudest gets the most attention, to wit, the so-called Tea Party movement.  

Perhaps it is that I see that violence of language often serves as a precursor to and instigator of violence of action.

Perhaps it is because I see how as a society we glorify violence in many forms, especially in much of our obsession with sports.

Perhaps it is because the current President does not respond to violence of language with similar expressions, but rather with humor, ridicule, and wit that some accuse him of being weak or un-American.

Perhaps it is because some believe that if we perceive ourselves as “stronger” or “more powerful” it gives us the right to impose ourselves by force or the threat thereof.

Perhaps it is because some will quote Matthew 11:12, From the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven suffers violence, and violent men take it by force,, while forgetting forgetting Matthew 5:3, Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.

Perhaps it is because I remember the words attributed to Gandhi, An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.

It is a Saturday morning, a time when often I am reflective.  It is a day when yet again I will give up some of my freedom to tutor students who need extra help to prepare for the AP Government exam.  It is also a day when we will celebrate the life and passing of Andrea “Froggy” Henderson, the art teacher who was with our school since its founding more than three decades ago and who just passed from cancer.  

And like many days, it is a day when I pause to take stock, to reflect upon my own words and actions.

I had a brilliant mother who graduated from Hunter College High School at 14, Cornell at 18, and Columbia Law at 21.  She was not physically imposing.  Yet it is from her I learned the most about violence.  Her command of language was often spectacular.  It was her weapon of choice.  She could skillfully disembowel a verbal opponent, as would a skilled swordsman, with seemingly little effort.  It was not the violence of brute force, nonetheless it was violence.  She used words.  Others used other weapons, and I learned from an early age that the use of violence of one form often lead to escalations of other kinds of violence:  my father, no dumy with his Cornell Phi Beta Kappa key, could not match her word for word but he could become very loud and shout down, or as occasionally happened when his younger child (me) demonstrated some of the verbal instincts of his spouse use his superior size and strength (at least until I turned 15) to strike back.  

I am not physically imposing.  When I was in peak shape I went about 178 pounds of pure muscle, as I graduated from boot camp at Parris Island at age 19.  In later days I worked part time as a bouncer in a bar, learning to use body language rather than body size as a means of controlling the situation, along with an ability to move quickly, observation of others, and some of mother’s facility with words not to tear down the person but to defuse the situation.  Still, I knew I was capable of violence beyond my appearance, both of the body and of the word.  And perhaps I relied too much upon that knowledge?

My role in life has changed and developed as I have aged.  I am 36 days away from my 64th birthday.  I doubt many of my 10th graders would be intimidated by my out of shape appearance, although I can and do break up fights between students sometimes bigger and stronger than I am – it is the element of surprise that enables me to gain a temporary advantage that I can then use to begin to defuse the situation.

But violence is not always the solution.  Perhaps my most famous occasion of breaking up a fight was between two girls, and there is for a male teacher real danger in attempting to grab one, for obvious reasons.  So instead I dropped to all fours, started barking, snarling and growling – they were so surprised that they both jumped back and I was able to step in between.

For better or worse, I know how to use force, physical and verbal.  I am too skilled in being violent, and not yet skilled enough in preventing it.

I am a product of the society in which I have lived for my than 6 decades.

Over time I have begun to learn that there are ways other than the path of violence – of thought, of word, of action.

Over time I have begun to try to walk those other paths in how I live, think, speak, and act.

It is only as I have done so that I have begun to learn truly how to teach.  It is perhaps why I was not ready to take on the responsibility of instructing adolescents until near the end of my 5th decade.  It is also why I am still learning how not to meet violence, actual or implied, with other violence, which is necessary if I am going to be able to reach my most difficult students.  If one asks me what I know about teaching, part of my answer would include these words:  I’m still learning what it means to be a teacher, as I am still learning what it means to be a human

being.

Part of that learning means learning from the experience and insight of others.  For example, the first half of a prayer attributed to St. Francis (although it cannot be traced back in written more than a century):  

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace;

where there is hatred, let me sow love;

where there is injury, pardon:

where there is doubt, faith ;

where there is despair, hope

where there is darkness, light

where there is sadness, joy

It does not say to meet violence with violence.

I acknowledge that force, of word and of action, is sometimes unavoidable.  Here I think of the words of a Russian monk on Mount Athos during World War II, when he prayed that the less evil side might prevail.  I turn back those words upon myself as a challenge, even as I acknowledge that merely to achieve a level of being less evil is not the point at which I wish my aspirations to cease.  It is a necessary, but insufficient goal.

Meditation does not always need to lead to conclusions.  This one will not.  Sometimes the greatest product of a meditation is to arrive at questions which can guide further reflection.

Are the words that I offer at least the less violent of the choices I can make?

Can I achieve the goal I seek with less force, of word, deed, or implication?

If the goal I pursue requires violence of thought, word, or deed, is it a goal I should pursue?

How is what I do loving, respectful of the integrity of others?

Can others get through my stubbornness, my willfulness, without resorting to implied or actual violence? Do my words and actions lead or provoke others to unnecessary violence?

Violence – I think especially of the third of the definitions with which I began: an unjust or unwarranted exertion of force or power

and ask myself if I am too quick to justify the exertion of force and power?

This is my reflection.  These are questions i will continue to consider.

What about you?

Peace.

Cross-posted at Daily Kos

Northern Virginians have lots of reasons to take pride in George Mason University, as a rapidly growing academic community named the #1 national university to watch in the 2009 rankings of US News & World Report, with Nobel Prize winning faculty and an occasionally great basketball team.

Unfortunately, GMU is also known as a “magnet for right wing money” which takes millions in corporate cash to run a network of centers to gin up and legitimate the latest ultraconservative talking points.

Now let me be clear: I strongly favor an academic environment that is open to debate and opinions from all across the political spectrum.  But there is a difference between principled, reason-based academic stands and corporate-funded attempts to skew debate and provide a fig leaf to cover naked profit-based self-interest.  

This brings me to the unfortunate role that our local university is playing in the political war over climate change. A lot of NOVA residents may not realize that GMU gives funding, support and – most importantly – academic legitimacy to some of the best known and most persistent deniers of the overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change – notably Patrick Michaels and S. Fred Singer.  In doing so, GMU perpetuates the myth that there is widespread academic disagreement about the facts and causes of climate change when in fact there is not.  

Notable among the funders to GMU are the notorious Koch brothers, about which Greenpeace recently released a damning report, “Koch Industries Secretly Funding the Climate Denial Machine.”  Koch, the second-largest privately-held company in the US, supports its interests in the oil industry by funding dozens of think-tanks, websites, and PACs to create an echo-chamber that endlessly repeats the latest bogus climate denial claims to convince the media, politicians, and citizens that climate change is just a hoax concocted by corrupt scientists, enviros and the nefarious Al Gore.

Koch and other right-wing donors give their money to support a web of GMU-affiliated organizations with names like the Mercatus Center, Institute for Humane Studies, and the Science and Environmental Policy Project.  Through these centers, GMU and their donors support such climate denial luminaries as Professor Patrick Michaels.

As Mother Jones noted a couple months ago:

Patrick Michaels has more credibility than your average climate skeptic. Unlike some of the kookier characters that populate the small world of climate denialists-like Lord Christopher Monckton, a sometime adviser to Margaret Thatcher who claims that “We are a carbon-starved planet,” or H. Leighton Steward, a retired oil executive and author of a best-selling diet book who argues that carbon dioxide is “green”-Michaels is actually a bona fide climate scientist. As such, he’s often quoted by reporters as a reasonable expert who argues that global warming has been overhyped. But what Michaels doesn’t mention in his frequent media appearances is his history of receiving money from big polluters.

Oh, yeah, about that corporate money, it includes:

a $63,000 grant in the early 1990s for “research on global climatic change.” He also received $25,000 from the Edison Electric Institute, an association of electric utilities, from 1992-95 for “literature review of climate change and updates.” And a 2006 leaked industry memo revealed that he received $100,000 in funding from the Intermountain Rural Electric Association to fund climate denial campaigning around the time of the release of An Inconvenient Truth. Reporter Ross Gelbspan wrote in his 1998 book The Heat is On, one of the earliest works documenting industry funding for climate change skepticism, that Michaels also received $49,000 from the German Coal Mining Association and $40,000 from the western mining company Cyprus Minerals.

Michaels and his supporters boast of his credentials – including his position as Senior Fellow in the School of Public Policy at GMU.  Curiously, however, if you search on Michaels’ name on George Mason’s website, you don’t find much – unlike other professors, who generally have their own web pages detailing their research and activities.  Might GMU be trying to downplay his presence on their faculty?

You won’t have much luck finding S. Fred Singer on GMU’s website either, although he is the other big climate denial fish being fed by the university.  You have to go to the website of the Science and Environmental Policy Project (SEPP) – one of the centers GMU keeps at arms length, conveniently, to attract corporate money to support conservative causes while keeping the university’s hands clean.

Singer, according to Source Watch, set up the precursor to SEPP with funding from the Reverend Moon’s Unification Church.  He’s had even more luck with other funders from the fossil fuel industries:

In a September 24, 1993, sworn affidavit, Dr. Singer stated that he had two meetings with Robert Balling in Pheonix for which his expenses were re-imbursed. Singer believed the the funding, which he received from Balling, originated from the Western Fuels Association.  Singer also admitted to working as a consultant on approximately half a dozen occasions for the Global Climate Coalition and that payments to him came either from the firm of John Shlaes, the coalition’s director or the PR firm, E. Bruce Harrison, which worked for the coalition.  He also stated that he had undertaken consulting work on “perhaps a dozen or so” energy companies. This included work on behalf of oil companies, such as Exxon, Texaco, Arco, Shell, Sun, Unocal, the Electric Power Research Institute, Florida Power and the American Gas Association.

(He also, incidentally, has in the past attacked the scientific finding that secondhand smoke can cause cancer, in a collaboration with a tobacco industry lobbyist.  This is one of the many connections between the corporate funded campaigns against regulation of tobacco and greenhouse gas emissions – apparently it’s a small world among academics up for sale to the highest bidder!)

There are many other corporate-funded attack dogs against climate science and environmental regulation hiding in the GMU bushes, like:

– Susan Dudley, Director of the Mercatus Center – which has received some $10 million dollars from Koch to rail against government regulation – and a Bush appointee to OMB, where she not surprisingly did all she could to stop environmental and other regulations.

– Brian Mannix, Dudley’s hubby, another Mercatus henchman and a Bush appointee to the EPA, where he reviewed EPA regulations before sending them to his wife at OMB to be killed.

– Walter E. Williams, GMU Economics professor, who begins one article with the scholarly observation: “Most of what the radical environmentalists preach is wrong or exaggerated, and sometimes are simply outright lies.”  

All of these folks have a fondness for spreading their views through non-peer-reviewed publications, articles and web postings that don’t adhere to the minimum requirements of the scientific method.  But they still benefit from being able to claim sponsorship by a reputable, accredited university.

So fellow NOVA residents, I’m not asking you to turn your backs on GMU – no, better that we turn our attention to what this university is up to and raise our voices when its good name is used to promote junk science and corrupt causes.  We deserve a great university – not a corporate shill – in our midst, and we should fight to ensure that is what GMU becomes.

See NLS for more on “The Awakening” conference Ken Cuccinelli spoke at yesterday. First, this woman’s panel was “immediately followed by a speech from Ken Cuccinelli, Virginia’s Attorney General.”  For more on Cindy Jacobs, see here and here. Wild.

As if that’s not crazy enough, check out this panel,  which claims that if the Employment Non-Discrimination Act passes, basically “teh gayz” will do all kinds of heinous things to disabled veterans and stuff.  Like, with anal probes. Anyhoo…

Not that people like Andrea Lafferty, Cindy Jacobs, and Ken Cuccinelli care, by the way, but I wonder how long it would take for their heads to explode if they read this article, which explains that “[v]arious forms of same-sex sexual activity have been recorded in more than 450 different species of animals by now, from flamingos to bison to beetles to guppies to warthogs.”  They might particularly appreciate the fact that “Male Amazon River dolphins have been known to penetrate each other in the blowhole.” Ah, nature! 🙂

Oh, and how long will it take everyone else’s heads to explode when they realize that Virginia’s freakin’ Attorney General was speaking at this conference o’ crazies?

Anyway, turn up the volume (very poor recording quality) and enjoy “teh crazy!”

Pastors from 19 Black churches in Virginia have written a letter to Gov. Bob McDonnell criticizing several of the positions he has taken since becoming governor.

It’s not just his proclamation declaring April to be Confederate History Month and lauding only the confederate history portion of the Civil War the pastors object to. (I will give McDonnell credit for realizing that his proclamation was a mistake that set off a firestorm of criticism and, consequently, revising it.) They also criticized the governor’s executive order barring employment discrimination which omitted sexual orientation as a protected class, budget cuts that hurt the most programs for the poorest Virginians, and the governor’s plan to force nonviolent felons seeking restoration of their voting rights to write an essay.

The pastors’ letter  also criticized the filing of “frivolous legal suits aimed at repealing the President’s advances in healthcare and protection of the ecosystem” and “the appointment of the attorney representing Club Velvet to the head of the ABC board, upon whose property President Obama has been demeaned by a vulgar representation in Joker-face for months – an attorney who may have serious conflict of interest issues.”  

“These actions are totally contradictory to the inclusivity that he stated he wanted to provide both in his inaugural address and his recent apology…It is a blight on the national reputation of our state and presents us as exclusionary and archaic,”  the letter contended.

The conflict of interest the letter refers to is that of James N. Insley, who was named chairman of the ABC Board by McDonnell. Insley is a lawyer representing Club Velvet, a strip club in Shockoe Bottom in Richmond. That club had its license revoked by the ABC board and is facing a hearing on the matter in May.

At the very least, McDonnell seems to be following the example of George W. Bush in his apointment of Insley and several other members of the ABC Board: put the fox in charge of the chicken coop. Insley has been a vocal critic of the board and its actions in the past, stating that they sometimes go too far in their investigations. (Insley also is a graduate of Pat Robertson’s Regent law school, as is McDonnell.)

In another sign that minority Virginians feel that the election of McDonnell has turned back the clock to a past we all hoped we had left behind, the Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity at the College of William & Mary has refused to attend a ceremony at the goveronor’s mansion to receive an award for the group’s community service. The fraternity was understandably upset when McDonnell proclaimed April as Confederate History Month, without mentioning slavery or the full history of the Civil War. The chapter will accept the award but not attend the ceremony.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t believe that Bob McDonnell is racist. Not at all. I am just saying that the political philosophy he subscribes to is bound to impact harshly on the poorest among us. Plus, the sort of policies we see coming out of Richmond right now are inevitable if the people in charge of the state government don’t actually believe that the government they run is capable of doing a good job.

Also, if a person’s religious beliefs insist that an entire group of people are to be judged and condemned on the basis of their sexual orientation, then that person will promote policies based on that prejudice if placed in a position of political power.

I believe that Bob McDonnell is a devout Christian. However, since I am a “Matthew 25 Christian,” as well as one who subscribes to Jesus’ command to us to leave judgment of others to God, I will never be someone who can accept many of the things that McDonnell does without strong protest. I applaud the pastors and their courageous stand. I gladly endorse everything they said.