Let Freedom Ring

 ...takin’ it easy, with iced coffee, waiting for things to cool down a bit to bike downtown to hear the Roots and watch fireworks on the Ben Franklin Parkway....hot July 4^th Wednesday, West Mt. Airy, State of Mellow Mildly Caffeinated Satori, U.S.A. almost a ghost town, people staying in with the air conditioning, or maybe downtown with the parade...me, still recovering from dehydration and heat exhaustion, spending the weekend walking around D.C., a city built on a swamp, in 104 degree heat, sustained by coffee and margaritas with friends, making my way through the National Gallery for Van Gogh, Picasso, Gerhard Richter and the Mirò exhibit, catching a sunburn walking out to see the new Martin Luther King Memorial...

....(some ago heard a usually-pretty-hip public radio kids’ show identifying King on his birthday as a man who had a dream...nothing more specific to ruffle ideological feathers....all the world loves a dreamer and speaker of positive intentions, right?....and asking kids to call in and say what their dreams were...turned it off after one hearing one too many young voices voices their dreams of having millions of dollars)...

...(then, it was another great American who said very well, then, I contradict myself....this, too, is America)...

The Interweb Quote of the Year!!!

One thing this blog’s kinda been known for is the quotations peppered through its posts...often making its original writing pale in comparison, but, then, so it goes...(Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five). Of course, in this, it's taking part in that greatest of postmodern practices, which has flowered so fully on the interwebs: using other people's stuff for lack of anything original to express. So, in honor of all that, the staff here would like to share the first (and probably last) annual Yoga for Cynics Interweb Quotation of the Year!

Certainly, in the year 2011, nothing else came close to the profundity, timeliness, or sheer ubiquity of:

Something I never actually said.
The Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr.

Thank you, thank you.

Runners Up include:

The timeless:

Something kinda new-agey I certainly didn’t say, and that probably wouldn’t really fit with my philosophy or beliefs, either...
Rumi, the Buddha, and/or Albert Einstein

And more topical:

Something I did say, but taken so far out of context that it seems to mean the complete opposite of what it meant in-context.
Barack Obama

And, finally, who could forget:

Of course we’re going to riot....What do they expect when they tell us at 10 o’clock that they fired our football coach?
Student, Penn State, November 9, 2011

Happy new year, folks...

For MLK Day...

Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
Martin Luther King Jr.

With a broken computer, and about to head out to take part in the Martin Luther King Day of Service, I'm not saying much, but thought I'd share a few images and words...

Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.
Martin Luther King Jr.

Namaste, & all that...

If A Shameless Plug Is For A Worthy Cause, Is It Still Shameless?

Everybody can be great...because anybody can serve. You don't have to have a college degree to serve. You don't have to make your subject and verb agree to serve. You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love.
Martin Luther King

...have been led by circumstances to put cynicism, irreverent yoga jokes, and gratuitous calls for cookies aside...for the moment...in favor of shameless plugs...raising the age old question if a shameless plug is for a worthy cause, is it still shameless?...

...signed up to join a bunch o’ coffee shop compatriots to volunteer at a homeless shelter this coming Monday...nothin’ like an opportunity to harass friends while helping the needy....it’s a beautiful thing....and thought I'd drop a suggestion that anyone out there not already committed to the Martin Luther King Day of Staying Home and Drinking Beer in Front of the Tube or the Martin Luther King Day of Grumbling About Having to Work on a Holiday can check out the Martin Luther King Day of Service* website for ways to get involved locally...

...while those feeling less motivated can help out victims of the earthquake in Haiti from the comforts of their own easy chairs in front o’ the tube...perhaps maxing out the old credit card with a donation to Doctors Without Borders to help pay for one o’ those inflatable hospitals...really, they got inflatable hospitals...check em' out...and, as slammin’ some beers tends to loosen up the wallet, this socially conscious blogger says drink up before making your contribution...or practice some yoga...whatever works...


...this post has not, technically, been approved by either Martin Luther King or Thich Nhat Hanh...pictured above...but I think they'd be cool with it...

*thanks to April for pointing out that my MLK Day link didn't work...it does now...

The King and I

Have we not come to such an impasse in the modern world that we must love our enemies - or else? The chain reaction of evil - hate begetting hate, wars producing more wars - must be broken, or else we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation.
Martin Luther King, Jr.

Martin Luther King’s birthday, when I was growing up, was marked by African American kids staying home from school...which, no doubt, would have really, really horrified Dr. King. Now, of course, we have the official holiday (even if most years it's not actually on his birthday...then, somehow only Christmas and the 4th of July manage to escape the overwhelming force of Americans' everlasting desire for a long weekend), though I don’t know how thrilled he’d be about everybody staying home and playing Grand Theft Auto in his honor, either...which is part of what makes the Martin Luther King Day of Service a beautiful thing....last year, I walked around Germantown picking up trash in vacant lots. This year...I must confess...I didn’t...though I’ve spent much of the day reading books on therapeutic writing, which I hope will be useful in helping some of society’s dispossessed to tell their stories....I think maybe Martin would be okay with that....

Lately there’s a lot of talk about how happy he’d be right now...and I can’t doubt he’d be pleased with certain recent events...though it's hard to picture him sitting around with a complacent smile on his face—more likely, I imagine, he’d be thinking hard and planning, eyes focused squarely on all that remains to be done....

Too Pissed Off to Blog

too pissed off to write Yoga for Cynics posts this week...so tried to create one in which I didn't say anything...just some pictures and quotes...that Jasper Johns American flag up there, with the opening lines of Song of Myself beneath it...followed by a postcard of a lynching and two words from Faulkner: they endured....was gonna call it Two Americas...subtle, no? Almost better to write a rant, I thought...and so ditched it...

been trolling political threads in on-line forums...making ad hominem attacks...then leaving...vowing to stay away in the future...at least for the next few weeks....

earlier this week, an elderly fundamentalist Christian relative forwarded a patently racist Revelations-quoting election-related e-mail to me...I hit the reply button and let it rip...and I mean really let it rip...not that charming good-humored therapeutic yoga-retreat kinda letting it rip...(though, to be fair, I got accused of supporting the Antichrist first)...as it turned out, she forwarded it to me by accident, and apologized for the mistake...I apologized for my tone...

still, to end on an idealistic note, I’ll include here the Martin Luther King quote I was gonna put at the end of that deleted post:

Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable.... Every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering, and struggle; the tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated individuals.

and promise to try harder next time....

Flakes of Wrath

Contrary to what your more irritatingly blissed out yoga practitioners in their designer label “Live Simply and Let Others Simply Live” t-shirts say in between expensive spa treatments, there’s a lot to be pissed off about.

Sure, forgiveness is a good thing, one might even say divine. And, apparently, it’s good for one’s mental health:
Forgiveness is an act of letting go. It is not something we do for others; it is a gift to ourselves....We do not release them from accountability by forgiving; we free ourselves from the burden of bitterness. Gordon Livingston, M.D.
Things get more complicated when you away from the personal, though. A long time ago, when I was an angry self-righteous young political activist, my Dad gave me a book by Eric Hoffer called The True Believer. Hoffer said that people who want to change the world are simply trying to avoid changing themselves. I thought: if King, Gandhi, and Mandela did what they did to avoid working on themselves, we should all be grateful for that.

Disillusioned words like bullets bark as human gods aim for their mark to make everything from toy guns that spark to flesh colored Christs that glow in the dark; it’s easy to see without looking too far that not much is really sacred.
Bob Dylan

Here’s what’s pissing me off at the moment (as opposed to ten minutes from now, or ten minutes ago): Republicans. Cindy McCain said “In Arizona the only way to get around the state is by small private plane.” Phil Gramm says people should stop whining about the economy, since, presumably, nobody he knows is so strapped that the private plane is on the block. Karl Rove says Obama is just like that snooty guy “everybody” knows from the country club that, presumably, “everybody” is a member of. And yet, find a picture of a Democratic candidate wind surfing or admitting that he reads a book now and then, and an Andover graduate son of a president who used family connections to keep out of Vietnam only needs to clear some brush in front of a Fox News camera and mispronounce big words to be a man of the people. Of course, these are also the people who’ve taken on the mantle of “morality” to the point that when the word “values” appears in the mainstream media, we can assume it means “right wing fundamentalist Republican values” even as they’ve fucked the world with their ideology of avarice, bigotry, paranoia, and unbelievable greed (though, admittedly, what pisses me off almost as much is that democrats/progressives/liberals let them do it...since, y’know, we’re too postmodern to use that kind of terminology).

Keep you doped with religion, and sex and TV, and you think you’re so clever and classless and free, but you’re still fucking peasants as far as I can see.
John Lennon, “Working Class Hero”

On the other hand, King et al didn’t, as far as I know, spend a lot of time sitting around stewing in their own rage. I have friends who can barely sit still over a beer thanks to their visceral hatred of George W. Bush. I’ve also met incredibly privileged people who spend hours every day gritting their teeth with rage as Rush Limbaugh rants about the possibility that a few of their tax dollars might go to healthcare for people with nothing. I spend a ludicrous amount of time and energy coming up with angry political rants (see above), ending up emotionally drained and, thus, actually less likely to take any significant action about anything.

There’s a scene in the movie Gandhi, where Gandhi’s on a hunger strike to get the Hindus and Muslims to stop killing each other. A distraught man enters the room, throwing a hunk of food onto his blanket. “I’m already going to Hell,” he says (all dialogue is from memory), “I won’t have your death on my conscience, too.” When Gandhi asks why he’s going to Hell, the man recounts that, after the Muslims killed his family, he bashed a Muslim child’s head in. Gandhi says “there is a way that you can escape from hell. Find a child who’s lost his parents in the fighting. Take him with you and raise him as your own.” Then, after a pause: “One more thing: he must be a Muslim, and you must raise him as one.” The point of this is not that the guy needs to make some bizarre and, most likely, impossible penance to keep from going to Hell after death; it’s that he’s already in Hell because of his hatred for the Muslims for what they did and for himself for what he did because of that hatred. The only way out is to break the cycle.

4th of July, Wissahickon Park (Scalia)

We have it in our power to begin the world over again
Thomas Paine, 1776

Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted

Martin Luther King, Jr.

The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons
Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Reality has a liberal bias
Stephen Colbert

On the transcendent issues, the most important issues of our day, I've been totally in agreement and support of President Bush
John McCain

Lesley Stahl interviewing everybody’s favorite Supreme Court Justice, Antonin Scalia on 60 Minutes:
STAHL: If someone’s in custody, as in Abu Ghraib, and they are brutalized, by a law enforcement person — if you listen to the expression “cruel and unusual punishment,” doesn’t that apply?
SCALIA: No. To the contrary. You think — Has anybody ever referred to torture as punishment? I don’t think so.
STAHL: Well I think if you’re in custody, and you have a policeman who’s taken you into custody–
SCALIA: And you say he’s punishing you? What’s he punishing you for? … When he’s hurting you in order to get information from you, you wouldn’t say he’s punishing you. What is he punishing you for?

Freedom’s just another word for...nothin’
Paraphrase of Justice Scalia’s comments, with apologies to Kris Kristofferson and Janis Joplin

Those willing to give up a little liberty for a little security deserve neither security nor liberty
Benjamin Franklin

Happy hour is now enforced by law
Jello Biafra

The first time I got arrested isn’t worth talking about, much. I was outside of a Dead show in San Francisco—in a state of mind that certainly made it seem significant at the time, though it might’ve been anyway, except that it wasn’t. We got set up by this older guy who handed us something and promptly disappeared, mere seconds before somebody else grabbed me, saying “guess who.” I answered “I dunno,” then saw the little blue earphone. A quick search showed we weren’t worth their trouble, but the story was enough to get me rejected for a jury twenty years later. More interesting was the second time, maybe a year later—standing or crouching along the fence, joking, probably, enjoying the desert sun and each other’s company—me, Hilary, Don, Jeff P., Mel, maybe Elyse and Tom—until we heard the sound of the drum—some hippie kid who’d been picked the night before around the campfire to give us the signal—and, as somebody started raising the strand of barbed wire, I thought ‘shit we’re actually doing this,’ and climbed through. Then we were walking across the desert, trespassing on government property, hand in hand, spotting the biggest jackrabbit I’d ever seen. Up somewhere way ahead, where we certainly didn’t expect to get, was Mercury—name of a planet, in honor of a Roman trickster god—where scientists toiled, building devices and testing them underground to make sure they worked—and that was exactly the problem—they worked way too well, and there were way too many of them, and yet more were being built and tested, and here we were, crawling through barbed wire and trudging across the desert, trying in our feeble all-too-theatrical way to say no...please...stop. That was all we could do, perhaps, but it was something. There has to be some value in simply saying no, even if no one listens. After a while, tired and simultaneously hot and cold as hot desert sun wrestled with icy winds, we saw the Wackenhut up ahead—back then, in the mid-to late 80’s these armies for hire were already a growth industry, if nothing like what they are today. We decided to at least make a token effort to walk away, but didn’t cause him too much trouble. Casually approaching, he let us know we were under arrest, herded us together with a group of others, and politely asked us all to stick out our wrists for plastic handcuffs—they were easy to slip out of, though one poor guy learned not to do so too blatantly in front of them. From there it was a three hour bus ride north, to Tonopah, where they put us in an auditorium, told exactly what statute we’d violated, then said we were free to go but would have to find our own way back. Good one, State of Nevada. And so we packed every bar and restaurant in that little town until enough cars made it there to drive us back down to camp, some to be arrested again the next day, some, like me, to drive up in support. One of my releasees was kind enough to treat everyone in the car to a dip at a hot spring on the way back down. The day after that, a bunch of us headed to the bay area for another Dead show, where this time I managed to stay out of police custody.

Well, boys, I reckon this is it — nuclear combat toe to toe with the Rooskies. Now look, boys, I ain't much of a hand at makin' speeches, but I got a pretty fair idea that something doggone important is goin' on back there. And I got a fair idea the kinda personal emotions that some of you fellas may be thinkin.' Heck, I reckon you wouldn't even be human bein's if you didn't have some pretty strong personal feelin's about nuclear combat. I want you to remember one thing, the folks back home is a-countin' on you and by golly, we ain't about to let 'em down. I tell you something else, if this thing turns out to be half as important as I figure it just might be, I'd say that you're all in line for some important promotions and personal citations....
Slim Pickens as Major T.J. Kong, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

freedom won through non-violence will mean the inauguration of a new order in the world. There is no hope for mankind in any other way
Mohandas K. Gandhi