Loaded gun

Moon Flower

"We take for granted that the federal government can forbid landlords to reject a tenant based on his race or religion; prohibit development on fragile wetlands; finance the Medicare program for the elderly; require public schools to give girls an equal opportunity to play sports; collect revenue to pay for the National Institutes of Health and the national parks; encourage energy conservation by taxing gas guzzlers; prohibit discriminatory voter ID laws; and vindicate the right of state government employees to take unpaid leave to care for sick relatives.

The conservative legal movement has already attacked many of these provisions, and the Roberts court has been steadily supplying it with ammunition to do so.  Conservative judicial rhetoric — for example, Justice Antonin Scalia’s denunciation last week of the Obama administration’s decision not to deport young, law-abiding illegal immigrants who came to this country as children — may be designed to change the political climate as well. . . .

A Congress that can advance national priorities only through its taxing power is a Congress with little power at all. That is the real legacy of the last term. The Supreme Court has given Americans who care about economic and social justice a reason to worry this Fourth of July. The court’s guns have been loaded; it only remains to be seen whether it fires them."

If you are curious to know why I think it's vital that Mr. Romney not be elected President and allowed a chance to appoint more conservative Supreme Court justices, like Chief Justice Roberts and Antonin Scalia, who would curtail or eliminate the government's ability to protect and defend these rights, read on.

By PAMELA S. KARLAN, New York Times, Op-Ed  June 30, 2012

ANTON CHEKHOV once remarked that “one must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it.” In the term that ended last week, the Supreme Court reached a liberal outcome in cases involving President Obama’s health care law, Arizona’s draconian immigration statute and mandatory life sentences for juveniles. But the conservative majority also laid down a cache of weapons that future courts can use to attack many of the legislative achievements of the New Deal and the Great Society — including labor, environmental, civil rights and consumer protection laws — and to prevent new progressive legislation. Far from being a source of jubilation, the term may come back to haunt liberals. 

The immediate result of Thursday’s 5-to-4 health care ruling was a victory for the Obama administration and the millions of Americans who will get improved access to medical care. But four justices would have struck down every provision of the 900-plus-page act, and Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., who provided the fifth vote to uphold the mandate that individuals buy insurance or pay a penalty, distanced himself from the law. “It is not our job,” he wrote, “to protect the people from the consequences of their political choices.” The chief justice, who at 57 is likely to sit on the court for at least another two decades, made clear that government’s ability to address many of the nation’s most pressing problems is subject to some new limitations. 

We take for granted that the federal government can forbid landlords to reject a tenant based on his race or religion; prohibit development on fragile wetlands; finance the Medicare program for the elderly; require public schools to give girls an equal opportunity to play sports; collect revenue to pay for the National Institutes of Health and the national parks; encourage energy conservation by taxing gas guzzlers; prohibit discriminatory voter ID laws; and vindicate the right of state government employees to take unpaid leave to care for sick relatives. 

The conservative legal movement has already attacked many of these provisions, and the Roberts court has been steadily supplying it with ammunition to do so.  Conservative judicial rhetoric — for example, Justice Antonin Scalia’s denunciation last week of the Obama administration’s decision not to deport young, law-abiding illegal immigrants who came to this country as children — may be designed to change the political climate as well. 

The federal government’s ability to regulate economic and social life stems largely from four powers in the Constitution. Under the commerce clause, Congress can “regulate” national economic activity. Under the taxing power, it can “lay and collect Taxes.” Under the spending power, it can “provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States.” And under the enforcement powers, it can enact “appropriate legislation” to enforce the 14th Amendment’s equal protection and due process clauses and the 15th Amendment’s guarantee of the right to vote regardless of race.

From the 1930s through the Warren and Burger courts, the Supreme Court largely deferred to the political branches’ judgments about the scope of these powers; it was their partner, not their adversary. The court recognized — as Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg pointed out in her opinion on the health care case — that the political process was the primary vehicle for limiting government’s powers. 

Under the last chief justice, William H. Rehnquist, the court began to turn, particularly on Congress’s commerce and enforcement powers. The court limited some statutes — notably, a section of the Americans With Disabilities Act that allowed state workers to sue their employers and a section of the Violence Against Women Act that gave victims of gender-motivated violence the right to sue in federal court — but upheld others, including other applications of the disabilities law, a provision of the Family and Medical Leave Act, and a statute criminalizing possession of homegrown marijuana.

The Roberts court has intensified the effort to reduce federal power. That the individual mandate was upheld should not overshadow the court’s ruling on Medicaid expansion — the part of the ruling that is most likely to affect other legislation in the near future.

For the first time since the New Deal, the court struck down an exercise of Congress’s spending power. It held that Congress lacked the power to deny Medicaid funds to states that refuse to expand their coverage. Chief Justice Roberts — joined by the liberal justices Stephen G. Breyer and Elena Kagan — held that while the government can deny additional Medicaid funds to states that refuse to expand their coverage, it cannot penalize them by rescinding current Medicaid payments.

This is a loaded gun indeed. 

MANY state and local governments, universities and nonprofit agencies build their operations around federal financing. If the federal government can deny them additional money only when it adds conditions the recipients must meet, it will be hamstrung in ensuring compliance with critical federal objectives. For example, the government gives grants on the condition that recipients will not discriminate on the basis of race, sex and disability. If Congress adds sexual orientation to the list — which seems likely at some not-too-distant point — must it maintain existing financing for groups that defiantly persist in discriminating against lesbians and gay men? 

A 2000 law requires state prisons and local jails that get federal funds to accommodate inmates’ religious practices. But those facilities received money long before the law was passed. Can the government credibly threaten to cut off funds to facilities that violate the law, or are its enforcement tools now limited? 

In less-noticed opinions, the court also curbed federal power in important ways. It rejected the government’s view that drug company representatives should be entitled to overtime under the Fair Labor Standards Act. It seemed poised to severely restrict Congress’s ability to give private plaintiffs the right to enforce consumer protection laws, unless they could show direct economic injury. (On the final day of the term, the court said it wouldn’t decide the case after all.) 

In another health care case, the court refused to permit state workers to sue for violations of their right to take sick leave for themselves under the Family and Medical Leave Act. A 5-to-4 majority ignored evidence that although the act uses a gender-neutral leave model, it was designed in significant part to protect childbearing women against pervasive employment discrimination.

In the fall, the court will have further opportunities to advance the conservative agenda. It will almost certainly decide cases involving voting rights, race-conscious affirmative action and same-sex marriage. Three cases involving federal environmental law are already on the docket. And even before the court struck down Montana’s century-old ban on corporate political spending, there were already a slew of new challenges to campaign finance regulations working their way toward the court.

What, then, to make of the court’s landmark decision to uphold the individual mandate? Chief Justice Roberts construed the mandate not as a requirement that individuals purchase health insurance but as a choice: buy insurance or pay a tax. But the conservatives surely know that a Congress that can tax but not do much else — spend money, regulate the economy or enforce civil rights — will be hamstrung. Taxes are unpopular and nearly every Republican member of Congress has promised to oppose any additional taxes on individuals or businesses. 

A Congress that can advance national priorities only through its taxing power is a Congress with little power at all. That is the real legacy of the last term. The Supreme Court has given Americans who care about economic and social justice a reason to worry this Fourth of July. The court’s guns have been loaded; it only remains to be seen whether it fires them.

Potter waving

Mimsy sleeping

Life happens

From Living Yoga by Kate Holcombe, the founder and president of the nonprofit Healing Toga Foundation in San Francisco (healingyoga.org).

Watching children on the playground, I am struck by how clearly the scene before me demonstrates Patanjali's Yoga Sutra ll.i5, which introduces the causes of suffering. A little girl begins to wail as her mother pulls her away from the sandbox. A boy cries as he chases another little boywho has a toy truck that he desperately wants for himself MY own toddler is weepy as he shows me the sore spot caused by sucking his thumb, but he brushes me away irritably each time I gently remove his thumb from his mouth to try to break him of the habit.

The word duhkham, most commonly translated as "suffering," literally means "tightness or constriction in the chest or the heart area." If you think about a time you were upset and what that felt like in your body, you'll probably recognize the feeling. In the Yoga Sutra, Patanjali uses duhkham to encompass all the disturbances in our equilibrium, from feelings of disquiet or unhappiness to all-out heartbreak. When you're upset, angry, anxious, sad, unhappy, or devastated, that's duhkham.

In Sutra ll.i5, Patanjali outlines the causes of duhkham, or suffering. The first is parinama, or change: You suffer when your circumstances change in a way that negatively affects you, whether it's leaving the park sooner than you want to or losing a job. The second is tapasltapab, or longing:You suffer when you want something you don't have; it might be a toy, a promotion, or anything else you long for. The third cause is samskara, or habit: You suffer when you knowingly or unknowingly repeat patterns or behaviors that don't serve you or that cause you harm.

The fourth cause of suffering mentioned in this sutra is a little more complicated. In essence, it is the ever-fluctuating balance of the energies in the body, which are known as the gunas. You can see this balance tipping when a child misses her nap and becomes overtired and hysterical or when you find yourself wide awake in the middle of the night and yawning at noon.


EASING SUFFERING

Throughout the Yoga Sutra, Patanjali offers multiple tools for developing a clearer perception so that you can suffer less from all causes. The clearer your perception- and the more connected you are with the quiet, inner place of the Self- the better poised you arc to respond with equanimity to changing circumstances, unmet longing, and patterns that may not be serving you.

But no matter how diligently you apply yourself to this endeavor, says Patanjali, you can't escape suffering altogether-no one can. For one thing, the fluctuations of the gunas are an unavoidable part of living in a body, so even those who have reached the highest states of yoga suffer on account of the gunas, at the very least. In short, this sutra teaches that there is no avoiding suffering, that no one is immune, and that suffering is everywhere.

This isn't as grim as it might sound. While the whole of the Yoga Sutra might be thought of as a guide to suffering less, Sutra 11-15 offers a hopeful perspective on the human condition: It's easier to cultivate compassion when you know that someone else's loss, unhappiness, or difficulty might just as easily be your own.

Also, Patanjali says, the experience of suffering is often the first step toward positive change. When your discomfort becomes so acute that it disrupts your life, you're more likely to seek a solution.

WHY ME?

In the next sutra, Yoga Sutra ll.16 (heyam duhkham anagatam), Patanjali says that if you can accept that no one is immune from suffering and you understand the causes of suffering, then vou can be prepared for the sufferingthat isyet to come and avoid unnecessary suffering.

You can't change the fact of difficulty, loss, and heartbreak, and you can't change that those things may cause you mental, physical, and emotional pain. But, with effort, you can change your reactions and your responses when life takes these turns. You can avoid destructive responses such as blame, guilt, and regret- the shoulda-coulda-woulda and the why me. ("Why not you?" Patanjali might answer; challenges, difficulties, and tragedies happen every day to undeserving people.) These responses don't relieve your suffering; they only add to it.

Inherent in Yoga Sutra 11.16 is the idea that there is no hierarchy of suffering. No one person's suffering or difficulty is any less legitimate than another's or any less deserving of empathy Case in point: At the same time that the mother of one of my friends was dying, another friend lost her dog and was devastated. Some in our circle of friends felt irritated that our friend with the lost dogwas so distraught in the face of our other friend who was losing her mother. But Patanjali would
say that each person's suffering is her own experience and that each is equally valid.

Suffering is universal, but each experience is unique to that person. When you accept this, you can avoid the unnecessary suffering that comes from comparing or judging yourself or others with thoughts like, "I should just get over myself- look how bad she has it!" or "Why is he so upset? I have much more of a reason to be upset than he does!"

When you understand and embrace the message of these two sutras, it's easier to let go of judgment and have compassion and empathy for the discomfort and troubles of everyone, including yourself. And, if you use your suffering as an opportunity to begin a process of inquiry and self-connection, you'll cultivate insights and tools to prepare you for whatever may come -and ideally avoid the additional suffering that often goes with it.

Tough time? This reflective practice can help

Bring your attention to your breath and try to regulate it so that it feels even and smooth. Allow yourself to reflect on the situation that has caused you to feel disturbed or has agitated you, and experience the range of feelings around it. Are you angry, sad, scared?

Once you are able to pinpoint what you are feeling, ask yourself if this feeling is something you have control over or not. You can't change being devastated by the fact that your dog was hit by a car, but can you let go of your quilt for having let him get out? Patanjaii emphasizes that instead of focusing on the past, you should focus on how you choose to move forward.

When you recognize feelings that you do have some control over, take note. They are only adding to your challenge or hardship, so imagine what it might feel like to let them go.

This practice is just that-a practice. It takes time to cultivate self-awareness and even more time to make changes. Throughout the process, remind yourself that you are not alone: Everyone experiences suffering of some kind.

Above all, be patient with yourself. Awareness is an important first step. In time, this practice can help you to reduce unnecessary suffering and to move through the suffering you cannot change with grace and compassion.

Yoga Journal, Oct. 2012, pp. 59-62 

Aftermath

The top of one of our trees came down in the storm Sat. night. :| Other pix of garden flowers & neighbor's cat, Riley.

Melrose Symphony's Unending Bombast concert (my title - Saint-Saens Organ Symphony & Tchaik 5) rehearsals start tonight & Northeastern teaching tomorrow so good-bye summer schedule. Can't say I'll miss the heat, though.

I was watching you

Headlights on a Texas Road
And Hank Williams on the radio
Church wedding, they spent all they had
Now the deal is done to become Mom and Dad

And I was watching you from above
'Cause long before life there was love

See those little girls dressed like china dolls
All for one then one by one they fall
High on a hill where the world passes by
You never came back but I know you tried

'Cause I was watching you from above
When it all falls apart there is love

All those years to prove how much I cared
I didn't know it but you were always there
Until September when you slipped away
In the middle of my life on the longest day
Now I hear you say

I'll be watching you from above
'Cause long after life there is love
Baby, I'll be watching you from above
Long after life there is love

Roseanne Cash - The Black Cadillac

Krista Tippet's very interesting interview with Ms. Cash is here. Another of Ms. Cash's songs, The World Unseen, is here.

Hedding Sesquicentennial

This is the run-through of the program Jim Roth and I are playing tomorrow @ the Hedding Campground in Epping, NH to help celebrate their sesquicentennial.  The first clip is the Andante movement from J.S. Bach's Sonate in e for flute & continuo (we're minus a cellist), and the other clips are from a piece by Edvard Titcomb, called Hedding Suite, that he wrote for the centennial of the campground. Somehow the first movement disappeared from my hard drive.

This is my first video outing - and we'd scheduled the rehearsal after I'd been away from the flute 2 weeks in Europe then sicker than a dog with a bronchial infection the week before yesterday's rehearsal. But the show must go on. Be gentle.

This I believe

From the first episode of The News Room. I hope you'll watch it to the end.



If you're interested, the whole first episode is here.

Pity the poor coffin makers

Next time you hear someone decry the 1% of our national budget that we spend on foreign aid (not the 25% many people think we spend), please consider this:

The Coffin-Maker Benchmark

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

MASERU, Lesotho

IF you worry that foreign aid is an utter waste, just chat with some mortality experts here in southern Africa — the coffin makers.

They’re miserable.

These coffin makers in the street markets are idle partly because American spending on programs to fight AIDS around the world means that vast numbers of people are no longer dying at a young age. So coffin makers sit dejectedly beside stacks of lumber, waiting for business.

“Before, a lot of people were dying of AIDS,” said Moeketsi Monamela, a 33-year-old coffin maker here in Maseru, the capital of the mountainous kingdom of Lesotho. A half-dozen years ago, he sometimes crafted 20 coffins a month, he said. Now, he typically sells five or six.

“Now there is medication, so fewer people are dying of AIDS,” Monamela explained. “I’m not very happy because this is my future.”

Realizing that this did not sound quite right, he started again: “Although the medication has affected my business, I’m happy because I don’t want to see people dying of AIDS.”

In this election year in the United States, there’ll be bitter debates about what should be cut from budgets, and one thing Democrats and Republicans seem to agree on is that foreign aid is bloated. Polls indicate that 6 out of 10 Americans favor cutting foreign aid.

A World Public Opinion poll in 2010 found that Americans believed that foreign aid consumed one-quarter of federal spending. They said it should be slashed to only 10 percent.

In fact, all foreign aid accounts for about 1 percent of federal spending — and that includes military assistance and a huge, politically driven check made out to Israel, a wealthy country that is the largest recipient of American aid. True humanitarian aid constitutes roughly half of 1 percent of the federal budget — and sometimes gets remarkable results, as is happening with AIDS.

My trips to southern Africa used to be heartbreaking. Funerals were constant, schools were emptied of teachers, and hospitals lost their doctors to the virus. In the countryside, children starved because adults were too sick to farm. In Swaziland in 2006, I came across a 12-year-old orphan girl who had become head of her household after AIDS had wiped out the adults.

Yet now the picture is starkly different. On my annual win-a-trip journey with a university student — this year it’s Jordan Schermerhorn of Rice University — we’ve been seeing how assistance changed the course of the AIDS epidemic in Lesotho and Malawi. Global AIDS deaths are decreasing steadily from the peak in 2004. New infections are down. About half a million mothers with H.I.V., which causes AIDS, used to infect their babies in childbirth each year, but now a simple treatment regimen aims to eliminate that by 2015.

The progress is the result in large part of Pepfar, or the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria (which the United States supports). To his great credit, President George W. Bush started Pepfar in 2003; it’s the best thing he did.

With the help of Pepfar and the Global Fund, antiretrovirals, which are powerful AIDS drugs, are now available free in needy countries. AIDS will still kill millions of people, and there are already shortages of medications, but the tide is turning.

“As a bottom line, millions would not be alive without Pepfar, while, at the same time, millions more in their families have been saved from poverty because mothers and fathers are productive again,” notes Dr. Peter Piot, the former executive director of the United Nations program against AIDS and the author of a sparkling new memoir, “No Time to Lose.”

“If we have reached a turning point in the global AIDS response, it is also largely due to Pepfar,” Dr. Piot added. “There are probably very few examples in international aid that can demonstrate such dramatic, direct impact.”

In Bobete, in rural Lesotho, we visited a clinic run by Partners in Health, the aid group founded by Dr. Paul Farmer of Harvard. The clinic tests virtually all pregnant women in the area for H.I.V., and those with the virus are given treatment so that they will not pass it along to their babies.

Those who need them get free antiretrovirals and treatment for tuberculosis (which often accompanies AIDS). With treatment, patients are able to continue to work and support their families.

It’s true that AIDS treatment has worked better than Pepfar’s prevention strategies, such as promoting condoms and discouraging multiple partners. Prevention by supporting male circumcision in hard-hit countries seems more promising (circumcision greatly reduces the rates of H.I.V. transmission through heterosexual sex). Lesotho is hoping to circumcise 80 percent of sexually active males within five years, up from less than 20 percent now.

In the Malawi village of Makaluka, a woman named Gladys Daniel told us that everyone knows how AIDS is spread, but that about half the villagers still sleep around, usually without condoms. “Our husbands can have multiple partners and put us in danger,” she said.

It turns out that her concern was not theoretical. “I know my husband has a partner,” she said, adding that her husband steals money from her to pay his girlfriend for sex. With risky behavior like this, some 2.7 million new infections still occur annually around the world. So although the progress is immense, there’s still a long war to be fought against AIDS — and if funds are slashed, the world will slip backward.

AIDS programs are just one of many foreign aid successes. Here in Lesotho, the United States used the carrot of Millennium Challenge grants to nudge the government to end a ban on letting women purchase property or borrow money from banks by themselves. Child mortality rates are plummeting because of money spent on clean water, vaccines and hospitals.

Granted, aid is often misspent, just as it is by the military and everybody else. Yes, the war on AIDS took many wrong turns (as documented in the recent book “Tinderbox”).

But when you hear candidates in this campaign season in the United States declare that money for foreign aid should be slashed, remember that modest sums have saved lives on an unprecedented scale. When there’s a depression in the coffin-making industry, that’s a tribute to foreign aid that Americans can take pride in — and should support.