Election Day is Here!

Over the weekend, I carefully and scrupulously read over my Voter’s Guide from Washington State, completed the lengthy ballot, then emailed it back for tabulation in this quadrennial exercise of participatory democracy. Emailing got me in before the deadline, but my votes won’t actually be counted until my paper ballot is received later this week through the mail, properly signed and dated.


Though I’ve lived in the Greater Toronto area for almost a quarter century, I remain a legal voter based on my former address in the Beacon Hill neighborhood of Seattle. I’ve now been an absentee voter for more years than I was a resident voter. I’ve been a registered voter in a few states: New York, Massachusetts, Missouri, Oregon, and Indiana, in addition to Washington (but never in my birth state of Michigan). I never actually voted in New York, because I was away at university in Massachusetts in 1972, the first year when eighteen year-olds could vote, and my absentee ballet wound up in a college administration building instead of in my dormitory mailbox, as I’d expected. So I never completed that first vote. It turned out not to matter very much, as that was the year of the Nixon landslide. My first presidential vote wound up being cast in Massachusetts four years later, for Jimmy Carter. Next time around, after primary season and my first caucus, in Kansas City, and disillusioned with Carter by then, I cast a vote for my first third party candidate, in the person of Republican defector, John Anderson.


In 2004, I did a vote swap. I wanted to give Ralph Nader a boost, but didn’t want to risk Kerry losing a vote he might need to prevail. So I voted for Kerry in Seattle, while a trusted friend promised to vote Nader in New York. But, I wasn’t actually in Seattle. That vote was already my 4^th absentee vote for President, made from Canada. This is my seventh.


A few years ago I became a Canadian citizen, and my dual status allows me to participate in the electoral process of two countries. The voting experience is quite different here from what I became used to in Seattle. In Canada, which has a parliamentary system, one usually gets to cast only a single vote, that is, to make a determination on only a single matter. One reason is that municipal, provincial and national voting doesn’t generally happen at the same time. But the more substantial reason is that, here, you essentially have to align yourself with a party. In last year’s federal contest, I cast a vote for the local candidate for Member of Parliament who represented the party of my preferred national leader, and that was that. Had I really liked the national leader, but thought the local candidate an idiot (or vice versa), I’d have been stuck with a “neither or both” choice.


Contrasting with that, the ballot I just mailed back to Washington was a hefty eight pages. It included dozens of votes. In addition to my choice for President, I also made choices for Senator, Congressional Representative, Governor, lieutenant Governor, Secretary of State, State Auditor, State Treasurer, Attorney General, and several judgeships and memberships on school boards and insurance commissions.

My favorite part of voting in the U.S. – and this varies widely from State to State – is the presence of Initiatives and Referendums. An initiative is a ballot measure put forward by a citizen or citizen group. All that’s required to get a measure on the ballot is a required number of signatures, enough to demonstrate that there is considerable interest. A Referendum, on the other hand, is a measure that the legislature has decided – for any number of reasons, practical or political – to refer back to the electorate for approval. Sometimes there will be competing Initiatives and/or Referendums, representing different solutions to a problem. These measures reflect a degree of direct citizen participation in government. Often these measures have a high public profile and generate huge campaigns that rival those of contenders for office.

In Washington State, the Initiative movement has been very strong, at least in the 34 years since I’ve been voting there. This year alone there are initiatives to:

-         Increase the minimum wage

-         Create a system to finance political campaigns

-         Allow family members to restrict access to guns by the violent or mentally ill

-         Increase penalties for fraud and identity theft targeting seniors

-         Create a carbon emission tax on fossil fuels

-         Push for a constitutional amendment to deny the rights of persons to corporations

In addition, there are a couple of other advisory measures, a proposed amendment to the state constitution, a city of Seattle initiative to improve health, safety and labor standards and protection for hotel employees, and a measure to fund the expansion of the light rail system. The ballot comes with a booklet containing non-partisan explanations of the measures and arguments and rebuttals, pro and con, as well as links to information about supporters and financing of each side.

It took me several hours over the weekend to read up on all of the measures and to make my choices. But it’s a wonderful exercise that forces one to carefully consider the responsibilities of citizenship. And it leaves me feeling that, though I’m long gone, I remain a citizen of my native land, and that I still play a role in shaping the future of a community that I continue to love and that was my home for quite a few years.

This election season, which has been so tortuously long and divisive, is finally ending. It’s been a perfect demonstration of how ugly and messy democracy can be. But as they say, it still seems like about the best system going.

Coming Into The Kefar

Dimona is a city in Israel’s Negev desert. It’s the home to about two to three thousand ex-patriot African Americans known as the Black Hebrew Israelites. I should say African Americans and their offspring, because more than half of the population was born here, since the community was established in late 1960’s. It is a prolific community, created by its founders “to establish God’s new kingdom on Earth”, and as such, it’s very pro-children. Families are the fundamental unit of the community, and many of them are very large. Some of the men have two, three or even four wives, and sometimes a dozen or more children between them.

My father immigrated here in 1973, part of a large group, mostly from Chicago, Detroit and Gary, Indiana, who came here with very little but their faith in what they were creating. There were many hard years, during which they faced financial struggles, deportations, and a fair amount of desertion. Since that time, they’ve won allies and admirers, certainly acceptance. But I’m not here to write a history, but to share the experience of welcome and community I experience coming here.

I first came here twelve years ago, to celebrate my father’s eightieth birthday with him and his two wives. The lived in Tiberius at the time, part of a small contingent of “the Nation” settled in that northern city on the Sea of Galilee. But even then, it was Dimona I was most eager to see and to visit – to see the heart of this community that my father joined so long ago.

Emmah Kaninah, 96 & Abbah Avraham, 92 (9'16)

One of the things that always strikes me here is that the Kefar – the perhaps ten acre square of mostly single-story, densely-packed apartments that holds the heart of the community – is full of my people. They are the people I was born among in Detroit, lived among in my teens in New York City, and encounter in the Black communities all over the U.S. They speak my language and I speak theirs; we share common roots and culture and growing up experiences. In some ways, they remind me, who has lived mostly among white folks through most of my adult years in Seattle and Toronto, of the communities of Black students I belonged to in boarding school and in college in New England: we were from all over the country, but were conscious and intentional in over-coming whatever differences we might have to support our togetherness.

Emmah & friends on the Kefar (9'16)

The other thing that makes an even bigger impression on me, is how healthy, vibrant and truly communal the Kefar is. For years, I worked in Toronto’s Regent Park, Canada’s largest public housing development. I love Regent Park, and it is certainly home to real community, with powerful, loving bonds, healing, grassroots energies and movements, and a powerful sense of identity. But Regent Park’s beautiful community existed on top of and inter-mingled with other communities that were disruptive and discordant and constantly draining it’s health – like the subculture of its violent, street drug trade.

Life in the Kefar, on the other hand, while I don’t suppose it to be trouble-free, is guided by a single vision and a fairly strict code of values and conduct that prevent any oppositional culture from setting roots. I don’t know that I could or would live within this particular vision and code, and this isn’t a time to explore that. By virtue of my father’s belonging, I have a foot in the community, and find acceptance here, but I am a visitor, an outsider. And yet, I look upon the Kefar with love, admiration and even a little, wistful envy.

Kids on the Kefar (9'16)

The Kefar is beautiful. It is humble and simple, but clean and welcoming. Though dense, it feels open. It is the village it aims to be. But it’s the life of the children here that speaks to me most. When I was first here, I wanted to return to Regent Park and scoop up all the children and bring them here. It is safe. Children play unattended, because all adults here share responsibility for their supervision and care. I observed a child of about four approach an adult to ask for assistance crossing the street that borders the Kefar. The adult called over a youth, who promptly responded, escorting the child to the school yard across the street. There are no glass shards, cigarette butts or other kinds of trash lying about. No obscenities or threats are being shouted. When I asked the children for permission to take their photo, they gathered around, eager, giggling and polite, showing no fear of the stranger.

In so many ways, life here is as it ought to be. And it makes me wonder at the extent of what most of us have sacrificed for our modernism and ‘progress’.

Rofe Amadyah's Cactus Garden on the Kefar (9'16)

What We Believe

I’m in Israel. It’s one of those countries on Earth where belief systems have played an incredibly historic and inspirational role, but have also given rise to generations of war and hate. It’s a place of pilgrimages and combat missions, of devotions and heresies, where the concepts of good and evil are probably more present in people’s thinking, and also more contradictory in expression than in most other places. In this part of the world, people seem to be blowing themselves up every day for what they believe.

My visit here is to a community full of true believers. My father’s Hebrew Israelite nation is founded on a pursuit of truth, a truth its members feel was historically denied, about the origins and true identity of Black Americans of African ancestry. It is a belief that directly challenges the truth as put forward by others who have claims to the territory and traditions of Israel. The beliefs of the Hebrew Israelites hold an invitation to me, one with great appeal on many levels. However, I cannot see a personal pathway to accepting the invitation, because it is loaded with so much belief that is contrary to beliefs I have developed on my own journey through life.

I hold to my own beliefs to varying degrees. My belief that the Earth is approximately round is pretty strong, despite my surprising, recent encounter with a sincere and adamant Flat-Earther (Yes! They exist! – though I wouldn’t have believed so before meeting one). This belief holds despite the fact that I have no direct evidence and have neither proved it nor had it proven to me. I believe it mainly because I’ve been told so, and because it seems to make sense, and because it fits in with lots of other bits of knowledge, gained through experience as well as indoctrination, about how the universe I live in is structured.

But my belief in intelligent alien life is much less certain. I belief in that largely because of the vastness of the universe (something else I take at the word of “experts” who’ve written books and have appeared on television). If the universe is truly as vast as they say it is, and populated by billions of suns and their planets, is just seems mathematically unlikely to me that we could be the only beings with the gift of intelligence. And, in the words of one of Carl Sagan’s “Cosmos” characters, if we are the only ones, “…it would be an awful waste of space.” But this belief in alien intelligence is not rock solid. I know it stems as much from wanting it to be true as from anything else. In the same way that my belief in Santa Claus persisted a good two or three years beyond being old enough to see through that one, because I so wanted him to be real.

This stuff is on my mind, in part, because of a couple of incredibly provocative books I’m reading. They are Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari, and Mindfulness in the Modern World, a transcript of talks by Osho. Harari says that the ability to create “fictions” and to believe in them is the key characteristic that separates Homo Sapiens (Us) from Neanderthals and other near human beings, and the characteristic that made us so dominant over the rest of creation. Among these “fictions” are religion, democracy, human rights and money. Osho states that all of our ‘religions’, as well as the other life-style theories that drive us, are nonsense, and that we ought to overcome them if we want peace, happiness, enlightenment. Both of these writers, coming at the subject from totally different angles, say that nothing we “believe” has much of anything to do with Truth.

Having written this far, I have to add that I’m not yet twenty percent through Harari’s book. I’ve only read about half of Osho’s (but that’s a different matter, his not being a book that one will actually ‘finish’, I don’t think). There are certainly no conclusions to draw in this post. But my mind is open to looking at all that ‘I believe’ in a fresh way, maybe to looking inward for what generates belief, to understanding why I have often felt a need to believe in something; why, at varying times, freeing myself from a particular belief has caused me to feel lonely and isolated, afraid, or absolutely empowered and free. Harari points out how powerful belief systems are. Osho, how limiting they are. The profusion of today’s wars, and conflicts of religious and political extremism, would support both. One of the key questions to me is: Given that belief is about a deep level of acceptance of a viewpoint, sometimes based on proof, but often beyond the point of verification or evidence, how much choice do we really have in what we believe?

How is this Trump Thing even Possible?

It really concerns and worries me that Trump is doing as well as he is in the polls, and that Hillary is struggling as she is. It causes me to worry about the character, insight and values of the American electorate.

I understand that Hillary Clinton is not an ideal candidate, that there are things about her candidacy, past errors in judgement, and the Democratic party platform that one can question and oppose. What I don't see is how anyone can look at her lifelong record and doubt that she has a deep and long-standing concern for regular people, and that she's worked hard over the decades to promote change that helps them.

But looking at Donald Trump, even supposing that one feels strongly about the "Republican values" he supports, how can one not be troubled by the character and personal values of the man? What has he ever done that hasn't been about self-promotion, about accumulating "personal" power, wealth and influence?

I'm stunned by those who say they distrust Clinton and yet ignore the chronic posing, distorting, misrepresenting and outright lying of Trump? I'm incredulous that people seem to think he will be a good manager of the economy, when all evidence shows that, as a businessman, he's all about lawsuits and intimidation, image and bankruptcies.

I've been asking myself what the explanation could possibly be, for millions of Americans actually wanting the presidency to be in the hands of such an immature, narcissistic and uninformed person. And I haven't been able to come up with any explanations that aren't depressingly cynical.

That so many Americans are just so fearful, that they are soothed by the bragging and bluster of Trump, whether he demonstrates any capacity for backing up his promises or not.

That so many Americans are so hateful, that they simply cannot acknowledge the decency of a Woman who would be commander in chief, any more than they accepted the decency of a Black Man as commander in chief.

That so many Americans are simply that stupid, that they really believe that the entire world (and American liberalism) is out to take advantage of, or even destroy, America, and that we have to attack and beat them down before they succeed.

I seriously fear for my country. This whole movement behind Trump strikes me as the kind of lunacy I see in my paranoid clients, who manage to either distort every fact that would poke holes in their delusion, or simply ignore it. It appears that Trump's supporters are able either to explain away the endless proofs of his unfitness to hold high office, or to ignore them.

I can't understand and I can hardly believe what may be happening.

Watching Over Dad

I’m fighting with my father.  He refuses to drink water. Sometimes he won’t eat. He often refuses to acknowledge people, to answer questions, to cooperate when I or others are trying to get him up out of bed, to get clothed, to sit at the table, or in his wheelchair.

My father is 92 years old and suffering from dementia.  He has aged remarkably well, but three years ago he started showing signs of dementia, and then he fell and broke his hip a few weeks ago and has dropped off substantially. For weeks, in the hospital and in the rehab center, he refused to do anything. Since coming home, he’s improved somewhat, but hasn’t made the efforts that we all know he is capable of making.

Today, he’s refusing to drink any water. He lives in Dimona, Israel, in the middle of the vast Negev desert. It hits thirty degrees Celsius every day, even as Equinox approaches. And it’s dry. Dehydration is a constant threat. Drinking water is a must, if he is to sustain life, and he fights it constantly, biting and chewing the end of the straw until it’s useless, blowing instead of sucking through it, refusing to hold onto the glass, keeping his lips pressed together, becoming fearsome and belligerent, or pretending that he’s less in control of his faculties than he is, insisting that he’s already drank the water, or saying he’ll drink it later and later and on until the never-arriving later.

He’s a hard-headed old man, and right now, I’m so frustrated and annoyed with him that I’d almost pack up and go back home and be satisfied if I never saw him again. But I know this will pass, and that however difficult this three and a half weeks becomes, I will treasure it. I remind myself daily that if this is not the last time I see my father, it may well be the last time he sees me and knows who I am. It was wonderful walking into the room in the small ‘House of Life’ last week and having his face break into a broad grin at seeing me. He was so unmistakably happy. He’d been told that I was coming, but in his state, it was a surprise he got to experience more than once.

The water thing is difficult. He must drink, but won’t. I’ve fussed and threatened to the point where I’m wondering whether I’m sliding toward elder abuse. I’m Aries, but he’s Taurus, and a battle of wills can last a long time.

How did I come to be in this situation? Being childless, it was looking like I was going to be one of those rare individuals never to have to concern myself with care of either a child or an elder. That is still the likely case – my father’s is a spiritual community to which he’s belonged for 43 years, and it is caring for him now, and will continue to. But I’m getting a sobering taste of a life that so many friends have endured, with parents, in-laws and others, sometimes two or three at one time. I’ve never imagined I could do what they’ve had to do. I feel even more doubtful of that now.

But I’m grateful for this time with my Dad. Grateful even for the experience of changing the diaper of he who once changed mine. It’s humbling, stirs up all kinds of memories and emotions, and makes my own mortality palpable, and oddly, somehow less threatening.

Donald Tweet

I haven’t been political enough in my blog. I’m so disturbed by the blind partisanship I see running through American politics that I’ve wanted to present my arguments from as non-partisan a position as possible. I've argued in this space against political attacks, and for greater respect for other points of view and the candidates that represent them. I've argued for keeping political discourse on high ground. Well, forgive me. But enough of that.

Donald Trump’s candidacy has me more disturbed than any I can remember, at any level of government. On many levels, Rob Ford’s term as mayor to Toronto was a joke. But as much as I disagreed with most of his policies, his rhetoric, and his presentation of himself as a man of the people, I at least credit him with a degree of sincerity in his desire to be of service to others.

I can grant Trump no such benefit of the doubt. I believe that his commitment to service, to the working class and to America go no deeper than his vanity and self-serving allows. He is the worst kind of opportunist, one who seeks to convince himself and others that his self-aggrandizement, his branding, and his bullying, blustery style are in the interest of the people. And the thing that pains me way more than his narcissistic immaturity is that so many Americans are falling for it.

Watching the Republican party implode over his candidacy has been infinitely fascinating and a little bit satisfying, and after being witness to how it has done everything in its power to smear and sabotage every effort of the Obama administration, I’ve felt like it represents karmic justice. But my satisfaction is tempered by fear that this cancerous candidacy, that has grown out of the eight years of lies and distortions directed at Obama – and now at Hillary Clinton – is not done eating away at what’s left of the mind and soul of America’s electorate.

Can there really be so many thinking Americans who believe Trump has any of the intelligence, the character, the interpersonal skill to occupy the office of President? Apparently there are, and that scares the hell out of me. But even more frightening is the vast number of people who must know how unqualified he is, but who will vote for him anyway, excusing their action with the claim that Clinton is no better.

I’ve never been a passionate Clinton supporter, neither of Bill nor Hillary. I see them both as politicians, a little too willing to compromise on policy and philosophy in order to secure position. But in looking at their history of service, at the issues they have chosen to fight for, over decades, I have no doubt that public service is the driving value behind Hillary’s run for the White House. Yes, personal profit and prestige figure into the equation, arguably more than one would hope for. But ego – elevation of self – appears to be the key motive force behind Trump.

I was really annoyed by Donald Trump’s recent visits to Detroit, his so-called outreach to Black Americans, and his talk in front of a Black church group. I trust that the vast numbers of Detroiters and Black church-goers, and citizens to Detroit and other struggling, inner-city communities will see through the paper-thin veneer of empathy and populism that Trump represents.

But what’s needed is for Americans nation-wide to wake up to the hoax that Trump is. I won’t even dwell on the bigotry, the divisiveness, the intolerance he spews and supports. I think that it all stems from a fundamental lack of depth in the man. He seems to have a character as superficial and as lacking in substance as one of his famous tweets. But however ignorant and offensive as his statements are, his die-hard supporters deflect by saying he doesn’t really mean it, or that he’s just positioning himself to bargain, or just keeping himself in the spotlight. Doesn’t that alone tell us everything we need to know about him?

On some levels, this election seems to be coming down to a sequel to 2000, when Bush’s no-substance, good-old-boy manner prevailed over Gore’s dull but substantive intelligence. Then, it was ultimately politics and the courts that decided things. What will decide it this time? Will enough voters see through Trumps straight talk bluster and strong man posing to see how he’s built a career out of bankruptcies, law suits and showmanship? Will enough of us acknowledge that as unhappy as we may be with the status quo, and as suspicious as we are of political dynasties and elites, there are minimal standards of maturity and awareness that are required in the Presidency?

Fear & Ignorance: Passed On, and On, and On...

Guilt is pretty useless, isn’t it? Forward motion requires more of a sense of confidence in who we are. Confidence enough to rise above the particulars of personal viewpoint and to at least try and understand the many viewpoints. What frightens me most of all is when I see violence following violence and hate following hate. Seems it’s one of the most vicious fruits of fear and oppression – the tendency to become like, to internalize one’s own rejection and subjugation, and to take on the aggression, the urge to destroy, the arrogance and self-centeredness of the oppressor.

Black Lives matter. Blue Lives matter. Are these really opposing statements? Or are they merely forced into opposition by our stubborn insistence that to take up one means you are senseless to, or even in opposition to the other? Or, worse yet, does our pain – whichever side we’re on – cause us to celebrate the pain of the other?

Of course Black lives matter, and of course Blue ones do too. And we do ourselves violence to hold to one and reject the other. If a life matters, and if a life should not be snuffed out merely because of what it represents to someone else, if it should be valued for the individual being that it is, with aspirations, needs, a personal history, connections, etc., then it must be valued regardless of what camp it superficially lies in.

It matters that, all around the world, people are killing others because of the pollution that exists in their own minds: because they believe something that has little or nothing to do with reality, beyond their interpretation of it: that a certain “other” people are a certain way; that certain acts are a requirement for a reward in some afterlife; that ‘my belief’ entitles me to end ‘your’ life. Insanity. Insanity passed from one to another.

This hatefulness seems to pop up everywhere. I cringe at the level of hate in evidence during the Republican National Convention: the determination to demonize every democrat and every democratic act as intentionally anti-American, anti-safety, anti-decency. And guess what? It’s no better on the Democratic side. My inbox is flooded daily by condemnations of any Republican and every Republican act as immoral, as intentionally oppressive, as though the Republican party is bent on removing all love and beauty from the face of the earth.

Really? Are we really so stuck in our own perspectives that we can’t even imagine the possibility of goodwill in our opponents? Is our fear of them so overwhelming that all we can wish for is for them to be silenced, removed, destroyed? Are the only worthy humans the ones who think and act exactly like us?

I’ve been reading Osho, a spiritual teacher. And a particular passage keeps coming to mind as I contemplate the various murders taking place around the globe, in the name of some insanity or another: judgements that certain others need to be controlled by lethal violence; acts of vengeance that target innocent surrogates; ideologies that promote bloodlust as service to God. All examples of “Murder in the name of ‘What I Believe to be True’”.

Here are words from Osho: 

There is a beautiful story. Whether it is factual or not does not matter; its beauty is in its meaning. One of the greatest emperors India has known was the Mogul emperor, Akbar. He can be compared only to one man in the West, and that is Marcus Aurelius. Emperors are very rarely wise people, but these two names are certainly exceptions.

One day he was in court talking with his courtiers. He had collected the best people in the country – the best painter, the best musician, the best philosopher, the best poet. He had a small, special committee of nine members who were known as the nine jewels of Akbar’s court.

The most important of them was a man called Birbal. Immensely intelligent and a man or great sense of humor, he did something which was improper to do in front of the emperor. Every emperor has his own rules – his word is the law – and Birbal behaved against something about which Akbar was very stubborn. Akbar immediately slapped Birbal. He respected Birbal, he love Birbal, he was his most intimate friend, but as far as the rules of the court were concerned, he could not forgive him.

But what Birbal did is the real story. He did not wait for a single moment; he immediately slapped the man who was standing at his other side. The other man was shocked, and even Akbar was shocked. He used to think that his man is very wise – “Is he mad, or what? I have slapped him, and he slaps the man next to him? This is strange, absolutely absurd and illogical.”

The other man was standing there, shocked, and Birbal said, “Don’t stand there like a fool, just pass it on!” So that man slapped somebody else who was standing by his side – and now the game became clearer: you have to pass it on.

In the night, when Akbar went to sleep with his wife, his wife slapped him. He said, “What is the matter?”

She said, “It has been going on around the city, and finally it has reached its original source. Somebody else has slapped me, and when I asked, ‘What is the matter?’ I was told that this is the game Akbar has started. I thought it is better to finish it, to complete the circle.”

The next day, first thing, Birbal asked, “Have you received my slap back or not?”

Akbar said, “I had never thought this would happen!”

Birbal said, “I was absolutely certain, because where will it go finally? It will go around the city. You cannot escape; it is bound to come to you,”

For centuries everything goes on being transferred, being passed on from one hand to another, from one generation to another generation – and the game continues. This is the game that you have to come out of.

A beautiful and funny story, isn’t it? It so illustrates the path we seem to be on. It’s been pretty well established, I believe, that the wars brought to the Middle East by the West, in our so-called self-interest, contributed substantially to creating the conditions in which ISIS could emerge. We in the West have been largely indifferent to the “terror” our weapons of mass destruction have brought to that region. But now that the terror has swung back our way, we want to up the ante. Now, we want to wipe them out.

Some elements in the Black community feel that we need to start shooting cops to somehow defend ourselves against the wave of ignorance and destruction that some cops are directing at unarmed and non-aggressive Black males. Really? I wonder how that’s going to turn out. I absolutely understand the rage and the frustration. But I don’t see how playing the “Pass it Along” game can possibly help.

Just because effective solutions are so incredibly difficult to come to, does not mean that reflex, impulsive, emotional reactions will save us. They won’t.

I wish I had the answers. But I don’t.

…to be continued.