Right Here, Right Now

"Our non-violence has to begin at home with our children, elders, neighbours, and friends." - Fragment of a Letter to Abdul Ghaffar Khan, Harijan, 18 Jan 1942 (from The Essential Writings of Mahatma Gandhi edited by Raghavan Iyer)

I dream, I pray, for non-violence in far away lands.  I practice non-violence in my front yard.

I live on a neighborhood street that is used to reach the local high school and other streets that lead out into the city.  I spend time in my front yard greeting strangers and neighbors who pass by and I plant shrubbery and trees along the edge of the street to narrow the lanes and slow the speeding traffic.

I compost. 

I recycle anything and everything that I can.

I live in a semi-arid land.  I dig up the plants that are water hogs, e.g. my lawn, and I plant native plants.

I ride my bicycle to the store.

I have two beautiful foster daughters.  Tomorrow, I will visit my locally elected representatives at the state capitol to lobby for continued support for abused and orphaned children as the legislators consider cuts to the budget.

I have an ever expanding garden to grow as much of my food as I can.

I buy local, organic fruits and vegetables whenever it is available.

It's a small start.  There is much more that I could do, but I am still at the beginning of this journey.

Would Jesus Drive?

"Living so as not to hurt others"

In July 2002, a small, now defunct, magazine called "The Other Side" published an article I wrote which I titled with the above question.  "The Other Side" was a left wing Christian magazine similar, if slightly more radical than, "Sojourners".  They did little editing to the original article except to change the title.  I guess they felt that "Would Jesus Drive?" was too in the face of their readership.

The thesis of the article was that driving an automobile was an act of violence.  Even though I now drive daily, my beliefs haven't changed. 

Ninety three (93) people a day are killed on our nations roads every day.  The number injured is probably ten times that high and many of those injuries are life changing.  And how many billions of dollars do we spend on new cars, upkeep, infrastructure, not to mention gasoline.

Our neighborhoods are chopped up by black dead zones, strips unsafe for life of any kind.

Exhaust from our cars is changing the atmosphere.  Mass extinctions are taking place all over the globe.

And then there are the oil wars.

So how do I "justify" driving?  Foster daughters.  Living in a moderately sized city with children, it is impossible to give them what they need without a car.  I knew that in 2002 when I wrote the article.  We have designed our cities to make life without a car extremely difficult even for people who don't have children.

Does the good out-weight the bad?  I like to think so, but...