"I Ever Compromise My Own Ideals"

"Achara means the outward mode of living and it can change from time to time.  The rules of inner living must remain the same; that is, one should cling to truth, ahimsa, etc.  In trying to follow them, we may change the rules of outward mode of living whenever necessary."  A Letter (G.), Mahadevbhaini Diary, Vol. I, p. 364

When I first read Gandhi many years ago, one of the first changes I made was to give up my car and begin riding my bicycle for transportation.  I felt then, and I still feel today, that in the United States, transportation by automobile is a form of violence.  We fight wars for oil for our cars.  Tens of thousands are killed on our highways, and hundreds of thousands are injured annually.  Our transportation system sub-divides neighbor from neighbor with dead zones of blacktop.  Money that could be spent helping the least among us is spent paving paradise and chrome plates our lives.  More can be added to the list.

For ten years my wife and I lived without a car.  We cycled everywhere we went.  To choose this life in an American city means sacrifices.  Our daily lives were circumscribed by our limited method of transportation.  We were happy with these limits for many years.

And then my life turned in a different direction.  My daughter found out she had a medical condition that precluded her from having children.  For many years I have worked with teenagers.  The prospect of no grandchildren made us rethink our lives.  We decided to become foster parents.  Teenage girls began to come and live in our home.  The foster care system requires trips to family court, to doctors, to therapists, to various and sundry meetings most of which were not in our city, and teenage girls have needs for social lives that are not local.  Being without a car was no longer an option.

We own two now.  The truth of sharing our home with children without homes has supplanted the truth of not owning a car.  I still try and ride my bicycle to the local store and any nearby meetings, but my life now revolves around my girls and not my transportation.

Do I have mixed feelings about this?  Of course, but I am comfortable in this decision.  It's not perfect.  I have had to compromise, but I can live with the compromise.

Maladjusted

"...there are some things in our social system to which all of us ought to be maladjusted... It may be that the salvation of the world lies in the hands of the maladjusted."            Dr. Martin Luther King

 The temptation to anger about...our political system, the environment, the economy, the starving millions, the way we treat animals, the war...the list is endless, leads generally to only to one of two things.  Violence - lashing out at the perceived institution responsible for the injustice, and make no mistake, these are injustices. O inertia, apathy, at the size and number of things that need to be fixed in this world.


Most of us choose apathy.


Oh, we recycle or become vegetarians or vote or use energy-saving light bulbs or stop wearing fur, small gestures that soothe our conscience, but have little effect on our actual ways of living.  

Don't get me wrong - these things are better than nothing.


But...How many of us are willing to stop driving?  How many of us are willing to stop paying taxes?  Hell, how many of us are willing to stop voting Democratic or Republican and look for an alternative to these two sad sacks.


I am not maladjusted.  I drive.  I pay my taxes.  I eat meat.  I have stopped voting for either of the two parties, but I put no money or time into the effort to make a third party viable.


I want to be maladjusted.

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...