Category Archive

Spoiler alert: this post reveals the end of the movie Grave of the Fireflies.

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Joy gave an inspired gift to our Munchkin for Christmas: the complete films of Studio Ghibli. This is the great Japanese animation studio, headed by Hayao Miyazaki, that has produced My Neighbor Totoro, Howl’s Moving Castle, Spirited Away, and other excellent movies. Now Munchkin can watch Kiki’s Delivery Service over and over with no more video rental fees. (Pixar writers and directors, please take note! I know you adore Miyazaki and frequently pay tribute to his movies, so have you noticed how many of his main characters are girls? Not tokens, not supporting roles, but the stars? If he can do it, so can you.)

So we have been watching these movies, and some of them get into more grown-up territory than Kiki. Our Neighbors the Yamadas are short pieces satirizing family life very funny for grownups, but a little over the munchkin’s head: picture a less frenetic, more realistic The Simpsons.  Munchkin enjoyed Whisper of the Heart, but it’s really a coming-of-age movie about a teenager’s falling in love and searching for a goal for her life. A few nights ago, we started watching Grave of the Fireflies, not knowing anything about it, and pretty soon I started to think we were in deeper than Munchkin or I was ready for. It takes place in Kobe, Japan, near the end of World War II, when the city was firebombed and much of it was destroyed. A teenage boy and his unbearably cute four-year-old sister are the main characters, and it isn’t long before we see the bombing that kills their mother.

Munchkin has a high tolerance for scary. She first watched Star Wars when she was about two. As she moved on to The Empire Strikes Back and The Return of the Jedi, Joy and I wondered at what point we’d have to skip scenes. It never happened; she watched them all with no ill effect. She loved Coraline at age three and only occasionally wants us to sit with her for the scariest part. She loves The Corpse Bride and The Nightmare Before Christmas (yes, we have a budding Tim Burton fan). Scary, scary things happen in these movies, including death, torture, and the disappearance of a child’s parents.

Yet with Grave of the Fireflies, I wondered if I should turn it off. The munchkin was doing okay, but I was trembling. Why? Because to her it is just a story, and to me it’s an account of something that really happened. I didn’t know at the time that it was based on the novel by Akiyuki Nosaka, who suffered through similar circumstances when he was a teenager taking care of his young sister. I just know that Kobe really was firebombed: that human beings, not people long ago in a galaxy far, far away, do these things to each other.

We watched about half an hour of the movie, and then it was bedtime. I looked it up on the Internet Movie Database to see how bad it was going to get, and discovered among the parental warnings that the little girl dies. That settles it (Munchkin would say, “That does it!”). We are not watching a movie about the death by starvation of a child her age. So I told Munchkin that it turns out the movie is pretty grown up and we’ll have to watch the rest when she’s older. She suggested, “When I’m seven?”–an age at which she imagines wondrously grown-up capabilities descend upon us.  (The other mystical ages, judging from her games–which are dominated by her obsession with people’s ages–are 10 and 16.) For me, the question is terribly poignant. At what age is one ready to learn that children starve, that one’s own country drops fire on them? Seven, 10, 16, 30, 50? How does one prepare someone for the knowledge that life, not just fiction, is tragic?

Stop the Internet Blacklist Laws

Do you love the internet? Me too. Please click, act, and don’t let anyone take away your freedom.

That’s it from me. I’m on strike January 18, neither writing nor reading any websites, because I want to try to imagine what it would be like not to have today’s internet.

I’ve been on study leave this week, and pursuing projects under three categories:

Reading:  From the Palmer Raids to the Patriot Act: A History of the Fight for Free Speech in America, Christopher Finan, and In Between: Memoirs of an Integration Baby, Mark Morrison-Reed. Maybe a book on strategic planning in congregations too.

Spanish: Remember the old days of language lab? Now you get CDs with your textbook–much better. I keep the CDs in the car and do the exercises while I’m driving, but I’d gotten past the chapters that I’d studied, and didn’t understand the grammar the CD was trying to make me practice. So, I’ve gone back to the textbook to review the subjunctive, discover just how much basic conjugation I’d forgotten, and at last learn the imperative properly. That plus some vocabulary about clothes from the same chapter will help me practice with Munchkin as she’s getting dressed in the mornings. Together we’re going to become bilingual.

Cleanup: Okay, this probably doesn’t count as a study leave project. But it is a wonderful feeling. Joy threatened to throw out any of those old boxes of my stuff that were still in the garage come January 1. I welcomed the challenge, knowing I’d never go through them if I didn’t have a firm deadline. Some of them have made several moves with me, unopened; not surprisingly, most of their contents turn out to be completely unimportant. My spiritual guide as I decide what to keep and what to toss: an elderly man at church who said he had a dozen packed file cabinets in his house and never looked into any of them.

New Year’s resolutions are usually just one more thing to start feeling guilty about, usually by February. I love Woody Guthrie’s list, but it seems a tad ambitious.

So I am going to make just one single, simple resolution: eat three servings of fruits and four servings of vegetables a day. Some days that might mean apple, apple, apple, carrot, carrot, carrot, carrot. Or apple, chocolate, apple, chocolate, apple, chocolate, carrot, chocolate, carrot, chocolate, carrot, chocolate, carrot. Whatever. I’ll have made good on my commitment as long as I fulfill those servings. Ready, set, go.

In some kind of personal record, I am going to make reference to four texts in one ten-minute Thanksgiving homily this morning:

Matthew 19:16-22 (here’s the King James Version)

And, behold, one came and said unto [Jesus], Good Master, what good thing shall I do, that I may have eternal life? And he said unto him, Why callest thou me good? there is none good but one, that is, God: but if thou wilt enter into life, keep the commandments. He saith unto him, Which? Jesus said, Thou shalt do no murder, Thou shalt not commit adultery, Thou shalt not steal, Thou shalt not bear false witness, Honour thy father and thy mother: and, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. The young man saith unto him, All these things have I kept from my youth up: what lack I yet? Jesus said unto him, If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come and follow me. But when the young man heard that saying, he went away sorrowful: for he had great possessions.

Thirteen Observations Made by Lemony Snicket While Watching Occupy Wall Street from a Discreet Distance

There may not be a reason to share your cake. It is, after all, yours. You probably baked it yourself, in an oven of your own construction with ingredients you harvested yourself.

Deuteronomy 6:10-12 (KJV again)

And it shall be, when the LORD thy God shall have brought thee into the land which he sware unto thy fathers, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, to give thee great and goodly cities, which thou buildedst not, And houses full of all good things, which thou filledst not, and wells digged, which thou diggedst not, vineyards and olive trees, which thou plantedst not; when thou shalt have eaten and be full; Then beware lest thou forget the LORD, which brought thee forth out of the land of Egypt, from the house of bondage.

The old story of Thankgiving, as told by our Associate Minister of Religious Education, Dan Harper.

Let us give thanks and pursue justice, for we drink from wells we did not dig.

Be very, very careful when choosing a company motto. People will hold you to it, especially if it’s as memorable as Google’s. And yes, I know that Google officially (if quietly) dropped the motto “don’t be evil” a couple of years ago, but I’m afraid I’m still going to hold them to it, because they touted it for several years and got everyone’s attention. And because taking notice of occasions when someone is being evil is one of those things I consider my responsibility as a human being.

As big companies go, Google seems to do a pretty good job of not being evil. It slips now and then, like when it allowed China to have a version of Google that would censor out inconvenient websites like ones implying that Tibet is actually a country under occupation, not a province of China, or that people were massacred in Tiananmen Square. But it has a strong commitment to sustainability, and, going by my informal survey of all the people I’ve known at Google, it’s great to their employees. (Also, I had lunch there with a friend last week, and its food lives up to its reputation.)

However, it’s time to hold its feet to that motto again. Google has just given a pot of money to legislators who are, look at that, supporting a tax holiday that would put millions of dollars back in its pocket.

Bill Sponsors Get big Donations from Corporations That Want a Tax Holiday

Imagine what we could do with a trillion dollars. Instead, we’ll have to make it up by other kinds of taxes, on people who don’t have money to spend on lobbyists, or by cuts to services that are especially needed right now. I don’t think the US economy can afford to make a gift of that size to companies that are doing just fine without it, do you? In fact, I consider it such an egregious manipulation of tax policy for a few people’s gain that I would call it evil. Come on, Google, pay your taxes and quit yer bellyaching.

I don’t get to vote on Google policy (you have to own some of their stock to do that), but I do vote in Senator Boxer’s state, and work in Representative Eshoo’s district, so I’ve written to them.

A few posts back, I was afraid that Occupy Oakland was setting itself up to look bad by calling for a General Strike without actually organizing a General Strike. Well, work did carry on in Oakland, but by all accounts, hundreds of people walked off the job that day. And the march was huge and peaceful–the word I keep hearing from participants and the media is “jubilant.” Most amazing, they shut down the fifth-largest port in the country–mostly to the cheers of the affected truckers (I note that this was because that union does have a clause about honoring other picket lines, I believe for 24 hours). I don’t recommend shutting down any port long-term as a strategy, but the show of strength was impressive. On a normal day, almost 90 million dollars passes through that port. You can bet the 1% are paying attention now. They don’t want that to happen to the ports where they move their goods. This is one of those times I’m happy to eat crow.

The vandalism that night was really distressing, but carried out by so few people that the main story was still “Seven thousand people protested peacefully.” At least, that’s what they said on NPR and KQED that night. I wasn’t listening to Fox, nor to Forum, where my colleague Jeremy Nickel called in to correct the focus (that blog entry of his is inspiring, by the way, so do click). I like what someone–might have been Jeremy–said on Facebook: if your actions are indistinguishable from a right-wing agent provocateur’s, stop.

Here on Move Your Money Day, I’ll also note that the 99% Movement (we really have to stop calling ourselves Occupiers–who the heck wants to live under occupation? though I like the twist of occupying your own damn country) can claim credit for the big banks’ dropping their plans to charge $5/month for debit cards.  It is not the systemic change we need; they are throwing down a few crumbs, hoping we will stop demanding a fair slice of the pie. But since people have been grumbling about bank fees for years without the banks taking any notice, it’s a measure of the power of this movement that this time, they backed off.

The munchkin and I traveled to Washington, D.C., for four days this week, to visit a sick friend in Baltimore. We stayed with other friends in Washington. I was hoping for a day wandering on the Mall, but we had only one afternoon for it due to rain. As it turned out, that was nothing. We got out of the region with 48 hours to spare before yesterday’s big storm hit.

So, Wednesday we went on the carousel, popped into the natural history museum for the living butterfly exhibit and a look at a lot of skeletons, and “climbed on things.” The Mall is full of low walls and fountains that were clearly designed with a four-year-old in mind. As far as Munchkin was concerned, we could have spent all day at the US Navy Memorial fountain on Pennsylvania Avenue. This was our compromise, since I wasn’t about to fly 3,000 miles to go to playgrounds, which probably would have been her first choice.

An unexpected, interesting-only-to-Mama treat awaited us on the way back from the Navy Memorial, though. Walking up toward the metro on 7th Street, we passed a sign reading

Unitarian Universalists collect famous Unitarian Universalists, and Clara Barton was a Universalist all her life. I did not know about this chapter in her career, which immediately predated the involvement in the American Red Cross for which she is most famous. Apparently she had done a great deal of work to identify Union soldiers in Andersonville Prison, and as the war ended, President Lincoln asked her to head up a Missing Soldiers Office in Washington. The site, the 9th floor of what is now 437 1/2 7th Street, NW, is held by the federal government as a potential museum.

I let out a little exclamation when I saw the sign, and of course, stopped to read about it, which led to one of those interesting conversations with the munchkin in which I try to explain the unexplainable and unthinkable. The wearing of identification tags wasn’t common practice yet during the Civil War, and tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of dead soldiers were buried, unidentified, on the battlefields where they died. Apparently Barton’s office handled over 63,000 letters in three years. The same source, the General Services Administration website,  says she was able to provide information to the families of 21,000 men. I wonder if it was ever good news.

Apologies to those who clicked on my one-word, Dada version of this post. Trying it again.

In the few days leading up to October 9, I had a niggle in the back of my mind telling me the date meant something, but preaching dates being the way they are, I ignored it. They tend to loom, not in a negative way, but in an I-could-rattle-off-the-date-of-every-Sunday-for-the-next-nine-months way, a condition endemic among ministers and, like savantism of all kinds, quirky but mostly harmless. (Yes, I know the date of Easter in 2012, <em>and</em> the next date it doesn’t coincide with Passover. Want to make something of it?)

Usually the “remember this date” pressure lifts after the service (or, rather, is transferred to the next preaching date), but this Sunday, on the way home, October 9 still niggled. Now that I had the mental space to turn my attention to the small child tugging at my brain, I asked it what it wanted to tell me, and finally got it. It was John Lennon’s birthday. Born 1940. Also his son Sean’s, b. 1975.

Whenever I forget something I really need to remember–which is more and more often–I think it’s because my memory is overloaded with trivia like this.