A Birth Certificate Shouldn't Be Your Destiny

Who decides who you will be? 

The other day I needed to find some documents, so I delved into the family file with all the legal stuff. There I found both my birth certificate and that of my wife Lilian.

Mine is a pretty standard official copy of a Texas birth certificate, detailing where I was born, when, sex, parents names, etc. 

My wife’s was a very different document. Long and narrow, with a coat of arms and a note that it is created according to the 1951 ordinance for registration of births and deaths. It shows she was born in Sarikei, Sarawak and gives the names of her parents (both born in China), as well as the registrar of births and deaths. The country in which she was born, Sarawak, appears in no official US government database. She was born in end times of the last "white raja" of Borneo, Viner Brooke. It wasn’t modern Malaysia. And it wasn’t a British colony, and strictly speaking it wasn’t quite a country, since Raja Brooke was sort of under the Sultan or Brunei. Sort of. Still, there it was, an official government document from a government that no longer exists. (And let me tell you, trying to talk to the Social Security Administration about a country that doesn’t exist is a pain.) 

Now I’ve been to my wife's hometown of Sarikei, but I don’t remember the house in which I was born because we moved when I was just over a year old. And suddenly here I had the address. Which I instantly recognized. It is just a block from where Lilian and I have lived for the last 14 years. How about that. After 50 years away, and 20 overseas, and parent’s long passed, I moved back to within a block of my birthplace, which I pass every day while out walking.

Destiny? No. A series of choices we made about the kind of house we could afford close to the lake and SMU. 

In another drawer there is another stack of documents. Our passports. With all those years abroad we both have many, most now punched or mutilated to indicate they are no longer valid, but had still valid visas we needed.  

The two most recent passports for Lilian and I are both blue, both US passports, and both have the same address just a block from my birth place. All her older passports are red, and came from Malaysia. From before she was a naturalized US citizen.

Destiny? No, choices that she was free to make about the country she would call her home. 

If there was anything clear at the founding of the United States, and its subsequent history, it is that your birth certificate is not your destiny. It can tell you who you were. It cannot tell you who you will become, where you will live, and what you will do with your life.

Deeply embedded in the vision of humanity at the core of our country is this simple idea: We as individuals, and as a nation, choose our destiny. It isn’t handed to us by the “old country” with its ancient religious bigotry and fawning subservience to fading political structures. A new nation is a chance for a new identity, new friends and acquaintances, new political parties, new professions. And always at the root is personal choice. No one can tell you what religion you have to follow, what job you have to do, who you have to vote for, which party you should join, where you have to live, who you can visit, and on and on. You can even choose your ethnicity if you don’t like the choices you are given on the form.

(I think about this sometimes, since my granddaughters have a Euro-American grandfather of mixed European heritage, An Austro-Hungarian Jewish grandfather with a little English mixed in, a Chinese grandmother, and a Ukrainian Jewish grandmother whose family may have come out of Iran. Their mother and father already stretch the ethnic label boundaries, and thus what are they? Here's an answer: humans.)

When I told some Austrians I'd worked with for years that I was moving back to the US one said, "Amerikaneren sind wurzzelos." Americans are rootless. She was right, and its the best thing about us. 

There is an interesting article in the Washington Post about a different kind of roots. It spurred some of these observations: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2018/06/27/feature/seeking-a-scientific-explanation-for-trans-identity-could-do-more-harm-than-good/

It ends by noting that the matter of sexual identity is determined by the individual as they discover who they are and want to be. It isn’t determined by science, and it isn’t determined by their birth certificate. Regardless of the influence of biology or genetics it is their choice. And it is a choice they fully have a right to make. And in our country, in the United States, it is a choice that we should all respect. Because our nation is founded on that fundamental idea that individuals decide who they are and whose they are. 

None of us should have to carry our birth certificate around, much less wear it like a ball and chain.

Except that’s whats some politicians want, Dan Patrick and Ken Paxton here in Texas in particular. They are demanding a law that people can only go to the bathroom that matches their birth certificate. And more than that, that all bathrooms be gendered as well! They are demanding that a birth certificate also be a destiny.

As others are demanding, in another way, of all those who want to come to the United States and make us their nation. "Give me your tired, your poor, your wretched masses yearning to breath free" has become "Stay out and stay home. Your birth certificate is your destiny, and you are destined to oppression, violence, poverty, and war."

Those of us who believe in the vision on which the United States was founded need to oppose these enemies of our values every step of the way, whether they are in public office or hidden behind the facades of PACs . They need to be voted out of office as quickly as possible so that we can return to being a state, and nation, in which words on a document filed at your birth never determine who you are, or what you dream about becoming.

The Outrage Factories

Get their raw materials from you and me.

We all have psychological pain within us. It is part of the human condition - what the Buddha called dukkha. Dukkha is often translated “suffering,” but I think a better definition is the condition of permanent dissatisfaction with the world, arising from the fact that it is transient. It is our abiding sense that happiness is fleeting while disease, decrepitude, and death are inevitable. It is suffering in the sense that suffering is the anticipation that pain will not end.

Now one would think that dukkha is something we all want to escape, and that anyone with a conscience would want to help us escape it. But we don’t and they won’t help. Because this permanent state of dissatisfaction is an itch we love to scratch, and a terrific resource for those seeking power and wealth. We’ll buy almost any thing or any idea, we’ll follow almost any course of action that promises us some relief from dukkha. 

One way to monetize dukkha is to tap into lust, which is the desire for distraction that takes our minds off dissatisfaction. Lust is the inevitable psychological accompaniment to dukkha, its flip side really. To be human is to be either desiring or to be dissatisfied, and you know which feels better. 

Advertisers have understood the power of lust for a very long time. If you can attach lust to a specific object or action people will buy and buy again. Because even as they experience the exhilaration of being distracted from their dissatisfaction they are dragging it along behind them like a ball and chain. 

Distraction is the meal that makes you hungry instead of full. 

But there is much more insidious use of the dukkha. If you can tap into the primal dissatisfaction in all humans, and attach that dissatisfaction, that suffering to an object or idea or event, then you can create outrage. You create a burning psychological pain that focuses a lifetime of suffering in one place and time on one thing. And once the rage is out, you can put it to use. 

To do that all you have to do is offer release, a way out of the dissatisfaction, and end to the suffering. Not realrelease of course, then you don’t have anything to manipulate. But you can promise release, you can promise that the pain will go away. And people will buy. 

The promise of release from the pain of outrage can take many forms, since we humans have a whole range of built in mechanisms for escaping psychological pain. Distraction is illusory but common. Drugs and alcohol have been around a long time. 

Then there is violence directed at whatever we’ve been taught it outrageous. Making other people suffer, or even causing yourself pain, is a great way of taking your mind off of dukkha. And of course that can run the range from harassment, to verbal abuse, to  physical violence. Turning dissatisfaction to outrage, and outrage to violence is one of the oldest political tools for those seeking power. We see it deployed daily worldwide and in the US.

Another possibility is to incite actions that will supposedly create an imagined future. The energy of present outrage can be directed into activities, like talking to this therapist, taking this medicine, voting for this party, marching for this cause, or donating to this charity or advocacy group will drain off the outrage and quiet the persistent pain of dissatisfaction.

It won’t, although it may change things for the better for others. The danger here is that the persistent pain will require stronger and stronger medicine. The danger is that frustration with the failure to reach impossible goals can eventually fuel the flame of violence. We’ve seen it again and again.   

The manufacturers of outrage and the promised relief are no different from the manufacturers of any good or service that objectifies our suffering then promises to relief from the pain. They want something in return for the relief they offer. It may be political power. It may be money, or less directly book sales. It may be eyeballs on ads. It may be celebrity as they pursue their own futile efforts at escape from dukkha.

Ultimately what they want is for you to lose freedom, becoming chained to whatever object they’ve convinced you causes your suffering, and whatever drug is on offer to cure the pain. Because they want to control your life, not you. 

Whether its HuffPo or Fox, the DCCCP or the GOP, (or many a religious group) the goal is to keep you and your outrage chained to their cause and their promise of relief, in exchange for dollars and power. 

This does’t mean they are necessarily bad people, although some are. The deeper problem is that this exchange, this psychological and economic transaction, is the root transaction of all human relationships not built on love. 

There is a better path to an end of dukkha, permanent dissatisfaction, and indeed the end of the suffering of our fellow humans and all creatures. It is the path that begins with self-realization, through acknowledging the dissatisfaction at our core. It leads to giving up all naiveté about ways to relieve it, understanding that only the silenced mind, the detached self, is unburdened by suffering. And it ends in cultivating compassion, a love for others that leads directly to acting in their interests without a detour through outrage. To put it in Christian terms, it is to abandon either law or punishment as a resolution of sin, and embrace God’s grace given freely in Jesus Christ. And then to act out of that grace.

Because only when we are set free can we do what is right for others, and not merely what gives temporary relief to our own suffering. 

Sticks and Stones

May break my bones, but words will never hurt me. 

I was taught as a small boy to say this in answer to the inevitable bullying and insults that are part of growing up. I suppose it was a kind of psychological defense if you were too scrawny (or in my case fat) to mount a more physical defense. 

Once I was older I realized it is complete BS, a bizarre post-Enlightenment gnosticism in which the mind is totally under the control of the will, and the body is irrelevant. It works, but at a high cost in self-dehumanization. 

Actually, as the Bible makes clear, words cause plenty of good and plenty of real harm. Some of it is direct, damaging permanently people’s minds and hearts. Much of it is indirect, providing the emotional and even intellectual rational for actual physical violence against others. 

Unfortunately the current core of American political ethics can be summed up in two words: plausible deniability. You can say anything you want, however hateful and inflammatory, as long as you go on and say, “but don’t hurt anyone,” or “no violence,” or “but I love them anyway,” or “that’s just a joke", or "locker room talk", or “a little hyperbole for effect,” or “its just politics,” or even “they deserve it.” After all, "sticks and stones. . ." and man-up and all that. 

So you get to fire your words out there like arrows, to use a Biblical image, and then quickly throw away the bow and deny you meant any harm. 

Well I call BS on that too. Are you shouting in someone’s face, using demeaning language, launching verbal attacks, lying, insulting or marginalizing some group of people (Muslims, journalists, liberals, conservatives, Jews, men, women, gays, transgendered, Republicans, Democrats, the poor, the rich, etc)?  Well you are causing real harm, real hurt, and you are engendering real violence even if you never personally lift a finger.

Jesus said, (Luke 6 for all those Christians from left to right who seem to have forgotten the Bible.) “But I say to you that listen, Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also; and from anyone who takes away your coat do not withhold even your shirt. Give to everyone who begs from you; and if anyone takes away your goods, do not ask for them again. Do to others as you would have them do to you.”

I don't recall Jesus saying, "unless you are really offended, frightened, angry, or hurt." or "unless it is a useful political strategy."

Attributed to Gandhi is an appropriate comment for our times. “An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.” Jesus' words are the secret to remaining human in dehumanizing times, they are the secret for keeping our vision in a world gone blind. And we have never needed humans with vision more than now.