Freedom of Commerce

 

A few years back, I found myself in a gifting conundrum.  It was my parent's anniversary, and I wanted to get them a gift.  Mom and Dad had been together for over fifty years, and had become perhaps the world's greatest Ballykissangel Superfans.

Bally K, as they both called it, was a British show from the late 1990s featuring the goings-on in a small Irish town.  Romance, minor intrigues, and that sort of thing.  Not much action, just an amiable band of characters living out their lives in an entertaining way.

Mom and Dad watched it every single day, religiously, and even though they'd seen the entire series through a dozen times or more, they wouldn't miss it for the world.

As I considered what to get them, I thought to myself: where...twenty years after it aired on the other side of the Atlantic...might I be able to find some BallyK merch?  

Nowhere within the borders of this nation was there anything, which wasn't a surprise.  It'd be like finding a Phantom Flan Flinger costume, or a Blue Peter T shirt.  Decades old esoterica from the Isles is just not going to be about in the U.S.

But across the pond, there were several sellers offering what seemed the perfect Bally K tchotcke.  It was a decorative teapot, shaped like the pub that's a central meeting place in the show.  It's one of the miracles of the modern age that one can find a used specialty teapot in a knick-knack shop in rural England, and without too much muss or fuss, you can have it shipped across the planet.  That's precisely what I did, and within two weeks, it had arrived at my doorstep.

Having lived in England as a boy, that worked both ways.  My grandparents could ship presents to me from Georgia or New York, and they'd be there on Christmas Day.

Only, well, that's how it used to work.  Back when things worked, and before Dear Leader and his Death Eaters mucked it all up.

Small items...like teapots, or specialty parts for old cars, or books?  These things used to be sent freely, by the mutual agreement of all of the civilized nations of the world.   If it's worth less than $800, we didn't worry about it.  

But the new tariffs included everything sent by everyone, no bottom limit, no exceptions.  And also, no process for actually doing what was proposed.  You know, like when you get that new idiot manager, the one who has no idea what they're doing, and they start making literally impossible demands that show they don't understand the business at all.  You'd have to put in an insanely excessive bureaucracy, and waste all of our time and money.

So now, a thing that has worked for 100 years no longer works.  Other nations, faced with this arbitrary, ill-conceived new demand, are choosing just not to work with us at all.  They're stopping all citizen-to-citizen or small-business-to-citizen mailing across borders.  You can't get that part for your vintage Triumph.  You can't peruse the wares at a little shoppe in Dublin and order it from the family that runs it.  You can't send a gift to a family member.  You are disconnected from the souls who still live in the lands of your ancestors.

That's temporary, hopefully.  Other people will clean up the mess.  Systems will figure their way around it, hopefully sooner rather than later.

How does that make us great?  How does that make us more free?

Incompetence never does.

Deep Gleaning

Every other morning lately, I'm out in the front yard, harvesting okra.  

I've grown far more of it than I need, with just about twenty plants chugging away.  Ten of those are packed over-dense into a four by eight bed, so their production has been less per plant.  This is only my second season growing, so I'm still figuring the whole thing out.  The tallest of them now stand well over five feet, and lately I get about a quart a day from the lot of 'em.  

I don't need anywhere near that much, and there's only so much bhindi masala, gumbo, and batter-fried okra folks in my household want to eat.  I've already selected the healthiest plants to let run to seed stock for next year, so the question becomes: what to do with the rest?

Giving those pods to neighbors?  That's a bit of a stretch in the suburban Mid-Atlantic, where okra mostly has a reputation for slime.  This is, of course, utterly unfair.  Okra's delicious when prepared properly, nutty and nutritious, with a satisfyingly toothsome texture.  But still, folks seem confused and unfairly repulsed by it.

In most of the rest of the world, that's not the case.  In the traditionally warmer regions of the planet, where most of humankind dwells, it's a staple crop.  Easy to grow and productive, it's highly desired, even in its spinier forms.

Out in front of my little church, there's that Little Free Pantry, one that we started to supplement the traditional food bank in town.  Folks get hungry in the off-hours, after all.  It's taken off in ways we didn't anticipate.  In the last six months, with the support of the church and our friends in the community, twenty seven thousand pounds of food have been funneled through a cheery little bird-feederesque box.  We've set out coolers, too, and...notably...built a Little Free Produce Stand.

Because Poolesville Presbyterian sits in the heart of an agricultural reserve, there are plenty of folks who garden, and from their efforts produce an overabundance.  There are, similarly, many who have more resources than they actually need for their well-being.  When gardens produce more than we need, it shouldn't ever go to waste.

When there's an overabundance, the great sacred narrative of the Bible is real clear about how we are to use it.  More than you need?  Torah sez: don't squeeze every last drop out of the land.  We are called instead to be sure to set a portion of our efforts aside for those who have need.  From Leviticus 19, we hear:

When you reap the harvest of your land, do not reap to the very edges of your field or gather the gleanings of your harvest. Do not go over your vineyard a second time or pick up the grapes that have fallen. Leave them for the poor and the foreigner. I am the Lord your God.  

From Deuteronomy 24, we hear:  

When you are harvesting in your field and you overlook a sheaf, do not go back to get it. Leave it for the foreigner, the fatherless and the widow, so that the Lord your God may bless you in all the work of your hands. When you beat the olives from your trees, do not go over the branches a second time. Leave what remains for the foreigner, the fatherless and the widow. When you harvest the grapes in your vineyard, do not go over the vines again. Leave what remains for the foreigner, the fatherless and the widow.

And as the Law was woven by storytellers into narrative form, that becomes part of the defining mythopoetics of a culture.  The Book of Ruth recounts how Ruth the Moabite and her mother Naomi...a foreigner and a widow, respectively...gleaned from the fields of the honorable Boaz.  And Ruth and Boaz getting to know one another better was, as the story goes, how the lineage of King David.  Without the ethic of leaving something for those who have need, there is no Israel.  There is no messianic understanding.  It's kinda sorta important.

And in our grasping, Mammonist age, we've forgotten this.  We're encouraged to anxiously optimize, until everything we have is turned inwards, our energies like those of a collapsing star, hoarding light as it folds upon itself.

If my efforts serve me alone, if I maximize my profit at every turn and seek my own advantage without exception, then I have become an affront to the justice of God's covenant.  That's a sustained and basic moral imperative, if you understand the Bible as an authoritative text in your life.

That said, there's not a whit to stop you from doing more.  Gleaning can go deeper.  If you expand your plantings, you can do so with the explicit intent of feeding those who hunger.

And so I knew, when I planted all that okra, that I'd have my fill, and that come harvest time, I'd be bringing bag after bag of tasty nutritious pods to the produce stand.

They're gone within the half-hour, picked up by women driving cleaning service vehicles, or men driving pickups filled with lawn equipment.

And every morning, when I snip those pods, I recall that if I expect any blessing upon the work of my hands, I need to be that blessing.

A Covenant of Meat

It was time, once again, to get our van inspected, and so I found myself sitting on a metal chair by an inspection station in the middle of the day.  It being the heart of suburban Annandale, all around me was strip-mall paradise, asphalt roads and asphalt parking lots radiating the heat of the mid-August Midatlantic sun.

In the sliver of shade afforded by the gas station's eastern wall, I observed my surroundings.  They weren't exactly verdant.  

Broken concrete and potholes abounded, wrappers and plastic debris scattered about, the endless flow of cars up the four lane of the Pike, all of it an anti-Walden of metal and rush and ambient polluting particulates.  Above it all, a dirty blue sky and a fiercely pressing light.  It's a harsh and ugly world we have made for ourselves, an alien incursion into the lushness of life.

Yet life adapts.  In almost every crack in that hard harsh habitat, pressing through blacktop and concrete alike were stubborn grasses.  Their roots set down in soil that was little more than crumbled rock, their shoots and growth defying and breaking apart our constructs.  

Near my feet, there lay the remnants of an almost finished hotdog.  Fragments of bun and a nubbin of sausage baked grey-black by the sun, it was hardly the most appetizing thing.  But there came a fluttering of brown and tan wings, and the sparrows landed, first one and then another.  They were dirty birds, ragamuffin birds, the sort of crass ubiquitous generalists that aren't worth a birder's notice.

They watched me warily, but still set quickly about the business of living from our waste.  They aren't the only creatures that do so.  There's a roaming murder of crows in the neighborhood that makes its way dumpster diving.  There are countless rats that do the same, sharp-eyed rodents which hide away from our eyes, knowing we're eager to poison and kill them.  When the neighborhoods around the strip malls were heavy with cicadas, the rats came pouring in to feast.  There are tiny critters...roaches, ants, and flies...that are similarly flexible.

These are the sturdy creatures that seem well adapted to the current Anthropocene mass extinction event.  Just as weeds and the small generalists endured asteroid impacts and planet-wide belches of volcanism, they'll do whatever they need to stay alive and reproducing while human hubris burns across our little world.

Observing the fiercely focused energies of these creatures, I recalled something spoken in an ancient sacred tale.  Up on the mountaintop, the Lord spoke to Noah and his family, standing wobbly on their land-legs after their vomitous forty-day journey through the tumult.  There, God unilaterally made two peculiar promises.

First, that flesh could now devour flesh.  Unlike the mythic perfection of a peaceful Eden, suddenly we were in a covenant of meat.  All creatures would fear us, because all of them were now ours to devour.

Meat was back on the menu, boys.

But that meant that we, too, would be devoured by the creatures that we consumed.  Further, bloodshed was the now the fate of all who shed the blood of others.  As divine blessings go, it's mixed, sharply double-edged, the sort of blessing one might receive when wished upon the withered paw of a monkey.

The Noahic Covenant, in Torah, is a peculiar one for another reason.  Unlike other covenantal commitments in the Bible, it's not between humankind and the Creator.  It's between all living things and the Creator.

Not just humankind, but with everything that lives.  

"I will never again destroy all of you," said the I Am That I Am, and he's talking to every living thing.

Let it be noted: God doesn't say "any."   Just "all."  "I'm not going to destroy all of y'all" means an unsettlingly different thing than "I'm not going to destroy any of you."

It would be fair at this point to note that in Hebrew, the meaning of the word kol (כָּ ל).  Kol is what we translate into English as "all" in Genesis 9.  Kol can mean both "all" and "any," and Hebrew requires us to grasp the distinction from the context of the statement.  But the context is clear as crystal here, particularly as expressed in Genesis 9:9-10.  All means all.

And that means that for some flesh, destruction may be still be God's intent.

Which for "some" flesh...that which won't adapt, that which won't listen, that which won't acknowledge the real or the good, that which willfully ignores God's fierce insistence on grace and justice...is a rather notable caveat.

One must take care around any one-sided covenant written in meat.

A Nation without Shame

Don't ever let anyone shame you for who you are.

It's one of the axioms of our culture, so basic now that we take it divinely received wisdom.  Shame is just what people do when they're trying to control you, or put you down.  Love yourself!  Love everything about yourself!  Love your light and your shadow equally!  You're perfect!

This seems lovely, and affirming, and inclusive.  All of those things.

In some circumstances, these things can be true.

In Nadia Bolz-Weber's engaging 2019 book SHAMELESS, for instance, the case is made for stepping away from shame.  As she puts it:

“Christians should help one another to silence the voice that accuses. To celebrate a repentance—a snapping out of it, a thinking of new thoughts—which leads to possibilities we never considered. To love one another as God loves us. To love ourselves as God loves us. To remind each other of the true voice of God. And there’s only one way to do this: by being unapologetically and humbly ourselves. By not pretending. By being genuine. Real. Our actual, non-ideal selves.”

Shaming and mocking others is a significant human addiction, to be sure.  It's the entire business model of most influencers on X, and it's all too frequently used to bully, manipulate, and control.  What could possibly be wrong with being honestly, wholly yourself, and loving yourself unconditionally?  In the book, Bolz-Weber talks about needing to integrate every aspect of yourself, embracing the whole of who you are, and argues that shame is an impediment to that process. 

“In my pastoral work I've started to suspect that the more someone was exposed to religious messages about controlling their desires, avoiding sexual thoughts, and not lusting in their hearts, the less likely they are to be integrated physically, emotionally, sexually, and spiritually.”

And right there is where I am obligated to disagree.  If shame...anxiety over potential loss of status, wealth, or influence...prevents you from getting help in dealing with your mess, sure.  If you can't get started down the path to recovery and restoration because you fear people will think less of you, yeah, it's a problem.  

But that's a very very different thing from being shameless.  Because there are new things that are selfish, unexplored possibilities that are cruel and brutal, and you can be genuine by being genuinely evil.

Being shameless, I would contend, is the darkest form of toxic empathy.  Here, I'm not using that loaded term in the same way as the false "Christians" who have lately taken issue with caring for the poor and the stranger and the outcast.  Radical, unwavering, and complete love of neighbor is a Gospel imperative, and those clucking about feeding the hungry and showing hospitality to the foreigner are simply trying to justify their own ego-driven cruelty.  

At the same time, the most dangerous form of empathy is our own seemingly endless willingness to tolerate our own BS.  Compassion becomes poison when we constrain it with our selfishness.  It is toxic when we only feel our own pain, and only sympathize with those who are exactly like us.  Unwavering and shameless love of self is nothing more and nothing less than narcissism, and it wrecks lives.  It is purely amoral.

Morality...meaning our defining purpose, the governing ethogenetics by which we understand the good...is what integrates our personhood.   Just as pain and discomfort alert us to that which damages our physical being, shame alerts us to the damage we're doing to our souls when we act in ways that subvert our purpose.

Shame is our moral pain.  As such, it's not something we are to do to others.  It's a necessary aspect of our own ethical existence.

If and when I violate the moral teachings of Jesus...meaning the things he ACTUALLY TOLD US TO DO...shame is a healthy response.  If I harm another, if I lie or cheat or steal?  I feel shame.   When I find myself lustfully objectifying others, or am distracted by the trivial baubles offered up by consumerism?  I feel shame.  When my righteous anger devolves into blind and consuming hatred?  I feel shame.  

Those impulses are a part of me, sure.  I'm human.  Failure to acknowledge that would be fundamentally dishonest.

But those desires, uncontrolled, become my rotting edges, the parts of me that sabotage my growth in grace and justice.  They impede my life-purpose.  Like an untreated and gangrenous necrosis in a living system, they will spread in a soul until the soul dies.  They are fundamentally and essentially dis-integrative, and as such, they must...for a moral person...be debrided away.

Being truly shameless is the mark of the soulless sociopath, the bullying brute, the serial predator, the unteachable fool and the breaker-of-things.

This is true of persons.  It is also just as true of nations.

If a nation's only purpose is itself, it is just as amoral as the most venal narcissist.  Some, like 20th century theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, suggest that nations are inherently immoral.  As he argued in his seminal MORAL MAN AND MORAL SOCIETY, political collectives are interested only in their own constituent members, and are unable to make decisions that might go against their own power and wealth.

This is, apparently, America's national ethic now.  Brazen, self-glorifying, and utterly unwilling to acknowledge any error, we are becoming a nation without shame, blustering and shouting at the nations around us like a drunken reality show contestant.  

Our moral purpose is our own power and our own wealth, period, end of story.  We are told that to suggest otherwise is to be ashamed of America, and that we should instead glory in our greatness and our power.

If your moral purpose goes deeper than pride in national power, though, this feels like nothing more than collective narcissism.  For those of us who actually pay attention to the sacred stories of the Bible, and who understand that God relentlessly calls both persons and nations to account, this is just the teensiest bit troubling.

Because if you've spent even a few moments reading the Torah and the Prophets, or cracked open the Gospels and Epistles, you know that God has never had much patience with wanton and shameless nations.

Lord have mercy on our souls.

The Sweet Sticky Harvest

In my morning walkabout through my garden the other day, all was pretty much normal.  I knocked back some of the wild grape that's tangled throughout my sunflower patch, snipping away the choking growth.  I checked in on my butternut squash, which is starting to cure on the vine, the soft wan green tanning to faint yellow.  I watched bumblebees noodle about through the wildly abundant, sweetly pungent basil, which...as we're getting into August...I'm now allowing to bolt to flower.  No flower means no seed, and as I'm two years into basil that I've started myself, I'd kinda like to keep that pesto-fountain going. 

Finally, I went around harvesting okra pods with my best sharp steel scissors.  I've got two four by eight beds dedicated to that traditional Southern crop this year, and the pods are poppin'.  They sever with a satisfying snap, as real force is required to get through the thick stem.  The yield has picked up as the season has progressed. There's a nice fat gallon bag filled in the freezer, with far more yet to come.  Batter fried okra and bhindi masala awaits.

But as I moved to the second of the two beds, I noticed a shadowing on the leaves and flowers a single one of the plants.  Uh oh.  Okra is pretty resilient, but the truth of gardens is that everything in the world wants to eat them.  As I approached, my fading middle aged eyes only saw a dark stippled fuzz.  Fungal growth?  Perhaps.  I couldn't tell without my reading glasses, so I used my other senses. I reached out and touched the greyness with an index finger.  It was sticky.  I held my finger to my nose, and sniffed.  Sweet.

Not fungus.  Aphids.  Drat.  

I went and grabbed my glasses from inside, then peered at the leaves to confirm.  Yup.  Black Aphids, a great bumper crop of them.  They were sucking the life from the flowers, and were a grey living hoarfrost suckling on the shaded underside of the leaves.  

I'd had another species of aphid devastate several kale crops a few years back, but hadn't had these particular little devils about yet.   As I mused on how I might destroy them, I noted that the aphids weren't alone.

All across the thickly blighted leaves were hundreds of small black ants.  They streamed up and down the stalks.  They moved delicately across the dense masses of feeding aphids.  Ahah, I thought.  Farmers.  

Ants are remarkable for many things, and one of the peculiar outputs of their distributed social intelligence is insect agriculture.  Aphids poop out honeydew, a sweet sugar-rich byproduct of their digestion, and so ants will gather and tend herds of aphids.  Think teeny weeny dairy herders, and you're not far off.  They'll eat some of the aphids, too, and while I can't confirm they use aphid leather as clothing, I wouldn't put it past the industrious little beggars.   I'd never seen it in action before, not that I can remember.    

It's cool if you're an entomologist, but rather less so when you're a gardener.  

The more I looked, the more I discovered the aphids, dense on the flower clusters, or squirreled away by the veins of a leaf.  Everywhere, they were tended by ants. My early fall okra harvest was under threat.  I mixed up a spray bottle or two with a mixture of soap and water, which weakens the aphids.  I doused every one of their colonies, and let that set for a while.

Then out came the garden hose, set on "Riot Suppression."  I revisited their leafy pastures, and blasted the aphids bodily from the plants.  It was rather satisfying.  

Ants are great pollinators, and generally garden-friendly, but once they've brought their livestock to feed, they've crossed a line.  They're not working with me, but against me.  The plants so carefully placed will wither and perish under that excess burden.  In pursuit of their sweet honeydew harvest, ant and aphid alike are taking more than the garden can give, and no gardener is obligated to tolerate that.

As I rewound the hose, I found myself musing on the ramifications of that idea.  I glanced for a moment skyward.  Nestled in the sprawl of the 'burbs, where all is steel and concrete and sticky sweet hyperabundance, I looked at the August sky, the blue tinged by the haze of far-off wildfires.  I considered how much more we take than can be given.  How much more we have than is mindful.

For a moment...in my mind's eye, and all...I visualized a great nozzle in the heavens, clicking the nozzle to "jet."

It wouldn't be the first time.