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| A Larger View |
How Current Events Reflect
The Spiritual Movement of Humanity
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| Volume X Edition 5 |
September/October |
2005 |
In this issue:
Maximum Sentence For a 13 Year-Old: Injecting Compassion, Learning From Niger: Thinking About Birth Control?, Cloning Pets And People: Are We Sure?, The Power of Forgiveness, Web Site of Interest: Like a News Stand And More, To Ponder On: World Food Day
Maximum Sentence For a 13 Year-Old: Injecting Compassion
A 13 year-old, 5-foot-1, 90-pound pitcher decided to fight back. His opponent was 15 year-old, 5-10, 190- pound Jeremy Rourke who had bullied and shoved him repeatedly. The young pitcher took out an aluminum baseball bat from an equipment bag and hit Jeremy first in the knees and then in the face. Shortly after, Jeremy was declared dead. The defense said it was self-defense. The prosecution said it was second-degree murder and asked for the maximum sentence: to be confined to a juvenile facility until the age of 25. Judge Richard Naranjo sentenced the 13 year-old (whose name was withheld because he is a minor) to the maximum penalty saying that this was a way to make society safer. The family of the victim was only sorry that the maximum was not more severe.
Are we really safer now that this 13 year-old has been sentenced? He shall spend formative years in an environment, which in California has been acknowledged by all sides to be dire, an environment where sexual crimes, often unreported, are frequent, and where allegations of staff sexual misconduct is roughly 10 times what it is for adult facilities. He may be forced to attend classes, but what kind of education will he obtain? He shall come out at the age of 25 probably hardened, an expert on life inside a youth authority facility, doubtless without job or prospect for one, probably without training, more than likely not much better equipped to handle his anger and frustrations than when he went in.
What do we as a society gain by being hardnosed? Is incarceration the way to teach this youngster and others like him that there is a more mature, more productive way of handling himself?
Would injecting a bit of compassion into sentencing not be to our benefit?
Learning From Niger: Thinking About Birth Control?
Our TV screens have been filled with images of starving children in Niger. The UN says that 3.6 million people are facing severe food shortages in the desert country including some 800,000 children under five. In addition another 1.6 million in the neighboring states of Mali, Mauritania and Burkina Fasso are also facing the same problem. Mainly the result of drought and locust infestation, the current crisis is not a surprise and the UN has been trying to avert it since last March, but without the necessary funds, there was little it could do. In great part due to this inability to act, Niger has now become a catalyst for change. To avoid such preventable famines, the world body is asking to boost its emergency relief fund to $500 million. Both Oxfam and the British government want to go even further and are pushing to have the fund be closer to $1 billion. Typically, some of the aid is in the form of loans, which not only cannot be made until pledges are received from wealthy donors or nations, but which can also result in delays before the money actually arrives. In Niger's case, their early request for such loans went unheeded, partly because they had no collateral. As a result, Oxfam is also asking for grants that could be given regardless of donor pledges or of being able to meet loan conditions.
In the wake of the G-8 meeting in July at which the member countries agreed to increase aid to Africa to $50 billion a year by 2010, it is particularly important to learn all we can from the crisis in Niger. The aid community realizes that it will take years for plans to boost agricultural and economic productivity to come to fruition and that the issues are far deeper than planning to avoid future emergencies. It also understands the causes of poverty, causes to do with climate, with the lack of roads and of a proper infrastructure for economic growth to take place. To the credit of the agencies and individuals who will have a voice in deciding how to spend the G-8 aid, their grasp of the need including the need to persist and forge a political will to match the underlying moral one is succinct and pithy. But little has been said about the consequence of religion's influence on foreign aid, particularly on how we deal with population programs like birth control. For decades now, since the Reagan years and the emergence of the religious right, foreign aid programs have not included funding for programs addressing birth control and related issues. Even if the guidelines for aid have changed, the problems have not. A few statistics taken from the CIA fact-book for Niger paint a distressing picture of what could be called unmet need. Sixty one percent of the population lives on less than $1 a day, the literacy rate is 19.9%, 40% of children 5 or younger are stunted or underweight for their age, there are 48.3 live births per 1000 population and 21.33 deaths also per 1000 population, the life expectancy is 42, and on average each woman bears 6.75 children. It does indeed seem that in a country like Niger population programs could have great impact not to speak of the way they could contribute to ease the burden on women.
We are at a crossroad in addressing the problems of Africa. For the first time in decades the opportunity to lift the continent is more than rhetoric. Part of this effort ought to be to at least rethink how religion shapes our participation in population programs like birth control.
Cloning Pets And People: Are We Sure?
The creation of Snuppy was good news for Genetic Savings and Clone, a company that sells cloned animals usually to bereaved pets owner. Their fee is more than many earn in a year, but some say it is worth every penny. Snuppy was the result of long and hard work by researchers in South Korea who had to transfer 1095 cloned embryos into 123 dogs before being successful with a Labrador retriever. All this is exciting for cloning companies and for scientific advances, but is cloning pets a good idea? Wayne Pacelle, the president of the Humane Society of the United States, believes that "...with millions of healthy and adoptable cats and dogs being killed each year for lack of suitable homes, it is a little frivolous to be cloning departed pets."
While cloning pets brings us closer to cloning people, frivolity is not an argument applicable to the cloning of human beings. But perhaps the cloning of pets in theory or in reality will come to show us the dangers of the procedures. Dolly the sheep did die of a respiratory ailment uncommon in young animals. But more to the point, there is no guarantee that a genetic duplicate will actually be a duplicate. It may actually look a little different, but far more important it may act different. We are each more than our DNA and that may be even more true of humans than of pets. While the old argument of nature and nurture, of the role of our environment comes to bear, there is the spiritual fact of the soul. What role would it play in cloning? If each soul is distinct, if each soul embodies given spiritual qualities and infuses a being with them, then a cloned being, even if a physical facsimile, would be just that a physical specimen, and the way in which the soul qualities influence the manifestation of its personality would not be subject to the genetic replication.
The phenomenon has not escaped Hollywood. Both in an old movie Here Comes Mr. Jordan and its remake Heaven Can Wait, Joe Pendleton dies before his time and his soul takes on the body of a hard-hearted tycoon whose wife is plotting to murder him. He looks like the tycoon but is still himself and when a young woman comes to plead with him to rethink ruining her father, he falls in love with her-and she with him. As Joe he is quite amenable to redress the situation that upset her. But he is soon murdered and must leave the tycoon's body. He then incarnates into the body of another boxer and accidentally runs into the young women. And of course they both sense something in the other, something beyond appearance, something of their inner quality.
We will eventually have the knowledge to clone the human body, but if we can't clone the soul, what kind of result would we get?
The Power of Forgiveness
Sometimes the simplest things can make a huge difference. That's why perhaps every now and then one human being does something of great importance to others. Such is the work of writer Marina Cantacuzino who created The Forgiveness Project, through which people can not only discover but also validate, experience, share and expand their forgiveness. It's in the mold of Bishop Tutu work with the Reconciliation Commission in South Africa. Regardless of place, the forgiveness of people who have been harmed makes them extraordinary beings and as they share their stories of how they came to forgive the one who wronged them, or themselves, we discover a side of humanity that is too rarely spoken of. Originally from the United Kingdom, The project, which has a traveling exhibit and a documentary, has recently come to the United States.
Bud Welch is typical of the stories the project has gathered. His daughter died in the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City. Bud drank to cope and seemed overtaken by bitterness, and then he remembered a picture of Timothy McVeigh's father bent over a flowerbed, as if bent over in pain-just the way he felt. Eventually he met Bill McVeigh and Tim's sister Jennifer and Bud who was learning to see Tim McVeigh as a person no longer wanted him to die. He realized that Tim's father was a bigger victim than he was. As we read the stories we are of course moved. More importantly, though, their lack of anger and of self pity along with the compassion and understanding that underlies them teaches and inspires us. Aside from collecting and presenting poignant such stories of forgiveness, the organization also has an education program. Visit www.theforgivenessproject.com
Web Site of Interest: Like a News Stand And More - www.aldaily.com
What is most impressive about this site is its breadth. Through it not only can one reach a large number of magazines and newspapers, but also columnists, radio stations, book reviews, web logs and more. It also provides links to keys articles published in a number of magazines covering as its title indicates arts and letters, sometimes known as the humanities, but always recognized as part of culture. The site is sponsored by the Chronicles of Higher Education, is reviewed daily and is a must for anyone trying to keep abreast of the intellectual life in the English-speaking world.
To Ponder On - World Food Day
Every year October 16th is World Food Day. It marks the day the Food and Agriculture Organization (a UN Agency headquartered in Rome) was founded in 1945. This year the theme will be the intercultural exchange between the world's many people as an essential to fighting hunger. An example is that of the potato which was introduced to Northern Europe from South America in the 16th century. It can easily, quickly and economically be grown and keep many from knowing hunger or feed hordes who might otherwise starve. Introducing camels to Africa-from Arabia-is another example. It meant a means of travel, easier commerce, a source of milk and meat. Maize is another story, originally from the American continent; it now feeds most of Africa.
One hundred fifty countries will celebrate world food day highlighting the need for fairer access to markets so that poorer countries can more easily sell their products to the industrialized world, play a role in economic growth and thus fight hunger and ecological devastation.
Celebrating the founding of the FAO calls to mind the work it does helping countries in crisis. Right now for example it is working on helping Malawi, where 75% of the population lives on $1 day or less, avert a famine due to the failure of its maize crop. Somehow the whole idea of World Food Day is in itself evocative: If food is a necessity and we have such abundance, oughtn't we to ponder our responsibility to share?
A Larger View is published by the Inner\Outer Partnership, a tax-exempt educational organization probing how spiritual principles can be agents of individual and societal change. We are funded through donations. Please send any - as well as any comments - to P.O.Box 1293, Pac. Pal. CA 90272-1293. Also contact us by email at alargerview@earthlink.net or call 310-836-7710 or visit our web site at www.innerouterpartnership.org
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