Urban Village of Pasadena

Economic growth in China has been incredible for a couple of decades; per capita GDP has increased 4-fold, despite rising population. So how is that working out for the majority of Chinese? I don't have data on income distribution like I reported on Americans for my May 1 blog entry, but a new paper out today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (one of the most prestigious peer-reviewed journals in all of science) reports on happiness. And the news is not good.

My argument with the 1% is not because they are rich.

Take Bob Taylor. Bob was a guitar maker who (with help from his engineering and business development friends) figured out ways to apply manufacturing techniques to boutique-quality guitars. They were able to make lots of high quality guitars at moderate prices, and they made a ton of money. They do their manufacturing in California; I don't know how much money the employees make but they seem to have good job satisfaction. This strikes me as a very legitimate way to get rich in America today.

When Sinatra's generation got old, they didn't act surprised. But now that the rock-and-roll generation of the 60s and 70s is aging, they couldn't be more shocked. ("The strangest story ever told/is how I got to be this old" -- Loudon Wainwright III) Maybe not surprising from the crowd that sang, "I hope I die before I get old."
So recent years have seen the emergence of the Old Man Album -- a whole album of songs about being old. I was already aware of Nick Lowe's "At My Age" in 2007, and Leonard Cohen's "Old Ideas" from earlier this year. Even Sir Paul gave a nod in this direction with the title of his 2007 "Memory Almost Full," a title he read off his iPod and applied to his own brain.
But since its release last week,my new favorite Old Man Album is Loudon Wainwright's "Older Than My Old Man Now."

"So what I'm trying to do is say the government should not be picking winners and losers, let the private sector determine the winners and losers, and then ... when somebody is successful, then you give them the subsidies and the tax credit." ~ Rep. Cliff Stearns (R-Fla.)

Sometimes Jesus, to our ears, seems to require certainty: "Truly I tell you, if you say to this mountain, 'Be taken up and thrown into the sea' and if you do not doubt in your heart, but believe that what you say will come to pass, it will be done for you. So I tell you, whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours." (Mark 11:23-24)

The following is a litany that we read at the Palm Sunday Peace Parade this past Sunday. Palm Sunday and April Fools' Day fell on the same day this year, so the theme of the parade was "Parade of Fools." I think the litany explains the theme

Litany of Fools

Leader: In these days of endless war and the worldly wisdom that justifies it, we stand here as fools who don’t understand. We don’t understand the efficacy of war. We can’t comprehend destroying a nation in order save it. We are simple people, and this worldly wisdom confounds us.

There is a truth which, until you can accept it, will always stand in between you and the freedom you seek from debt. It is the truth that in order to be free from debt, you must be willing to change your lifestyle. There are no shortcuts that anyone can take to circumvent this truth. It is axiomatic. The larger the debt and the quicker you wish to free yourself from it, the greater, more drastic changes you will have to make.

If 16 ounces of Coke is good, 44 ounces of Coke must be better, right? And, by the same logic, if living 70 years is good, living 80 or 90 years must be better. No one wants to die prematurely, but in our efforts to live longer, we're doing away with the only good ways of dying. Maybe I'll take up smoking....

http://www.ted.com/talks/peter_saul_let_s_talk_about_dying.html

Recently I was expressing to a friend some frustration over the sad fact that so few people in our society, including in our churches, actively work for justice and peace. She wondered if I was implicating her in this cacophony of inaction. I was not including her because two months prior, in the space of three weeks, she had participated in two street actions and two organizing meetings.