The other day the Senate voted not to increase the minimum wage from $5.15 to $7.25. The minimum wage has been at $5.15 for the past 10 years. Working 40 hours a week at that rate will earn you a bit over $10,000 a year.

As Senator Ted Kennedy pointed out, the average senator's salary has increased by $30,000 in the past 10 years.

Interesting.

Haditha & the Fall of Man

I'm reading Searching for God Knows What by Donald Miller, halfway through it and loving it. Part of what I read last night was about war, and he mentioned Robert MacNamara and the documentary Fog of War. Later that night, after a failed attempt at a movie rental, I looked at the TV guide (something I havnt done in months) and saw that Fog of War was actually going to be on. Coincidence?

Well I have to admit that I did not make it through the whole documentary, but kept switching back to it. In one part MacNamara talks about his first memory- being two years old and seeing people in the streets celebrating the end of World War One. They thought it was the war to end all wars.

A few days ago I was reading the June 12th Time magazine's article on Haditha, Iraq, where 24 Iraqis were killed by Marines in their homes after one Marine was killed by a roadside bomb. This was back in November, and the Marines reported that the roadside bomb killed not only their buddy but 15 Iraqis. The truth is just now coming out, thanks to an Iraqi human-rights actvist named Taher Thabet who filmed the scene of the crime and all the bodies in the morgue. There was plenty of evidence on tape to show what really happened.

So did the Marines just snap? go crazy with rage? did they really feel like the women & children minding their own business in their houses had something to do with the insurgent(s?) responsible for the bomb? The killing took place over 5 hours. To me that seems like enough time, maybe not to calm down after seeing a friend killed, but enough time to think through your actions instead of just shooting at whatever moves. We can't really know what went on in their heads and what scares me most is that they are just people...sure they are trained to kill but also trained to know when not to kill. This particular group of Marines, the Kilo Company, "had already seen some of the uglist fighting in the postinvasion period", according to Time. I can't even imagine...

Donald Miller, in talking about WWII and war in general, says,

"I bring this up only because the fall of man, when Adam and Eve ate from that tree, occurred because there was a war going on. This is the only way I can explain life as we know it. The people of Japan were not monsters, they were just people, but they were caught up in war. They were victims of war, victims of a handful of mean, a handful of leaders who wanted something they couldn't have. .... We are wired so that other people help create us, help make us who we are, and when deception is fed to us, we make bad decisions. War is complicated; it isnt black and white".

Don writes a lot about Genesis and the fall. He says that humans were wired to be connected to God, to find our identidy in God, but the Fall changed all of that. The potential for that connection is still there, but we seldom hook up and instead look for other things to define our beings.

So these three things were running around in my head all weekend: the fog of war, Haditha, and the fall of man. and they all just helped the other to make sense. MacNamara, a former secretary of defense, admited that mistakes were made in WWII Vietnam. Mistakes are being made in Iraq (and throughout the world for that matter) as we speak. We don't look to God for our identity anymore, we look to others and our expiriences with others. The Marines were deceived by war, maybe deceived into thinking that more violence would justify their friend's death. Maybe you could say that they were totally desentized to violence and death that killing was just the natural response to emotional pain. They made bad decisions. You can find lots of people or events to blame for it, and in the end it just goes back to the garden of eden, to the first spiritual battle that satan won.

biodiesel

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2006/03/worlds_largest_2.php

A Biodiesel plant is coming to Indiana!

As a diesel owner this excites me. My only concern is that they find some new places for soy bean fields, because it seems to me that in the long run we should be using existing farmland for food...

But props to the Governer for taking a risk on an alternative fuel!

So I wrote my senator yesterday, thanks to an informative and inspiring LiveJournal post by Lindsy. There is a bill that Congress recently voted on, and soon the Senate will vote on it, and it is scary.

There is a New York Times editorial about it here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/03/opinion/03fri1.html?_r=1&incamp=article_popular&oref=slogin

I don't really think I have anything else to say that was not said in Lindsy and Keira's posts and the comments that followed.

I need to write to my representatives more often. It's not that hard, and the more I do it the better I'll get at it, and it, along with grant writing, will help me keep the writing skills that I utilized every week in college. Perhaps if more people wrote to their senators, they would put more weight on the people's voices and not just vote with their party. Maybe not...but maybe.

So I will keep my eyes open for things that disgust me and proceed to make my voice heard.

call to renewal

The other day at work I met young woman who used to work in my office (in fact, her last day was the day that i interviewed for the position). So she came by the other day and I happened to be introduced to her again. She then began telling us of a protest she went to in Washington DC, and naturally my ears picked up.

She flew to DC in December to join 100 other Christians to protest the budget cuts of Welfare programs. She spoke clearly and passionatly and even though I had known her for 3 minutes I knew that I wanted to be like her. "We are believers" she said. "We believe in the Bible and live by it. The Bible has 2,000 some verses about taking care of the poor, and if you cut those out, the book will not hold together. If you claim to run a country based on God's teaching, you must take care of the poor!" She went on to talk about the inspiring people who lead the protest and then told us all 100+ of them were arrested but then released on a $50 bail.

It raises an important question to the religious right- what makes those verses used to justify stances on abortion and homosexuality more important than those verses about the poor?

I know that one justification given for the budget cut was to give more money to Hurricane relief. And that is important, I know. In a past editorial, the executive director of Horizon House inquired as to why people are more willing to give money to impoverished victims of a natural diaster than to impoverished victims of circumstance- the homeless out on the streets and the low income families in the inner city. I'll admit that it is easier to give money to the "innocent", victims of disaster, but there must be a balance. We must take care of everybody regardless of circumstance.

For more information go to www.calltorenewal.org

So today was my first day of "work", and it was basically an introduction to the organization and to the social problem of homelessness. One statistic that I learned is that the average hourly wage of a family on welfare is $7.62. To rent the average 2 bedroom apartment in this city, one must earn an hourly wage of $11.31! A brochure I read states that housing is considered affordable if it costs no more than 30% of ones monthly income. It also stated that single mothers on welfare often spend up to 75% of their income on childcare!

So this points out two obvious problems that contribute to homelessness, lack of affordable housing and lack of affordable childcare.

I also learned that homeless people rarely panhandle- beg for money on the street. Of course there are exceptions, but it seems that most panhandlers have housing and use money for drug fixes.

After 4 years of book learnin I'm seeing what its like in the real world.