Cooper Zale's Open Salon Blog

Thoughts on Liberty & Youth

Sat, 10 Apr 2010 23:04:03 -0400

As I have said many times before (from my reading of human history), the development of our species for the past five millennia has been all about the transition from patriarchal institutions based on the rule of strength to more partnership ones based on the rule of law. This transition involves more people becoming stakeholders with the liberty to chart their own course, check the power of their leaders, and contribute their two cents to the growing collective wisdom that has brought us such breakthroughs as the 2008 election of Barak Obama as President of the United States.

For me, a logical step still ahead of us in this progression is conferring more liberty upon our young people so they can be greater stakeholders in their own development, prior to their reaching adulthood.

These thoughts about the importance of liberty were triggered by my partner Sally posing a rhetorical question the other day. It was the starting point for the typical kind of philosophical conversation we often have around our kitchen table at dinnertime. I recall many such discussions with our two kids present and contributing, but now that the nest is empty, most these days include just Sally and me.

Sally’s question was how the American colonies were blessed with such a brain-trust of individuals, who helped found a country on such egalitarian principles (as far as they went) and enshrine those principles in a well written constitution and its initial amendments (The Bill of Rights).

My initial thought was that the resources, strength of will, and ingenuity it took to uproot oneself from ones homeland and make the perilous journey to a new land tended to select people with broad vision and practical intelligence.

Then recalling the work of left-libertarian John Taylor Gatto, my second thought was that it probably had something to do with the principles of liberty, whether fully realized or not, that wove their threads through American colonial life and its facilitating institutions.

One of course needs to acknowledge that liberty was only extended to a minority of inhabitants. Women, slaves and children were still legal chattel of the men who controlled them, and indentured servants had to work off their contracted time. But at least among the white men who owned property, a single class of citizenry was created, a system at odds with the aristocratic rankings of their European roots. This was the egalitarian vision of Thomas Jefferson (whom the state board of education in Texas, in its collective wisdom, is currently hoping to expunge from its children’s textbooks).

I include the Texas reference only parenthetically for context, because this piece is not a (perhaps more typical DKOS) rant against “them”, but a concern for all of “us”.

Though the Puritans of New England (including Abigail and John Adams) were perhaps overly pious and righteous, and not particularly tolerant of other faiths or cultures, they developed a strong tradition of democratic governance through town meetings.

The Quakers of the middle colonies (including Thomas Payne and John Dickinson) took it even farther, practicing a radical egalitarianism and consensus governance, including a high level of tolerance (that confounded the Puritans). Their English Quaker forbears had been vilified because they would not tip their hats to their aristocratic “betters” (and were recipients of legally sanctioned beatings as a result).

The “Cavaliers” of Virginia and the southern colonies (including Thomas Jefferson and George Washington) plus the “Highlanders” (Andrew Jackson) that settled the Appalachian mountains, were born and raised within a strong libertarian ethos that is woven through American history, including the settlement of the West (by white people at the expense of the native population), and continues today as a strong thread in American thought.

In the context of freedom (spawned by an ocean dividing colonial America from European roots) I believe principles of egalitarianism and liberty created a vibrant milieu unleashing a meritocracy (initially just among the privileged) that resulted in the collection of great minds that launched our country and wrote its founding documents.

Through the Industrial Revolution, these libertarian principles inspired the best of entrepreneurial capitalism helping to build a robust country with a vibrant culture. But its dark side also emerged, and the accumulation of economic power in fewer and fewer hands bucked the trend towards egalitarianism and liberty in favor of a new hierarchy of corrupting power. Such is the frustrating three steps forward and two steps back of human evolution.

It was the continuation of these ideas of liberty and egalitarianism (along with other factors) that encouraged a talented and inspired minority to organize the 19th Century movements for racial and gender equality that have born fruits in the 20th and our own fledgling century, extending the hand of partnership and the dream of liberty to an ever larger circle of equals. Think of the aspirations that women and people of color can now realize, and the enhancement of their contribution to our human evolution that can result.

My partner Sally and I, along with our now young-adult kids, are part of a still small minority of people who have come to believe that this expansion of egalitarianism and liberty can be extended to our children and youth. Acknowledging that each extension of the human circle of stakeholders has its complexities of implementation and implications, we believe that these issues can be resolved so we can unleash a quantum leap in human development. The same principles that have been extended (at least in theory) to all adults in our and other countries can, at least in a large degree, be extended to our young people.

To many people, I understand that this seems counter-intuitive. We are talking about “children”. The very word is often used by adults as a derogatory term to describe a person behaving irrationally or out of control.

The prevailing wisdom among most parents and other adults is that children and even older youth need to be controlled, in many cases (particularly in the home or in school) in an authoritarian fashion where there “advice and consent” is not sought or even considered (if volunteered). In a disagreement between young people and their parents or teachers, rather than practicing the Golden Rule, we understand that the adults (who have the “gold”) make the rules. To most people this makes absolute sense. Anything else invites rampant permissiveness, “childishness”, and results in anarchy. I have heard this argument made by most adults that I know and respect, including parents and teachers.

These same fears of anarchy were previously used historically to argue against enfranchising serfs and commoners, and treating (supposedly inferior) people of color and women as equals. People who are viewed as less capable than those in power need to be controlled for their own good and everyone else’s.

I acknowledge that it is more complicated when dealing with young people. Adults have a legitimate responsibility to ensure that our youth have a safe end enriched environment to grow and develop. Young people can at times lack the maturity to sufficiently consider their own safety, or may not be aware of some opportunities that can encourage their own development. Adults play a legitimate stewardship role in these situations, and so may have just cause to restrain a young person’s liberty or not seek their consent.

But having to exercise unchallenged authority in certain circumstances does not justify wielding that type of authority in all circumstances. Further, preventing any advice from youth on decisions made without their consent (as was often done in the schools that I and later my kids attended) is in my thinking rude, at best, and at its worst a corruption of power. History teaches us over and over again that unchecked power leads inevitable to corruption and loss of the moral authority to lead.

I am part of a still small minority of people that believe that adults can play their youth stewardship role employing mostly facilitative rather than directive leadership, and always seeking input from youth on decisions that will affect them. I was raised by parents who mostly followed these principles, and I tried to raise my own kids this way as well.

If you want to see these principles in action, attend a YRUU (Young Religious Unitarian Universalist) event and witness the very limited role that adults play. The main thing that has drawn me to Unitarian-Universalism is the YRUU program that is built on the principle of creating an environment of liberty and enfranchisement for older youth. Adults play as minimal a role as possible (based on legal and other safety requirements) in YRUU events and decision-making, allowing the youth participants to develop and govern their own program, and charter events as part of that program.

As we develop as a species, we continue to learn that the more people we define as “us” (and treat with love and respect) and the fewer we define as “them” (and deal with in fear through mechanisms of control), the more we unleash the brilliance of our individual and collective light. I believe one of the challenges in this new century is to move youth (and anyone else) from the remaining group of “them” in favor of a world of only “us”.

Power (Over) Corrupts

Sun, 4 Apr 2010 18:04:41 -0400

The pedophile priest scandal in the Catholic Church over the past 25 years is just one more example of the societal axiom that “power corrupts”. The phrase is actually a bit too simplistic, not all forms of power necessarily corrupt. I would say more specifically that power exercised from the top down (what some delineate as “power-over”) inevitably leads to some form of corruption if the people subjected to this form of leadership are not involved in the governance process and/or do not have comparable power of their own to check the actions of their leaders. This was a key factor motivating the American Revolution (e.g. “taxation without representation”), the French Revolution and many other similar insurrections... part of a larger trend in the world to move from authoritarian toward more egalitarian models of governance. This other idea of power flowing from empowered consent of the group is what is delineated as “power-with”.

Many of us and our forebears through the centuries have fantasized about all the great things an “enlightened despot” could get done, rather than have to go through the messy “sausage making” of the democratic process. A recent case and point is the difficult path to passage of American health care reform legislation. If I had despotic power I would enact a single-payer system for the U.S. like Canada’s. Others might be convinced that this approach would be a disaster, and if enacted by dictatorial fiat (rather than by majority agreement) it probably eventually would be.

I have read extensively about Napoleon Bonaparte, perhaps the world’s most famous enlightened despot, and the milieu in which he rose to power, initially through popular consent but then transitioning to virtual dictatorship. The French republic of the early 1800’s (recently formed by violent revolution) that he rose to power in, was besieged on all sides by the remaining monarchies of Europe that feared the contagion of republicanism (plus the British who had their own set of issues with the French). As Napoleon quickly demonstrated his ability to lead armies to victory and expertly build progressive national infrastructure (in his country and conquered territories throughout Europe), the majority of the French people (in their desperation) willingly granted him his despotism, an act of at least initial consent of sorts.

Ultimately he did not succeed in making peace (through strength of arms) with France’s powerful neighbors and adversaries, but instead was “corrupted” leading to his misguided attempt to militarily subdue all the major continental monarchies of Europe, including a disastrous invasion of Russia. Whether it was ego, hubris, desperation or too narrow of a perspective, Napoleon did not have the empowered consent of his very able generals to perhaps advise him otherwise.

Fast-forwarding several centuries, look around the world today and see the corruption of power-over hierarchies, whether authoritarian national governments (like Iran or China) or hierarchical organizations (religious, educational, etc) within politically democratic countries. I continue to be troubled by our own education system’s hierarchical “command and control” bureaucracy that seems to me more like the old Soviet Union than an effective institution for preparing our youth to be active citizens in a democratic country.

And returning to religious denominations, see how the ones that are the most top-down in their governance structures tend to be the ones most subject to corruption. As I mentioned at the top of this piece, look at the troubles the very hierarchical Catholic governance structures are facing. If the goal is maintaining organizational continuity, and there are no checks and balances (including feedback from an empowered laity), then incidents of corruption (in this case child abuse) tend to be “managed” without transparency toward that goal of continuity and maintenance of the power structure.

In Iran, another hierarchical power-over theocratic structure continues to corrode what attempts this proud and long-lived country makes to reinstate more progressive governance institutions. Iran is no Yugoslavia or Iraq, countries cobbled together with disparate ethnic enclaves by imperialist Western countries. The United States was involved in setting up what was essentially an attempt at an “enlightened despotism” in the rule of the Shahs in Iran after World War II. The corruption of that regime led to revolution and the replacement of secular despots by a theocratic order that maybe had the approval of the majority of the people initially, but with its power-over model led inexorably to a new corrupt despotism.

I find it of note how Judaism has generally avoided high levels of corruption. With the destruction of the Temple thousands of years ago, its governance model transitioned from the original hierarchical priesthood to a much flatter, more egalitarian model of rabbis and minions exercising a more facilitative power-with model, without a strong central authority akin to the Catholic archdioceses and Papacy. The Protestant Reformation introduced flatter, more egalitarian religious structures within Christianity, which can be argued were precursors of the more egalitarian secular governments in the West that followed.

I am less familiar with the branches of Islam, Hinduism, and other religions centered more in Asia, but note the apparent egalitarian governance of Buddhism, and its continuing role as an ethical conscience (and challenge to corrupt authoritarian regimes) in many parts of Asia.

Even our country’s recent financial meltdown has the hallmarks of power-over corruption. Big financial firms were essentially operating without checks and balances, creating new finance products that were not sufficiently understood by most investors, and lost their sense of balance, being corrupted by the possibility of huge financial returns.

Frequently this sort of power-over situation exists between adults and youth (think kids with their parents and kids in school for two key areas). As a society, and in our laws, we tend to put the adult in the (often difficult) position of being completely responsible for one or more non-adult human beings. The adult is expected (by law and/or custom) to make all the important decisions, and by those same conventions, allowed to do so without the consent or even the consultation of the youth under their charge. For some adults, who are not well versed in developing good relationships with young people under their purview, it can become an exercise in simple enforcement of adult-mandated rules “by any means necessary”, which can involve an inordinate amount of power-over control and coercion.

Just like any other institution where power-over control is exercised, the adults (parents, school staff, etc) in positions of authority over youth put themselves in the position of being vulnerable to the inevitable corruption.

But what forms does the “corruption” take in the adult-youth interaction? I see it when I am out and about, particularly in a store, restaurant or a mall where a certain amount of decorum and restraint is expected, and kids (unlike perhaps in parks) can’t just “run wild”. I see the parents saying “stop that!” to their kids and/or threatening some punishment, the words spoken with an undercurrent of anger which feels like a projection from something repressed. Perhaps the angry parent is venting rage from some previous interaction with another adult (spouse, boss, etc) where the situation or social convention (or personal shyness) prevented them from confronting the real source of their directly.

The convention is that parents can “discipline” their own kids however they see fit, as long it doesn’t cross some abstract line into overt “child abuse”. This amounts to a nearly unmitigated power-over relationship between parent and child, and for the parent who perhaps does not know better, a situation where they can vent or dump stresses from other situations on a young person who really has not good means of redress. I have been guilty of this at times with my own kids along the way. Some of us adults learn to consistently speak respectfully to young people (even when we are very angry) like we would with another adult. Some of us don’t.

But the temptation is always there to dump on your kid... no one is likely to rise to their defense. Where conventions of hierarchical control still hold play, like they mostly do in parenting (and in the surrogate parenting in schools), even we parents who consider ourselves more “enlightened” will have the occasion to vent or dump on our kids inappropriately. Kids generally assume that they are somehow at fault, that their bad behavior justifies all this rage directed upon them. Or else they “suck it up” and instead dump on a younger sibling or years later on their own kids.

What I believe is at play here are remnants of ancient patriarchal wisdom, perpetuated for thousands of year from generation to generation (see my previous posts on “Defining Patriarchy” and “Defining Adultism”). The wisdom of hierarchical power-over control is to do as you will with your “charges” just as long as you ensure they behave appropriately for their “station”. We have done so much as a world to move away from this unequal relationship between people, but obviously we still have a long way to go.

Tags: patriarchy, patriarchal conventions, patriarchal wisdom, conventional parenting wisdom, relationships between adults and children, respect for youth, partnership between youth and adults, partnership rather than patriarchy, adultism, power-with, power-over, power corrupts, institutional corruption

Saying Goodbye to a Decade

Fri, 1 Jan 2010 01:01:49 -0500

Since this is the time of year when we indulge in this kind of stuff I’m going to join the fray. We are now ten years into the 21st Century (and the 3rd Millennium of the “Common Era”). As a person who has always been a big sci-fi fan and focused on the future, my anticipation of the “21st Century” (through the last forty years of the 20th) was always filled with thoughts of great forward-looking human achievements and a human race focused positively on the future and leaving behind much of the crap from the past. I must say I was disappointed as things unfolded in 2000 with Bush’s election, the events of 9/11/2001 soon after that, and much of what’s transpired in reaction to those events since.

So some of you are probably familiar with the exercise of writing things down that you are ready to be done with on a piece of paper, which you call out and then ritually burn. It is certainly one of the provocative rituals that my Unitarian-Universalist congregation practices. So in a personal version of that exercise, here are some things from these last ten (much anticipated, certainly by me) years that I’d like to call out, burn, and be done with...

First of all, I’m ready to be done with framing our country in a perpetual state of war with an elusive enemy that is seemingly undefeatable. I think it is corrosive to our culture to have to keep reiterating (for domestic political purposes if nothing else) that we are at “war” with “jihadists” or “terrorists” with all the martial vigilance this implies.

Maybe as our Republican comrades keep reminding us, it is naïve to frame this as a “law-enforcement action”, but framing it as a “war” (particularly after two horrendous world-wide conflagrations in the 20th Century) I don’t think is the right label either. It smacks too much of viewing the world as basically hostile, with “us and them” in some sort of Armageddon, when over 99 percent of the people you would ever encounter on our planet would wish to be your friends.

The second thing I’m ready to be done with is looking at our social interactions and developmental efforts as a struggle always featuring winners and losers, or “survivors” and those “voted off the island”. I guess it really pushes my buttons... Life is not a freaking contest!

Indulging in this frame leads to many of my fellow Americans, including many members of the media, looking at politics as a spectator sport where one side triumphs and the other is necessarily vanquished. As is exemplified by the healthcare reform debate and its media coverage, the kind of compromise that is the reality (and even the hallmark) of the democratic system is not well served by this obsession with constantly calling out winners and losers. Given that there are the shrill voices of Fox News and others on the right, I am grateful in one sense that there is Keith Olbermann and others like him dishing it back from the left. But I would gladly make a deal that quieted both of these “sides” in favor of more thoughtful discourse.

The third thing, and closely related to the first two I think, is framing the education and development of the next generation in such high-stakes “now or never” or “one size fits all” terms. A six-year-old who is slow to read is not “behind schedule” and should not be viewed as in danger of having a failed life unless they get back on that “schedule”. There is no single developmental “train” that everyone has to leap on as it leaves the station or be left behind. There always have been many paths of learning and will continue to be so, even as we currently obsess on one primary academic instructional path while we mostly ignore all sort of non-instructional learner-driven alternatives or real world mentoring and apprenticeship.

Our education system has gotten so high-stakes in its orientation, that I’m afraid we are producing a generation of stressed out young adults who will need years of one or another sort of “medication”, whether it be real drugs, obsessive consumerism, or couch-potatoing vicarious media spectating to get beyond it. I don’t think this is a recipe for building real agency in a new generation of people.

Fourth and finally (for now at least) and returning to health care, I’m ready to be done with an American health care system that relies on the hit and miss of entrepreneurial capitalism to drive it. I truly believe in the power and efficacy of risk-taking, free enterprise in most areas, but as the saying goes, “Don’t fool around with your health!”

Creating a market environment where individuals and corporations can seek their fortunes providing (or not) medical services on a catch as catch can basis seems to me like the absolute wrong way to go. I believe we can foster a truly vibrant entrepreneurial society with more positive risk-taking by not keeping people in constant stress about their health, even though neutralizing this major “profit center” of health care will hurt some.

Anyway... those are my big four things that I would like to be done with, and I would be interested in hearing what yours are.

Holding Close with Open Arms

Sat, 26 Dec 2009 15:12:57 -0500

It was 26 years ago yesterday that my partner Sally and I had our wedding ceremony, officiated by our friend, fellow feminist activist and mentor Toni Carabillo. Toni read the vows Sally and I had written, but added her own poem at the end, “Holding Close with Open Arms”. At the time, I saw the verse as good advice for our budding partnership. 26 years later I see that same thought more broadly as a positive path forward for our entire human civilization.

The piece’s title, at least in the most concrete physical terms, presents a contradiction. How can you hold someone close without wrapping your arms around them to secure their proximity which is bound to constrain their ability to move? Metaphorically, that contradiction is a challenge to maintain a difficult equilibrium; to have intimacy and share love and support without limiting the liberty of your partner to grow and become that unique person they can continue to become.

Toni was the last perhaps of my “feminist aunts”, the activist women of my mother’s generation who took me under their wing as if I were part of some larger “family”, nurtured my sense of ethics and equality, and taught me how best to work and fight effectively for those principles. She was wizened, small cigar smoking, gravely voiced and a great strategist, thinker and writer, who always mentored and generally looked after me. Because of her style, behind-the-scenes maneuvering, and the smoke-filled rooms (she loved and literally helped create), we often referred to her as the “Godmother of the women’s movement”, not in the sense of fairy godmother, but more in line with what the term “godfather” connotes. And given all that, this woman a quarter century my senior used to tease me by telling me I had “nice legs”, with that ever present twinkle in her eye.

My budding feminism, catalyzed by Toni and my other “feminist aunts”, inspired me to really come to grips with the human story in terms of an in-depth examination of our history. As I have written before, I was profoundly enlightened by reading Riane Eisler’s works, particularly The Chalice and the Blade, laying out the theory (that Eisler put forward in tandem with archeologist Marija Gimbutas) of the origins of the patriarchal “dominator” model of society and the profoundly alternative “partnership” model that continues to challenge it.

Eisler laid out the story of an evolutionary transition from domination to partnership reflected in historical transitions away from slavery and serfdom, a metaphorical holding of people in a tight and more constricting embrace. In essence, human society learning (or relearning if you accept Eisler and Gimbutas’ full premise) to “hold close with open arms”; to move toward greater human freedom (still tenuous today of course with totalitarianism, fundamentalism and perhaps even fetishized consumerism continuing to push back), and allow more the flowering of all of the full range of humanities talents.

Managing and even leveraging the tension between connection, relationship and liberty is at the heart of the pragmatic tools and strategies that make up the “power with” facilitative leadership that Eisler and others promote as an alternative to the hierarchical “command and control” institutional structures of more patriarchal thinking.

In an educational context, “holding close with open arms” can mean encouraging more connecting relationships of appreciation and respect between teachers and students while allowing those students to take greater responsibility for crafting their own educational path and participating in governance of their schools. It encourages increased individual agency within a heightened context of collaboration, leading to a more evolved sense of community.

As I have born witness to before, I have seen this work within the Unitarian-Universalist community of older youth. These young people do not depend on adult leadership to coalesce around because they have the agency and learned skills to anchor their community around their own shared leadership, with loving adults playing an important but secondary and supportive role in the background. UU older youth camps and conferences are generally organized, programmed, and led by the youth themselves, with adults available as mentors, advisors, and consultants as called on. I can state unequivocally that both my son Eric and my daughter Emma have profoundly benefitted developmentally from their participation in this community.

I also see this “holding close with open arms” model being practiced among a cadre of more enlightened managers at my workplace. Individuals with talent and maturity are hired to staff out the various work groups, with the expectation that these individuals will be given the liberty to execute their areas of responsibility effectively without the tight supervision of their managers, but with the encouragement and supporting resources from those same managers. I heard this approach once described by a business process “guru” at a conference as “turning the org chart upside down”.

Toni’s metaphor has even informed and inspired my own approach as a parent, and given me a pragmatic and simply stated principle to guide me in this role. Throughout my kids’ childhood and youth, I have tried to leverage the tension between “holding close” – building strong relationships with my kids and providing them a safe environment – with the “open arms” that encourage them to speak their minds and make their own choices wherever possible. And when conflicts arise and the temptation and path of least resistance is for me as the parent is to “lay down the law” and to say, “Just do it my way. Believe me, I know better than you!” I remember my principle and at least reconsider this approach.

I challenge each one of you reading this piece who wears the parent hat to call out (at least in your own mind) a simple statement or two encapsulating your own approach to effective parenting. If you find this a daunting exercise, your difficulty itself might tell you something about perhaps a need to reassess and rethink the effectiveness of your relationship with the young people that you steward. I have found in every context, an effective approach can usually be simply stated in two or three sentences. Try it... and please let me know how it goes.

FYI... here is the full text of Toni’s poem...

Love that holds close with open arms

Is love large enough

To leave each free

To grow, to learn, to do

As each, uniquely, must

With perfect trust

That makes no rigid rules

That then become the tools

Of mutual constraint

Love that holds close with open arms

Is love that’s there

To make both safe enough to dare

Some new frontier of being

That cherishes each advance

Confident of the chance

Of growing too

Santa Claus, Baby Jesus, and Honoring Children

Fri, 25 Dec 2009 13:12:51 -0500

My mom had a great love for everything that had to do with Christmas, and particularly the figure of Santa Claus and what he symbolized in terms of celebrating and honoring children. She believed in God (unlike me) but also felt that organized religion was one of the great scourges of human history. Given that, she still enjoyed even the Christian celebration of the birth of the baby Jesus, and the bestowing on him of great gifts, seeing it as a metaphor as to how all people should greet and treat our children with an abundance of love.

Though they lived on a new college professor’s modest earnings, my parents made every effort to make Christmas time the most wonderful time of the year for me as a child. They perhaps more than most parents of the 1950s understood the value of play in the development of a young person and researched and bought me wonderful toys - like Tinker Toys, Lincoln Logs, wooden trains, plastic soldiers and dinosaurs - that they wrapped and placed under our Christmas tree, sometimes as much as a week or two before the big day, fueling my anticipation of this yearly event. Add to this great anticipation, we would sometimes do our Christmas celebration back east at my mom’s folks house in Binghamton, a journey usually taken by train in a sleeping compartment, one of my young life’s most memorable adventures.

Though not Christians ourselves, we would invariably be at some sort of gathering of family or friends where Christmas carols would be sung, and my mom, dad, brother Peter and I would heartily sing “Silent Night”, “The Little Drummer Boy”, “O Little Town of Bethlehem”, and other songs celebrating the birth and honoring of the wonderfully special baby Jesus. In my mom’s heart and mind, these songs were metaphorical about how all children should be treated in a world she saw as often very child unfriendly. It was truly “wise men” (and women) who bestowed gifts on children, tokens of their love and esteem for the newest generation of the human race. I learned to share this vision as well.

But the essence of the honoring of children in my mom’s thinking was the idea of Santa Claus. He was the icon, the avatar, of the relationship she felt all parents and other adults should strive for with the children and youth they were blessed to be in relationship with. There was nothing greater and nobler in the human spirit than the bestowing of gifts, blessings and love on the young. Some people might criticize this as “permissive” or “coddling”, but if they told that to my mom’s face, she would be hard pressed to restrain herself from punching them in the nose before dressing them down for their shortsighted ignorance.

She made every effort to imbue in my brother and I that Santa was real, and even as I figured out he was not, at some level I understood his metaphoric “reality”, particularly to my mom and her world view, and basically continued to go along with that “reality” she was creating.

And still as an older youth and a confirmed atheist, I loved the winter holiday season more than any other time of the year with each day building in anticipation to December 25. The snow and cold outside while the lit tree glowed in our living room and others could be seen through the windows of neighbors’ homes. The gathering of family and friends in a context of warmth, gratitude and love. The coming of Christmas Eve, with me so worked up with anticipation that I would barely sleep and by five or six in the morning start pestering my parents to get up so we could open those gifts under the tree. Finally tearing the wrapping paper off my presents and taking possession of the wonderful toys that my parents had researched long and hard to give me the most play value for the money.

Looking back on it now as an adult with a broader awareness of the context of my younger life, I must acknowledge the privilege that my parents did have, despite our limited funds, to muster the discretionary income to buy their kids gifts and take us over the metaphorical “meadow and through the woods”, by rail, to Grandmother’s house. As a youth I was not exposed to the reality of people with much less means than ours, and was never struck by the over-consumption associated with the holiday; realities that I would embrace many years later. Also it was later, that I met my partner Sally and heard of her very different experiences with the Christian holiday, including being harassed for her family not having a Christmas tree.

But also looking back, I feel I have benefited in so many ways from having parents who showered me with love, honored my existence and listened and responded when I told them what I needed. I feel blessed and thus empowered and inspired to bestow blessings on others that I am in relationship with, in my family, my circle of friends, co-workers and others I collaborate with in my circles within the larger community.

Many of my fellow Unitarian-Universalists and I see Jesus more in the context of great teacher, rabbi or guru, rather than a deity or particularly the “son of God”. Given that context for this famous individual, whether real or invented, but in either case strongly metaphorical, did not the gifts and other offerings of love and great hopes have contributed to Jesus’ flowering as a truly unique individual with such gifts to give to others as an adult. Would not a similar approach to every baby born in this world lead to the greatest flowering and evolution of the whole human race?

My mom would certainly think so. Though she ended this incarnation on Earth in 2006, I’m sure she is somewhere grinning as I write this and saying proudly, “That’s my kid!”

I love you mom... you did good by me and gave me the love and liberty to figure out who I could continue to become and pass on your blessing and my dad’s to others.