Still Getting Started

Two things that may be of interest (emphasis on "may").

- The name "Lotus" is one I've used since the mid-1970s for newsletters I've edited/published from time to time over the intervening years. The Vietnamese Buddhist Peace Delegation (the pacifist opposition within Vietnam to the bloodshed there during the war years - Thich Nhat Hahn, of who some of you may have heard, was it's foreign representative) used it as a symbol of renewal because, as I understood it, in Vietnamese tradition the lotus is a flower that seems to be found in places where other blossoms can't grow. That symbolism appealed to me, so I adopted it.

Which also means, of course, that it has nothing whatsoever to do with the Lotus Development Corporation and if any of their lawyers want to give me any guff, I can show that I was using the name for a newsletter years before LDC existed, so back off. Harumpf.

- What follows is the introductory column I wrote after I took over editing the newsletter of a local peace group in Bridgewater, MA, 'way back in March, 1988. Change a detail or two and it can, I expect, still serve to provide some insight into your humble serva - whoops, sorry, thought I was Bill O'Reilly for a second - I mean blogger. The column was called, of course, "Lotus."

Since you'll be reading this - or at least I imagine you will - I think I owe you an explanation of who I am and how I came to be doing it, so you can put what you find in future columns into some kind of perspective.

I am, in many ways, a child of "the 60s," having come to political awareness during that brief (and, some would have it, mythical) time marked at one end by the Sgt. Pepper summer and at the other by Altamont - or, politically, by Flower Power and the Days of Rage. Like most (at least male) members of my generation, it was Vietnam that initially drew me beyond vague "concern" into concrete involvement: Even for those of us "safe" with draft deferments, the war was always there, swirling around us like a fog, tugging at us like an undertow, threading in and out of our lives/futures/consciousnesses, ignored only by being repressed. And each "answer" our government offered to the whens, wherefores, and, most importantly, whys of the war seemed to raise at least two new questions.

I had been to that time what I now call a "right wing liberal," that species of American political animal that's clearly liberal on domestic issues and clearly conservative on foreign policy, a type whose philosophy I later summed up as "hooray for justice, beauty, truth, and Kill Commies." But increasing alienation as the war dragged on amid repeated promises that it was, really, already over and mounting evidence of what the governments we supported in South Vietnam were really like eventually prompted me to - very shyly - attend a meeting of a local peace group. That was, if memory serves, in the fall of 1968.

You can relax; it's over now. I've no intention of inflicting my autobiography on you. But knowing the roots of my involvement in the movement may help to explain where I've wound up: I am, as I wrote recently in another context, an "aging hippie artist househusband, the terms' order of presentation depending on my mood of the moment." I am also a democratic socialist-feminist with an anarchist bent, a civil liberties absolutist, an environmental advocate who generally agrees with the ecological basis (but despairs at the politics) of bioregionalism, and, at the heart of it all, by both intellectual conviction and moral compulsion, a radical pacifist.

In doing this column I'll be guided by four editorial principles:

1) "To thine own self be true." (Shakespeare)

2) "The US isn't the worst - but it is the biggest." (Joan Baez)

3) "Sometimes a bit of humor contains more inner truth than the most serious seriousness." (Aron Nimzovich)

4) "No one but no one, no matter their ideology, political perspective, or status as 'left' or 'right,' 'revolutionary' or 'counter-revolutionary' can be by that reason exempt from either criticism or praise." (me)

Finally, remember one thing: You may find the views expressed here to be on various topics hopelessly naive, outrageously radical, or (gasp!) boringly moderate - but the responsibility for them is mine and mine alone; I am not speaking for BAND. So if anything does offend (or excite) you, please don't yell on other BAND members, withdraw support, or whatever. I'm the one you're exercised about.

Oh, yeah. How I came to be doing this. I offered.

So what details would I change? Well, while I still sometimes like to fantasize that I'm the Great Undiscovered Artist of Our Time, I've moved too far in other directions to continue to call myself one, and I'd now replace "househusband" with "educator." As for the aging hippie part... well, yeah, that's still true.

Update: Minor edit of grammatical error.