A new link on the main page — much recommended: Jeff Carriera's Evolutionary Philosophy blog. Jeff's the Education Director at EnlightenNext who has been taking these advanced insights to whatever forum will listen. He has written about the vital role of Emerson and the Transcendentalist movement in anticipating an evolutionary spirituality and philosophy.

BTW, look for an announcement on the main page about an intensive on Evolutionary Spirituality (in content a lot like the Orlando course on the main page) to be scheduled this Winter at Unity Temple in Oak Park, Illinois. Last weekend I was there to celebrate the building's 100th birthday with the congregation of Unity Temple Unitarian Universalist Congregation, where I served from 1993 until 2002 as minister.

Speaking of Orlando. Whilst there, my little vote helped replace a far-right-wing congressman with Alan Grayson. So imagine my delight in his gutsy, clarion call for progress on real healthcare reform, from his Congressional forum. Every Republican demand for an apology has been the occasion for yet another, even better speech.

This is part of what he said:

For the last six months, Democrats have been dwelling, debating, and hoping for Republican Olympia Snowe to vote for health care reform.
Why?
Olympia Snowe was not elected President last year. Olympia Snowe has no veto power in the Senate. Olympia Snowe represents a state with one half of
one percent of America's population.
Americans should not have to wait any longer.
Democrats are for health care reform. Republicans are against health care reform and quite simply, Barack Obama.
If Barack Obama were somehow able to cure hunger in the world, the Republicans would blame him for overpopulation.
If Barack Obama could somehow bring about world peace, they'd blame him for destroying the defense industry.
In fact, if Barack Obama has a BLT sandwich tomorrow for lunch, they will try to ban bacon.
America doesn't care if it gets 51 votes in the Senate or 60 votes in the Senate or 83 votes in the Senate.
Every year, over 44,000 Americans die because they don't have health care.
What are we waiting for?

It's so good to be home again. It really feels like a sacred place. Note the hammock, for which it's getting a bit too nippy. I'll post more photos as the wild colors come to these hills.

Up late. MSNBC is running NBC’s original coverage of September 11, 2001. I’ve seen this so many times already — per the three networks, per BBC News, per CNN. And I watch, astonished all over again. The story:

Urgent warnings come to the government, right down to Islamicist terrorists intending to use commercial airliners to inflict their terror. But that's not in the report. It’s as if nobody knows anything about it. It will be a long time before anybody mentions this. Fast forward.

One bright Boston morning an airliner takes off and is hijacked on its way to LA but nobody knows. Then three more. Does anybody know about this? Here's what we did see:

Something has hit the WTC North Tower in Manhattan. Stunned horror. What could have happened? Explosion? Something about a small airplane? Katie Couric and Andrea Mitchell and Jim Nikochevski check their sources as best they can, call government agencies, as more NBC correspondents turn up to join them. Nobody knows. They talk with eyewitnesses. One is sure she saw a pretty big plane fly into the building. We learn that the president has the authority to put Air Force jets in the air but they stay on the ground. Three more terrorist-controlled airliners are in the sky and nobody knows it. These now hurl toward their targets.

Somebody’s saying that American Airlines flight 11, from Boston to LA, had been diverted to one of the New York airports and then mysteriously rammed the WTC. Was it an accident? After all, says one of the correspondents, there’s lots of air traffic around NYC.

Shock. Something else has happened. An explosion? In the same tower, or the other one? By now enough cameras are trained on the towers to see that something has happened to the second tower, but what? An eyewitness saw a big airliner fly right over head and into the South Tower. This looks bad. The government is saying it’s got to be an act of terror. The president is in Sarasota to talk with school children. Oh, he’s said something, stating the obvious, no mention of what else should have been obvious because nobody seems to know four airliners have been hijacked. He flies off somewhere.

Somebody on the ground tells NBC he saw some giant wheels fall from the sky and smash a car or something.

A report from Washington. Big noise at the Pentagon. What in hell? Correspondent describes odor in the air.

I didn’t stay up any later. We know the story, after all. I would have learned that an airliner crashes in the Pennsylvania countryside. They’ll wonder if the incidents are related.

The terrorists turn out to be from Afghanistan and Egypt, some outfit called al-Qaeda. So there’s an invasion of Iraq. We’re told that nobody could have expected such an attack. Ever since we’ve been told that the government has protected us.

Protected us? Didn’t do.

In October, my brother and sister and I visit a badly hurt friend, our beloved New York City. We park in midtown and walk around lower Manhattan. They're still pouring water onto the ruins but most of the horrific stench is gone now. Security is high, and you cannot get into public buildings, like the wonderful Woolworth Building. The Winter Garden is a heartbreaking shambles. (They’re still dying from the poison dust.) Photos of the dead and missing cover, it seems, every surface. The president’s popularity is at its zenith for protecting us.

By the afternoon that day, this was the image I photographed on the tellie screen.

I've been watching the funeral mass from Mission Church, more formally The Basilica of Our Lady of Perpetual Help, on Mission Hill, a grubby neighborhood in Boston where I once lived. This was Senator Kennedy's choice, and very intentionally so. It's not a diocesan parish, but a mission church of the Redemptorist order serving this neighborhood on the edge of Roxbury. On the other side of the hill is Brookline. We lived here because, frankly, it was about the only place we could afford. Roxbury itself is heavily African American; Mission Hill largely Hispanic, but this is really about class, not race.

Just down Tremont Street and around the corner on Huntington or Brookline avenue is Harvard Medical School, Brigham & Women's Hospital (founded by William Ellery Channing's church), Beth Israel-Deaconess Hospital, and, importantly, Children's Hospital. When his son Teddy had a leg amputated because of cancer, the Senator spent a lot of time at Children's, and would come to Mission Church to pray.

Officiating at the service were priests from Mission Church and from the Kennedy family's parish in Centerville on Cape Cod. And so Boston's acutely benighted and bigoted archbishop had the smallest of roles in the service, just at the end, praying over the casket and censing it. The scripture reading came from Matthew — I was hungry and you fed me, I was naked and you clothed me; because you did it for the least of these my brethren, you did it for me. The remembrances and reflections were ennobling, especially that of his son Teddy, now a lawyer in New Haven, and his son Patrick, now a member of Congress from Rhode Island. "The dream shall never die!" — his causes were lifted up in a way that reminds me of the next-to-last words from the mouth of the dying Senator Sumner: "My bill — don't let my bill die!" It was a civil rights bill to ensure the rights of free black people in the United States, something he fought for from 1852 until his death. I guess we know what we have to do.

Dick Hill, the exceptional music director at the UU Unity Church in North Easton, had told me about the ecstasy of playing the great organ at Mission Church, and its magnificent resonance in that church. It lived up to Dick's description.

Next, he joins Jack and Bobby at Arlington National Cemetery.

This morning I woke to the news: Senator Kennedy had died during the night. Why was I stunned? It was my hope that somehow, with the best of medical care and with his fighting spirit, he'd be back in the Senate. The brain tumor took him, as it has taken virtually everyone with this particularly merciless cancer.

He made me proud of Massachusetts and grateful to be here. A few years ago, as the Defense of Marriage Act was making its way to President Clinton's desk (where Clinton signed it), I heard the Senator speak at a Boston hotel to a gathering of gay community activists, calling the bill the "Defense of Bigotry Act."

I remember farther back: following the election of Ronald Reagan, Reagan's popularity had a silencing effect on Democrats. But not Senator Kennedy. For awhile he was the only critical voice I remember hearing. The Contra obscenity, the anti-government frenzy, the burgeoning military . . . Kennedy took it on, all of it.

Jimmy Carter is a spectacular former president, but he was a bumbling president. I was cheering for Kennedy's gutsy challenge for the nomination four years later.

I don't know what it's like to have a brother die in a war, then another be elected President and then be assassinated, then another, on the verge of the nomination for President, assassinated too. 1969 wasn't his best year, and the incident at Chappaquiddick kept him from being President. But it also turned him around. He rose from those ashes.

Edward Moore Kennedy joins Charles Sumner, my two greatest heroes in the United States Senate. Sumner represented Massachusetts from 1852 until his death in 1874. Kennedy served from 1962 until his death in 2009. Sumner was a leading figure in the new, radical Republican Party, but it wasn't very many years until he was pretty much alone, his party having already turned to the right, and to big money. Kennedy was the conscience of the Democratic Party. He was among only 23 senators to vote against authorizing the invasion of Iraq. Obama, not yet in the Senate, early and strongly spoke against it; Kennedy's early and strong support for Obama helped propel him toward the Democratic nomination.

The entire Massachusetts Congressional delegation is progressive Democrats. I'll hope the Legislature changes the law so Governor Deval Patrick can appoint a temporary replacement until a special election can be held. We've got to be fully represented — and there will need to be sixty Democrats in the Senate — when that fateful vote on healthcare reform comes. It's the least we can do to honor Senator Kennedy.

Today I wrote to my Senators Kerry and Kennedy, and to Representative Olver, this:

My dear Senator Kerry:

I have just read a headline reading “Wall Street Celebrates Apparent Death of Public Health Option: Health Insurance Companies' Stocks Spike.”

And I am hearing of deals and agreements made — by an elite group of three Democrats and three Republicans (which makes no sense at all); by the White House with the pharma industry.

I am deeply grateful for your consistent work toward real reform including a public option, despite the pressure from the insurance and allied industries is intense.

There being tens of millions of us citizens who are uninsured or underinsured — I would like to underline the fact that it’s precisely the interests of the millions of us, and not the benefit of those industries, that must be the foremost concern.

My work took me for the past year to Florida. When I arrived in Florida last August, I was informed by insurers — Florida Blue Cross among them — that I don’t qualify for any of their plans. I was asked about pre-existing conditions and medications, and then excluded. That is what the for-profit industry does when it’s making the rules. Even had I been able to get a policy, that industry would have charged me an exhorbitant premium because I am diabetic. The Insurance Commissioner’s office said, lamely, “There’s nothing much you can do, sir.”

During this past year in Florida I was covered, though, only because my denomination, the Unitarian Universalist Association, headquartered in Boston, has an (expensive) national plan. But I now know firsthand what happens routinely to others. And right now, the numbers of unemployed are swelling. What are they supposed to do?

And now, out of work, I ’ve returned to Massachusetts, where I am covered by our single-payer system called “Commonwealth Care.” Previously, with an income, I chose from commercial options under “Commonwealth Choice,” good and affordable policies negotiated and regulated by the state.

Surely the country as a whole, with more thoroughgoing reform, can do at least as well.

But it looks like our party may have failed us, even betrayed us.
It may be that the pitiful “reform” being proposed is just a windfall for the insurance industry, which has always served the profit motive and, when free to do so, screwed the public. The moral argument I want to make is that it’s just immoral that the healthcare that’s available to you should depend on how much money you’ve got or for whom you work. It’s just wrong.

I could go on. Instead I ’ll simply say that if there’s no genuine public option, it’s no reform, and I will oppose it. And if that is what the Democratic party has done for us, it can go to hell. I hope that if what's offered is as lame as we're now being told, that you'll vote No, and continue to call for real reform.

To Senator Baucus, who's chairing that dreadful little committee of three and three, I wrote a similar but somewhat less grateful letter. Meanwhile, I used http://www.congress.org/congressorg/ to get the text of the letter to them pronto via web form. It's easy. if you use www.congress, note that checking the appropriate subject matter takes a bit of patience because the site is skewered toward the anti-reform point of view.