d. a. levy was born in Cleveland, in 1942. In the five years before his death, he self-published over 55 books on a hand-operated printing press. He gave away copies of his books on street corners. I’ve changed some of the profanity from this 1968 poem, one of the last ones he wrote.

Letter From An Invisible Greek

“because property is not more sacred than a human life.”

There are radicals and there are Radicals

and there are those who disappear in the

middle of the day

I listened to at least a million angry voices

when i was seventeen. went to meetings

walked on picket lines

One day a Chicago pig just barely missed

putting dents in my head

I was falling into the clouds of oblivion

waiting for my brothers to fill the Space

where I had stood

and they were running in the darkness

while I was falling in the light

Yah, there are radicals and there are Radicals

and I’m not going to get my head busted

for a handful of words again

I wear a suit and tie and I am old though

only twenty. You can barely notice me at all,

yet inside me burns an inferno

that screams for actions NOT holy doctrines

of Marx or Lenin

I dont talk so much anymore and I dont let

the pigs get between me and the enemy either

I just go to my classes and study

Someday I’ll probably get a job as an engineer

and when I think of revolution

I just open my eyes and see where all the

money is

I used to wonder about those who disappeared

in broad daylight and now I know

where we go

Last week I threw 75 university ashtrays

into the lake—sailed them high into the

air

like clay pigeons Pow Pow

Sealed ten parking meters with Elmers

glue

and tonight some hippy will call me a

creep

and the r(R)adicals will try to rake

my conscience with words about the war

The system is going to fall I’m sure

next week I’m putting plaster of paris

in the toilets of city hall

I’m just making sure it doesnt fall on me

There must be a million ways to protest a

war economy other than getting your

head

beaten to dust for television audiences

I dont let the pigs get between me and

In my pocket 100 student subscriptions

to Time magazine and 100 unknown

addresses

There must be a million of us who drop

tacks in official parking lots—let them have

their special reserved spaces

[Darn] it—I’ll be the first to agree

we need Law and Order

(but what does that mean?)

I can’t complain, getting clubbed by that

animal in Chicago has done a lot for me

You might call me a hypocrite, but inside

I know who my enemy is and I know who

protects him

I don’t smoke pot or talk against

the system

I’m just helping it along

the mysterious road of suicide

Why would it invest its sons in korea

Vietnam or [line break added]

praise cops that mace children

in the streets if it wanted to survive

Democracy, we all fall down as the

majority votes on information provided by

business men and the warmakers and the

death rattle on the wind is ignored

and the

death rattle on the wind is suppressed

by creating louder noises

It could have been a nice country

 

if the people had only noticed

how many were beaten in the streets

crying for freedom

There are radicals who talk until the sun

rises and some who disappear unknown

My money goes to the movement in an

anonymous check and the school I go to

has thousands of machines waiting to be

wrecked

If I went to the regents with the students

at my back and asked the University

to close its doors for a week

in protest of the war

I’d end up in jail or out on my ass

Why waste a good education getting lost

and assassinated in Proper Channels

Someday I’ll be an engineer and know it

cost the school more than it cost me

rah rah rah for the old school spirit

and all the Puritan myths

Yah Boeing, Yah Dow

Will ROTC teach me how to fire a gun?

Someday I’ll need it

I know who my enemy is

old university, On, with your military

research more money from the federal gov

Youll need it just to replace the janitors

tired of cleaning my [sludge] from your snow

white image

Let the kids from SDS get busted trying

to find their voice.

I’ll wear my suit and tie

My education will cost a few grand

Its already cost you twenty-five.

I may not be honest, but no one will ever

call me a commy. I’m a quiet student.

I sit back and watch and I’ve learned a

lot from the faculty on how to screw

someone from behind.

 

Helen Keller lost her sight and hearing due to an illness when she was 19 months old. With her teacher, Anne Sullivan, Helen learned to spell words with her hands, and to read Braille, and eventually graduated from Radcliffe College. She toured the world, lecturing and raising money to improve conditions for people who were blind. She also spoke in support of labor unions, and worked tirelessly to popularize socialism.

I have kept her gendered language.

"Security is mostly a superstition.

It does not exist in nature,

nor do the children of men as a whole experience it.

Avoidance of danger

is no safer in the long run

than outright exposure.

Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing."

 

U. S. Blues (Hunter/Garcia)

Red and white/blue suede shoes

I'm Uncle Sam /how do you do?

Gimme five/I'm still alive

Ain't no luck/I learned to duck

Check my pulse/it don't change

Stay seventy two/come shine or rain

Wave the flag/pop the bag

Rock the boat/skin the goat

Wave that flag Wave it wide and high

Summertime Done come and gone My oh my

I'm Uncle Sam /that's who I am

Been hidin' out/in a rock and roll band

Shake the hand that shook the hand

Of P.T. Barnum/and Charlie Chan

Shine your shoes/light your fuse

Can you use/them ol' U.S. Blues?

I'll drink your health/share your wealth

Run your life/steal your wife

Wave that flag Wave it wide and high

Summertime Done come and gone My oh my

Back to back/chicken shack

Son of a gun/better change your act

We're all confused/what's to lose?

You can call this song/the United States Blues

Wave that flag Wave it wide and high

Summertime done come and gone

My oh My

Summertime done come and gone

My oh My

 

How many of you have stood in an airport security line? How many of you have had something confiscated by the Transportation Security Administration workers? How many of you feel safer because of these restrictions?

My wife, Becky, and I traveled to the annual General Assembly of the Unitarian Universalist Association of congregations last weekend, in Fort Worth, Texas. It is a week-long convention, so we had a lot of luggage. We stood in line to check that luggage, and finally gave them to the nice woman in charge of feeding bags into the giant x-ray machine. As we walked toward the next security line, with the personal checkpoint, I recalled that I still had my pocket knife. I admit, I uttered a mild curse word when I remembered. I have already lost one knife at an airport—a gift, of a genuine Swiss army knife, bought by my grandmother on her one trip outside the USA—and I was angry that I was about to lose another one. I decided that I would drop the knife into my briefcase, which is chock-full of useful stuff, from coins to candy, from aspirin to nondairy creamer to small toys for children. I hoped that they might miss the relatively tiny knife in all the other stuff. If they found it, I could plead ignorance, and at least I would have tried to keep it. When the time came, I put my briefcase into a plastic bin, and took my shoes off, and added them to the bin, and sent it through their machine. I went through the doorway-shaped machine for scanning human beings and was relieved to discover my briefcase, unmolested, on the other side.

On the trip home from Texas, I made sure to pack my knife in my suitcase, because it is legal to transport it in checked luggage. Sure enough, after going through the machines there, the security officer approached me and asked if he could open my briefcase and confiscate the lighter that was there. I had forgotten about the lighter—they have only recently become illegal to carry onto planes. Being in the chalice-lighting business, I find it convenient to carry some means of creating fire with the other emergency supplies in my briefcase. I allowed the nice man to take my lighter, and I reflected that it was a good thing I hadn’t tried to sneak my knife through a second time.

Then I realized—not only had the crew in Chicago not found my knife, when I went through security a week earlier, they hadn’t found the lighter, either.

Benjamin Franklin is supposed to have said, “people willing to trade their freedom for temporary security deserve neither and will lose both." In this case, at least, Ben is right: I have lost my freedom to carry two simple tools of everyday living and I am not really any safer because of it.

If they missed both my knife and lighter the first time, which they consider to be dangerous, how many other dangerous things are they missing? This government intervention does not make me feel more secure. In fact, I feel less secure, because I no longer have the tools I would need should we crash-land in some remote area. I agree that people should work together, to create a more safe world community, but I believe that the cornerstone of such safety is personal responsibility.

I think the members of the Grateful Dead would agree. They sang a lot about personal responsibility and personal liberty. One of the songs they played most frequently was “Deal,”

which begins:

“Since it cost a lot to win
and even more to lose
You and me bound to spend some time
wondring what to choose.”

I find this a useful reminder that all of our actions have costs associated, and consequences as well, and that we are responsible for the choices we make.

In the song, “Terrapin Station,” Jerry Garcia sang:

The storyteller, or songwriter, or singer, makes no choice: we have to decide if the sailor, or the soldier, is the wiser. And each man is held responsible for his choice. Just as we are, each woman and man, in the real world.

Finally, to make it totally explicit, Jerry sang a song called “Liberty,” which includes the lyric:

“Leave me alone to find my own way home.”

Alas, our government does not leave us alone, but rather creates and enforces a wide range of restrictions meant to keep us more safe on our way home.

This is not necessarily a bad thing. I think it probably stems from our human desire to make the world more safe and secure for our children, and for others who are less fortunate or less able to care for themselves. But I think we tend to go a bit overboard. Like the lyrics from the song that Larry and Elgin played:

“drink your health

The social contract may begin in merriment and mutual concern, and we may agree to share our resources, to work for the common good, but all too often, our governments eventually try to run our lives. And, while they haven’t yet tried to steal my wife, there are many people in our state and federal governments who have acted to prevent two women from getting married—

thus stealing the opportunity to have a wife.

I am not being partisan here; I am not criticizing the current administration any more than I did the previous ones. It is my job, as a religious leader, to prophesy against anyone who fails to act with justice and compassion. I find it all too rare that politicians act to truly help the poor, or to voluntarily diminish their power over our private lives.

I think James A. Baldwin said it best:

“I love America more than any other country in this world,

and, exactly for this reason,

I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.”

When the United States of America began, 229 years ago tomorrow, it had almost unlimited promise. The planet’s first democracy, or democratic republic, more accurately, changed the world. It changed the way we human beings understand ourselves and our possibilities. Of course, we are imperfect, and so are the things we create. Any government is bound to make mistakes. It is our right—and RESPONSIBILITY—to call attention to those mistakes, in order to move toward “a more perfect union.”

My biggest critique today is an echo of a criticism first written by H. L. Mencken:

"The whole aim of practical politics

is to keep the populace alarmed

(and hence clamorous to be led to safety)

by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins,

all of them imaginary."

Well, the current means of alarm is the war on Iraq. The Iraqi store of chemical weapons was imaginary. The Iraqi laboratories developing biological weapons were imaginary. The links to the terrorist attack of September 11^{th, 2001, despite numerous references thereto by Mr. Bush in his speech last Tuesday evening, are imaginary. Terrorism is a noun: it cannot be defeated, it can only serve as an excuse and a distraction. While the populace clamors for security, at all costs, some politicians steal our money and our liberty in approximately equal quantities. To be clear, Saddam Hussein is a very bad man, but he was not a threat to the US. And if we are now leaping to the aid of every country with a cruel government, then we have a long list from which to work.}

Worse, that list would certainly include our own nation. Amnesty International condemns our prison system, and referred to Guantanamo Bay as a “gulag.” Seven million US children live without health insurance; (http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/N29474286.htm)

We’ve seen pictures—but not the worst photos—of the torture that our soldiers committed at Abu Ghraib and in Afghanistan. And we know that our government outsources abuse by “rendering” people to other countries where those people are tortured, sometimes until death.

d. a. levy asked “Why would it invest its sons in Korea or Vietnam?”

I ask: why do we invest our sons and daughters in Iraq? Why do we praise cops that mace children? Why do we get our information from business men and warmakers and why do we not notice how many are beaten in the streets, crying for freedom?

Our efforts in Viet Nam didn’t make the world safe for democracy. It did not secure our borders,

nor preserve our “way of life.” Communism was defeated by the ever-renewing human thirst for freedom.

Our efforts in Iraq will not make the world safe for democracy, either. It will not make our nation “secure.” This is not because we are using the wrong strategies, it is not due to there being too few or too many of our troops involved. It is because security is a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of humanity experience it.

Like the weapons of mass destruction, the very concept of “security” is imaginary.

Even if we close our national borders, even if the combined FBI and CIA monitor everyone who looks different, or acts different, or worships different, there will still be engineers in suits and ties who are secretly radicals, who oppose government warmaking, and who pour plaster of paris into city hall toilets.

However:

I want us to oppose government warmaking and the theft of our civil liberties with less secrecy.

I want us to act as publicly as we are able.

d. a. levy feared getting his head bashed in, which is understandable. But he confessed that he already felt old at twenty. It is tiring to live differently in the external world than we do in the private sanctuaries of our soul. Besides, as I’ve been saying, there is no security—levy may well have banged his head somewhere else. Better to listen to the advice of the Grateful Dead:

We ought not give up the fight, but we should definitely learn to duck. Garcia sang that he’d “been hiding out in a rock n’ roll band” and levy was hiding out as a suit-and-tie-wearing engineer. We must take risks, but we can learn to calculate those risks.

While at the General Assembly, I listened to a lecture by Jim Hightower. He shared some astonishing things, that he found in recent polls and surveys:

67% of our fellow Americans would prefer to have more spending on education and health care than to implement President Bush’s tax cuts

64% are in favor of universal health care--

More than half of us want it, even if we have to pay more taxes to get it.

70% would pay more taxes if the money went to education;

84% would pay more, if the money went specifically to teacher salaries, reducing class size, etc.

67% of us feel strongly that we should do “whatever it takes” to protect the environment

I found these statistics remarkable. My beliefs are actually in the majority on these important issues! Why haven’t I heard this before?

Because that’s what they do. They keep us as ignorant as possible and they flood the airwaves with the spun & slanted information they want us to hear. They want people who oppose their policies of greed and destruction to feel like they are alone. They want us to question our own opinions. They want us to feel hopeless about our causes, to give up even before the fight has begun.

Rabbi Michael Lerner calls this “surplus powerlessness.” While it is true that we do not have a lot of power, we do have some. If they get us to quit without even trying—if we abandon what power we do have—then they win even more easily.

This is why it is important that we protest publicly. Even if others cannot muster their own courage, they witness with their own eyes that things are not exactly as the newspeople report.

I remember, as a boy, watching a movie about Anne Frank. When the Nazis took her and her family away, they offered to let her grandfather stay, if he would behave. He replied if he were to stay, his home would be open to any Jews who asked for help. I remember thinking that the grandfather was stupid to say that. He could have remained free—and he therefore could have helped other Jews—if he would have just lied, and promised to be good. I’m still torn about it, but I now understand why it was also good to make his public statement. His words gave courage to others. They could see that at least one among them was not defeated. He demonstrated that the Nazi propaganda—that Jews were cowards—was a lie. We may, at times, have very little power, but it is usually powerful to speak the truth.

The last verse of the song “U. S. Blues” is:

back to back / chicken shack

Sometimes we may indeed feel confused, because we are on a religious journey without certainty, without security. The only thing we have lost is dogma. As religious liberals, we have no recipe—no guaranteed method of access—for heaven; we aren’t even sure that there is such a place, after our earthly death. Perhaps, this is fortunate: I have heard it said that the greatest evil is the affirmation of an unchangeable good. I don’t entirely agree; I think there may be a time in our lives that we need such a concept. Nevertheless, it is the case that some of the people who are certain—certain that there is a heaven and certain that they know exactly how to get there—are the ones who strap explosives to their body and blow up themselves and others. Certainty does not always lead to goodness.

This is where we do not have the U. S. Blues—we in the United States have the freedom to choose our own path. We have the freedom to be uncertain. It may look to others like we’re wrong, but we are nevertheless free to march to the beat of the drummer we hear.

I’m reminded of the words to another Dead song:

Part of enjoying this life is finding meaning in our existence, and in our actions. We humans actually need a sense of purpose. And, once again, we have the freedom and the responsibility to seek that purpose ourselves. We do not follow blindly the laws and taboos of others. Rather, we test their advice against the truth of our own lived experience, and we accept the burden of finding and creating our own meaning.

Many of us find such meaning by helping other people, by connecting to other nodes in the great web of life. Finding meaning might require risking a little money, or risking some time, or risking discomfort with people who are different from us. It might require the risk of being seen as a loser; as an unsophisticated, insufficiently cynical, person with hope; as someone out of step with the monolithic Fox News organization.

It might include voting, and wearing an “I voted” sticker all day. It might include writing a letter to the editor and signing your real name. It might include protesting against the war, or against the various attacks on our civil liberties. Whatever brings meaning and joy to your life, whatever risks bring the most reward to you, I encourage you to pursue them with as much energy as you can muster, as publicly as you can.

“Since it cost a lot to win,

and even more to lose,

you and me bound to spend some time

wondring what to choose.”

For our own sakes, and for the sake of the world, I hope we choose well.

So may we be.