So I Hear Pope Francis is a Communist. Really?

Today I was poking through the news and spotted this article on the BBC,  Is the Pope a communist?. I about spat out my coffee in laughter.   Of course, it wouldn't be the first time that I'd seen the allegations of being a communist get launched at the Pope.  In fact, that seems to be the primary insult thrown at the man and Ed Stourton, the author of the article, makes sure to peg one of those source of the diatribe as being Rush Limbaugh.  What a surprise.  What I find interesting though is that does seem like a lot of people, based on comments left on news articles, Youtube videos and more, immediately jump to the conclusion that the Pope is, in fact, a communist.  It was just so surprising to see it on the BBC's own website as an article posing that question and maybe all that commentary is precisely why they chose to open up a dialogue about that question.  Stourton does a pretty good and fair assessment of the question, coming to the eventual conclusion that no, the Pope isn't a communist.  However, he's a Roman Catholic.  Is he really going to speak out against the Pope?

As an atheist, I don't see the Pope as being a dirty Marxist either.  I see him pretty much saying things like they are in his recent encyclical.  Do I agree with everything he wrote in it?  For the most part though there are some points that I do disagree with as is to be expected considering I'm an atheist and the Pope is clearly not.  What Pope Francis did, however, to encourage the wrath of the likes of individuals such as Rush Limbaugh, was to dare criticize capitalism, itself.   My goodness, what a grievous sin.

Here's the thing though--even in capitalism's greatest bastion, the United States, we've acknowledged time and time again where capitalism has failed.  We acknowledged it way back when it was decided that the Department of Education should be formed.  We realized that maybe capitalism when applied to roads wasn't such a good idea and centralized the creation and maintenance of those as public services.  In fact, almost every one of the public services that we have today came about simply because capitalism wasn't quite cutting it for those things.   Some of these things are controlled by local city governments, counties, states, and yet others are federalized.  Our history is peppered with times that capitalism didn't work.

Now, I'm sure that some reading at this point might say "OMG She's a communist!" but they'd be about as correct as anyone saying that Pope Francis is because he made observations and criticisms about the plight that many across the globe are in as a consequence of consumerism and, well, capitalism.  The big issue, as I see it, is that we have this extraordinary penchant in this country to view anyone who criticizes--even correctly--capitalism as being a communist.  That kind of sounds like having a belief or behavior involving uncritical zeal or with an obsessive enthusiasm and that's the definition of fanaticism.  (Thanks, Wiki)

Usually when one thinks of fanatics, the first things that may jump to mind are religious fanatics or those crazy Apple consumers who may very well eventually change their names to having an "i" before it to express their adoration of the company's products even more clearly to the general public at large.  (Just kidding, Apple lovers--maybe! ;) )  The less frequently considered form of fanaticism is probably the most common though--political ideology.  Why it's so prevalent isn't that hard to figure.  A country requires some degree of agreement amongst its populace as to what they view as the general "best practices" for the country itself and that can easily lead to fanaticism about that ideology and a lot of allegations that aren't necessarily true when more thoroughly examined.  You can find ideological or political fanatics in any group anywhere.   We're just as guilty of that here in the US as the guy who believes in the unfailing excellence of Communism in China.   It goes both ways and both really are bad.

In my blog post From Russia With Love,  I talked about my experiences when I was given an unexpected and unbeknownst to the Russian government tour of Moscow to see the contrasting lifestyles of the officials and the average Russian, the long toilet paper lines, and more before the fall of the Iron Curtain..  In exchange for her time, I gave the girl, Maria, two rolls of toilet paper and she regarded them like I had just dropped $1000 in her lap.  It was that bad but did people complain?  No.  Maria admitted that she felt uneasy and at risk by stating her complaints about the failings of her government and its favored ideology because she didn't know who was going to hear her say such negative things and turn her in.   While we don't do that here in the US, we still cushion our criticisms of capitalism and other entities that may have earned (or not) our ire for fear of societal condemnation.  We may not get a physical Gulag like Maria but boy, we can get a social gulag for saying that capitalism is failing.  That's bad because we need to be able to objectively examine, converse and feel free to criticize prevailing ideologies that may not be working and worse yet, bringing us into dire straits.  When we don't do that, we are not seeking out ways to correct those problems and make a better system.  Doing such things worked in the past with our roads and more but then again, it's only been the last 167 years of this nation's history that we've had a formidable opponent to our own prevailing ideology.

The greatest irony of them all is that I openly criticize the failings of capitalism and did so all throughout earning my degree at PSU's School of Business Administration.  In fact, when it came time for me to write my final paper ever for the School of Business, I chose not to sing the praises of capitalism in order to please my prof but instead, launched a tirade of well researched condemnations at those in my own field and went so far as to say this:

If capitalism as a system appears to the general public to be drunk on greed, as protesters frequently state, then it is the accounting professionals who act as the enablers by providing the bottle from which capitalism drinks. Professionalism and Accounting in the 21st Century

My professor, though this was his field that he'd been working in for 30+ years, didn't call me a dirty Marxist or a communist because I had the gall to criticize everything.  Instead, he gave me an A+.  Not every dirty capitalist thinks Pope Francis is a communist.  Not even an atheist one.  He's just stating the obvious.  We're screwing up.  

Kids and Identity Crises: One Parent's View

My Godzilla Princess playing with dinosaurs

Just a couple months ago, my 13 year old daughter came home to inform me that one of her best friends, who was 12, had decided that she was a lesbian.  And the boy that lives not too far away that is her same age?  Well, he was pondering whether or not he was gay.   Being someone who has never really made someone's sexuality or gender identity be a gauge of our friendship, I wasn't alarmed by this seeming neighborhood epidemic of gender and sexual preference questioning in a bunch of kids that were just reaching puberty.  Instead, I was humored and half glad to see these kids pondering these questions because I'd come to the conclusion a long time ago that they really should be questioned.  We've finally become a society where a kid who is thinking of whether they like the same sex or not can freely question it without fear of (too much) abuse from their peers.   I think that's awesome.

As a little contrast, I was born just a few days after Woodstock, which my mother always reminded me about because that meant that she couldn't go.  If there was anyone who was gay in my high school back in the 80's,  I sure as heck didn't know at the time.   In fact, the idea of a transgender or gay classmate didn't even cross my mind until I went to a gay nightclub as a straight girl (greatest nightclub ever) in 1995.  That night, I ran into an old classmate and recognized them right away through the make up, the great dress and wig.  This old friend of mine from high school?  "He" (actually she) was gay and transgender and she was absolutely petrified that I recognized her.  I just gave her the biggest hug that I could with tears in my eyes and told her that she looked gorgeous.   It crushed me to see her distress at the thought of somebody from school knowing these things about her.  All I could think about was how long she'd kept it hidden and, in doing so, kept herself at arm's length from all of her peers the entire time she knew them.  That's tragic.   Men's style clothing can be fashionable for women--but god forbid a man wears female style clothing.  That's hypocrisy really when one thinks about it. 

Today's kids are growing up in a different world that accepts diversity in all of its forms, including sexuality and gender--very unlike the world that I grew up in.  While some might scream that we're going to descend into Sodom and Gomorrah, I wholeheartedly disagree.  There have always been gay and transgender people in various societies around the world.  Whether they were apparent or not simply depended on the majority of society's view of them.  Secondly, I think that what many of these kids are actually questioning  is the very stereotypes that make up a small portion of the fabric of our society.  If you're a girl, you can only like boys and not think another girl is attractive or vice versa.  If you're a boy, you can't cry or be emotional because, well, then you're a girl (and that is somehow bad).   We have so many stereotypes about what boys do and what girls do that at the end of the day, it's hard to imagine that anybody really fits into the sum total of those stereotypes.  When are we going to learn as a society that, unlike physiological sex most of the time,  "masculinity" and "femininity" are, well, full of crap? 

For example, my daughter loves her pink bedroom which we have decorated with bunches of flowers, faux feathered birds and more to make it a girly girl paradise.   She also loves video games, was a dinosaur junky, ate up more Godzilla movies as a 4 year old than you could possibly imagine (hearing her sing the Mothra song was really adorable), and, oh...did I mention that she loves bugs?  Yep, she identified every bug that she encountered and can name almost every species of bug (I mean, "insect", as she would correct me) indigenous to the Willamette Valley.  These things aren't anything that I ever pushed her into.  She simply ignored the dolls and grabbed at the dinosaurs early on.   I even bought her plenty of dolls and what did she do?  She took their accoutrements and applied them to animal toys.  Her dollhouse?  Filled with toy snakes, spiders, dragonflies, and other critters like a permanent haunted house sitting in that pretty pink and soft green room of her choosing.  Some days she'd dress in a dino t-shirt.  Other days, it was all about big bows in the hair.  Sometimes, it was dino t-shirts with big bows in her hair (kind of loved that look, truth be told).  I've called her my little "Godzilla Princess" for years and she never quite got it until that day that she brought up her friends and their personal quests to comprehend their identities, both of gender and sexuality. 

Gender, I told her, is not being just one thing or the other.  She is neither stereotypically feminine or riddled with aberrant masculinity.  She's just the girl who loves what she loves, no more and no less, without being judged or confined to any label of what she can enjoy and can't.  In my mind, I explained, gender is a spectrum like so many other things in nature.  Nature loves diversity and if it made all of us be girly girls and macho boys, then we would be going against our very own natures and robbing nature of its diversity.  And the sexual preferences?  They're 12.  Their hormones and emotions are running amok.  As my own beloved put it, he'd get stimulated by a breeze passing by when he was in middle school. 

Are her friends gay?  Who knows--that's certainly not for me to decide as that is the flushing out of a personal truth for themselves about themselves.  It could be that they think someone of the same sex is attractive, they think that must mean that they are gay but instead, they're really just appreciating beauty where it's found.  That kid was me and I'd be lying if I didn't have a few panicked nights that worried that I was gay because I thought some girl was so amazing and pretty.  The ultimate truth for me was that I didn't want to date them.  I wanted to be them. Or it could be that they really are gay.  Or perhaps that even sexuality and attraction are, like gender, yet another spectrum and things that a lot of people ponder at some point in their adolescence.  I've lost count of how many times I've had talks with close friends who admitted about wondering about themselves at some point in their youth.  We cannot be that strange of a bunch  (okay, maybe we can be).  Maybe all of this is not as clear cut as we think but at least kids today feel safe enough to broach these questions unlike my many high school friends who have since come out of the closet after so many years of hiding who they truly are.  Isn't that worth some openly questioning?

Whatever it is that these kids decide for themselves as they grow older, I can only hope that they are given the space and freedom to ponder and explore those questions.  The last thing that I told my daughter is that no matter what it is that her friends decide about themselves in the end, it doesn't matter.  They're still the same people as they were the day before but just that much truer to themselves without fear of not being accepted for who they are by their peers.  If such questioning shakes the pinnacles of our society, then perhaps they needed to be shaken so that we all can have the ability to embrace our unique differences that nature granted us without fear or feeling like we have to conform to outdated and perhaps erroneous labels.