No Looting in Japan

by Amy Chavez
Huffinton Post - World


People around the world have marveled at the lack of mass-looting in Japan among the survivors of the recent earthquake and tsunami. Many people are still asking: Why was there no mass-looting?

People are undoubtedly comparing the incident in Japan with other natural disasters in the world when people under similar circumstances did loot. And they didn't just loot food or necessities, but big screen TVs and other "must have" household appliances.

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One common experience among foreigners coming to work in Japan for a year or more is that when they leave Japan, they leave a more polite person. As a foreigner, you learn that certain things that may be accepted back home are just not tolerated here. Petty crime (Who stole my plastic gnome lawn ornament?!), verbal assaults on store clerks, and anger in the form furrowed brows, pursed lips and the occasional disgruntled snort, are not accepted here. So while in my society, an angry, gnome-stealing person may be normal, in Japan such people are thought to be selfish and dishonest. And, by God, you don't just take things because they're not chained down! Once you know the rules of a society, however, it's surprisingly easy to adjust your own behavior to fit into that society.

Two adjectives that immediately come to mind when describing the Japanese: polite and harmonious. Which makes me wonder, if you are not polite or harmonious, what are you?

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An honest society is not unique to the Japanese. Ask your own parents or grandparents and they will surely tell you how it used to be, when there was more respect, less crime and no road rage. But whereas we have slowly lost our integrity, the Japanese have not lost theirs.

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A Prayer for Japan

by Tyler Wigg-Stevenson

Tyler Wigg-Stevenson (@TylerWS) is the founding director of the Two Futures Project (@2FP) — connect to 2FP via their website (http://twofuturesproject.org) or Facebook page (http://facebook.com/twofuturesproject)

It is too soon for meaning-making with the ongoing crisis in Japan. There will be time later to determine its ramifications for the world economy, for the future of the much-vaunted “nuclear renaissance.” But now is not that time. The living are still finding their dead, or seeking and not finding. And workers brave an unimaginably hostile environment as they fight to keep nuclear reactors cool, battling the twin threats of explosion and radioactivity. Several have been hospitalized with radiation poisoning; we don’t yet know how many more will fall in the containment effort.

As every good pastor knows, tragedy’s immediate aftermath does not require sensible words and coherent explanations nearly so much as it requires simple presence, compassion and attention. For those whose hearts are rent by the unfolding revelations of loss in Japan, and torn further by our impotence to act, we have a conjoined responsibility.

First, we should respond when and as we are able with concrete gifts to alleviate suffering.GOOD Magazine has a great, constantly updating list on concrete ways that you can help.

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So it seems that one of the purposes of prayer, in such conditions, is its presence to individual lives. The New York Times reported on Syunsuke Doi, 22, who was at work when the tsunami hit his town; after a period of vain hope, he recovered from the morgue the bodies of his wife and childhood sweetheart, Sayaka, and their 2-year-old daughter and 6-month-old son, who were caught in their car while trying to escape. I had been reading the news with genuine concern and sorrow. But in reading of Syunsuke and his lost family, I leaned back in my airplane seat and had to fight to keep composure.

I write this while returning from a weekend at a reunion for my small, geographically disparate family. It was a rare opportunity to visit with my sisters and their husbands; to play with and be an uncle to their young sons, Selim and Joshua. And in watching their families’ daily routines, their mutual love and care, I can hardly take in the investment of care that goes into the raising of a single life — the stringing together of innumerable moments that comprise each person’s being brought into the world.

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In all that is to come, it seems to me that our task — in addition to caring for concrete needs of food, water and shelter — is to maintain, in prayer, the possibility of grief. Statistics homogenize individuals into a lump sum, hiding them behind stacks of zeros. Our job is to unearth, in prayer, the people who make up such mind-boggling numbers. They are all simply one plus one plus one. Only in this will we be able to maintain the central humanity of all tragedy, without which we are lost.

This blog post originally ran at Relevant Magazine

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Love Wins - Summarized in 8 Short Paragraphs

by Stephen McCaskell

“First, there is exclusivity.

Jesus is the only way. Everybody who doesn’t believe in him and follow him in the precise way that is defined by the group doing the defining isn’t saved, redeemed, going to heaven, and so on. There is that kind of exclusion. You’re either in, or you’re going to hell. Two groups.

Then there is inclusivity

The kind that is open to all religions, the kind that trusts that good people will get in, that there is only one mountain, but it has many paths. This inclusivity assumes that as long as your heart is fine or your actions measure up, you’ll be okay.

And then there is an exclusivity on the other side of inclusivity. This kind insists that Jesus is the way, but holds tightly to the assumption that the all-embracing, saving love of this particular Jesus the Christ will of course include all sorts of unexpected people from across the cultural spectrum.

As soon as the door is opened to Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and Baptists from Cleveland, many Christians become very uneasy, saying that then Jesus doesn’t matter anymore, the cross is irrelevant, it doesn’t matter what you believe, and so forth.

Not true.

Absolutely, unequivocally, unalterably not true.

What Jesus does is declare that he,

and he alone,

is saving everybody.

And then he leaves the door way, way open. Creating all sorts of possibilities. He is as narrow as himself and as wide as the universe.

He is as exclusive as himself and as inclusive as containing every single particle of creation.”

*Taken from Love Wins, a book by Rob Bell. Pages 154-155.

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P!nk - Fuckin' Perfect

I'm on a Pink kick thanks to Jeremy Myers. If "Raise Your Glass" doesn't speak to the importance of embracing our inner dirty little freaks then this sure does. Wow!

P!nk - Raise Your Glass

There's life in struggling--like the struggle of a baby being born--we have to celebrate the struggles. We have to celebrate that we are ALL dirty little freaks--and that's a good thing.