Forget just "Ban the Box", as leaders of faith, we must shout "Ban the Cup!"

Ban The Cup

Urine screenings, "are you a felon" questions of applications and in interviews, and other behaviors that are antithetical to Jesus message of compassion, human decency and hope.

Can we as leaders of faith remain silent?  No more!

Folks, I/we (the Anabaptist community) have stayed silent long enough.  Your pain is obvious, your sins horrific, and your patience with warmongers, greedy people and those who think they have the right to control others' choices is killing you, killing our communities, killing your own children and frankly, killing the planet.

ENOUGH.

Thanks to the failed and cruel and for-profit "war on drugs", a new and horrific problem has emerged.  Like a chemical warfare agent developed especially to harm our culture, economic welfare and future, these new substances make marijuana, cocaine, heroin and methamphetamine look like something you should hand out at Halloween.

DESIGNER DRUGS

The brilliant author and philosopher and lifelong addict William S. Burroughs posited a future when people would develop intoxicating substances that would peel the skin from their bones.

He foresaw the truth, as crack cocaine and now synthetics cause mothers to literally put their baby into a car seat on a hot day, and get out, close the door and walk away - never to return.

That baby slowly heating up in that car is the face of American addiction, 2019.

THANKS

We Anabaptist think perhaps many of you preaching and teaching from pulpits are to blame. 

Let me tell you about JESUS

Why?  Because Paulinian (the gospels of Paul) morality, which stands in opposition to the words and life of Jesus Christ, is the only possible excuse for damning our own kids to hell (tough love/zero tolerance) while greedily encouraging donations from monsters who build bombs and bullets for a living.

FOR SHAME.

Well, as my own personal family and faith heritage is now enduring, mistakes do happen.

Cathedral Church and School, West Lafayette, Indiana

We are Roman Catholic - here is a picture of the Cathedral and school where my Grandfather was a janitor.

We Catholics, like you, are horrified by abuse revelations in recent years.

But as Catholic leader, Pope Francis has said, "In a few hundred years if we do rightly, this scandal shall fade."

I think it is much more likely history will forgive a few thousand pedophile priests and a cabal of gay perversion in the RC church than the potential judgement of history on the post WWII regime of war and terror that is modern America.

Do you think the human race will ever forgive us our coups and assassinations, our enforcement at the point of force the "right" of soulless, moralless corporations to bribe and break the backs of any nation so bold as to refuse to sell their precious resources and farm land for paper?

You as an America may actually think we are a good nation...  but you ignore confirmed fact, not opinion, fact.   

We are the bully in the bar, we are a nation that uses force to serve only wealthy interests here and abroad.

Add to that the war on people that is our so-called "War on Drugs."  We incarcerate right now, a greater percentage of our population than any regime, any dictatorship, any nation in the history of this planet.

Freedom to share?  That is laughable!

If you honestly believe being mean to human beings will cure a disease (addiction) that has been part of the human experience for the entire sweep of recorded history, then grab a baseball bat and come on over.

At least if you kill us, you will be honest for once - and it is truly horrific to die (as eleven friends of mine have in the last five years) under a bridge when the temperature is -10 in Northeast Indiana.

You are monsters - who scoop out your own eyes to ignore the truth and the evil you do, often to your own family.

Here's a nugget of real information:  There was cocaine in most Egyptian royal mummies.  Think about that.

A disease.

Now that you're sick I can really ruin your life!   Stop being sick!!

Addiction is a human condition, and once triggered, it instantly becomes a medical one.  

Addiction follows the same progression as most other potentially fatal chronic illnesses.

Addiction is a genetic predisposition no different than those who acquire black lung or dying from lung cancer if you consume tobacco.  It is common, it is statistically significant, and prohibition has never, throughout human history, resulted in anything but lawlessness, violence and the rapid growth of a condition that thrives in darkness and feeds on shame.

Zero-Tolerance Memorial Garden

Hatred and shame are a feast for the inner turmoil and the beast that is addiction.  I know - I have and still endure a 28 year struggle against crack cocaine.

My name is John Edward Charles Hubertz, and I am a scholar, an activist, an educator, a grandparent, a good citizen, a patriot...  and I started using crack cocaine in Mobile Alabama almost 30 years ago.  

I am an addict - an incurable condition based on current science.  Instead of believing it is a "choice", why don't you read some real science from Europe - they are making real progress.

It isn't "enabling", it is accepting the humanity of the afflicted.

Regarding myself, my wife died 4 years ago suddenly.  Problem.

Only constant support and vigilance regarding my cash resources since then keeps me sober.  There is no cure - but I am at this moment in remission, and that is the best I can ever hope for.




The "war on drugs" was generated by a nation and a culture and especially by monied interests to replace the gross injustice we no longer could perpetrate on people of color.

The timing is too fortuitous, the result (unrepentant hatred, human misery and prejudice to the point of death) is identical, and it gives the wealthy powers the tool they most love, an issue to distract from their wealth, their wars, their laws and income-generating prisons and to add a point to the spear, their endless cruelty in the name of "company policy" and "liability reduction" or "insurance regulations".

What a load of crap.

 

Add caption

WHY ARE WE ALONE?

I don't see you shouting from pulpits to reject them from table and home, and I sure as hell don't see you speaking out as Wal-Mart piss tests young men and women, fires them, and drives them into the arms of human predators selling poisons as alternatives to pot.

Several hundred millions of dollars were wasted by so-called "Christian Conservative" politicians trying to bribe or buy one scientifically accepted study that marijuana is harmful.

We should note that we are neither pro nor anti drugs, but see them as a fact of existence no different from Ginger Kids and people who have bad breath and icky teeth.  

So, here is a new perspective for your life, your ministry, your hiring and your pulpits:  "If the job is simple and can be done by someone who is impaired, find an ADDICT to do it."

Insurance regulations be damned.  These are human beings, and if we go in with our faith held as a banner and our heads held high, I defy anyone to sue us for the fact Tom gets high on pot at lunch or Sue takes a few painkillers to get through her day.  These corporate excuses are KILLING people - and here is the real issue right now:

Spice (K2) a new potent meth variant molecule called Molly B and especially, fentanyl (one grain of sand can kill 100 users) are horrific, deliberate molecular variants that create a hellish cycle of addiction, withdrawal, madness, violence and death.

Seven instances in the last six years of K2/Spice users going into a frenzy while using and attacking, disabling and eating the living flesh of the faces of their friend or some innocent stranger.

Eating the living flesh.  How's that for a reaction to "tough love" there Doctor Phil?

Molly B, while not yet fully understood, has withdrawal that may simply mean death or madness.  Reports include skin just peeling from your body (death) and hysterical psychosis with paranoia that would make death a sweet release.

There you go, that's your war on drugs.  Now people can piss in your cups with no problem, as long as they die of the effort to do so.

WELL, YOU GET WHAT YOU GET WHEN YOU HARM PEOPLE FOR PROFIT OR OUT OF ARROGANT PRIDE. DISAGREE?

If you do not disagree, gather up your true faithful, the compassionate, the decent among us who have known America has been seriously off the rails since WWII. And DO SOMETHING. Something like this:

Fort Wayne Interfaith Initiative on Designer Drugs

Life is not a popularity contest, and neither is faith. Set an example in Jesus' name, or you and your communities will (and already are) pay a very dear price for our deliberate ignorance and neglect of the meaning and message that is Jesus Christ of Nazareth.

John Edward Hubertz at Fort Wayne, Indiana  

Carl Zehr Professor of Moral Economics and Theology, 

New Hope Peace Academy (worldwide)

Economic Disparity and Hygiene difference in USA nearly derails peace talks with North Korea

Dateline:  Palisade Drive, Fort Wayne, Indiana

January 17, 2019

Approximate text of 911 call - Fort Wayne City dispatch center:

"Hello - I am having great trouble."  "My name is Cindy...."  "My landlord crazy, he keeps telling me "No Coat, No Stay!!!".  

"I already pay $20 for room two nights!"   "He take $60 for bed - no bed yet!!"  

"Come help!"  "Please come help!"

Although they were buried in work, preparing for a potentially man-killing winter storm, the good protectors of this conservative Indiana town heard her cry in broken English and responded.

As is typical in Fort Wayne, the first police cars pulled up at 2816 Palisade Drive less than five minutes later.  A shivering, mature woman - so tiny next to the black-clad and bulletproof shielded officers of the Fort Wayne Police Department jumped shivering from her tiny Honda automobile, her face strained with worry and fear.

"That man crazy!"   "He take my money, but he say "no coat, no boots, no stay!"  

"Please please please, help me."

Context:  

On a prosperous but humble (by United States standards) street on the Southside of a community in the central United States (State of Indiana), a drama of great importance, a drama of culture, language - a drama of conflict, fear and compromise, had been unfolding for 24 hours.

At that address, admittedly by standards of any other country in the world - a mansion, at that Palisade Drive address of a small city (250,000 people) called "Fort Wayne, Indiana..."

In that small, inconsequential town, something of importance to the entire world was taking place.

Peace, peace was being waged that icy night:

Like a tiny but critical cog in a great wheel, these humble, decent midwestern people toiled in their fields and homes, factories, restaurants and of course, farms.

Ah, the farms of Northeast Indiana.

The land so rich, the water so plentiful both in mild summers and under sometimes two feet of heavy ice was that night as it has for untold millenia crisscrossing that town, that good rich flat land, and you could almost sense it under the rapidly falling snow, falling, melting then flowing in those wide, brown lazy rivers.

Three rivers.  Fort Wayne, an Indian village originally, named after a military strategic and well-known madman, the General "Mad" Anthony Wayne.

Allen County, Milan Township - like currents of health and rich promise, two rivers become one and they spill both East and West toward the destination all water eventually finds - the sea.

East to the great lake Erie, West then South to the mighty Ohio, the Mississippi, and finally rolling thick with Brown with not filth or pollutant, but a heavy milk-cream of good water and strong agriculture traditions that flowed past rich and poor, farm and city alike.

In a home built by his father, a boy who walked first down that street when it was new, a boy who like his father, worked hard, studied hard, prayed each day - he was troubled you see.

Peace - peace had been lost in his family's beautiful home.

My name is John Edward Charles Hubertz, and my family has toiled in this soil, raised proud sons and strong daughters, for over 230 years.

We are a family of teachers, a family of enormous and diverse faith.  Our family includes many faiths, many cultures, and many many stories from long ago.

I am neither young nor anything but what typically grows in this rich soil - like many of us here, I am hugely fat, powerfully built.  A man-mountain, fat even by standards of the United States (the fattest country on earth).

I was widowed four years before, but by faith and family tradition, I had not suffered this loss alone.

You see, in addition to hundreds of years of Catholic faith and tradition, my people on one side of our small but hard-working family, my people never live alone.  We are Anabaptist as well as Roman Catholic.  We are never alone.

We are Anabaptist, and we don't really understand the concept of "being alone".  Within our culture, that is simply not encouraged nor allowed.

As the police comforted the sobbing woman, alternately crying and pointing, shivering in her thin and humble coat as the cold prairie wind blew down that street, they gathered and tried to hear her story - the story of a stranger lost, confused, tired and frustrated to the point of literal madness.

She had told the fat man, the landlord-man of this street and this place, her name was "Cindy".  When pressed, she insisted that in her home country "China", that is her name.

At that moment, John Hubertz became concerned.  

Regardless of truth or fiction, without asking for identification, without challenging the obvious lie of both her arrival, her name and indeed, her national identity, hundreds of years of Indiana tradition reached toward this stranger at the gates of the city and extended a hand of welcome.

A hand of welcome, to a stranger, poorly clothed, confused, speaking a strange tongue and hardly able to assemble a coherent English sentence.

.

Externally, it might have looked like this old fat man was alone.  But then as now, today, yesterday - tomorrow, he was not.  

faith and tradition

Standing within and beside him, evident within the strength of his shoulders, 

Major Democratic and Faith Leaders from Indiana switch sides - Build that Wall!

We have changed our minds.  Based on projects in Canada, Switzerland, Venezuela and elsewhere, we have a wall proposal we can get behind 100%.  

No more infighting, no more shutdown - let the bulldozers roll.  We stand with Donald Trump...  we need a substantial, tangible and yes, "beautiful" wall on our Southern border, indeed on all our borders.  It will be a monumental project, it will enrich and educate and set an example for the world.

But, you must do it this way, or we will fight you tooth and nail until the name Donald Trump is a distant memory.  

President Trump, here is your wall:

A perfect border is not a wall at all, but a welcoming place - it is parklike, serene, well-designed and built to accomodate both man and beast.

It isn't a wall at all, but a Palisade.   

DEFINITION of PALISADE

Thus, a palisade.  Not so much a physical barrier (although that infrastructure exists, at the push of a button), but a long, nearly endless barrier that defines the border of our country, and is well-stocked with the smartest and most unobtrusive technology science can provide.

You see, if we want to avoid human trafficking, drug trafficking and terrorist, we should count spiders.

One of the most environmentally diverse, sensitive and spectacular areas in the United States and deep into Mexico is the border.  Defined by the winding, often invisible thread of water that is the Rio Grande river, like all wet environments in the desert, life flourishes.

Trade flourishes

and People need to both flourish and travel freely in commerce, peace and for family and personal reasons.

So - we build Palisades.  Beautiful fences as President Trump says, but fences with frequent and wide and natural openings, fences that block neither beast nor bird nor butterfly (the Mexican border is critical for migration of Monarch butterflies and the incredible Southern Tarantula (both species in severe decline).

At these openings, at these natural and human bridges across this palisade, there will be young people and professors....

Watching....

Listening.....

Counting spiders..... and birds......  and antelope......  and butterflies.

And if someone is so desperate, so criminal, so foolish or so uninformed as to try to sneak in?  That is laughable - it is absurd!!

Why?  If I am sitting there on a Harvard University grant in a research station, well concealed, perhaps even underground, watching instruments and COUNTING SPIDERS.

I am DAMN SURE GOING TO NOTICE SMUGGLERS AND REFUGEES IF THEY APPROACH.....   If I am watching for elk or owls, spiders or butterflies, using the most sophisticated equipment imaginable, NOTHING WILL PASS unobserved.

If there is a problem, I become VERY concerned.  And as a scientist, believe me, I will take action.  If I am there at the border, all I must do is push the big red button...  and help arrives INSTANTLY.  Things get real lively till those folks and that problem gets handled...   and I go back to watching bugs.  

Watching bugs.

We will welcome the hungry, house the homeless, clothe them and comfort them....  "Welcome to America".   We will defend ourselves against enemies with drugs, people-traffickers, and others who might do us harm....

THAT is America

THAT is the land of the Free

and THAT sets an example, for all mankind.

John Edward Hubertz

Carl Zehr Professor of Moral Economics and

Chancellor, New Hope Peace Academy (Indiana, USA)

Foundational Elder (Founder) "Ordinary" Anabaptist Church, Worldwide

BA Purdue, Fort Wayne

MS Miami of Ohio

Dr.D Ordinary Anabaptist Seminary, (Europe)

Honorable Order of Kentucky Colonels

Member, Order of the Good Time (est. 1606)

Winner, 1985 Peace Oratory Contest, Indiana and National Award Winner

Who's Who in American Colleges and Universities, 1986

This essay was prepared with the enthusiastic cooperation of our entire faculty, board of directors, staff and students.  Special thanks to Rabbi Avram Friedman, Trelinda (Jackie) Thompson, the Carl Zehr family foundation and library, Hope Library at Goshen College of Indiana, Purdue University school of Agriculture and many others.

NY Times, January, 2019: Finally, a leader is emerging from the chaos that is American politics. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

It has been quite a little while since we've any "good news" about politics and the future for America.  That has suddenly changed.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, has a dream - and it is a dream we can All share.

New York Times, January 7, 2019

The leading thinker on rational, progressive tax policy in American governance in 2019? A waitress without a formal education in governance. Finally - a rational American voice.

(clickable link to NY Times)

The most frightening truth about 2019 America is our churning sea of political chaos.  We lack a shared vision, clouds of war, destruction and environmental disaster are looming all around us and we seem helpless, frozen in fear.

for example Mike Pence

(clickable link) 

"The real risk of the Trump presidency is the looming horror that would be a Pence Presidency."

The United States of America at this moment is a nation in peril, and the world trembles as they watch the American dream teetering on the edge of disaster.

Without hope and a shared vision, we really are in trouble.

There is an old Irish saying however, "Tis a rare wind indeed that blows no good, for the storm that drowns the sailor also waters the crops."

Oh, we have plenty - we have food and water, but we are dying of both hunger and thirst...   We thirst for a new, compassionate, rational vision for tomorrow's America, and we hunger, indeed are starving, for voices of truth and justice and hope for tomorrow.

Ms Ocasio-Cortez' voice rings like a bell over the babble of chaos and the shouts of terrified fools.  We have real problems, and we need real solutions, new ideas, and a new path into a bright future for us all.

We need leaders who can see a future not buried in the darkness of chaos and torn apart by inevitable and looming change, but a leader who instead holds up a lamp of truth and motions to us all, black and white, rich and poor, young and old and says in a calm, clear voice...

"Here is a path!  If we go this way we all might make it out of this alive!!!"

************

(closing thoughts)

This is not a "United States" story - politics in 2019 America represent a breathless moment, a looming disaster, for the entire world.

Without Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez (a real leader of vision of hope), we are facing perhaps a new world war - against the USA.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is holding a lamp of truth, a beacon of hope and change brighter than any current figure on the American political stage.  I am ready to follow that light into a new, brighter future for the world.

John Hubertz at Fort Wayne, Indiana
Carl Zehr Professor of Moral Economics and Theology
New Hope Peace Academy (worldwide)

About the New Hope Project - a faith neutral Anabaptist (amish, mennonite, ordinary, etc...) center for multicultural, multi-faith education and peace studies.

Announcing Church Formation and Personnel Change

Fort Wayne, Indiana, January 1, 2, 3, 4 2019.

The Fort Wayne Anabaptist Church and the New Hope Peace Academy welcome and uplift Hillary Suzanne Billingsley Donaldson, being of good character and able to bear true witness hearby joins our assembly in faith and in deed.

She will act as a bursar and office/communication specialist in the office of the Chancellor of the University.  Her tenure begins immediately with full pay and benefits.


The church may be expanding into Defiance Ohio.  They have acute need for our transportation and employment ministries.  Please pray for this effort to bear fruit.

John Edward Hubertz
Foundation Elder
New Hope Peace Academy

Fort Wayne Anabaptist Church

260-416-8560 (cell)
260-297-0535 (office)

Hillary Suzanne Billingsley Donaldson, New Hope, Anabaptist, Fort Wayne, Peace, New Hope Peace Academy, New Hope Church Fort Wayne, Universities, Bursar, 

Is it appropriate for we, as leaders of congregations large and small, to remain silent?

The Good Book

Political and Corporate Greed

In the face of greed, warfare, injustice, prejudice and corrupt, money-riddled political systems, is it appropriate for any man or woman of God, or indeed any person of any faith, to remain silent?

How is this happening in America?

Are we committing grave sins of omission and indeed of commission, if we willingly preside over $10,000 corporate funerals - when we know the widow and surviving children will live in poverty?

Do we honor his life and legacy?

"I have a dream"

What would Jesus, Buddha, Martin Luther King or Billy Graham have said or done, in 2019?

Would they have accepted donations from war profiteers?  Would they have approved of endless wars of profit and human misery?

Discarded American military hardware, worth billions of dollars

Would they have stood silent as thousands upon thousands of innocents in Yemen are helpless, barred from travel, and starve to death?

One of 7 trillion-dollar American Aircraft Carrier task forces

 We have but one world to share, yet some people and some nations rob the poor, and build mansions on their graves.

Can we stand in our finery and preside over such gross injustice in silence?

MLK and Stokely Carmichael, Memphis, 1968

Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael), Yale Law School, 1960s

Malcolm X as he stood defiant against racial violence

 Should this statement by Selassie, who unified Africa, not guide our actions as people of faith?