A Word About Mychal Judge, NYC Gay Priest Who Died on 9/11

By Richard Ammon
GlobalGayz.com
September 12, 2011

Many stories circulate about this Catholic clergyman, a Franciscan friar; about his past alcoholism; his down-to-earth style of ministering; chaplain for the New York Fire Department; saying mass in the local firehouse; dubbed the 'Saint of 9/11,' in a 2006 documentary; his private homosexual orientation; his friendships with homeless people, rock-and-rollers, recovering alcoholics, local politicians, and middle-aged couples from the suburbs; and his love of Irish music...

In a word, Mychal Judge was a man of cross-cultural compassion whose hazel eyes saw a person's soul and the good in each regardless of their world circumstances. A man whose ecclesiastical training was set in one doctrinal system but who embraced all doctrines. No divisions, no prejudice, no boundaries.

He was a good man in the most real sense of the word: benevolent, a person who (from Middle High German 'gatern') united differences and offered his heart to those who lost theirs or were weak in spirit.

I doubt there a better way to describe to describe Mychal Judge--or Jesus himself--two men who died before their time serving others.

Also read:
-The lesson we could all learn from the gay hero of 9/11
-More stories about Mychal Judge
-Final video footage before his death

The lesson we could all learn from the gay hero of 9/11:
Brendan Fay, a friend of the priest, said of him: "On 9/11, the one thing we can take from Mychal Judge is, in the midst of this hell and war and evil and violence, here is this man who directs us to another possible path as human beings. We can choose the path of compassion and non-violence and reconciliation. Mychal Judge had a heart as big as New York. There was room for everybody. And I think that's the lesson."

9/11: Grief and Ignorance

By Richard Ammon
GlobalGayz.com
September 11, 2011

9/11 comes on strong this year, a flood of media stories, personal memorials, new analyses, videos of ground zero, the Pentagon and Pennsylvania. Grief, horror, shock and much loss. My cousin emerged from the subway at Church Street that morning, looked up and saw the collapsing mushroom cloud and ran for his young life, not stopping for fifty blocks, he said later.

Sudden human death is one of life's most traumatic events. An attack of this kind evokes severe anguish for loved ones and overwhelming anger at the perpetrators. The terrorist group that engineered this nightmare were acutely mad and hateful; since then they have been justifiably demonized. America the wounded heroic country assailed by a wacko fringe of Saudi Al Qaeda killers .

So the usual version goes as we focus on our own aggrieved feelings and reject those killer Muslims.

But in today's complex world, the story of 9/11 is not simple. The necessary and unanswerable question is 'why'? Why were 3000 people slaughtered on that September day (plus post-attack 4500 war-related deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan)? Who and why could be so hateful to cause such devastation

'Muslim extremists' is the overt answer. They envied our American way of life. They hate our religion and our democracy and free markets. Demonizing starts and ends there for most people--us and them.

But the larger answer is less simple and less self righteous. Since the 20th century America has positioned itself, indeed intruded itself, as a militant godfather into the affairs of foreign nations: Korea, Vietnam, Granada, Argentina, Panama, Serbia, two European 'World' wars and (post 9/11) Iraq and Afghanistan to mention only some overt actions. Many more intrusions are covert and hidden from the public view.

America has also inserted itself as a charitable nation as well. Countless humanitarian governmental and non-governmental (NGO) organizations exist overseas working on behalf of health, agriculture, industry and politics. No country in the history of civilization has ever intended more help for others. Much good has been done; much love has been left behind--but also resentment in the form of our materialistic and condescending style of 'helping' others, in both visible and invisible actions. Aid workers ride around in white pickups and SUVs leaving dust behind in the faces of impoverished walking locals on their way to an American-funded water well.

In India I once spoke with a local AIDS organization director who turned down millions of Gates Foundation money because GF had their own idea of how to do HIV outreach in India. The rejection set GF back and forced them to reconsider their approach to native traditions and methods. Only when they agreed to follow the local lead did the money flow to the Indians.

The point here is that American good will is not so welcome around the world because it comes with strings attached: our way of life is better so do things our way. Our materialist wealth has lead to militaristic, religious and political arrogance and condescension toward smaller less powerful countries, which is felt and tolerated for the most part because they need the money.

But 'terrorists' (activists who resort to violence) don't want the money. They want their own culture, religion, laws and forms of government--whether American agrees with them or not. They hate our style of pushing small nations around and manipulating their politics. And they hate our neglect of desperate nations who do need our help but are mostly ignored. Perhaps more than any other nation, the 'nation' of Palestine has been viewed by many--especially Arabs--as an abused punching bag of western power (which includes Israel). Sixty years of conflict in the Palestine-Israel region still festers in the political bullring with no resolution in sight. Unconditional American support of Israel has brought down the wrath of Islam upon us, PLO terrorism not withstanding.

Is all this simplistic? Yes, but not wholly inaccurate. To understand why thousands of innocent American were killed on 9/11 we need to look at the thousands of lives lost, especially since World War II, in which America has transgressed on the territory and sovereignty of foreign nations. (We have been involved in 28 war actions since 1675; eleven of these on American soil; ten since and including WWII.)

We are not alone on this planet. We are not really a 'super' power with impunity for our foreign policies. We have offended others mightily. We are not wholly clean and the Arab and Muslims are not wholly dirty--we are all unclean with blood on our hands. 9/11 was a pitiful, small and horrifying effort at payback that solved nothing.

The only way forward to a peaceful world is to listen to one another as equals and join together to cure the hostility between our tribes. In the end, although some want war, most want peace much more.

How Far Away is Hope For LGBT People?

By Richard Ammon
GlobalGayz.com
September 1, 2011

As I travel the world interviewing LGBT people about their lives, their cultures and countries I hear stories of effort, strategy, frustration and achievement. One question I have failed to ask these courageous activists, some risking their lives, is "how far away is hope?"

How far away is hope for equality, tolerance, acceptance, relationship recognition, political participation, religious compassion, social calmness...? And what is keeping it in the ever seemingly receding distance?

Another way to ask the question is how long will it take humankind to unlearn the teachings of religion against human sexuality. Indeed, can humanity unlearn something so ingrained in mind from religious prohibitions against sexuality--period. This most human of appetites is the most proscribed against.

The desire for another person is diminished by using the word sex; it reduces it to a genital activity when in truth there are more significant needs that are desired.

Even in the 'crass' exchange of money-for-sex , the so-called "world's oldest profession," there is good reason for that title. The desire for sexual intimacy has become hard-wired in our brains over milennia, beyond the instinct to procreate. With the developing mind becoming more learned by acquiring knowledge and sophisticated systems for survival, came also an increase in more sophisticated desire called intimacy, mental contact, emotional affection, nurturing, warmth, touch...

This want runs so deep that people will kill for it. Crimes of passion are a common occurrence in 'civilized' humanity, some resort to murder when it is frustrated , denied or betrayed.

The challenging question is, given this core aspect of human nature why is it that the religious/spiritual thought/belief systems that have emerged recently, over two or three thousand years, have become so antagonistic toward a human's fundamental need for intimacy and sexual desire? And why/where/when has come this fanatical obsession to reject, discriminate, punish or kill people whose desire for intimacy leans toward their own gender?

It is one of the greatest paradoxes that such an essential trait has become so stigmatized, sometimes to the degree that torture and murder feel justified in an effort to eliminate it.

How far away is hope? About as far away as modern human sexuality is from the human truth that people are different; people are born straight, gay and in-between.

Homophobes refuse to see this truth and prefer to cling instead to their hostile opinions; they refuse to see these opinions as imaginary fabricated beliefs made up by a (very) few tribal men and scribbled down--for what reason scribbled down?--despite their own inherent human desire for intimacy. Why would these early scribes 'legislate' or opine against their own nature? At the time, the reasons were likely less religious than political. Indeed, were they in fact writing about intimacy and sexuality at all or something more public--the various language translations and the inevitable changes of word meanings, in addition to the uncertain original meanings, have obscured the initial intent.

So the current anathema against homosexual desire continues unabated, unexamined, unintelligent and has little to do with any kind of divine source. Simplicity is dangerous in the minds of ignorant people who will not look beyond their own fears. Gay people are not some modern scourge; same-sex desire is not a recent 'problem'. Ancient attitudes about homosexuality are not authoritatively known. It's claimed the Bible is the 'word of god' without realizing there were many gods back then. Was there a God of gods who took a consensus and decided that sex had to be confined and controlled and homesex was a no-no? The questions into the past become ludicrous the further back we look and try to think clearly.

How far away is hope? Fortunately modern civilization has improved in certain countries--in fits and starts, stumbling along but for the better--so that things like democracy, equality and human rights have taken root and helped create an international judicial belief system that parallels the religious system. Judicial thought and action has begun to turn back the excesses and abuses of religion and forwarded human rights as an equal and better way of managing civilization. Slowly in one country after another, officially sanctioned legal decisions have blocked religious persecution (in the guise of discriminatory political statutes) from advancing further against homosexually-inclined citizens.

Slowly, gays rights have become part of the fabric of human rights as one bias after another is being taken down: gay relationships are legal, gay marriage is legal (and published in the New York Times); gays in the military will soon be legal; discrimination in jobs, housing, health care and inheritance are illegal; child adoption by gay couples is legal... All of which were opposed and prayed about by religious institutions. (Imagine praying to one's God on behalf of discrimination and bigotry!)

How far away is hope? In Zimbabwe or Iran it is far distant. In Holland, UK or, unevenly, in USA hope has already arrived.

Hurricane Irene. August 27-28, 2011. Central Massachusetts.

By Richard Ammon
GlobalGayz.com
August 27, 2011

Oh, what a lovely hurricane.

I like this image of what's about to hit our area (seen faintly in the upper right corner). So magnificent in its raw natural immensity--about 600 miles in diameter. Not that I like the toll it takes on the human environment but one has to stand in total awe of its power, size, intensity, ferocious appearance, agitated power and magnificent beauty. (click on photo to enlarge)

It appears overhead as we lilliputian humanoids run around with our over-bloated egos and political/religious opinions and international warfares and civil war slaughters of Arab-African-Asian countrymen, women and children... so overstuffed with our petty affairs and profits and market values and money that we care so little about the only planet we have to live on. We pollute and defile and abuse the globe as if there were a dozen nearby planetary alternatives to flee to when we've finished ruining the climate and soil of this one.

No, no. Delusional we are to think we can continue to dig up the forests and bury our plastics and lead-filled old computers and spew toxins and radioactive dust into the air.

Look at this incredible photograph of the hurricane. Yes, it is beautiful from afar, but I think it is an angry storm. It is a visceral form of nature palpably reminding us of who is ultimately in charge of our affairs. The planet has not completed its work; it is not a stable playing field for our human pleasures and deals. The forces of nature are very alive with hurricanes, volcanoes, earthquakes, forest fires, landslides, avalanches, ancient trees toppling and new seedlings sprouting.

Human creatures are not the ultimate life form. We are smart mutated species from a primitive past on our way to a 'destiny' shaped by our brain development, our impact on the earth, our aggression, our fear, our ignorance about how to create harmony and tolerance for human differences, and foolish decisions about how to steward our globe floating alone in the drift of the universe.

Ozymandias once stood as a great granite statue in the Egyptian kingdom dedicated to the most powerful pharaoh of antiquity, Ramsses II. Inscribed below on the pedestal of this ruler, this king of the planet, this pharaoh of great power were the words (from Shelley's poem) "My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"

I visited this colossal stone monarch several years ago at the Ramesseum (photo left), a memorial temple built by Ramesses at Thebes, near Luxor in Upper Egypt. The monument originally stood 56 feet high (17 meters), mighty and muscular, a monument to human art, power and ego.

Today this great nexus of power rests in broken pieces, felled by an earthquake, half buried in sand, mostly ignored (except for tourists) and unknown to the world, in this "annihilated place".

Hurricane Irene (ironically a Greek name meaning 'peace') is a vivid reminder of the change that comes to all human affairs and to this precious planet called home.

Shelley's closing words in his poem about this once pinnacle of human might should give us pause about our purpose, reason and effect of being here today:

"Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away."

Sic transit gloria mundi (thus passes the glory of the world).

Hot Men, Great Art and Great Thought

By Richard Ammon
GlobalGayz.com
August 20, 2011

Recently I sent a gay friend some photos of 'hot' men, that is, beautiful looking adult males with minimal clothes that revealed their handsome faces and muscled bodies. Several such images are included here (taken randomly from the Internet).

After my friend finished swooning he recovered his breath and asked why did some guys have such wonderful appearances leaving most of us 'in the dust', so to speak.

Well, one answer to that erotically profound question is similar to why we have great artists among us who are capable of creating magnificence in a mostly mundane world: Michaelangelo, DaVinci, Rembrandt, Rafael, Turner, Picasso, etc. Or why there are great thinkers who come along and shape the hue of civilization: Karl Marx, Thomas Jefferson, Sigmund Freud, Richard Dawkins, Albert Einstein, Charles Darwin, Reinhold Niebuhr, Jiddu Krishnamurti, etc.

So too with these inspirational images of beautiful men. They are like art, wordless and beyond thought, that touch a deeper level of our being. Indeed, they express the fundamental aspect of aesthetic value--beauty.

Whether intellectual, visual or erotic we desire to be touched at this level; it vibrates the 'soul' and lifts us out of our daily routine of common feeling and thinking that are framed by our immediate repetitive circumstances. Indeed some argue that such experience touches the vitality of the sacred.

'Gorgeous genes' are like artistic talent or intellectual creativity that raise the few above the many, the Bach cantatas beyond the pop jingles of Christmas carols, the Einstein theories above the TV soap operas, the BelAmi boys above the raunch of home videos.

The 'valence' of erotic representations, the appeal of superior male imagery, takes us momentarily beyond the barriers of common-ness into aesthetic fantasy, into a soothing hedonic moment of joy--not unlike viewing Michaelangelo's luminous statue of David. (photo right)

Why some people possess such superiority and most do not is simply the way of evolution as certain organic mutations are more effective at survival or attracting attention or expressing genius. Like much of life, it is simply chance happening.


So next time you go to a museum or an art show or read great ideas and feel aroused, animated, or imbued with the spirit of certain works, it's not so different from the private ineffable 'rush' we feel viewing beautiful male (or female, if you are so inclined) figures.


Enjoy the show and the feeling it evokes; it's there for us to be a willing audience and feel the breeze of beauty and the inspiration of unique originality. And be grateful for the exceptionals among us.

Two Fathers, One Boy: LIfe is Good

By Richard Ammon
GlobalGayz.com
August 11, 2011


See this wonderful video of music, love, childhood fun, peer approval--a vision of the future : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qf0puHJ-KM

A twelve year-old boy, Terrence, sings a pretty song in tribute to his two fathers, a gay couple in Holland. He sings it at a children's concert in front of an audience of hundreds of other children about his own age who join in three times in the song's refrain:

I have two fathers,
two real fathers,
sometimes cool and sometimes strict,
but it's going great with us,
two real fathers,
who if they have to,
both can be my mother...


For anyone who feels weighed down by the hate, homophobia, fear-mongering and bigotry against homosexual people, this video is a balm, a soothing reminder that gay life is cheerful, tender, child-loving, compassionate and worthy of song and praise.

The hundreds of other kids singing in harmony with Terrence join with him in his love song that's full of respect for his two fathers.

Truly, from the mouth of babes shall come forth the love that will light the world and turn back the dark minds of discrimination and hatred.

The Way of the World: Dalai Lama vs China's Factories

By Richard Ammon
GlobalGayz.com

The following bit of news was written by Jamie Johnson and published in Vanity Fair magazine July 19, 2011
(http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2011/07/harmonic-divergence-wealthy-dropping-the-dalai-lamas-name-literally.html)

"It was big news last weekend when President Obama refused to let journalists into his private meeting with the Dalai Lama. The maneuver reflects increasing concerns in the U.S. that emphatic public support for the Tibetan leader will alienate Chinese officials, and in turn jeopardize our strategic interests in the world’s fastest growing economy... a rising number of international billionaires have begun to worry that backing the Dalai Lama could pose a risk to their personal wealth by potentially limiting access to lucrative markets in China... now that the seat of financial power has started shifting eastward, patronage of the Dalai Lama can come at a considerable cost. Sadly, China’s increasing sway over our economy compromises the Dalai Lama’s ability to attract wealthy American patrons...

The opportunity to make money is something billionaires simply can’t resist—even if giving in to that persistent urge means shunning an enlightened spiritual guru."
--------------

Thus we have the way of the modern world. Not that I'm a spiritual follower of the Dalai Lama's Buddhist beliefs--not the issue here--but I do care that an intelligent and enlightened man (a lot more than most) is seen as losing traction to spiritless commercial forces of low-tech wage-earning and hi-tech investment profiteering. China is a factory producing infinite 'stuff' and the West is a hungry consumer of those goods, insatiably starved for more things, countless baubles, Wal-Mart discounts, stock deals... spending and getting.

Where is all this taking us? What human desire is being met by plastic bottles, credit cards, shiny cars, sugared food, clever-tech toys, FaceBook popularity, political positioning...?

What is the need we are trying to assuage? Some have suggested existential ennui, listless boredom, hollow spiritual life, loneliness... that we buy more and more stuff for our emotionally impoverished hovels and grand mansions. No matter the level of financial status, most of us in this 'advanced' country are addicted to a richly materialistic/monied throw-away lifestyle surrounded by noise (iPods, radios, TV, computers) that we no longer can see outside the cage.

At my local dump/transfer/recycle station in a rural town in western Massachusetts (population 1800) purchased goods become discarded goods: coffee-makers, children's books, dinnerware, air conditioners, stereo sets, microwave ovens, portable BBQs, baby strollers, sofas, pill bottles... off loaded to the recycle shed to be picked over with the leftover tossed over the edge into the dumpsters. (Some plastic, metal, glass, paper is recycled in a separate dumpster.)

But the volume of discards increases monthly, yearly. What is this? What is being thrown away besides stuff? I think at least part of our cultural soul goes out with the trash. We have become mis-users of the land, the planet. We have lost our feeling for our earth home.

After a recent festive party to celebrate a two-year-old's birthday, I watched as dozens of plastic cups, spoons and forks, plastic plates, paper napkins, extra cake, pretty gift wrapping and ribbons were tossed into plastic bag-lined trash cans then tied up and tossed in the back of a pickup truck on its way to the dump the next day.

What is the gift here? (Most of the plastic gift toys to the to birthday toddler will end up as toss-outs within a year.) What is really being thrown away?

I think the message of the Dalai Lama is being lost: compassion kindness and mindfulness beyond our immediate pleasure and families, compassion kindness and mindfulness toward the green planet, toward the needy world of other tribes suffering poverty and hunger, and toward our own 'being'. We have become saturated homo sapiens drowning in our own foreign-made abundance.

Is this the purpose of our being here? To make stuff and make profits? At what cost? What does China offer us beyond it's factories? What is the future the Chinese are leading us to?

I think it is not compassionate, kind or mindful.