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specialRecent polls are saying that Obama is the most likely Democratic candidate to stand a chance against McCain, Obama and McCain are both viewed as likely to unify the country, while "Clinton polls best with Gays, Lesbians." (http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/11/29/clinton-polls-best-among-gays-lesbians/)
You don't say.
caffeinatedEvery candidate has to survive a test of endurance, and Barack Obama's is whether or not talk of his pastor friend Rev. Jeremiah Wright's fiery comments will ever die down. It's true that people will see what they want to see; Clinton backers looking for a finger to point at Mr. Obama grow indignant and scornful and convinced that the preacher's words are Mr. Obama's direct doing. Those of us in Mr. Obama's camp see a classic case of injust guilt by association.
I've been reading Obama's book Dreams From My Father which he wrote well before meaning to run for president. A particular passage struck me, in light of the recent Wright damage and Obama's brilliant, once-in-a-lifetime speech. In this passage, Obama recalls a conversation with a college mate who quizzes him on why he would read Conrad's Heart of Darkness, a book which casts a racist narrative.
"Because it's assigned." I paused, not sure if I should go on. "And because the book teaches me things," I said. "About white people, I mean. See, the book's not really about Africa. Or black people. It's about the man who wrote it. The European. The American. A particular way of looking at the world. If you can keep your distance, it's all there, in what's said and what's left unsaid. So I read the book to help me understand just what it is that makes white people so afraid. Their demons. The way ideas get twisted around. It helps me understand how people learn to hate."
"And that's important to you." [said by his friend].
My life depends on it, I thought to myself.
What draws me to Obama's candidacy, what makes him stand out as different than the rest, is his drive to see all the viewpoints. He considers, gives thought, opens his mind on so many deeper levels than any politician we've seen in awhile. Go ahead, declare that he doesn't have the experience to be ready "on Day One." But, Dear Readers. That's the magnetism. We have here someone who finally hasn't been steeped so long in Washington that they stink. Someone who is eager to do the right thing. We have here fresh blood, new thought, uncorrupted. The audacity of hope, if you will.
downHere's the deal: I voted Obama in yesterday's primary.
I think it was last April when I first read about Senator Obama in the on-line version of the New York Times. He stood out to me. Bearing a slight political resemblance to Abraham Lincoln, Obama smacked of a new integrity the likes of which we haven't seen in a politician in, you know, my entire lifetime. I've been watching ever since.
But. Hilary was famous. Obama, not so much. It was a long shot. The shot is looking less long these days.
A friend recently wrote to me about voting Obama yesterday. She said, "Part of me voted for him yesterday because of his age. I am turned off by old people running the country right now." I think this change theme of his is working. It would seem there are those of us who are ready for a little fresh air in the White House.
Which makes Hilary's counter statement all the more delicious, for those of us in the Obama camp: “This is the choice we face: One of us is ready to be commander in chief in a dangerous world,” Mrs. Clinton said in the remarks, which she also planned to expand upon in a speech in New York City on Wednesday. “One of us has faced serious Republican opposition in the past — and one of us is ready to do it again.” (from NY Times)
One is ready to be commander in chief in a dangerous world.
One is ready to be a leader in a healed world.
One has faced serious Republican opposition and ready to take it on again.
One is ready for unity.
In fact, more than one of us is. At least that's the way it's looking. Thanks, Hilary: You've summed up exactly what it is about this bad taste in my mouth for you that I couldn't otherwise have put my finger on. Petty on, Mrs. Clinton.
a-okDear Readers, I've been having problems with the "FW: FW: FW: [no subject]" type messages showing up en masse in my inbox. Um, EW. So, I composed this morning and sent it (Bcc) to my most faithful forwarders. If this arrived in your inbox this morning from me, guess what: You were on my mind.
I invite anyone who needs to use this to feel free to copy and paste it, and send it along to the forwarding annoyances in your life. I hope it helps.
-Amy
Everyone loves to be in the loop of a joke that's making its way around the internet. Some of them are highly entertaining! But there are some things about forwarded messages that are NOT entertaining. There is a growing category in the etiquette books, and because we all like to share the humor, stories, or whatever else that entertains us in our e-mails, we want to make sure we're doing it right. Here are some tips to pass along to your friends (smile) to help them and others in their forwarding excursions:
Now, with that being said, you have my permission (that's right, permission is good etiquette with e-mail too) to forward this to the people who share forwards with you - with the condition that you practice those etiquette requests. Copy, paste, Bcc. You know what to do. If you want more tips, a good place to go is www.BreakTheChain.org which dedicates itself to stopping junk e-mail. Now go show off those beautiful e-mail manners! THANK YOU!
not sureThere is a funeral happening today for a 30-year-old man, originally from my home town, who was hit by a bus while riding his bike. I barely remember what he looked like as a kid, let alone what he looked like last week as a living, working 30-year-old. But, you know, news like that sticks with you, and somehow it seems to hit at a personal level even when it happens to someone you've given absolutely no thought to over the last two decades. That's the effect of a young person dying, I guess.
On Saturday I drove Hunter to karate class. It has become a matter of course that, when he and I are alone in the van, he goes into Deep Thinking mode. To me, that's the good stuff of parenting - that one-on-one pondering of the mysteries of the universe together. Sometimes his questions are about people in other countries, or about what happens in outer space, or whether or not Santa exists. This time Hunter quoted the Bible: "Ash to ash, dust to dust." And wanted to know what the heck that meant. They are never one-lined answers, these questions he presents. So I described what happens to a body after death: It decomposes, goes back to the earth, rots. Dust to dust. Talk about opening a can of worms; Hunter's questions multiplied, naturally. And our discussion delved into the subjects of disease, preservation and burial of the dead, and eventually, our own mortality. Yikes. At one point, Hunter made a comment along the lines of, "If you die..." If? IF? What's this IF? When, Hunter. When I die. And it wasn't that he didn't know that before. It's just that, to a ten-year-old, mothers seem to live forever. But the reality is that no one does. And then Hunter grew quiet while he thought about it. I felt compelled to remind him that there was no shame in dying. Dying is not failing. Dying, in fact, is part of life. Dust to dust.
We live in an age of Supersizing. Go to McDonald's and order a burger, some fries, and a drink, and then you can tell them to SUPERSIZE it. They hand you a tray brimming with large portions. More, more! We also live in an age of convenience. My microwave oven has seventeen buttons in addition to the ten on the number pad. This is so that, if I'm making microwave popcorn (so that I don't have to make it the old-fashioned way, in the air popper), instead of punching four buttons (3, 3, 0, START, for the 3:30 it takes to pop popcorn), I hit only one button: POPCORN. Voila! I've never even used the button labeled "Frozen Pizza" and now I may never have to; they now make this device called a Pizza Pizzazz, and it cooks a frozen pizza in like two minutes! How convenient can you get? Except that I'm dolt enough to enjoy making pizza from scratch. You know, starting with yeast and waiting two hours, then choosing my toppings and baking in the oven for about 18 minutes. I know. What an idiot.
We also live in an age of medical miracles. Vaccines prevent measles and chicken pox and rubella. No dying from rubella! Sterile hospitals reduce the risk of infections. No dying from infections! Ashtma inhalers, dialysis, quadruple bypass, hip replacement, liver transplants, AIDS research. All designed to KEEP YOU ALIVE, if not completely comfortable. Do you see the message? DO NOT GIVE IN TO DEATH. Death is failure. Death is shame. Death is losing control of your life. And pain? Is for wimps, wimps who still believe that time is the best healer and that recovery is something to take time out for. But then, that would mean taking time out for it.
A few months ago National Geographic magazine did an article about poisons. What do you think of when you hear the word "poison"? Arsenic? Cyanide? Snake venom? How about oxygen? According to wikipedia.com, by definition a poison is a substance that causes damage, illness, or death to live organisms. The NG article reminded its readers that "poison" is often associated with substances that do that in small amounts (as in, it takes only a small amount of cyanide to kill you. Highly poisonous!). But there are slower poisons. Know what the effect of oxygen is to organisms? Aging. In exchange for breathing oxygen, the body is broken down a little, worn out a little, with each breath. How much oxygen does it take to eventually kill a human? About 80 years' worth. Oxygen, then, is the ultimate poison.
Do a Google search on the word "aging" and you are likely to come up with a whole list of councils, agencies, committees, and institutes that are devoted to understanding and dealing with the process of aging. Interesting, how concerned we are with our own mortality, and yet how far we seem to be from truly facing it.
So. We have a human body that is destined to wear out, break down. Against a culture that is trying to save it at all costs. Supersize my life, dear doctor! I want more, more! My dad has been an M.D. for close to 40 years. In his work, he has seen countless families come to him with frail, ill octogenarians whose time is coming to pass; these families are often asking for a life-saving procedure to SAVE their loved one from death. As if. Dust to dust; more, more! They are at odds.
But this is just dealing with elderly death, isn't it? Isn't it something else entirely to see a young man, a middle-aged woman, a child die? Yes, and no. It is different, in that those left to mourn feel robbed of watching what that person would have done with his or her life. But wait a minute. I was never going to watch Adam do anything. Why is it difficult to ME? Because it brings to the foreground the thought that one of my own children may one day fall victim to circumstance. Dust to dust, but not yet please.
Americans have removed themselves from the possibility of young death through the belief that vaccines, doctors, bike helmets, and car seats are successfully protecting their own child. I for one am grateful for the vaccines and doctors, and although we've never once been in an accident requiring so much as a seat belt's protection, I've got my kids buckled in car seats every time they ride with me.
But there is also a part of me that cringes at the little pink ribbons that have come to popularize the support of breast cancer research. People, do we really think we can survive it all? Do we fully understand what could happen if we save our lives from everything? What do you think the earth would look like, covered with multiplying, consuming, occupying humans? My child has not met unkind circumstance, so I know it's easy for me to say this: What gives us the right to think we are owed long life? What makes us think we ought to be spared at all costs? What makes us think we are above death?
The most common response to the death of a young person is Why? Sometimes I wonder if we are so hung up on death - death as failure, death as losing control of life - that we forget that God (while sad for our loss) is far less worried about death than we are. I picture Him sighing, wanting to say Would you stop it already? You're making a big deal out of the wrong thing. Death is fine. I've got it handled! It's LIFE that you need to concern yourself with. You know, doing a better job with what I gave you.
There are people who understand this. There are parts of the world where death is measured, perhaps because it is seen in a higher frequency. Or at least it is accepted with dignity. Pain is tolerated because it is understood. I wonder how many of these wise people live in our culture.
Hunter came away from our discussion with an insight about the biblical passage, but what I love about Hunter is his ability to use his current knowledge as a lens to understand other things too. Yesterday he took notice of the scalped hillside that is being turned into a sand mine near our town. He understood that people are of the earth and return to the earth, so why are people abusing the earth? He understood that the preservation and burial of humans is for the benefit of those mourning, not the one passed on. He understood that life has a natural cycle, and that death is one part of it.
There is a line in W. H. Auden's poem "Their Lonely Betters" (which I am certain that at some point I have put on this blog in full): Not one of them was capable of lying,/ There was not one which knew that it was dying/ Or could have with a rhythm or a rhyme/ Assumed responsibility for time. What makes us different from the plants and animals, most simply, is our understanding that we are dying. But I'm not convinced that is always to our benefit.
That's not to say it isn't okay to feel grief when the occasion arises. Precisely because of our culture's refusal to acknowledge the necessity of death, it is also difficult for us to take grief seriously. In Joan Didion's book The Year of Magical Thinking the author states, "One way in which grief gets hidden is that death now occurs largely offstage." Again, we are an age of medical miracles; death has taken a backseat to vaccines and sterile rooms and magic treatments. It becomes difficult to know 1) how to grieve, and 2) how to treat those in mourning, when as a nation we have chosen to keep all thoughts of death at arm's length. Didion wisely remarks, "We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. As we were. As we are no longer. As we will one day not be at all." Part of losing someone is being sad for yourself. It's ok, if not important, to take on that sadness when it happens.
The point is, we need to understand that it happens. It happens, and the world must go on. It happens because it is the natural order of things. Deaths like Adam's slap us in the face because we are otherwise lost in a dream.
Today there is a family grieving over a young man whose death was not foreseen. What I mean is, whose death was not foreseen so soon. It brings to the foreground the thought that it could happen to any of us. That someday, it will. Ash to ash, dust to dust. We, too, make noises when we laugh or weep,/ Words are for those with promises to keep.
brightOn a bumper sticker:
Just say NO to Negativity.
quizzicalBeing a bit overactive in the imagination, I find myself often pondering how the footprints of today's population will be viewed by future discoverers: the curious burial ritual stories assumed by explorers coming upon a cemetary, the opening up of a landfill, the museum display devoted to what used to be a dishwasher.
Imagine, then, that after our lifespan has come to pass, the next generation to own what is now our home will, in the course of remodeling what will by their standards be an old-fashioned kitchen, pry up the large square cabinet that now comprises the base of our island. Underneath, they will find a single playing card bearing the picture of Mt. Fuji and the logo of National Geographic. A ten of spades, to be exact.
They will never know, these future cupboard ripper uppers, how a geography-loving 9-year-old boy received a pack of cards purchased at Walgreen's two days prior. Or how his little sister became jealous that Dad was going to sit down and play cards with Brother rather than continue to hoist her into the air in those goofy acrobatics that only dads can launch. And that in her jealous fit, she knocked the cards - the brand new, picturesque cards - out of her brother's hand, sending one sailing smoothly and precisely under the island and forever out of reach.
not sureAccording to this morning's New York Times, people who have sustained injuries to the part of the brain called the insula - a small region under the frontal lobe, near the ear, which has a hand in cravings and urges - are able to quit smoking instantly.
The discovery is a new one, and there is much to be researched yet. One of the concerns is that scientists do not yet have a good grasp on how the insula correlates with other areas of a healthy brain in the quest for addiction quelling. Obviously, the second concern is that eliminating brain activity to end smoking seems pretty drastic. It's not feasible that smokers seeking an end to their habit are going to sign up for brain injury.
But aside from opening up a whole new can of worms in the study of addiction and the human mind, it does bring up the question, How far do people want to go to quit smoking? And (as is undoubtedly the hope), how will these findings branch into the curbing of other addictions, such as alcohol or cocaine?
What gets me, Dear Readers, and I'm speaking strictly as a non-smoker here, is how people can paint themselves into a corner with their own behavior. The warnings are there: Don't smoke. We have proof it's a bad, bad idea. And yet I see people - young adults, even, who grew up in the age of Say No To Tobacco! - lighting up all over the place. Getting angry when restaurants post No Smoking signs. Fighting city ordinances that strive to clear the air in bars and taverns. Standing outside in Wisconsin in January, huddled around the flicker of their cigarette, on break at work.
And what gets me is that these same people, both in love with their addiction and defiantly resentful of it, will tell us Free Breathers, It's about liberty! I suppose I can claim that painting myself blue and changing my name to Smurfette is my legal right, too, but that doesn't mean it's a good idea. You don't like our smoke in bars? Don't go to bars! To which I pretty much want to reply with an expletive starting in F and usually ending in a fight. As if the whole damn world needs to bend over and kiss their sooty asses.
So when I see articles come out and say Brain Injury Will Help You Kick Your Habit! I want to say....no kidding. It sort of speaks a lot, Dear Readers. On one hand, smokers want their civil rights to smoke, and on the other? You have proposed brain damage. Congratulations, America. It's a new low.
lyricalThey Are Not Long
by Ernest Dowson (1867-1900)Vitae summa brevis spem nos vetat incohare longam.1
They are not long, the weeping and the laughter,
Love and desire and hate:
I think they have no portion in us after
We pass the gate.They are not long, the days of wine and roses:
Out of a misty dream
Our path emerges for a while, then closes
Within a dream.
1. The shortness of life prevents us from entertaining far-off hopes. (Horace, Odes 1.4)
lyricalIt shouldn't have been surprising; it would seem that every Christmas carol, even the so-called secular ones, contains a secret. But I had no idea, until today, that "The Twelve Days of Christmas" had an alternate meaning. Here ya go; sit back and learn. And then just TRY to get the song out of your head. He he.
The "true love" is God Himself.
The "me" who receives the presents symbolises every baptized person.
'A partridge in a pear tree' is Jesus Christ. A mother partridge will feign injury to decoy predators from her helpless nestlings. The children hearing this song would know that, and would understand the parallel between the acts of a mother bird, and the sacrifice of Christ.
The other symbols continue the symbolism:
For credit reasons, and in case you want to know more, please refer to http://www.domestic-church.com/CONTENT.DCC/19971201/ARTICLES/ADVTRAD3.HTM.
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