Disconnect...

From time to time, I get to thinking about the power of language, and how different ways of speaking (whether out loud, or in your own head) about something can result in two people perceiving the same thing in diametrically opposite ways. Separately, but related, I'm often struck by the cavalier manner with which people use language. Language, speaking, actually causes and shapes real things in the real world.

Think about JFK promising that, within a decade, we would send a man to the moon, and return him safely to earth. Lofty, yes, but most importantly, much of the technology and materials needed to accomplish that vision did not exist when he spoke it. And we in fact did send man to the moon and return him safely to earth within that decade. That is the power of language to create...

"Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!!" ...'nuff said.

I got a letter the other day from someone I was close to many, many years ago, sparked, apparently, by my having made a connection request on LinkedIn. The details aren't important, but what's germane to this post is the language in the letter, and how it knocked me back on my heels. I read a fast, hard-hitting synopsis of the last twenty plus years (by the way, I'm paraphrasing a little here, since I don't remember the exact wording, and I threw the letter out)..."I'm Catholic, and I'm pro-life," and "I own firearms" and "I held the son of a friend of mine as he died after being hit with a terrorist IED," along with a lot of pain that's apparently been sitting just below the surface all this time. I got to thinking...

• Catholic and Pro-Life, own firearms, apparently have been to Iraq or Afghanistan or both. What does "Pro-Life" mean exactly? Pro-all life? Or just one specific kind?
• Doesn't owning firearms on some level make you pro-death? I mean, they're kind of a single-purpose device, they accomplish exactly the same end as suction or the morning after pill, only by different means. Mind you, I'm not anti-gun...not by any stretch of the imagination. But I'm also acutely aware that I can't (and don't) claim that I'm pro-life if I'm pro-gun!
• Is a yet-to-be-born life intrinsically more valuable than one that's gone on for 19 or 22 or 25 years? It's ok to kill and be killed in a war fought by a government, but it's murder if it happens in a war between rival gangs? What about a prisoner, convincted in a trial by a jury, whom science later proves was not guilty? (There's a good book called "Picking Cotton" which talks about the unreliability of eyewitness testimony in the context of a story of a man who was convicted of rape, and convicted again in a second trial, based on the eyewitness testimony of the victim, and ultimately, DNA evidence proved it wasn't him, but someone who looked very much like him. What if he had been executed?) Why, exactly is one form of killing wrong, and others are right? Seems to me, the dead are still dead, and as far as I know, that's still an irreversible condition.
• What about embryos? Those which are used become people...those unused are discarded...like garbage...not buried, not given a funeral. Is one life, the other not? Who gets to draw that distinction? The Bush administration drew one, albeit weird and twisted...these embryos were, in fact, life, and so could not be "destroyed" for stem cell research...yet they could be discarded like garbage if not implanted in a uterus and brought to term.
• Holding someone dying from injuries from an IED...is that qualitatively or otherwise different from holding someone dying from a gunshot wound on the street, or holding someone dying from cancer, or not being able to hold someone who died when the airplane they were on vaporized in the World Trade Center? Is one experience morally superior to the other? Does one give you some bona fides to speak morally that the others do not?
• In case the pro-choice nuts take solace in what I wrote about what it means to be pro-life, just what the hell does "pro-choice" mean? Yes, I understand the usual exceptions for rape and incest. Life of the mother presents some interesting dilemmas. BUT...the choice was exercised in the instant the decision was made to have unprotected sex. To pretend that there's yet another choice to be had about that decision after it's been made...is hypocrisy. And the idea that somehow or other it is about the woman's choice about what to do with her body completely ignores the fact that there were two involved in creating that life that grows within her...what to do about what two created is not solely the choice of one, is it?? Again, I don't state this like it was handed down on stone tablets...I could be (and maybe am) wrong, from one or more points of view...

Apparently, the letter-writer has also read things I've posted online, like this blog, and made a random comment about, essentially, defending my right to spew my left-wing blather...and how my travels have been to "tourist destinations" while the writer's have been to other, presumably less-pleasurable, destinations. I've traveled extensively in my work, and the effect that has had (and you can get some of this from previous posts I've made here) is that I've realized that the world is way smaller than one might believe, especially if you have remained coccooned within a couple hundred miles of where you were born your entire life. And in an odd way, the more of the world you see, the more you realize what a lunatic fringe radical Islamism is...it would sort of be like judging that the United States is nothing but a bunch of white supremacists because your only exposure to the people of the US is from something you saw about some Aryan group in Idaho. Here again...language can be used in such a cavalier fashion...with such powerful results, positive or negative!

I ...we all... owe an unpayable debt of gratitude to those who've made the choice...the commitment...the sacrifice to join the nation's armed forces, and who are then obligated to go where they are ordered to go, and do what they are ordered to do. But please...don't presume moral superiority over me because you've chosen to go, while I did not, and don't put your choice in my face, because it was your choice...nobody forced that decision on you, nobody made the choice on your behalf.

The decision to go to Iraq and not to pursue bin Laden was a political decision, and I don't accept that had we not gone to Iraq, somehow my freedoms would have been challenged. Nor, frankly, do I accept that my freedoms were in peril when the towers fell. In fact, my government has done more to restrict my freedom since 9/11 than Al Quaeda did. In a perverse way, my government has become Al Quaeda's instrument to undermine the American way of life, and the freedoms we...to my letter writer's point, perhaps...take for granted.

So thank you for your service to our country...sincerely...but our children dying in Iraq is not making me more free or even preserving the freedoms I already had, and that, in my humble opinion, is a far greater crime... Ending the scourge of Nazism and Hitler in WWII, especially because Hitler got so close to achieving his goals...that was a question of preserving our freedoms. Going to war with Japan because they bombed Pearl Harbor...that was a question of preserving our freedoms. Going into Afghanistan to crush Al Quaeda and find bin Laden...that would be about preserving my freedoms...Iraq was a disastrous decision, and mind you, not one I pin on our military, anymore than I blame our military for the fiasco in Vietnam.

One last point about this...the recent stream of revelations about how we tortured people in our custody has made the world considerably less safe for me as an American, and considerably less safe for my children...as Americans, perhaps as future soldiers, sailors, or marines... The game that is ongoing around whether or not it was torture, whether or not what we do can be called torture, even if it resembles in every way the same activities conducted by other governments which we have unequivocally labeled as torture...is really a vile, dangerous game, and is completely about shaping perception with language...attempting, in a very real and concrete way, to change reactions and behavior by changing the speaking about it...

But back to the main reason I began this post...it blows my mind that two people can share an experience (as in the ongoing torture conversation), and yet have completely unrelated perceptions of that experience...or worse still, believe that two separate things took place. It is all about how we choose to talk about it, and how we shape our perceptions, our memories, and our judgments, based on the language we use to describe it.

As for my letter-writer...I can only profess my contrition for unwittingly causing pain, the more because my experience of those events could not possibly have been more different than described...that they were is perplexing...and makes me wonder how I could have "spoken" differently...and why our separate language about the shared experiences could be so different...

Random Thoughts...

I guess I'm not really much of a blogger...just realized I haven't blogged in about three months...

One of my intellectual heroes, B.F. Skinner, used to say that if you wanted to become a good writer, you should write every day. He believed that writing was like any other behavior...the more you practice it, the more skilled you become, and that it is self-reinforcing.

The "stimulus" bill has passed, and the president will sign it tomorrow. Not a single Republican vote from the house, and just 3 in the Senate. I get really irritated seeing key Republicans (John Boehner, John McCain, Lindsey Graham, as my favorite examples), men who led us down the path of ruin over the last 8 years, stand in the well of the Senate and bloviate about the bill, how it's just another Democratic spending bill that will put us in debt. Hello, McFly? Just what the hell do you think a stimulus is? I particularly enjoyed Congresswoman Candice Miller (R-MI) standing in front of the cameras to declare that this bill was full of pork, like high-speed rail from Los Angeles to Las Vegas, and that Michigan was being railroaded with this bill. OK, lady, first of all, if you can't do word play as well as Jesse Jackson or Johnny Cochran, then don't try, because you sound stupid. Secondly, I'll grant you that there are probably more useful and justifiable places to put high-speed rail than between LA and Vegas. BUT...think about the number of jobs that will be created to build it...and jobs are important, especially when we're losing 500,000 of them a month in this country...

I think people under-appreciate the economic peril we are in. And I think that the failure to grasp how close we are to the precipice is a failure of intellect or honesty or both. If you're much over the age of 30, and haven't suffered a major head trauma sometime in your life that's caused you to forget the past, you don't need to be a Harvard-educated economist to know that there's never been an economic condition like this in your lifetime. And you also don't need to be exceedingly bright to realize that if we've slipped further and further in the last eight years, then whatever we were doing during that time must not have been working very well. And that if you try something over and over and it doesn't work, then you stop trying the same thing, and try something different!

I think what Obama's done is the right thing, and even yet, it could fail. It COULD fail...but certainly, doing nothing, or continuing to do the things which got us into this mess WILL fail...

There are times when I wish I could just retire...walk away, and spend the rest of my days reading, relaxing, and cooking in my own restaurant...and then I reflect on just how unrealistic that dream is...maybe some day I'll hit the lottery...

A New Day in America, or the same old same old?

I hate writing posts like this...I really do...

"Let these bastards get in...I don't give a damn anymore." That beauty comes from Roberta McCain, John McCain's mother. My immediate response, which should come as no surprise to anyone who knows me, is... well, those of you who know me can well imagine the expletive-laced epithet that immediately comes to mind...but I've been told my gutter mouth leads people to not listen to the message... Let's put it this way...I hope that Roberta McCain doesn't need anything from the Obama administration...if she's collecting Social Security or a military pension, perhaps she should express her outrage and moral superiority by giving it back... amazing the sense of entitlement that some people have...

Here's another beauty from a business associate of mine, from his facebook page: "What a truly, truly sad day in American history!!! When we put financial hope and superficial emotion over moral standards and right & wrong!!!" Dude...moral standards like...sending nearly 5,000 young American kids to their deaths in Iraq for a war which was justified with lies? Moral standards like calling Obama a terrorist, a traitor, and screaming that he should be killed? Moral standards like letting unused embryos be discarded in the trash, rather than using them for stem cell research, which might actually prolong life and find cures for diseases like Parkinson's and spinal cord injuries which otherwise shorten life? Those kinds of moral standards? I cannot believe the arrogance...

But, I don't even really need to look far from home...my own brother-in-law sent me and his sister an email in which he asserts that Obama won because 95% of blacks (he won't call them African Americans) voted for him, (and here's the good part) and that's just racist! Pity is, I know how he was raised...and it saddens me that he is such a bigot...for no reason...my in-laws are lifelong Republicans, but decent, good people...I don't know what happened with their son.

I wrote in a previous post that I was heartbroken at the level to which political discourse had sunk in this country. I fear that I was wrong...it wasn't about political discourse. If only it were that trivial. Instead, I fear that we have come no farther in my lifetime than where we were when I was a child, divided as a society, suspicious of one another because of our skin color, or the shape of our nose, or because some speak with an accent...I thought that we had become more enlightened...

I've heard many a news reader or commentator or political analyst remark that we elected Obama because we had finally transcended race as a people...not hardly, I think...oh yes, some of us did...perhaps a great many of us. Yes, it's true that he got 61% of the "white" vote...and yet...

Can we imagine that Bill Clinton or John Kerry or John Edwards or hell, Joe Biden, would have been called a "terrorist"... a "socialist" ... a "traitor"? Yes, it's true that Kerry was savaged over his service to his country in Viet Nam. I supposed it is OK to question him if you, too were there, and didn't come back and criticize your country. But, isn't even questioned service more honorable than service avoided? Yes, I'm talking about you, W, and you, Cheney, and you Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz and Rove and the rest who lied us into Iraq...who never having served in a war...never having seen its horrors firsthand, thought nothing of sending our sons and daughters to die in one? But even at the height of the indignation over Bill Clinton's lascivious behavior, nobody ever called him unpatriotic, or a terrorist, or a traitor. Why Obama and not Clinton? Or Kerry? When you can't call someone a "nigger" anymore, what do you call him? A traitor, a terrorist, a socialist... You try to make people believe that he's dangerous...that terrible things will happen if he's elected. I was happy to hear Colin Powell be the first to say, about people calling Obama a Muslim...so what if he was? Why, in a country founded on religious freedom would we not be accepting of a Muslim president?

But wait... why is Obama a "black" man? His mother was "white"...are we still back in the days of the late 1800s when the so-called "one-drop rule" came into being? The rule held that if you had just one drop of non-white blood, then you were not white. Madison Grant of Virginia in The Passing of the Great Race wrote: "The cross between a white man and an Indian is an Indian; the cross between a white man and a negro is a negro; the cross between a white man and a Hindu is a Hindu; and the cross between any of the three European races and a Jew is a Jew." (Interestingly enough, the "one-drop rule" wasn't declared unconstitutional until 1967, when the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed Virginia's inter-racial marriage ban in Loving v. Virginia.) If we considered Obama to be "white" would we have called him all these names?

What if none of this "below the surface" racism were there...what about those who labeled him as an elitist? It blows my mind that we are suspicious of smart people...think about that for a minute, why don't you? My dad is retired now. He was a schoolteacher, on the secondary level, taught foreign languages, science, math, and English. It used to happen to him, probably once a year, that during parent-teacher conferences, a parent would say to him "You're so smart! Why are you teaching here?" My dad would respond, incredulously, "Would you have an idiot teaching your children?"

One would think that we would want only the smartest among us as our leader. One would think that after eight long years of the "C-" president, we would hunt, desperately, for intellectuals to lift us up...to tackle the difficult problems that the current holder of the office has led us into. Instead, we got the hillbilly from Wasilla. The lipstick on a pig analogy was oh so appropriate...this non-intellectual journalism major who can't name a single newspaper that she reads, who had the audacity to claim that she had foreign policy experience because she can see Russia from her house...oh my god...

I am thrilled beyond my ability to describe it that Barack Hussein Obama will be our next president. As Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg put it, she had been waiting all of her life for someone to inspire her the way that people told her that her father had inspired them. He is certainly inspirational. He is eloquent. He paints broad pictures of big ideas. No president in my lifetime, since JFK, has done that. Will he succeed at everything he touches? Probably not. But I do believe that he will reach for grand things. Will he be my generation's JFK? Or given the current situation in the world, our FDR?

It is dangerous to invest too many hopes and dreams in one man (or woman). Yet, for the first time in my lifetime, I feel hopeful, and I dare to dream of a country so much better than it is today. Time will tell...

So overdue...

I need to find the time to reflect on the election of Barack Obama...and I will...but for the moment, after not blogging for so long, after being so angry by where i saw this country moving...

I am SO thrilled at the potential ahead of us...

more later...

A Reflection on the Fragility of Life...

Today, I attended a funeral...

It wasn't a "normal" funeral...you know, one where the deceased has lived a long, full life, is in his or her 70s or 80s or 90s, and even though there is sorrow at the passing, there's not shock or devastation at the sudden, inexplicable loss that happened too soon...

Today, I went to a funeral for the son of a friend, a man I work with. His son, just 19 years old, was killed sometime shortly after 3AM this past Sunday. In the rain, which made the roads slick, in the middle of the night, he wrecked his car, got out, tried to cross the interstate to get to safety, and was hit by a semi-truck and killed.

It's not the details of the accident that provide the shock, though they are shocking enough. It's the sense of senseless loss, the end of an all-too-young life in an instant, the tragedy for a father and mother and four-year-old brother he leaves behind, of instantly being robbed of a bright light in their lives. As a father myself, I cannot fathom, nor do I hope that I will ever have to, the profundity of their loss. Fathers are not supposed to bury their sons...not supposed to bear the pain of going on after having someone so precious taken from them...

And, as for this child's mother...I cannot ever claim that I can know what she must feel. I have always been (just the tiniest bit) jealous of the bond between my wife and our children...she carried them inside her for 9 months, felt them, literally, as a part of her...gave them life, and then nurtured and fed that life, all in a way that I, of course, could not, a bond I can never share. No matter how much Dad must feel that his heart has been wrenched out of his chest, his grief, his pain, must pale in comparison to that of his wife...

This is the third time in just over ten years that I have attended a funeral like this one. The first, in November, 1997, was for the daughter of a friend of mine, a child who suffered from Shone's Syndrome, and lost her hard-fought battle at the tender age of 8 1/2. The second, in June, 2004, was a friend of my son's, an almost 8-year-old boy who died when, while riding his bike, he collided with a pickup truck. And now this one...

It is these times, when a life ends so suddenly, that we're reminded just how fragile and how precious life is. It is times like this when you realize that you may not get the time to mend a broken friendship, or to renew a relationship with a relative. Life is oh so short, oh so tenuous, and each day lived is a victory over death. In our rapid-fire culture here in the US, it seems sometimes as though we always live for tomorrow. If we work just a little harder now...if we invest ourselves in our careers a little more now...if we labor to make progress now, so that someday...SOME day...we might be able to slow down a little, take a breath, and smell the proverbial roses.

We see commercials on television that tell us we need "a plan" for our retirement, that play on our baby-boomer sensibilities, that tell us we can have our cake and eat it too, our sense that there is a future to which we are entitled...

We are entitled to nothing...

I am certainly not preaching a "live for today, to hell with the future" philosophy...certainly we should never fail to plan...but we must also learn to live, to wring every drop from life each and every day, because tomorrow is not guaranteed. The very title of this blog captures the essence of what I'm talking about..."Il dolce far niente"... literally, the sweetness of doing nothing...the idea that in those moments we can steal from the grind of daily life, obligation, work...one can find the sweetness that is what living is truly about...

Recently, on Countdown with Keith Olbermann (if you read this blog, you know Keith is my hero), there was a short piece about a man in the United Kingdom, 101 years old, who was preparing to run the London marathon. When asked what he does to prepare, the first thing he said was that he wakes up every morning...good prep!

There's no lesson here (I'm not qualified to offer one even if there were), and I'm not even sure why I'm writing this, except perhaps for catharsis for myself.

For each of my friends, I cannot know your grief and your pain, and I pray that I never shall, and I do not know what I can do to help you with yours, other than to pray for you, for your children, and for myself and mine...

Rush Limbaugh is a fucking moron...

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23176099/

“I would like today to announce a tentative decision — I’m still thinking about it — to endorse Barack Obama,” he said, his head cocked slightly toward his 18-karat-gold-plated microphone, his hands spread wide like the wings of his sleek G4 jet. His microphone is 18 karat gold plated?? These are the kinds of people that, when a revolution happens, the poor, hungry, and disenfranchised seek out first, and tar and feather, or disembowel, or behead. I'm sorry...was daydreaming there for a second...

“Folks, can we agree, just between us,” he told his listeners, sotto voce, on Wednesday, “has it not been brilliant how strategically I have inserted myself in this campaign?” Is this guy actually for real??

I'm heartbroken...I really am...at the level to which political discourse has fallen in our country.

Soldier blogs from beyond the grave...

As I was perusing msnbc.com this morning, I came across the story of Major Andrew Olmsted, killed in Iraq on January 3 (seven more American service people have died since him, bringing the US death toll to 3, 915). He had been blogging for some time, under a nom de plume, about the war, his experiences, life in general...

Major Olmsted wrote (and apparently revised a couple times) a final blog entry to be posted in the event of his death. It's a worthwhile read, as, I'm discovering, so much of what he wrote is...

Requiescat in pacem...

http://www.andrewolmsted.com/