The Shame We Endure

Tags

911, economy, Election 2012, Humor, Libya, Mitt Romney, right-wing teabaggers, satire

It’s been some kinda week huh?

We had a choice of how we were going to remember 9/11. Each person could observe the day in whatever manner best represented their way of dealing with national events that pain us all.

There is probably no wrong way to do this, only personal preferences and needs.

It appears there is a good chance that the attack in Benghazi may have been planned as a 9/11 event, taking advantage of the anti-Muslim video that surfaced and was shamefully promoted precisely to incite.

I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised. After all the GOP has been betting and cheering against the US for nearly four years now, hoping for economic downturns, hoping for disasters of one sort or another over which they could claim that somehow they would have done a better job and the _________would never have happened.

It wasn’t just that Willard was spectacularly obvious in his smirking “take down” of the Obama administration over Libya, it was the fact that he was spectacularly insensitive, cruel, and hopelessly self-oriented.

Never has anyone so blatantly announced to the country that he neither cared about the actual victims or the circumstances of the tragedy, but found it entirely useful to land a blow against his opponent. Opportunism is the first word that one thinks of.

With one ill-worded and ill-timed press release, Willard told us a boatload of important things.

1. He is not nearly as bright as we are told he is. He signed off on this statement, never asked the right questions or demanded any confirmation. The excitement of getting in a sword thrust was too much for him.

2. He has an awful campaign staff who couldn’t lead him away from this disaster, thus we must assume he doesn’t have much talent in picking good people. Echoes of a future cabinet?

3. He has no natural empathy for other people and their pain. Common sense would suggest that remarks about the loss of life would come first, but of course, he spoke before he knew the facts.

4. He is an utter bold-faced, liar who when caught simply “doubles down” and continues lying. Where does one learn this? From his family, his church, or his business?

5. He is seriously incurious when it comes to foreign policy and apparently leaves it to others to explain things to him. The problem is again, the people he chooses–who thus far don’t seem to have a very good grip on reality.

Meanwhile Congress continues to ignore their jobs in favor of doing nothing.

Eric Cantor says the House is through after next week, taking a two month vacation.

Left undone:

1. The farm bill and the awful losses suffered by drought impacted farmers.

2. The jobs bill, now a full year old with no action by the do-nothing-GOP.

3. Violence against women bill is still waiting for passage, but the GOP reminds us that they are not against women, but they certainly won’t pass this bill.

4. Assistance for Veterans in the job market. The GOP is all for the troops, but not if it means adding one single job. That might make the president look good and we can’t have that.

5. Sequestration? Oh the new meme is that that is all the President’s fault. And exactly why did you vote for it GOP?

I’m sure there is more. That is enough to throw the bums out.

Willard claims there is still a vast sea of “undecideds” out there. There are not, but he is not courting them anyway.

No rational talk here, he says.

Instead he talks about God on our money, and embraces fools like Pat Robertson and Steve King.

He is virtually indistinguishable from the crazy Tea People who live in the deep trench at the bottom of the Pacific and surface only to murmur, “I hate Obama.”

Did you hear that Willard said that he thought the debates might be tough, because “the President has a tendency not to tell the truth.” Did you hear that? Did you ears fall off? Did you dance like a duck while you waited for your brain to catch up with your skull? Did you scream at the top of  your lungs–YOU HYPOCRITE YOU! Did ya?

Which all leads me to give the Willard a very bad D- this week.

I think he needs to go to the Principle’s office and get a paddling, and then plenty of homework to teach him some stuff he would need if here were to become President (which please LORD please don’t let happen, and I’ll never swear again, always be polite, walk every day for the rest of my life, make my husband’s favorite meal once a week, and never eat another potato chip in my life, please).

Dunce you are Willard. What in the world did your parents call “raising” that you turned out to be such a douche?

 

It’s nice to know that Willard has something in common with the extremists.

Seriously, do you want this man anywhere near the codes?

Do you want him to be all you have to turn to in times of a national disaster?

Are we so sure that the “five boys” he raised are anything more than carbon copies of their lying self-absorbed father?

This man said that the middle class are those making $200,000 a year or more. He said that two days ago. To George Stephanopoulos. He meant that.  He has no clue. The median income in America is $50,000. Jesus, man does anyone on your campaign advise of anything more than what time it is?

Have a great weekend!

I think I’ll work on my string theory thesis this afternoon after I shave

 

Remember?

Tags

911, editorial

 

 

I’m not good at memorials. I grieve in my own manner and not by a clock. It seems that each anniversary now, we are offered the CBS Morning Show with Katie Couric, taking us minute-by-minute through the national tragedy.

I find myself with some sort of a morbid curiosity this year to hear it all again, noting the mistaken theories and facts as the event unfolded. It is often said, “everyone knows where they were when X happened.” This is one of only two occasions when I can confidently say that. Not just in general, for I can say that about a number of significant events, but the most minute details are seared in my mind. I recall what I said, the scenes play out in my mind.

Remember how we were just a little kinder to each other in the days following? We smiled sympathetically at strangers as if we shared something, just that one thing. With our loved ones, with our pets, we reached out to touch more. We, let’s face it, clung to each other finding other life re-assuring.

Remember how you thought kinder of President Bush for at least a little while? Remember how you listened to his words and sought to find comfort? Remember how the unlimited number of “random acts of kindness” brought tears to your eyes as you realized that people “really are good”.

Remember how politics ceased to matter and how our politicians seemed to coalesce around us as people dedicated to our democracy and our “way of life” and how the common good mattered more than any other thing?

Remember how we were stunned that any group of people could hate us, this diverse melting pot, enough to offer their lives to murder large numbers of our community? Could we be that bad? Had we been that bad? Did the world secretly cheer our agony?

For a remarkable time we were united as one people, banding together in our hearts at least as Americans. For even one such as me who places so little truck in displays of patriotism or even in the thought of it, the world shrunk to MY COUNTRY.

And here we are these years later, and whatever good came from that misery is no where apparent. At least to me. Our divisions have overtaken us and made us nearly murderously at odds with each other. We taunt, we insult, we cast every invective upon anyone who is “wrong-headed” enough to be on the other side. We both claim patriotism, we both claim right, and we are dangerously poised on the precipice of destruction.

We are fueled by greed for money and power and no longer (if ever?) care about the pain we inflict on others. We joke through e-mails that our company has screwed tens of thousands of invisible men and women out of their savings and out of their futures.

We are ideologues who preach our manifestos of political rectitude, and condemn disbelievers as ungodly monsters. We have staked ourselves as bastions of truth and declared all others liars. We either stand shoulder-to-shoulder with our President, or we hate him with a venom that is hardly imaginable.

Our politicians are increasingly answering only to those who fill their campaign coffers, and thus the need to control the reins of power becomes paramount to the public good. We delude ourselves of course that this is not true. We tell ourselves so many lies that in time we have made them us, rotting us to the core.

And through it all, we either scream at the top of our lungs that God will avenge us, his true followers, or that God is dead and we are fools to delude ourselves with fairy tales. We are increasingly looking out for “number 1”.

Have we remembered nothing? Have we learned nothing?

At times it seems not.

Do I really feel that pessimistic? At times I do. At other times, my natural belief that history shows that ours has always been a climb upward, makes me feel that in the end, things will be better.

It is such a big world. We are so tiny within it.  Most of us can do almost nothing that affects but a few. It seems at times useless. It is easy to turn inward and think only of “my little family.”

But there are philosophers and theologians, poets and playwrights, who write of the human spirit as the highest soaring element in our universe. There are painters and sculptors, actors, athletes, musicians,  whose talents infuse us with just how amazing we can be. There are precious moments of innocence, of laughter, of the realization that this world is truly beyond beautiful.

Our hearts sing, they gurgle like the pristine brook that collects and passes on mountain snow thaw. A doe pauses at the sound of an eagle’s wings above her head, then drops her sweet head and munches the meadow grass. A butterfly momentarily stops upon a unspeakably perfect flower. We feel, in that moment that we are good, life is good, and that we collectively are good.

And in that same moment, we know that that feeling is played out down through the eons, the centuries, the decades. It is what makes us strive on. It is what makes us human. We remember at last who we are–we can see everyone behind us, and we carry on.

Amen.

 

Related articles

• Remembering 9/11 with a Random Act of Kindness (virtualassistusa.com)
• Anniversary of 9/11 proclaimed Patriot Day (upi.com)
• Remembering 9/11 by Not Forgetting 9/12 (holisticdiva.wordpress.com)

 

Turn the Page

Tags

911, GOP, post modernism, Rick Perry, sociology, teabaggers

Well, hi there. Long time no see.  I have returned. It seems a little strange. I’ve never not blogged for this long before.

Anyways, as I am wont to say, things are better on this side of the Mississippi. I’m not sure what I wish to say about it, but suffice it to say that a claim was placed against our property, and disproving it required a lot of disparate documents, that we were afraid might be long gone.

Well, they weren’t, and so far we have disproven most of the claim. We are still waiting for a few things to arrive.

We have, however determined that our window of opportunity for moving this year is really closed. So we will wait until spring. We will continue to get things ready and hopefully next year all will go smoothly and with much less anxiety. I’ll be way ahead on the packing for sure!

So that’s that.

Hope you like the new look. I wanted something much cleaner and easier to load. So I did away with lots of the silly stuff, cuz, heck we aren’t silly are we? I’m not happy with the header yet, but those are much harder to find. I’m still wandering around Google Images from time to time seeking the right one.

That being said, boy has nothing changed in the world of politics? It was really impressed on me that it’s just the same old crap day in and day out. The same tired arguments, the same crazy people.

♦

While the GOP pretended they were prepared to play nice after President Obama’s jobs creation speech, the truth will out. They are gonna stonewall it by and large. Stupidly they are making it clear once again, that getting read of the dark one in the White House trumps the country’s well-being. 3ChicsPolitico has a variety of snippets from around the political world noting that the TeaNutz® still seem to have the GOP by the short hairs.

♦

All my seeming indifference and whatever to the mass of “today’s political scene” is rather creatively looked at by Jay Merrick, in a well done piece on post modernism. We have slipped into an “whatever” mentality, that includes a boredom with everything. The world today is one where ALL opinions are ALL put forth for our examination and agreement. No one is weeding out the inane, insane, or pure crap any more. We are called upon to judge it all, and we’ve pretty much given up. Make sense? Go read what he says, since he says it way better than me anyway.

♦

I don’t know what you did, but we did our level best to avoid the 9/11 “festivities”. That was an editorial comment. That is what most of it was. No doubt there were some events that were important to the people who were most directly effected. What is always horrifying to me, is that there is a type of person who seems to get a rush over watching “tragedy” again and again. Perhaps it is a sense of feeling “left out” and this lets them feel part of important national events. I don’t know. I only know that I do not want to see the “planes hit the towers” or the “buildings collapsing” one more time.  And you?

What I particularly dislike is  all the cheap publicity offered by entertainment entities, each offering that their “heartfelt” sympathies to the “families who lost loved ones”. Sorry, but it all seems to contrived to me. Keep you “first responders” ball caps to yourself. And you?

♦

My greatest fear (well not really, but I’m trying to make a point) about Ricky “loud-mouth” Perry, is that his BIG Mouth (echos of Jackie Gleason please) would end his campaign before he had secured the GOP nomination and made my day.

It seems the hairhead is well on the way. He did basically a good thing for not good reasons in regard to ordering young girls to be vaccinated against the HPV virus. Course it’s not a “small government” kind of act, and so he’s scrambled to say that he did it the wrong way. However he has flat-out lied about his financial interests.

In the recent debate he did a, “you can’t buy me for $5,000” retort to the claim that his campaign financial benefited from his order. (Merck manufactures the vaccination and contributed the money.) Turns out that Perry got more like $30,000 from Merck, which I guess answers the question of what amount he can be bought for. Perry’s in deep poo here I think.

♦

The six rational Republicans left in the GOP (no don’t ask me to name them, that would take it down to probably two), are mighty worried I suspect at what has been happening at these silly debates. The one hosted by CNN (wasn’t that the silliest crap you’ve ever seen at the beginning?), was apparently reserved for TeaNutz® only. The one at the Reagan Thrill library was more a composite I’m told.

Anyway, we you not disturbed when there was rousing clapping to the fact that Texas under Perry had executed well over 200 people? (by the by, projected across the nation that would mean about 15,000 executions, so ponder that.) Then on the CNN Ron Paul is applauded for saying that basically a dying person who chose not to get insurance should be abandoned to die.

This IS the way the TeaNutz® think. It is what they BELIEVE. According to Michele (help my 15 minutes of fame is nearly up) Bachmann, this is the AMERICAN WAY. Well, I seriously hope not. My fervent hope is that the middle of roaders out there are just as appalled by this kind of thinking as we progressives are.

I guess we will find out.

 

Related articles

• Perry’s Merck link in spotlight following vaccine order (msnbc.msn.com)

We Remember

Tags

911, America

I did not set out this morning with the thought of writing about 9/11. In fact, I’ve never written about it except in passing.

I turned on the TV at the computer at a bit after 9 am this morning and discovered that CBS at least was replaying the tape of that day.

Once again, I was caught up in the event, mesmerized by visions I have come to know too too well.

It is one of those things that happen where forevermore one will remember exactly what one was doing at the time one learned of it.

I was home, watching GMA, as we learned that “something” had hit the World Trade Center building. Or there had been an explosion. No one knew. As Diane Sawyer was speaking, one suddenly saw a plane flying strangely close to the buildings, as if to examine close up what had happened. And then the second explosion, and my mind reeled, unable to comprehend what I was seeing.

It went grocery shopping that morning, and didn’t learn until I was in the check-out that the Pentagon was also hit. I panicked then, inside, if not outside. Outside, I was calm, but numb. I wanted only to be home.

We watched, as did everyone I suppose, all day, all night, and on and on through the many days. We watched until we were too sick of watching the same film again and again. It became morbid. Nothing more could be said. It had all been said a hundred? two hundred? times.

Strangely, after a couple of specials in the ensuing months, we avoided further rehashing. We avoided the anniversaries. New tragedies came along, though not as shocking or as painful perhaps, but still, filling our limited capacity for horror. Wars and natural catastrophes of one sort or another were enough to grieve about.

Yet, somehow today, I couldn’t stop watching and listening, as I am now. I am amazed at the calm of newscasters even as it became known that this was an intentional act, an act of war. There were rumors that proved untrue, the truth was horrific enough.

Somehow today. Somehow, it requires my attention. Perhaps because of what has been happening in America. Perhaps it is the hatred and vicious anger that has been both expressed and worse, which has been whipped up by sick individuals for political gain.

What has been a pain in the ass, what has engendered anger at an attempt to destroy a presidency by fear and deliberate obstruction, looks different today. It looks sick. It looks pathological. It is born of sociopathic persons whose interests are personal power and wealth.

Look what you have created, you Palins and Becks and Boehners and McCains, you Limbaughs, Hannitys and O’Reillys. Look what you have wrought. A country increasingly torn internally with hate and fear. Cultish immoral humans announcing the destruction of another faith’s sacred texts, all in the name of their own so-believed superior faith. Acts of malicious destruction of buildings, attacks on persons, venomous talk against each other, based on skin color, ethnic heritage, religious preference, sexual orientation, party affiliation.

They did not accomplish this in a vacuum of course. They had help. People too lazy to learn truth, all to ready to accept the demagoguery of money-hungry pundits. People in love with their own voice and power. Speaking to people in love with the good life, having no time for civic responsibilities.

People too interested in entertainment to think or read critically about anything except the box scores or the NASCAR standings. People too interested in tuning out, and giving into pursuits of the hedonism that throttles us by the throat.

Not a one of us escapes condemnation, only the degree is in question. If we were to honor what happened that dark Tuesday in September of 2001, this surely is not the way to have done it. What should have joined us together, has rendered us asunder. Perhaps that is the greater tragedy.

We have become no better at understanding, of learning, of listening, of being compassionate, of caring, of loving, of being generous, of being tolerant. We have if anything become worse.

That is one hell of a lousy legacy to have to face today.

Do something, do anything, just one God forsaken thing to show that you don’t hate all the time, everyone who is not like you. Do it. Reach out in a parking lot, in a restaurant, at the mall. Smile at someone you would ordinarily look warily at. Offer a helping hand with a package, a door. Let someone go in front of you with less in their cart.

Do something for God’s sake.

Let It Be A New Day

Tags

911, Alvaro Uribe, Asteroids, astronomy, Cedar Rapids, Columbia, Detroit, Facebook, Flint, fundamentalism, Georgetown, GOP, Iowa, Islamic faith, journalism, Muslims, Qur'an, religion, right wing, tea party, tolerance, urban renewal, voters

Praise be to whatever Goodness speaks in your heart this day! In response to hatred, there is love being expressed, tolerance overflowing and men and women of good will gather in friendship.

A couple of important notices:

First, for those living near the environs of Cedar Rapids, IA, please take note that an interfaith “Day of Remembrance, Unity and Respect” is scheduled for 9/11 at 1-2:30 pm at the Islamic Center of Cedar Rapids, 2999 1st Ave NW, Cedar Rapids, IA. Members of the Islamic faith, Judaic faith, and Christian faith will gather for a few words and prayer. Please come if you can to show your support for tolerance, and unity in recall of our time of tragedy.

If you cannot attend, please consider this Facebook call for unity and tolerance. Dr. James McGrath has created a FB page called, “read the Qur’an day.” Please go and sign up. We cannot remain silent in the face of the hatred being expressed by a tiny minority. We must speak out. We are a nation of immigrants. Tolerance is what defines us.

I caught this over at National Catholic Reporter. Fr. John Dear, SJ, has written a post on the sad but true fact that what can only be described as dictator, Columbia’s former president, Alvaro Uribe, has accepted a teaching position at Georgetown University. Fr. Dear has a good history of both Uribe and Georgetown’s questionable dealings with the American war machine in the past. This is truly sad to hear. I certainly don’t deny that Uribe has a right speak his piece about whatever, but I surely think there were better choices for teaching our youth than one who has had such a close connection to warlords and other murdering types.

I was born in Flint Michigan and lived a considerable number of years in Detroit, so I know of what I speak. Both are ugly decrepit cities and nothing much can save them I suspect. Both largely grew to magnificence (or some semblance of that) through the age of the Automobile, now both rust away as the heyday of automotive power wanes.  The Boston Globe has an interesting article on how these declining cities deal with this. How to downsize? (Note: recently Detroit decided to go forward with wholesale demolition of old neighborhoods long abandoned–thousands of homes are involved so I understand) A truly innovative look at a problem.

To those of us who pay attention, the Teapartiers have always been an anomaly. A conglomeration of mostly uninformed folk, who rant about “our freedoms” while having little or no clear thinking about what the Constitution says or means. Ironically they are often “for” things that are in-opposite to long-standing constitutional norms. In essence, they are often willing to eviscerate the Constitution in the name of upholding it. DeWayne Wickham at USAToday has a great article about the new KnowNothing Party.

Oh and before I forget, let my say this: This refusal of most of the “high-ranking GOP leadership (read Palin, Boehner, Gingrich et al) to condemn the Qur’an burning is disgusting and amounts to an endorsement. They are willing to allow their hate spewing followers to believe they favor it rather than have the guts to stand up for what is right. So much for ethics. But then who ever assumed they had any?

And we see that John Sidney McCain is criticizing the President for allowing the tax cuts for the rich to expire. Oh but, darn, McCain voted against them when Bush proposed them? How to reconcile this old fart? Just another one of your vengeful acts isn’t it John? You hated Bush for beating you, and you hate Obama for beating you. You need to go sit in your chair and muse about the dust bunnies in the wind.

If I hasn’t come to you yet, it will. Which came first: the insipid vapid (id words you see) moronic lack of intellect of the average American, thus requiring constant feeding of irrelevant nonsense, OR the increasing laziness of the journalistic working man and woman, who has traded actual journalistic skill for a few tips from Entertainment Nightly. Huh? Well, D-Cap tackles this one.

Christian Beyer is a fine writer and thinker and knows fundamentalist Christianity from the inside. See his blog entry today: It’s time for Christians to declare jihad against Fundamentalism. Just an excellent read.

Sad to say, but perfectly predictable, the right-wing and GOP are using the upcoming 9/11 date to raise money and spread hate. They have been doing it for years, and plan to continue it seems.

Ya know there is just plenty of crap to worry about. I worry a lot about that seething mega volcano just waiting to erupt in Yellowstone. That will take most all of us out. I worry about the state of our magnetic field, without which we will all be toast in days. Well, now I gotta worry about asteroids again! I thought we had that one all taken care of with an array of telescopes all searching for any misdirected balls of iron. (Jupiter with its super-massive gravity well is largely to blame–just so you know where to direct your ire.) Turns out NASA which runs this safety program is RUNNING OUT OF MONEY.

So I figure, we should perhaps set up a citizens brigade or something. You can leave your name and number and the night you would like to take your watch. Don’t push. Sharp eyes and a pair of field binoculars are required.

What’s on the stove: chili today. Oh I know it’s early, but I was hungry for some, and I made it really good and hot, and with some fresh corn bread. HA!

Related Articles

• Islamophobia After 9/11: Enough, Already (beliefnet.com)

Ranting from my Soapbox

Tags

911, sociology

Today our featured art is “The Union of Earth and Water” painted by Pieter Paul Rubens in 1618 and presently lodged at The Hermitage in St. Petersburg.

Just a small aside of something that has stayed with me long enough that it deserves to be committed to writing. A few nights ago, the Contrarian wished to watch one of his innumerable “classics,” movies he considers timeless. (actually just any movie he likes that was done before 1950) He exclaims whenever this idea comes up that he “distinctly remembers that in an e-mail while we were courting, I said that yes I loved old movies too,” yet I never want to watch any he suggests.

This largely is because his favorite “classics” always seem to involve Humphrey Bogart, John Wayne, or others of that ilk which I rather dislike. I’m more the Betty Davis, Katherine Hepburn , Cary Grant type and especially enjoy the classy 40’s movies where everyone wears slinky evening gowns and tails.

In any event, we decided to watch “Night of the Iguana” with Richard Burton, Ava Gardner and Deborah Kerr. It was a very good movie and I enjoyed it thoroughly. One segment was of particular interest and the idea derived from it rattled around in my head these last few days. I thought about blogging about it, discarded it, and then resurrected the idea in light of something I read in Susan Jacoby’s book, “The Age of American Unreason.”

Ms. Jacoby suggests that thinking has been replaced by visuals and sounds. Words and ideas have sunk as a result. And there is substance to this no doubt. I can say that I have enjoyed a great many movies recently but many if not most were visual extravaganzas rather than moral lessons. The same is undoubtedly true of most of television.

Night of the Iguana was definitely a thinking movie. Burton, playing a Anglican priest who has become embroiled in a sex scandal and has left to lead tour buses into Mexico, meets up with Kerr, an itinerant watercolorist traveling with her grandfather a real poet. Burton suggests he has hit rock bottom, and has nothing to believe in. Kerr assures him that she too has struggled with demons, but has found solace and hope in the recognition that ordinary strangers in a moment of crisis, go to the aid of one another. There is a human quality, inborn as it were that causes us to empathize and extend our hand to a stranger who is suffering.

This struck me and did not leave. Soon, I realized why. It was because it reminded me of one of the most potent statements I had ever witnessed on TV. Some time after the 911 tragedy, the Contrarian and I watched a two-hour special on faith and 911. Basically there were stories and interviews about people who had been personally touched by this event and how they reacted, what they did, and most importantly how their faith was affected. Of course there were those who stated that their faith had died; no God they could relate to could allow such an event to take the lives of so many innocents. (One wonders at this–do these folks not remember all the millions who have died from starvation, war, genocide, floods, earthquakes, etc., etc. ?)

They then turned to those who had jumped from the towers, jumped to their certain deaths. Now I have a big issue with jumping as a method of suicide. (It probably does not help that a co-worker of mine some years ago, did just that. More on that another day.) I don’t know why this form of suicide makes my skin crawl. I am not a suicidal person. I simply refuse to believe that no matter how bad things are, that a day won’t come when I will find myself smiling, or laughing. So I figure it means suicide is an emotional aberration that will pass given time. Jumpers have time to think about what they have done, time to regret it, and that creeps me out.

Someone who’s faith had obviously been increased by the Twin Tower catastrophe, brought this thought to bear: As he watched ( I could not watch jumpers but turn away) these people, often standing side by side, getting ready to step out into nothing and certain death, invariably he saw, reach out and take the other’s hand. They descended that way for some time, perhaps the entire time. He saw in that event, something beautiful about humanity. At the moment of sure death, our last official act of livingness was to reach out to another human being, seeking and offering this paltry comfort. It is part of our genes.

If that does not give rise to hope for humanity, I dare say nothing will. In fact, I view much of the 911 story as one of unfailing human comfort and aid. People collected what they thought might be personal items and deposited them at a local location so that later, loved one’s might recover some tiny thing that had belonged to the one they lost. Shoe store owners brought out boxes of sneakers and gave them to people forced to walk hours and miles to leave the area. That is what I shall always remember the most from that day now.

That is the power of television and the movies. They can make us think. In truth, this has been true as long as both have been around. There have always been these movies, these shows that touch us and show us how dearly alike we all are. How we all wish the same basic things for ourselves and our families. People ask when evil entered the world. I don’t bother with the religious claptrap about the serpent and Eve and the devil and all that. The first time that a man or woman turned another away from his food, his shelter, or his fire because there was “not enough for both,” evil entered the world. Every time we do not turn out back, disregard our own comfort or needs and share what little we may have, we push back that evil a bit.

We have become a fat and sassy nation, most of us live comfortable lives for the most part. We stuff our refrigerators with food, our living rooms with electronics, our backyards with power tools, and we lament that we do not have this or that new toy of the moment. Most of the world barely survives day to day. Most have a rude hut, a few simple clothes, and a diet that does not vary and is insufficient. Most don’t go to school, and college is perhaps a word they are not even aware of. Medical help of any kind is unheard of. We feel bad, we throw a few paltry bucks at it and call it charity and we then mostly ignore it. That is the way most people live. We are the exception. That is why so many hate us, not for what we have, but for what we waste. Not because we have schools and amusement parks, but because we ignore for the most part that they don’t.

I offer no solutions, I don’t know how to unmake our cultural conditioning. I do know that we are not raising our children right, because they turn out as we did. We once cared passionately, yet we no longer do. Our children won’t either, much as they protest otherwise. It is what I was thinking about today, and well, it was only supposed to be a brief aside. Sorry if I depressed you. It was not my plan. I’m going off to crochet and, well, think. I’m good at pointing out problems, not so good as I said with solutions.