Can Our Government Shine?

The weather has gone abominable in the Pacific Northwest, and, since people are staying home in droves—which means they are not darkening the doors of the café—I have found myself with considerable amounts of time on my hands. My first instinct is to wring those very hands in worry and frustration with the evil-looking numbers we are putting up for this week (and probably for the rest of the month, considering that the weather is not slated to improve much between now and New Years'…) Instead, I've decided to pick up the book I've been trying to read for the last month, and see if I can't get through to the end. Yes…I'm still reading Barack Obama's The Audacity of Hope.

When I first cracked open the book several weeks ago, I found myself often reading through tears. I was still in the "relief bordering on disbelief" stage of post-election euphoria. I could hardly read a well-formed, comprehensible sentence crafted by the man slated to become our next president without experiencing an almost overwhelming feeling of awe, gratitude and victory. It felt for all the world like a religious conversion experience. (And I know from where I speak on such things, believe me…)

As time has passed, the euphoria has given way to practicality. I'm starting to wonder how many wheels our broken economy has to lose, as one seems to go spinning off into the gutter every few hours. If the wails of woe issuing from the Senate, the auto industry, the energy and oil industries, China, real estate and construction concerns, and just about every other contributor to our nation's financial stability don't snap one's attention back to dire reality, nothing will. So I have continued my reading in a more subdued state of mind.

And, here's the thing. It's not that Mr. Obama isn't intelligent, well-read, even-tempered and introspective…all traits that will indeed be pleasant to attribute to an American president. It's just that he is very much a regular guy. The things he writes are refreshing and reasonable, but they are not revolutionary. What makes him look like the second coming is the backdrop of the last eight miserable years of intellectual and moral retreat through which this nation has suffered under the Bush Administration. It would be hard for anyone not to look like a knight in shining armor coming out of that cistern of muck. What I fear now is that the media, the government, and the American people are going to expect way more from Barack Obama than any human being could possibly deliver. And then turn on him like a pack of wolves…

The nation is watching closely as Mr. Obama selects his cabinet and top advisors. Everyone is still gun-shy of the cronyism that was the hallmark of Bush Administration appointments. We ooh and aaah over Obama's thoughtful selection process as he calls upon experts and scholars, people who might actually have credentials, some of the best credentials, in fact, to fill key roles in his government. Once again, why do we find this so fascinating? Isn't this how the process should look?

Yes, there will be quite a contrast between the government assembled by a privileged, ne'er-do-well scion of a Texas oil baron-turned-politician, and the one brought together by a middle-class Constitutional scholar who came to politics via the route of public service. Bush's philosophy of government is that it act only in ways that will enhance the power of the powerful…thereby keeping our nation strong and, through trickle-down, improving the lives of those without power. And all that power must intersect in the person of one central figure: the President. The guy who at least appears to hold all the cards and make all the rules.

Mr. Obama's philosophy is that government is a coalition of the best minds and practitioners, even those with opposing viewpoints, working together for the greater good of society. The president is the guy whose responsibility it is to call all these various factions together and facilitate their cooperation. I think we can expect Mr. Obama's to be a government of conviction rather than agenda. It is one thing to have solid beliefs and to live by them; it is quite another to have an agenda to force everyone else in the country to live according to your convictions. In Mr. Obama's mind, the way to govern—indeed, the very foundation of our government—is to bring the best, most capable minds together and allow them to have at it. Here are his words on the subject:

"Whether we are for or against affirmative action, for or against prayer in schools, we must test out our ideals, vision, and values against the realities of a common life, so that over time they may be refined, discarded, or replaced by new ideals, sharper visions, deeper values. Indeed, it is that process, according to Madison, that brought about the Constitution itself, through a convention in which 'no man felt himself obliged to retain his opinions any longer than he was satisfied of their propriety and truth, and was open to the force of argument.'"

Imagine that. A government that would be all about encouraging people to open their minds, or even change their minds; as opposed to a goose-stepping regime that adheres to a strict list of written-in-stone commandments, crying "flip-flop!" at the slightest prospect of an enlightened recalculation.

I don't know about you, but I personally am very eager to see Mr. Obama's—and the Founders'—theories of government get a chance to shine. No matter what happens, we will no doubt be living in a very different country than we have been of late. And it is SO about time!

Presidential Reality

I didn't actually hear the entire speech. In fact, I didn't even know Mr. Bush had spoken at a commencement on Friday (or that there was a self-respecting school on the planet that would want him) until I found this little quote on a friend's blog.

And I immediately thought, "This explains a lot." And it is more than a little disturbing, coming out of the mouth of the man who has been the Leader of the Free World for the past eight years:

"Remember that popularity is as fleeting as the Texas wind. Character and conscience are as sturdy as the oaks on this campus. If you go home at night, look in the mirror and be satisfied that you have done what is right, you will pass the only test that matters."
-- President George W. Bush, from his commencement address Friday at Texas A&M

Isn't this just a fancy and inspiring way of saying, "Choose your own reality?" To hell with truth, justice, and everyone else in the world. As long as YOU can live with what you've done, that's all that matters.

Evidently, Mr. Bush wants everyone to rest assured that he will be able to sleep like a baby every night in his approaching retirement. I'm SO reassured…aren't you?

Bursting The Handbag Bubble

As is typical of the season, I receive about ninety-five ads, catalogs and solicitations in the mail every day. My kitchen counters are awash in shiny, full color spreads from Home Decorators', Walmart, Kohl's, Touch of Class, Fred Meyer. All clamoring for their share of the general population's fast-disappearing discretionary dollar. Some retailers are even trying to adopt the, "Our loss is your gain" tactic. Kind of like, "We're sinking fast but you can get some real good deals before we go under…"

And then…and then, there's Nordstrom. Steadfast in its appeal to the "Haves." As opposed to the "Have Nots." Or the "Did Have but Won't For Longs."

Nordstrom with its hand-picked selection of $250 costume jewelry watches, with which one can adorn one's wrist while toting a $600 designer handbag. Nordstrom…in all its unerring allegiance to pricey, unnecessary affectation.

Nordstrom stands alone here in the Pacific Northwest as a testament to the excesses endemic to the lifestyle of riding the economic bubble. That bubble which burst…sometime in the relatively recent past. (The Bush Administration is allowing now that it actually burst sometime last December…?)

But burst it has; causing those of us who might once have foolishly considered the purchase of a $600 purse to pull the strings on our shabby little $25 tote bag as tight as we can, the better to hold in the funds we need to merely survive.

Not that I ever entertained the notion of owning a multi-hundred dollar handbag. But it makes you wonder…who would? What in god's name would make a stupid purse worth what many people pay in monthly rent?

What were we thinking?

Makes one realize that this country was badly in need of an…economic correction, doesn't it?

On Our Black Magic Economy

Here is the opening paragraph in Wikipedia's entry under "Economics:"

"Current economic models developed out of the broader field of political economy in the late 19^th century, owing to a desire to use an empirical approach more akin to the physical sciences.^[2] A definition that captures much of modern economics is that of Lionel Robbins in a 1932 essay: "the science which studies human behavior as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses."^[3] Scarcity means that available resources are insufficient to satisfy all wants and needs. Absent scarcity and alternative uses of available resources, there is no economic problem. The subject thus defined involves the study of choices as they are affected by incentives and resources."

Okay…I am not a stupid woman. Perhaps I'm less educated than I would like to be, but I think my intelligence level is right up there. And I have no idea what any of that means. A couple of weeks ago, my landlord rather sheepishly confessed that he has a degree in Economics. "Geez, Brian," I groaned, "That's like having a degree in witchcraft."

From all that I can gather, I've come to the conclusion that economics is an infuriating concept which no one really understands, and upon which no two people seem to agree, yet it governs the relative ease or challenge of my daily existence. It can dictate whether I have a roof over my head, food to eat, and decent medical care when I need it, yet it is so ethereal that I have as much personal control over it as I do over spirits on The Other Side. There are words, like incantations, that only a privileged few are allowed to speak, and even those chosen few are loathe to utter them. Words like "recession," "slow-down," "correction," and the most powerful of all—the "Beetlejuice" of the economic lexicon—"depression."

Somewhere along the line, the decision was made that the best way to rebuild the economy after the September 11^th terrorist attacks was to hand the whole smoking mess to the richest of the rich, promise a stream of unlimited profits pouring into their treasure chests, turn the other way and let them have at it. It was so vital that the United States be able to stand up, dust itself off and say to the world, "Ha-ha, didn't hurt!" that we sold our souls to the devil. And the economic witch doctors to whom we turned have conjured and chanted and eye-of-newt-ed us to the top-heavy, over-inflated monster that is even now falling down around our heads.

"Black Friday" is the aptly named holiday upon which we celebrate the apex of our greed-based economy. The traditional game of this holiday involves retailers dangling irresistibly priced carrots in front of frenzied customers, who must then jump through demoralizing hoops—like lining up in the middle of the night in the rain outside the local Wal-Mart. This is the reward we get for carrying the nation's economy on our backs, year-round, by dutifully streaming to the stores and trading a hefty portion of our income for the latest technology, newest toy, or flashiest bling. What is wrong with this picture?

In the past weeks, the demise of our black magic economic model has been the star of the global stage. The entire world has watched as our booming gaseous blimp of an economy has lumbered toward the same end as the Hindenberg. And it is to be hoped that any country in its right mind, rather than queuing up behind us to subscribe to the same system (and help bail our burning butts out of our flaming ship), will run screaming in the opposite direction. I have no idea what healthy national economies are supposed be based upon. But it's pretty obvious, for a whole host of reasons, that rampant consumerism isn't it. For the past seven years, we've built an economy based largely on lending large amounts of money that did not really exist to people and entities that were not likely to be able to pay it back. How can that not fail, in the end?

It seems to me that a healthy economy must first and foremost be a moral economy. There needs to be equal opportunity for all members of society regardless of race, sex, ethnicity, religion; fair wages for fair labor; an equal chance for any business—large or small—to succeed. There needs to be access to superior education, and the best health care must be considered an inalienable right. There needs to be a sense that enough is enough, and too much is never a good thing. There needs to be a sense of stewardship, of protection of the earth and its resources. There needs to be a spirit of service, of the necessity of doing things that help other people, and not just looking out for number one. In short, there needs to be a means to responsible sustainable growth, rather than rampant irresponsible expansion.

Change is always difficult. It is too easy to get into the middle of something that you come to realize is wrong, but you don't know how to get yourself out of it. Perhaps the Universe is doing us a favor with this economic crisis. It is giving us the opportunity to start over. Let us hope it isn't too late. Let us hope that the people taking over the reins now will be bright enough and far-sighted enough to build something meaningful and substantial that will carry us well into this century, and beyond.

Cross-posted at Women On...

What a Difference Four Years Make

Four years ago, I was so depressed by where our country found herself, so saddened by the depths of inexplicable depravity in which she had wallowed for more months than I cared to count, that I could barely rouse myself on the morning after the 2004 election. I had held so tightly, so desperately,to an unfounded hope that the silent majority would miraculously arise, shake the fog from their heads, and hand the Bush Administration its walking papers. I could not quite believe that my fellow Americans would award the Axis of Evil an additional forty-eight months to indulge its acquisitive lust for power, money, and more power.

And so I rose on the morning after Election 2004--the election that I firmly believed would be the most important of my lifetime--hope warring with dread in the core of my being, looked out the window at the new day and contemplated…

I decided I would let the dawn be the omen. If we had a spectacular
sunrise, no matter who won, things were going to be all right. A rainy, drizzly,
weeping dawn would foretell of dire consequences for our nation. Funny thing…I
knew the forecast was for sun today…knew the rain had stopped and the clouds had
scuttled away before we went to bed last night. I think I was creating a
scenario in my mind where my "good omen" daybreak was more than likely to
happen.

But we didn’t have a spectacular sunrise. The day dawned bright and
brittle. The sun just marched up over the horizon, cold and hard in the east.
And it frosted last night…the first frost of the season. The bright hard rays of
the rising sun glittered off the sodden masses of my garden flowers that were
killed by the frost. So, tell me…what kind of omen is that? Coming to Terms… November 3, 2004.

November 5, 2008 dawned grey and drizzly and dark…very much a typical late autumn day in the Pacific Northwest.

Yet I jumped out of bed, bustled into the café and gushed to my staff and any customer within earshot:

“Isn’t it a beautiful day!"

And I wasn’t talking about the weather.

Tears for the Victor

Did anyone else watch an eloquent, intelligent young man humbly accept the gift of the presidency of the United States from the hands of the American people—a people burdened and burned by eight dark, oppressive years of an administration devoid of hope, empty of compassion, bankrupt of honor—with tears welling up and spilling into your lap?

I couldn’t help it. There stood a man, a bright articulate man, speaking of change and hard work, healing and unification… instead of mouthing platitudes, whipping up blind nationalism, reminding us of our fears and encouraging our craven trembling in the face of all manner of threats and dangers. And this man…this well-spoken, inspirational man… was designated our next president. Representing the absolute antithesis of the buffoon we have borne in that capacity for way …too…long.

It hardly bears believing.

As I watched Barack Obama address his people, I literally felt as if a great heavy cloud was lifting from our nation. A cloud that no matter how hard we’d struggled or how loudly we’d shouted at it, would not budge, but rather settled more and more heavily upon us until we were utterly immobilized by its weight, a weight more analagous to the granite of a tombstone than the insubstantial mist of cloud.

Oh my god, it’s been a long time coming. I can believe in this country again. I can hope for this country again. I can look forward to seeing her regain her proud place among the nations of the world.

I emphatically wish we hadn’t had to endure the past eight hideous years in order to see this day. And I suppose it is likely that if the past eight years had been any less hideous, we would not be seeing this day. We have seen the worst. Dare we hope that, now, we may see the best?

All I know is..for the first time in a really long time, I can say with some conviction…

I’m proud to be an American.

History Begins Now...

******

Election 2008

NATION ELECTS FIRST BLACK PRESIDENT

******

On the "Sport" of Hunting

Cross-posted at "Women On..."

This morning, I left for work just after dawn. I poked my head out my front door, and was greeted by the staccato pop! pop! pop! of shotgun fire from across the channel: Sportsmen taking potshots into the great flocks of game birds wintering in the wetlands on and surrounding Sauvie Island. That sound never fails to grip my heart and squeeze.

I hate guns.

My dad owned a pair of pistols and a rifle. They weren’t loaded, they weren’t kept at the ready in case some hoodlum broke into the house in the middle of the night intent on murdering us in our beds. In fact, the pistols were locked up in a metal strongbox.

Dad was brought up with guns; he grew up in a small town in Oregon where guns and hunting were part of the culture. He spoke proudly of earning enough money on his paper route to buy his first rifle when he was twelve years old. He treasured his guns as a connection to his roots, a memento of a time and place far away and fondly remembered.

But he respected their potential to create mayhem in the wrong hands…knew they really had no place in the sleepy, mid-century exurbs of Chicago. Dad’s guns lived in the back corner of my parents’ bedroom closet. We girls were sternly threatened never, ever to touch, look at, or interact with those guns in any way. Ever. So sternly that I don’t remember even being tempted to burrow into their hiding place to look at them. So began my hate affair with guns.

I’m no longer that frightened little girl, totally cowed by the demonic presence hiding in the dark reaches of my parents’ closet. But even in adulthood I have not acquired any love for or acceptance of the role of firearms in 21st century society. “Guns don’t kill. People kill.” Small comfort, really, when you think about it.

Today, with the sound of shotgun fire echoing in my ears, I wondered about mankind’s fascination with guns. And with killing.

We kill the animals over which, our religious tradition tells us, we were given dominion. We kill each other. For the hell of it.

What is wrong with us? Why must we kill? Why are we the only species on earth that has constructed such an elaborate ritual around the senseless killing of other animals? We call it “hunting.” We do it for sport. Not because we need the food. Not because these animals are capable of, or interested in, killing us if we don’t kill them. They don’t come looking for us. We take it to them.

We kill because we can. Because we want to. Because it gives us some kind of perverted feeling of power.

How sick is that?

Fall is my favorite time of year to walk on the dike. I go to see those stunningly huge flocks of birds flying in shifting waves across the marshes to the island. I go to hear their chaotic barking and honking. That sound always stirs up something wild and restless in me.

And when I think of some idiot dressed in camo with his designer dog at his heel, pointing a blunderbuss into those great wild flocks and blowing the life out of bird after bird for sport…for the fun of it…

I wonder where to hand in my resignation from this race that is truly beyond hope.

Better Terms Rises From the Ashes...Sort Of

Sometimes, this whole blogging experience can be SUCH a challenge. More challenge than I really want to encounter, most of the time.

This evening, I have discovered two things:

Deleting multiple entries from “Blogger” is WAAAY more trouble than it is worth…

And…

I can SOMETIMES outsmart the capricious cyber-gods and actually bend this recalcitrant medium to my will. To a certain extent.

In other words, I figured out how to convert this old blog to the “Layout” format from the “Template” format, even though it refused to show me the magic buttons through normal channels.

But I will not be able to make the 300+ old “Coming to Terms…” entries I painstakingly copied and pasted into this journal go away without deleting them one by one. Something in which I choose not to invest precious time at this juncture.

So, I cannot restore “Better Terms” to its original ideal of a blog that contains only my “next level” writing.

However…

I can now mess with the template and pretty it up to my heart’s content.

You win some, you lose some…

For Those Who Followed "Coming To Terms..."

Hey~~

AOL actually did something right for a change. I was indeed able to export "Coming to Terms..." in its entirety to blogger.

It's here. It's intact. And it's where I'll be from now on.

I'm not sure exactly what to do with "Better Terms." It was originally supposed to be a repository for my "next level" writing. A way to present my better stuff to the larger blog audience.

But here I am, with three (count them, THREE) more blogs out here in front of this "larger blog audience."

I'll have to think about doing a little paring down.

Until then, all you who thought you needed to follow me here to "Better Terms," please tune me in at Coming to Terms, blogger version...

Driven

With all the things I have to do, all the responsibilities I’ve accumulated in the past few years, with the café, and my husband, and my family…I’m driven to save my journal.

Of late, I have barely had two hours a week to invest in the writing I so love, and have so missed. Now, I spend four or five hours a day, copying, pasting, saving.

As soon as the danger became known, there was never any question.

Never any thought that I wouldn’t find the time. Never an ounce of consideration given to just letting it go because I would not find the time, in my real life, to deal with this.

Because this, this journal, has been such a huge part of my life for the last five years.

In many ways, and on many occasions, it has BEEN my life.

Or saved my life.

So, yes, I have AO-hell to thank that my world has been turned upside down. And that an additional dire deadline is hanging above my head.

And I have them to thank that I will spend the next 26 days more stressed, more sleep-deprived, more desperate than I would have otherwise been. Something I definitely did not need.

But I will not let my words disappear at the whim of…well, who knows whom.

Thanks AOL. Thanks for treating us like negligible, expendable crap.

It’s the American Way, is it not?

Tags: leaving aol

How Much Fun Is This?

Funny how no one has been posting much. AOL tells us they’re going to be closing their doors in 30 days, and we all just…abandon ship. Actually, if everyone else is spending the hours and hours it is taking ME to painstakingly transfer my entries and comments to blogger, I know exactly why everyone has been so incommunicado.

I have spent, oh, about ten hours so far on the "copy, paste, redate, publish" thing… It reminds me of the hellish months I spent trying to re-invent myself as a data entry clerk. Very much why I ran screaming back to the foodservice business. B-O-R-I-N-G!!!!!

And, yet, the entire time I’m doing this, I feel this sense of doom hanging over my head. As if there is no way I’m going to get this all finished before the deadline. Auugh!!!

I have gotten all the way through March of 2004. Which means I have only 4 ½ more years to go.

And I haven’t noticed any helpful e-mails from AO-Hell telling us they’ve figured out how to move our journals to…somewhere else. I’m thinking it will be a cold day in hell when that happens. And I’m also thinking there is no way I would entrust THEM with this precious compilation of the last five years of my life. Sure as s**t they would lose it all into cyberspace, never to be seen again. There is no way I would take that risk.

So, soldier on, everyone. We shall meet again on "the other side!" :-]

Woo-Hoo!

Okay...I posted a title.

Duh.

Anyhow, the woo-hoo was because I just found out that you can pick the date of a post. So, theoretically, that means I can go to "Coming to Terms..." bring the posts here, and put the proper dates on them, and they will go back into the archives and line up just the way I want them.

Theoretically.

And now I have to go DO that thing and see if it works...

Okay...IT WORKS. It's going to be tedious and time consuming. But it works.

And if anyone knows a better, faster way to do this thing, I'm listening...

Election 2008

You all knew I'd have something to say on this subject, didn't you....?

Dubya is possibly the lamest duck in the history of the genre. Legless, headless, plucked and gutted, he lies, rotting, while his presidency grinds to a merciful close. And the American people are engaged in the process of choosing his successor.

Four years ago, I firmly believed Americans were facing the most important election in their lives. After four years of goose-stepping nationalism, state-sanctioned racism and payback fever, the 9-11-induced madness appeared to be abating. There was a slim glimmer of hope that we as a nation would come to our senses and reject George W. Bush and everything he stood for.

Or not.

It’s fair to say the Democrats didn’t present us with much alternative. Rather than take a stand and advance a candidate who embodied everything that King George wasn’t, they gambled that Americans would back a Democrat only if he promised do everything Bush was already doing, only better….? So they created "Bushenstein;" I mean, John Kerry. Kerry was easily dispatched by G.O.P. hatchet men back in 2004, perhaps because he was never more than a cardboard collage of a candidate to begin with. My sincere apologies to Mr. Kerry, who, I think, took his candidacy much more seriously than did just about anyone else in the world.

And now, it is 2008. The year for which the sidebar on my original aol blog has yearned since shortly after the 2004 election results became final. But I find myself curiously detached from the process, this time around.

First of all, I’m sorely disappointed in the American people. Oh, they’re all for change…now. They see what a mess Bush has gotten us into…finally. They’re crying, screaming, clamoring for a drastic, sweeping leadership transformation…at last. I’m sorry…for me, it’s a case of way too little, far too late.

So, when people tell me this upcoming election promises to be the most exciting in their lives, I just…cringe. And shake my head. I can’t help feeling they showed up four years late for that boat.

We could have made a statement, could have made a difference, in 2004. We could have shown the world what we thought of Bush and his cronies and their power grabbing, world-dominating, civil-rights-stealing ways. We could have served notice that it isn’t all about the money. That the peons of the world do not prosper or starve, live or die, at the will of the rich and powerful.

Instead, we granted the Evil Empire another four years. Four more years to dig deeper into the cookie jar. For more years to hone and polish the art of the spin, the embellishment of the truth, the outright lie. Four more years to brand the values of greed, dishonesty and arrogance indelibly upon of the Spirit of America.

But change is in the wind. It has to be. We won't be allowed to give Bush another four years (thank god.) So we're hopping up and down and clapping our hands at the excitement of it all!

As the Democratic candidates spar and bicker and one-up each other right down to the wire.

And John McCain sits quietly on his nomination, and the Republicans contrive to dial down the rhetoric and bide their time. Hoping that, in doing so, they will morph the GOP into looking like the perfect alternative to…the GOP.

It looks like it could be a very long four more years….

Settling In and Rearranging (or trying to...)

Now, I suppose I should make it look like I really LIVE here…

I’ve been screwing around with the template, trying to get it to where I can customize it, but that doesn’t seem to be working for me. And I am not, by god, going to abandon this blog, too, and start all over AGAIN! I’ll make it look like I want it and do the things I want it to do if it takes forever.

And it might…

Anyhow, to any of you sliding over here from "Coming to Terms…." (y’know, I get a little misty just typing the name…)

Welcome.

Let’s see if we can curl up and get comfy here. Or feisty. Or whatever mood strikes us.

Lisa :-]

Very Cool

Today the city of Scappoose held its annual festival. Which bring the entire community to the blocks right outside the door of my café.

But what we learned from enduring the past two years' Sauerkraut Festivals is this:

Yes, the entire city parties right outside the doors…but they bring their own food.

So, this year, we decided to just…be open. And let the citizens of our fair town feel obligated to buy a cup of coffee so that they can use our bathrooms. Sigh!

Business being what it was, husband and I had the opportunity to "do" the festival. Which took all of about ten minutes. We did, however, come up with one incredible find.

An original oil painting, entered into the fine art contest at the library: 


Look familiar?
 
Probably not.
 
Hint: The painting is titled "Café in the Heat of the Day."
 
My café. On the right. Tables on the sidewalk and all.
 
Very cool.

Our Worst Nightmare

Sarah Palin is our worst nightmare.

She’s not, as she claims, a pit bull with lipstick.

She’s George W. Bush with lipstick.

She’s everything we’ve loathed, everything that has gone wrong with this country for the past eight years. She’s an uncurious, uninspired, unflinching Fundamentalist. She has deep, deep ties to the oil industry. She’s uneducated to a laughable degree…at least Bush’s rich family made sure he was availed of an undistinguished tenure at Yale. You want to talk inexperience? She’s lorded it over the less than 700,000 souls that inhabit America’s largest and most remote state for just short of two years. Before that, she spent ten years in the city government of Wasilla, Alaska—with a population of not even10,000. Foreign affairs? Here is a woman who freely admits that she has not spent much time thinking about the War in Iraq. Though she seems to have guessed enough about it to call it “God’s work.”

Put a dick on her and she could BE George W. Bush.

Do we want, need or under any circumstances hanker to be saddled with four moreyears of this sort of character in high office in Washington, D.C.?

Not on your life.

She’s an insult to women, an insult to democracy, and an insult to government in general.

And when I think of all the worthy women who have toiled and fought and cajoled and struggled in American government for the past 100 years—women like Bella Abzug and Madeleine Albright, Elizabeth Dole and Hillary Clinton, and, yes, even Condoleeza Rice—I swear that if this, this person becomes the first woman to be elected to high office in this country, I will have to seriously consider renouncing my citizenship and moving to Canada. Or Europe. Or any nation that couldn’t so disregard the good work of so many and award the prize to a hand-picked charlatan from the Evil Empire.

If Sarah Palin is elected Vice President of the United States, it will be the death blow for my faith in or respect for the American people.

We may not be able to change the minds of those who have allowed their pastor or their bible or their red-neck neighbors to dictate their vote. But we can and we must energize any and all voters likely to sympathize with the Obama ticket to VOTE. Don’t take for granted that the other guy is going to make sure thecountry is put in safe, sane hands. Without every possible opposing vote, there could be just enough nut-jobs to give the nod to a McCain/Palin victory.

We’ve weathered so many Bush-generated disasters that perhaps we are desensitized to them. But, mark my words, we haven’t begun to witness the kind of destruction a Sarah Palin administration—should Mr. McCain die in office—would visit upon this country and the world.

Stand up. Vote. Throw these ignorant good ole boys--and gals--out of Washington to the back of beyond, where they belong…

On Poor Choices and Sarah Palin

I’m sure Sarah Palin is a very nice woman. And she is probably even a competent governor. Of a very large state. With very few people. And a budget fat with oil and gas revenues.
I have to wonder what exactly John McCain was thinking with this pick. Palin has no national credentials. No one has ever heard of her or the dinky Alaskan town in which she cut her political teeth. Her main claim to fame seems to be a strong tie to that mystical, magical, black substance that currently rules the fate of the free world. Isn’t that just exactly what we need? Four more years of someone intrinsically connected to the Big O plunging fingers into pies in Washington D.C.?

And now…we find out she has a seventeen-year-old unmarried daughter who is five months pregnant. Okaaayyyy…exactly what was that little factoid supposed to bring to the national political table? Oh, yeah….that’s another thing for which our nation has been crying out: More validation for teen-agers to have careless, unprotected sex, get knocked up, and give birth to the next generation of young people with dysfunctional moral compasses. That “one man, one woman” sanctity of marriage thing that the right-wingers claim is the basic building block of our society seems to be getting a bit of a bashing from its own side of the aisle. Looks like they can't even get their kids to swallow it.

The moral values people would have a field day with this, if it was a Democratic candidate’s daughter sporting a “baby bump.” I’m dying to see how they spin this for a (recently) prominent player in the good ole GOP.

I’ll be the first to admit that American voters have made really dumb-ass choices in the voting booth over the past eight years. In fact, we are pretty much a laughing stock on the world political scene. McCain must be counting on some truly overwhelming idiocy out here in the electorate… Apparently, he believes we don’t require experience, competency, or charisma of our female political hopefuls. Any person sporting a nice set of tits will rope in the gals’ vote. Oh. My. God.

Up until now, I had leaned toward conceding that McCain, who probably has the upper hand in the coming election due to his general whiteness, might not make an utterly objectionable chief executive. No one, I thought, could possibly be as stone stupid as the Current Occupant.
Recent events have caused me to reconsider that opinion…

little squares cut
from the past
windows
or doors
flat and neat
no dimension
no substance
no emotion

when I look at them
I’m there, but not
I see, but I don’t
through those little doors
little windows
forever sealed

On Religion: Pros and Cons

I’ve written in this space previously about my spiritual agnosticism. I’m not an atheist. I believe there exists a spiritual plane to which we are intimately connected, and about which we know almost nothing. Our chance encounters with the power of that realm have led us to create our pitiful forms of religion—mankind’s weak attempts to put something infinitely too huge for our comprehension into terms that we can understand. And manipulate…

Religious clashes have led to some of the most heinous human behaviors in recorded history. For whatever reason, once a group of modern homo sapiens has crafted a set of beliefs based on its perception of the Source of All Things, it has felt obligated to use those beliefs as a club with which to beat other groups into submission. We’ve gone so far as to weave the concept of "blood sacrifice" into our religious fabric, as a means of sanctifying our primal and uniquely human drive to kill large numbers of our own species. Oceans of blood have soaked the pages of history in the name of "God." The overriding question that comes to my mind in view of all this is, "What the hell is wrong with us???"

Clearly, I am no fan of organized religion. And I’ve often thought that if we could purge religion from modern society, the world would be immeasurably better off. Which is not to say that we could then live in blissful moral anarchy. There need to be rules, need to be codes of ethics in order for human beings to coexist peacefully. Yes, religion has traditionally bade us slit the throat of the guy who doesn’t believe as we do, but it has also passed down admonitions to feed the hungry, care for the indigent, honor our elders, and "Do unto others as you would have done unto you." If we do away with religion, what delivery system are we going to use to express and pass on those codes?

My own recent experience has led me to wonder about this. In the past two years, I’ve had the chance to work with young people of varying religious and social backgrounds. Some of the girls who work for me have had little or no religious training. Others were raised in strictly religious households. And there are marked differences in the way these two groups function.

The non-churched group has real problems with moral ambiguity. Having never been instilled with the codes of behavior that are part and parcel of our human "faith," they’ve been left to their own devices to create the filters through which they view their own behavior and make decisions. They’ve been forced to rely upon something else which permeates every aspect of their lives to form their moral foundations: the media. The media have assumed the role of moral compass. Bounced upon the knee of modern media, these children absorb such credos as "Does it work for me?" "How do I get mine?" and "What’s in it for me?" The idea that their behavior and their choices might have real consequences for other people is entirely secondary, if it’s considered at all.

In contrast, the young people who have been raised in a strict religious atmosphere have been endowed with a completely different set of filters through which they view the world. They were born into a belief system that set forth specific rules of behavior. They were brought up believing that they answered to a higher authority than themselves—higher yet than their parents, teachers or other earthly authorities. They’ve understood almost from infancy that any decision they made needed to be made in the context of that authority. They understand that their actions have implications that go far beyond themselves.

I see this in my own life. I was born and raised Catholic. By the time I reached high school, I had almost entirely rejected the confines of the faith in which I was raised. The bigoted, unimaginative written-in-stone-ness of the dogma drove me away as I grew old enough to chafe at the restrictions of it. But the moral foundation I received as a child of the church—any church—was mine for a lifetime. Catholicism and Judaism have been half-jokingly called religions of guilt. We joke about the knee-jerk guilt we experience whenever we try to color outside the lines of our upbringing. But I’m beginning to think that guilt is not entirely a bad thing. A little guilt—a twinge of understanding that what I do creates ripples that go far beyond myself—can be a healthy and necessary thing.

Those young people I encounter who were given a religious upbringing are now at the age where they are questioning, and in some cases, rejecting, their parents’ religious views. But they will carry the moral imprint with them for the rest of their lives. It will serve them well. It will make them more compassionate, more generous, more respectful and more aware of their duty to others than their unchurched peers. Viewed simply from my own little corner of the world, it certainly has made them better employees!

There are those of my generation who bear some responsibility for the lack of moral upbringing of the youngsters I’m working with now. Our churchy childhoods clashed head-on with the social changes of the sixties and seventies. We had to reject the conservative confines of the faiths in which we had been raised in order to embrace loftier ideals like civil rights, world peace, women’s rights, gay rights… As a result, many of us made the conscious decision NOT to church our children. Let them go on their own voyage of spiritual discovery, we thought, when they reached the age of reason (whatever that is.) It seemed like a logical and fair line of thinking. But in the end, it backfired.

Evidently a spiritual quest is best performed from the platform of having rules in place to accept, reject or build upon. We will seek to change or improve upon the moral code handed us by previous generations; but if we were never given any kind of ethics, we don’t seem inclined to go looking for them. At least, not in the right places. If parents leave the void, it will be filled with whatever pop culture jams into it. So by the time our children reached "the age of reason," they were perfectly satisfied with the self-absorbed me-first lifestyle with which they had been stuffed since they were old enough to watch their first television commercial. They're not the least bit inspired to seek out a new set of rules.

I have heard young couples say that, though they don’t go to church now, they will start going as soon as they have kids, because "kids need that." And I have thought, "How hypocritical!" But now, I’m not so sure they aren’t correct. Kids DO need that. Some of it, anyway. So how do we go about rejecting the negatives of organized religion while preserving the benefits? How many centuries will it take mankind to come up with some other way to codify positive moral values and pass them on to succeeding generations, while leaving out the mumbo jumbo of blood sacrifice and the admonishment to beat the snot out of those who don’t view the Almighty in exactly the same way?

I don’t think we have that much time.