Adieu the simple mind

I sat across the table from a friend from church today.

We didn't stop talking for more than an hour and a half.

While we were supposed to be chatting about interfaith and ecumenical ministry, we spent most of the time talking politics.

He's one of the few people, I found today,  with whom I can discuss politics without causing myself gritted molar distress.

I find it hard to develop an opinion, he said to me, because the issues are so complex.

Then he unleashed a torrent of facts, ideas and sobering examples of people who were only getting their news from one media outlet -- and had opinions to match.

He's swung back and forth between our two large political parties. Neither of us is particularly happy with the status quo.  Both of us have questions. Big questions.

Such conversations, I am afraid, are increasingly rare in America.

Earlier that morning, I'd sat in the car in the Cabrini parking lot, listening to "Morning Edition" as the anchors confirmed the news that Ambassador Chris Stevens and three of his staff had been killed the night before. I listened as the Egypt-based reporter's voice broke when she got the news.  Stevens had been very much respected, she said.

Then I wept.

Wept, as many Americans probably did this morning, for the death of a good man, a man who was driven by  faith.  Faith in the people he served  Faith in the people with whom he served. Faith in the power of an ideal larger than himself.

When I heard that Republican candidate Mitt Romney had criticized the "Obama Administration" as apologists on the evening of September 11th, I was horrified.

Yesterday, by general and unspoken agreement, was a day on which the nation was supposed to rise above politics.

Apparently Romney didn't get the message.

He's been on the "Obama is an apologist" kick for a while -- and when he saw an opportunity, he took it.

It wasn't long before the Administration fired back by telling him and millions of Americans how "shocked" they were by his comments ( remarks which preceded our knowledge of Ambassador Stevens' death).

Stop.

Please.

Just stop, damn it.

Can't we have a day to grieve before hurling accusations?

One day's vacation from rhetorical excess.

A day to let the families of the murdered men cope with their own and much more valid shock?

President Obama's got his hands full right now.  We don't really know what's going to happen. It could be that he's going to mess up the United States response and we will inexorably be drawn into the chaos that is Middle Eastern politics right now.

It could be, on the other hand, that he's going to give it his best in a world with increasingly complex problems.

Syria remains a huge bloodstain on the world's conscience -- and in decency today, we may grieve too for those innocents who have gotten trapped in an increasingly barbaric war.

That seems appropriate.

Moderation seems appropriate.

Neither Romney nor Obama are idealists, or passionately engaged with other citizens in a way that reveals their hearts.  It reads as though Stevens was, perhaps -- and he's the one who is dead.

Maybe that tells us something.

But it's not something I want to hear tonight.

Leave me alone. Leave us alone.

Have you no decency...at long last?

What would it take, politicians, for you to care first about the people you serve?

Democracy is not  a game...and grief not a garment, to be put on and taken off at will.

To take a day or two to be respectfully quiet, or to unite with our Commander in Chief, is what most of
Congress chose to do.

Because they know something about loss.

We move on.

They weep still.

The 28th Amendment: the right to free oppression

Are we morphing into a nation of babies....and is that dangerous?


http://open.salon.com/blog/nocheapshots/2012/09/02/a_nation_of_whiners

A matter of (mis)trust

What happens when a therapeutic relationship is over....


http://open.salon.com/blog/nocheapshots/2012/08/21/the_good_doctor

Young evangelicals: key to climate change future?

Are young evangelicals, with their openness to working across religious lines when it comes to social justice issues, part of a coalition that will help us become more responsible environmental stewards?




http://lancasteronline.com/article/local/720642_Column--The-climate-and-young-evangelicals.html

Why Missouri's Todd Akin's rape comment offends me

The darker subtext of Akin's 'off-handed' comments: sexual violence against women.  It's still a present and common reality among girls -- and women in America.

I thought we had a societal agreement that rape was rape -- and that rape wasn't consensual. How ignorant I was.

http://open.salon.com/blog/nocheapshots/2012/08/21/taking_todd_akin_very_personally

Fiddling while we burn

I have some pretty dark thoughts about our earth's future.

But mostly, I keep them to myself.

They sound too apocalyptic -- and frankly, too paranoid.

I keep reminding myself, however, that I'm not generally regarded as a crazy person.

Nor am I prone to fantasy -- though I am bent to wasting time.

Precious time.

Time that might be usefully done manning the gates as the barbarians storm them.

I thought I was alone, or nearly alone, in my fantasies, until I heard the beginning of an interview with a nature writer, and novelist named Peter Heller.

Heller, who generally writes about real-world travel, decided to imagine a world in which most of the population had been wiped out by a pandemic.

He said that he thinks a lot about extinction -- and, in the process, alluded to the sixth great extinction.

Wow.  When it came to the first five, I'd missed the memo!

Was this a theory by a bunch of wackos?

Indeed not.

Some scientists argue that within 300 years, seventy-five percent of species could be gone -- because of human behavior. (Of course, they could also be saved, many of them, by changing the manner in which we live).

I'm not alone in my grim thoughts, my "Hunger Games" nightmares.

Some comfort.

Today, (thanks so much, NPR),  "Fresh Air" featured Michael Lemonick, a science writer from Climate Central, who basically says that we may have passed the point of no return.

But life goes on, doesn't it?

What I find incredible is how many of us have become seduced (myself included), by the pseudo-community of the Internet, focused not on action but on our tweets and our status updates.

Political debates become reduced to dueling pictures taken from some aggregator's Facebook page -- or harsh words exchanged in virtual time.

Cute animal pictures vie with news about the kids and the grands.

It's not that any of this is bad -- it's that it is all so stunningly irrelevant to the size of the threat we face.

Already the drought, for example, has raised prices for corn and soybeans -- how will that affect the food supply, not solely for the world's poor, but for those of us who live in relative comfort?

What are our moral obligations?

How does this speak to our faith -- or lack of faith?

I realize that this isn't a popular point of view -- so I rarely share it, except with people I know are similarly inclined.

And I also understand that many of us feel powerless, so we focus on what we can, or believe we can, affect.

Yet it seems to me that there is power in community, in shared goals, in aspirations that connect us to something greater.

In many ways, virtual communities in democratic countries seem to have made us less, not more free.

I am not so ignorant as to think myself more impassioned about the future of our planet, and our children, than you.

Perhaps I am unduly pessimistic.

Possibly I am too convinced, too self-righteous.

But I wrestle with whether I am, in some way, supporting a denial that may prove, frankly, harmful, or ultimately fatal to our species.

And I'm not sure, not at all sure, what to do to salve my conscience, if not make a true difference.

Perhaps these small decisions have an effect.

Those of us who are alarmists have an obligation, at the least, to find out.

Climate change -- watch those evangelicals

American opinions on whether climate change is occurring seem to vary, as fickle as the weather.

If you want to see the future of climate change "deciders," watch evangelicals.  That's where the debate is the hottest, as it were.

In deciding not to spotlight "deniers," I made a deliberate decision to step outside the "he said, he said" perspective journalists often take when analyzing a complex issue.  To me, climate change is a fact -- hurling insults over the great divide doesn't move the ball forward.

Go ahead. Debate me (grin).

http://lancasteronline.com/article/local/710799_Column--Evangelicals-face-climatic-challenges.html