In defense of uh, junk food

I start this post with the melancholy knowledge that to some of you, I will be defending the indefensible.

After all,  my friends tend to be well-educated, middle or upper-middle-class men and women.

We know about the evils of preservatives and food coloring.

When we can afford it, we buy organic.

Those of us who can or care to cook, do.  Our idea of indulgence in food is pizza from Trader Joe's.

Some of us have medical reasons not to touch the chips or Hershey's, not to dip into the dip or eat a pint of Cherry Garcia..

But not all.

Lamenting the demise of Hostess Twinkies (as quite a few of my friends have done online) is one thing.

But actually eating one? Quite another.

Fat.  SUGAR.  Cream made out of heaven-knows-what.

A square a day of dark chocolate? That's healthy.

But Little Debbie snacks? Gotta be a bunch of bad mommas buyin' that stuff -- or perhaps dads who don't know better.

Consign me to the ranks of the ignorant -- or worse, the defiant.

My larders brim over with various types of crackers and chips. Not only do I bring milk AND dark chocolate into the house, but I order it from Amazon and Great Britain.  My son's lunch has both Oreos and Lay's Potato Chips, leading him to ask why his dinner looks like it came over with the Puritans and his lunch like a meal fit for decadent Rome.

I have no idea.

All I can say is that into everyone's life a little trash must fall.  Trashy food. Trashy novels. Trashy love affairs.

And if you don't provide a little exposure to food, movies and books that may not be up to your ideals,  kids are going to look for it somewhere else. (Love affairs, they can find on their own).

Personally, I enjoy a handful of chocolate chips in my cereal or a soft-serve ice cream cone on a hot night in Glenmoore.

No paragon of culinary virtue I.

In fact, turning on the stove often seems like the beginning of an amazing race to dinner.

But I'd rather my kids knew how to eat less than perfect food in moderation, rather than see it as forbidden fruit.

Or that's my justification for that huge plastic bin of chocolate candy, anyway.

I had to buy it --because the Halloween candy is long gone.

They love their children too

Someone prayed for Palestine on Facebook and Israel tonight, as bombs whirred between the militants in Gaza and the Army in Israel.

Tonight, the Israeli army  prepared for what looks like an invasion.

 Palestine. I thought my Facebook friend was very brave to use the word.

Because that's how bad it's gotten over here.  Not to mention over there.

On the battleground itself, a land drenched in the blood of historic hatred  another battle is simmering -- a virtual war of phrases, pictures and fury on Twitter, Facebook, and other social media.

There are few of us here who dare to take a stance that recognizes the suffering of the Palestinian people.  If we comment on it, we risk being branded traitors, secret militants who doubt Israel's right to exist.

But to be able to hold in tension Israel's right to exist in peace, without constant shelling and hatred, and a Palestinian right to self-determination doesn't make us traitors. It makes us human beings who have a different opinion from you, perhaps.

Those friends of mine who have been to the West Bank and Gaza and have spoken to Palestinians come back changed -- so often, meeting the stranger in the flesh, and seeing their face, changes you always.

They don't hate Israel or wish for it to go away.  Instead, they seem touched by the misery of the people of the West Bank and Gaza -- at the same time that they want safety and prosperity for the people of Israel.

To recognize the appalling state of the people of Palestine is not to ignore the fear of the Israelis who have to spend the night in bomb shelters -- or the nihilistic rage of the men of Hamas, who think they can fight the best-equipped and perhaps most determined army in the Middle East and win.

Or perhaps they don't even care about "winning" -- maybe they just want the loyalty of the starving people they lead, those who have come to think that violence is their only hope. When did violence solve anything? It is the last drug of the desperate.

 Even now, as you read these words, people are dying. Be sure of it.

Most likely, because of the sheer volume and efficiency of the Israeli weapons, they are the people of Gaza.

But in the days to come, days that look pretty violent and filled with horror at the moment, it's very possible that more  Israelis will die.

I'm going to cry for all of them.   And when I do, I will wonder, as I have so many times in the past,  why we as human beings can't seem to walk in the murky middle, seeing truth on both sides -- and working for a just peace.

Recently I have questioned why we, as a species, are so bent to fast judgment.  Thank goodness I believe in a God of mercy, one reaches out to His penitent and humble people in love. I'd hate to be judged by some of those so eager to hurl names and insults.

Our only hope on God is founded.

Pray for the people of Israel -- and the people of Palestine -- as the bombs continue to fall.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2012/11/16/the-israeli-palestinian-politics-of-a-bloodied-childs-photo/?hpid=z1

The Blue Moon Effect

Writing is the closest I come to piloting an airplane (and be thankful for that, gentle reader).  Though unmistakably a craft, it does not feel like work,most of the time.  I write--therefore I am.  On many occasions, putting fingers to keyboard has saved my sanity.

I don't review a book to please an author.  I'd probably be a lot wealthier if I did public relations.

Yet it still makes me feel really good to think that I, in some way, approached or touched on an author's intent -- particularly when reviewing works of fiction.  One can almost as easily be wrong as correct.

So thank you, Beth Kephardt, for sharing -- your book is rich and multidimensional and still lingers in my mind, like the smell of orange on one's fingers after the fruit itself is consumed.

http://beth-kephart.blogspot.com/2012/11/the-philadelphia-inquirer-review-of.html

Life after God

Does the death (and life) of writer/philopher/spokesman Paul Kurtz end a chapter in the secular humanist movement?

Or did his work mark a step out of the shadows for the increasingly vocal freethinkers who ask: what do we say after we say "no God"?

http://lancasteronline.com/article/local/774184_Column--Secularism-after-Kurtz--A-freethinker-s-immortality.html

The future has arrived

As I drove to work this morning, I had the radio tuned to NPR, as usual (in dating site profiles, I have described myself as a NPR-listening, tea-swilling moderate, caveat emptor). This morning one of the guests, post-election, was the Washington Post commentator, and former George W. Bush speechwriter, Michael Gerson.

It is he who said, looking back bravely and soberly on the wreckage of Republican hopes for the Presidency this time around, that the future has arrived -- and that it is time for his party to face this truth.

What does that mean, exactly?

Take off one's ideological lenses for a minute, and it means this --  there weren't enough white voters to ensure a Romney victory.  Or perhaps it is more accurate to say that there weren't enough male, older, white voters to get Romney into the White House.

Yes, there were women who voted for Mitt Romney.  They were, in large part (though not completely, of course), older white women.  There were Hispanics who voted for the former Massachusetts governor (but less than 30 percent). Romney held on to a lot of independent voters, but it's possible to argue that many of these soi-disant "independents" were actually Tea Party conservatives to begin with.

Younger voters, minorities, and women gave Barack Obama victory. More than 45 percent of the folk who went for Obama were minority voters.

All over America, Republicans are wondering how they can appeal to minority voters.

But my concern has little to do with ideology.

Many white voters went to the polls and voted their values and their values were much more in harmony with those of Mitt Romney than those of Barack Obama.

A contest based on opposing perspectives was fair.

But some people are also fearful.

Bad behavior, like the ongoing stream of racial innuendo directed against the President, ought not to be tolerated.

But neither is it helpful to tell those who are afraid that they are bad people, morons, or lower than you, when they may not even be able to name the emotions that impel them.

Fear itself is most natural. And that's one emotion that we all share, whatever ethnic or racial group we ally ourselves with.

I hope that we can find a way, in our communities, to talk openly and honestly about our fears as well as our values. I hope that we will be open to the truth that we are all, in our own ways, biased against each other.
I hope that we can admit the possibility that each one of us is made in God's image -- and see through her or his eyes, if only for a minute.

For the truth is, of course, that there is no such thing as a "black" person or a "white" person -- we are, genetically speaking, a mix of all kinds of ancient ancestors. We are all, if you go back far enough, brothers and sisters, husbands and wives, uncles, cousins and aunts.

That which unites us is so much more than that which divides us.

Though we haven't figured this out as a species, perhaps we could, on a personal level, act as though it was true?

Yesterday I spoke to a neighbor, one with a yard sign on his lawn that identified him as a Republican. It's time for us to come together, he said -- whoever wins.  He's sick of the influence of money on elections, and the sense that he gets from those in power that having money means more than helping people.

I left that conversation feeling strangely hopeful.

The perils ahead are great -- but we are much, much stronger if we face them together.  Even if, sometimes, we make each other quake.

How do you define "apocalypse"?

Here in our corner of southeastern Pennsylvania, we were, relatively speaking, unscathed.

Most of  us, though not all, had power -- or lost it for a couple of days.

Some streets are closed off due to trees toppled during Sandy's wrath on Monday and Tuesday. 

Grocery stores were a bit jammed.  Geez, there were three people ahead of me on line at Trader Joe's. 

So why do I still feel so sick inside? 

I can't speak for you --   we all react to major events so differently.

But having grown up in New York,  I know those dark streets. 

I've taxi'd through Chinatown,  strolled the Lower Manhattan street, gotten stuck in a car near City Hall more time than I could count.

My heart breaks for New Yorkers, as it did in the terrible days after September 11, 2001.

The lovely twenty-something new teacher and her male friend, crushed by trees in Brooklyn as they walked the dog.

The boys swept out of their mothers arms to a watery grave.

The young woman burned alive by a wire as she went to photograph the storm.

That's not to mention the elderly without power in the cold, the younger folk who can't get to work, the hospital personnel who are stuck until someone comes to relieve their five-day shift.

And let's not speak of the battered, devastated Jersey and Long Island beaches.

What bothers me the most, I think, is that if New York City and our country had taken appropriate steps a decade or two ago (or even, in the city's case, a couple of years ago), we probably never would have had this disaster.

Melting ice fuels rising seas.  As the temperature creeps higher, the water warms, fueling even more violent storms.  Hurricane Sandy, that might once have moved out into the waters of the Atlantic,  made an almost unprecedented move west. This is because perhaps, research tells us, the jet stream is lessening.

Are we bringing on our own apocalypse?

Judging by the posts on  Facebook, including mine, we are mostly glad to have escaped what could have been a ghastly experience -- what was, for many, beyond terrifying.

But have our perspectives changed? Will we, would we be willing to make the financial and lifestyle sacrifices needed to help heal our broken world?

I doubt it.

Instead, we will, in most likelihood, keep driving to work in our SUV's, repairing our beach homes, being quiet when we need to speak out for green energy, and acting as if nothing has changed. 

Maybe it hasn't changed.

For us.

This time.

What have we learned?

My reflections, in my column for Lancaster (the neighboring diocese of Central Pa.), on what we here in the D of P have learned, or could learn, from our years in the desert with Bishop Bennison.

http://lancasteronline.com/article/local/765370_Column--Tumultuous-chapter-nears-end-in-Episcopal-diocese.html