nipo masumboni...I am in Masumbo, quite possibly my favorite place in the world. We went swimming yesterday, in the morning when there were no clouds. The sun shone beautifully on the massive boulders and ruddy currents of the Mto Ruaha. Paul and I clambered around on the rocks and boulder-surfed the main current and I partook of the opportunity to impart a little well-needed soap upon mine armpits. Life is good. We've (and by we I mean Paul, with a little kibbitzing on my behalf) been putting the finishing touches on the new director's house, and hobnobbing in the evenings with Iringa's finest and dining alternately between the Jacaranda and the Hasty Tasty Too.
It's quite phenomenal to see what has happened in the two years since I was here last. Abbas has married, Masumbo is getting a (admittedly slow) wireless internet hub, the solar water purification program (using cast-off plastic bottles and corrugated tin) is in full-swing, the craft shop has expanded fourfold and has a coffeeshop that serves panini, the bat-box program is getting onto its feet, Andy and Suzie got another baby and the closest thing anyone locally has ever seen to a Vespa...
And other things haven't changed at all. The night watchmen still chill out by the kitchen and are still good for both laughter and good conversation. The river is still the ultimate playground. And, oddly enough, people in the Iringa marketplace still remember me...and are as sharp bargainers as ever.
It's good to be here. Good people, good places, good food, good times.
14 December 2006
05 December 2006
on the road again...
I love travelling long distances--it's not just seeing new things, it's taking your entire world and routine apart and being free to dilly-dally and dawdle and mess with it so long as you don't miss a flight.
And, you get to experience random things. Like, for instance, being chastised by a guy who barely spoke English for sleeping while wearing my shoes at the interfaith prayer room in London's Heathrow Airport...a drab little cube with an arrow pointing to Mecca and a bench where weary travellers like myself can practice their own form of contemplative prayer. I thought it was awesome that I got to slumber there and hear/see the Arabic poetry in motion that is daily Muslim prayer. I get the impression that the drab cube way off the beaten track exists so that faithful Muslims who work the airport's various menial jobs can excercise their spiritual duty of daily prayers (replete with foot and hand washing, rugs, and vigorous Sunna/Shia debates) without freaking out international travellers. It's a far cry from the quite posh "Meditation Room" here at Amsterdam's Schiphol.
By the way. I learned last night that if you use the loo's next to the exclusive executive travel lounges (where economy class people like me are not allowed) you can score yourself all sorts of perks. Like free showers. Hot showers, with no time limits (granted, there are no towels if you aren't a paying customer, but who needs towels when you are a well-equipped, moisture-wicking hiker sort?)
On the downside, if you spend the night in a Dutch airport, you will be serenaded nonstop by bad/cheezy/sappy American pop music. It's their version of elevator music. Grrrr...need Gorillaz!
Well, I'm almost out of time. Next stop: Tanzania. cheerio!
And, you get to experience random things. Like, for instance, being chastised by a guy who barely spoke English for sleeping while wearing my shoes at the interfaith prayer room in London's Heathrow Airport...a drab little cube with an arrow pointing to Mecca and a bench where weary travellers like myself can practice their own form of contemplative prayer. I thought it was awesome that I got to slumber there and hear/see the Arabic poetry in motion that is daily Muslim prayer. I get the impression that the drab cube way off the beaten track exists so that faithful Muslims who work the airport's various menial jobs can excercise their spiritual duty of daily prayers (replete with foot and hand washing, rugs, and vigorous Sunna/Shia debates) without freaking out international travellers. It's a far cry from the quite posh "Meditation Room" here at Amsterdam's Schiphol.
By the way. I learned last night that if you use the loo's next to the exclusive executive travel lounges (where economy class people like me are not allowed) you can score yourself all sorts of perks. Like free showers. Hot showers, with no time limits (granted, there are no towels if you aren't a paying customer, but who needs towels when you are a well-equipped, moisture-wicking hiker sort?)
On the downside, if you spend the night in a Dutch airport, you will be serenaded nonstop by bad/cheezy/sappy American pop music. It's their version of elevator music. Grrrr...need Gorillaz!
Well, I'm almost out of time. Next stop: Tanzania. cheerio!
03 December 2006
27 November 2006
Well. As the newest member of Houghton College's crack security force, I am once more enjoying the perks of being paid to sit around waiting for stuff to happen. But now I have free, unlimited access to the internet--the perfect place to while away hours without the needless fear of being productive or useful.
And since I've finally got access to a computer less than five years old, I've been happily introduced to incredible time-wasting power of Google Earth. Never before has a mere computer program come so close to actually making me nauseous. If you start, for example, with **** Centerville Drive, Houghton NY 14744--my current living address--you will see satellite photographs dimly displaying the foresty setting of the northern "suburbs" of Houghton, NY as witnessed from a simulated altitude of 4,485 feet (a little under a mile up). Type in "Moshi, Tanzania" and the earth falls away beneath you as you soar, digitally, to a simulated altitude of 1,503 miles in less than two seconds. The earth moves beneath you as you move eastward, crossing the Atlantic ocean in the time it takes you to sneeze, and suddenly you are falling, quite rapidly, crossing all those tiny West African countries, gaining speed as the Democratic Republic of the Congo speads out beneath you, falling even faster as you move over Lake Victoria and the massive Mt. Kilimanjaro fills your vision...
Actually, your computer screen. At any rate, your descent slows as the land becomes blurry and green, as if your eyes were sparing you your impending impact, a moment frozen in terrified agony in your head. And you are there. 7,657.23 miles away, as the crow flies if he happens to be a crow capable of cross-oceanic endeavors and feels so inclined. It's quite disorienting, at first.
And, in six days, this old crow, charting a course from Buffalo, NY to Washington DC(282.5 miles), across the Atlantic Ocean to London, the UK (3,672.31 miles), take a short layover (6 hours), then hop to Amsterdam (the shortest leg yet at 230.22 miles), followed by the longest layover in the trip (16 hours, overnight), and then embark on the longest flight (a whopping 4,275.65 miles) to Kilimanjaro International Airport, Moshi, Tanzania, arriving on the third day of his sojourn, logging an extra 45.13 miles overland (as even the average crow could fly, with proper motivation) and an additional 803.45 air miles (should the airline pilots choose to follow the incredibly overachieving crows and their ridiculously straight lines).
Ahhh. Thanks to all who chose to contribute their opinions and the ever-accommodating Amazon.com, I will be accompanying myself with good reading. Thanks to none of you, I'll be provisioning myself with granola bars, oatmeal, crackers, cheese, and a beef stick for the duration of what will be, if all goes according to schedule, something like 52 straight hours of airline flights and layovers. Note to self: bring the nalgene bottle.
Well. Cheerio! I'm off to explore blog-land and try to find Mollie's blog again. (hint, hint...Mollie). Until next shift, cheerio!
And since I've finally got access to a computer less than five years old, I've been happily introduced to incredible time-wasting power of Google Earth. Never before has a mere computer program come so close to actually making me nauseous. If you start, for example, with **** Centerville Drive, Houghton NY 14744--my current living address--you will see satellite photographs dimly displaying the foresty setting of the northern "suburbs" of Houghton, NY as witnessed from a simulated altitude of 4,485 feet (a little under a mile up). Type in "Moshi, Tanzania" and the earth falls away beneath you as you soar, digitally, to a simulated altitude of 1,503 miles in less than two seconds. The earth moves beneath you as you move eastward, crossing the Atlantic ocean in the time it takes you to sneeze, and suddenly you are falling, quite rapidly, crossing all those tiny West African countries, gaining speed as the Democratic Republic of the Congo speads out beneath you, falling even faster as you move over Lake Victoria and the massive Mt. Kilimanjaro fills your vision...
Actually, your computer screen. At any rate, your descent slows as the land becomes blurry and green, as if your eyes were sparing you your impending impact, a moment frozen in terrified agony in your head. And you are there. 7,657.23 miles away, as the crow flies if he happens to be a crow capable of cross-oceanic endeavors and feels so inclined. It's quite disorienting, at first.
And, in six days, this old crow, charting a course from Buffalo, NY to Washington DC(282.5 miles), across the Atlantic Ocean to London, the UK (3,672.31 miles), take a short layover (6 hours), then hop to Amsterdam (the shortest leg yet at 230.22 miles), followed by the longest layover in the trip (16 hours, overnight), and then embark on the longest flight (a whopping 4,275.65 miles) to Kilimanjaro International Airport, Moshi, Tanzania, arriving on the third day of his sojourn, logging an extra 45.13 miles overland (as even the average crow could fly, with proper motivation) and an additional 803.45 air miles (should the airline pilots choose to follow the incredibly overachieving crows and their ridiculously straight lines).
Ahhh. Thanks to all who chose to contribute their opinions and the ever-accommodating Amazon.com, I will be accompanying myself with good reading. Thanks to none of you, I'll be provisioning myself with granola bars, oatmeal, crackers, cheese, and a beef stick for the duration of what will be, if all goes according to schedule, something like 52 straight hours of airline flights and layovers. Note to self: bring the nalgene bottle.
Well. Cheerio! I'm off to explore blog-land and try to find Mollie's blog again. (hint, hint...Mollie). Until next shift, cheerio!
16 November 2006
okay, so my phone died and I have an appointment with traffic court to explain why I haven't fixed the muffler on my truck which is currently immobile due to a faulty alternator, so this will be very short:
1. and most important. I am going to have a lot of empty time in my life soon and reading will be very important. I'm putting in an order to Amazon by the end of the week. What should I buy/borrow/read? Stipulations: absolutely nothing involving analyses of postmodernism and/or Evangelical Christianity.
2. no, it's not a sin to not feel as I feel; but it is a sin not to feel at all, or to feel only what it is safe or accepted to feel. Remember the ringing condemnation of Christ: We played a dance for you, but you did not dance. We played a dirge for you, and you would not mourn. Mindless obedience or the heartless participation of a safely detached observer, both are missing something vital. If you can witness something beautiful or sorrowful without being moved, isn't there something disturbingly wrong with you? Something problematic with your soul?
Furthermore, there are sins that are not individual: corporate sins of a church that emphasizes dogmatic intellectual conformity over freedom in Christ--freedom to explore, learn, grow, experience, and express in the guidance of the Holy Spirit the fullness of a unique and awe-inspiring human life. A fullness that goes far beyond attaining correct theology or learning how to go through the motions of some particular Christian community.
A church where people are incapable of independent response to something beautiful and human because they have been trained into passively waiting for someone in authority to tell them how to act appropriately is a broken, dysfunctional, lifeless church. If you have to curtail or conform your actions because of the sanctions or standards of a church, isn't there a problem with that church?
Conformity to Christian social structures is not holiness; in the words of Flannery O'COnnor, to be holy is "to be specially, super-alive:" full of the grace of God, and participating fully in the image of God--the creative and oft-surprising image of God that is reflected with special treasure differently and uniquely in each and every human being.
There were at least five people at that concert who, well schooled in the consequences of being nonconformist in Christian communities, disappointedly sat down because they were the only ones standing in a crowd who stood and sat as if someone was holding up signs: "applause," "stand," "clap," "sit," "heel," "stay," "good boy, have a biscuit."
I'm not saying that everyone there should have participated or involved themselves in that particular moment. But they came and provided an environment where they remained disinterested observers while musicians laid their souls bare with incredible grace, beauty and energy; and I find their response tremendously callous and fearful.
Callous hearts worry me, and strong social structures that encourage and discipline (to use Foucoult's words) hearts in conformity or quick obedience to the status quo terrify me. The church should have noting to do with these things. The church is where people come alive in Christ. If music and poetry cannot move you--either to mourn or to dance or even to lift your eyes to heaven and not see whether the people next to you are standing or sitting or leaving--what can?
I don't think it's just a matter of taste--that the polite, detatched spectators in this moment would be fully awake and alive in another context. I think there's some genuine soul pathology at work here. And God wants souls to be alive and involved, sensitive and able to percieve and respond to people in a myriad of ways and expressions.
Well, I could go on. But the pathos of my daily life is calling. Actually, not calling, since my phone won't work. Alas. I'll be in Buffalo next week, working overtime for the holidays, and if I don't call--sorry. no phone...
1. and most important. I am going to have a lot of empty time in my life soon and reading will be very important. I'm putting in an order to Amazon by the end of the week. What should I buy/borrow/read? Stipulations: absolutely nothing involving analyses of postmodernism and/or Evangelical Christianity.
2. no, it's not a sin to not feel as I feel; but it is a sin not to feel at all, or to feel only what it is safe or accepted to feel. Remember the ringing condemnation of Christ: We played a dance for you, but you did not dance. We played a dirge for you, and you would not mourn. Mindless obedience or the heartless participation of a safely detached observer, both are missing something vital. If you can witness something beautiful or sorrowful without being moved, isn't there something disturbingly wrong with you? Something problematic with your soul?
Furthermore, there are sins that are not individual: corporate sins of a church that emphasizes dogmatic intellectual conformity over freedom in Christ--freedom to explore, learn, grow, experience, and express in the guidance of the Holy Spirit the fullness of a unique and awe-inspiring human life. A fullness that goes far beyond attaining correct theology or learning how to go through the motions of some particular Christian community.
A church where people are incapable of independent response to something beautiful and human because they have been trained into passively waiting for someone in authority to tell them how to act appropriately is a broken, dysfunctional, lifeless church. If you have to curtail or conform your actions because of the sanctions or standards of a church, isn't there a problem with that church?
Conformity to Christian social structures is not holiness; in the words of Flannery O'COnnor, to be holy is "to be specially, super-alive:" full of the grace of God, and participating fully in the image of God--the creative and oft-surprising image of God that is reflected with special treasure differently and uniquely in each and every human being.
There were at least five people at that concert who, well schooled in the consequences of being nonconformist in Christian communities, disappointedly sat down because they were the only ones standing in a crowd who stood and sat as if someone was holding up signs: "applause," "stand," "clap," "sit," "heel," "stay," "good boy, have a biscuit."
I'm not saying that everyone there should have participated or involved themselves in that particular moment. But they came and provided an environment where they remained disinterested observers while musicians laid their souls bare with incredible grace, beauty and energy; and I find their response tremendously callous and fearful.
Callous hearts worry me, and strong social structures that encourage and discipline (to use Foucoult's words) hearts in conformity or quick obedience to the status quo terrify me. The church should have noting to do with these things. The church is where people come alive in Christ. If music and poetry cannot move you--either to mourn or to dance or even to lift your eyes to heaven and not see whether the people next to you are standing or sitting or leaving--what can?
I don't think it's just a matter of taste--that the polite, detatched spectators in this moment would be fully awake and alive in another context. I think there's some genuine soul pathology at work here. And God wants souls to be alive and involved, sensitive and able to percieve and respond to people in a myriad of ways and expressions.
Well, I could go on. But the pathos of my daily life is calling. Actually, not calling, since my phone won't work. Alas. I'll be in Buffalo next week, working overtime for the holidays, and if I don't call--sorry. no phone...
10 November 2006
wow
just got back from an internet-less week in Buffalo. put in 86 hours of ambulance work in six days...and a Jars of Clay concert.
conclusion: i love EMS, so long as I'm not burnt out. and Jars so helps you not be burnt out...pretty stinkin' incredible show. BUT...I was absolutely furious at the tepid audience response. I have decided that it is a sin to pay someone stand up in front of you and pour out their heart and energy and emotion and just sit and watch and refuse to answer with the same heart and energy and emootion. The whole audience just stood there. And sat down on cue the moment a slower song began. It's like they were totally incapable of experiencing passion or emotion publically without someone telling them what to do: stand, sit clap, yell, sway from side to side, move around...but only on cue. And only when everybody else is too.
It's wierd. I guess I got pretty indignant...work makes me pretty hardened, pretty deadened, pretty numb. We work in an efficient health-care machine and we are expected to be clinical and detached. It's like working with inks or motor oil or concrete or manure--it gets under your fingernails and in your hair and imbeds itself in your skin and you start smelling like death all the time.
And then something like Jars of Clay or Kate York comes along and sings and dances over you like clean pure spring water and you know what it meant to fishermen and camel drovers and dusty-street-worn tax collecters to have their feet washed by a man who's eyes were everything not deadened and stale. You know you need it, just to stand and let something real and human and intimate wash over you so you can feel something again, anything again, like a real breathing person and not some machine.
It's just plain wrong to see something beautiful or heartbreaking and appreciate it detatchedly. There's no way to avoid it in the information age, with the overwhelming flow of more information than can possibly be attended to. But when you pay someone to come and strip themselves (metaphorically) naked on the stage and be intimately human in the most powerful manner possible, and just sit and watch, that's wrong. Dead wrong. Detachment will kill your soul so fast it's unbelievable. And a little salvation is right there saying, uncross your arms, shake your feet, stop looking for the right cues and right responses, and live in this beautiful moment. Breathe or dance or close your eyes or sign along or something, please give me a sign that your heart is still beating! Respond to beauty and sorrow, feel beautiful or broken yourself through identification with something human, participate somehow for the salvation of your soul...it may not feel safe because it requires creativity and initiative and risk-taking...someone may ridicule you, or despise you, or see you vulnerable, or worst of all you may see yourself in all your glory and weakness...
but the smug alternative is so much worse.
thought of the day:
conclusion: i love EMS, so long as I'm not burnt out. and Jars so helps you not be burnt out...pretty stinkin' incredible show. BUT...I was absolutely furious at the tepid audience response. I have decided that it is a sin to pay someone stand up in front of you and pour out their heart and energy and emotion and just sit and watch and refuse to answer with the same heart and energy and emootion. The whole audience just stood there. And sat down on cue the moment a slower song began. It's like they were totally incapable of experiencing passion or emotion publically without someone telling them what to do: stand, sit clap, yell, sway from side to side, move around...but only on cue. And only when everybody else is too.
It's wierd. I guess I got pretty indignant...work makes me pretty hardened, pretty deadened, pretty numb. We work in an efficient health-care machine and we are expected to be clinical and detached. It's like working with inks or motor oil or concrete or manure--it gets under your fingernails and in your hair and imbeds itself in your skin and you start smelling like death all the time.
And then something like Jars of Clay or Kate York comes along and sings and dances over you like clean pure spring water and you know what it meant to fishermen and camel drovers and dusty-street-worn tax collecters to have their feet washed by a man who's eyes were everything not deadened and stale. You know you need it, just to stand and let something real and human and intimate wash over you so you can feel something again, anything again, like a real breathing person and not some machine.
It's just plain wrong to see something beautiful or heartbreaking and appreciate it detatchedly. There's no way to avoid it in the information age, with the overwhelming flow of more information than can possibly be attended to. But when you pay someone to come and strip themselves (metaphorically) naked on the stage and be intimately human in the most powerful manner possible, and just sit and watch, that's wrong. Dead wrong. Detachment will kill your soul so fast it's unbelievable. And a little salvation is right there saying, uncross your arms, shake your feet, stop looking for the right cues and right responses, and live in this beautiful moment. Breathe or dance or close your eyes or sign along or something, please give me a sign that your heart is still beating! Respond to beauty and sorrow, feel beautiful or broken yourself through identification with something human, participate somehow for the salvation of your soul...it may not feel safe because it requires creativity and initiative and risk-taking...someone may ridicule you, or despise you, or see you vulnerable, or worst of all you may see yourself in all your glory and weakness...
but the smug alternative is so much worse.
thought of the day:
"To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket — safe, dark, motionless, airless — it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside of Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell." --C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves
25 October 2006
Reason #8 to live in Upstate NY
Yeah, baby. The Cronks have (had) a plethora of less-than-beautiful apples in their backyard from the old apple tree. First we grabbed a handy tennis racket and taught them the meaning of...tennis raquet; then we got ol' Bertha out and really put the fear of God in those apples. That's not apple you see exploding off the head of that driver.
That's fear.
word.
and Happy Birthday Nathan. I'm taking my car off the road.
--
and for the record, Chuckles, NO! Dear God no! I do not work for Houghton Custodial. Oh. You said Maintenance. No. Not yet. That would be cool though. I landscape with Creekside Landscaping, a.k.a. Allan Yanda. And pick up odd ambulance shifts in nearby Springville. And cut down trees with Glen Falkhe. And do odd jobs for pretty much anyone who will pay. And maybe in a few weeks, I will wear the grey of the faithful Houghton Safety and Security. We shall see. I'm becoming a bona fide community member. See also: bona fide day laborer. Yeah!
23 October 2006
more thoughts (no bills!)
Hmmmm....
Watched "Failure to Launch" last night. It's ridiculously awesome if you re-watch portions with the French language overdubs. Especially the "Nekkid Room." My house is totally going to have a naked/library room. With a reading hammock. And a minibar. Terry Bradshaw's in pretty good shape for an old man...good call, Jeff. I'd move downstreet in a heartbeat. Find me a job.
As for dragons, I'm all for slaying them, and I'm all for the Shire. I think I'm game for going out and slaying them in groups. Not groups of dragons--groups of dragon slayers. In other dragon-slaying news, I'm nine pages into the uber-project. Maybe another seven to go. It's lookin' good. The secret, I've found, is Oreos and good Pollywogg Holler berry wine. And late nights.
I had a good discussion with a beautiful woman yesterday. Is sin action, or an attitude of the heart? The seven deadlies are all attitudes of the heart--Rage, Lust, Sloth, Gluttony, Pride, Envy, Greed. (thanks to little Wetherby for the help on the last three...not my specialties :) If the sin comes out, it evidences the heart infested with death--and in need of salvation. Following that line, sometimes a little active sin is a good thing. Like a nasty case of stomach cramps, it evidences the need for healing--salvation. Our salvation is not gained or lost--it is a series of losses and gains. We lose our lives, we get them back.
"As a man dies many times before he's dead, so does he wend from birth to birth until, by grace, he comes alive at last." -Godric
And I wasn't cutting a line between my friends in the world captivated by lies, and myself outside and redeemed. I am struggling not with necessarily straight-out lies, but influences, values, the ideas that drive my generation. They're mine as much as they are theirs, and they are my cultural context--both struggle and joy. I like being a twenty-first century American twenty-something...but like any other place or time, it's got questions to be answered and difficulties to be overcome. Got a need for the wind and wisdom of God, just like every generation.
Well said, Katrina. Reminds me of a few shiningly great of examples of artists who escape the status quo and give a little time to those not single teens or twentysomethings, who I shall celebrate here.
Cheers go out to the artists of Iron & Wine, for love songs like "Naked As We Came" celebrating the romance of those married with children. And the writers of Firefly and Serenity for integrating Zoe and Wash and the various and sundry stresses of married life into the tale of life on a starfaring freighter. And, of course, The Flaming Lips and Death Cab For Cutie for making the theme of love in the face of death O-So-Trendy right now with "What Sarah Said" ("Love is watching someone die/Who's gonna watch you die?") and "Do You Realize" ("we're floating in space...that happiness/makes you cry...that everyone you know/one day/will die?")
And, right back atcha Jeff, you should watch "Friends with Money," a really awesome and very NPR (so trendy right now) film about the lives of three married well-to-do couples and their unmarried and not-so-well-to-do friend. Which includes the coolest married couple I can remember being portrayed on film, with the chipper husband blissfully unaware that all of his friends thinks he's gay. Good flick.
So. Dr. Tawfiq Hamid is here, advocating peaceful Islam, and I am off to pretend to be a prospective student in class because it's too cold and wet to cut lawns today. I think it's becoming a trend. I shall call it, "winter." Just signed up for a few shifts driving the old ambulance. Good bye, lawnmowing, I shall miss the paychecks.
Watched "Failure to Launch" last night. It's ridiculously awesome if you re-watch portions with the French language overdubs. Especially the "Nekkid Room." My house is totally going to have a naked/library room. With a reading hammock. And a minibar. Terry Bradshaw's in pretty good shape for an old man...good call, Jeff. I'd move downstreet in a heartbeat. Find me a job.
As for dragons, I'm all for slaying them, and I'm all for the Shire. I think I'm game for going out and slaying them in groups. Not groups of dragons--groups of dragon slayers. In other dragon-slaying news, I'm nine pages into the uber-project. Maybe another seven to go. It's lookin' good. The secret, I've found, is Oreos and good Pollywogg Holler berry wine. And late nights.
I had a good discussion with a beautiful woman yesterday. Is sin action, or an attitude of the heart? The seven deadlies are all attitudes of the heart--Rage, Lust, Sloth, Gluttony, Pride, Envy, Greed. (thanks to little Wetherby for the help on the last three...not my specialties :) If the sin comes out, it evidences the heart infested with death--and in need of salvation. Following that line, sometimes a little active sin is a good thing. Like a nasty case of stomach cramps, it evidences the need for healing--salvation. Our salvation is not gained or lost--it is a series of losses and gains. We lose our lives, we get them back.
"As a man dies many times before he's dead, so does he wend from birth to birth until, by grace, he comes alive at last." -Godric
And I wasn't cutting a line between my friends in the world captivated by lies, and myself outside and redeemed. I am struggling not with necessarily straight-out lies, but influences, values, the ideas that drive my generation. They're mine as much as they are theirs, and they are my cultural context--both struggle and joy. I like being a twenty-first century American twenty-something...but like any other place or time, it's got questions to be answered and difficulties to be overcome. Got a need for the wind and wisdom of God, just like every generation.
Well said, Katrina. Reminds me of a few shiningly great of examples of artists who escape the status quo and give a little time to those not single teens or twentysomethings, who I shall celebrate here.
Cheers go out to the artists of Iron & Wine, for love songs like "Naked As We Came" celebrating the romance of those married with children. And the writers of Firefly and Serenity for integrating Zoe and Wash and the various and sundry stresses of married life into the tale of life on a starfaring freighter. And, of course, The Flaming Lips and Death Cab For Cutie for making the theme of love in the face of death O-So-Trendy right now with "What Sarah Said" ("Love is watching someone die/Who's gonna watch you die?") and "Do You Realize" ("we're floating in space...that happiness/makes you cry...that everyone you know/one day/will die?")
And, right back atcha Jeff, you should watch "Friends with Money," a really awesome and very NPR (so trendy right now) film about the lives of three married well-to-do couples and their unmarried and not-so-well-to-do friend. Which includes the coolest married couple I can remember being portrayed on film, with the chipper husband blissfully unaware that all of his friends thinks he's gay. Good flick.
So. Dr. Tawfiq Hamid is here, advocating peaceful Islam, and I am off to pretend to be a prospective student in class because it's too cold and wet to cut lawns today. I think it's becoming a trend. I shall call it, "winter." Just signed up for a few shifts driving the old ambulance. Good bye, lawnmowing, I shall miss the paychecks.
11 October 2006
thoughts after bills
so bills are obnoxious--glad all I have to worry about is the phone and the student loans. elsewise I might go mad.
a quick thought before I head back out into the un-wired-world.
I have a lot of friends (guys and gals, but more guys than gals) who are late twenty-something, single, living at home or on their own, Playstation and X-Box owners who simply don't want to grow up.
I don't mean that in a derogatory way--it's just that my generation of guys has no real desire to marry, settle down, have a career, become a grown-up. I think that's why one of my friends just got a divorce and a new girlfriend.
We're the type who have mid-life crises at twenty-five. We get divorced and start hitting the bars again at thirty. Maybe because we grew up being told that grown-up life is boring, and hence grown-up's lives are over. Life, if it was to be lived, was to be lived in that hedonistic aura of high school and college individualistic excitement. At least, that's what every marketing image we've ever seen has told us.
And now they're telling us that we can be youthful and accumulate toys and have adventures and never settle down or accumulate responsibilities. Because once you have responsibilities and commitments you are no longer free. life is over.
Of course, without responsiblities and/or commitments, life is pretty much meaningless. But we haven't realized this yet. We keep wondering where we've been sold wrong--why we feel disappointed with our marriages, jobs, where the excitement and feelings of significance and importance went. Maybe they're over there, around the corner, if I could be free I would be able to live it up, to taste the excitement again...
huh. It's not a clear idea so much as a feeling I had yesterday while moving dirt from point A to point B and thinking about why one of my childhood youth group friends is getting a divorce. But I have work to do, so I don't have time to pound out something really incisive and profound. Just found it interesting to think about twenty-something angst and flailing in terms of the mid-life crisis.
When you're raised in a materialistic paradise where everyone is told everyday by image-based advertising that glamour and excitement and wealth and sensuality are your birthright, and the good life is there for anyone who can go out there and buy it, and you don't feel it, feeling left out can be really devastating. You could be happy and fulfilled and instead you're feeling cheated and held back.
You were meant to be larger than life; treating yourself to good things, being on the cutting edge of teachnology or music of something significant, being someone impressive, suave, exciting and hip and involved, oh yeah--these are the stuff of the good life, real life. Think about MTV's The Real World: the hijinks and instensity of high school and college are real life. Dating isn't a preparation or precursor to real adult life--it is real life, the only life exciting enough to warrant attention. Exploring your identity through new musical, emotional, sexual, stylistic or ideological experiences isn't a stage in growing up to a stable adult--it's all there is to life.
If it isn't epic, it isn't living. If you're settled, you're boring. If you aren't mobile, you're dead. Growing up is the act of becoming irrelevant, too consumed in commitments to be free and wild. We have nothing to look forward to because being young and free was supposed to be the best time of our lives, and we particularly blessed for being born American in the golden age of Living It Up For Me.
There's no glamour to growing up--nothing to look forward to, no really exciting prospects to something like marriage or commitments. Sure, it's a lie once you think about it--but how can you stop and think about it when it's so widely assumed? And who is proclaiming any sort of desireable alternatives? Smug, boring evangelicals?
well. brain vomit. I wish I had time to edit. oh well. cheers!
a quick thought before I head back out into the un-wired-world.
I have a lot of friends (guys and gals, but more guys than gals) who are late twenty-something, single, living at home or on their own, Playstation and X-Box owners who simply don't want to grow up.
I don't mean that in a derogatory way--it's just that my generation of guys has no real desire to marry, settle down, have a career, become a grown-up. I think that's why one of my friends just got a divorce and a new girlfriend.
We're the type who have mid-life crises at twenty-five. We get divorced and start hitting the bars again at thirty. Maybe because we grew up being told that grown-up life is boring, and hence grown-up's lives are over. Life, if it was to be lived, was to be lived in that hedonistic aura of high school and college individualistic excitement. At least, that's what every marketing image we've ever seen has told us.
And now they're telling us that we can be youthful and accumulate toys and have adventures and never settle down or accumulate responsibilities. Because once you have responsibilities and commitments you are no longer free. life is over.
Of course, without responsiblities and/or commitments, life is pretty much meaningless. But we haven't realized this yet. We keep wondering where we've been sold wrong--why we feel disappointed with our marriages, jobs, where the excitement and feelings of significance and importance went. Maybe they're over there, around the corner, if I could be free I would be able to live it up, to taste the excitement again...
huh. It's not a clear idea so much as a feeling I had yesterday while moving dirt from point A to point B and thinking about why one of my childhood youth group friends is getting a divorce. But I have work to do, so I don't have time to pound out something really incisive and profound. Just found it interesting to think about twenty-something angst and flailing in terms of the mid-life crisis.
When you're raised in a materialistic paradise where everyone is told everyday by image-based advertising that glamour and excitement and wealth and sensuality are your birthright, and the good life is there for anyone who can go out there and buy it, and you don't feel it, feeling left out can be really devastating. You could be happy and fulfilled and instead you're feeling cheated and held back.
You were meant to be larger than life; treating yourself to good things, being on the cutting edge of teachnology or music of something significant, being someone impressive, suave, exciting and hip and involved, oh yeah--these are the stuff of the good life, real life. Think about MTV's The Real World: the hijinks and instensity of high school and college are real life. Dating isn't a preparation or precursor to real adult life--it is real life, the only life exciting enough to warrant attention. Exploring your identity through new musical, emotional, sexual, stylistic or ideological experiences isn't a stage in growing up to a stable adult--it's all there is to life.
If it isn't epic, it isn't living. If you're settled, you're boring. If you aren't mobile, you're dead. Growing up is the act of becoming irrelevant, too consumed in commitments to be free and wild. We have nothing to look forward to because being young and free was supposed to be the best time of our lives, and we particularly blessed for being born American in the golden age of Living It Up For Me.
There's no glamour to growing up--nothing to look forward to, no really exciting prospects to something like marriage or commitments. Sure, it's a lie once you think about it--but how can you stop and think about it when it's so widely assumed? And who is proclaiming any sort of desireable alternatives? Smug, boring evangelicals?
well. brain vomit. I wish I had time to edit. oh well. cheers!
05 October 2006
Road Trip! (lette)
Took a few days off to play a coffeeshop with Hiram in Lancaster and visit Timmie and Mollie in Philly! (I only regret that we did not see Dave Lilley...)
And, since the boss is out of town this week, I'm out of work. Hooray for Lost Season Two (holy crap stressful ending batman!) We missed the Season Three premier by an hour because we broke for dinner before watching the Season Two finale...bummer. You can't watch a season premier when you're totally excited about the last season's season finale. Have to see if we can catch it on rerun or iTunes or something.
so. I have to go do office work. but for your enjoyment (if blogger doesn't mess with me): pictures!
"Dance the spears with me, dark one!" If you look close you can see Mollie's not-quite-bemused disbelief in the background.
So this is the museum of art where Rocky runs up and down the stairs while getting in shape to the tune of "Eye of the Tiger", and they put this statue of him up in the middle of the steps, and then everybody said, dude, Rocky isn't art, so they took the statue down, and then all the tourists complained, so they put it back, but this time in a discrete corner so that the artsy fartsy types wouldn't be insulted and the tourist types could get their pictures. but that's unimportant. important: I'm rockin' awesome. A frickin' tank. Rock Out Me!
Ummnm. Hi? She likes to dance. And I have a cool hat.
And, hey why not pay a little homage to karate kid, too...you can't see Timmie doing the same thing next to me, while people are trying to take their wedding pictures with us in the background. Yes. Wedding pictures. Four separate weddings rolled up to take pictures in front of the museum. And with Rocky. What can you say? It's Philly...
And, since the boss is out of town this week, I'm out of work. Hooray for Lost Season Two (holy crap stressful ending batman!) We missed the Season Three premier by an hour because we broke for dinner before watching the Season Two finale...bummer. You can't watch a season premier when you're totally excited about the last season's season finale. Have to see if we can catch it on rerun or iTunes or something.
so. I have to go do office work. but for your enjoyment (if blogger doesn't mess with me): pictures!
"Dance the spears with me, dark one!" If you look close you can see Mollie's not-quite-bemused disbelief in the background.
So this is the museum of art where Rocky runs up and down the stairs while getting in shape to the tune of "Eye of the Tiger", and they put this statue of him up in the middle of the steps, and then everybody said, dude, Rocky isn't art, so they took the statue down, and then all the tourists complained, so they put it back, but this time in a discrete corner so that the artsy fartsy types wouldn't be insulted and the tourist types could get their pictures. but that's unimportant. important: I'm rockin' awesome. A frickin' tank. Rock Out Me!
Ummnm. Hi? She likes to dance. And I have a cool hat.
And, hey why not pay a little homage to karate kid, too...you can't see Timmie doing the same thing next to me, while people are trying to take their wedding pictures with us in the background. Yes. Wedding pictures. Four separate weddings rolled up to take pictures in front of the museum. And with Rocky. What can you say? It's Philly...
27 September 2006
well. hello.
so, that nasty habit of breathing persists--and a persistent hacking cough, as well. i am well enjoying an established life and routine; of course, this means it's about to be rudely interrupted.
Alex the Scott is no longer here, and that makes us sad. For a few short weeks, he graced our pantry (it makes a nice visitor's quarters, except for the stepping over bodies to get to the morning Cheerios) with good looks, good cheer, good music, and good conversation. it is fitting, i suppose, that on his last night here we were up to two-thirty a.m. tracing the evolution of American society, generation by generation, from the Great Depression to the present. 'twas most excellent.
i like being settled in finally. it gives me time and energy to diversify. and diversification is diversion most excellent! like spending a few hours in the pool with paddlesports last night. it's nice to know that not only do i still have my kayak roll, i somehow developed the ability to handroll my kayak in the several years since my last attempts. Charlie was impressed. my arms were angry. they had to weed-whack for six hours straight and then i told them it was time to shake, paddle and roll. silly arms. maybe i'll teach them what's what and go rock climbing tonight.
oh. and exciting news! i'm going to be an uncle again! hooray! and, my brother and sister-in-law might have the little (guy? girl?) in Tanzania...so I might get to visit Tanzania next summer and see the newest Holcomb!
Alex the Scott is no longer here, and that makes us sad. For a few short weeks, he graced our pantry (it makes a nice visitor's quarters, except for the stepping over bodies to get to the morning Cheerios) with good looks, good cheer, good music, and good conversation. it is fitting, i suppose, that on his last night here we were up to two-thirty a.m. tracing the evolution of American society, generation by generation, from the Great Depression to the present. 'twas most excellent.
i like being settled in finally. it gives me time and energy to diversify. and diversification is diversion most excellent! like spending a few hours in the pool with paddlesports last night. it's nice to know that not only do i still have my kayak roll, i somehow developed the ability to handroll my kayak in the several years since my last attempts. Charlie was impressed. my arms were angry. they had to weed-whack for six hours straight and then i told them it was time to shake, paddle and roll. silly arms. maybe i'll teach them what's what and go rock climbing tonight.
oh. and exciting news! i'm going to be an uncle again! hooray! and, my brother and sister-in-law might have the little (guy? girl?) in Tanzania...so I might get to visit Tanzania next summer and see the newest Holcomb!
13 September 2006
Bated...and Switched
oooh, what a surprise! overcast and drizzly rain. again.
no lawnmowing today!
as previously metioned, i continue to pass Leonard St. and wonder if Paul and Kat are home and whether or not I can bum dinner and a beer off them, only to be pulled short at the empty realization that they are gone. there is a sense of loss.
but there is a great balance. last night, on a meander through the coffeeshoppe, a young lady caught my eye, grinned, and said hello. being of tremendous mental agility and posessing the response times of a caffienated leopard, I gave her a grin, a nod, chalked it up to freshman uncertainty and my own commanding presence.
four-and-one-half steps later, as i caught a chair leg with my left toe and began a graceful in-flight path reorientation, my astounding powers of perception indicated that I should, in fact, recognize this person.
several minutes of sorting later, with surgical precision i deduced that i definitely should know this girl. from somewhere. earlier.
and then i observed with the keenest discernment--the Ruaha National Park sticker on the laptop computer! aha!
i should know this person from Tanzania.
Tanzania. Tanzania...
Tanzania Program...
[click...click...click...click...fizzle......flatline beep.............]
[click...]
"Hiram...is that Chera M from Tanzania?"
"why yes dan. i think it is."
so. we lost Paul and Kat to Tanzania, but we got Chera. And, she recognized me in a moment of looking up from her studying, after an absence of two years, somehow picking me out of the hundreds of students who have revolving-doored through the campus next door to their home over the past eight years of Tanzania programs. pretty impressive.
and if you haven't caught on, Hiram Ring and Alex Scott are in town, and Hiram and I put on a little guitar-and-djembe concert in Houghton's coffee shop. it rocked out. we rocked out. something. it was a grand ole time. if you haven't heard Hiram, he's the Jack Johnson of Western PA. and Afghanistan. Folksy, bluesy, swingin', his lyrical talents are by turns honest, poetic, and fun. definitely a cut above your standard coffeehouse share, and two or three cuts above your standard Christian coffeehouse share for depth of lyricism and creativity.
see Hiram Ring Dot Com and give a listen. My personal picks are "Play Switch", "To Be A Swallow," "Breathe Deep," a sea shanty entitled "Last Tide," and the one about the car...
check him out!
no lawnmowing today!
as previously metioned, i continue to pass Leonard St. and wonder if Paul and Kat are home and whether or not I can bum dinner and a beer off them, only to be pulled short at the empty realization that they are gone. there is a sense of loss.
but there is a great balance. last night, on a meander through the coffeeshoppe, a young lady caught my eye, grinned, and said hello. being of tremendous mental agility and posessing the response times of a caffienated leopard, I gave her a grin, a nod, chalked it up to freshman uncertainty and my own commanding presence.
four-and-one-half steps later, as i caught a chair leg with my left toe and began a graceful in-flight path reorientation, my astounding powers of perception indicated that I should, in fact, recognize this person.
several minutes of sorting later, with surgical precision i deduced that i definitely should know this girl. from somewhere. earlier.
and then i observed with the keenest discernment--the Ruaha National Park sticker on the laptop computer! aha!
i should know this person from Tanzania.
Tanzania. Tanzania...
Tanzania Program...
[click...click...click...click...fizzle......flatline beep.............]
[click...]
"Hiram...is that Chera M from Tanzania?"
"why yes dan. i think it is."
so. we lost Paul and Kat to Tanzania, but we got Chera. And, she recognized me in a moment of looking up from her studying, after an absence of two years, somehow picking me out of the hundreds of students who have revolving-doored through the campus next door to their home over the past eight years of Tanzania programs. pretty impressive.
and if you haven't caught on, Hiram Ring and Alex Scott are in town, and Hiram and I put on a little guitar-and-djembe concert in Houghton's coffee shop. it rocked out. we rocked out. something. it was a grand ole time. if you haven't heard Hiram, he's the Jack Johnson of Western PA. and Afghanistan. Folksy, bluesy, swingin', his lyrical talents are by turns honest, poetic, and fun. definitely a cut above your standard coffeehouse share, and two or three cuts above your standard Christian coffeehouse share for depth of lyricism and creativity.
see Hiram Ring Dot Com and give a listen. My personal picks are "Play Switch", "To Be A Swallow," "Breathe Deep," a sea shanty entitled "Last Tide," and the one about the car...
check him out!
09 September 2006
even more transient...
well. with or without internet access, days and weeks dreamily meander by; we are now in my favorite season after spring. warm summer days, cool, star-filled evenings, and deep, cold, tucked-into-the-sleeping-bag nights. the grass is still green, and the trees are still leaf-clad, the creeks are still burbling and splashable, and next to all the quiet greens and browns the threat of winter grayness seems intangible and silly.
so the days of late summer roll by, marked by the difference in dinner's, or the excitement of a movie or a game or the visit of a friend. or by the leaving of friends--i am not excellent at goodbyes--I did not linger long enough with Paul and Katrina before they embarked for Tanzania, and now they have departed. Houghton is duller now, knowing that I cannot stop by their balcony for tea and dark chocolate with little witticisms on the wrappers.
but the days continue their meander, and the little routines of living in day-to-day commitment to people and geography are pure grace--space created through proximity for personality, personality and life, life and transformation: and I am become a person again.
so the days of late summer roll by, marked by the difference in dinner's, or the excitement of a movie or a game or the visit of a friend. or by the leaving of friends--i am not excellent at goodbyes--I did not linger long enough with Paul and Katrina before they embarked for Tanzania, and now they have departed. Houghton is duller now, knowing that I cannot stop by their balcony for tea and dark chocolate with little witticisms on the wrappers.
but the days continue their meander, and the little routines of living in day-to-day commitment to people and geography are pure grace--space created through proximity for personality, personality and life, life and transformation: and I am become a person again.
07 August 2006
ahhhhh...
see, the great thing about the life of a vagabond is all the unpaid vacation time...
Upward Bound is done, finished off with a splendid banquet. I actually got to sit back and enjoy last weekend instead of trying to resolve staff conflict or sort out some kind of intervention strategy for bad study habits or prep for another week. The Properts were away on vacation, so I got a dog and a house with a beautiful view, too. And a DVD player. Ah, happy.
I'm a little sad-faced about it though. Those were good students. I didn't get to know them nearly as well as I wanted to. I will miss them...
They are a pretty unique community, these Upward Bounders--they inhabit a place where they are allowed to be their normal teenage selves in an environment shaped by and infused with Christianity which welcomes them to come and build their own creative community without having to conform to Christian norms.
Basically, it rocks out. You can be part of the transforming work of Christ in community without all the nasty expectations of conformity that make the church boring and miserable.
Funny, Yesterday felt like the most relaxing day of the summer, and it was the most productive of them all. A day of discoveries:
-the awesomeness of Feta Cheese on Pollywogg Holler Pizza
-a clear, cold spring on the other side of the Genesee flowing with water that is so much better than Houghton-On-Tap
-Bittersweet Symphony Ice Cream at the Oramel Coffee shop
-An old, old cemetary on Cronk Hill
-Lattice Bridge
-Higgin's Hole, on my new favorite Creek in the Whole Wide World (that would be Higgin's Creek)
-Sour Green Apple Kool-Aid while chillin' with the Shaffners (finally! after a summer of hasty teatimes and IM conversations) on their front porch
-Philip Christensen is ridiculously awesome...and a putz!
-V for Vendetta is still an awesome movie.
-The habits of the woodland Shaffners in their native habitat can be quite...peculiar.
And all of that after church. I think I accomplished more living in that one day than all of last August. I like it here.
--edit--
banqueting picture: I like it here.
--edit again--
check out this guy, scroll down to "Feminism and Beer Ads"...especially if your name is Gustav.
Upward Bound is done, finished off with a splendid banquet. I actually got to sit back and enjoy last weekend instead of trying to resolve staff conflict or sort out some kind of intervention strategy for bad study habits or prep for another week. The Properts were away on vacation, so I got a dog and a house with a beautiful view, too. And a DVD player. Ah, happy.
I'm a little sad-faced about it though. Those were good students. I didn't get to know them nearly as well as I wanted to. I will miss them...
They are a pretty unique community, these Upward Bounders--they inhabit a place where they are allowed to be their normal teenage selves in an environment shaped by and infused with Christianity which welcomes them to come and build their own creative community without having to conform to Christian norms.
Basically, it rocks out. You can be part of the transforming work of Christ in community without all the nasty expectations of conformity that make the church boring and miserable.
Funny, Yesterday felt like the most relaxing day of the summer, and it was the most productive of them all. A day of discoveries:
-the awesomeness of Feta Cheese on Pollywogg Holler Pizza
-a clear, cold spring on the other side of the Genesee flowing with water that is so much better than Houghton-On-Tap
-Bittersweet Symphony Ice Cream at the Oramel Coffee shop
-An old, old cemetary on Cronk Hill
-Lattice Bridge
-Higgin's Hole, on my new favorite Creek in the Whole Wide World (that would be Higgin's Creek)
-Sour Green Apple Kool-Aid while chillin' with the Shaffners (finally! after a summer of hasty teatimes and IM conversations) on their front porch
-Philip Christensen is ridiculously awesome...and a putz!
-V for Vendetta is still an awesome movie.
-The habits of the woodland Shaffners in their native habitat can be quite...peculiar.
And all of that after church. I think I accomplished more living in that one day than all of last August. I like it here.
--edit--
banqueting picture: I like it here.
--edit again--
check out this guy, scroll down to "Feminism and Beer Ads"...especially if your name is Gustav.
02 August 2006
food for thought
Casualties
You can filter the entire list for "Non-Hostile" deaths...there are quite a few ways to shorten your lifespan in this world. Even sergeants get heart attacks. Man knows not his time. But it's pretty sure to be closer in Iraq.
Also, from the news section of the same page.
You can filter the entire list for "Non-Hostile" deaths...there are quite a few ways to shorten your lifespan in this world. Even sergeants get heart attacks. Man knows not his time. But it's pretty sure to be closer in Iraq.
Also, from the news section of the same page.
29 July 2006
Real Sex
[it's a book by Lauren F. Winner]
In a nutshell, what I miss most about the Tanzania program and working with Wilderness Adventures.
I was once asked what I would say to a friend whom I knew was having premarital sex; I told my interlocutor that the first step in speaking to my friends about sex was making sure that we enjoyed relationships built on top of hundreds of ordinary shared experiences--plays attended together and pumpkins carved together and accompanying one another on doctor's appointments and changing the oil together. To say this is not to side-step the question. Community doesn't come about simply by having hard, intimate conversations. Having hard, intimate conversations is part of what is possible when people are already opening up their day-to-day lives to one another."
In a nutshell, what I miss most about the Tanzania program and working with Wilderness Adventures.
27 July 2006
yo donald miller
already there buddy--coming up on renewal for my first year's subscription!
check out what Donald Miller has to say about news magazines
ummm....it's been a crazy busy couple of weeks. any and all progress in fields other than my fourtteen Bridge students has come to a complete stop. i am exhausted.
but I got to go to the Counting Crows/Goo Goo Dolls concert last weekend, and play in Wiscoy again, and play Settlers, and Dan Sahli's been stopping by this weekend to hang out and shoot the...
oh, right, still not employing the extended vocabulary with students around. but I'm going to Buffalo this weekend for Shakespeare in the Park, and that means off-campus rules apply. hmmmm...can you say fruit of the vine?
hey, check out how ridiculously high-powered Paul's camera is. you can see individual drops of Wiscoy Creek on my face.
check out what Donald Miller has to say about news magazines
ummm....it's been a crazy busy couple of weeks. any and all progress in fields other than my fourtteen Bridge students has come to a complete stop. i am exhausted.
but I got to go to the Counting Crows/Goo Goo Dolls concert last weekend, and play in Wiscoy again, and play Settlers, and Dan Sahli's been stopping by this weekend to hang out and shoot the...
oh, right, still not employing the extended vocabulary with students around. but I'm going to Buffalo this weekend for Shakespeare in the Park, and that means off-campus rules apply. hmmmm...can you say fruit of the vine?
hey, check out how ridiculously high-powered Paul's camera is. you can see individual drops of Wiscoy Creek on my face.
18 July 2006
excitement
So I almost died this weekend. Wiscoy Creek was running higher than I had ever played in it before (I've seen it higher, and quite rightly decided not to tempt God to bring me home early), so naturally we frolicked in the rushing dancing water and climbed the waterfalls. Of course I tried to fight the current and touch the middle of the middle falls, and of course it swept me away in my hubris and I had to act quickly to avoid the lower falls. It looked a lot nearer a call than it really was, which of course had the desired affect of impressing the women. Or convincing them that evolutionarily speaking, my genes are right on par with those of the dodo.
Needless to say it was an awesome day. I don't know why God made summer in New York so bloody hot and humid, but so long as there are waterfalls and streams and rivers aplenty, I'll not complain too loudly. I think the highlight of the last few weeks has been meandering along Houghton Creek in the heat of the afternoon.
And that's not the only reason my grin-to-scowl ratio is greatly elevated from last year's norm--I am indescribably happy to be a part of a community again. My employer informed me the other day that my job description could be summed up in the simple phrase: "Be Dan Holcomb." I love the feeling that I'm actually integral and important and doing something few other people could do. Yes it makes me happy.
What also makes me happy is, though there are fewer friends in my life these days, I have never tasted of such quality fellowship--I am blessed to know some amazing people, and occasionally they stop by Houghton for an hour or two of fine coffe and simply phenomenal cinnamon rolls at the Daily Grind. Sometimes in a conversation you can find a part of yourself after long estrangement.
And, finally, a lighter note of circumstance: I think maybe I have located the Bush Whacker's* soul mate. Unfortunately, I was on the way to pick up my students from internship so I couldn't wait around for this particular Jeep's owner to show up...but I got a picture:
*Bush Whacker: Jeep belonging to the twilighttreader, similarly decorated with eccentric leftist bumperstickers and often the target of animosity from police officers and angry conservatives.
--Later Edit--
So here's how I abuse office hours:
I was pondering Nietzsche:
"Whoever fights monsters
should see to it that
in the process he does not
become a monster.
And when you look long into
the abyss, the abyss also looks
into you"
And I decided to see what the context was, hoping for a larger paragraph on the nature of knowledge, self-exploration, the depravity of humanity in general, etc. Unfortunately, the larger context is a collection of "Aphorisms and Interludes," so there is no exploration of the idea--unless you count, of course, the body of his work and eventual suicide. But I digress. In the name of a chuckle, I give you the context of his quite remarkable statement: women.
"131
The sexes deceive themselves about one another: the reason being that fundamentally they love and honour only themselves (or their own ideal, to express it more pleasantly‑). Thus man wants woman to be peaceful ‑ but woman is essentially unpeaceful, like the cat, however well she may have trained herself to present an appearance of peace."
and a little later...
"144
When a woman has scholarly inclinations there is usually something wrong with her sexuality. Unfruitfulness itself disposes one to a certain masculinity of taste; for man is, if I may be allowed to say so, `the unfruitful animal'.
145
Comparing man and woman in general one may say: woman would not have the genius for finery if she did not have the instinct for the secondary role.
146
He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you."
And a little later, a meditation on love:
"153
That which is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil."
hmmm...peculiar. people call me a chauvanist.
Needless to say it was an awesome day. I don't know why God made summer in New York so bloody hot and humid, but so long as there are waterfalls and streams and rivers aplenty, I'll not complain too loudly. I think the highlight of the last few weeks has been meandering along Houghton Creek in the heat of the afternoon.
And that's not the only reason my grin-to-scowl ratio is greatly elevated from last year's norm--I am indescribably happy to be a part of a community again. My employer informed me the other day that my job description could be summed up in the simple phrase: "Be Dan Holcomb." I love the feeling that I'm actually integral and important and doing something few other people could do. Yes it makes me happy.
What also makes me happy is, though there are fewer friends in my life these days, I have never tasted of such quality fellowship--I am blessed to know some amazing people, and occasionally they stop by Houghton for an hour or two of fine coffe and simply phenomenal cinnamon rolls at the Daily Grind. Sometimes in a conversation you can find a part of yourself after long estrangement.
And, finally, a lighter note of circumstance: I think maybe I have located the Bush Whacker's* soul mate. Unfortunately, I was on the way to pick up my students from internship so I couldn't wait around for this particular Jeep's owner to show up...but I got a picture:
*Bush Whacker: Jeep belonging to the twilighttreader, similarly decorated with eccentric leftist bumperstickers and often the target of animosity from police officers and angry conservatives.
--Later Edit--
So here's how I abuse office hours:
I was pondering Nietzsche:
"Whoever fights monsters
should see to it that
in the process he does not
become a monster.
And when you look long into
the abyss, the abyss also looks
into you"
And I decided to see what the context was, hoping for a larger paragraph on the nature of knowledge, self-exploration, the depravity of humanity in general, etc. Unfortunately, the larger context is a collection of "Aphorisms and Interludes," so there is no exploration of the idea--unless you count, of course, the body of his work and eventual suicide. But I digress. In the name of a chuckle, I give you the context of his quite remarkable statement: women.
"131
The sexes deceive themselves about one another: the reason being that fundamentally they love and honour only themselves (or their own ideal, to express it more pleasantly‑). Thus man wants woman to be peaceful ‑ but woman is essentially unpeaceful, like the cat, however well she may have trained herself to present an appearance of peace."
and a little later...
"144
When a woman has scholarly inclinations there is usually something wrong with her sexuality. Unfruitfulness itself disposes one to a certain masculinity of taste; for man is, if I may be allowed to say so, `the unfruitful animal'.
145
Comparing man and woman in general one may say: woman would not have the genius for finery if she did not have the instinct for the secondary role.
146
He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you."
And a little later, a meditation on love:
"153
That which is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil."
hmmm...peculiar. people call me a chauvanist.
16 July 2006
lonely roads
so on a star lit night I complained to that wise frood* of the woodlands Alex the Scott:
man, I'm so fricken' bizarre that not only do I not fit into normal society, but even the strange ones don't really know what to do with me. I feel pretty lonely freakish right now; pretty cut off.
to which he replied...
dude, you're in the company of the best of men. what great rocker or poet or thinker hasn't quested his way from the ordinary to the strange and found himself deep in the proverbial woods?
and he sang,
"I walk a lonely road/the only one that I have ever known/don't know where it goes/but it's only me/and I walk alone..."
so I'm listening to Green Day's Boulevard of Broken Dreams again, still as bold and fresh a CD as when I heard it in a very dry place last summer. "ring out the bells again/like we did when spring began...here comes the rain again/falling from the stars/drenched in pain again/becoming who we are"
JRR Tolkein's words are on the back of my new STEP t-shirt:
"Not all who wander are lost."
----
*from the Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy:
The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy has a few things to say on the subject of towels.
A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitch hiker can have. Partly it has great practical value — you can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapours; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a mini raft down the slow heavy river Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or to avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (a mindboggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can't see it, it can't see you — daft as a bush, but very ravenous); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.
More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitch hiker) discovers that a hitch hiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitch hiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitch hiker might accidentally have "lost". What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is is clearly a man to be reckoned with.
Hence a phrase which has passed into hitch hiking slang, as in "Hey, you sass that hoopy Ford Prefect? There's a frood who really knows where his towel is." (Sass: know, be aware of, meet, have sex with; Hoopy: really together guy; frood: really amazingly together guy.)
man, I'm so fricken' bizarre that not only do I not fit into normal society, but even the strange ones don't really know what to do with me. I feel pretty lonely freakish right now; pretty cut off.
to which he replied...
dude, you're in the company of the best of men. what great rocker or poet or thinker hasn't quested his way from the ordinary to the strange and found himself deep in the proverbial woods?
and he sang,
"I walk a lonely road/the only one that I have ever known/don't know where it goes/but it's only me/and I walk alone..."
so I'm listening to Green Day's Boulevard of Broken Dreams again, still as bold and fresh a CD as when I heard it in a very dry place last summer. "ring out the bells again/like we did when spring began...here comes the rain again/falling from the stars/drenched in pain again/becoming who we are"
JRR Tolkein's words are on the back of my new STEP t-shirt:
"Not all who wander are lost."
----
*from the Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy:
The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy has a few things to say on the subject of towels.
A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitch hiker can have. Partly it has great practical value — you can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapours; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a mini raft down the slow heavy river Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or to avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (a mindboggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can't see it, it can't see you — daft as a bush, but very ravenous); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.
More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitch hiker) discovers that a hitch hiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitch hiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitch hiker might accidentally have "lost". What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is is clearly a man to be reckoned with.
Hence a phrase which has passed into hitch hiking slang, as in "Hey, you sass that hoopy Ford Prefect? There's a frood who really knows where his towel is." (Sass: know, be aware of, meet, have sex with; Hoopy: really together guy; frood: really amazingly together guy.)
10 July 2006
office hours
one of my students asked me what my hourly wage was last night and I laughed. Up at 7:00 am, to bed around 11:30 pm, there's no way they'd be paying me by the hour. What am I getting paid anyway?
So, my office hours/daily repose stretches from breakfast at 8:30 a.m. to the staff meeting at 11:00 am, Monday through Friday. Mug of coffee, notebook, and blogsurfing. And G-Mail Messaging. Forget this hiking stuff!
So. Viva Italia! Zidane must learn some self-control, it seems...
So, my office hours/daily repose stretches from breakfast at 8:30 a.m. to the staff meeting at 11:00 am, Monday through Friday. Mug of coffee, notebook, and blogsurfing. And G-Mail Messaging. Forget this hiking stuff!
So. Viva Italia! Zidane must learn some self-control, it seems...
05 July 2006
gee golly whillickers
So I really ought to have kept my mouth shut. Sera's compressor fell off at the drive in--it's a good thing I found it before it started doing laps around the fan belt and banging into other, more important parts of the engine. Can you believe my little baby actually had air conditioning? So, she's resting until I can get my grubby paws on a ratchet set...I knew I shouldn't have put off getting one...
And, in other bad news, I recieved my first bit of spam at my gmail address that I reserved for friends and family and never used for commercial or business purposes. Drat.
Well. UB staff training is rockin' along merrily, and this weekend we're going to the drive-in for Pirates of the Caribbean II with a whole plethora of STEP and UB and Houghton-ish people. Next week we get students!
And, in other bad news, I recieved my first bit of spam at my gmail address that I reserved for friends and family and never used for commercial or business purposes. Drat.
Well. UB staff training is rockin' along merrily, and this weekend we're going to the drive-in for Pirates of the Caribbean II with a whole plethora of STEP and UB and Houghton-ish people. Next week we get students!
01 July 2006
clean and new
I moved out of my home in Buffalo exactly a month ago. 2,187 miles and nine beds later, I'm temporarily bunked on Ethan's bed in Leonard Houghton 23. So I have internet for a moment. And for all the naysayers--that's 2,187 miles on my sweet old pickup without a single hiccup. Take your shiny Fords and your plasticky Escalades and go home.
I just got out of the woods--a week of living outside in the rain, coddling flatlander softies and cajoling the tremulous into pushing themselves. I am so deeply and profoundly happy to be working not just with my hands, but with my heart.
Happy, happy, happy. My students actually begged me to lullaby them to sleep at night. I talked people up rope ladders and down zip lines and through puzzles and mazes and initiatives and built fires. What more could you ask for?
So I went home twice for various celebrations of my brother's escaping high school, and discovered the joy of Lord of the Rings miniatures strategy gaming and promptly played two straight all-nighters before settling for gaming only during twilight hours. The Men of Minas Tirith will hold fast!
And I got a satisfyingly bloody week of work in Buffalo, replete with two gunshots, an incredibly messy car wreck (see ambulance below, after brisk swabbing with towels), and of course the obligatory drunk guys.
Well. It's Houghton for me for the summer, with the Upward Bound students. I'm off to a barbeque tonight, and staff training tomorrow. Cheers!
I just got out of the woods--a week of living outside in the rain, coddling flatlander softies and cajoling the tremulous into pushing themselves. I am so deeply and profoundly happy to be working not just with my hands, but with my heart.
Happy, happy, happy. My students actually begged me to lullaby them to sleep at night. I talked people up rope ladders and down zip lines and through puzzles and mazes and initiatives and built fires. What more could you ask for?
So I went home twice for various celebrations of my brother's escaping high school, and discovered the joy of Lord of the Rings miniatures strategy gaming and promptly played two straight all-nighters before settling for gaming only during twilight hours. The Men of Minas Tirith will hold fast!
And I got a satisfyingly bloody week of work in Buffalo, replete with two gunshots, an incredibly messy car wreck (see ambulance below, after brisk swabbing with towels), and of course the obligatory drunk guys.
Well. It's Houghton for me for the summer, with the Upward Bound students. I'm off to a barbeque tonight, and staff training tomorrow. Cheers!
04 June 2006
sunny meanders
hmmm...just found this draft while sorting through the old stuff. i wrote it one year and five days ago, so I guess I'm marking my one-year anniversary as a Houghton returnee. wow.
dlh
ps--and Sera is still tickin' along! wooot! woot!
----------------------------------------
So it's good-bye Buffalo. I got to visit the airport on my last night at work, for some poor girl who fell out of an airplane and dislocated her hip. So I have one more sure-fire winner in the "Have You Ever?" game: Have you ever driven on the runway of an international airport? With a police escort? I don't think so. Drink up!
The Stronghold is packed and gone. Sean is moving into my room, and I am back on the road. I have a traveling chest now, with all the stickers I could find slapped on the outside, and pictures and notes taped to the inside lid. A mini-stronghold, with natrually more books and pens and torn-up-cereal-box notebooks than clothes...unless you count the wool socks.
I'm sitting at home, listening to Colin Hay. It's still home, even though I haven't lived here in four years. I think it's the curtains. When you put curtains up, when you start attending to decoration, you're committing to a place and a time. Home in Detroit is the last place I lived with curtains, and here I am sleeping in a real bed and eating meals that have multiple dishes. What a lark!
Still I am transient. I am at home and home will always be home--but I don't really exist here. My family and friends have work and school and chores and the kind of small talk visitors on holiday are not involved in. I have all the time in the world to sleep, and three books lie open next to my bed, and I am sitting paused in front of an empty screen. Words are reluctant, sentences tentative, and I am doing a lot of waiting for nothing in particular.
In a week, maybe two, I will be off for another curtainless room in Houghton. My identity will change again. I do not know how stressful it will be--or how deeply I will alter my habits of presentation. What new Dan Holcomb will emerge between me and my new co-workers? I wonder how recognizeable I will be to co-workers who have known me before. I wonder how recognizeable I am now to older friends from home. Will I know myself in this new place? Already my thoughts have grown turbulent around bringing the tougher, harsher man I have become in the nights on Buffalo streets home to mother and church.
I've been sleeping for the past eight months with a collection of old notebooks and journals on the bookshelves over my head. I haven't read through them in, oh, over a year. Part of me thinks I should--it's a semi-regular custom. Part of me doesn't want to. I've even been shying away from perusing the prior parts of my current journal when I'm opening it to write--something I haven't done in a little while. I'm strangely hesitant about anything committal, and putting words down on paper is a committment if you're a packrat like me. Those words will be there, in a journal I plan on keeping until I die.
What's keeping my hands hovering near but never opening those old books? Is it that there's no turning back? It won't be my friends and family not recognizing the me I've become. It won't be new acquaintances confused about the shape of my face and the color of my language. It'll be a younger me staring back appraisingly.
I'm not at all sure I'll recognize myself. It might grate in the unpleasant taste of the bargain I've struck with my current circumstances, stick it in the back of my mouth where I can't get at it and can't get it out of the way of a fragile peace I've made with a pretty uncompromising adult world. Maybe that's the fracture in the foundation that's unsettling this curtainless house with its empty rooms in my head...
Are these thoughts mine? Am I really at conflict with myself? Is something implicit in me warring with something explicit and important in my life? Am I walking a line between pragmatism and capitulation? Am I wishing I could find that line marked tight and clear?
This writing thing is scary. This identity thing is scarier. I am wondering how stable and endurirng and faithful the "I" is. Am I learning and growing, or or just adapting to the moment? I don't like feeling adrift and disconnected, removed a short distance even from the life of my old community at home. I don't like that eerie mercurial sense of personal transience that I get in between communities, in between lives.
But I really don't like the thought of burying it, unresolved, in the generation of a new noisy rhythmic busy life. I don't like the thought that I may remain unchanged, unresolved, subsumed into some quieting patterns and distracting tasks, something insubstantial into an identity in need of something solid and true.
dlh
ps--and Sera is still tickin' along! wooot! woot!
----------------------------------------
So it's good-bye Buffalo. I got to visit the airport on my last night at work, for some poor girl who fell out of an airplane and dislocated her hip. So I have one more sure-fire winner in the "Have You Ever?" game: Have you ever driven on the runway of an international airport? With a police escort? I don't think so. Drink up!
The Stronghold is packed and gone. Sean is moving into my room, and I am back on the road. I have a traveling chest now, with all the stickers I could find slapped on the outside, and pictures and notes taped to the inside lid. A mini-stronghold, with natrually more books and pens and torn-up-cereal-box notebooks than clothes...unless you count the wool socks.
I'm sitting at home, listening to Colin Hay. It's still home, even though I haven't lived here in four years. I think it's the curtains. When you put curtains up, when you start attending to decoration, you're committing to a place and a time. Home in Detroit is the last place I lived with curtains, and here I am sleeping in a real bed and eating meals that have multiple dishes. What a lark!
Still I am transient. I am at home and home will always be home--but I don't really exist here. My family and friends have work and school and chores and the kind of small talk visitors on holiday are not involved in. I have all the time in the world to sleep, and three books lie open next to my bed, and I am sitting paused in front of an empty screen. Words are reluctant, sentences tentative, and I am doing a lot of waiting for nothing in particular.
In a week, maybe two, I will be off for another curtainless room in Houghton. My identity will change again. I do not know how stressful it will be--or how deeply I will alter my habits of presentation. What new Dan Holcomb will emerge between me and my new co-workers? I wonder how recognizeable I will be to co-workers who have known me before. I wonder how recognizeable I am now to older friends from home. Will I know myself in this new place? Already my thoughts have grown turbulent around bringing the tougher, harsher man I have become in the nights on Buffalo streets home to mother and church.
I've been sleeping for the past eight months with a collection of old notebooks and journals on the bookshelves over my head. I haven't read through them in, oh, over a year. Part of me thinks I should--it's a semi-regular custom. Part of me doesn't want to. I've even been shying away from perusing the prior parts of my current journal when I'm opening it to write--something I haven't done in a little while. I'm strangely hesitant about anything committal, and putting words down on paper is a committment if you're a packrat like me. Those words will be there, in a journal I plan on keeping until I die.
What's keeping my hands hovering near but never opening those old books? Is it that there's no turning back? It won't be my friends and family not recognizing the me I've become. It won't be new acquaintances confused about the shape of my face and the color of my language. It'll be a younger me staring back appraisingly.
I'm not at all sure I'll recognize myself. It might grate in the unpleasant taste of the bargain I've struck with my current circumstances, stick it in the back of my mouth where I can't get at it and can't get it out of the way of a fragile peace I've made with a pretty uncompromising adult world. Maybe that's the fracture in the foundation that's unsettling this curtainless house with its empty rooms in my head...
Are these thoughts mine? Am I really at conflict with myself? Is something implicit in me warring with something explicit and important in my life? Am I walking a line between pragmatism and capitulation? Am I wishing I could find that line marked tight and clear?
This writing thing is scary. This identity thing is scarier. I am wondering how stable and endurirng and faithful the "I" is. Am I learning and growing, or or just adapting to the moment? I don't like feeling adrift and disconnected, removed a short distance even from the life of my old community at home. I don't like that eerie mercurial sense of personal transience that I get in between communities, in between lives.
But I really don't like the thought of burying it, unresolved, in the generation of a new noisy rhythmic busy life. I don't like the thought that I may remain unchanged, unresolved, subsumed into some quieting patterns and distracting tasks, something insubstantial into an identity in need of something solid and true.
14 May 2006
housekeeping
is painful. behold, my room, the many-piled domain of entropy. at least I found my watch.
experiences of the weekend have validated previous observations that balconies are superior to porches and, indeed, many other manifestations of architecture. in more than just the literal sense. my conclusion draws its support not just from a multitude of daytime sunshine and evening conversation upon my balcony, but the same from Kat and Paul's balcony as well. indeed, it seems that the older and more worn a balcony is (and, perhaps, the more precarious), the better. additionally discovered over a weekend of graduation in Houghton, is that balconies are wonderful places to sit in the cool of the evening and listen to Great Big Sea.
balconies also maintain a better entropy than rooms. between the wind and the rain, that which is untended is caught up into a more natural and unsuspended entropy than that which is left in enclosed spaces. there is no artificial prolongation, no long, haunting empty shell clinging motionless.
and that is the rambling of the day.
--
I have decided to continue this round-table political discussion in a place where it will not consume my rather limited creative space here. Abbreviated ponderances and succint considerations on the reified nature of "government" in this debate, whether or not "governments" have a responsibility to act, and if the focus of "righteousness" is personal piety or communal action, will follow in short notice as time permits.
experiences of the weekend have validated previous observations that balconies are superior to porches and, indeed, many other manifestations of architecture. in more than just the literal sense. my conclusion draws its support not just from a multitude of daytime sunshine and evening conversation upon my balcony, but the same from Kat and Paul's balcony as well. indeed, it seems that the older and more worn a balcony is (and, perhaps, the more precarious), the better. additionally discovered over a weekend of graduation in Houghton, is that balconies are wonderful places to sit in the cool of the evening and listen to Great Big Sea.
balconies also maintain a better entropy than rooms. between the wind and the rain, that which is untended is caught up into a more natural and unsuspended entropy than that which is left in enclosed spaces. there is no artificial prolongation, no long, haunting empty shell clinging motionless.
and that is the rambling of the day.
--
I have decided to continue this round-table political discussion in a place where it will not consume my rather limited creative space here. Abbreviated ponderances and succint considerations on the reified nature of "government" in this debate, whether or not "governments" have a responsibility to act, and if the focus of "righteousness" is personal piety or communal action, will follow in short notice as time permits.
09 May 2006
For a good conversation...
You wrote that at 7:54 am? AM? I'm lucky if I can remember to put my clothes on forwards at 7:54 am...--Tegan
Yes, dear Tegan, but I am just getting off work at 7:54 am, so my clothes are already on and generally forwards.
...UN...---Just About Everybody
I find this interesting--I think perhaps you who mentioned this are reacting to what you expect to hear...erroneously anticipating the arguement. I never once mentioned the UN in my last post. What I did argue is that governments wield unique capacities to act and responsibilities that individuals, and groups, do not and should not hold. For instance, the governments of the world have created a system by which cruel and abusive dictators, such as Charles Taylor and Slobodan Milosevic, can be brought to justice--something else no individual or non-governmental organization can accomplish. Notice, you alluded to the successful humanitarian intervention to the tsunami by nation-states: Australia and America. The relief could not have been achieved without the close interaction between the governments and the ubiquitous NGOs--non-governmental organizations. NGO's played a vital role--but so did governments. NGOs cannot negotiate trade treaties, tamper with the international and national economy, or help bring stability and peace to anarchic and semi-anarchic situations.
I could care less whether the United Nations or an ad-hoc coalition of the willing are the medium for actions that cannot be accomplished nongovernmentally. Please be careful to read what I write--not what you automatically assume your fallen liberal relative enshrines in the warm and fuzzy cloud world of his ideology. I am not an ideological liberal. I am a practical humanitarian discovering that classic American conservative thought is simply not compatible with the teachings of Jesus Christ.
...impose utopia...
(see above) I never claimed to attempt to impose utopia. What I am trying to do is have active compassion for my neighbor by attempting to establish some semblance of justice and peace in places where people are suffering and dying for the lack. Please don't try and make me into some idea of a cardboard cutout grinning liberal that exists in your head. It demeans the both of us.
The fact that many of the material goods we buy were made elsewhere: who would pay those people for anything if they could not sell things to those Americans who have money to pay? Would they be richer or poorer if no American money was spent in their countries?
Let's creatively rephrase that question. "They should be greatful, those miserable bastards, that we give them anything at all for their lost childhoods, destroyed health, shortened life expectency, miserable working conditions, constant fear of unemployment..."
You have not yet opened your mind to the possibility that the urban poor are a result of economic changes in the world--changes forced by powerful economies in the west (that's you, and me, and everyone we know). The very existence of western economic superpowers and international trade produces changes in national and local economies. Quasi-subsistence farming becomes untenable. Western firms, with capital, introduce mass-production farming, edging small-plot farmers into poverty. The livelihood of hundreds of families becomes the livelihood of a manager, a few tractors and a score of hired hands. Where do those families go? They cannot compete, so they have no way to make bread. No money to send their children to school with. No land, because corporations take what they cannot buy, harnessing their economic power to secure political power through the cooperation of corrupt local officials.
During the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain, the problem was apparent--the abuse of cheap labor, unhealthy working conditions, minor miners, etc.--were next door. So Christians made a stink and the government changed the rules. Now, the injustice is easier to ignore because it is far away--but it is still our problem. We are involved in it, it is wrong, so why are the Christians like you doing nothing to change it?
Is it bad or good that Americans buy cotton which is grown in the US? Is it bad or good for the government to tinker with the market by subsidizing a crop in that way?
I believe in freedom. Americans should be able to buy cotton grown in the US if they so desire. I don't belive there is, ethically, any inherent justice or injustice in either subsidization and economic control or the laissez faire. I do believe, however, that there is something injust about the use of power to benefit one person or group of persons at the expense of another person or group of persons. That is what angers me about the United States--not that she is rich, or powerful, but that she bases that wealth upon injustice and uses that power to further her wealth at the expense of others. Sometimes to their detrimental and impoverishing expense. Sometimes to the point of impoverishing other countries and destabilizing their economies.
Since when did governments ever do anything but tax people, blow things up, and punish those who disobeyed their (the government's) rules? Can you think of even one instance where the government has been successful in "fixing" anything like you suggest it has the power to?
and
How do government offices visit people in prison, train people to become self-reliant?
You are apparently suffering from a critical lack of imagination. I work for a government-funded agency that provided emergency medical care within eight minutes of a telephone call. We work with government-funded people who will put out any fires that threaten your house and property. Your water is delivered to your tap, clean and drinkable, by the government, and whisked away to be safely recycled by the same government, after you've used it. The government makes sure you have a nice, green, oxygen-producing national forest to go to so that you don't have to vacation someplace paved. I went to college and learned self-reliance in part due to a government loan. The library that you enjoy was made possible...by the government. Government job-retraining projects were part of the conservative welfare revolution that decreased the welfare roles and made more people...self-reliant. This is a short list. Stretch your mind a little.
Let's look internationally. National governments have cooperated to put both Slobodan Milosevic and Charles Taylor on trial for the crimes they commited while they were in positions of power. Until recently, national governments cooperated to stop the proliferation and use of nuclear weapons, a hazard to us all. It was the United States government, acting in concert with other nations, that acted so ably to assist those devastated by the December 2004 Tsunami. National governments participated in an international ban on the trade of ivory, stemming the demand that drove both and elephants and rhinocerouses almost to extinction. Governments and coalitions can provide a neutral force to enforce cease-fires, disarm warlords of their private armies and return power to more representative, less thuggishly self-serving governments, and defend neutral places such as refugee camps where noncombatants can live safely and recieve medical attention, clean water, and food.
And finally...the United Nations (I will finally bring her into the discussion) regulates and overseas the internet internationally so that Jeff can join this discussion from Tanzania. It does so with such effectiveness--that you didn't even know it was involved.
Next, I don't see why you as an individual couldn't get together a group of like-minded people and find a way to smuggle in food, water, and medical care to hurting people. If others are smuggling weapons, bullets, bombs, and other such truck into the country, why can't someone smuggle in the things those people really need?
Again, you suffer from a lack of imagination. You cannot smuggle in healthcare, education when there is no peace. People cannot carry on with life when they live in the constant and real fear that someone is going to ride into town, take their food and belongings, rape their women, and force their children to execute their parents and grandparents. This is not hypothetical--this is actual, documented, widespread.
You cannot smuggle in peace. Nor can you smuggle in economic justice and opportunity when governments and organizations with money, guns, and the power they bring are happily taking part in economic injustice at the expense of people's economic opportunity. Not to mention the economic and political injustice that we, the world's most powerful nation, are actively involved in.
You said intervening personally would get you killed. So? The Iron Curtain came down because individuals stood up for their faith, got imprisoned, slain, were beaten, and somebody managed to get out and tell about it. If nobody has the guts to get imprisoned, then who will the government send to act on their behalf?
No. The Iron Curtain fell because it was opposed and considered unjust by many people, including Ronald Reagan, a head of state who used the power of both the United States government and coalitions of other national governments to resist, undermine, and promote change within the Communist Bloc. People had been standing up for their ideas, and dying in droves, for a long time before the Iron Curtain fell.
Additionally, it's not a matter about having the guts to be imprisoned for some lofty ideal. It's about wanting to be live in peace and instead being subjected to anarchy, genocide, banditry, rape, slavery, child-soldiering, and famine, but not being able to do anything about it. Those who "stand up" for anything against armed mobs lay down quite quickly and permanently and those in power do not care. In the Iron Curtain, they learned to care, because even in the Iron Curtain it was unacceptable to openly slay large segments of the populace. Not so in anarchy and failed states.
And Finally...
As for Christian symbolism, Jesus didn't appeal to the government to fix anything. He appealed to the people, the people who had nothing, to be generous with each other. Jesus didn't preach to the rich, he spoke to the poor, the needy, and the destitute. He advocated a world without government, not a world with the perfect one. He advocated a world in which everyone was self-governing.
Does your Jesus speak to Lazarus about embezzlement and abuse of tax-gathering status? Does not your Jesus advise wealthy young men from Arimathea? Were there not bureaucrats and centurions in thoselarge crowds of people? Wasn't Jesus' ministry supported by a group of wealthy women? Does the Jesus you know address the injustice of women being stoned for being found in adultery...while the man with whom she was committing adultery was not being stoned? Does he not say "Render onto Caesar what is Caesar's"?
Remember that Jesus lived in an occupied country where religious courts handled much of the day to day governance, and Jesus had an awful lot to say to those religious leaders about their justice and their concern for the poor and helpless. Remember that the national government was not a democracy, but a puppet monarchy, in which the people had no say whatsoever. Remember that economies were to a larger extent simple and local, without the massive centralization of power and resources that exists today.
Yes, dear Tegan, but I am just getting off work at 7:54 am, so my clothes are already on and generally forwards.
...UN...---Just About Everybody
I find this interesting--I think perhaps you who mentioned this are reacting to what you expect to hear...erroneously anticipating the arguement. I never once mentioned the UN in my last post. What I did argue is that governments wield unique capacities to act and responsibilities that individuals, and groups, do not and should not hold. For instance, the governments of the world have created a system by which cruel and abusive dictators, such as Charles Taylor and Slobodan Milosevic, can be brought to justice--something else no individual or non-governmental organization can accomplish. Notice, you alluded to the successful humanitarian intervention to the tsunami by nation-states: Australia and America. The relief could not have been achieved without the close interaction between the governments and the ubiquitous NGOs--non-governmental organizations. NGO's played a vital role--but so did governments. NGOs cannot negotiate trade treaties, tamper with the international and national economy, or help bring stability and peace to anarchic and semi-anarchic situations.
I could care less whether the United Nations or an ad-hoc coalition of the willing are the medium for actions that cannot be accomplished nongovernmentally. Please be careful to read what I write--not what you automatically assume your fallen liberal relative enshrines in the warm and fuzzy cloud world of his ideology. I am not an ideological liberal. I am a practical humanitarian discovering that classic American conservative thought is simply not compatible with the teachings of Jesus Christ.
...impose utopia...
(see above) I never claimed to attempt to impose utopia. What I am trying to do is have active compassion for my neighbor by attempting to establish some semblance of justice and peace in places where people are suffering and dying for the lack. Please don't try and make me into some idea of a cardboard cutout grinning liberal that exists in your head. It demeans the both of us.
The fact that many of the material goods we buy were made elsewhere: who would pay those people for anything if they could not sell things to those Americans who have money to pay? Would they be richer or poorer if no American money was spent in their countries?
Let's creatively rephrase that question. "They should be greatful, those miserable bastards, that we give them anything at all for their lost childhoods, destroyed health, shortened life expectency, miserable working conditions, constant fear of unemployment..."
You have not yet opened your mind to the possibility that the urban poor are a result of economic changes in the world--changes forced by powerful economies in the west (that's you, and me, and everyone we know). The very existence of western economic superpowers and international trade produces changes in national and local economies. Quasi-subsistence farming becomes untenable. Western firms, with capital, introduce mass-production farming, edging small-plot farmers into poverty. The livelihood of hundreds of families becomes the livelihood of a manager, a few tractors and a score of hired hands. Where do those families go? They cannot compete, so they have no way to make bread. No money to send their children to school with. No land, because corporations take what they cannot buy, harnessing their economic power to secure political power through the cooperation of corrupt local officials.
During the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain, the problem was apparent--the abuse of cheap labor, unhealthy working conditions, minor miners, etc.--were next door. So Christians made a stink and the government changed the rules. Now, the injustice is easier to ignore because it is far away--but it is still our problem. We are involved in it, it is wrong, so why are the Christians like you doing nothing to change it?
Is it bad or good that Americans buy cotton which is grown in the US? Is it bad or good for the government to tinker with the market by subsidizing a crop in that way?
I believe in freedom. Americans should be able to buy cotton grown in the US if they so desire. I don't belive there is, ethically, any inherent justice or injustice in either subsidization and economic control or the laissez faire. I do believe, however, that there is something injust about the use of power to benefit one person or group of persons at the expense of another person or group of persons. That is what angers me about the United States--not that she is rich, or powerful, but that she bases that wealth upon injustice and uses that power to further her wealth at the expense of others. Sometimes to their detrimental and impoverishing expense. Sometimes to the point of impoverishing other countries and destabilizing their economies.
Since when did governments ever do anything but tax people, blow things up, and punish those who disobeyed their (the government's) rules? Can you think of even one instance where the government has been successful in "fixing" anything like you suggest it has the power to?
and
How do government offices visit people in prison, train people to become self-reliant?
You are apparently suffering from a critical lack of imagination. I work for a government-funded agency that provided emergency medical care within eight minutes of a telephone call. We work with government-funded people who will put out any fires that threaten your house and property. Your water is delivered to your tap, clean and drinkable, by the government, and whisked away to be safely recycled by the same government, after you've used it. The government makes sure you have a nice, green, oxygen-producing national forest to go to so that you don't have to vacation someplace paved. I went to college and learned self-reliance in part due to a government loan. The library that you enjoy was made possible...by the government. Government job-retraining projects were part of the conservative welfare revolution that decreased the welfare roles and made more people...self-reliant. This is a short list. Stretch your mind a little.
Let's look internationally. National governments have cooperated to put both Slobodan Milosevic and Charles Taylor on trial for the crimes they commited while they were in positions of power. Until recently, national governments cooperated to stop the proliferation and use of nuclear weapons, a hazard to us all. It was the United States government, acting in concert with other nations, that acted so ably to assist those devastated by the December 2004 Tsunami. National governments participated in an international ban on the trade of ivory, stemming the demand that drove both and elephants and rhinocerouses almost to extinction. Governments and coalitions can provide a neutral force to enforce cease-fires, disarm warlords of their private armies and return power to more representative, less thuggishly self-serving governments, and defend neutral places such as refugee camps where noncombatants can live safely and recieve medical attention, clean water, and food.
And finally...the United Nations (I will finally bring her into the discussion) regulates and overseas the internet internationally so that Jeff can join this discussion from Tanzania. It does so with such effectiveness--that you didn't even know it was involved.
Next, I don't see why you as an individual couldn't get together a group of like-minded people and find a way to smuggle in food, water, and medical care to hurting people. If others are smuggling weapons, bullets, bombs, and other such truck into the country, why can't someone smuggle in the things those people really need?
Again, you suffer from a lack of imagination. You cannot smuggle in healthcare, education when there is no peace. People cannot carry on with life when they live in the constant and real fear that someone is going to ride into town, take their food and belongings, rape their women, and force their children to execute their parents and grandparents. This is not hypothetical--this is actual, documented, widespread.
You cannot smuggle in peace. Nor can you smuggle in economic justice and opportunity when governments and organizations with money, guns, and the power they bring are happily taking part in economic injustice at the expense of people's economic opportunity. Not to mention the economic and political injustice that we, the world's most powerful nation, are actively involved in.
You said intervening personally would get you killed. So? The Iron Curtain came down because individuals stood up for their faith, got imprisoned, slain, were beaten, and somebody managed to get out and tell about it. If nobody has the guts to get imprisoned, then who will the government send to act on their behalf?
No. The Iron Curtain fell because it was opposed and considered unjust by many people, including Ronald Reagan, a head of state who used the power of both the United States government and coalitions of other national governments to resist, undermine, and promote change within the Communist Bloc. People had been standing up for their ideas, and dying in droves, for a long time before the Iron Curtain fell.
Additionally, it's not a matter about having the guts to be imprisoned for some lofty ideal. It's about wanting to be live in peace and instead being subjected to anarchy, genocide, banditry, rape, slavery, child-soldiering, and famine, but not being able to do anything about it. Those who "stand up" for anything against armed mobs lay down quite quickly and permanently and those in power do not care. In the Iron Curtain, they learned to care, because even in the Iron Curtain it was unacceptable to openly slay large segments of the populace. Not so in anarchy and failed states.
And Finally...
As for Christian symbolism, Jesus didn't appeal to the government to fix anything. He appealed to the people, the people who had nothing, to be generous with each other. Jesus didn't preach to the rich, he spoke to the poor, the needy, and the destitute. He advocated a world without government, not a world with the perfect one. He advocated a world in which everyone was self-governing.
Does your Jesus speak to Lazarus about embezzlement and abuse of tax-gathering status? Does not your Jesus advise wealthy young men from Arimathea? Were there not bureaucrats and centurions in thoselarge crowds of people? Wasn't Jesus' ministry supported by a group of wealthy women? Does the Jesus you know address the injustice of women being stoned for being found in adultery...while the man with whom she was committing adultery was not being stoned? Does he not say "Render onto Caesar what is Caesar's"?
Remember that Jesus lived in an occupied country where religious courts handled much of the day to day governance, and Jesus had an awful lot to say to those religious leaders about their justice and their concern for the poor and helpless. Remember that the national government was not a democracy, but a puppet monarchy, in which the people had no say whatsoever. Remember that economies were to a larger extent simple and local, without the massive centralization of power and resources that exists today.
08 May 2006
lettin' ya'll sit in around the infamous Holcomb dinner table
What's with this recurring theme that because we in America have it good someone else has to be getting the short end of the stick? I never understood that thought process and still don't.
Also I think getting into situations in other countries militarily, providing the situation isn't really effecting the US, is getting into a fight that was never ours in the first place. Personally going and trying to help solve the problems that these troubled peoples have is the best way to show compassion in my book.
It's just too easy to sit back and say, "that's too bad, we should send the government in to fix it . . ." Especially when there is plenty of junk going on here at home that needs fixing.
Anyway, my two bits.
David
Dear David,
excellent questions. Here are my responses:
i) people around the world are obviously and continually getting the short end of the stick. Americans are obviously, in a material and political sense, ridiculously and incomparably wealthy, with only Europe for comparison. You are arguing from a standpoint where the two can be separated. I, along with good Marxists everywhere, argue that they cannot, especially when you consider how interconnected the world economy is.
Almost everything you wear today is made somewhere else. Taiwan, Indonesia, Malaysia, just read the tags. Taiwan, economically and politically, is doing all right. Indonesia and Malaysia...not so much. The reason the American clothing market can function with the opulence that it does is sheerly because children under the age of twelve work in sweatshops for a pittance This is the ugly truth about the world economy: people with power can exploit people without power in order to make more money for themselves. During my research on agricultural subsidies, I discovered that American cotton growers were being paid to the tune of billions of dollars by the federal government to grow cotton. This allowed them to charge ridiculously low prices, driving North African cotton growers into poverty and bankruptcy--wreaking havoc on their already fragile economies. All so that Americans could have the most prosperous and successful economy in the world.
If you ever want an interesting conversation, I will give you my friend Tegan's phone number; ask her why she does not wear a diamond engagement ring. She is rather passionate about the awful and quite hazardous conditions that exist in diamond mines in Africa, the disproportionally ridiculously low wages the workers are paid, and the integral role diamonds play in the illegal arms trade--a trade which results in massive amounts of AK-47s and bullets which end up in places like Rwanda and the Sudan. Which brings me, after a short digression, to your second question.
--short digression--As I hope I made clear, you cannot separate our prosperous economy here from suffering and misery over there. It does not aid matters that our political power is brought to bear on foreign economies in order to gain preferential and often unfair advantages for our economy. American's are demanding "fair prices at the pumps" when in reality, we enjoy some of the lowest gas prices in the world, due to effective diplomacy and interference in the affairs of foreign powers. Also consider South America, where the United States felt free to meddle in the seventies, eighties, and nineties, assisting in the toppling of governments and tinkering with their economies. If their problems can not be justly laid at our doorstep, we can at least admit to playing a significant role in their creation. We are inextricably linked to the rest of the world, and while our prosperity and wealth and peace are good things, they are not good things if they exist because of unjust relationships with other nations and the abuse of power and position. A great South American painter once portrayed a successful executive in his well-panelled office, behind the stereotypical massive desk. But his desk was not held up by wooden drawers and legs--it rested on the backs of shackled and crippled poor people. Does our prosperity rest on the back of shackled and crippled poor people? You as a Christian should be immediately concerned at this prospect, for whether across the street or over the sea, the poor are your neighbors--this Jesus was adamant about.
But that is digression. What is point nubmer ii? It had to do with AK-47's, I believe.
ii) Once more we arrive at the issue of power. People with guns have power that people without them do not have. People with governments have power that people alone do not have. With that power comes an ability that transcends the power of the individual. I, as an individual, am powerless to stop a bullet or a bomb or a torch from setting fire to a hut. As an individual with a gun, I can perhaps kill a few people, but I cannot prevent the government of the Sudan from funding these janjaweed militias and I will not last long against any concerted group. And as an individual, I cannot stop the illegal international arms trade, that puts guns and machetes into the hands of mobs everywhere. And I, as an individual, cannot set up a hospital or a safe zone or a refugee camp--I have no power to do so.
But governments do. Governments exist because there are things that established authority can do that individuals cannot: regulate competing interest, protect the weak from the strong, provide education and healthcare to those who cannot afford it. Governments can also protect "public goods" (things like clean air and water, public safety, national forests) that can be destroyed or taken from everyone by individuals or small groups.
Individuals in destabilized countries such as Somalia and certain regions of the Sudan, as well as in Rwanda during the genocide, have no choices--they cannot choose to live in peace or choose to not pollute their wells or choose to live healthy lifestyles with good medical care. Those things are taken from them by individuals and small groups of people with power--economic power, and the power that comes from wielding armed force. They can chose to take up arms--if they are available--and fight with one group or another, but they cannot choose to live in peace unless they live under a stable government who has an interest in their peace.
I cannot as an individual do anything about that. I cannot even feed the hungry, clothe the naked, visit the lonely and imprisoned, give the thirsty clean water, or care for those in need of medical attention--because governments and gangs and ideologues will kill and/or rob both me and the people I would try to help.
But governments--and leagues of governments--can stop the illegal arms trade, denying militias like the janjaweed access to the basic element of their power: bullets. They can pressure corrupt indifferent governments to become governments interested in the welfare of their people. They can provide safe-zones for refugees and protect aid convoys and delivery zones. They can not only pray for the peace of the proverbial Jerusalem, but actually do something about it.
I am intentionally adopting the language and imagery of the Christian Scriptures because I am trying to remind you of the Christian imperative to love, and serve, our neighbors; to champion the cause of the helpless and the poor. Christ is not a capitalist; he is not an American; and most importantly, he does not believe in leaving people to their own devices or their own messes. Rather, in the midst of our mess, he left Heaven to come help us reconcile to each other and God and heal this wounded world. For his pains he was ignored, villified, and painfully put to death--yet He came with aid anyway, and continues to this day working to usher in a Kingdom of Heaven, a place without injustice, hatred, war, death, plague, inequality or famine. It was the hope of this kingdom that propelled him during his earthly ministry, and it was the proclamation of that kingdom that he made the focal point of that ministry. He described his mission as bringing healing to the sick, freedom to the captives, good news to the poor people, and wholeness to the brokenhearted, all wrapped up in the favorable year of the Lord. And he left hanging unsaid the next verse which rang in the memory of his audience: ...and the day of the vengeance of our God.
The vengeance is easy to find in the works of the prophets, from Amos to Isaiah. It is vengeance upon the wealthy and powerful who exploit and abuse the helpless. Read the prophets and see how often the welfare of the helpless--"the widows and fatherless"--is God's cetral, sorrowful, angry theme. The rich rarely do well in the prophets, and we are the richest in the world today. Even we, little brother, of modest and unostentatious means among our fellow Americans, are wealthy beyond compare in the eyes of two-thirds of the world's six billion people. We ought to bear our wealth carefully, as those who will give an account of our actions as stewards to a master with a fondness for charity and involvement in the cause of the helpless.
Sincerely,
Dan
Also I think getting into situations in other countries militarily, providing the situation isn't really effecting the US, is getting into a fight that was never ours in the first place. Personally going and trying to help solve the problems that these troubled peoples have is the best way to show compassion in my book.
It's just too easy to sit back and say, "that's too bad, we should send the government in to fix it . . ." Especially when there is plenty of junk going on here at home that needs fixing.
Anyway, my two bits.
David
Dear David,
excellent questions. Here are my responses:
i) people around the world are obviously and continually getting the short end of the stick. Americans are obviously, in a material and political sense, ridiculously and incomparably wealthy, with only Europe for comparison. You are arguing from a standpoint where the two can be separated. I, along with good Marxists everywhere, argue that they cannot, especially when you consider how interconnected the world economy is.
Almost everything you wear today is made somewhere else. Taiwan, Indonesia, Malaysia, just read the tags. Taiwan, economically and politically, is doing all right. Indonesia and Malaysia...not so much. The reason the American clothing market can function with the opulence that it does is sheerly because children under the age of twelve work in sweatshops for a pittance This is the ugly truth about the world economy: people with power can exploit people without power in order to make more money for themselves. During my research on agricultural subsidies, I discovered that American cotton growers were being paid to the tune of billions of dollars by the federal government to grow cotton. This allowed them to charge ridiculously low prices, driving North African cotton growers into poverty and bankruptcy--wreaking havoc on their already fragile economies. All so that Americans could have the most prosperous and successful economy in the world.
If you ever want an interesting conversation, I will give you my friend Tegan's phone number; ask her why she does not wear a diamond engagement ring. She is rather passionate about the awful and quite hazardous conditions that exist in diamond mines in Africa, the disproportionally ridiculously low wages the workers are paid, and the integral role diamonds play in the illegal arms trade--a trade which results in massive amounts of AK-47s and bullets which end up in places like Rwanda and the Sudan. Which brings me, after a short digression, to your second question.
--short digression--As I hope I made clear, you cannot separate our prosperous economy here from suffering and misery over there. It does not aid matters that our political power is brought to bear on foreign economies in order to gain preferential and often unfair advantages for our economy. American's are demanding "fair prices at the pumps" when in reality, we enjoy some of the lowest gas prices in the world, due to effective diplomacy and interference in the affairs of foreign powers. Also consider South America, where the United States felt free to meddle in the seventies, eighties, and nineties, assisting in the toppling of governments and tinkering with their economies. If their problems can not be justly laid at our doorstep, we can at least admit to playing a significant role in their creation. We are inextricably linked to the rest of the world, and while our prosperity and wealth and peace are good things, they are not good things if they exist because of unjust relationships with other nations and the abuse of power and position. A great South American painter once portrayed a successful executive in his well-panelled office, behind the stereotypical massive desk. But his desk was not held up by wooden drawers and legs--it rested on the backs of shackled and crippled poor people. Does our prosperity rest on the back of shackled and crippled poor people? You as a Christian should be immediately concerned at this prospect, for whether across the street or over the sea, the poor are your neighbors--this Jesus was adamant about.
But that is digression. What is point nubmer ii? It had to do with AK-47's, I believe.
ii) Once more we arrive at the issue of power. People with guns have power that people without them do not have. People with governments have power that people alone do not have. With that power comes an ability that transcends the power of the individual. I, as an individual, am powerless to stop a bullet or a bomb or a torch from setting fire to a hut. As an individual with a gun, I can perhaps kill a few people, but I cannot prevent the government of the Sudan from funding these janjaweed militias and I will not last long against any concerted group. And as an individual, I cannot stop the illegal international arms trade, that puts guns and machetes into the hands of mobs everywhere. And I, as an individual, cannot set up a hospital or a safe zone or a refugee camp--I have no power to do so.
But governments do. Governments exist because there are things that established authority can do that individuals cannot: regulate competing interest, protect the weak from the strong, provide education and healthcare to those who cannot afford it. Governments can also protect "public goods" (things like clean air and water, public safety, national forests) that can be destroyed or taken from everyone by individuals or small groups.
Individuals in destabilized countries such as Somalia and certain regions of the Sudan, as well as in Rwanda during the genocide, have no choices--they cannot choose to live in peace or choose to not pollute their wells or choose to live healthy lifestyles with good medical care. Those things are taken from them by individuals and small groups of people with power--economic power, and the power that comes from wielding armed force. They can chose to take up arms--if they are available--and fight with one group or another, but they cannot choose to live in peace unless they live under a stable government who has an interest in their peace.
I cannot as an individual do anything about that. I cannot even feed the hungry, clothe the naked, visit the lonely and imprisoned, give the thirsty clean water, or care for those in need of medical attention--because governments and gangs and ideologues will kill and/or rob both me and the people I would try to help.
But governments--and leagues of governments--can stop the illegal arms trade, denying militias like the janjaweed access to the basic element of their power: bullets. They can pressure corrupt indifferent governments to become governments interested in the welfare of their people. They can provide safe-zones for refugees and protect aid convoys and delivery zones. They can not only pray for the peace of the proverbial Jerusalem, but actually do something about it.
I am intentionally adopting the language and imagery of the Christian Scriptures because I am trying to remind you of the Christian imperative to love, and serve, our neighbors; to champion the cause of the helpless and the poor. Christ is not a capitalist; he is not an American; and most importantly, he does not believe in leaving people to their own devices or their own messes. Rather, in the midst of our mess, he left Heaven to come help us reconcile to each other and God and heal this wounded world. For his pains he was ignored, villified, and painfully put to death--yet He came with aid anyway, and continues to this day working to usher in a Kingdom of Heaven, a place without injustice, hatred, war, death, plague, inequality or famine. It was the hope of this kingdom that propelled him during his earthly ministry, and it was the proclamation of that kingdom that he made the focal point of that ministry. He described his mission as bringing healing to the sick, freedom to the captives, good news to the poor people, and wholeness to the brokenhearted, all wrapped up in the favorable year of the Lord. And he left hanging unsaid the next verse which rang in the memory of his audience: ...and the day of the vengeance of our God.
The vengeance is easy to find in the works of the prophets, from Amos to Isaiah. It is vengeance upon the wealthy and powerful who exploit and abuse the helpless. Read the prophets and see how often the welfare of the helpless--"the widows and fatherless"--is God's cetral, sorrowful, angry theme. The rich rarely do well in the prophets, and we are the richest in the world today. Even we, little brother, of modest and unostentatious means among our fellow Americans, are wealthy beyond compare in the eyes of two-thirds of the world's six billion people. We ought to bear our wealth carefully, as those who will give an account of our actions as stewards to a master with a fondness for charity and involvement in the cause of the helpless.
Sincerely,
Dan
03 May 2006
letters to family and friends
dear steve--
let me reiterate: this gentleman prosposed nuclear genocide, the armed appropriation of others' resources, the merciless execution without trial both of "terrorists" and their innocent families, all for the sake of a more comfortable and prosperous American existence with no regard to the expense the rest of the world is forced to bear in order to make that existence comfortable.
that is neither acceptable, practical, nor tenable. its only tenuous connection with the term "solution" is that which can be drawn to ideas such as "The Final Solution."
also, as Tegan put excellently and I shall briefly reiterate, the "problem" is not bad guys fighting bad guys, but the attendant famine, disease, rape, pillage, slaughter, conscription of children into armies, and horrible cost borne by those who have conflict thrust upon them.
this is not a war of armies. this is a war of mobs of men (and children) with guns. there is no optional involvement: you don't choose to lose access to medical care, food, your own land, your life, your family. the people with the guns chose for you. fight and die, or run and die, there are you options. the world is not as pretty and safe as life in America. they can't "just get a job" over there.
so, "tying up our military to solve other people's problems" is more like "sending our armed forces into harms way to protect those who cannot protect themselves" and takiing an effort to tend to the helpless and suffering--sounds a bit like widows and fatherless that the old testament prophets got all bent out of shape about. refugees and malaria patients and the like.
your militant liberal brother,
dan
jeffrey--
thank you for some salient points. as usual, while i remain in the realm of rhetoric and theory, you actually have some concrete historical data. bravo, I shall have to tame my biting criticism of the evil American capitalists for the moment.
and good thought about that ticket...
your sheepishly militant liberal brother,
dan
dear self--
the most amazing conclusion that i have drawn from this little exchange is the revalation that this blue-collar American advocated a morality that was actually more despicable than that of a standard jihading terrorist. let me reiterate: death squads, summary execution of family members, nuclear warfare...
at least a suicide bomber has some notion of self-sacrifice for a greater good while defending home and country. at least he claims some sort of moral code.
perhaps the logic of a terrorist is not that difficult or alien to our civilized way of life as we would like to believe. I may be "peevishly self-involved," but I also may be closer to genuine evil that I'd like to believe.
self
and finally, on a lighter and more important note
dear gustav and fellow pennsylvanians,
i extend my sincere condolences for the psychological trauma you must have experienced last night. while it was my hope that our own Buffalo Sabres would find victory in your hallowed arena last night, we did not in our wildest dreams anticipate the most humiliating drubbing your Philadelphia Flyers were made to endure in their own horrifyingly hushed stadium last night. three unanswered goals in the first fifteen minutes of game time was really a tough blow, but when your first goal of the night, just before the end of the second quarter, was immediately answered with our sixth of the night, that was just cruel. to lose 7-1 on your sixth, and unfortunately las game of the playoffs, must be an unbearable agony in light of the hope rekindled by your recent victories.
it must have been difficult. i wince imagining it. in your honor i sall contain my gleeful grinning for five minutes of somber silence and petition our father in heaven to restrain his partying as well and grant you some respite for your troubled souls.
-now-a-sabres-fan-cuz-the-wings-just-got-knocked-out-of-the-playoffs-by-some-two-bit-canuck-team,
dan
let me reiterate: this gentleman prosposed nuclear genocide, the armed appropriation of others' resources, the merciless execution without trial both of "terrorists" and their innocent families, all for the sake of a more comfortable and prosperous American existence with no regard to the expense the rest of the world is forced to bear in order to make that existence comfortable.
that is neither acceptable, practical, nor tenable. its only tenuous connection with the term "solution" is that which can be drawn to ideas such as "The Final Solution."
also, as Tegan put excellently and I shall briefly reiterate, the "problem" is not bad guys fighting bad guys, but the attendant famine, disease, rape, pillage, slaughter, conscription of children into armies, and horrible cost borne by those who have conflict thrust upon them.
this is not a war of armies. this is a war of mobs of men (and children) with guns. there is no optional involvement: you don't choose to lose access to medical care, food, your own land, your life, your family. the people with the guns chose for you. fight and die, or run and die, there are you options. the world is not as pretty and safe as life in America. they can't "just get a job" over there.
so, "tying up our military to solve other people's problems" is more like "sending our armed forces into harms way to protect those who cannot protect themselves" and takiing an effort to tend to the helpless and suffering--sounds a bit like widows and fatherless that the old testament prophets got all bent out of shape about. refugees and malaria patients and the like.
your militant liberal brother,
dan
jeffrey--
thank you for some salient points. as usual, while i remain in the realm of rhetoric and theory, you actually have some concrete historical data. bravo, I shall have to tame my biting criticism of the evil American capitalists for the moment.
and good thought about that ticket...
your sheepishly militant liberal brother,
dan
dear self--
the most amazing conclusion that i have drawn from this little exchange is the revalation that this blue-collar American advocated a morality that was actually more despicable than that of a standard jihading terrorist. let me reiterate: death squads, summary execution of family members, nuclear warfare...
at least a suicide bomber has some notion of self-sacrifice for a greater good while defending home and country. at least he claims some sort of moral code.
perhaps the logic of a terrorist is not that difficult or alien to our civilized way of life as we would like to believe. I may be "peevishly self-involved," but I also may be closer to genuine evil that I'd like to believe.
self
and finally, on a lighter and more important note
dear gustav and fellow pennsylvanians,
i extend my sincere condolences for the psychological trauma you must have experienced last night. while it was my hope that our own Buffalo Sabres would find victory in your hallowed arena last night, we did not in our wildest dreams anticipate the most humiliating drubbing your Philadelphia Flyers were made to endure in their own horrifyingly hushed stadium last night. three unanswered goals in the first fifteen minutes of game time was really a tough blow, but when your first goal of the night, just before the end of the second quarter, was immediately answered with our sixth of the night, that was just cruel. to lose 7-1 on your sixth, and unfortunately las game of the playoffs, must be an unbearable agony in light of the hope rekindled by your recent victories.
it must have been difficult. i wince imagining it. in your honor i sall contain my gleeful grinning for five minutes of somber silence and petition our father in heaven to restrain his partying as well and grant you some respite for your troubled souls.
-now-a-sabres-fan-cuz-the-wings-just-got-knocked-out-of-the-playoffs-by-some-two-bit-canuck-team,
dan
01 May 2006
so this one time at a Billy Graham Jihad...
been dyin' to say that for such a long time. in light of what happened last night, I feel no qualms whatsoever. BBC (you can hear it on NPR after midnight) sparked a discussion with my medic in which I amazingly maintained a restrained tone of voice.
highlights include:
-the solution to the Darfur issue is to let them kill each other. there are too many bleeding heart compassionate people in the world.
But, sir, women and children are being massacred by government-armed, American-oil-company-backed militias. American corporations actively destabilize, subvert, and aid in the corruption of weak governments in order to exploit such situations.
-it's not my problem.
But, sir, the price of oil would go up.
-then we should just go in and take it. we're the most powerful nation on the globe. why should their problems interfere with our economy?
Umm...remember Vietnam? you know, how completely impossible it is to invade and control a country that doesn't want you there? besides, isn't that robbery? we're having a pretty damn difficult time just maintaining stability in Iraq right now. We're stretched really thin. I don't think you can really manage that.
-we should have just nuked 'em.
What?!!
-yeah. nuked 'em and taken the oil. problem solved. situation stable.
Nuclear warfare? Aren't you worried about fallout, nuclear winter, radiation contamination?
-nope. I'll be dead before that's a problem.
Right. Ok. what about our relationships with other countries around the world? Wouldn't that jeopardize our economic ties, peace treaties, etc?
-we're America. we don't need them.
Hmmm. Ok. what about terrorism? That would probably get a huge boost from nuking an Islamic country in the name of exploiting their natural resources?
-Terrorism? there'll always be terrorists. Tell you what would make it a lot better though. We should just find the terrorists, haul them out in the street, and shoot 'em right in the heads.
I think that would make the problem worse.
-No. Not if you take them and their families out into the street and just execute 'em all. That would take the wind out of a lot of their sails.
Okay. So. Let's recap. Nuclear genocide, international armed robbery, subversion of foreign governments, and execution squads. Not to mention the military takeover of other countries. "Might makes right?" I ask him.
He agreed.
"Is this what you teach your children?"
Yep.
-----
Damn.
The world's greatest democracy is wasted on f****** g**d*** idiots. peevishly self-involved ones to boot.
--the previous conversation has been neither embellished nor exaggerated in the slightest, nor did the interviewer employ leading questions or excite exaggerated reactions. somehow the interviewer managed to remain calm and conversational throughout. he remains as flabbergasted as you no doubt are.
Dan Perrine...now I understand you. now I understand.
highlights include:
-the solution to the Darfur issue is to let them kill each other. there are too many bleeding heart compassionate people in the world.
But, sir, women and children are being massacred by government-armed, American-oil-company-backed militias. American corporations actively destabilize, subvert, and aid in the corruption of weak governments in order to exploit such situations.
-it's not my problem.
But, sir, the price of oil would go up.
-then we should just go in and take it. we're the most powerful nation on the globe. why should their problems interfere with our economy?
Umm...remember Vietnam? you know, how completely impossible it is to invade and control a country that doesn't want you there? besides, isn't that robbery? we're having a pretty damn difficult time just maintaining stability in Iraq right now. We're stretched really thin. I don't think you can really manage that.
-we should have just nuked 'em.
What?!!
-yeah. nuked 'em and taken the oil. problem solved. situation stable.
Nuclear warfare? Aren't you worried about fallout, nuclear winter, radiation contamination?
-nope. I'll be dead before that's a problem.
Right. Ok. what about our relationships with other countries around the world? Wouldn't that jeopardize our economic ties, peace treaties, etc?
-we're America. we don't need them.
Hmmm. Ok. what about terrorism? That would probably get a huge boost from nuking an Islamic country in the name of exploiting their natural resources?
-Terrorism? there'll always be terrorists. Tell you what would make it a lot better though. We should just find the terrorists, haul them out in the street, and shoot 'em right in the heads.
I think that would make the problem worse.
-No. Not if you take them and their families out into the street and just execute 'em all. That would take the wind out of a lot of their sails.
Okay. So. Let's recap. Nuclear genocide, international armed robbery, subversion of foreign governments, and execution squads. Not to mention the military takeover of other countries. "Might makes right?" I ask him.
He agreed.
"Is this what you teach your children?"
Yep.
-----
Damn.
The world's greatest democracy is wasted on f****** g**d*** idiots. peevishly self-involved ones to boot.
--the previous conversation has been neither embellished nor exaggerated in the slightest, nor did the interviewer employ leading questions or excite exaggerated reactions. somehow the interviewer managed to remain calm and conversational throughout. he remains as flabbergasted as you no doubt are.
Dan Perrine...now I understand you. now I understand.
21 April 2006
o me, o my, i heard me ol' wife cry
yeah. best concert ever. somehow we scored fifth row tickets to a sold-out Great Big Sea show by showing up fifteen minutes after doors were supposed to open. rock on us. those guys can throw a concert...basically sang along to every song and now my throat is gone. but how can you not when they throw "General Taylor" out there right after "I'm a Rover" and "Donkey Ridin'" and "Excursion Around the Bay..."
and "Patty Murphy" and "Mari Mac" and "Jack Hinks" and "Lukey" and "Consequence Free"...
and a boatload of quite awesome new songs. including two about horses falling through the ice, and that beautifully thoughtful one about whether it's better to have a mermaid with the top half woman and the bottom half fish or the other way 'round...
so we sang real loud. and then when they did a brief montage of verses from eighties hair ballads and such...they stopped singing and let us carry along with Whitesnake, Summer of '69...yeah.
So, by the time the second encore rolled around, they came out and shushed the audience to the first complete hush in three hours and laid out a beautiful "Ol' Brown's Daughter" completely a capella, completely sans amplification. Complete and total awesomeness.
yeah. what a night. how could such a night be any better? well, i did get a sunburned scalp from clambering around at letchworth after cooking venison burgers on the first fire of the summer...
not a bad end to a slothfully uneventful week.
oh, yeah. and spent the first night of the season outside. underneath the crisp, clear sky full of Houghton stars. in the back of my truck. let the legendary travels begin.
with a nod to Joss Wheedon, I give you...the Lady Serendipitiy.
and "Patty Murphy" and "Mari Mac" and "Jack Hinks" and "Lukey" and "Consequence Free"...
and a boatload of quite awesome new songs. including two about horses falling through the ice, and that beautifully thoughtful one about whether it's better to have a mermaid with the top half woman and the bottom half fish or the other way 'round...
so we sang real loud. and then when they did a brief montage of verses from eighties hair ballads and such...they stopped singing and let us carry along with Whitesnake, Summer of '69...yeah.
So, by the time the second encore rolled around, they came out and shushed the audience to the first complete hush in three hours and laid out a beautiful "Ol' Brown's Daughter" completely a capella, completely sans amplification. Complete and total awesomeness.
yeah. what a night. how could such a night be any better? well, i did get a sunburned scalp from clambering around at letchworth after cooking venison burgers on the first fire of the summer...
not a bad end to a slothfully uneventful week.
oh, yeah. and spent the first night of the season outside. underneath the crisp, clear sky full of Houghton stars. in the back of my truck. let the legendary travels begin.
with a nod to Joss Wheedon, I give you...the Lady Serendipitiy.
04 April 2006
loooopity loo
well. so. this friendly lady is Maureen. she works for the University of Buffalo. see how she looks friendly, competent, engaging, professional? yes.
now. attend to the young man. perhaps not so competent, professional--but well compensated with friendliness and perhaps overenthusiastically engaging. yes. he is coked out of his mind on a friendly little relative of diazepam--known to the layman as valium, or Madame V. serendipitously, Madame V was joined on her stroll through my circulatory system by the ever congenial nitrous oxide, also known as "laughing gas." or even better, "irrepressible giggling like a schoolgirl for no apparent reason gas." our young man had just attempted--and failed--twice in valiant and perhaps overambitious attempts to stand on his own two feet. it's hard when it feels like you have three or four very groovy feet--of which one, the ex-hippie-zebra-from-florida appears slightly enamored of the green penguin. and if you thought he had an odd sense of humor stone sober...
to make things more interesting, a "short term amnesiac" had joined the pharmaceutical mambo-ing through this young man's bloodstream.
so. short term amnesia being what it is, if you recieved a telephone call this morning from said young man, he does not remember it. at all. nor could he even remotely be considered responsible for what he did or did not say, or any confusion so resulting. and, finally, he hopes that you derived as much enjoyment from the experience as he did. because he had an absolutely fine birthday morning.
with all the swank in my voice...thank you Maureen. such a lovely maiden of the moonshine mist...
now. four wisdom teeth lighter, and eight days of sick leave ahead of me...it's time to sit back, slurp down the ibuprofen-laced slurpees and enjoy this season of-- in the grand words of Dan "Perm" Crandall--maxin' and relaxin'.
yeah.
03 April 2006
the cross on my back
or "tatoo pt. II"
twilighttreader:
well, "this girl" was once upon a time a good friend of mine, so I should preface with a dear affection for an old friend. but. I also have pretensions towards being an intellectual. and i think ideas are important. so here's what I think.
Why? because trendy things entail a safe and easy form of "meaningful" self-expression when one leaves college and enters law/grad/hard knocks school and discovers the sheer difficulty of actually doing anything even minutely creative or important--of simply surviving in a system of pragmatic acquiesence to forces beyond your control.
It's a cog in a wheel in a transmission in a factory "sticking it to the man" without actually losing it's coveted little coggish place or recognizing its utter dependence on the system. Refuge through empty symbolism which you convince yourself is important. a lot of religious fervor works like that. Self-convincing action to artificially enliven a disappointing futility and rescue the self-concept from the oppression of being considered pretty insignificant by forces like nature and macroeconomic systems and socialized mass behavior.
Identity through contrived spiritual experiences. A coping mechanism in the place of humility.
Of course, I'm probably reading my own experiences and psychology right on top of hers. She may be validly experiencing something very spiritual, something she chose to express from deep conviction of its importance. For her sake I sincerely hope so. Because if not, she's compensating around an important bit of reality rather than facing it. And as we learn in the medical profession, compensation without action to address a threat is a losing game.
And for my sake, I hope she never reads this :)
twilighttreader:
"The ironic thing is that you can turn on the TV and see any number of celebrities and such who are patently not Christians sporting the iconography, be it with tattoos or "bling" or whatever. Why this girl things that inking a cross on her shoulder is making such a bold statement is really beyond me."
well, "this girl" was once upon a time a good friend of mine, so I should preface with a dear affection for an old friend. but. I also have pretensions towards being an intellectual. and i think ideas are important. so here's what I think.
Why? because trendy things entail a safe and easy form of "meaningful" self-expression when one leaves college and enters law/grad/hard knocks school and discovers the sheer difficulty of actually doing anything even minutely creative or important--of simply surviving in a system of pragmatic acquiesence to forces beyond your control.
It's a cog in a wheel in a transmission in a factory "sticking it to the man" without actually losing it's coveted little coggish place or recognizing its utter dependence on the system. Refuge through empty symbolism which you convince yourself is important. a lot of religious fervor works like that. Self-convincing action to artificially enliven a disappointing futility and rescue the self-concept from the oppression of being considered pretty insignificant by forces like nature and macroeconomic systems and socialized mass behavior.
Identity through contrived spiritual experiences. A coping mechanism in the place of humility.
Of course, I'm probably reading my own experiences and psychology right on top of hers. She may be validly experiencing something very spiritual, something she chose to express from deep conviction of its importance. For her sake I sincerely hope so. Because if not, she's compensating around an important bit of reality rather than facing it. And as we learn in the medical profession, compensation without action to address a threat is a losing game.
And for my sake, I hope she never reads this :)
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