Day One, Year One

Many have come to our nation's capital to protest wars and injustice. Today the largest number of people ever to gather in Washington DC comes to welcome, toast, and support Barack Obama and all that he and his new Administration stand for.

Today's assembly braces against sub-freezing temperatures that match the absence of warmth, generosity, and American goodness left by the outgoing regime. Ironically its chief henchman, no friend of people with disabilities, will appear in a wheelchair. It's as if the oncoming good spirit of the gathering has served up some sort of poetic justice for his unabashed legacy of disability.

The in-pouring of hope we see in the faces of the American people today expresses their determination to bring the American spirit back to America. That wholesome determination is washing like a tsunami over the stench and stain the former regime—built on greed and pettiness, led by a profoundly stupid man, a puppet of evilly greedy men.

People from every corner of the world recognize our eight-year failure. Yet once again they are about to forgive us. They are with us now, just as they were immediately after 9/11. Their good faith will not be squandered this time. We are starting over.

When thinking of starting over, it occurs to me how purely arbitrarily we number our years. We still count from the purported birth of a Messiah of one, dominant religion among our thousand faiths. Somewhat less arbitrarily we divide our numbers by tens and come up with centuries.

So to accept that the current millennium began with the Supreme Court appointment of our nation's most corrupt and un-American regime—one bent on bullying its way around the world—is not only ill-founded, it's discouraging and counter-productive. We don't have to accept it.

Why not start over, not just with our efforts but with our calendar? Why not mark this new beginning with an appropriately fresh way to number our days? Well, because that would be arrogantly self-congratulatory. We're over that. More to the point, we have yet to prove we can create an America worth calling new. That's for history to decide.

Besides, we and our new Administration have many and much more pressing issues to address. All of us have to pitch in and make things better before we deserve such a distinction. But there's nothing wrong with setting a new calendar as one of the ways we might measure our success.

Can we make this point forward so worthy of note that one day it will be called Day One of the Year One?

Labels: America, Barack Obama, calendar

It's Not a Frickin' Miracle

US Air Flight 1549 from Laguardia to Charlotte, North Carolina, went down a little while ago, immediately after take off. The pilots had to ditch in the Hudson. Probable cause—engines clobbered by a flock of geese.

Reports say everyone is off the plane, safe, and accounted for. What great news!

Unfortunately commentators and interviewee experts are letting fly with the word miracle.

What an insult to all the peole who made the water landing and courageous rescue possible!

It's not a frickin' miracle! It's a human triumph! The practical result of lots of cool-headed, steady-handed piloting. Witnesses call the landing a smooth descent.

Pilots were backed, no doubt, by the right response of well-trained flight attendants. The passengers must have behaved admirably as well. An image shows some standing calmly on a wings as rescue boats gather to take them on board.

Behind all today's professionalism and even heroism is years of disciplined design, thorough planning, and creativity on the part of dedicated people.

The Coast Gurard, NYPD and fire, commercial craft, Circle Line... they all pitched in. And after the follow-up investigation, we'll learn more from this incident and make even more safety improvements.

In short, so many people worked so hard to make the emergency end well, that the thick and flimsy word miracle and numskull phrases like truly a miracle are an insult to all who made the success happen.

Now if all the luggage is returned to their owners, that would be a miracle.

Labels: creativity, Hudson, miracle, US Air Flight 1549

An Atheist Who Prays

I'm an atheist who prays, not to a god or to some loosely defined spiritual entity—I don't believe in any of that—and certainly not to myself. I was raised Catholic and studied to be a priest, so I'm familiar with prayer and other meditative processes. And you know what? They work—just not the way some religious people claim they work.

John Tierney, who calls himself a heathen in his New York Times, Science Times, article "For Good Self-Control, Try Getting Religious About It," quotes psychologist Michael McCullough, whose work has uncovered evidence that devoutly religious people, not pious show-offs, demonstrate greater self-control.

Brain-scan studies have shown that when people pray or meditate, there’s a lot of activity in two parts of brain that are important for self-regulation and control of attention and emotion. The rituals that religions have been encouraging for thousands of years seem to be a kind of anaerobic workout for self-control.

Is anyone surprised? Anytime you take time out, cast off your pressing concerns, and open yourself to your mind's infinite variety of options, you start breathing more slowly and deeply. Your heart rate and blood pressure settle down. You feel better. Best of all, you set yourself up for taking a more optimistic outlook and for making decisions that align with your purest intentions and most heartfelt hopes. It doesn't matter what you call the object of your attention in this condition, it's the condition that improves your condition.

Sigmund Freud writes in Moses and Monotheism that faith in God just might help the believer enjoy a richly introspective life. He argues further that the Jewish religion gave its people the advantage of intellectual abstraction. The fact that Freud, an unrepentant atheist, accomplished a whole lot of abstract thinking makes me think that introspection with or without God or gods might just do the same thing.

My most tolerant, believer friends have told me they believe that all religious people actually address the same god by different names. I simply take it one step further. My most intolerant atheist friends have balked at attending atheist meetings in church basements. I refuse to limit myself that way.

So even though I agree with Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion and Christopher Hitchens in God Is Not Great, I have no problem returning to the practices that once deluded me into quietude, purposefulness, and peace. I've just dropped the delusion part.

It's no surprise to me that prayer still works, when it works, no matter how it works.

Labels: atheism, God, prayer

Please Don't Vote for More TV Terrorism

"In fall 2006 the creators of "24" received a visit from the dean of the United States Military Academy at West Point and other experts in military interrogation, who told them that West Point cadets and soldiers in Iraq were being influenced by the uninhibited — and unrepentant — use of torture on the series."

So says Edward Wyatt in his New York Times story "New Era in Politics, New Focus for '24'."

I wondered about that as I watched the revolting, one and only episode I endured. Talk about torture! The puerile characters and their hollow dialog made watching almost unbearable. Forget water-boarding, this is what I call pain! Yet the outrageous waves of gratuitous violence made it difficult to ignore. Not out of interest, mind you, but out of disgust.

Apparently in response to the Obama victory and the wholesale disgrace and insignificance of Shrub, the ever led-by-the-nose Fox network has decided to do something like repent for its sins by beating this dead-horse show into another season.

Thanks, but it's too late, you sniveling whores. Even if Bauer were to develop opposable thumbs and disavow all that he has stood for, once was enough for me.

I sampled. I spewed. And I won't be back for more abuse.

Peter Liguori, chairman of Fox Entertainment, is said to be confident that he can win back his audience. Is Jack going to see the light? If so, end of show. Is Jack going to continue on as the same reprehensible ass? Probably so.

That's where you and the plea in my title of this post come in. Will you come back for more? Or will you vote this disgusting series off the air with your absence?

If the military has voiced concern over the show's horrible effects on its soldiers, what good could continuing this disgrace ever do?

Just say no. Nielsen will do the rest.

Labels: 24, Fox Entertainment, Jack Bauer, Peter Liguori, television, violence