Monday, September 17, 2001   Write me! Shana Tovah! Happy 5762! Rosh HaShanah, the Jewish New Year, began this evening. According to the research I did online (always a questionable pursuit) this is the day on which God created man. Each year on this day, God decides whether a person merits another year in this world. Though that judgment is made, it can still be changed during the Ten Days of Repentance, the period leading up to Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, at which point God seals the book for the next year. This is like the time of the school year when the teacher is ready to hand out the final grades, but there's still one more opportunity to improve your grade. Only in this case, you manage it by doing a little extra credit work in the areas of "repentance, prayer, and charity." Prayer and charity are probably already on a lot of people's agendas for the next ten days. And not just those of the Jewish faith. The events of last week have brought many, including some non-religious folks, to the point of prayer. And charities such as the Red Cross have been at the top of lots of lists. Repentance may be quite another subject, however. Repentance is for when you've sinned, either by doing something wrong or neglecting to do something... Oh, wait a minute. Maybe this is the loophole we need to locate in order to get into this repentance thing for the next ten days. Perhaps we can repent of the sin of neglecting our citizenship in turning over the government of the people, by the people and for the people to just a few corrupt people and the greedy and power-hungry who take advantage of them. Which leads to a foreign policy that devalues human life in favor of strategic political and economic advantages. As if politics or economics would have a life without people. It's probably past time to again read Barbara Tuchman's "March of Folly," in which she examines the fatal flaws in the psychology of governing classes at four points in history. "The power to command frequently causes failure to think," she writes. Tuchman also quotes George Orwell's definition of "crimestop" from his dystopian classic: "The faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments... and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. In short... protective stupidity." Let us repent of our protective stupidity as we enter the new year, and perhaps God will be willing to give us a passing grade. [ Posted 10:12 p.m. | Streams Archives | Comments? ] Sunday, September 16, 2001   Write me! Dark and Dangerous It's been difficult sitting down in front of the computer this week. Sure, I manage to while away the workday taking care of what needs taking care of. But when it comes to creating some words or pictures for my own sites, it's pretty much been a lost cause. I'm still in shock. Or anger. Or one of those stages of grief. I'm sure Beth could lay it all out for me. So I've been relying on the words of others. Some of them I've linked from here. Some of them I've just absorbed at their sites and moved on to the next place on my list of links. Or a link two, three, four times removed. It's easy to just wander when your mind isn't focused on anything in particular. There's a story I didn't get around to telling, about the big, angry man in a pickup truck who followed me into the parking lot at Beth's office and stalked up to my window yelling at me because he didn't like the way I was driving. It was a couple of weeks ago. It brought up a lot of fear and anger, and the scene itself, and alternative scenarios, kept playing through my head for several days. Something similar is going through my head now. Alternatives scenarios to this week's horror. But it doesn't help, because they're not what really happened, and I eventually have to look again at what did occur. The vision of it is in my mind, and even if I don't see it continuously replayed by the news media, it will scroll repeatedly in my memory. There are alternative scenarios for the future, however. They are being weighed now. Most of them involve violence of some form or another. Mirroring, on a much larger scale, the violence now being perpetrated against people in this country who are Arabaic. Or Islamic. Or look Arabic or Islamic. Or look like ignorant people think Arabs and Muslims look. Any plan for bringing terrorists to justice that includes the killing of innocent people is one which will only succeed in perpetuating the cycle of violence in this world. And it's one which I cannot and will not support. No matter what may come. And I will say right now, that it feels like what is coming is something very dark and very dangerous. [ Posted 03:12 p.m. | Streams Archives | Comments? ] Saturday, September 15, 2001   Write me! An Agnostic's Prayer I'll eventually have some words of my own to share, but in the meantime, Ron Yeany has a few choice words in his entry for today: "We're staring at an enormous beehive. Let's not bash it with a baseball bat because we have been stung badly. We need to be very deliberate and maintain our compassion while resolving to eliminate this beehive without killing the tree or setting the forest on fire." [ Posted 04:43 p.m. | Streams Archives | Comments? ] Friday, September 14, 2001   Write me! Whither the News Media? Dan Kennedy is the excellent media commentator for the alternative Boston Phoenix, and this week he wonders about how news media will respond to the events of recent days: "Can the media -- accustomed as they have become to celebrity trials and semen-stained dresses -- return to the infinitely more difficult task of providing the information a self-governing people need? After years of sex and scandal, of shuttered foreign bureaus, of downsizing and profit-mongering, it’s not going to be easy." [ Posted 09:56 a.m. | Streams Archives | Comments? ]