Darfur et al

While searching for performances of religious music, I came across a web-site which called for action against the atrocities in Darfur.  I had a conversation with a friend, whose response to my pain and indignation was that this kind of thing was "inevitable" and "eternal".  It made me sadder and my inherent cynicism popped up and I said, "Yeah, and if they had any resources that anybody cared about, the world would jump in with both feet screaming and shouting about the injustice and the genocide."  Oh, Cynicism, thy name is History.

The Memorial Mass

Father James Quinn was at our parish for seventeen years during the early days.  Then, as is traditional in the church, he was moved about and upward.  He quietly served wherever he was sent.  His integrity and morality remained unquestionable throughout his long career.  He never gave anyone cause to worry.....not the church, not the parish members, nor children, nor any of the thousands he brought the sacraments to, the comfort of God, and the common sense advise and counsel that were his hallmark.  He died as quietly as he lived and if what we believe is true, he sleeps in God awaiting the return of Christ.  As God might say, "Well done, O good and faithful servant."  As for me, requiem in pacem, Father Jimmy.  You earned it.

Understanding Events Through the Media

When I was a student nurse, one of the first things I was taught was that "all behavior has meaning and can be understood."  It took me a really long time to get that.  My other favorite was that nobody does anything without a reason, that there is always some motivating factor. The caveat in both cases is that we have to have all of the facts.  What I find endlessly amusing is that very often, we are clueless.  It is the same way with trying to determine motivations and facts about events from the media.  The media has no business attempting to editorialize about such things anywhere but on the editorial page.  What I see is every wannabe journalist....no, not journalist....reporter on the planet, trying to tell you why things happened.  Excuse me but I believe that being a reporter is about "reporting", not opining.

Making a Sacrifice on the Altar of Public Opinion

Edmund Burke was a member of the British Parliament.  He is quoted as saying that a representative owes the people not only his industry, but his judgment, and he betrays those he represents if he sacrifices that industry and judgment to their opinion.  Back in those days, only the rich had access to education and usually only men had access to true academics.  With the advent of the internet and almost universal access, we have leveled the playing field.  Today, with a little careful research and verification of source reliability, everybody can know almost everything.  And we, the constituency, can communicate our educated recommendations to our leaders.
The point here is that we elect our leaders to office for the purpose of exercising their judgment for our benefit and we trust them to know what needs to be done and how to do it.  If they cave to pressure from us, failing to do what they truly believe is right.....if they are too busy KEEPING their jobs to DO their jobs, they are not leaders, they are merely politicians.

More than a little pain

I know the sorrow of losing my home will cause tears.....probably lots of them.  I cannot permit that to immobilize me.  I have to take whatever action will ensure my survival.  I have to prove to MaryBeth, Patricia, Robert and myself, that I have the ability to survive and flourish.  I need to do a little praying I think.....asking for wisdom and courage and strength and, maybe, a miracle.  The truth is that God helps those who help themselves.  He did not bring me this far only to have me fail miserably.  The fact is that I must succeed spectacularly.  Maybe success is not tied to the life I know at all.  Perhaps, it is about adaptation, change, flexibility.  This will be very hard.

The Excommunication of Sister Margaret

It was because she acquiesced to the aborting of a three month pregnancy in a mother of four living children.  It was a pregnancy that could very possibly resulted in both maternal and fetal death and was certainly extremely high risk for a woman who already had children at home who needed her.  It would have been ok by church law to let mom die.  However the church views abortion as murder.  I am Catholic.  I love my church.  Frequently, I do not love the exclusive men's club that rules it.  Frankly, I don't think Christ had any problem with women being in charge.  Please remember that the Bible, old testament and new, AND the Koran, were all written by men.  What do you think they are going to say?  They were arcane times and the society of men were afraid that the society of women would rule again, so they used every tool at their disposal to prevent it from ever reverting back.  Call it genetic gender defect.  Call it galactic stupidity.  Call it incredibly bad judgment.  Call it what it really is:  a great tragedy.

Recovery

We are starting to recover from the largest single day drop in the stock market in history.  It was purportedly caused by a program glitch that showed what appeared to be a 50% drop in the price of Procter & Gamble stock.  People panicked and what followed was rapid, ugly and painful.  All for no good reason.  There has to be some way to slow down or prevent panic selling.  I don't know how it can be accomplished, but I think it is a worthy goal.

Juicing Up the Economy

The CEO of General Motors comes on the television and says they paid their entire loan plus interest five years ahead of schedule.  If this is true, we should be hearing more stuff like it.  You want to see the stock market take off like a kite in a November wind? Publicize that kind of thing everywhere, everyday, all day long.

We are living in a troubled world....

I sort of suspected it, but not until Father Murnane and the rest of the priests started asking at every mass for the prayers of everyone for all priests.  He didn't say for all religious...... brothers, deacons, nuns, lay-brothers and sisters.......just priests.  This has nothing to do with us praying for more vocations to increase the population of priests and nuns because people just tend not to do it anymore.  No.......we are even praying that Pope Benedict's burdens be lightened.  I hate to be the one to point out the obvious, but if this pope had, at the time he was merely a prince of the church, done what he should have done, perhaps his burden wouldn't be so heavy now and a lot of children, now grown, would have been spared the tragic misery of violation.  I do not fear homosexuals in the priesthood.  They are adults who, if they have sex, have it with other consenting adults, unlike the monstrous pedophile, who takes advantage of his own authority and his victim's innocence for the selfish purpose of sexual gratification.  A priest having sex with another adult, regardless of gender, may be a no-no to the church and to society, but if the other adult consents, there is no crime.  Pedophilia is a crime...........period.

The church's role in all of this should be as any specialized employer, to screen applicants thoroughly and monitor any suspicious activity.  I don't mean a continuous witch-hunt, but I do mean that the church should have a strong role, as the arbiter of morality, in educating the public at large and children about the hazards of life including the potential exposure to sexual predators.

Be brave, O Bride of Christ, and make the effort to protect your children, not just figuratively, but literally.

It isn't funny at all...........

Ever since the crash of the plane carrying the president of Poland and his wife and a host of governmental officials, the Polish joke have been flying thick and fast........even from the Polish-American community.  I shall repeat NONE of them here.  What a horrific tragedy.  What happened to the time-honored practical practice of everybody taking separate flights?  Can we please go back to that?  I never want to hear about this kind of thing happening again.......... ever.

Getting out of the trouble we are in......

Sometimes I think that we may have progressed too far in the pursuit of free-time.  In the old days, say when our country was being founded, men and women pretty much spent all of their waking hours trying to stay alive.  It was a full-time occupation to keep some kind of shelter overhead, food in the belly and protected from predators, both the four-legged and two-legged varieties.  The mortality rate was high and life-expectancy was low.

There was no electricity and there were no appliances, so you worked til the sun went down and the light disappeared and you dropped from exhaustion.  There was no time for all the back-biting, lying and terrorizing of the public.  Of course, the fastest form of communication was drums and smoke-signals, so it might take a while for an idea to make around to the general public.  Rumor and innuendo were not effective weapons in the political world at that time because they required much more rapid communication forms to be meaningful.

Nowadays, we can say everything longer, louder, faster, and to many more people than ever before.  And, you and I know that if you say it long enough, often enough and to enough people.....you can convince those people of anything.

I say turn off the electricity, make everybody hunt and grow their own food, make their own clothes, let them barter for everything.  That ought to keep them busy enough to stay out of trouble.....at least...the kind of trouble we are in today.

Is there light at the end of the mortgage?

Who knows?  It took me five month in arrears before I could get any change.  Mind you, they were always thoughtful, supportive and considerate when I called, first Wachovia, then Wells Fargo.  Then I got a two thousand dollar a month reduction and a ninety day trial period.  We have been doing that for six months.  There hasn't been any real correspondence, just statements that show my ever-increasing arrearages.  It is sort of scary.  Now our president tells us that there are going to be pressures brought to bear and incentives for banks to move forward with the permanent loan modifications.  Maybe there is light at the end of this tunnel.
However, experience has taught us all the same thing. "If it sounds to good to be true, it probably is."

Dangerous and Out of Control

Without a doubt the health care reform bill is the hottest topic out there.  Where you stand on it will either leap-frog you to political stardom or bury you in the legendary elephant graveyard,  although with the number of political resurrections I have seen in my lifetime, there doesn't seem to be any such thing as actual political death.  However, if you are on the unpopular side you can definitely get voted out of office for a while and no political divo (or diva, for that matter) wants that no matter how temporary a situation it may be.

What I want to make very clear to our badly behaved citizenry is that this country, our America, our Land of the Free and Home of the Brave, was founded on dissenting opinion, the absolute right of our citizens to believe DIFFERENTLY from one another and to act on those divergent beliefs as long as those actions to do not injure or violate the rights of others.  People have given up their lives for that principle.  The American Civil Liberties Union exists for the sole and sacred purpose of defending and thereby assuring those rights.  Let none of us shame the memories of those who died to guarantee us the right to disagree.

The other thing I feel compelled to mention is that we were all raised in polite society.  You don't throw a brick through somebody's window to make a point and you don't publicly attempt to insult and humiliate others because they disagree with you.  You have a home in a world where you can differ in your opinions, but let us be civilized, polite and humane beings about those differences.  What happened to the art of persuasion?  the formal argument of debate?  overwhelming the opposition with facts?  Grow up, people!  Only small children and utter bullies use such tactics.  Mature people use reason and rational discussion.  Let us prove that we deserve the magnificent concept of America.

Health Care Reform

Everybody else has weighed-in about it.  I guess it is time I did, too.  I have not read the bill.  Let me admit it up front.  I hear the same thing you do and expect there is a lot of truth-stretching and down-right lying on both sides of the aisle.  The only way to really know what it says is to read it, but even then, stuff in these bills is frequently open to interpretation.  I would like to see a panel......multi-political, multi-ethnic, multi-gender, multi socio-economic......go through this bill line by line to see what it  ACTUALLY says and put the politicos on the hot-seat for interpretive purposes.

Life and experience have taught me that if you wait until you are fully prepared to do anything, you will never really do anything.  In that regard, perhaps it was better to do something, no matter how imperfect, with a plan to revise and correct, than to do nothing.  The Chinese say that even a journey of a thousand miles begins with a first step.  So we took the first step, now we can work on correcting the navigation so we can get where we really want to go.

Comprehension and Interpretation

Of the many wonderful skills I have acquired in my lifetime, there are two that I deem the most important.  The first is reading quickly with strong comprehension, which I acquired in a special summer program at school.  The second is objective and truthful reporting which I learned from my dad.  I have other skills to be sure, but these two are the ones that impact the ability to transfer information accurately.  It is bad enough to misrepresent something because you truly fail to understand it, but to do it deliberately, to put a "spin" on it and use the media to disseminate it as fact and truth, is a brand of criminality that I am only just being able to recognize and abhor.  It is one thing to edit a movie or a novel.....FICTION.....to create an atmosphere and present a specified point of view, but you don't get to edit LIFE.  If you want to express an opinion then clearly define it as OPINION coming out of the gate.  DO NOT....let me repeat.....DO NOT....represent your opinion as fact.  As in sins of commission and ommission, misrepresenting facts, leaving out information.... is exactly the SAME AS LYING.   Using it as a tool to play on the fears of the public is cruelly manipulative.  Before I go, let me advise you that this is all MY OPINION and is how I truly feel about the subtle and not-so-subtle distortion of truth to accomplish a goal.  Do the ends EVER justify the means?  I don't know the answer to that.  You would have to operate under the supposition that someone else can make better decisions for you than you can make for yourself.

They started the countdown on health care reform............

People.....all people.....behave differently when it come to money.  Yesterday, there were some folks who are probably normally well-behaved, polite, responsible individuals, who melted down and turned into individuals their mothers would never recognize.  Their actions were socially unacceptable, uncivilized.....even barbaric.  I can say that even though I have never seen any of  them and don't know their names, backgrounds or views.  I would also be willing to bet most of them were what middle-America refers to as God-fearing, family people.......the ones you see everyday in the grocery, the mall, in a church, mosque or temple.  Their children go to school with your kids.  They are people you buy from, sell to, visit with, and your relationships with them vary from friends to strangers.

No rational, responsible, compassionate person wants to see others suffer from illnes, ignorance or depravation......no one.  The fact is that the level of gullibility found in the average American is staggering.  They epitomize the concept that if you say something confidently long enough and loud enough, people will begin to believe it.  High-profile individuals with access to any public forum suddenly become crowned with voices of authority, touted as tellers of fact and truth.  As such, they rally the masses with a call to battle based on speculation and opinion.  Are you willing to bet your life and the lives of those you love on information that is no better than unsubstantiated rumor and unverifiiable fact?  I am not.

I will always tell you what I think....

I am of the opinion that everyone has the potential for being "a great thinker".  I feel strongly about the things that touch my life in some way and have little or no feeling about things that don't.  That doesn't mean I don't have compassion, sympathy and even empathy for the unfortunate people of Haiti and Peru and everywhere else disaster strikes.  It doesn't mean I don't want health care, education and good, decent lives for everybody.  I just don't care whether members of Congress ever get a raise.  I don't care that Nancy Pelosi was actually correct about Saint Joseph.  I care very much that we allow genocide.....and starvation......and preventable diseases to continue when we have the ability to end them.  The point is that I feel that my opinion is important.  I also feel that YOUR opinion is important.  I will tell you what I think about almost anything without any provocation at all, but I will NEVER tell you what YOU should think.  You have to do that work on your own.