August 2007

This article has been posted for a couple weeks, but I’ve been meaning to post a link to it since I first read it.

The fact that health care is going to be a pretty big hot-button issue in the upcoming election combined with the fact that nearly every one (if not everyone) of us has an intersection with health care systems multiple times a year, makes it a concern worth concerning ourselves with. I know my hatred for Kaiser Permanente of Southern California runs deep and long for all the money and time of mine that they singlehandedly waste.

Thoughts?

http://blog.beliefnet.com/godspolitics/2007/08/jim-wallis-my-encounter-with-i.html

A few more words of wisdom from our friend J.D.:

“Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You’ll learn from them — if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It’s a beautiful, reciprocal arrangement. And it isn’t education. It’s history. It’s poetry.

I’m not trying to tell you that only educated and scholarly men are able to contribute something valuable to the world. It’s not so. But I do say that educated and scholarly men, if they’re brilliant and creative to begin with — which, unfortunately, is rarely the case — tend to leave infinitely more valuable records behind them than men do who are merely brilliant and creative. They tend to express themselves more clearly, and they usually have a passion for following their thoughts through to the end. And — most important — nine times out of ten they have more humility than the unscholarly thinker.

Something else an academic education will do for you. If you go along with it any considerable distance, it’ll begin to give you an idea what size mind you have. What it’ll fit and, maybe, what it won’t. After a while, you’ll have an idea what kind of thoughts your particular size mind should be wearing. For one thing, it may save you an extraordinary amount of time trying on ideas that don’t suit you, aren’t becoming to you. You’ll begin to know your true measurements and dress your mind accordingly.”

- J.D. Salinger, The Catcher In The Rye (p. 246-247)

On my vacation, my beautiful family-in-law and I visited the Mackinac Island area of Michigan (which I highly recommend if you haven’t been). While traipsing around the commercial tourist trap that is Main Street Mackinaw City, we found a small ice cream shop, and, as it was vacation forgoodnesssake, we knew it was time to partake.

While waiting for said processed dairy, I found a tattered TIME magazine from December 10, 2006 lying on the coffee table in the corner. The cover story was called “How to Bring Our Schools Out of the 20th Century.”

As I get older (I know that sounds lame, and I’m not that old yet, but it’s true), I find myself knowing more people with kids, and thinking about having some myself someday (gasp!), and the issue of education is becoming more and more frontburner. I know I’m going to have a boatload of issues that get ferried to the surface when my as-yet unconceived child enters schoolworld, but for now I can remain idealistically detatched, and mostly livid.

What’s it going to take for us to get our schools out of their archaic modern mindset? Holy crow: READ UP!

“I felt like praying or something, when I was in bed, but I couldn’t do it. I can’t always pray when I feel like it. In the first place, I’m sort of an atheist. I like Jesus and all, but I don’t care too much for most of the other stuff in the Bible. Take the Disciples, for instance. They annoy the hell out of me, if you want to know the truth. They were all right after Jesus was dead and all, but while He was alive, they were about as much use to Him as a hole in the head. All they did was keep letting Him down.

I like almost anybody in the Bible better than the Disciples. If you want to know the truth, the guy I like best in the Bible, next to Jesus, was that lunatic and all, that lived in the tombs and kept cutting himself with stones. I like him ten times as much as the Disciples, that poor bastard.

I used to get in quite a few arguments about it, when I was at the Whooton School, with this boy that lived down the corridor, Arthur Childs. Old Childs was a Quaker and all, and he read the Bible all the time. He was a very nice kid, and I liked him, but I could never see eye to eye with him on a lot of stuff in the Bible, especially the Disciples. He kept telling me if I didn’t like the Disciples, then I didn’t like Jesus and all. He said that because Jesus picked the Disciples, you were supposed to like them. I said I knew He picked them, but that He picked them at random. I said He didn’t have time to go around analyzing everybody. I said I wasn’t blaming Jesus or anything. It wasn’t His fault that He didn’t have any time.

I remember I asked old Childs if he thought Judas, the one that betrayed Jesus and all, went to Hell after he committed suicide. Childs said certainly. That’s exactly where I disagreed with him. I said I’d bet a thousand bucks that Jesus never sent old Judas to Hell. I still would, too, if i had a thousand bucks. I think any one of the Disciples would’ve sent him to Hell and all — and fast, too — but I’ll bet anything Jesus didn’t do it.

Old Childs said the trouble with me was that I didn’t go to church or anything. He was right about that, in a way. I don’t. In the first place, my parents are different religions, and all the children in our family are atheist. If you want to know the truth, I can’t even stand ministers. The ones they’ve had at every school I’ve gone to, they have these Holy Joe voices when they start giving their sermons. God, I hate that. I don’t see why the hell they can’t talk in their natural voice. They sound so phony when they talk.”

- J.D. Salinger, The Catcher In The Rye (p. 130-131)

The world may call us crazy, but we are not alone.

“The good-humored teacher and street-corner prophet Peter Maurin, cofounder of the Catholic Worker movement, put it this way: ‘If we are crazy, then it is because we refuse to be crazy in the same way the the world has gone crazy.’

What’s crazy is a matter of perspective.

After all, what is crazier: one person owning the same amount of money as the combined economies of twenty-three countries, or suggesting that if we shared, there would be enough for everyone?

What is crazier: spending billions of dollars on a defense shield, or suggesting that we share our billions of dollars so we don’t need a defense shield?

What is crazier: maintaining arms contracts with 154 countries while asking the world to disarm its weapons of mass destruction, or suggesting that we lead the world in disarmament by refusing to deal weapons with over half of the world and by emptying the world’s largest stockpile here at home?

What’s crazy is that the US, less than 6 percent of the world’s population, consumes nearly half of the world’s resources, and that the average American consumes as much as 520 Ethiopians do, while obesity is declared a ‘national health crisis.’

Someday war and poverty will be crazy, and we will wonder how the world allowed such things to exist. Some of us have just caught a glimpse of the beauty of the promised land, and it is so dazzling that our eyes are forever fixed on it, never to look back at the way of that old empire again.”

– Shane Claiborne, The Irresistible Revolution (p. 344)

So, I’ve been having problems with comments showing up on the wrong posts — hopefully it’ll be fixed now (I think/hope I figured out what was causing it), but if someone wants to test it out and comment here, that’d be grand…

For an organized person like myself, that kind of crap drives me nutso.

I can’t review Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows because, frankly, I don’t know enough synonyms for “amazing.”

Instead, I will simply implore you to please, if you have not yet, read all seven books. You will thank me.

Actually, you will first thank Ms. Rowling. But then you can thank me.