Memory Lane

Note: I've moved my blog to my own web site - the new address is:
www.nonaverage.net/insomanywords/
Comments can only be left at the new location.

----------------------------------------------------

Several years ago I knew this man who was a very intelligent guy. He was born in Southern California - his father was from New Mexico and was Hispanic and Native American, and his mother was born in Mexico City. Not surprisingly, Spanish was his first language, but by the time he was a young adult he had learned to speak English fluently and taught himself to speak without an accent. He enlisted in the U.S. Air Force and eventually became a 2nd Lieutenant and a pilot, flying those large cargo planes and taking skydivers up for training. At some point the Air Force doctors discovered that he had a congenital heart defect - a hole in one of his heart valves - and they grounded him which, as I was later told, was a big disappointment for him. Back in civilian life, he taught himself things like auto repair, electronics, television repair and even some carpentry. He made extra money by fixing old tube stereo amplifiers and televisions in his spare time. He once ordered one of those entertainment center kits - unfinished wood and electronic parts - and he built and finished the cabinets and assembled and installed the stereo amp, and it ended up looking and working great. He got a job as a civilian employee at a U.S. Navy base, and he went to college at night on the VA Bill to help him get promotions. He owned an older house on a 1/2 acre of land and remodeled it himself, and built (as in, he sawed/hammered/roofed) a two-story garage/shop in the back yard which was where he restored his 1967 Cadillac. He was a coach for his son's sports team - overall he and his wife were pretty involved in their son's life, and his family was quite devastated when he died in 1998 of complications from a seizure.

I also knew a man who wasn't as involved in his children's lives. This man was one of those people who carried a lot of anger inside most of his life. Now this man had had a very cruel father, a father who beat him and his siblings, a father who cheated on the man's mother. Eventually this man's father left the man's mother and family for another woman and started another family. So this man, who was the oldest child, was left to be the "father" of his home, which probably had a lot to do with the anger this man lived with, but even as an adult he never found a healthy way to release his anger. He married a county girl from Kentucky and they had a son, but the man's anger soon revealed itself in their marriage. One day, the young son was on the floor of their home playing with a new toy truck given to him by a sweet older neighbor lady. The man came home from work and asked the son where the new toy had come from. The son told the man that the neighbor lady had given it as a gift. The man didn't like the neighbor lady - he had told his wife that he didn't want her talking to the neighbor lady - so when the son told the man who the toy had come from, the man walked over, lifted his foot and crushed the toy, right in front of the son. That is the earliest memory that the son has of the man. Later, more children were born, another boy and three girls, and as they got older and needed discipline like all children do, the man began to be more and more harsh with the children, and eventually the man started beating his children. And the man also started beating his wife and cheating on her. And he later left her with the children and started a new family with another woman.

And the smart guy and the angry man have something in common - they were both my father.

But everybody's scared of this place...

Peace On Earth

Note: I've moved my blog to my own web site - the new address is:
www.nonaverage.net/insomanywords/
Comments can only be left at the new location.

----------------------------------------------------

A few weeks ago Emily and I were driving through town and stopped at an intersection. On the corner there were a few women, dressed in black and standing quietly while holding signs in protest of the war in Iraq. I later discovered that these women are part of an organization called Women In Black and that is one of the ways their group protests, by standing in silence dressed in black. A couple of weekends later, on another street corner, there was a small group of people holding up more signs protesting the Iraq war. This second group were dressed in normal multi-colored attire and were waving their signs, and some were even shouting at the passers-by. This is probably a lot more typical of anti-war protesting here in America, but the thing about this kind of protest, no matter how you are dressed or how noisy you are, is that it really doesn't do anything to stop the war. Sure, the protesters like to say that they are raising awareness. But it's a pretty safe bet that everyone driving by already knows about the war and already has an opinion about it, an opinion that isn't going to be changed by a few Magic Marker signs being waved around over on the side of the road. So really, the only awareness that is raised is the awareness of whatever group is protesting - basically, it's just advertising for the protesting group/organization. And it has always seemed to me that if these groups really want to make an impact on worldwide violence, protesting in America is only addressing part of the problem. These groups should also be protesting on street corners in Baghdad, Kabul, Bukavu, Harare, Tehran or Beirut. Of course, it's much safer to protest in America - you can stand all day on any street corner in America and the worst thing that might happen is that some right-wing war hawks might shout out an F bomb while driving by, while on the other hand you probably wouldn't last 20 minutes standing on a street corner in Mosul carrying peace signs and dressed in black. Nonetheless, I have a difficult time taking these street-side war protesters seriously, because I think that if they really wanted to make a difference, they won't be standing in relative safety on a street corner distracting uninterested drivers who are trying to simultaneously drive and talk/text on their cell phones. But that doesn't mean that I don't want to stop war. War is hell, right? Isn't that what eleven seasons of M*A*S*H taught us? (Actually, most of us realized that war was bad well before M*A*S*H - what M*A*S*H really taught us was that we were supposed to find it humorous that a self-absorbed alcoholic chauvinist was allowed to sexually objectify women - but I digress.) I hate war and want to see it ended - I want the U.S. to be able to leave Iraq with no further violence there after we've left. I want to see peace in the Congo and an end to the horrible travesties against the women there. I want to see peace in Israel, in Afghanistan, in Sudan. I want to see Albanians and Serbians living together in peace with no threat of war. I would like peace to encircle the Earth for centuries to come...

But that's not going to happen. No matter how much you and I want that, there is not going to be that kind of peace on Earth. Even if we convinced everyone we know, and eventually convinced our whole country, even if all countries and nations and governments decided to stop war, even if the whole world agreed... we still would not be able to sustain a real peace. Even if the whole of the Earth, in a moment of united humanity, decided to stop war, we could only stop war for the briefest of moments. And that's because once the whole world had visualized world peace and put down its weapons and stopped fighting, once everyone had stopped the wars and the violence, once we had attained that covenanted moment of global peace... someone, somewhere would take advantage of this peace for his or her own selfish gain. Someone, somewhere would try to take control or steal or harm another or murder or rape. It may not be you or me, or anyone we know, but without a doubt, somewhere, somebody would certainly do this - and again we would not have peace. And this sin of selfishness - of putting one's own desires ahead of the needs of others - is buried deep in our human nature. It's in all of us, although most of us try to control it. But it will always be there within us to some extent, and there will always, always be some who do not care to control it, and that is why we will never have true peace as long as humans are living on this planet.

Now you may think that I'm being cynical, that I'm looking at the worst of our human nature, that I'm a philosophical pessimist, a naysayer and a really bad egg. Except for maybe the egg thing, I'm really not those other things - I believe in the "better angels of our nature", that there is immense good in most people everywhere, that most people want to live in peace, that many people from all over the globe would help someone in distress or share out of what they have for the less fortunate. In my life, I have been the recipient of that kind of goodness, and my belief in the good of human nature is based on my experiences. But, like many of you, I've also experienced the ugliest underside of human nature, and we all experience it even more now that the Internet brings stories and pictures from all over the world into our homes and offices. This dark side of humanity has always been with us, as far back as history can reveal, and it will always be with us. This isn't about declaring that the glass is half empty - this is about looking realistically at our strengths and flaws, and preparing ourselves for both the best and the worst in people. And this is what convinces me, in spite of the incredible human capacity for goodness, that short of the Second Coming of Christ we will never have peace on Earth.

But that doesn't mean that we should give up and wallow in hopelessness. I try to remember that catch phrase from the 60's: "Think Globally, Act Locally". I can't personally feed the starving Nigerian children, I can't end the fighting in Iraq and Darfur, and there's very little I can do about the atrocities happening in the Congo (yes, I know that I can give money to help most of these causes; however, actually going to these people and making an immediate difference in their lives is beyond what most of us are able to do). But I can support and donate food to the homeless shelter here in my town, I can buy a sandwich for the lady sitting on the ground next to the exit of a shopping center, I can offer a ride to a safe place to the woman who just had a fight with her boyfriend and is walking down my street at night carrying her suitcases, I can buy a pizza as a way of saying "Welcome to the Neighborhood" for my new neighbors who just moved in, and I can buy a fan belt and install it for a UCSB student who's Volkswagen broke down at a dark, lonely Highway 101 offramp. And I can decide to respond peacefully even when I'm wronged, like I was recently by the jerk who kept my daughter's $50 deposit after she decided not to buy his car. Even though I often feel that selfishness welling up inside me, the desire to either get ahead or get even, the temptation to put what I want ahead of what might help others, in spite of all of this - in spite of myself - I can try to do what I can to bring peace to my small portion of the world. And I think that that may be the most peace on Earth that most of us will ever know.

All we are saying...

The Weight Of The Words

Note: I've moved my blog to my own web site - the new address is:
www.nonaverage.net/insomanywords/
Comments can only be left at the new location.

----------------------------------------------------

I recently discovered a web site that rates blogs on readability, or the "level of education that is required to understand your blog". I hadn't really thought about this before - I've just assumed that most everyone who has a basic command of the English language could understand what I've written. But now the people at Critics Rant have created a web script that analyzes web pages and determines what level of education is needed to read the analyzed web site. I don't know what parameters they use to make their determination, but it seems to me that there are too many variables involved to accurately assign an educational grade level to the reading level a particular web site using only scripting code. So I don't put a lot of stock in this rating, but it's interesting to me in a technological way - someone wrote the code to search blogs (it also works on web sites), rate the type of words used, and determine a level of comparative educational understanding. Cool, but it's really all for fun - after all, you'd think that a guy in his fifties who got A's in college English could write better than high school level, but according to Critics Rant, that apparently not in the case... maybe if I had written more sentences like "She remained entirely pusillanimous and supercilious, yet her enticing pulchritude and luminosity were thoroughly debilitating" I would have gotten a better score.



More sagacious than pedantic