Lift Up Your Hearts!

In “All Religions Are the Same…” (except Where They’re Not), John Stackhouse takes on the fallacy that all religions, at heart, are basically the same and of equal value.

What needs to be argued and not just asserted is that each of the major religions really does reduce down to moralism or mysticism without a loss to its essential character. And, in my view, most religions do not so reduce. Devotional (bhakti) Hinduism (the most popular form of Hinduism) doesn’t; Mahayana Buddhism (the most popular form of Buddhism) doesn’t;  Judaism doesn’t; and Christianity and Islam, the most popular religions in the world, certainly don’t. (I recognize that there are moralistic and mystical varieties of each of the Abrahamic religions, but the majority of believers and of those religions’ formal traditions do not, I maintain, reduce to mere moralism or mysticism.)

[A]s politically useful and personally pleasant a belief as it would be—that all religions are basically the same—I continue to aver what most of the religions of the world actually do say: They’re not basically the same and one does have to choose.

We’ll have to keep investigating and thinking about what Map of Reality (which is what religions and all other forms of life-philosophy purport to offer) is the best one. We don’t have to conclude that all religions are wrong except one. More than one map can depict at least some of the territory at least somewhat correctly. But we can’t blithely suggest that they’re all equally, or even fundamentally, right, either. That would have to be shown, and I haven’t seen a good argument yet for that (unlikely) hypothesis.

This started as a comment to the Sockdolager post on Daley Ponderings, but it turned out to be long and off-topic, so I migrated it here. The article in question is a thought-provoking one, but it had one unintended consequence.

I've been having an ongoing conversation with our rector, who insists on frequent use of simple "praise choruses" at all our services, even the most traditional, so that they will stick in our heads and we'll have them handy in times of need.  I understand the motivation:  this is why I memorize Scripture, hymns, liturgy, poetry, anthems, and other useful and helpful works.

But because I know he does not set out to torture his congregation, I know his brain processes music in a different way from mine.  By this I don't mean that he likes different music from me, although that is certainly true.  The issue is not a matter of style or taste, but of processing.

Music sticks in my brain.  I wish it were only the best music that sticks in my brain, but it's not.  The simpler and more banal it is, the more it sticks.  And it won't go away.  Round and round and round it plays like a track on eternal "repeat," until I manage to kick it out—often by substituting something else—or go crazy.  So far I've managed not to reach the latter point...quite.

This can be a useful affliction, as it does help with learning choir pieces.  But it doesn't stop after we're done with the anthem.  A little of that can be enjoyable, but even my favorite anthems can get stuck, and I have to work actively to stop the process so I don't end up loathing them.  And if I don't like a song from the beginning, you can imagine what I think of it by the 455th repetition.

The more complicated the work, the less likely it is to annoy me, which is why the simple praise choruses are more than usually troublesome.  But complex music is not exempt:  the other day I had part of Mozart's g minor symphony stuck on "repeat" and it was driving me nuts, even though I really like the piece. Fortunately, I know enough of that one that I was able, by effort of will, to kick it over into the next section.

It's not only music that does this to me, but words—though usually only if I'm writing them.  I tend to compose paragraphs while walking—often they later become letters or blog posts.  That can be an efficient way to think, but sometimes I'll get stuck going round and round with the same phrases and thoughts, and that's when I know it's time to pull out the mp3 player and let someone else's words into my brain.

Does anyone else share this blessing/affliction?

But the point of all this is what happened after I read the article, which is about Davy Crockett and the Constitution.  So far, writing this post has been the only thing able to stop my endless mental repetitions of The Ballad of Davy Crockett.  I never saw the movie, nor the television show, but as a child I had a record of Disney songs, of which that was one.  Despite 50 years or so having passed since I last heard that record, I could still sing it to you.

I won't, though.  You can watch this instead.

Our greatest involvement in our children's public schools came during the heyday of the self-esteem movement, and I recall the frustrations of being a lone voice crying out that easy success is as much an inhibitor of learning as repeated failure.  Those who sail through their early educational encounters with too much ease are often surpassed by their supposedly less able compatriots later in life, because they've missed the important lessons taught by failure.

With a hat top to Free-Range Kids, here's a Wall Street Journal article on why that college rejection letter, that teacher's put-down, and even our own weaknesses can be agents that propel us to success.

Warren Buffett was devastated when Harvard Business School rejected his application.  Buoyed by his father's "unconditional love...an unconditional belief in me," he looked for Plan B, squeaked in under Columbia University's application deadline, and was accepted, later donating some twelve million dollars to the institution whose investment in Buffett turned out to be as savvy as Buffett himself.

"The truth is, everything that has happened in my life...that I thought was a crushing event at the time, has turned out for the better," Mr. Buffett says.

Columbia's current president, Lee Bollinger, grew up in a small town with limited educational opportunities.  He, too, was rejected by Harvard, and the shock taught him to take responsibility for his own education, to realize that "it was up to him alone to define his talents and potential."

His advice: Don't let rejections control your life. To "allow other people's assessment of you to determine your own self-assessment is a very big mistake," says Mr. Bollinger, a First Amendment author and scholar. "The question really is, who at the end of the day is going to make the determination about what your talents are, and what your interests are? That has to be you."

Success has many lessons to teach, too, and frankly I prefer that classroom.  But for grit, determination, perseverance, responsibility, and hard work, failure may be the better teacher.

Cleaning out old things, found this Hagar the Horrible comic, probably from last October.  (The link is to the current comic; if you can't see the image below—some feedreaders strip images—you'll have to click through to the original post.)

Take it any way you want.  I see it mostly as a statement of how weak and selfish we have become to care more about prosperity than freedom.  But it also bears a hint of the truth that without economic freedom, the higher liberties are endangered.

Beer, bread, cheese...and now musical instruments.   Jan Swafford's recent Slate article, In Search of Lost Sounds, mentions that in Europe, artisanal craftsmen are creating reproductions of period instruments for those interested in more flavors than the standardized, homogenized, modern sound.  This comes as no surprise, since Janet owns at least three such instruments.

The article is long, and some of my readers will be tempted to skip it, but please don't.  Skip the text if you wish, but don't miss the recorded excerpts, which are Flash objects that I can't reproduce here.  Hear Beethoven, Brahms, and Debussy on the pianos of their day, and compare the sound to the same music on today's instruments.  Whichever you like best, you'll agree that the older instruments have a different and often exciting flavor.  (They also occasionally sound out of tune to me, and I'm wondering if it's my ears, the recording, or a different tuning of the pianos—though I thought equal temperament tuning was common by Beethoven's time.)

The end of the article resonates especially well with one who mourns the lost days when orange juice did not all taste the same, but varied with the season and the fruit, when cider did not have a bland "apple juice" flavor, and when the taste of milk depended on what was growing in the fields in which the cows grazed.

Why should everything be the same? Why should three or four piano makers, however splendid, especially the Steinways that inhabit the majority of concert halls, dominate the scene? It's like the beer situation 30 years ago, when you had about a half-dozen standard brands to choose from. Now we have myriad brews flowing around the land—the way it was in the 19^th century.

In music, the situation works something like this. In classical as in other varieties, most of the time people hear music in recordings. When people go to a live concert, they tend to want it to sound like a recording. When you're a classical pianist, you get ahead by winning competitions, where they tend to want you to play as perfectly, and as impersonally, as a recording. And they want you to sound pretty much like everybody else, which means you play a Steinway, as in most recordings. And Steinways are voiced to an even, velvety sound from top to bottom. The number of companies making a dent in Steinway's supremacy—these days mainly Bösendorfer, Baldwin, Bechstein—have receded steadily (except for home sales, where cheaper Korean pianos rule). The standardization of pianos and of piano performing are two sides of the same coin, and the main culprit is recordings.

To be sure, Steinways are tremendous instruments and have earned their glory. But should any one brand be that dominant? A modern piano is a matter of iron and steel and high-tech and some degree of assembly line. In the days of Beethoven and Schubert, it was a matter of one man or woman (such as the legendary Nannette Streicher) with hammers, saws, planes, and chisels, and there were myriad visions of what a piano could be.

What drives spam?  Money, obviously.  And sin.  Sin on both ends:  the sin of greed on the part of the spammer, and the sin that the spammer is hoping will entice his victim to throw money his direction.  Spam, therefore, may be a diagnostic tool, an x-ray scan revealing the broken and diseased places of our society.

If the spam that hits this blog (and is mostly filtered out before you see it) is any measure, the sickest area of our society is sex, although that observation is a bit like peering at an x-ray and announcing that the patient's leg is broken when anyone can see the jagged bone protruding from the flesh.  Porn of the worst kind, body part enhancements, "performance" drugs:  "greed meets lust" is a terrible combination.

Then there's "greed meets greed," the get-rich-quick schemes, from online gambling to fraudulent investments to Nigerian banking scams.

I don't know what to make of the drug spams.  Most are obviously either lust spam or promoting illegal drugs, but some appear to be illegitimate sources of legitimate drugs.  (Unless there's a street use for Retin-A that I'm unaware of.)

Every once in a while there appears a spam that actually looks as if it might be an ad for a real company that decided to try a new marketing ploy.  Poor judgement, but at least inoffensive.

The latest wrinkle, although also inoffensive, has me both worried and frustrated:  essay spam.  Greet meets dishonesty?  Greed meets incompetence?   Have students become so lazy, so insecure, and so convinced of the uselessness of their classes that the market for essays has become lucrative enough to attract spammers?  Is anyone really so stupid as to buy an English essay written by someone who could pen the following?

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This need very long time to find more ideas just about this post but the essay writing can aid somebody to get the proper custom papers and to buy essay 

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This kind of spam is difficult for the filters to manage, it hardly seeming reasonable to ban the word "essay."  I delete it when i see it, but that's usually not before feedreaders have picked it up.  That's frustrating—but at least the amusement factor eases the sting.

Someone else posted an enthusiastic link to Michael Hyatt's Do You Make These 10 Mistakes When You Blog?  That I am not so enthusiastic is probably due to having a serious problem with the first sentence, which reads, 

Assuming you want to increase your blog traffic, there are certain mistakes you must avoid to be successful.

After reading Hyatt's article I realized that not only do I make several of the mistakes, but I often make them on purpose.  That's when I realized the real problem:  I'm not convinced I want to increase my blog traffic.

Neither am I convinced I don't.   What writer puts that much effort into his work and doesn't want it read?  I like to hope that each post manages to inspire, inform, or encourage someone, somewhere.  It's a big world out there, so I don't think that's a vain hope.  Nonetheless, "going viral" is not my idea of a good thing.  Staying under the radar is much more my style.  Fortunately, my blog is likely to keep its low profile, as long as I continue to score well on Hyatt's list of mistakes.

Mistake #1: You don’t post enough.

Mistake #2: You post too much.

I'm guilty of both, thanks to life constraints, a varied audience, and an inner conviction that if something exists, it requires my commentary.  It's impossible to please both those who check my blog once a week, if that often, and those who check more than once a day.  So I mostly post as I have time and inspiration, though I have been known to write a post but hold back from publishing it for a day or two, just to spread things out.

Mistake #3: Your post is too long.

Guilty, though not as much as I thought.  I frequently exceed his recommended limit of 500 words, but include enough short posts to keep the average in line.  Considering only my last 10 posts, I averaged 450 words, with the maximum being nearly 1200 and the minimum a mere 18.  I could learn something from his suggestion to make longer posts "scannable" by including such devices as subheadings and lists.

Mistake #4: You don’t invite engagement.

I want engagement, comments, and discussions, but then again I don't like controversy and acrimony, which permanently excludes me from major blog status, I guess.

Mistake #5: You don’t participate in the conversation.

Ha!  That's not my problem!

Mistake #6: You don’t make your content accessible.

By this he means catering to people with short attention spans who like the fragmented style that drives me nuts in newspapers and magazines:  short paragraphs, side bars, pull quotes, lists, etc.  I can learn a bit from this; in fact, I've notice my style changing somewhat in this direction, but in general I consider it a vice.

Mistake #7: You don’t create catchy headlines.

Not gonna change here.  The site he recommends for learning to write good headlines made me gag.  However, I do need to learn to make the headline more informative of the content.

Mistake #8: Your first paragraph is weak.

Definitely a problem.  I often prefer to use the first paragraph for background or to set up the main point, but that's because I egotistically assume people want to read everything I write.  I need to learn to put more relevant information content up front, so people will know sooner whether or not they are interested.

Mistake #9: Your post is off-brand. 

If you are a hobby blogger, you can get away with the occasional post that strays from your primary message or brand. But if you are trying to build traffic, you need to find an editorial focus and stick to it. A tighter focus leads to higher traffic.

Hobby blogger it is.  I would have to have a lot more time to devote to writing to pull this one off, because I could only do it by having several blogs, each with a different focus.  I guess my brand is "eclectic."

Mistake #10: Your post is about YOU.

Yep.  Self-centered and egotistical as it may be, I write about what I know best.  My first, largest, and most important audience is family and friends, and they really do want to know what's going on in our lives.

I realize this makes it boring for the wider audience, but so be it; they have Google.  That kind of reader comes here via search engines, thus finding the posts that might be helpful without having to wade through the rest.  These readers are as eclectic in their tastes as I am.  If my statistics are accurate, they are most especially interested in converting between Celsius and Fahrenheit, why Firefox might suddenly seem invisible, xylitol, American Sign Language, the dangers of epidural anesthesia in childbirth, and the connection between homosexuality and fertility. Who'd have thought?

Is there a word, in any language, for "my daughter's husband's cousin's husband"?  That's what Kevin Michael Johnson is, and I'm proud to claim the family relationship, however distant and awkwardly-phrased.  Kevin is an actor, living in New York City with his lovely singer-songwriter wife, Steph Shaw.  One of his recent triumphs was in the show Wild Black Yonder, which a number of members of our family (but, alas, not I) were privileged to see at "The Kate" in Old Saybrook, Connecticut.

Kevin's latest venture is The Raid, a documentary about the tremendously popular online game, World of Warcraft.  Everything I know about WOW I learned form the Foxtrot comic strip...at least until I watched Kevin's promotional video.  The embedded video below is from YouTube, but the link will take you to a video on the official, more informative site, where you can also get involved in the project if it excites you.  You can also check them out on Facebook.

I have three further reflections on what I learned from It Happened in Italy, which didn't fit nicely into my review.

The first is some thoughts on why the story of Jews in Italy during World War II is so little known.  These are my speculations only, and not from the book.

"Relative comfort" is perhaps one key idea.  Holocaust survivors from Italy would most likely feel a bit uncomfortable in a gathering of Holocaust survivors from anywhere else.  Can one talk about lost homes and possessions to one who has seen his children murdered?  Of wasted days to slave laborers?  Of hiding in a neighbor's cramped shed to those whose neighbors betrayed them?  There is a fellowship of suffering:  Amongst those who survived German concentration camps, I'd imagine those from Italian camps might feel they had not suffered "enough."

"The head of the camp in Ferramonti took the Jewish children away in his truck—but they went to get ice cream.  My little sisters were taken away from me immediately, not to go get ice cream but to go to an oven."

On the other hand, the Italians who hid and helped their Jewish neighbors might be reluctant to talk about that era because of feeling they had not done enough.  After all, the treatment of Jews in Italy would have earned mass condemnation had it not been dwarfed by Hitler's atrocities.  Elizabeth Bettinga's work in bringing the Jews and their neighbors back together released the stories on both sides.

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Secondly, I have gained an appreciation for the Italian way of life that I never had before.  I've only been to Italy once, and then only to Como, so my experience is very limited—but that trip left a negative impression that has lasted more than 40 years.  The contrast with Switzerland, our previous stay, was dramatic:  spotlessly clean vs. littered and dirty, polite vs. rude (my point of view as a female), organized and efficient vs. disordered and unreliable.

I suspect the contrasts are still pretty much valid—though I'm willing to give Italy another chance under the right circumstances .  However, I've learned that "organized and efficient" is not necessarily a positive attribute when the world has gone insane.  After a frustrating encounter with unhelpful police during a reunion visit to Rome, one Jewish survivor gently reminded his annoyed American companion, "That is why I survived.  I am here because things like that are not important to the police."  Official orders concerning Jews in Italy could be ignored, lost, or minimally obeyed because such attitudes were not unusual in Italy.  In efficient Switzerland, such behavior would have been discovered and punished at once.  What's more, I fear the law-abiding Swiss would not do as well as the more casual Italians when it comes to choosing obedience over compassion.  I hope I'm wrong, because I still like my country-in-law best.

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Finally, there are the questions:  How do we best prepare for a time when our own country—whatever it may be—goes crazy?  There's no point saying that it can't happen, because there's too much evidence, from tribal Africa to highly educated and modernized Germany, that it can.  Is there a "tipping point" at which what I might call "ordinary" human sinfulness becomes otherwise unthinkable evil?  If so, how do we keep ourselves from reaching that point?  And what can we do to mitigate the effects of such evil?  Can we have sophisticated systems of surveillance for catching increasingly sophisticated criminals without giving our governments the control Hitler could only dream of?  Can we have trains that run on time and still have a bureaucracy loose enough to let innocent victims slip through?  Is the current obsession with controlling speech and thought (rather than merely behavior) a sign of proximity to the tipping point?  And how can we prepare ourselves to be the kind of people who will help their neighbors rather than betraying them?

The Occasional CEO is one of my favorite non-family blogs, not only because Eric Schultz is a good writer, but also because he is a good compiler:  He's great at weaving into a coherent essay the common threads from varied sources I'd never find on my own.  His most recent post, with the unassuming title of Odds and Ends, led me to Paul Campos's excellent Wall Street Journal article, "Undressing the Terror Threat."

Both essays are well worth reading in their entirety.  The first quote box below is from Mr. Schultz; the rest are Mr. Campos's words.

[W]e are buried by data, and are constantly searching for ways to separate signal from noise....Someone wants to take flying lessons: that’s noise.  Someone wants to take flying lessons but doesn’t want to know how to land the plane: that’s signal.  Similarly, someone gets on an international flight, pays cash, and checks no bags—that might be signal.  Someone sews explosive into his underwear: Signal.  Panic.

The question is, how much do we pay to find out?  What’s the real risk of dying at the hands of a terrorist in America?  And if 1,900 Americans [under age 65] die today from a variety of preventable causes, how much are we willing to invest to save those lives?

I'm not much of a basketball player. Middle-age, with a shaky set shot and a bad knee, I can't hold my own in a YMCA pickup game, let alone against more organized competition. But I could definitely beat LeBron James in a game of one-on-one. The game just needs to feature two special rules: It lasts until I score, and when I score, I win.

We might have to play for a few days, and Mr. James's point total could well be creeping toward five figures before the contest ended, but eventually the gritty gutty competitor with a lunch-bucket work ethic (me) would subject the world's greatest basketball player to a humiliating defeat.

The world's greatest nation seems bent on subjecting itself to a similarly humiliating defeat, by playing a game that could be called Terrorball. The first two rules of Terrorball are:

(1) The game lasts as long as there are terrorists who want to harm Americans; and

(2) If terrorists should manage to kill or injure or seriously frighten any of us, they win.

These rules help explain the otherwise inexplicable wave of hysteria that has swept over our government in the wake of the failed attempt by a rather pathetic aspiring terrorist to blow up a plane on Christmas Day.

As to the question of what the government should do rather than keep playing Terrorball, the answer is simple: stop treating Americans like idiots and cowards.  It might be unrealistic to expect the average citizen to have a nuanced grasp of statistically based risk analysis, but there is nothing nuanced about two basic facts:

(1) America is a country of 310 million people, in which thousands of horrible things happen every single day; and

(2) The chances that one of those horrible things will be that you're subjected to a terrorist attack can, for all practical purposes, be calculated as zero.

No amount of statistical evidence, however, will make any difference to those who give themselves over to almost completely irrational fears. Such people, and there are apparently a lot of them in America right now, are in fact real victims of terrorism. They also make possible the current ascendancy of the politics of cowardice—the cynical exploitation of fear for political gain.

Unfortunately, the politics of cowardice can also make it rational to spend otherwise irrational amounts of resources on further minimizing already minimal risks. Given the current climate of fear, any terrorist incident involving Islamic radicals generates huge social costs, so it may make more economic sense, in the short term, to spend X dollars to avoid 10 deaths caused by terrorism than it does to spend X dollars to avoid 1,000 ordinary homicides. Any long-term acceptance of such trade-offs hands terrorists the only real victory they can ever achieve.

It's a remarkable fact that a nation founded, fought for, built by, and transformed through the extraordinary courage of figures such as George Washington, Susan B. Anthony and Martin Luther King Jr. now often seems reduced to a pitiful whimpering giant by a handful of mostly incompetent criminals, whose main weapons consist of scary-sounding Web sites and shoe- and underwear-concealed bombs that fail to detonate.

Terrorball, in short, is made possible by a loss of the sense that cowardice is among the most disgusting and shameful of vices. I shudder to think what Washington, who as commander in chief of the Continental Army intentionally exposed himself to enemy fire to rally his poorly armed and badly outnumbered troops, would think of the spectacle of millions of Americans not merely tolerating but actually demanding that their government subject them to various indignities, in the false hope that the rituals of what has been called "security theater" will reduce the already infinitesimal risks we face from terrorism.

What then is to be done? A little intelligence and a few drops of courage remind us that life is full of risk, and that of all the risks we confront in America every day, terrorism is a very minor one. Taking prudent steps to reasonably minimize the tiny threat we face from a few fanatic criminals need not grant them the attention they crave. Continuing to play Terrorball, on the other hand, guarantees that the terrorists will always win, since it places the bar for what counts as success for them practically on the ground.

 

Jennifer at Conversion Diary is turning 33, and asked her readers what they would say to their 33-year-old selves if they could.  That's the kind of challenge I can't resist, and neither can I resist recycling what I wrote as a blog post.  It's pretty much just off the top of my head, and in no particular order, but here are a few of the things I wish I could have told myself.

• Have more kids.  There were some good reasons why we didn't, but a very bad reason was buying into the "you can't afford it and neither can the world" mentality.  If you haven't lived through it, I don't think you can fathom how much pressure there was in those days to have no more than two children.
• Expect much more from your children than society does, on every level.  From the day they are born, your children can learn more, do more, and behave better than you will be told is possible.  Don't limit them with your low expectations.
• Homeschool.  Homeschool.  Homeschool.  From the beginning, and never look back.  This is one of the best decisions we ever made, and I wish we had never subjected our children to the "school mindset."  But when I was 33, school was "the way things are done," and I never questioned it till years later.
• "Bloom where you are planted."  Make the most of your present situation, because you never know when it will change. 
• Keep a journal, take pictures (and label them!), make recordings.  Concentrate on people and places dear to you—there are plenty of professionals documenting the rest of the scenery.
• When you videotape your children's performances, be sure to include their friends as well.  You may not care, but your children will!
• Talk with older family members about their childhoods and their life stories, and get everything you can from them about your ancestors and family history.  Make sure their pictures are labelled!
• Take care of yourself.  When you have young children at home, it's very easy (and seems virtuous) to shortchange yourself when it comes to sleep, exercise, education, and the care of your soul.  Make yourself make time for these things.   Enlist the aid of your spouse—I don't mean to tell you what to do, but to make sure you get the time to do it.  Your children will thank you later.
• If you are too busy to get organized, you are too busy not to get organized.  Make the time (and again, get your spouse to help).  There is no moment better than now; that mythical time "when I have time" will never come.  Never give up; experiment with different systems till you find one that works for you.  Be prepared to alter it as needed, however, when your circumstances alter.

I'm not that good at taking advice, so I'm not sure I would have listened.  But I wish I had.

John C. Wright is a science fiction writer, but his essay, On Writer's Block struck me for its wider applicability in his assertion that even the best advice can be counterproductive if it doesn't fit the personality of the recipient.  [The emphasis below is mine.]

Each writer approaches his craft in a different way, and advice from one writer to another is useful if and only if you happen to be a writer of the same method and temperament as the first.

Robert Heinlein famously used to advise would-be writers never to rewrite their first drafts, except at an editor’s suggestion. Unless you are a ditherer, that is, someone who wastes his limited writing time rewriting scenes that are already saleworthy, this advice is not useful, or indeed may be counterproductive. Heinlein was warning against the pitfalls of perfectionism. But if you are not a perfectionist, and not a ditherer, the advice is counterproductive, because writers who should rewrite are being told not to. Heinlein was a First Draft man: he could breeze off printable copy his first try. His books sold on the strength of their wittiness, readability, and speculative ideas: one strongly suspects he never went back to his first chapter to set up some plot twist he invented for the last.

If you do not write like him, merely able to breeze off finely crafted copy in your first try, then do not take his advice. Frankly, I thought this one of the worst pieces of writing advice ever, because I suffer the opposite vice. I write impromptu and I like to stick with my first instinct, and therefore I do not rewrite often enough. Hence Heinlein’s advice was the opposite of what someone like me should be told.

Every bit of writing craft advice is only good for you to the degree that it applies to your situation. In this example, Dithering Perfectionists should follow Heinlein’s advice, and never rewrite except at an editor’s suggestion. Impromptuarians should follow the opposite advice that all writing is rewriting.

The catch, of course, is that Impromptuarians are inclined to snatch at the advice best for Dithering Perfectionists, and vice versa.  Back in the late 1970s and early 80s, we were frequently urged to do less driving and more walking, advice that I followed with alacrity and even a bit of pride.  Alas, there was no virtue in my environmentally-correct response, since at the time getting behind the wheel of a car tended to bring on panic attacks.  What I needed to do, at that particular moment, was to walk less, drive more, and conquer my phobia.

Know then thyself.

RootsMagic, my favorite genealogy database program, has released RootsMagic Essentials, a version you can download that is absolutely free!  In case anyone is wondering, I don't get a thing for this endorsement; I just like RootsMagic, and I like encouraging interest in genealogy.  It looks as if one can do a lot with Essentials, and it might be a great, commitment-free way to keep track of family information even if one doesn't have (yet) a desire to delve any further.  Sadly, one of my favorite features, color coding of families, is not part of the stripped-down version, but—tanstaafl—if there is, sometimes, a free lunch, the full-course dinner always costs.

If any of my family members decide to download RootsMagic Essentials, I'll be happy to send along a copy of my database.  :)

In Forgetting the Unforgettable, I remarked on how ordinary were my diary entries when the Berlin Wall was breached.  In a subsequent comment, Stephan mentioned that he barely remembers the event, despite living so close to Germany.

Soon thereafter, while taking my customary walk and listening to a history lecture on my trusty mp3 player, I was reminded that the Cuban Missile Crisis occurred when I was the age Stephan was when the Wall fell.  I have no memory of the event whatsoever, nor of any particular anxiety because of the imminent threat of nuclear war.  We had "air raid drills" in our elementary school, but that was nothing new; they were a normal part of school, like the equally-frequent fire drills.  If the adults in my life worried about the situation, none of that filtered down to me.  My life comprised surviving fifth grade, playing with my friends, and enjoying my new baby brother.

Curious, I delved into the journals that my father had kept, hoping there would be entries for October 1962, and there were.  I looked forward to hearing how he and my mother had dealt with the fears that, I'm told, caused families eating breakfast to wonder if they'd still be alive at dinnertime.

He had written absolutely nothing.

The closest thing to a political comment came on November 6:  "This was election day, and therefore a holiday.  We voted a little before 9 a.m....Most of the evening was spent in front of the television set watching election returns."  No mention of the results, nor how he felt about them.

As for the rest, he wrote a wonderful chronicle of everyday life.  He wrote about the speed-reading class he was taking in the evenings, the meetings of the Beukendaal Volunteer Fire Department (almost 50 years later, it's still volunteer, and still uses yellow trucks!), and a little about his job (not much, since much of that was Classified).  He noted my three-year-old brother's reaction to his smallpox vaccination ("Nothing serious, just a little fever that makes it obvious he is not feeling real well"), and my reaction to my first Civic Music Concert ("I think Linda truly enjoyed it.  I am sure part of her enjoyment came from the fact that she went somewhere new and part from the fact that she stayed up late.  On the other hand, she has always liked classical music, and has recently been exposed to The Fire Bird Suite^* in school.").  He chronicled Saturday errands in town with his son, a visit to Rochester to see his father ("All three children behaved beautifully!"), and a Columbus Day holiday venture in which he took my Girl Scout troop climbing in the Adirondack Mountains ("All the troubles of going up were forgotten on the top and the girls were soon busy admiring the view and eating lunch in that order.  They were all thrilled at being on top and for many it was a new experience....Just as we were almost packed up to leave, the skies opened up and we got rained on....At least they know why we said to bring a change of clothes."), and Hallowe'en ("Linda's costume this year was a parking meter.  She made a box that covered her head with an opening in front and a rotating disc in the opening that indicated the time left on the meter.  She wore the aluminum-colored shirt and gray slacks that she wore last year as her suit of armor....[My brother] wore the clown suit that Lynn made for Linda at about that age.").  He spoke of raking leaves, turning the compost heap, and planting bulbs, of making applesauce from two bushels of apples we had picked ourselves at a cost of $3.50, and of the unusually warm weather (October 18: "We still have not had a killing frost.").  There were always repairs to be made:  to the car, to the baby seat, to the radio ("mostly by replacing a tube"), and of course there were school meetings ("Social Studies...tries to be as timely as possible, especially with regard to government.  'A big part of 5th grade is getting the children interested in something other than themselves.'").  There were lovely evenings by the fire, with popcorn and games, and visits to and from friends and neighbors.

But there was no politics.  It hard to imagine that the subject did not come with their friends across the bridge table, but if it did, I did not hear it—and I did eavesdrop from time to time.  I think back then it was considered more important to protect children from the harsher realities of life, and we weren't immersed, as children are today, in a sea of unrelenting media coverage.  Those were also the days when politics, religion, and one's ailments were not considered suitable topics for general conversation. 

My parents were both intelligent and well-educated folks, and my father especially loved history.   But of their political views they said little, and I'm not all that sorry for it.  They believed so strongly in the secret ballot that they almost never revealed for whom they had voted.

Later in life, however, my father did make one memorable political statement that expresses both the climate of the times and his own personality.  "They told me," he intoned, "that if I voted for Mr. Goldwater for president, our country would become mired in a war in Vietnam.  Well, I did vote for Mr. Goldwater, and sure enough it came to pass, just as they had said."

This day in 1918 marked the end of the War to End All Wars.  Less than a handful of veterans of that war remain to be honored.  But where there are people, there will be wars; where there are wars, there will be veterans; and where there are veterans, they deserve honor and respect.  In any conflict there will be some, to be sure, who serve dishonorably, for their own gain, with evil intent, or with twisted logic, as recent events attest.  The hanging scene in Shakespeare's Henry V is intense, and shocking to our modern sensibilities, but makes the point that in a civilized society wrongdoing in members of the armed forces is even more offensive than civilian crimes.

Horrendous exceptions to the contrary, soldiers and sailors, be they enemy or ally, are standing "between their loved home and the war's desolation."  As J. R. R. Tolkien reminds us in The Return of the King:  "It must often be so ... when things are in danger: some one has to give them up, lose them, so that others may keep them."

Thank you, veterans and current members of our Armed Forces.