Lift Up Your Hearts!

I don't agree with John Stackhouse on everything—no surprise to those who know me; I'm not sure I even agree wtih myself on everything—but greatly appreciate the way he can take a controversial subject and shake it out with clarity and common sense.  I have little patience with the whole "postmodernist" idea that there's no such thing as real, absolute truth,  but at best only a useless, mealy-mouthed "true for you" or "true for me."  But equally frustrating are those whose claim to know the truth about something leaves no room for doubt, and what is worse, no room for the possibility that they might, in fact, be wrong.  Stackhouse addresses the latter situation with refreshing rationality in I'm Certain that There Are Two Kinds of Certainty.

Isamu Fukui doesn't make lemonade out of life's lemons, he makes the whole lemonade factory.  As a fifteen year old high school student, he vented his frustrations by secretly writing a novel about a dystopia in which the world is run like a school.  Unbeknownst to him, his father found out, and instead of sending his son to a psychiatrist (I'm extrapolating here), sent the manuscript to a publisher.  Three years later, Fukui is still in high school with a critically acclaimed, published novel and a contract for two more.

Write a book for yourself alone, so you can say just what you want, let someone else promote it, and have the publishers come begging you for more.  Works for me!  And a far better use of teen ambition than working for gender-blind college dorm rooms.

Thanks to Jon who directed me to the GeeK Dad article on Fukui's book, Truancy. 

The other day we were told, by one whose buisness it is to predict these things, that no matter who wins the upcoming presidential election, our taxes are going up.  He may be right.  If they're serious about stimulating the American economy, raising American taxes seems a foolish approach, but the public keeps demanding more services, and there's always a bill for services rendered.

So I got to thinking, at lunchtime, as I munched on my barbecue potato chips, about Switzerland.  They have some wonderful potato chips there, somewhat like our barbecue variety, but better—though that impression may have been due to Favorable Emotional Circumstances.  One day I made a hasty stop at the grocery store and grabbed some food for a train trip, only to discover, too late, that I had paid over $5 for a medium-sized bag of chips!

The bag I was munching from was more than half again as large, and priced at $2.50.  I actually paid half that; I generally don't by chips unless they're on sale.  It occured to me that a price tag of $7.50 would be a significant deterrent; I would probably still buy them for very special occasions, but casual purchasing would defintely be out.  Thus it would be in my best interest, health-wise, if the potato chip manufacturers decided to triple their prices.  But they wouldn't do it.  Without illegal collusion in the industry, competition would force the price back down immediately.

Unless the government stepped in.  Imagine a $5/bag tax on potato chips; applied to all, no one manufacturer could undercut the market, and suddenly Americans just might start reducing their consumption.  I only pick on potato chips because they are my own weakness, but let's not stop there:  corn chips, soda, candy, cookies, Happy Meals—all those top of the food pyramid, artificial ingredient, and preservative heavy "foods" that make up so much of our modern diet and have nutritionists and health professionals wringing their hands.

Sin taxes have their problems, I know.  The last thing I want to do is create yet another opportunity for organized crime to fluorish.  (Pssst!  Wanna buy an Oreo?) But it would be my favorite kind of tax:  likely to provide significant income for the government, yet completely avoidable simply by eating as we know we should. 

The Cult of the Amateur arrived from the library yesterday, not that I've had time to crack it open yet.  But I thought about it when I read today's perspicacious post from "Et Tu?" on Mommyblogging and the water well. It may be debateable whether the amateur works of ordinary blogging folks provide a valid community for otherwise isolated people, or merely distract us from the more difficult task of creating real, physical communities, but there's no denying their significance in many of our lives.

I treasure communities of both kinds, as does the author of "Et Tu?".  One important dimension added by the Internet, I find, is the ability to interact with people who are dealing with the same issues as I am, and/or have perspectives similar to mine.  I value beyond measure my short-distance, in-the-flesh friendships, but in all the contacts we have had locally—church, school, work, music, sports, neighborhood,  Indian Princesses and even other homeschoolers—we have found, yes, good friends, but also big, aching gaps with no one to understand, discuss, struggle, and rejoice together.  A broader net was required to gather that community.

Many thanks to Liz at Smithical for directing me to "Et Tu?".  And thanks to my feedreader (Bloglines), without which I wouldn't have allowed myself to indulge in yet another interesting distraction.

I wouldn't have thought to search the pages of USA Today for Good Friday inspiration, but Google News thought otherwise and led me to this article on the decline of sin in modern times.  Not a decline of sin itself, sad to say, but of the idea of sin as a fundamental break with objective, universal, and time-independent standards.  Relativism is not new, but it is getting more pervasive, as if most people are thinking, "We'll never know for certain what's right and what's wrong; we have to make it up as we go along, and change it as circumstances change."  Which means, of course, that we have traded the tyranny of God-ordained standards for the tyrrany of mutable public opinion.  Good Friday and Easter provide a path to forgiveness for sins against God; for offenses against rules-of-the-month standards our only hope is short memories and a good public relations campaign.

Polls to the contrary, it's hard for me to believe that most people don't carry with them, however deeply buried, the knowlege that they are not living up to anyone's standards, especially not their own, and that they are in need of radical repair to be consistently or even frequently good, however they might define the term.  Perhaps what we need is not so much an understanding of sin, but encouragement to turn off the televisions, put away the iPods, get away from our omnipresent distractions and take time to consider who we are, what we think we should be, and what to do about the chasm between the two.

I’ve been a fan of the Mars Hill Audio Journal since the early 90s, though only an intermittent subscriber.  I enjoy and appreciate its insight into life and culture, but generally prefer to receive information in printed, rather than spoken, form.  Plus I was tired of finding places to store the cassettes.

Recently I re-subscribed, because they now offer an mp3 version.  This I can take with me on my walks, and it takes up no physical space in the house.  Works for me. (More)

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life, by Barbara Kingsolver,  Steven L. Hopp, and Camille Kingsolver (HarperCollins, 2007)

When we were visiting Janet, a friend of hers was reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle.  The friend wasn’t totally happy with it, but it sounded intriguing enough that I borrowed it from the library when we returned. (More)

Two years ago, Andy F. alerted me to a National Review article by Rod Dreher entitled Crunchy Cons.  This was actually a reprint, the original having been published 'way back in 2002.  Andy suggested I might enjoy both the article and the opportunity to turn it into a blog post, and he was right.  It's not his fault it's taken me so long to write.

Dreher has a book of the same title that I haven't yet read, so I'll only be commenting on the article.  But the book's subtitle nearly says it all:  How Birkenstocked Burkeans, gun-loving organic gardeners, evangelical free-range farmers, hip homeschooling mamas, right-wing nature lovers, and their diverse tribe of countercultural conservatives plan to save America (or at least the Republican Party). (More)

I know you're all waiting to hear of our most recent adventures in Switzerland, but I've been catching up on blog reading (over 100), which resulted in yesterday's post, and e-mail (also over 100), which inspired this one.

Most of my readers, I suspect, are familiar with Randy Pausch, the CMU professor whose inspirational "final lecture" has been making the Internet rounds for months.  If you're not, I recommend listening to the entire recording, but some may prefer the much shorter "reprise" featured on Oprah.  (The latter is also grandchild-safe, as far as I recall—not that they would sit still long enough to catch the few mildly offensive words in the CMU version.)  Thanks are due to my friend LJ, whose e-mail to me of the Oprah version brought this all back to mind, and incidentally led me to one more Randy Pausch lecture, this one on time management.  (If you listen to that one first, you will probably opt for the Oprah version of the other lecture.  )  Most of what Pausch has to say is not new, but the purpose of such talks is more inspiration than information, and at that Pausch is a master.  If you're as frustrated as I was at not being able to see the PowerPoint slides he refers to, you'll be happy to know they're available here.

Unrelated side note:  For those of you who know BF, our friend from choir—note the many similarities in looks, voice, speaking style, and gestures!

Humor is a funny thing.  Laughter may be the best medicine, but it can also wound deeply.  John Stackhouse addresses this issue thoughtfully in his post, Why No One Here Is Laughing at My Jokes.  While lecturing in India, he discovered that all his standard jokes fell flat with his Indian audience, except amongst those who had been educated in the West.  Only when he switched to more obvious, I Love Lucy-style joking did the others respond.

Their humour, it seems, is straight on the nose, big smiles telegraphing the punch line, with no ambiguity: That’s a joke. Ours, instead, comes at you sideways, no smile, with a dash of bitters. Oh, yeah: I get it.

The experience caused him to reconsider his own joking. (More)

I'm trying to clean up my office.  There's too much stuff that needs attending to, and it's getting lost in the paper shuffle.

Unfortunately, one of the things that needs attending to happens to be my sample ballot for the upcoming Florida presidential primary.  It inspired me to go online and try again to find help deciding for whom to vote.  Now that was depressing.  I suppose it doesn't matter, because the Democratic National Committee has chosen to play the bully and not count our votes. (They're still sore over 2000, I guess.)  What hurts so much that it's hard to think about is how opposed all of the Democratic candidates are, in their stated positions, to so many things I hold dear.  What I once believed to be the party of the little people seems bent on being the party of big government, big unions, big education, and big medicine—the bullies that are pushing around the little people I know.  "Litmus tests" on the issues are of questionable value, but it's hard to see all the candidates failing all of them.  Sigh.  I can't say I'm impressed by any of the Republicans, either, but some of them at least give lip service in favor of my positions.  So I could always cast my primary vote hoping to put forth the least electable candidate.  If I could figure out who that was.

Clinton the First wasn't as bad as he threatened to be, partly because it seems one must be extreme while campaigning, and partly because Congressional opposition kept him from accomplishing all his goals.  Perhaps my best hope is a similar stalemate.

There's always the temptation to set up a Bush - Clinton - Bush - Clinton - Bush line of presidents (all different people).  :)

I normally don't mind that most news stories are bad news.  After all, the different, the unusual, that which makes "news" should be bad; good should be so common that it doesn't make headlines.

However, I'm beginning to suspect that some folks actually enjoy reporting bad news, as stories that have both good and bad sides always seem to be reported in the negative.  Take the latest housing "crisis."  Yes, I know, people who should have known better, and bankers who did know better, behaved stupidly and even wickedly, which led to the sub-prime mortgage crisis and I understand how that's a problem for a lot more people and businesses than those directly involved.

I certainly sympathize with those who are trying to sell their houses and find that prices have fallen and they have to sell for less than they could have received a year ago—maybe even less than they paid.  But this is not news.  There have always been "buyer's markets" and "seller's markets," and I grew up knowing that one is more likely to be on the wrong end of the swing.  Yet now the headlines scream disaster because housing prices keep falling.

Sure, this is bad news to some.  But a few years ago the headlines cried woe and doom because housing prices kept rising, squeezing people—especially first-time home buyers—out of the market.  We certainly felt that way when we looked at buying a house in the Boston area.

If it must always be bad news, if the country is headed toward disaster when housing prices rise, and again when they fall, I'm likely to cry, "A plague on both your houses!" and toss the paper over in favor of my World of Puzzles magazine.

 

 

Thank you, veterans, and all who are and have been prepared to give the "last full measure of devotion" for our lives and freedom, whether we honor, despise, or ignore them.

The Power of Full Engagement: Managing Energy, Not Time, Is the Key to High Performance and Personal Renewal, by Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz (Free Press, 2003)

I must send this book back to the library without a proper review, but it deserves a few comments.  After hearing a friend's summary, I had to find out more.  I'm afraid I was somewhat disappointed, but I think that was more because my friend's summary was so good, causing me to expect more than was there.  I almost, though not quite, would have been as well off with just the summary.  I also might have appreciated it more if I had not already read so many books by Stephen Covey, of which this book reminds me very much.  I think Covey's books are well worthwhile, and this too, but there wasn't as much new as I had expected. (More)

I wasn't one of the ones she "tagged," and I generally think "memes" are generally inane, but Liz over at Smithical posted this one, and I like it, so I'm jumping on the bandwagon.

Five Good Things

Silence  This blessed commodity is very hard to come by these days.  I don't mean total lack of sound so much as freedom from mechanical, manmade sounds and loud sounds in any form.  As I sit here in my office, it is "quiet":  Porter is reading, there is no music, television show, nor telephone conversation to hear.  And yet I am still assailed by noise at significant volume:  the chug of a hard drive, the whirr of a fan, the whine of a monitor.  If I sit on our back porch early enough, I can avoid the noise of pool pumps, air conditioners, and power saws, but the birds, bugs, frogs, and squirrels don't quite drown out the roar of the highway two and a half miles away.  Waiting at the doctor's office, driving down the road, eating at a restaurant, getting one's hair cut, grocery shopping—whatever we do, we are bombarded with sound.  And when was the last time your church allowed any amount of time at all for silent prayer and meditation during a worship service?  At one of ours, we designed a Maundy Thursday service that included a full minute of silence; it seemed an eternity, but was very powerful.  Without silence, we will lose our ability to think deep thoughts.

Hugs  In our sex-obsessed culture, we have forgotten the critical importance of non-sexual physical affection.  Without it, infants "fail to thrive"—they die.  As we grow, we learn to endure that deprivation, but we die inside.  Only young children give their affection freely; perhaps that's why they are so beloved.

Books  Our connection to the Great Conversation, to the past, to the wide world, to worlds of fantasy.  How could we live without books?  Whether a dusty genealogy tome in the library, a delightful novel with a comfortable chair and a cup of tea, or a children's book and a grandchild in my lap, I love books!

Water  Was there ever such a wonderful element?  Cold water, the best drink ever for a thirsty throat; cool water to swim in on a hot day; water for washing away the grit and grime of life; no wonder God endowed this symbol with such rich spiritual significance.

Making Music Together  Music, itself, is a Good Thing, but the miracle of coming together and making music for the joy of it is a Very Great, Powerful, Healing Thing.  With our professional music groups, our concerts, and our CD's, we have access to music of a variety and quality no other era could imagine.  But we have almost lost what it means to make our own music, and that is tragic.