This week, a man walked into a school where his estranged wife worked.  He shot her, and two of her students, in front of a room full of children.  I have yet to see anyone in the media ask where and how he was radicalized.

This week, a woman in Wisconsin was walking home from her prayers.  A man got out of a truck, demanded she take off her hijab.  He knocked her down, beat her and cut her with a knife.  I have yet to see anyone in the media ask where and how he was radicalized.

The reality is, even if we asked, it would be hard to answer that question in the case of these two women.  The CDC reports that 1 in 4 women have experienced severe physical violence from an intimate partner.  Simply put, violence against women is endemic in our society, and being endemic precludes being radical.

But it should not preclude us from asking the question, because asking the question is making the argument that the prevalence of violence need not be taken as normal.  We need to ask why someone thinks he can shoot his wife.  We need to ask how someone got to the point where they could physically attack a woman based on what she was wearing.  We need to ask the question every time until we no longer think of this as normal.  We need to ask until domestic violence takes some form of radicalization.

There are three holidays of note this week.  The one that I got off from work is the least significant.

On the 14th, we had the holiday of Saint Valentine of Rome.  According to legend Emperor Claudius the Cruel was afraid that solders who had families would be more devoted to their families than to their emperor, so forbade solders to marry.  The priest Valentine did not accept Claudius’s jurisdiction over love and marriage, and as the story goes, married several couples in defiance of the Claudius’s edict.

The earliest recorded Valentine written was from, Charles, Duke of Orléans who is said to have written poems to his wife in France while a prisoner in the Tower of London, his words of love escaping his confinement.

Even if history cannot corroborate these stories, Valentine’s Day is a day where relaxed social rules allow extravagance in romance.  We have permission to let romantic love take precedence over normal rules.

The second holiday was Elizabeth Peratrovich Day on the 16th.  That’s the day where we celebrate her work, and the work of many within the ANB/ANS, in passing the Alaskan Anti-Discrimination Act of 1941.  If you have not read the transcript of her testimony to the Alaskan Territorial Legislature, read it here.  Her description of the three types of people who practice discrimination will be the most important thing you read today.  When we celebrate her day, we are celebrating all of those who speak to power and authority with a moral clarity that cannot be ignored.

Which brings us to today, President’s Day.  Today was the day that chosen as a compromise so we did not have to chose which great man’s birthday we should celebrate.  We take their day off of work, and celebrate their contribution to history.

Presidents don’t make history any more than bankers build buildings or politicians launch ships.

People remembered in our history books stand in front of others who actually build and they take credit for the work of the builder.  So my wish for you today is this… enjoy your day off but remember, when love overcomes convention, when moral clarity speaks to power, THEN is when we make history.  And while there will always be a person at the front who gets the credit, it’s you and I who make it happen.

HMS Terror has been found well preserved in 11 meters of water.  It appears her crew had taken time while abandoning her, so perhaps she was caught in the ice, and the crew then removed useful items and tried to make for home on HMS Erebus.

The discovery of the two ships has been a mix of science and story.  Research vessels had been following Inuit oral tradition, and the first sighting was made by an Inut fisherman who later crewed on the research vessel that confirmed the find.  Some 150 years after the expedition, the Terror was still sitting proud on the ocean floor, with her mast above the water for Sammy Kogvik to find when he was fishing.  6 years later, that find is confirmed.

I wonder how the passengers and crew of the Crystal Serenity are taking the news of this find.  She entered Bar Harbor, Maine yesterday after cruising the Northwest Passage this summer.

/my post on the rediscovery of the HMS Erebus

There are several emails circulating that remember how much better things were.  They shows kids playing outdoors without cell phones.  They show dads and sons fishing, or teenagers dancing in a soda-shop, all clean, neat and protected.  They show kids riding to school on bikes without helmets and playing on equipment that would “drive safety-lawyers crazy.”

The thing is, if you look at those emails, all the people in them are white.

Sociologists started looking at the commodification of nostalgia in 1979, with Fred Davis’s piece Yearning for Yesterday: A Sociology of Nostalgia.  In it, Davis noted that nostalgia was nothing new, but creation of group nostalgia, mostly through advertising, was.  With nationwide media shared in common, regional memories became less powerful than national ones, and the national memories were being created by the advertisers of that same media.

Advertisers created a memory of a simpler past, where things made sense.  An image of Eden that we, as consumers, could buy into simply by buying their products.

It’s an easy pitch to make, most things make sense in hindsight.  To make that pitch, however, much of history needs to be omitted.  Salespeople are not hired to tell the whole truth, they are sell a product.   Frequently, they do so with allusion to a simpler past, which only works if the storybook past actually appears simpler.

So, we got a version of the past without strife.  We see middle-class kids playing, and the the kids with the luxury of being middle class in the 50’s are white.

The result of this advertising is that we now have a collective nostalgia that  merged with collective amnesia.  We look to a simpler time that we understand (in retrospect) by looking at, and idolizing, the lives of middle-classed children.  Lost in that picture is the grown up world of Mutually Assured Destruction, school de-segregation, or class and social unrest.

The ultimate nostalgia trip is the idea of the fall from Eden.  The tale predates modern media, but has similar common elements.  Art from thought Abrahamic history depicts Adam and Eve being cast out of paradise, never to return.   The sin for which they were cast out was none other than that of understanding Good and evil.  Before they knew that, things were simpler and more idealistic.  A paradise to be sure, but a paradise ultimately made possible by ignorance.  Most of the religious artwork that depicts the scene shows Adam and Eve looking back, longing for what they lost.  Like us, the garden seems ideal, but with our experience in the garden predating our understanding of good and evil, how could we know?

When we talk about making America great “again,” we are panting our own picture, with us gazing back at paradise and longing for ignorance.  We dream, not of President Eisenhower putting a Christmas message into space on the back of a modified ICBM, but of a little girl picking a daisy in a field.  When I look back, I can’t help but hear the count-down voice-over, and shudder at how complicated life really was.

I much prefer to look forward to the greatness ahead.

I recently commented that the “oldies” radio station was playing music from my college years. Driving into work, I heard the Goo Goo Dolls, followed by an announcer who said “I know, get over it.  We’re playing your music on this station.  It eventually happens to everyone.”

I must admit, it made my day.

My cohort has reached a new milestone in life.  As I was driving home yesterday I realized that every song I heard was on the radio when I was in college.  This would not be a big deal, but I was listening to the oldies station.

Well, my friends, we’ve made it.  The nation’s advertisers have coalesced around us as a prime demographic.  They are showing us the sort of interest that we have not seen since before we got our mortgages.  We are in the sweet spot now.  Next, we will be loosing some of our stations to the younger wave of music and disk jockeys that tell the kids it’s all about them, but for now, the radio is OURS!

Apropos, disk jockey is an amazingly resilient moniker.  It worked for both acetate and vinyl disks, compact disks and hard disks.  Really, it’s only now that we are using solid state drives that DJ’s are no longer spinning disks in any way shape or forum.

There is a certain vibe to public buildings that are mostly empty with those still left still having work to do.  I am sitting in a university library over spring break.  Desks are empty and computers are plentiful, but the people around me are working with a relaxed focus, much as I did through almost every “break” in college.  There is none of the frantic wasted energy of finals, just the determination of the tortoise taking advantage of a nap in the college schedule to slowly pull back into the race.

It’s the same feeling as an airport or bus station at midnight, or a shopping mall an hour after closing.  Whatever mania the day may bring is replaced with custodians trying to repair the frayed edges of the day gone by, and the occasional traveler trying to catch a nap on a bench.  Everyone trapped inside a living space as it takes the time to breathe.

Reflection is itself a reflexive action.  When running full out, if forced to slow down the mind still keeps going, keeps making connections.  So, I’m sitting at a public computer, a Foucalt Pendulum swinging in the background, the rattle of library carts as a student workers re-shelve in peace, and surrounded by tortoises.  My people.  I’ve been there often enough that it’s hard to not feel a kinship with those around me who are quietly, urgently moving forward while the library around them breathes deeply.

When the song of the angels is stilled,
When the star in the sky is gone,
When the kings and princes are home,
When the shepherds are back with their flock,
The work of Christmas begins:

To find the lost,
To heal the broken,
To feed the hungry,
To release the prisoner,
To rebuild the nations,
To bring peace among people,
To make music in the heart.

                                                                   –Howard Thurman

It’s so easy to dream of the days gone by, so hard to think of the times to come.

The Grace to accept every moment as a gift is a gift that is given to some.

What can we do with our days but work and hope?  Let your dreams bind your work with your play.

What can you do with each moment of your life, but love ’till you’ve loved it away?

Love ’till you’ve loved it away.

 

There are sorrows enough for the whole world’s end, there are no guarantees but the grave.

This life that we live and the times that we spend are treasures too precious to save.

What can we do with our days but work and hope?  Let your dreams bind your work with your play.

What can you do with each moment of your life, but love ’till you’ve loved it away?

Love ’till you’ve loved it away.

 

-Bob Franke

It is in vogue for Presidential contenders to out-do each other with more extreme ways of saying “no” to Syrian refugees.  When making sure the vetting process was not enough, Trump simply said we should stop accepting them altogether.  When Christie needed to cut through the noise, he made it explicit that even toddlers were a risk.  Meanwhile the French, even in the aftermath of the attacks on their soil, are continuing to accept refugees.  This brings to mind for me Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s meditation on the parable of the Good Samaritan.

In the parable, Jesus tells us of a man traveling from Jerusalem to Jericho who gets beaten, robbed and left for dead.  The dying man is passed by a priest, and than a Levite, both of whom continue on their way, refusing to render assistance.  Then a Samaritan, always a strange choice for a hero in Biblical stories, came to the man, helped him to safety and paid for his care.  Jesus calls upon us to be like that Samaritan.

Dr. King’s speech, I’ve Been to the Mountaintop references the parable;

I remember when Mrs. King and I were first in Jerusalem. We rented a car and drove from Jerusalem down to Jericho. And as soon as we got on that road, I said to my wife, “I can see why Jesus used this as the setting for his parable.” It’s a winding, meandering road. It’s really conducive for ambushing.

You start out in Jerusalem, which is about 1200 miles — or rather 1200 feet above sea level. And by the time you get down to Jericho, fifteen or twenty minutes later, you’re about 2200 feet below sea level. That’s a dangerous road.

In the days of Jesus it came to be known as the “Bloody Pass.” And you know, it’s possible that the priest and the Levite looked over that man on the ground and wondered if the robbers were still around. Or it’s possible that they felt that the man on the ground was merely faking. And he was acting like he had been robbed and hurt, in order to seize them over there, lure them there for quick and easy seizure. And so the first question that the priest asked — the first question that the Levite asked was, “If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?”

But then the Good Samaritan came by. And he reversed the question: “If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?”

Several candidates who would be our President, several governors are calling on us to ask what will become of us.  Meanwhile the French, who have recent experience with what could happen, are reminding us that we need to reverse the question.

All the world’s a stage.  We are  all merely players.  In our time, we play many parts.  Right now, the city of Raqqa is playing the part of whipping boy for the world’s most powerful men.  When Vladimir Putin needs to show strength after ISIS bombs a plane, Russia bombs Raqqa.  When Francois Hollande needs to show strength after the attacks in Paris, France bombs Raqqa.  Meanwhile, ISIS knows full well the role of Raqqa, and cleared out of the targeted areas before the airstrikes came.  The French are hitting abandoned ISIS bases while the Russians hit bridges, stadiums, clinics and hospitals.

Meanwhile our media has it’s part to play.  NPR had a piece this morning that discussed the disparity of news reporting between the Paris attacks and the attacks in Beirut.  Eleven stories talked about Paris this morning, there were no further stories about Beirut.  None was needed, as NPR pointed out the newsworthiness of the Beirut story is tempered by the fact that we expect it there, we don’t expect it in Paris.

If death becomes less newsworthy when it becomes expected, it is probably telling that neither this morning’s show nor yesterday’s talked about last weekends mass shooting in Texas.  6 campers were shot and killed.  The campers have moved into their final part; mere oblivion.  Their death is yet another shooting and is not even newsworthy.

We come now to the politicians.  The merchants of fear are playing their part.  They would have us fear refugees, the Trojan Horse that would bring violence to our country.  The violence is already here.  We have 5% of the world’s population, and 31% of the world’s mass shootings.  With 190,000 murders since 9/11 we have a history of violence that we are unwilling to discuss least we be forced to make uncomfortable decisions as a society.  Instead, they expect us to play the part of the coward who is afraid to face our own demons.  They would rather us be interested in facing the threat posed by fleeing refugees.

We’ve yet to decide what part we will play.

I’ve had a lot to think about since listening to our President sing “Amazing Grace.” I normally would not reflect on the leader of a secular nation in a religious context, but after President Obama delivered a magnificent eulogy that referenced racism as our countries original sin, it’s hard to not to.

President Obama did not talk about the Sumerian Woman at the Well in his speech but that is where my mind goes when I reflect on the nature of grace. It’s a simple story, but one of ones I find the most challenging. In the story, the woman’s relationship with Jesus grows not because she is perfect, but because she is imperfect. In the story, Jesus meets with the woman and tells her her sins. She does not deny them. She does not protest. She accepts him for who he is, and then goes on to be his first cleric, the first person sent before him to give the good news. She tells her town that the messiah is coming, and that he knew her and all her sins. To do so, she had to confess to her fellow townsfolk that she was a sinner, and allow all to be amazed that he knew what she had kept so secret.

To sin is an old archery term. It simply means to miss the mark. When you do so, you pick up another arrow, and you try again until you get it right. You can’t do that if you don’t look at the target after you shoot. If you don’t acknowledge to yourself that you missed, you never get better. In this way, President Obama was quite correct to call us out as a nation on the areas where we still sin. He was right to bring up economic injustice, he was right to bring up voter suppression. Much like the Sumerian Woman, we are elevated not when we hide our sins, but when we confront them.

So, we must confront our sins as a nation, but we can’t stop with what happens within our borders. Our original sin is not just racism, but it is that we as a nation maintain our position and authority through violence.

We have given our President the authority to target people on foreign soil with drone strikes. This authority gives him the position of being both judge, jury and executioner. The process used to determine a valid target is shrouded secrecy. There is no daylight, there is little discussion. What we know is that there is a “Disposition Matrix” which determines if someone is a “legitimate” target. There is a lack of transparency in how we come to that determination which makes it impossible for us to learn from our sins, to re-focus, and to improve. It also makes it impossible to understand how we could mistake a wedding convoy for an arms shipment, and impossible for us to explain to the victims what steps we are taking to make sure it never happens again.

President Obama has taken flack for talking about racism, but he was right to do so. There is nothing wrong with this country that can’t be fixed by what is right with it. When we work on problems, we make things better. President Obama has taken the first step, but the conversation must be bigger than the racism within our own borders. Like the Sumerian Woman, we could move forward with the Amazing Grace that comes from self-reflection. Like the slaver captain who wrote that song after freeing his human cargo, we can improve ourselves and the world, but first we need to be willing to look at ourselves. We are still blind. We need to be willing to see.

The Sun is the source of essentially all color on our planet. Sunlight is full-spectrum, and when you see something that has color, what you see is the reflected color that is not absorbed.  When the sun is at its brightest, the world is over-saturated with color, and we see less definition.  Paradoxically, there is so much color that we actually see less of it as direct sunlight trends to wash out everything. It is only when the sun is filtered that we see nuance and hue. Under a grey overcast day with light rain the solid monolithic green of a forest a becomes a multitude of greens, as well as reds, browns and yellows.  Resurrection Bay, on Alaska’s Seward Peninsula, is a deep fiord that accentuates that effect with steep craggy mountains providing depth and texture, shadow and light.  It really is the coastal rainforest at its finest.

Today, I saw the sun through a different filter.  The Alaska Sealife Center includes a delightful aquarium that is a must see if you ever get to Seward.  Every time I visit I discover something new. The first time it was the obvious things, watching birds “flying” through the water, seeing birds in a whole new light, and environment, as they show more grace underwater than one can imagine as they kind of lumber through the air.  I went back, and learned about fish policy, and the attempts at restoring Prince William Sound, and what has our had not recovered from the Exxon Valdez spill. This time my discovery was a new way to look at rain.

The signature piece for the Sea Life Center is the outdoor pen for the rehabilitation of marine mammals, filled with water constantly taken from and returned to Resurrection Bay.  Greater than 2 stories tall, you can stand at the bottom, and look up at the surface of the water.  What I discovered with this trip is that in a rainfall, each drop becomes a pin-prick of light; sunlight refracted to a diamond’s radiance.  As the water hits, it creates circles emanating outwards, each of which creates a mini rainbow, as transient as the raindrop itself.  Filtered light falling on water from the bay, showing a new layer of nature’s beauty.

I have come to a  fantastic realization; I have finally stopped following my dreams.  I am now following my happiness instead.

I have not given up on my dreams.  If a leprechaun were to grant me a wish (aside from the obvious of simply making for me a good fitting pair of shoes), I would have a band full of strings and harmony, and we would be performing hopeful, lightly political music at Winnipeg this summer.  We would jam on workshop stages with other musicians and share The Craic long into the night.  There are no handy leprechauns,  so getting to Winnipeg (or Carnegie) is not a matter of dreaming but a matter of following a series of choices, and not ones I can make.

A couple of years ago, I went to a workshop at Winnipeg about the economics of the entertainment industry.  In  it, we were given the best possible advice that anyone could give.  We were asked why we wanted to be professional musicians, and then told that there is only one “good” answer.  “That you must.  You can love music, you can love to entertain, you can want to serve, but at the end of the day the only thing that will be worth all of the sacrifices you will need to make is if being a musician is simply what you must do.”

I have spent some time “on the road.”  While I will always love traveling I have come to the conclusion that the “romance of the road” is a myth we tell ourselves so we can enjoy the resulting show.  For the brief time I was on the road following my dreams.  I remember long drives going over in my head what I needed to remember for my part and long drives home categorizing what I needed to fix in my costume or re-living the audience interactions where I should have been brilliant but was not.  I remember waking up in a hotel room, and looking for a phone book to figure out where I was.

I also remember specific nights more than a decade ago on where the craic was good.  Those were amazing nights and I could certainly see how some people must have that lifestyle.  For days after such a night creativity flowed out of me faster than my brain could register.   Poetry, writing, or solutions to stubborn problems would seem to come from nowhere.  There is not a feeling like it, and the best way to get to that feeling is to be with imaginative people who you don’t otherwise spend much time with.  People who have enough in common to share stories, but who have not yet shared their stories with each other.  Travelers who come together for brief periods of time.

I have felt this at festivals, at youth hostels, at conferences, at pub song-circles and in the back of a greyhound bus.  This, as much as the audience interaction, is what I dream about.  This is what the leprechaun would give me, but amazing craic on its own cannot equate to happiness for me.

I wrote some pretty good songs while under the influence of other people’s creativity, but the themes are all of saying goodbye to those people and of meeting again sometime in the future.  They are songs of not being together now.  I was in my early 20’s, and writing music that was essentially re-living the glory days.

Lao Tzu is attributed to saying “If you are depressed you are living in the past, if you are anxious you are living in the future and if you are at peace you are living in the present.”  Following my dreams lead to a few glorious moments of being in the present, surrounded by a a lot of time being either anxious about how I was going to get to a present moment, or depressed about no longer being there.  I was not very often happy, and that is what I have given up by not following my dreams.

Shannon and I are building a family.  Some parts are harder and more complex than we had bargained on, but with her I am not focusing my energy on a few nights of matchless camaraderie, but focusing on building what we have, every single day.  Our short term energy is focused on a fair next week, and the creative outpouring that will entail, but it is a fair we share, and when it is over, we will share in that process as well.  After that, we will share trips to see more of our family, and then the next project we choose to be a part of, together.  Eventually (no, this is not an announcement) we will be sharing projects with our kids in an expanded family.

Not following my dreams is allowing me to be very, very happy.  I won’t need a phone book to tell me where I am; I will be home.

I probably owe some of you an apology.   I went back through my blog, and I made public much of my old poetry.  Some of it is good, some is not, but although all of it is old, apparently my blog emailed each piece as a new post.  I suppose that everything old is new.

I graduated.  My hope is that I will now have time to devote to writing again, which prompted this excessive in the first place.

The webpage history is split into 4 basic parts.

• My original website, which had some writing on it, but no room for response,
• The LiveJournal days, which had some good writing and some real and meaningful responses from a few good friends,
• The Facebook days, which has a lot of posts shared with a lot of people, taking a lot of time, but ultimately having the depth and breadth of a mud puddle,
• This page, which we have yet to develop.

Essentially all of my poetry comes from the first two parts.  While a quick reading of the poems would suggest that I wrote only when I was feeling depressed, it was actually rather the opposite.  When I was feeling pretty good, I was feeling creative.  Many of the songs I wrote were actually written or fleshed out at Hostfest, written during breaks from performing as a troll, or on the trip back when my head was still buzzing with excitement and a desire to create.  I just found it easy to write about feeling depressed because it is an easier subject to find a models in art to draw inspiration from.

That desire to create has never gone away.  The difference is that I actually used to give myself the time to do so.  LiveJournal as a format encouraged spending time on posts, and the posts were worth reading.  As I migrated to Facebook, I found myself spending less time on posts, and then wondering why I only got so many likes.  Instead of responding to friends posts, I simply liked them and moved on.  I got in that same habit in real life.  I would walk the dogs, take time and think, and come up with something worth developing.  I would then get home, fire up the computer, and … fill my head with other headlines, other ideas, and all manner of things that would choke the life out of any ideas I could have been developing.

About a year ago, I walked away from Facebook, but I still did not give myself time to create.  The idea of growing ideas itself withered on the vine as I looked to other priorities.  So, I have made public some of my old writings as a reminder to myself of what I want to improve and develop.  The “Songs” tag has a list of much of that work.  Some of it good, some of it not, all of which comes to a conspicuous end as I became more addicted to Facebook.  So, hopefully this will complete my return to the creativity of that time, when I knew the difference, as Kelz so beautifully put it, between being mindFULL and being mindful

Sometimes I wonder if the astrologers have a point.  It’s hard to conceive of a planet 50 million miles away having an effect on the goings on in life, but something seems to bundle events.  Something seems to be the catalyst for change, and once it starts, it spreads to parts of your life that are totally unrelated.  Frankly, a planet in retrograde makes just about as much sense as anything else.

The task this year has been to hold on.  The idea of a journal, well intended as it may be, fell to the wayside as I finished my Master of Public Administration, lost an aunt, visited the family, lost a cat, gained a dog, and tried varied in interesting new ways of using health insurance.  Somewhere along the way, the seasons turned.

I can actually tell you exactly when it happened.  Graduation.  The whites and greys of winter had melted, leaving the golden remains of autumn for all to see.  Then, the day I received my Master’s hood, the budding leaves hit critical mass on the mountains behind my house.  Green.  Such lively, vibrant colors.  Shades of green beyond description set off the remaining gold on the ground.  Green and gold.  The school colors for UAA.  It was a fantastic day.

I will get back to writing down my original thoughts soon.  For now, I will redirect you to another blog, and ask that you go read in tribute to a friend who died last week.

Ron played a large role in my childhood, and certainly in my education as to what adulthood was really all about.  Whether his stories were true or not, whether he believed his conspiracy theories or not, he was a brilliant man who taught me to look at things a different way.

My years at Saint Olaf College taught me to frame my thoughts in thesis, antithesis and synthesis, always looking to logically check myself and my assumptions.  Ron was there to remind me that the very mental discipline it takes to check your own work is itself a trap.  You can go over the same problem in your head over and over, but sometimes you just need to take some black-powder up to Castle Hill, fire off the old cannons at 3:00 AM, and see what happens.

As for adequately describing the man himself, words honestly fail me.  For that, I ask you to hop on over to John Straley’s blog, where you can read his much more eloquent hand and meet my departed friend.

I started reading the following, and had several moments of “this is great, I need to quote it….”  Well… it’s just better to send you over to read it.  Some “bad job” stories are therapeutic, some funny, this one is just art.

Hey, New Girl? Happy Halloween.

In 1998, the State of Alaska made a horrible mistake.  We adapted into our State Constitution an amendment that restricted the rights of others.  Nothing else in the document singles out a group of people for inferior treatment.  Everything else makes it quite clear that Alaskans should be treated as equals.

Today, the courts have stuck down that injustice we enshrined.

Today is a very good day.